ANGLICAN ENLIGHTENMENT

This is an original interpretation of the early European Enlightenment

and the religious conflicts that rocked England and its empire under
the later Stuarts. In a series of vignettes that move between Europe and
North Africa, William Bulman shows that this period witnessed not
a struggle for and against new ideas and greater freedoms, but a battle
between several novel schemes for civil peace. Bulman considers anew
the most apparently conservative force in post-Civil War English
history: the conformist leadership of the Church of England. He
demonstrates that the Church’s historical scholarship, social science,
pastoral care, and political practice amounted not to a culturally
backward spectacle of intolerance, but to a campaign for stability
drawn from the frontiers of erudition and globalization. In seeking
to sever the link between zeal and chaos, the church and its enemies
were thus united in an Enlightenment project, but bitterly divided
over what it meant in practice.

william j. bulman is Assistant Professor of History at Lehigh

University.
 C A M B R I D G E S T U D I E S I N E A R LY MO D E R N B R I T I S H HI S TO RY

series editors
john morrill
Professor of British and Irish History, University of Cambridge,
and Fellow of Selwyn College
ethan shagan
Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
alexandra walsham
Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge,
and Fellow of Trinity College

This is a series of monographs and studies covering many aspects of the history
of the British Isles between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth
century. It includes the work of established scholars and pioneering work by a
new generation of scholars. It includes both reviews and revisions of major topics
and books which open up new historical terrain or which reveal startling new
perspectives on familiar subjects. All the volumes set detailed research within
broader perspectives, and the books are intended for the use of students as well as
of their teachers.

For a list of titles in the series go to

www.cambridge.org/earlymodernbritishhistory
 ANGLICAN
E NL I G HTEN M E NT
Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England
and its Empire, 1648–1715

WILLIAM J. BULMAN
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107073685

C William J. Bulman 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2015
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Bulman, William J., 1979–
Anglican enlightenment : Orientalism, religion and politics in England and
its empire, 1648–1715 / William Bulman, Lehigh University.
pages cm. – (Cambridge studies in early modern British history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-07368-5 (hardback) – isbn 978-1-107-42328-2 (paperback) 1. England – Church
history – 17th century 2. Catholic Church – History – 17th century. 3. Church of England –
History – 17th century. 4. Christianity and politics – England – History – 17th century.
5. England – Intellectual life – 17th century. 6. Great Britain – History – Stuarts, 1603–1714.
I. Title.
br756.b85 2015
942.06 – dc23 2015003496
isbn 978-1-107-07368-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To KB
 Contents

List of illustrations page ix

Preface: a word about enlightenment xi
Notes on the text xviii
List of abbreviations xix

Introduction: from learning to liberalism? 1

part i foundations
1 Literature and violence 17
2 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 41

part ii culture
3 Histories 73
4 Universals 115

part iii religion

5 The propagation of the faith 149
6 The worship of God 175

part iv politics
7 Restoration 209

vii
viii Contents
8 Revolution 245
Conclusion: from pastor to spectator 277

Select bibliography 291

Index 330
 Illustrations

1 ‘A mapp of the citty of Tanger, with the straits of Gibraltar’,

by Jonas Moore, engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar.  C British
Library Board. BL Maps K.Top.117.79.11.TAB. page 46
2 Lancelot Addison, West Barbary (Nuremberg, 1672),
frontispiece engraving by Cornelius Nicolaus Schurtz. Herzog
August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel: QuN 836 (2). 60
3 Asiatische und Africanische Denckwürdigkeiten dieser Zeit
(Nuremberg, 1676), frontispiece engraving by Cornelius
Nicolaus Schurtz. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel: Gv
330. 99
4 Lancelot Addison, The present state of the Jews (London, 1675),
frontispiece engraving. Courtesy of the Library at the Herbert
D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and Kislak Center
for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University
of Pennsylvania: DS135.A25 A4 1675. 100
5 Lancelot Addison, An introduction to the sacrament (London,
1682), frontispiece engraving by Friedrich Heinrich Van Houe.
The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford: (OC) 138 i.
405. 192
6 Thomas Comber, Short discourses upon the whole of
common-prayer (London, 1684), inset engraving by James
Collins. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale
University: Mrp29 C73. 193

ix
 Preface
A word about enlightenment

While the world’s ongoing culture wars and security debacles have led
many people to think differently about the Enlightenment in recent years,
I still expect some readers to bristle at the title of this book. One British-
born academic’s reaction a few years back might well encapsulate the
reaction of others: ‘I don’t know much about Anglican Enlightenment’,
he told me, ‘but it sounds like a contradiction in terms’. This impulse
may only be amplified for anyone who has correctly concluded from the
book’s subtitle that the Enlightenment it describes was largely the work
of men who were not only pious Anglicans, but persecutors, royalists,
and imperialists with no more than a marginal interest in philosophy.1
The sentiment, of course, is perfectly understandable. After all, even the
Enlightenment’s sworn enemies on the right and the left prefer their
Enlightenment ideologically and intellectually pure. But readers who reject
the umbrella term I have employed in the title and on occasion in the
pages to follow will still have to reckon, as I have, with the facts arranged
under it.
One of those facts is a particularly awkward one: the basic concepts,
norms, concerns, and practices that we typically associate with the Enlight-
enment were never even remotely confined to the domain of philosophy,
and they never consistently led to the promotion of either secularism or
liberation. In my view, the most compelling way of registering this fact
is to admit that the Enlightenment was ideologically open-ended, socially
embedded, and disciplinarily diverse. This can be done without render-
ing the notion of Enlightenment so pluralized, vague, or apolitical that
it becomes incoherent, useless, or uninteresting. It might even capture
some important truths about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and about our own time. Enlightenment sceptics, in turn, ought to admit

1 For the usual view of the Enlightenment as a philosophical movement of secular liberalism see, for
example, Gay, Enlightenment; Israel, Enlightenment contested; Pagden, Enlightenment.

xi
xii Preface
that like it or not, the Enlightenment is here to stay. Whatever its value
as a term of analysis, it seems unwilling to retreat in the face of relentless
scholarly subdivisions, warnings, and denials. We might as well make the
best of it.
In this book, I use the term ‘Enlightenment’ to refer to the articulation,
defence, dissemination, and implementation of ideas under a specific set of
historical conditions.2 The most important conditions were the products
of over a century of religious war and global expansion stretching from the
early days of the Reformation to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That era left
to Europe gory spectacles of religion gone wrong, maddening confessional
stalemates, persistent domestic turmoil, and a bewildering awareness of the
planet’s religious diversity.3 Many elites became convinced that religious
and public life finally needed to be organized in a manner that prevented
the fires of zeal from laying waste to civil order. While this conviction
was increasingly accompanied by a more positive commitment to worldly
human betterment, the early Enlightenment – which stretched from about
1650 to 1715 – was dominated by a concern for peace.4 This guiding
commitment to stability and improvement might also be expressed in the
form of a motivating question: what forms of intellectual, social, religious,
and political organization could procure these goods?5 This query was
primarily one about order, security, and prosperity. As a result, the answers
to it could be intolerant, authoritarian, and communitarian just as easily
as they could be liberal, egalitarian, or individualist.6 To insist that the
Enlightenment was ideologically multivalent is not to deny that it was
defined by civic ideals.
The second basic condition for Enlightenment was bound up with the
first. Europe’s violent religious fragmentation and its encounters with non-
Christian religions across the globe conspired to give rise to what we might

2 For a broader discussion, see Bulman, ‘Enlightenment for the culture wars’. See also Bulman and
Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment. Edelstein, Enlightenment, 13, 125, concurs but imposes
different conditions.
3 This impetus for Enlightenment merges those posited by Israel (Enlightenment contested, 63) and
Hazard (Crisis of the European mind, 3–28), but my account of the immediate effects of war and
expansion is fundamentally different. These historical conditions did not require forward-thinking
Europeans to jettison their institutional and intellectual inheritance.
4 Israel’s ‘crisis’ or ‘prelude to the Early Enlightenment’ begins in 1650 (Radical Enlightenment, 14)
and Hazard’s crise ends in 1715. Robertson’s post-1740 Enlightenment tackled similar problems of
‘human betterment in this world’ and ‘sociability’ (Case for the Enlightenment, 28, 30).
5 Compare Pocock, Barbarism and religion, I, 7; Pocock, ‘Conservative Enlightenment’, 84–94; Pocock,
‘Clergy and commerce’, 532.
6 Paquette (ed), Enlightened reform; Koselleck, Critique and crisis; Hunter, Secularization of the confes-
sional state; Bates, States of war; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 535–45.
 Preface xiii
call a condition of elite secularity.7 This state of mind was long in the
making, but its emergence was precipitated by the civil conflicts of the
mid seventeenth century and the concomitant rise of schism, sectarianism,
libertinism, and freethinking. European elites quickly became more acutely
aware than ever before that their own religious commitments (or lack
thereof ) constituted a choice among many available forms of religion (and
irreligion), all of which could be embraced by sane and intelligent (if erring)
people. It was with this awareness that many Europeans posed, answered,
and tackled in practice the questions of civil peace and human flourishing
that the previous century had bequeathed to them.
This tended to mean that Enlightened solutions to the riddle of public
religion were defended (and alternative solutions refuted) with recourse to
both immanent critique and purportedly minimal, shared epistemological
and ontological assumptions. In this way elite secularity supplied a second
guiding question for the Enlightenment: how could plans for moving
forward be defended, evaluated, and implemented in a manner that people
of widely varying types and degrees of belief and unbelief could possibly be
expected to accept? The need to answer the question of civil peace under
conditions of elite secularity accounts for the familiar turn in Enlightened
argument away from the theological, the demonological, the providential,
and the revealed, and towards the useful, the natural, the rational, the civil,
the moral, the peaceful, the cosmopolitan, and the human.
The content, dissemination, and implementation of those arguments
were in turn conditioned by a novel panoply of media. These included prac-
tices and institutions, both invented and inherited, that underwent impor-
tant changes after 1650: scholarly methods, learned disciplines, literary
genres, rhetorical techniques, voluntary associations, and reading publics,
to be sure, but also universities, churches, governments, and empires. These
media themselves often amounted to partial answers to the Enlightenment’s
guiding questions.8 Enlightenment could thus be pursued in a variety of
institutional and learned settings, and on a variety of geographical scales,
7 This concept merges the phenomenological and discursive models of secularity employed, respec-
tively, in Taylor, Secular age, esp. 3–4, 12–14, 19–20, 192–4; and Stout, Democracy and tradition,
92–117. Yet it also registers the role of globalization and eschews Taylor’s narrative and anthropology.
See also Rubiés, ‘From antiquarianism to philosophical history’, 323; Edelstein, Enlightenment, 34.
8 See Bulman, ‘Hobbes’s publisher and the political business of Enlightenment’. Compare to Sheehan,
‘Enlightenment, religion, and the enigma of secularization’, 1075–7; Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible,
xi–xiii; Siskin and Warner (eds), This is enlightenment. The following account differs from Sheehan’s
in emphasizing the prevention of religious war and including ecclesiastical and governmental practices
(see Edelstein, Enlightenment, 10–11, 32, 79–98). Sheehan implicitly acknowledges the role of elite
secularity when he argues that the Enlightenment Bible answered anew the question of why one
should read it.
xiv Preface
from the local to the international.9 The fact that specific people, institu-
tions, ideas, and practices were vehicles for Enlightenment does not imply
that they were Enlightened in toto. This is why we can speak of many
people and institutions as Enlightened even when they retained traditional
theological and doctrinal commitments and engaged in behaviour that did
not lead to peace.10 To do so is to capture only one aspect of their exis-
tence: the extent to which they were sites for active attempts to tackle the
problem of civil peace and worldly flourishing under conditions of elite
secularity. On this reading, Enlightenment becomes less a framework for
studying intellectual, social, religious, or political history than a lens on
their interrelationships.
If Enlightenment is understood this way, Anglican Enlightenment
should not be so hard to stomach. It simply denotes the participation
of conforming members of the Church of England in the Enlightenment,
under a variant of the Enlightenment’s characteristic historical conditions:
the aftermath of the English Civil Wars and Revolution, the fragmentation
of English Christianity, the rise of English freethinking, the emergence of an
imperial state, and the transformation of the pastoral and political activities
of the established church. In all these realms, this book describes the Angli-
can Enlightenment’s early, largely conformist, and predominantly clerical
phase, which has never been acknowledged, let alone studied in detail. I
also approach the other major condition for Enlightenment in England –
Europe’s many realms of scholarly and literary practice – in an intention-
ally selective manner. I sideline the much-discussed and over-emphasized
worlds of science and philosophy in favour of historical scholarship. The
study of the past was arguably far more important to the early Enlighten-
ment than other spheres of inquiry, because of its central role in religious
and political conflict and the enduring importance of the humanist culture
that it embodied.11 While no aspect of the Anglican Enlightenment was
without close continental parallels, the national conditions under which
it emerged inevitably distinguished it. For like all species of Enlighten-
ment, it was only indirectly an intellectual phenomenon: it extended from
erudition and polemic to political practice and pastoral care.12 Its history
is as much a history of culture, religion, and politics as it is a history of
ideas.
9 See Withers, Placing the Enlightenment; Hesse, ‘Towards a new topography’.
10 On this point from a different perspective, see Pocock, Barbarism and religion, esp. V, x–xii, 12–18,
221, 309.
11 See Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment.
12 Enlightened Anglicanism therefore denotes those styles of thought, scholarship, apologetics, and
ministerial and political practice that were part of the Church of England’s participation in the
 Preface xv
Another variety of enlightenment has also been a part of this book from
the beginning. Fortunately there were not so many burdens, pitfalls, and
ambiguities in the way of appreciating it. This was the brilliance of the
scholars, friends, and family around whom this book was conceived and
written. The leading lights, without question, were Peter Lake and Anthony
Grafton, who have been constant sources of insight, encouragement, and
advice to me for over a decade now. It is impossible for me to conceive of the
genesis, development, or completion of this book without thinking of my
conversations with both of them. I will be forever in their debt. But without
inspiration from Jeffrey Matson, Mark Pegg, and Derek Hirst, I would have
never become an historian, and without early reflections on the value of
this project from Linda Colley, Brendan Kane, and Steve Pincus, it may
never have gone anywhere. Peter, Tony, Mark, Derek, Brendan, and Linda
all read and commented on at least one version of this book and helped
shape it at many other junctures. So did a number of other bright minds
from whose writing, criticism, counsel, and camaraderie I have benefited
immeasurably over the years, including Alex Barber, Carolyn Biltoft, Justin
Champion, Alastair Hamilton, Robert Ingram, Anthony Milton, Jason
Peacey, Nicholas Popper, Jonathan Sheehan, Brent Sirota, Nigel Smith, and
Philip Stern. Countless others – too many to list – have often unwittingly
shed light on difficult aspects of this project in conversation and in their
responses to reading or hearing about either my dissertation or portions
of the book, including David Armitage, Adam Beach, Alexander Bick,
Brian Cowan, Richard Cust, Natalie Davis, Sarah Ellenzweig, Kenneth
Fincham, John-Paul Ghobrial, Gabriel Glickman, Mark Goldie, Philip
Gorski, Karl Gunther, Paul Halliday, Tim Harris, Ann Hughes, Khurram
Hussain, Mark Knights, Nitzan Lebovic, Dmitri Levitin, Paul Lim, Jan
Loop, Michael Raposa, Andrea Schatz, Scott Sowerby, John Spurr, Victor
Stater, Isaac Stephens, Heather Thornton, Dale Van Kley, James Vaughn,
Charles Walton, Benjamin Wright, and Craig Yirush. Needless to say, any
shortcomings that remain in the text are due not to the purveyors of all
this enlightenment, but to its intended recipient.
Like its upper-case cousin, the enlightenment from which I sought to
benefit while writing this book merits description not simply in intel-
lectual terms, but also with reference to the groups, institutions, and net-
works that made that writing possible. Anglican Enlightenment was planned,

Enlightenment and influenced by that participation. Following Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, xii–
xiii, we might say that ‘the Enlightenment Church of England’ was a set of new answers to the
question of why one should accept the establishment, liturgy, and priesthood of that church. The
new answers, of course, co-existed with the old.
xvi Preface
researched, and written alongside other projects while I was a doctoral stu-
dent at Princeton University, a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University
and Yale University, and a junior faculty member at Lehigh University. The
library staff at all these institutions have been crucial sources of book supply
and banter, and without the help of experts at scores of libraries and archives
in Britain, my work would have been impossible. At both Princeton and
Vanderbilt, Elizabeth Lunbeck managed to be an unforgettable welcoming
presence. At Yale, in addition to Pincus, Gorski, and Walton, whom I have
already mentioned, Keith Wrightson and a wonderful cohort of graduate
students quickly made me feel at home. At Lehigh, nearly every one of my
generous colleagues in History and Global Studies helped me finish this
book in one way or another, but I would be remiss in not singling out (in
addition to Lebovic, mentioned earlier) Michael Baylor, Stephen Cutcliffe,
Jack Lule, John Pettegrew, John Savage, and John Smith. This project was
also made possible through the support of fellowships and grants from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program,
Princeton’s Centers for the Study of Religion and Human Values, and the
Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs (RIHA) Program of the His-
torical Society, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions
expressed in this book are mine, and do not necessarily reflect the views
of any of these entities. The final site for the production of this book, of
course, was Cambridge University Press, where Chloe Dawson, Elizabeth
Friend-Smith, Chloé Harries, and Rosalyn Scott offered sound advice and
smooth management while the series editors provided truly searching and
indispensable commentary. I also ought to acknowledge the illuminating
feedback I received on aspects of this project over the years from audiences
at Bangor, Harvard, Lehigh, London, NYU, Oxford, Penn, Princeton,
Texas, Vanderbilt, William and Mary, and Yale, not to mention a series of
hotel conference venues.
Finally, and again like what I will describe in the pages to follow, the
enlightenment that helped push this project forward was not simply a
matter of clever ideas, vibrant institutions, and productive practices. It was
ultimately a matter of guiding and motivating concerns and commitments.
I have been unfathomably fortunate to have loving friends and family who
have not only practically enabled my work more consistently and caringly
than any academic entity, but also ensured that I approached it in the right
frame of mind. Among the many friends who have guided me along the
way, J. Andrew Harris has been my most steadfast supporter and a singular
example to follow in learning and in life. Without the uncanny ability of my
parents, Catherine and William III, to simultaneously dedicate themselves
 Preface xvii
to my endeavours, let me go my own way, and keep me grounded, the path
to this book would have never been open to me. My grandfather, William
Jr, an inspiring storyteller, remains my greatest fan. My parents in law,
Susan and Eric Busch, have stepped in on countless occasions when I had
to travel or meet a deadline, and they have always shown effortlessly genuine
appreciation for what I do. My brother Bryan has helped me keep perspec-
tive, and my sister, Bridget Matarazzo, now also an academic of sorts, has
been a sympathetic listener and a role model in a dozen different ways.
Ever since they could string sentences together, my sons Andrew and
Liam have politely inquired about how the seemingly endless reading and
typing on the computer in my office is going. They have buoyed my exis-
tence with these words, and with every other bright moment they have
conspired to create since their arrival. As they remind me every day, talk-
ing to Kathryn Busch (now Bulman) on the back steps of my St Louis
apartment after my first research trip to England was probably the most
enlightened thing I have ever done. Her support, patience, sacrifice, and
encouragement have been unyielding but never indulgent, and her com-
panionship, acumen, and perspective have kept me content, poised, and
present from start to finish.
 Notes on the text

In quotations from Anglophone historical sources, orthography and

transliterations have usually been modernized. Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic
words have been transliterated throughout the main text except in cases
where doing so would introduce ambiguity. Dates are rendered in Old
Style, with the year beginning on 1 January. The footnotes contain short
title and author or editor references. Full references appear in the Select
Bibliography, where the titles of early modern printed books have been
abbreviated, and the place of publication for all works listed is London,
unless otherwise noted.

xviii
 Abbreviations

AR Archiv für Religionsgeschichte

BL British Library
Bodl Bodleian Library
CAC Carlisle Archive Centre
CDS Addison, Christians daily sacrifice
FSM Addison, First state of Mahumedism
GU Addison, Genuine use and necessity of the two sacraments
HJ Historical journal
IS Addison, Introduction to the sacrament
JEH Journal of ecclesiastical history
JHI Journal of the history of ideas
KAC Kendal Archive Centre
LPL Lambeth Palace Library
LRO Lichfield Record Office
MP Addison, Modest plea for the clergy
ODNB Oxford dictionary of national biography
OUA Oxford University Archives
PI Addison, Primitive institution
PSJ Addison, Present state of the Jews
QCA The Queen’s College Archive, Oxford
QCL The Queen’s College Library, Oxford
Spectator Addison and Steele, Spectator
Tatler Addison and Steele, Tatler
TNA The National Archives of the UK
WB Addison, West Barbary
WSA Wiltshire and Swindon Archives

xix
 Introduction
From learning to liberalism?

In 1706, England’s freethinking firebrand Matthew Tindal published The

rights of the Christian church, a scathing attack on all men of the cloth.
One of the first priests to respond to Tindal was his former Oxford tutor,
George Hickes, the country’s greatest living historian and the éminence
grise of the Anglican high church movement. He publicly corrected his
pupil early the next year with 600 pages of angry erudition.1 That summer,
though, a friend handed Hickes a much pithier work, already thirty years
old, called A modest plea for the clergy. Upon reading it, he was stunned.
‘Had I come sooner to the knowledge of it’, he later admitted, ‘instead
of writing against the Rights myself, I should have thought it sufficient
to reprint it, with some application, and reflections, as an answer to that
insolent book’. A new edition of the Plea appeared two years later, with
a preface from Hickes. This book, he promised, was the perfect anti-
dote to Tindal and his evil brethren. ‘It was about the time The modest
plea for the clergy was first published’, Hickes recalled, ‘that these enemies
of the priesthood, growing numerous, grew also bold and daring’. Sensing
the threat, this writer had set out to ‘obviate’ what many now regard as the
founding provocation of the Enlightenment: the claim that since ancient
times, ‘the whole Jewish and Christian world have been abused by crafty
priests’.2
In his quest the anonymous author of the Plea brandished weaponry he
shared with his enemies. He relied on ‘invincible strength of reason’ and
‘great variety of learning’, both ‘humane and divine’, to defend the Chris-
tian ministry. ‘If he will read no more’, Hickes teased his reader, ‘let him
but read the second chapter’, where the author had used Thomas Hobbes’s
own methods to defend the same priests the monster of Malmesbury had
pilloried. This was a book, Hickes declared, ‘which I desire the serious to
compare with any of those, which the Deists, those disciples of Spinoza,

1 Hickes, Two treatises. 2 Hickes, ‘To the reader’; Bodl Ballard MS 12, f. 170.

1
2 Introduction
have published’. Hickes was announcing that in 1677, three decades before
Tindal even put pen to paper, and years before the Enlightenment is even
thought to have begun, the best freethinking of the age had been antici-
pated and parried in a tract so obscure that Hickes could not even discover
who had written it.3
Readers of the Plea could find in its pages not only the tools of the
church’s enemies, but their very thoughts and sentiments. The tract rang
with alarm at the sloth and pretension of the nation’s priests and prelates.
It cited their role in hastening England’s horrific descent into civil war.
It nodded to Hobbes and other men who had discerned this and urged
drastic courses. Like Leviathan, it sought a lasting peace that all could
accept, whatever they thought about God, by pondering the nature of
religion and politics without reference to his plans. It affirmed that the
essence of every religion was the religion of nature. And for a moment,
it even granted that all priests were imposters. But then it asked: were
priests not a part of this religion of nature? Were they not essential to the
stability and improvement of society? After all, they were the performers
of sacrifices before the people, the teachers and scolders of the masses, and
the trusted counsellors of kings. They were at once pastors and politicians,
the ultimate governors of life.4
The Plea dared those who denied the divine pedigree of the priesthood
to deny its function. It dared them to deny that in a Christian society, the
prudent course was to sustain the belief that priests were Christ’s successors
on earth, whether this was true or not. There is no doubt what Hickes
meant when he claimed that the Plea obviated the campaigns of Spinoza
and his brothers across the North Sea to put an end to clerical mind
control. These proposals simply did not follow from their stated premises.
They followed only, Hickes believed, from their true premise: the desire
of notoriously dissolute men like Tindal to destroy everyone who stood
between them and the objects of their lusts.
Since the shadowy author of the Plea referred to the clergy in the third
person, Hickes ranked him among the ablest laymen to defend the English
ministry since the Reformation. In fact, he was a fellow priest. His name
was Lancelot Addison.5 The long-forgotten father of the Whig literary
3 Hickes, ‘To the reader’. Compare Kors, Atheism in France. The secondary apparatus in the notes to
follow is by no means comprehensive. For additional bibliography and historiographical discussion,
see Bulman, ‘Constantine’s Enlightenment’; Bulman, ‘Enlightenment for the culture wars’; Bulman,
‘Hobbes’s publisher and the political business of Enlightenment’.
4 See, for example, Gorski, Disciplinary revolution; Headley et al. (eds), Confessionalization in Europe;
Foucault, Security, territory, population, 87–283; Foucault, Religion and culture, 135–52.
5 For confirmation see, for example, PSJ, 3rd edn, ‘Books lately printed for William Crooke’.
 From learning to liberalism 3
giant Joseph Addison (of Tatler and Spectator fame), he was baptized in
1632 in the north of England, where he went to school while his country was
ravaged by war. After the killing of the king he made it to Oxford, where
he became a master of arts shortly before the death of Oliver Cromwell.
Forced out of the university after he failed to secure a fellowship at his
college and publicly insulted the puritan dons, he preached in the Anglican
underground and travelled in Spain and France. In 1663 he moved further
south, across the straits of Gibraltar, to serve as chaplain to England’s
first African colony, Tangier. He lived there for seven years, attempting to
convert North Africans to Christianity and observing what he could.
On his return to England Addison settled into a lowly living in Wilt-
shire, began to write, and rose to leadership in the church on the strength
of his pen. In 1683 he was named dean of Lichfield, and the next year
archdeacon of Coventry, but his hopes for a bishopric were dashed by the
Glorious Revolution. He remained an active but frustrated presence in the
church and the Tory party until his death in 1703.6 His oeuvre totalled
thirteen works besides the Plea. They ranged from studies of the Jews and
Muslims he encountered in the Maghrib to a volume of devotional poetry
he composed in his deanery. Nearly all of his scholarly and pastoral pur-
suits were also political interventions. Hickes almost certainly knew about
Addison, since they had both been promoted in the heyday of the Tory
Revenge. Had he been able to identify the late dean as the author of the
Plea, Hickes could have referred to scores of other moments in Addison’s
career that played to his point that freethinking was apparently thriving
but intellectually stillborn.
Whatever his ignorance about who wrote the Plea, and whatever the
partisan fury that drove his esteem for it, Hickes had done well to return
the book to public view. It lay bare a series of facts that both he and his
enemies were usually reluctant to admit, and the liberal-minded historians
of the past two centuries have been even less willing to acknowledge.
The thoughts, concerns, and practices that enabled the famous learned
rebellions of the late seventeenth century immediately fuelled an attempt
to quell them. This had been possible because the freethinkers’ tools had
not been invented by dissidents, but long cultivated by the establishment.
And it had been plausible because these tools, and the norms that governed
their use, were compatible with both dreams of freedom and fantasies of
authority.

6 Hamilton, ‘Addison, Lancelot’.

4 Introduction
In the decades that followed, these facts were occasionally recalled but
eventually forgotten. Today, it is hard to imagine that a book like the Plea
ever existed. The civic humanism and classic liberalism that prospered in
the world Hickes inhabited have maintained a firm grip on the interpreters
of that world. Despite all the ghastly counter-examples of modern history,
it still proves tempting to assume that humanistic innovation automatically
fosters ethical citizenship and freedom of all sorts, especially in unfree soci-
eties like early modern England.7 Liberals on the right and the left, whether
political theorists or laymen, tend to believe that the human sciences born
in this era were not only largely consistent with liberalism, but bound to
produce it.8 Historians usually concur. The overwhelming consensus is
this: in John Locke’s England, intellectual advances and progressive ideas
about church and state went hand in hand. In the days of grasping monar-
chs, domineering priests, and confessional states, the relativistic ideas and
irenic concerns about religion and politics that founded the scientific study
of both naturally spurred demands for freer religion, freer speech, limited
government, and the expansion of civil society. In other words, the raw
materials of early Enlightenment culture were inseparable from struggles
for emancipation.9
England’s Enlightenment has thus been taken to be the intellectual face
of its Glorious Revolution. Most see it as the child and protector of 1688,
pious and conservative by both English and continental standards: it may
have had a radical wing, but it mostly defended the Whig constitution and
refused to go further.10 Others trace England’s Enlightenment back to the
reign of Charles II. For them it was a precursor to 1688, the brainchild of
Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke. But in structure it looks much the same,
a mix of moderation and extremes. It was an affront to the establishment,
but tame by Spinozist standards. Its radicals were anticlerical, impious, and
republican, but not quite irreligious.11 Even its most polite proponents,

7 For background, see Grafton and Jardine, From humanism to the humanities, xii, xiv, 22–8, 66,
138–49, 196–200.
8 For a broad overview, see Collins, ‘Early modern foundations of classic liberalism’.
9 Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture, esp. 517.
10 Young, Religion and Enlightenment; Porter, ‘Enlightenment in England’; Pocock, ‘Clergy and com-
merce’; Pocock, ‘Post-puritan England’; Pocock, ‘Conservative Enlightenment’; Pocock, Barbarism
and religion, esp. I, 7–8, 21–7, 53–4, 298; V, xi, 16–18; Pocock, ‘Historiography and Enlighten-
ment’, 85; Porter, Enlightenment; O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment. At points Pocock and Young
seem to entertain the notion that the English Enlightenment first took root among ‘latitudinar-
ians’ in the Restoration church: Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’, 530–31; Pocock, ‘Conservative
Enlightenment’, 86–7; Young, Religion and Enlightenment, 11.
11 Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken; Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment
culture.
 From learning to liberalism 5
the so-called ‘latitudinarians’, sought to place the church under the thumb
of the state and relax the yoke of conformity.12 Both period portraits sit
well with a wider consensus among scholars: the European Enlightenment
clearly began as a profound threat to priestly power, even if sometime
afterwards it was co-opted and corrupted by the old regime.
There is no place in this story for Addison’s Plea. And in the master
narrative of politics to which this history of ideas has been wedded, there
is no place for Addison. The account of later Stuart England that prevails
today honours not the Whig constitution as a whole, as it used to, but
toleration, the religious tenet of that constitution and the cultural tenet
of liberalism. It is a tale of dialectics and dichotomies. It renders the later
seventeenth century the site of an epochal conflict between intellectually
innovative proponents of increased religious freedoms and intellectually
ossified opponents of those freedoms. The fact that this was indeed a period
of fitfully expanding religious liberties has encouraged the notion that the
period witnessed a struggle for and against them.13 The mere existence of
Addison and his Plea suggests the need for a less Manichean account. The
intellectual facts of Addison’s life clearly clash with the dominant narrative,
but so do the political ones. He was a stern conformist among Christians
at home, but he was an ecumenical tolerationist in Africa. He even wanted
to formally welcome the Jews back to England.
As it turns out, Addison is only the beginning of the problem. The
dominant view of the period cannot be salvaged by adding nuance, or by
noting an exception to the rule that Anglican conformists were benighted
reactionaries.14 Among the leaders of the church, apparent exceptions like
Addison were the rule. The Plea was and is obscure not because it was
a solitary, eccentric work of genius that everyone preferred to ignore, but
because it was an ordinary specimen in a church that teemed with creativity.
12 Marshall, ‘The ecclesiology of the latitude-men’; Rivers, Reason, grace, and sentiment, I, 25–88;
Jacob, Newtonians and the English Revolution; Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, 36–58; Cragg, From
puritanism to the Age of Reason, 61–86; Pocock, Barbarism and religion, I, 53.
13 Examples abound. See Harris, Restoration, esp. 54–6; Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the birth of Whiggism’;
Goldie, ‘The theory of religious intolerance’; Harris, Politics under the later Stuarts, 40–74; Marshall,
John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture; De Krey, London and the Restoration; Knights,
‘“Meer religion” and the “church-state” of Restoration England’; Goldie, Roger Morrice; Sowerby,
Making toleration. For more secularist liberal accounts, see Pincus, 1688; Patterson, Long Parliament
of Charles II.
14 The most sophisticated and widely cited intellectual portraits of conformist Anglicans would have
them devoted to scholastic philosophy and theology, ‘the ipse dixit of the Fathers’, the ‘anti-heretical
and anti-schismatic literature’ of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, and pre-Civil War political
theory. See Goldie, ‘The theory of religious intolerance’, quotation on 335; Goldie, ‘Political thought
of the Anglican Revolution’; Goldie, ‘John Locke and Anglican royalism’; Marshall, John Locke,
toleration and early Enlightenment culture, 195–466, quotation on 213.
6 Introduction
Its author is obscure not because he is an undiscovered gem, but because he
was flanked by a series of truly exceptional divines who often exceeded him
in their erudition and pious activism. Even worse, Addison’s inconsistent
stance on religious liberty made him not anomalous but ordinary among
the English elite at large. His friends and his enemies mostly sided with
both freedom and restraint as it suited their broader objectives – the
things that truly divided them. Addison and nearly every single one of
his contemporaries in early modern Europe saw toleration as a political
tactic, not a political principle. It was much more a mode of power than a
prop to freedom.15
Once all these facts are assembled, the usual story of later Stuart England
no longer seems tenable. There can be no conflict between innovators and
ossifiers with innovators on both sides, and there can be no conflict for
and against religious liberties when hardly anyone in the period seems to
have been willing to consistently countenance them. It is also impossible
to redeem the existing consensus about the English Enlightenment, the
English church, and revolutionary England itself by making vague refer-
ences to ‘Anglican rationalism’ or by arguing that the occasionally open-
minded, irenic outlook of priests like Addison merits them a place on the
liberal side.16 A description of this period that renders figures like him
intelligible must be holistic and open-ended, free of liberal (and illiberal)
dialectics and denouements. It must be driven by less loaded questions
about the combination of ubiquitous piety and creeping modernity in
revolutionary England that has always fascinated its students. One such
question worth special attention is this: how did such a fervently Protestant
and overwhelmingly Anglican establishment come to accept for good the
idea that civil stability is more important than religious uniformity?
The acceptance of this idea was driven not by a clarion call for increased
religious freedoms, but by a desperate cry for peace, one in which pleas for
tolerance were barely audible, and calls for conformity continued to ring out
loud and clear. Accordingly, the event that holds the key to explaining the
emergent priority of civil stability in England is not its second revolution,
but its first. The entire period between the execution of Charles I and the
death of Anne was in many ways a post-revolutionary era. England’s elites,

15 Walsham, Charitable hatred; Shagan, Rule of moderation, 288–325; Murphy, Conscience and com-
munity; Hunter, Secularization of the confessional state; Parkin and Stanton (eds), Natural law and
toleration. For a broader view, see Brown, Regulating aversion.
16 Contrast Trevor-Roper, Crisis of the seventeenth century, 179–218; Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans,
and puritans, 40–119, 166–230.
 From learning to liberalism 7
like their contemporaries all across Europe, were living in the shadow of
internecine bloodshed. They were preoccupied with the basic question
their own civil war had posed: how was it possible to reconstitute the
relationship between faith and politics in order to avert another descent
into chaos? They realized that this was a moment in which brittle reaction
had no place. For the most part, they came to contend with one another
not over whether England should move beyond the cultural, religious, and
political arrangements that had torn it apart, but over the way in which it
should do so, and over which people and practices were holding back this
forward motion.17 The conflicts of the later Stuart era were not battles for
and against intellectual innovation, religious freedom, or progress. They
were struggles among rival visions of modernity.18
There is no better way to appreciate this than to look again at the most
apparently backward force of the age. The Restoration Church of England
was the largest, most complex institution in Britain, and it dominated insti-
tutions of learning. Yet it remains curiously neglected and misunderstood.
The two best available models for describing it are drawn from interpretive
frameworks invented by the partisans of later Stuart politics. One seeks to
grasp the extent to which the church was unified in outlook and action
in this period, as its apologists claimed it was.19 The predominant model,
by contrast, tends to describe the church as its Whig and puritan enemies
portrayed it: enamoured with hierarchy, driven by angry zeal to persecute
its enemies, and divided between a reactionary, thick-headed, ‘high church’
majority and a more progressive, ‘rationalist’, ‘latitudinarian’ minority.20
The ultimate reason why the church is now thought to have been over-
whelmingly hostile to every novelty that occurred under its watch is that
its leadership worked tirelessly to convince their contemporaries that it
was. And the ultimate reason why the church has long been described as
essentially coercive, domineering, and moribund is that its enemies were

17 On stronger understandings of worldly betterment in later eighteenth-century Britain, see

Spadafora, Idea of progress.
18 Contrast the similar positions of Pincus, 1688; Pocock, ‘Conservative Enlightenment’, 85, 87, 91;
McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment.
19 Spurr, Restoration Church of England, is by far the best treatment within this category. Fully aware
of the diversity and tensions within the church, Spurr nevertheless tended to sideline them, partly
in an attempt to counter the usual Whiggish or secular liberal account (see, for example, 163–4).
20 Rose, Godly kingship, provides a great deal of evidence for the inadequacy of this model but
appears to retain it (see esp. 131–2). The most recent defence of it is Tyacke, ‘From Laudians to
latitudinarians’. For devastating criticisms, see Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration
church’; Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and toleration’. Use of the term ‘high church’ is at least as
untenable and misleading before the reign of Anne, and again in the Georgian period.
8 Introduction
keen to make it seem so. Both campaigns have succeeded brilliantly to the
present day.
A better understanding of Anglicanism in later Stuart England would
be guided by the views of neither its enemies nor its advocates.21 Tindal,
of course, was partly right about the clergy. They guarded their privi-
leged place in society and helped to make Charles II’s reign a spectacle
of persecution and repression. Yet close scrutiny of their public pitches
and pastoral practice reveals that from the Restoration onwards, neither
state violence nor the rusty political theology often used to justify it were
central to their vision for the future. Their agenda is best described not
as an angry drive against heterodoxy that emerged from an intellectual
backwater, but as a novel scheme for civil stability and moral improvement
drawn from the cutting edge of learned culture. The Anglican Enlight-
enment was the church’s primary response to England’s post-Civil War
predicament.
This can only be appreciated by combining a more holistic view of
English culture, religion, and politics with a more global view of English
history itself. The contingency of the church’s support for persecution and
its leading position in intellectual life only come into view once the insular
framework of most writing about ideas, religion, and politics in later Stuart
England is jettisoned. When this moment in English history is studied with
close attention to its colonial, European, and transcontinental dimensions,
crucial environments for early modern knowledge production appear, and
religious history takes on a comparative dimension. Only then is it possible
to properly evaluate the pastoral, political, and scholarly activity of men
like Addison. Achieving this sort of perspective, though, is a project in
itself. It demands the integration of a large body of historical writing on
three seventeenth-century topics that are usually treated in isolation: the

21 Whig and anticlerical views on the church and its role in politics are echoed in a legion of recent
studies. For important examples in otherwise excellent scholarship organized around attempts
to contextualize the thought of canonical, Enlightened Whig thinkers, see Champion, Pillars of
priestcraft shaken; Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture; Marshall, John
Locke: resistance, religion and responsibility; and the series of seminal articles by Mark Goldie cited
above. In ‘Priestcraft and the birth of Whiggism’, 212, Goldie acknowledges this problem and notes
that it can only be remedied by a study like the present one. The confessionally driven literature
is also voluminous and various. Works partial to the Laudian and Arminian traditions include
Cross, Oxford movement and the seventeenth century; Tavard, Quest for catholicity; McAdoo, Spirit
of Anglicanism; Bennett, ‘Patristic tradition in Anglican thought’; Chadwick, Mind of the Oxford
movement. Works friendlier to the Calvinist or ‘Reformed’ strain within the Stuart church include
Allison, Rise of moralism; Hampton, Anti-Arminians. A more liberal treatment is Avis, In search of
authority.
 From learning to liberalism 9
history of European scholarship, the history of England, and the history of
England’s fledgling empire.22
No single volume can present this novel understanding of the English
church, the early Enlightenment, and later Stuart England in an exhaus-
tive fashion. But a series of vignettes from Addison’s life and times can
certainly serve to sketch it. To follow Addison and his friends from
England to Europe to Africa and back again is to encounter each dimension
of the early Anglican Enlightenment in turn. A single narrative becomes an
organic platform for a thematic sequence. The major episodes in Addison’s
career immediately open up into a series of case studies in colonial, cultural,
intellectual, religious, and political history. The temporal progression of
his work as a missionary, orientalist, apologist, and administrator charts
a path from knowledge and empire to ideology, ministry, and conflict.
Exactly the same movement is sustained when Addison’s oeuvre is read
four times in succession, in a different register on each occasion. Techni-
cal, conceptual, ideological, and topical readings yield information about
scholarly practices, foundational ideas, pastoral and political agendas, and
public interventions. These two general procedures – the merger of narra-
tive and thematic arcs and the iterative analysis of texts – make it possible
to bring together a series of topics that are integrally related but usually
kept separate, all within the reach and rhythms of a single life.
If one considers the set of available lives and the extant evidence for
each of them, it is hard to think of a better person around whom to build
such a study. Addison’s life foregrounds some of the most important and
neglected aspects of Anglican scholarship in the later seventeenth century
and its role in English and European history. His work in Oxford and the
Maghrib exposes the intimacy of intellectual innovation with the dilemmas
of civil strife and the imperatives of churches, states, and empires. The
literary fruits of Addison’s African tenure shed light on the single most
important realm of learning for the religious and political struggles of his
time: the study of the past. This was where Europeans most often sought an
epistemological, rhetorical, and practical edifice of order and security after
a century of bloodletting. By grappling with the crisis of historical truth
that consumed the energies of so many of their contemporaries, Anglicans
were able to grace their schemes for the reconstruction of English society
with strong claims to credibility. Addison’s work abroad also showcases

22 For additional bibliography and corroborating argument on the history of scholarship front, see
Levitin, ‘From sacred history to the history of religion’.
10 Introduction
Europe’s consequential encounter with global diversity in the seventeenth
century. In particular, it draws attention to travelling scholars’ attempts to
understand the great Islamic polities of the day and the Jews and Muslims
who inhabited them. These extremely important but understudied areas
of early modern inquiry contributed to the emergence of elite secularity
and enabled Europe’s creative response to that condition.23 In the course
of their own orientalist efforts, Anglicans made crucial contributions to
comparative religion and politics, two of the nascent disciplines of the
early Enlightenment.
Yet the lessons of civil war and empire did not simply spur new ideas.
In the Church of England, violence and expansion also inspired new styles
of pastoral and political practice. Addison’s writings on Christian, Jewish,
and Islamic piety invite a reconsideration of the liturgical, theological, and
devotional commitments of leading Anglican divines in the aftermath of
the English Revolution. His published works divert attention from eccle-
siology, ‘political thought’, and religious coercion, topics that have inap-
propriately dominated scholarship on the established church, in favour of
more basic pastoral concerns. The church’s mundane pursuit of its ministry
was what ultimately guided its attitudes to more overtly political problems.
Addison’s career at home also reveals how the propagation of the faith and
the practice of worship were persistent sources of both consensus and ten-
sion. For the church’s leading defenders, the implications of war, revolution,
and religious pluralism were always fairly clear, but never clear enough. As
a result, the dynamism of Restoration churchmanship gradually exposed
divisions within the pastorate amid the pressure of events. After 1687, as the
church was forced to commit itself year after year to a competitive pastoral
marketplace, its internal tensions were slowly forced into the open. They
eventually became public conflicts. Addison’s career is an ideal platform for
examining all this at play in the most important political moments in later
Stuart history. He seems to have appeared prominently and revealingly at
nearly every critical juncture between his return from Africa and his death
in 1703: the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence, the resurgence of Anglicanism
at Charles II’s court, the Popish Plot, the Tory Revenge, the Anglican Revo-
lution, the Moral Revolution, and the Trinitarian Controversy. Along with
an account of the religious settlement of Tangier, these fraught moments

23 On elite secularity, see above, xiii. The understanding of secularity employed here is compatible
with the institutional secularity emphasized in Casanova, Public religions in the modern world;
Sirota, Christian monitors. It ought to be contrasted with the relativization theses of Worden, ‘The
question of secularization’; Knights, Devil in disguise, esp. 5, 7, 180; Knights, Representation and
misrepresentation, esp. 6, 29, 219.
 From learning to liberalism 11
in domestic history provide the highlights of a continuous narrative of
religious struggle in England and its colonies from 1660 to the late 1690s.
At that point, the famous projects of Lancelot Addison’s son, Joseph, take
the story into the next century.
This history of Anglican Enlightenment is not a history of ideas, a his-
tory of religion, a history of politics, or a history of empire. But it is a
history that has implications for all four areas of inquiry. It encompasses
them and explores their interrelationships, making it possible to appreciate
how they mutually constituted one another. In the Restoration Church of
England, the ideas that emerged from civil war, imperial expansion, and
late humanist culture did not provide a rhetorical platform for a familiar
cause. They prevented most divines from holding on to the past in any
meaningful sense. These men’s ideas about history, nature, civilization,
and humanity influenced the way they envisioned their pastoral and social
roles, and thereby conditioned their religious and political behaviour. That
behaviour, in turn, shaped the way in which the leading clergy formulated
their ideas. It is difficult to successfully grapple with the question of conti-
nuity and change without a dynamic understanding of historical structure
that transcends the usual division of scholarly labour and eschews mislead-
ing dualisms and dichotomies.24 This understanding is ultimately what
allows a tour of Addison’s life to capture the radical discontinuity between
antebellum and post-Civil War England without falling back on the tra-
ditional schemas of liberalization and secularization that have featured in
all previous attempts to do so. It is also the key to moving beyond a series
of false dilemmas that still hang over debates about the later seventeenth
century. This period was neither modern nor pre-modern, neither secular
nor religious, and neither the first phase of a long eighteenth century nor
the last phase of a long Reformation.25 None of these stark designations
can capture the importance and distinctiveness of a liminal moment.
Later Stuart England’s political and religious establishment was over-
whelmingly populated by zealous Protestants. They despised religious plu-
ralism and never ceased to pursue or espouse theological and liturgical uni-
formity. But they did come to admit in public, and to an extent in private,
that the intrinsic importance of the theological and liturgical uniformity
they craved was secondary to the importance of that same uniformity as
a guarantor of civil stability. Along the way, they altered both the tech-
niques they used to pursue uniformity and the sort of uniformity they

24 See, for example, Sewell, Logics of history.

25 See also Apetrei, Women, feminism and religion, 21–6.
12 Introduction
pursued. The turn towards worldly justifications for religious policies, a
turn that was neither universal nor exclusive, was arguably the crucial polit-
ical development of the period. Calls for toleration were simply one of its
symptoms. The growing tendency to defend divine plans in earthly tones
was not solely or even primarily the work of anticlerical, nonconformist,
latitudinarian, or heterodox dissidents. It was the product of competition
among programs for political stability that were promulgated by the estab-
lishment and the radical fringe, usually motivated by religious impulses,
and marked in every case by calls for both freedom and restraint. While
elites of all political persuasions took part, Anglican conformists arguably
led the way, by virtue of their central position in English society. Their
commitment to a confessional state remained, but their understanding and
public espousal of its nature and purpose changed.26 Reeling from civil war,
stung by the experience of persecution, and well aware of worlds beyond
their own, they came to argue that Anglican Christianity was the ideal civil
religion: it offered peace and virtue on earth, and salvation above.27
In the end, there should be nothing baffling or mysterious about the Plea,
or the air of confidence with which Addison set out to refute the anticlerical
Enlightenment on its own terms, in its very infancy. Nor should there be
anything confusing about the scores of other clergy in his day who were
busy doing much the same thing. In a very important sense, they were
simply writing against emergent rivals within a shared project that had
been jointly conceived.28 As the Enlightened sons of the church and their
most inventive adversaries looked back on a scene of religious violence and
credal chaos that they could never be sure would ever be behind them, there
was one thing, at least, on which they could agree. Any successful proposal
for a way out of their country’s post-war predicament would be defended in
multiple registers, in a manner that audiences of differing forms and degrees
of belief and unbelief could accept.29 Men like Tindal and Addison simply

26 The account of confessionalization, secularization, and Enlightenment here therefore differs funda-
mentally from the framework espoused in Clark, English society; Clark, ‘Providence, predestination
and progress’; Clark, ‘Secularization and modernization’; Clark, ‘England’s ancien regime as a
confessional state’.
27 Here, civil religion is not understood to be inherently anti-Christian or republican. It denotes
any religion that succeeds in promoting civilization, political stability, and virtuous citizenship or
subjecthood by achieving a balance between solidarity and recognition of diversity that is appropriate
to the current historical situation and characteristics of a polity. In this period established religions
were, in part, Enlightened to the extent that they were defended as civil religions. See Beiner, Civil
religion, 189–98, 249–58, 356–8, 418; Tuck, ‘“Christian atheism” of Thomas Hobbes’, 125; Gorski,
Fall and rise of American civil religion.
28 See Bulman, ‘Hobbes’s publisher and the political business of Enlightenment’.
29 Contrast Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 226, 236, 261, 268.
 From learning to liberalism 13
disagreed vehemently over which proposal fit the bill. At the bottom of
their competing schemes for national and global redemption lay a common
learned culture and a common set of experiences. And so it is with that
culture and those experiences, with books and with blood, that the history
of Anglican Enlightenment ought to begin.
 part i

Foundations
 c h a p ter 1

Literature and violence

Every weekday before dawn in March 1648, Lancelot Addison left his home
and walked six miles east over dark, rolling hills, from the small northern
village of Maulds Meaburn to his school in the town of Appleby. As he
reached the last mile of his daily jaunt, and the sun had just begun to
illuminate the cloudy sky, he caught sight of the imposing stone tower of
Appleby Castle, which since the end of the great war had been controlled
by men Addison and his neighbours considered rebels. Addison entered
town on the west side, and on a narrow street, just before he reached the
market, he came to his school house, a square stone structure, about forty
feet long on each side, and not yet thirty years old. It had been built,
like the school’s reputation, by the antiquarian Reginald Bainbrigg, who
had died in 1606 before the structure was complete. As he passed through
the doors of the school house, Addison met the other side of Bainbrigg’s
material legacy. Lining the walls were at least 295 books, treating all the
arts and sciences, from lexicons and grammars to historical and magical
treatises. This formidable collection of humanist learning, surrounding
him as he stood in the classroom saying his prayers, was now the horizon
of his studies.1 He had come to the end of his grammar school forms, but
there was no telling when the university in Oxford, closed to young men
since the war began, would again open its doors.2 In the meantime, he
came to Appleby, pored over Bainbrigg’s books, and waited.
From about the time the Scots invaded England in 1640, Addison had
been studying quietly in Appleby, somehow always just out of range of
the fighting. Like nearly all leaders of the Church of England from his
generation, Addison was bombarded by the riches of late Renaissance
culture from a very early age. While his country fell into civil war, he was
ceaselessly drilled on William Lily’s Latin grammar by William Pickering,
1 Budden, ‘Notes on Appleby Grammar School’, inset school plan, 246–53; KAC WDS 46/11/1.
2 Roy and Reinhart, ‘Oxford and the Civil Wars’, 699, 719, 726–7; Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’,
750 n. 85. Natives of Cumberland and Westmorland typically attended the Queen’s College, Oxford.

17
18 Foundations
a middle-aged bachelor of arts.3 After memorizing Lily, Addison learned
to turn simple English sentences into Latin, and then to imitate more
and more complex classical exemplars, until he began composing his own
themes, poems, declamations, and orations.4 By his fourth year he had
begun to tackle Greek grammar, and turned to renowned humanists like
Lorenzo Valla, Desiderius Erasmus, and Omer Talon for guidance in the
subtleties of Latin and the basics of rhetoric. In later years, Addison pored
over Latin and Greek dialogues, letters, poems, and histories, and set again
and again to his own compositions.5 Pickering made sure that Addison
acquired these discursive skills in a moralized, Protestant environment.
Addison mastered Latin and Greek in part by reading the Church of
England’s catechism and the New Testament in both languages. In the late
1640s, he would have begun to struggle through the Hebrew scriptures as
well.6 Like any other schoolboy, Addison was imparted with an ancient set
of techniques that in themselves had little if any moral content. Yet he was
encouraged to put them to use as a Christian, and he grew familiar with
applying them to holy subjects, with his salvation in mind.
By the spring of 1648, Addison had already collected many of the ancient
rhetorical weapons he would later transfer to English at the most important
moments in his ecclesiastical and literary career.7 He shared this weaponry
with future allies and enemies of the Church of England, both clerical
and lay. Thirty years later, for instance, after using apostrophe to address
a chorus of radical sceptics among his countrymen, he would take up
compositio in offering his views on the ideal bishop. ‘And Christ, speaking of
that prelation and government which was to be in his church, he sufficiently
intimated that he would not have it to be like that of the world. That is’,
he continued, ‘not a government whose dominion is despotic; the coercion
imperious; the laws externally compulsory; and the titles big and swelling’.8
Once steeped in grammar and rhetoric, Addison had probably turned back
to Bainbrigg’s books to go higher, into dialectic; but he would have done
so with frustration and impatience, as he waited to discover the tomes of
Oxford.

3 Hinchcliffe, Appleby Grammar School, 36.

4 Watson, English grammar schools, 293–5, 408, 413, 423–53.
5 This reconstruction of Addison’s grammar school studies is based on a reading of the general
secondary and printed primary literature, and a study of the Bainbrigg library catalogue (KAC WDS
46/11/1).
6 Watson, English grammar schools, 58–66, 72–82, 121–2.
7 To provide just a few examples here the focus is on elocutio.
8 MP, 14–15, 99–100; Erasmus, On copia, 26, 36; Talon, Rhetorica, 43–5; Cicero, In Catalinam, 32–3,
66–7.
 Literature and violence 19
While Addison studied and stewed in Appleby, the two great royalist
warriors of northern England, Sir Philip Musgrave and Sir Marmaduke
Langdale, were hiding out in Edinburgh. They were waiting eagerly for
the Scots to seize upon Charles I’s request, made the day after Christ-
mas, that they invade northern England and restore him to power.9 On
17 March, their day finally arrived, when the Scottish parliament empow-
ered a committee to raise an army that would march into England and
seize Berwick and Carlisle.10 Addison’s school house was about to become
part of a battlefield, and he was about to be separated from Bainbrigg’s
books.
By 1 May Musgrave, Langdale, and their men had swept into England
and fortified both cities.11 Two months later, they were ready to take
Appleby. On the dark, rainy morning of 17 July, joined by men under the
command of the duke of Hamilton, they marched all their forces towards
the town. They were within a mile of Appleby before John Lambert’s
reduced horse lookouts could see them through the rain. They had hoped
to surprise the parliamentarians completely, but the River Eden was so
swollen that they were forced to try to take the bridge. As Lambert’s men
turned back to retreat into town, the king’s troops followed hard on their
heels. The royalists made repeated attempts on the bridge, but they could
not break through such a narrow, well-defended entry. They persisted until
they could no longer see the enemy in and around the darkened town,
and finally they quartered on a nearby moor. In the middle of the night,
the parliamentarians abandoned the town and destroyed the bridge. Most
of them retreated towards Kirkby Stephen; others remained in the castle,
to which Musgrave laid siege in the weeks to follow. By the end of the
month, the king was back in control of Appleby for a time.12 But Addi-
son remained separated from Bainbrigg’s books, and within days the scene
was flipped, and the royalists’ fortunes reversed. In August, John Ashton’s
2,000 horse and foot poured into Cumbria, along with Oliver Cromwell’s
New Model Army. Berwick and Carlisle fell right away, and on 9 October
Musgrave, unsure whether the Scots would ever come to his aid, surren-
dered Appleby without a fight.13 The town would remain under the control

9 Gardiner (ed), Constitutional documents, 349–51; Firth (ed), ‘Narratives’, 303.

10 Parliament of Scotland, Acts, VI, ii, 13.
11 Rushworth, Historical collections, VII, 1099; Firth (ed), ‘Narratives’, 305.
12 Great victory at Applebey, 3–6; Paulden, True relation, 2–3; Rushworth, Historical collections, VII,
1211; Burnet, Memoires, 356; Gardiner, History of the great Civil War, IV, 180; Firth (ed), ‘Narratives’,
308–9.
13 Firth (ed), ‘Narratives’, 309–11.
20 Foundations
of the New Model for the rest of the war, and now, only Scarborough and
Pontefract held out against parliament.14
At some point around the time Charles I was tried and executed in
London, Addison may have made it back to his school house, once again
reading on his own, and pondering his predicament. He had finally been
struck with an experience common to most Englishmen of his generation,
and to thousands of Europeans who had grown up in the age of religious
violence that stretched from the Peasants’ Wars to the Peace of Westphalia,
which had been concluded just as Appleby was being taken for the last
time. He had been forced to see how civil conflict, and all that lay behind
it, could be destructive of learning, and the civilization built upon it.
The importance of this lesson for the century to follow can hardly be
exaggerated. Europeans everywhere began to imagine societies in which
it was impossible for religious zeal to destroy civil order. On occasion, in
Oxford and elsewhere, the erudite elite whose ranks Addison was soon to
join imagined a society that only they would populate: a Republic of Letters
that prized learned truth over perpetual conflict. Even more importantly,
these scholars joined many other elites in imagining national, international,
and imperial regimes that could render all chaos created in the name of God
a thing of the past. The only problem was that these images of redemption
tended to contradict themselves, and most importantly, each other.

The logic of politics

Immediately after Addison witnessed the destruction and dislocation
wrought by a holy war, he was confronted by the other side of the fraught
relationship between letters and revolution that preoccupied so many in
his generation. He began to discover, but never fully admitted, that it
was the world of learning, perhaps more than anything else, that had
spawned the violence that surrounded him in his youth, and by so doing,
threatened to devour itself. Like all future leaders of the Church of England
in his time, he began to acquire the very literary skills and erudition that had
helped to rip apart his society, while wincing at their potential effects. It was
hard to see how he could restrain himself while seeking and protecting the
truth.
The war had kept Addison from the university for nearly four years. But
finally, in the winter of 1651, he found himself on Oxford’s High Street
and passed for the first time through the wooden, street side doors of

14 Great victory at Applebey, 2; Gardiner, History of the great Civil War, IV, 230.
 Literature and violence 21
the Queen’s College.15 After a protracted immersion in Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew in Appleby, Addison was poised, like his classmates, to secure a
firm grounding in the tools of logic and rhetoric. This would make it
possible for him to obtain a basic grasp of all the arts and sciences before he
graduated or left the university. Nearly everyone around him would have
agreed that this plan of study was the best way to prepare for his future
endeavours, whether he applied his knowledge to a profession and read on
his own as he aged, or he decided, as he eventually did, to pursue a higher
degree.
An indigent student, who could really only hope for a career in the
church, Addison studied hard under his tutor, the great mathematician
Richard Rawlinson, and in his spare time, turned away from the thick
tomes assigned to him only to find a mountain of menial chores that he
owed to the other better-heeled scholars who were paying his way.16 The
austerities Addison faced distanced him from the future lawyers, courtiers,
diplomats, and parliament men on whom he waited, but his education did
not. Even Addison’s neighbour from Maulds Meaburn, a distracted gen-
tleman named Richard Lowther, who lasted only months in Oxford and
was destined for a rocky career on battlefields, in courtrooms, and in par-
liaments, joined him in pursuing an eclectic curriculum crafted by a long
line of humanist reformers from John Colet to William Laud.17 Lowther
laboured under Joseph Williamson, who tutored boys from Queen’s both
in Oxford and in France between 1655 and the Restoration, when he was
called to government service. Williamson’s pupils were sons of the gen-
try, destined for only one, two, or three years of arts training before they
moved on to the Inns of Court. These boys nevertheless had the same gen-
eral educational goals as Addison, who would eventually earn a DD, the
university’s highest degree, and enter the priesthood. Williamson exposed
Richard and his other charges to logic, grammar, rhetoric, history, mathe-
matics, moral philosophy, geography, and even some divinity, all subjects
with which Addison too became familiar.18 To consider the education
of Addison, Williamson, and Lowther in tandem is to witness how the

15 Hamilton, ‘Addison, Lancelot’.

16 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, IV, 517; Hamilton, ‘Addison, Lancelot’; Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, I,
9; Magrath, Queen’s College, I, 47–8; II, 88; QCA Reg. H, 151; Wood, Fasti Oxonienses, I, 182;
OUA NEP/Supra/Reg Qa, ff. 46v., 83r., 189r., 202v.; Sykes, Church and state in England, 192–7.
On Rawlinson, see QCA 2T 97; Wallis, Operum mathematicorum; Sheffield UL, Hartlib papers,
10/9/1–3; QCL MSS 425–32.
17 Henning, House of Commons, II, 773–4; Feingold, ‘Humanities’.
18 CAC D LONS/L/1/10–11; TNA SP 18/101, f. 23; SP 18/124, f. 116; SP 18/128, f. 207; SP 18/131, f. 142;
SP 18/205, f. 50; SP 18/94, f. 21; Feingold, ‘Humanities’.
22 Foundations
thoroughly humanistic curriculum of the mid-century universities tran-
scended vocational boundaries and extended to all levels of instruction.
One reason why Oxford students were usually forced to struggle through
textbooks on logic and rhetoric and read ancient exemplars of these two
arts before they ventured elsewhere was that skill in argument, whether
garnered wholly through the study of logic or partly by mastering inventio
within rhetoric, was the precondition for progress in the other arts and sci-
ences. Argumentation was the centrepiece of the humanistic curriculum of
the early modern period, just as it had been the centrepiece of the scholastic
curriculum of the late Middle Ages. Fatefully, though, seventeenth-century
tutors no longer taught logic primarily as a field of inquiry in itself. Instead,
as the humanists had insisted, logic became a largely propaedeutic, instru-
mental discipline that taught, in concert with grammar and rhetoric, the
‘arts of discourse’: the skills of thought and expression that enabled one
to pursue more substantive inquiries and become an effective orator and
writer.19 In this sense and in others, politics went to the heart of a mid-
century university education.
Teachers, students, and parents alike recognized that logic, in particular,
was the bedrock of the humanities. ‘Crakanthorpe’s logic should the best
methinks agree with his apprehension’, the gentleman John Langhorne
wrote to Williamson about his son in October 1655, referring to a popular
textbook. ‘Those pains, good sir, that you take with him, I would it be in
logic and Greek; if he had hold of these, philosophy and rhetoric would
easily follow. But he that seems to stay and fall back in logic, goes scarce
more forward in other learning’.20 Boys’ immersion in logic and the studia
humanitatis laid the foundation for a variety of later pursuits. In 1657
Williamson’s other pupil, Lowther, was back in London studying law after
his brief period of general education at Queen’s. ‘I hope’, he wrote to his
father John, ‘that little light I have into logic both natural and artificial,
illuminated by that great one of your indulgent patronage . . . will serve,
with heaven’s concurrence, as the clew of Ariadne to conduct me through
this labyrinth to a point of consistency, or as a Jacob’s staff, or astrolabe,
help me in taking the dimensions, and full weight hereof, by an infallible
rule of certainty’.21
Even a mediocre student like Lowther could be confident that his logic
studies would one day benefit him beyond the university. But many would
19 Ward (ed), Statutes, I, 20; BL MS Add 27606, ff. 1v.–9r.; Sanderson, Logicae artis compendium, 1
(original pagination); Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 276–306, and works cited therein.
20 TNA SP 18/101, f. 23.
21 Richard Lowther to John Lowther, 24 March (no year) (CAC D LONS/L1/1/10).
 Literature and violence 23
have found his hopes of ‘infallible’ routes to certainty in law to be misplaced.
The texts Rawlinson commanded Addison to read before turning him to
lectures in dialectic and the original material in Aristotle brought humanist
and medieval logic teaching together in a distinctive hybrid. These books
taught Addison to form arguments in a multitude of ways, and each mode
of argument yielded a different level of certainty. For this reason, each mode
was to be applied to an appropriate subset of the disciplines he encountered
later on at Queen’s.22 Yet beyond the university, the proper domains of
application for each mode of argument remained in dispute: Thomas
Hobbes, most famously, sought demonstrative certainty in the knowledge
of politics, with impious consequences.23 If Addison’s contemporaries had
been able to agree on how to apply logic in the world, many of the
intellectual controversies of the following decades might have been averted,
along with their wider repercussions.

Journeys in books and over land

The preparation of Oxford men for the world beyond was by no means
confined to the city itself. Like many young university graduates in his gen-
eration, Addison considered travel to be an advanced stage in his education.
He remained at Queen’s until he had become a master of arts, but then,
in 1658 or 1659, he headed to Spain.24 His literary remains offer only tan-
talizing traces of his journey: a knowledge of Spanish, and a few references
to Spanish friars, scholars, and proverbs. They only dimly illuminate the
nature of educational travel in his day. Fortunately, the European sojourns
of his friend from Queen’s, Williamson, are far better documented. They
exemplify the way in which travel was thought to benefit young men of
any level of educational and scholarly attainment.
Youths with more compressed educational horizons than Addison’s often
travelled earlier in life than Addison did. As a result, they often found them-
selves under the tutelage of other students, men who were slightly older
and had more advanced agendas. These pairings embodied the variety of
humanist travel at the moment this tradition gave rise to a modern one: the
Grand Tour. In 1655 Williamson, now a bachelor of arts, left Oxford with
a few pupils, sailed across the English Channel, and settled into Saumur,

22 TNA SP 18/94, f. 21; SP 18/98, f. 84; SP 18/101, f. 23; SP 18/131, f. 142; Fleming and Magrath, Flemings
in Oxford, I, 251, 295, 322–3; II, 251–2.
23 See, for example, Skinner, Reason and rhetoric, 294–306, 335–6.
24 Hearne, Remarks and collections, I, 121; Rigg and Kelsey, ‘Rumbold, Henry’; CDS, ‘To the Hon-
ourable Sir Benjamin Bathurst’.
24 Foundations
the premier site of Protestant learning in France.25 He and his charges
approached their journey in a way that had been familiar in England since
at least the second half of the sixteenth century, when travel according to
the dictates of the humanist ars apodemica became an important element
in a young man’s preparation for a political career.26 Travel was important
to both the curtailed arts education sought by the budding lawyers and
parliament-men Williamson tutored, and Williamson’s own quest to fur-
ther his Greek and Latin scholarship and become a citizen of the Republic
of Letters. Saumur offered a setting for basic arts training that included
immersion in the French language, and an opportunity for a young scholar
like Williamson to meet and establish correspondence with erudite men
whose work he admired.27 At this point in his life, he had not yet decided
on a career. He expected to become an academic, a statesman, a physi-
cian, or a divine, and he knew that travel conduced to all these ends.28 In
the seventeenth century, even politics was considered to be an intellectual
pursuit.
By February 1656 Williamson was tutoring three gentlemen’s sons,
including Lowther, Addison’s boyhood neighbour.29 These boys’ parents
relied on their tutor to protect them from the dangers that were obvious
to anyone with commonplace views on travel. The boys were to immerse
themselves in French, and adopt the manners of the country, but some-
how still avoid permanently imbibing them.30 It was no coincidence that
Williamson had taken the boys to a Protestant city before moving on with
them to Paris, and then to Rome, as he planned to do. Their challenge was
to sensitively explore a foreign environment while protecting and even pro-
moting their prior ideological and religious commitments. They had to be
eased into the task. ‘With God’s graces’, Richard Lowther assured his father
John in a letter from April, ‘no foolish and fantastic humors commonly
incident to this country, shall take even root in me’.31 Lowther’s tutor him-
self had reason to be wary of French corruption, both civil and religious,

25 TNA SP 18/123, f. 98; SP 18/124, f. 56.

26 Stagl, et al., Apodemiken; Howard, English travellers; Warneke, Images of the educational traveller;
Stoye, English travellers abroad; Stagl, History of curiosity; Rubiés, ‘Instructions for travellers’.
27 TNA SP 18/124, ff. 116, 141; SP 18/126, ff. 201, 232, 285; SP 18/130, ff. 104, 229; Richard Lowther
to John Lowther, 27 February 1656 (CAC D LONS/L1/1/10); Lipsius and Stradling, Direction for
travailers, sig. b2r.; Bacon, Major works, 375; Devereaux, Profitable instructions, sigs. a3r.–v.
28 TNA SP 18/100, ff. 25, 287; SP 18/130, f. 70.
29 Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 945; CAC D LONS/L1/1/10.
30 Turler, Traveiler, 20–22; Palmer, Essay of the meanes, 50; TNA SP 18/127, f. 78; CAC D LONS/L/1/11.
For a slightly different perspective, see Bacon, Major works, 376.
31 Richard Lowther to John Lowther, 27 February 1656 (CAC D LONS/L1/1/10).
 Literature and violence 25
as Williamson’s own teachers from Queen’s reminded him.32 Years later,
as a servant of the imperial regime and the Church of England, Addison
too would venture abroad with this fraught commitment to curiosity and
fidelity, and return home with the acute sense of elite secularity it helped
foster.
While Lowther was eventually deemed an utter failure as a traveller by
his angry parents and his frustrated tutor, he at least knew, from books
and conversation, what to say to them about travel. Williamson’s decision
to start in Saumur, Lowther noted, was based on the fact that it was a
university town, ‘where we shall have the convenience both of the best
books, and company’.33 Here, Richard knew, he would also benefit from
the privilege of attending university disputations and lectures.34 Lowther
likened his studies in Saumur to his movement across the English Channel:
his reading, especially his historical reading, was a form of travel. ‘We
remain here at Saumur still in the same condition’, Richard explained to
his father in June 1656. ‘We shall not depart hence this two months till
we have finished our voyage also in geography’.35 Lowther assumed that
his geographical and historical reading was a prerequisite for his journeys
over land, and in general, he viewed his structured travel in books and
university culture as a prelude to more adventurous itineraries.36
Richard eventually grew tired with Saumur, and as he pleaded with his
father to allow him to move on to Paris, he revealed more of what he knew
about travel and its tiers of maturity. He simply must make it to Paris, he
whined, ‘there being there for every hour of the day lectures in all sciences
read, and it being also a place the best for conversation in the world, there
being certain places called the meeting of the beaux esprits, consisting for
the most part of ambassadors, secretaries, as all other ingenious persons,
where is handled the discourse of all passages transacted’.37 Richard even
pointed out that while he stayed in Paris, he could observe the Parisian
parlement, and thereby benefit his later career in law. Paris, Richard con-
cluded, was ‘generally accorded (Rome excepted) to have the pre-eminency
of all the world, for breeding either a lawyer, statesman, or politician, a man

32 TNA SP 18/102, f. 27; SP 18/100, f. 188. See also Stagl, History of curiosity, 76; Dallington, Method for
travell, sigs. b1v.–b2v.; Palmer, Essay of the meanes, 25; Devereaux, Profitable instructions, unpaginated,
and sig. a1; Descartes, Discourse, 10.
33 Richard Lowther to John Lowther, 27 February 1656 (CAC D LONS/L1/1/10).
34 Richard Lowther to John Lowther, 13 January 1656 (CAC D LONS/L1/1/10).
35 Richard Lowther to John Lowther, 2 June 1656 (CAC D LONS/L1/1/10).
36 Palmer, Essay of the meanes, 37–8; Lipsius and Stradling, Direction for travailers, sig. b1v.
37 Richard Lowther to John Lowther, 27 October 1656 (CAC D LONS/L1/1/10); Howard, English
travellers of the Renaissance, 120–32.
26 Foundations
generally qualified, and since my year comes on apace, I think it requisite
to study men a little, being the only end of travel I suppose’.38 Ideally,
travel brought youths like Lowther from the study of books to the study
of men.

Oriental Oxford
Williamson himself had gone to France to do the sort of work that many
other aspiring masters of arts did in Oxford. He delved further into the
eclectic studies he had pursued as an undergraduate, developed inde-
pendent scholarly interests, and began to establish a scholarly network.
He avidly pursued the humanistic learning that was characteristic of the
Queen’s College and the University of Oxford in the seventeenth century,
focusing on Greek philology, Latin poetry, biblical scholarship, and divin-
ity. He wrote constantly to college friends back in England, and much
of this correspondence detailed the pursuits he shared with advanced stu-
dents living in Oxford and elsewhere in England. Members of his circle
exchanged Latin and Greek verse and prose, and Williamson, in his enthu-
siasm, often bowled over his friends with knowledge.39 ‘You are become
a Grecian’, wrote the young lawyer Jerome Bankes, in exasperation. ‘All I
can do is to afford you a χαιρε’.40
As one Queen’s fellow explained to Williamson in October 1656, the
most impressive way for him to fulfil his teaching requirements for the
master of arts degree and position himself for a fellowship would be to
head back to Oxford ready to lecture on philology.41 To do so Williamson
turned away from his college friends and towards senior members of the
Republic of Letters in France, including his neighbours in Saumur.42 He
became an intermediary between the French and English worlds of schol-
arship and book trading. In March 1656, Williamson was corresponding
with the Huguenot Tanaquil Faber, asking him about the most recent
edition of Ovid, arcane points of Greek philology, and the recently pub-
lished correspondence of Claude Sarrau. Through Faber, who lived in
Saumur and became a close friend, Williamson made contact with other
classical scholars living in Paris, including the Catholics Gilles Ménage

38 Richard Lowther to John Lowther, 18 October 1656 (CAC D LONS/L1/1/10); Palmer, Essay of the
meanes, 95–125; Bacon, Major works, 374–5; Devereaux, Profitable instructions; Hammer, ‘The uses
of scholarship’, 48–9.
39 TNA SP 18/99, ff. 69, 74, 168; SP 18/100, f. 187. 40 TNA SP 18/100, f. 287.
41 TNA SP 18/130, f. 72.
42 On this scholarly world, see Laplanche, L’écriture, le sacré et l’histoire.
 Literature and violence 27
and Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de la Mesnardière.43 He also connected the Lau-
dian orientalist divine Herbert Thorndike with the Saumur scholars Louis
Cappel and Moı̈se Amyraut, who had taken an active interest in the progress
of the London Polyglot Bible.44 Williamson thereby immersed himself in
the production of scholarship while soliciting guidance from his seniors.
At the same time, he followed the learned controversies in which these
men were involved, and discussed those controversies with friends back
in England.45 Along the way, he helped to solidify relations between his
French contacts and his college.46
Williamson’s commitment to philological studies, and to a philologi-
cal and historical approach to the study of the Bible, typified the scholarly
environment of Queen’s and all of Oxford during the Interregnum, despite
the hostility of many puritan dons, including the vice chancellor, John
Owen, to these pursuits.47 As an aspiring master of arts himself, Addi-
son joined Williamson in continuing to explore the arts and sciences, the
studia humanitatis, and philosophy, as he had during his undergraduate
years.48 He also focused his efforts a bit, and probably began truly schol-
arly inquiries into the subjects that most interested him. These subjects
included what seems to have been a particular strength of his college, the
main basis for Oxford’s strong reputation on the continent, and a cen-
tral site for intellectual innovation in seventeenth-century Europe: oriental
studies.
At Queen’s, advanced inquiry in the arts revolved around the provost,
Gerard Langbaine, and the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Thomas
Barlow, who were renowned practitioners and patrons. Over the course of
his career Langbaine displayed interest and expertise in a stunning variety of
scholarly fields.49 He was also the main promoter of orientalist scholarship
in Britain, working closely with both John Selden and Edward Pococke.50
Both Langbaine and Barlow seem to have inculcated a passion for historical
and orientalist studies in many of their most ambitious undergraduates.51

43 TNA SP 18/125, f. 201; SP 18/126, f. 83; SP 18/179, ff. 43, 97, 115a; SP 18/158, f. 105.
44 TNA SP 18/126, f. 258; SP 18/158, f. 74. 45 TNA SP18/127, f. 106; SP 18/179, f. 63.
46 See, for example, TNA SP 18/158, f. 129.
47 See also Mandelbrote, ‘Authority of the Word’. Owen and many others apparently recognized
that this strand of scholarship would later provide resources for impious writers and accordingly
distanced themselves from the form of Christian Enlightenment it came to embody.
48 Ward (ed), Statutes, I, 22–4, 114.
49 Bodl MS Selden supra 109, ff. 376r., 380r., 452r.; Hegarty, ‘Langbaine, Gerard’.
50 Feingold, ‘Oriental studies’, 485, passim; Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 749 n. 81; Carter, History
of the Oxford University Press, 37–41.
51 For evidence of interest in orientalism before the Langbaine era, see Crosfield, Diary, 1, 6, 12, 18,
30, 31, 53, 70, 81.
28 Foundations
In the 1650s, students from Queen’s and elsewhere were treated to advanced
lectures by Pococke, who was Regius Professor of Hebrew and Arabic.52
The Hebrew lecturers at Queen’s probably prepared Addison and other
students for these more advanced lessons.53 A striking number of Queen’s
students in the 1650s – among them Addison, Henry Denton, Thomas
Smith, Thomas Hyde, and Joseph Williamson – showed serious interest in
oriental studies. Smith, for instance, while only a bachelor of arts, published
an analysis of the Aramaic paraphrases and translations of parts of the Old
Testament, otherwise known as the Targums.54 And in 1657, a master of
arts from Queen’s published an English translation of Johann Buxtorf’s
Juden Schul, the greatest early modern study of contemporary Judaism.55
But oriental studies were so common among students of theology in those
days that a lack of later publications or teaching in this area of learning did
not imply a lack of avid engagement with it.56
It was only natural that advanced education in Oxford retained its
cutting-edge, late humanist character when students reached divinity, the
pinnacle of the curriculum. And yet too often, the opposite is assumed.
Addison’s advanced education as a divine, for which he later earned the
BD and DD degrees, was for the most part a continuation of his studies
in Oxford during the 1650s.57 When he left Oxford he knew, in precise
detail, from friends, teachers, and popular manuscript treatises circulating
in his college, what sorts of studies were expected of a future leader of
the Church of England.58 Indeed this sort of detailed advice was not even
really necessary, since Addison’s previous education had already shown him
the way. To become a doctor of divinity, and a skilled preacher, scholar,
pastor, and ecclesiastical governor, he merely had to continue to pursue the
ideal of general learning that had guided his studies as an arts student. Like
thousands of other literate Europeans who sought influence in religious and
secular life during this period, he strove to continue his general education

52 Feingold, ‘Oriental studies’, 464.

53 QCA LRC (unfoliated); Feingold, ‘Oriental studies’, 457.
54 Smith, Diatriba. 55 Buxtorf, Jewish synagogue.
56 QCL MS 42; Plumptre, Life of Thomas Ken, II, 295–6. 57 Ward (ed), Statutes, I, 54–6, 119.
58 This and the following paragraphs combine the history of reading that can be gleaned from Addison’s
published works with the prescriptive literature in order to reconstruct Addison’s divinity education
as a typical one. The treatises under examination here appear to be the work of Thomas Barlow,
Richard Baxter, James Ussher, Jeremy Taylor, Meric Casaubon, and Henry Dodwell. See also Bodl
MS St Edmund Hall 72, f. 524r. On the Barlow and Baxter treatises and relevant manuscripts, see
Jacobsen, ‘Review’. For evidence of such treatises being used in Addison’s college, see QCL MSS
217, 518, 478.
 Literature and violence 29
while slightly focusing his energies on the knowledge most relevant to his
specific career.59
For the rest of his life, despite the clerical vocation that drove much of
his reading, Addison would continue to pore over books in all the arts and
sciences, including many of the same texts read by Oxford undergraduates.
He returned to his old commonplace books of Latin and Greek litera-
ture, and the classics themselves. He continued to peruse the Bible with
commentaries and annotations nearby, and seems to have favoured widely
read scholars like John Gregory, Johannes van den Driesche, Giovanni
Emmanuele Tremellio, Jean Calvin, Paul Fagius, Willem Hessels van Est,
Tomasso de Vio, and Girolamo Zanchi. He reviewed catechisms, practical
divinity, systems of divinity, and natural theology. He also continued to
read, as he had as an arts student, famous defences of orthodox Christianity
that had been written in antiquity and during the Renaissance. He even
continued to study civil law, which was important to religious controversy.
His goal, again, was general learning.60
Addison also pursued studies that he had scarcely begun as an undergrad-
uate, because they were thought to require mature judgment. He deepened
his knowledge of biblical scholarship to the extent that he knew how to
defend both the canon and the doctrinal and ritual apparatus he derived
from it against Christian, Jewish, and Muslim critics. To do so, he read
parts of the Talmud, the Qurʾan, and heterodox Christian scholarship
from antiquity onwards. He delved more deeply into biblical criticism,
particular heads of divinity, natural theology, church history, and various
fields of law. When Addison turned to the Church Fathers, he read them
in historical order, and he assessed them critically as he did other scholars,
ancient and contemporary, using their works as sources of evidence for the
history of Christianity. His favourite authors included Tertullian, Justin
Martyr, Eusebius, Eutychius, and Augustine, and he also took material for
early church history from Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus. He then
moved on to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century histories of the church,
and the records of church councils. Finally, at some point Addison began
a course of reading in theological controversies, paying close attention to
William Chillingworth, Moı̈se Amyraut, and Richard Hooker, while also

59 For articulations of the ideal of the general scholar in the context of divinity, see Casaubon, Generall
learning, 92, 95, 103, 117; Leigh, Treatise of religion and learning, 31; Wilkins, Ecclesiastes.
60 Barlow, Library, 1–18, 21, 43–4, 46; Casaubon, Generall learning, 93–5, 99–101, 103, 122, 127–9;
Ward, Statutes, I, 16; McKelvie, ‘Jeremy Taylor’s recommendations’, 100–103; PI, 43, 53, 160–61,
204; WB, 161–2; PSJ, title page, 33, 70–71, 178, 180, 203; Bodl MS Rawl.C.945, ff. 503–16.
30 Foundations
reading a number of heterodox authors along with learned responses to
their work.61 He was preparing himself to defend Christian orthodoxy with
recourse to an array of late humanist armaments.62
The learned defence of Christianity could also benefit from linguistic
proficiency in Hellenistic Greek, Hebrew, and other oriental languages, a
skill set that exceeded the expertise of most arts students. In his work on
this front Addison had on hand works like Buxtorf’s Hebrew and Aramaic
dictionary and the Suda, an encyclopedic Byzantine lexicon. To expand his
historical understanding of the world of the Bible, Addison also immersed
himself in all varieties of orientalist scholarship, including antiquarian
studies of Judaism and Islam, and sacred chronologies and geographies. He
paid close attention to Selden, Buxtorf, Corneille Bertram, Josephus, Carlo
Sigonio, Fagius, van den Driesche, and Edward Brerewood. Like other
mature divinity students, Addison also transcended the largely humanist
emphasis of his arts education, and became familiar with what seventeenth-
century scholars considered to be the best of the scholastics. Yet he evaluated
their arguments according to notions of probabilistic reasoning that the
authors of these works would have rejected.63 Even his ‘scholastic’ reading
was conducted in a humanistic spirit with which any learned layman of
the period would have identified.
For there to be any truth in the traditional intellectual portrait of the
leadership of the Restoration Church of England, a pencil sketch of that
portrait, at the very least, would have to be visible in the formal education
of budding Anglican clergy. Yet there is hardly a trace of that portrait to
be found. None of the available evidence for undergraduate and advanced
education in English universities during this period suggests that graduates
destined for ecclesiastical careers had a profile of learning that even resem-
bled the one that nearly all hostile commentators, from Hobbes to modern
students of English history, have attributed to them.64 The universities were
incubators, purveyors, and disseminators of an eclectic, critical form of late
humanist erudition. The style of theology cultivated in this environment
could never be directly refuted by a new philosophy. Oxford, Cambridge,

61 Barlow, Library, 21–5, 31–7, 44–70; McKelvie, ‘Jeremy Taylor’s recommendations’, 101–3; Addison,
Millennianism, 27; WB, 50; PI, 9, 43, 50, 142; PSJ, 28–30, 36; Addison, ΧΡΙΣΤ´ΟΣ ΑΥΤΟΤΗΕΟΣ;
Casaubon, Generall learning, 93–5.
62 For a focus on the patristic dimension of divinity studies, see Quantin, Church of England and
Christian antiquity, 160–68, passim.
63 Barlow, Library, 25–31, 44, 49; McKelvie, ‘Jeremy Taylor’s recommendations’, 102–3; Casaubon,
Generall learning, 117–18; QCL MS 217, f. 41v.; WB, 101; PSJ, 42, 44, 72–3, 89, 178, 203.
64 For a discussion of the prevailing, traditional understanding of the seventeenth-century universities
as bastions of scholasticism, see Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 211–14.
 Literature and violence 31
and many of their counterparts on the continent promoted the intellectual
innovations of the Enlightenment far more than they inhibited or opposed
them.65

Disputers and orators

In another sense, though, Hobbes may have been right about the disastrous
effects of university education on English society. After all, he had been
one of the first to link the outbreak of civil war to the discursive habits
of preachers, politicians, and polemicists.66 Despite the repeated warnings
about the relationship between literature and politics that they received
from stern teachers and recent events, Addison and his classmates wasted
no time in deploying their newfound learning as political ammunition.
Their education had conditioned them to do so, and this conditioning
extended well beyond the books they read. In the exercises they performed
in their colleges, and later, on the public stage of special university events,
they were taught, over and over again, how to apply logic and rhetoric
to controversial subjects.67 The instrumentality of humanist logic was
constantly reinforced through practice. Addison and other undergraduates
were required to attend disputations every day in their colleges, and to take
their turns participating directly. Declamations, too, were held in colleges
every week.68 In the end, there was very little that educators could do
to regulate their students’ use of the argumentative techniques they were
acquiring. As the seventeenth century wore on, the dons grew increasingly
concerned with both the way in which university disputations were being
conducted and the causes to which logic and rhetoric were being devoted.69
During Lent in 1655, just after he had become a bachelor of arts, Addison
made clear his intent to go further, by turning up twice to publicly defend
theses in the arts school. Public speaking, and in particular, disputation,
continued to be the basic way in which Addison could assess his progress in

65 For the French case, see Edelstein, Enlightenment, 86–91, and works cited therein.
66 Hobbes, Behemoth, 127–8, 136–8, 189–90, 196, 262. See Skinner, Reason and rhetoric, 426–37;
Johnston, Rhetoric of Leviathan; Kahn, Rhetoric, prudence, and skepticism, 152–81.
67 On Elizabethan disputations, see Shuger, ‘St Mary the Virgin’. For the available evidence that the
provost and fellows of Queen’s took the college and university statutes seriously, see Fleming and
Magrath, Flemings in Oxford, I, 262–3; II, 252.
68 Costello, Scholastic curriculum, 14–35; University of Oxford, Statutes of the colleges, I, ‘Queen’s
College’, 14–15, 30; QCA LRC; Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 231; Ward (ed), Statutes, I, 32–6, 86–7,
324–5.
69 Sanderson, Logicae artis compendium; Ward (ed), Statutes, 324–5. Peltonen, Rhetoric, politics and
popularity, explores this problem with reference to early Stuart rhetoric and oratory but does not
address dialectic, disputation, or preaching.
32 Foundations
general learning, garner recognition for that learning, and prove his fitness
as a future leader of the church. As an aspiring master of arts, he continued
to attend daily disputations and disputed publicly on at least four other
occasions. In these years he also delivered two public declamations and
six original lectures. He was simultaneously making a bid here to gain
preferment in the church and, at least for a time, to remain at Queen’s as
one of its fellows. The standards for both future employments – not to
mention service in government, for which some of his classmates opted –
were essentially the same. In 1657, a year earlier than usual, Addison was
examined by the regent masters of the university to assess his ‘learning and
progress in polite letters’, and was allowed to stand for his degree.70 He
would be honoured at the annual Act, the climax of the academic year in
Oxford.
The Act itself featured a series of public disputations and attracted a
considerable audience from outside the university. It showcased more than
any other academic event the relationships between learning and political
discord that preoccupied Addison and his contemporaries. On 11 July 1657,
at the first philosophical disputation of the Act, Trinity College’s Daniel
Danvers stood up before a crowd of hundreds71 in the church of St Mary
the Virgin. His task was to refute Robert South’s argument that ‘the ears
avail more knowledge than the eyes’.72 Before he spoke, John Owen, vice
chancellor and architect of the Cromwellian church, stood up and gave
the young man a stern warning. Danvers could say what he liked, Owen
told him, as long he refrained from profanities, obscenities, and personal
attacks.73 Oxford’s puritan leader went out of his way to do this since
Danvers, who was from a strongly royalist college, had been chosen for his
wit and oratorical finesse to address this question as terrae filius (‘son of
the earth’), the jester of the Act. Danvers was supposed to provide some
elegant, whimsical relief for the audience in the midst of his refutation of
South’s argument.74 Yet lately, the terrae filii had been taking far too much
licence in their speeches. Danvers was no exception. Once Owen sat down,
Danvers launched into an oration in mostly academic Latin. But instead
of answering South’s argument, he showered the audience with obscenities
and personal jibes, as Owen yelled at him, over and over again, to stop.

70 Ward (ed), Statutes, 37, 42, 44, 47–8, 85.

71 If not thousands: see Wood, Life and times, III, 427.
72 OUA NEP/Supra/Reg Qa, f. 153v.; Holford-Strevens, ‘Some seventeenth-century terrae filii ’, 261.
73 Owen, Sermons, xi.
74 Ward (ed), Statutes, 59, 64, 68. On the terrae filius, see Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 303–5; Haugen,
‘Imagined universities’; Henderson, ‘Putting the dons in their place’.
 Literature and violence 33
After Danvers had suggested that the warden of New College was an atheist,
and had perorated on Owen’s powdered hair, the vice chancellor sent his
bedels to pull Danvers down from the stage. The bedels were stopped in
their tracks by a mob of undergraduates, who wanted Danvers to go on.
Owen then took matters into his own hands. Against the protestations of
his friends, he pushed past the young scholars, climbed onto the stage,
pulled Danvers down, and had him thrown in prison.75
Owen closed the Act that year with his own oration, in which he railed
against the terrae filii and their enshrinement in the university statutes. His
comments, which compared the terrae filii on stage in St Mary’s church
to players in the now-suppressed London theatres, were revealing.76 ‘We
contend among us as to who would put others to ridicule before the
people in manner more jocular or wittier’, he complained. This was ‘a
nauseating contest, unworthy even of masked actors’. While in antiquity
‘the Macedonian powers’ and ‘paganism everywhere’ ‘suppressed the merry-
making Old Comedy which offended with raillery against the reputation
of wise men’, England had now ‘desperately fallen in love’ with the same
species of vice. ‘Now that it has been driven out of the popular stage’, he
explained, ‘we are busying ourselves with its rehabilitation by introducing
it into the academic Comitia’. Like the theatre, Owen thought, the Act
could breed contempt for authority, moving from Latin on the stage to
English in local haunts. ‘As long as lunacy of this sort holds its sway over
us’, he warned, ‘anyone who can pour forth words soon to be recited by
the profligate in the eating houses, taverns and brothels, he alone has wit,
and all others are like shadows hovering about’. This misbehaviour, he
insisted, was malignant, in both a moral and political sense: it originated
from ‘hate, love, or the party spirit’, and was destructive of what might
otherwise be a useful academic exercise.77 Owen was admitting that the
speeches, and their tradition of insult, allowed young scholars to mask
public, political attacks in personal terms. In October, the Greek Professor
John Harmar also delivered an oration devoted to crushing the terrae
filii, and it was soon published in London.78 Allies of the republican
regime had launched a rhetorical campaign against a politicized use of
oratory and wit that they thought threatened both learning and the polity
itself.

75 Wood, Life and times, I, 221; Owen, Sermons, xi.

76 On traditional links between fears of rhetoric and theatricality in Renaissance England, see Kahn,
Machiavellian rhetoric, 89–92.
77 Owen, Oxford orations, 30–38, quotations on 31–2. 78 Harmar, Oratio steliteutica.
34 Foundations
Addison, sitting in the audience that day for Danvers’s speech and
Owen’s rage, seems to have been less offended by Danvers’s performance
than inspired to outdo him.79 Addison’s own college was probably the
primary royalist stronghold in the entire university. In tune with the pre-
vailing sentiments there, he was keen to exploit any opportunities he had
for promoting the monarchy and the Church of England. After he took
his master of arts degree two days after Danvers’s speech, at the close of
the Act, he made plans to set out for the Anglican underground. Five days
later, he asked the university congregation if he could be excused from
attending future assemblies (as masters of arts were required to do), since
he would be preaching in the countryside.80 He soon made his way to
Petworth, Sussex, where he was secretly ordained and supported by the
ejected bishop of Chichester, Henry King. He spent the rest of the summer
preaching to Anglican gentry there.81 In the fall, he returned to Oxford,
where in December he was nominated to be a fellow at Queen’s. He failed
to be elected, but was invited to stay in the college as long as he could.82
He seems to have spent most of the next year preaching in Sussex and
studying in Oxford. The following summer, he was given a chance to bring
his resistance to the Cromwellian regime out of the underground and into
the public eye, when he himself was honoured as one of the terrae filii for
the Act in July 1658.83
At the Act that summer, the terrae filius on 10 July, Thomas Pittis,
gave a speech so offensive that he was later expelled.84 Two days later,
Addison waited excitedly in St Mary’s as Robert South addressed his second
philosophical question, ‘Is the world made of atoms?’85 Even South, now
a veteran of these disputations, did not approach the question in full
seriousness. Instead of genuinely addressing Pierre Gassendi’s theory of
atoms, he used the question as an opportunity to make fun of Cambridge.86
When Addison was called upon to argue against South that the world
was in fact made of atoms, he immediately turned to raining obscenities
upon the crowd. At one point Addison turned his Latin venom on South
himself, who responded with an attack on Addison. The terrae filius had
apparently lost one of his eyes after having a bone flung at him at dinner
79 Ward (ed), Statutes, 64. For more evidence of Addison’s misbehaviour as a student, see TNA SP
18/124, f. 73; SP 18/129, f. 140.
80 OUA NEP/Supra/Reg Qa, ff. 65v., 83r.
81 LRO Ex D&C B/V/10/1; Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 518. 82 TNA SP 18/158, f. 58.
83 Wood, Life and times, I, 256; Hearne, Remarks and collections, I, 121; Bodl MS Rawl.C.146, f. 366r.;
Holford-Strevens, ‘Some seventeenth-century terrae filii ’, 261.
84 Wood, Life and times, I, 221. 85 OUA NEP/Supra/Reg Qa, f. 154r.
86 Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 304.
 Literature and violence 35
one evening in Oxford, and this made him an easy target for ridicule.87
South stood up in the audience and addressed Addison as Polyphemus:
‘you horrible, deformed, unnatural monster’, he exclaimed, ‘missing an
eye!’88 Addison was unfazed. Like Danvers the year before, he pushed on,
and eventually focused his attacks on the godly leadership of the university,
turning the aspersions common to the terrae filius oration into ideologically
charged railing.89 In his struggle against the republican regime, Addison
had implicated himself in the very abuse of learning that he, and thousands
of others, would later claim had been responsible for a decade of civil war,
and another decade of degradation and upheaval.
The university authorities waited only until the next day, 13 July, to
punish him. In accordance with the Laudian statute, Addison knelt in
front of all the doctors and masters of the university assembled in Convo-
cation and begged for their pardon, while his formal submission was read
aloud to them.90 Two weeks later, on 30 July, another Convocation was
held, in which the new vice chancellor, John Conant, proposed that the
terrae filius orations be abolished. He said this drastic course of action was
demanded by the speeches of recent years, and in particular, by Addison’s
speech at the previous Act. When Conant brought the matter to the floor,
a vote by voices to abolish the orations was held. Most people seemed
to cry ‘Non!’ But Conant pressed the issue. He demanded that those in
favour of the terrae filii go to one side of the room, and those opposed
go to the other, thereby forcing his colleagues to publicly declare sup-
port for men like Addison, who had attacked him and other godly dons.
Some of the masters fought back, demanding a count of individual voice
votes. Others simply made a ruckus. Conant eventually gave up and sat
down.91
The Oxford Act was loaded with politicized disputation. These public
exchanges addressed questions that had led directly to civil war and rev-
olution in the decade before Addison turned up at Queen’s. In the 1652
theology disputation, for instance, Obadiah Grew was asked extremely
controversial questions. Did he believe that Christ died for all men? Did
he affirm that the souls of the dead live through Christ after their bodies
have been interred? Did he believe that a clear power was vested in pres-
bytery? Grew, advertising his presbyterian Calvinism, answered ‘no’, ‘yes’,

87 Hearne, Remarks and collections, I, 121; TNA SP 18/158, f. 58.

88 Hearne, Remarks and collections, I, 121: ‘ô monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen
ademptum’ (Virgil, Aeneid, III, 658).
89 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 517–18. 90 Ward (ed), Statutes, 70; Wood, Life and times, I, 256.
91 Wood, History and antiquities, II, 684–5; Ward (ed), Statutes, 134.
36 Foundations
and ‘yes’ in turn.92 It was no coincidence that the Act was held neither in
1660 nor during other important political conjunctures in the later Stuart
period.93 In the first decade to follow the Restoration, when royalists were
back at the centre of power, they were predictably far more eager to suppress
the terrae filii than in the 1650s, when they craved any means available to
safely resist the control of men they deemed to be rebels. With his aca-
demic career at an end, there had been no reason for Addison to hold back.
In fact, the terrae filius oration was the perfect opportunity for disgracing
the republic and its church. By ostensibly attacking the dons, regardless
of their politics, Addison could publicly abuse some of the most powerful
figures in the regime without allowing anyone to prove that he was doing
so. The university statutes reinforced this code, by institutionalizing the
terrae filius speech and imposing penalties not for political rhetoric, but for
the personal insults that shrouded it.
The spectacular circumstances of Addison’s departure from Oxford in
1658 epitomized many aspects of a post-bellum crisis in the relationship
between learning and social order. The university remained both an incuba-
tor and a microcosm of national politics. The Civil War had been destruc-
tive of education, from catechizing in parishes to advanced courses in the
universities. Yet the habits of public disputation and oratory that so many
people already viewed as primary causes of the war were products of the
very education they seemed to threaten. Achievement at the university was
to an extent equated with gaining expertise in practices that tended later
in life, if not immediately, to perpetuate political conflict. Scholars before
and after the English Revolution recognized this, and yet the university
remained unreformed, long after the Independents had completed their
reformist tenure at its helm.94

The martial Republic of Letters

Of course, in the academy, and in the European Republic of Letters as a
whole, it was thought that such problems could be averted, if only men
would commit themselves to a code of civility in which ideals of scholarly
exchange and friendship trumped the recognition of political and religious
difference.95 Yet the politics of the Cromwellian university show that the

92 OUA NEP/Supra/Reg Qa, f. 150v. For other religiously and politically charged disputations, see
ff. 150r., 152r., 153v., and 154r.
93 Haugen, ‘Imagined universities’, 17. 94 Contrast ibid., 14–15.
95 Waquet, ‘Éditions de correspondances savantes’; Waquet, ‘Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres?’;
Bots and Waquet, République des Lettres; Dibon, Regards sur la Hollande; Ultee, ‘The Republic
 Literature and violence 37
reality was far more complicated. This was the only period before the
reign of James II in which the royalist Anglicans of Addison’s generation
were subject to persecution. While just years later many of these men
would promote both religious coercion and absolutism, in Interregnum
Oxford and elsewhere they emerged as strident proponents of tolerance,
civility, freedom of speech, and liberty of conscience. At the same time, the
Independent divines and politicians who would later champion these same
ideals worked tirelessly, within and without the university, to persecute
their enemies and restrain public discourse in the name of godliness and
order. This reality exposes the considerable extent to which the norms and
slogans usually associated with the Republic of Letters were not expressions
of proto-liberal principles but tools for authorizing political action and
perpetuating political conflict.
Royalists and other opponents of the Independents’ reforms managed
to retain powerful university positions during the Interregnum. While
Owen, Conant, and their allies were certainly concerned with reactionary
stirrings among teachers and students, they were preoccupied with the
radical calls for the destruction of the universities that proliferated beyond
the walls of Oxford and Cambridge. Renowned scholars who could ably
defend and honour England’s institutions of higher learning were priceless
in such an environment, and yet most of Oxford’s first-rate academics also
happened to oppose the Cromwellian agenda.96 In order to protect the
university’s reputation and salvage their own claims to be committed to
the promotion of learning, Owen and his allies were forced to keep the most
learned royalists around, even while they regularly ejected lesser minds with
identical political and religious beliefs from their academic and ecclesiastical
posts. At one point, for instance, the vice chancellor found himself saving
Pococke, the great orientalist (and committed Laudian royalist), from the
clutches of the new national church that Owen himself had done more
than anyone else to create.97 In 1654, Pococke’s parishioners in Childrey
tried to eject him from his cure under Cromwell’s act for the removal of
scandalous ministers. They alleged that he kept the Book of Common
Prayer in his chapel, prayed for the destruction of the present government,
railed against the profession of godliness, ignored unworthy reception of

of Letters’; Koselleck, Critique and crisis; Goldgar, Impolite learning; Mulsow, Die unanständige
Gelehrtenrepublik; Gordon, Citizens without sovereignty; Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early
Enlightenment culture.
96 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 734–42; Bodl MS Selden supra 109, f. 452.
97 Twells, Pocock, I, 83, 125–41; Toomer, Eastern wisedome and learning, 157–8; Burrows (ed), Register
of the visitors, 82.
38 Foundations
the sacrament, and encouraged profanity. Pococke was only rescued by the
efforts of Oxford dons, including Seth Ward, John Wilkins, John Wallis,
and Owen himself.98
While royalists like Pococke found some security in their utility to the
university leadership, they still often found themselves on the defensive.
On these occasions they were happy to use the norms of civility to protect
themselves and promote their agenda. For the Cromwellians, civility was
a rhetoric of order; for royalists, it was a rhetoric of resistance. Friends of
the Stuarts certainly believed that the zealous application of scholarship
had contributed to the eruption of civil conflict over the past decade,
but in the 1650s they were too concerned with survival to remain true to
these concerns. Instead, powerful dons – including the Queen’s provost,
Langbaine, the civil lawyer Richard Zouch, and the general scholar Ralph
Bathurst – used their learning to defend both the Laudian tradition of the
university and their own position in religious and political controversies,
just as they had since the beginning of the Civil War.99 They constantly
appealed to the need to protect learning at all costs, but they did so primarily
in order to authorize the political action that their learning fortified.
Langbaine, for instance, made full use of his status as an accomplished
antiquarian and historian, keeper of the university archives, and expert on
the history of his own college. From the moment violence in England ceased
for the first time in 1646, he employed his learning to protect the university
and college that he cherished from puritanical excess. His understanding of
the history of the university was unrivalled. Owen turned to Langbaine to
defend the university’s privileges against its external enemies, but he could
not stop the provost from putting his erudition to obstructionist uses at
the same time. Langbaine brought his scholarship to bear upon politics in
his most mundane activities. In his correspondence, for instance, he could
be found mulling over philological and historical minutiae in the interest
of precise scholarship, while pausing to reflect on the political lessons this
work afforded.100
Langbaine and other Anglican royalists repeatedly marshalled the norms
of the Republic of Letters to stymie and ridicule their puritan masters.
Learning, they insisted, should never be stifled in the name of godliness
and the plots that often lurked behind the claim to it. Langbaine confided
to Selden in 1653 that the threats to scholarship from outside the university
98 Bodl MS Rawl.D.843, ff. 124r.–127r.; Twells, Pocock, 151–75.
99 For the example of Addison’s royalist tutor, Richard Rawlinson, see Wood, History and antiquities,
II, 462; Wood, Historia et antiquitates, final leaves; Magrath, Queen’s College, II, 305.
100 See, for example, Bodl MS Selden supra 109, f. 452r.; QCA 2T 97; Hegarty, ‘Langbaine, Gerard’.
 Literature and violence 39
were less alarming to him than the godly threat from within. ‘I was not so
much troubled to hear of that fellow who lately in London maintained in
public that learning is a sin’, he wrote, ‘as to see some men, who would be
accounted none of the meanest of ourselves here at home, under pretence
of piety, go about to banish it in the university’. Langbaine was referring
to an order of the official Cromwellian visitors to Oxford that pertained
to candidates for fellowships. The order, he explained, demanded that no
candidate be elected ‘unless he bring a testimony under the hands of four
persons at the least (not electors) known to these visitors to be truly godly
men . . . [that] he who stands for such place is himself truly godly’. On this
basis, Langbaine claimed, the visitors rejected men whose ‘conversations
were best known to be unblamable’ because they ‘are not known to these
visitors to be regenerate’. He pledged to disregard this order in an upcoming
election at his college. ‘If I be baffled’, he warned Selden, ‘I shall hardly be
silent’ in the face of men who dared to ‘sit judges of all men’s consciences’.101
Langbaine’s seemingly libertarian quest to preserve learning and conscience
from zealotry was hardly a simple plea for a tolerant Republic of Letters.
Instead it was a necessity grounded in his own exclusive religious and
ideological convictions. He sought to remain true to his beliefs while
defeating his enemies.102
By making successful pleas for civility and free inquiry, Langbaine and
his allies were ironically able to ensure that whatever the costs to political
order, the republican regime’s most bitter enemies would never be deprived
of their most powerful means of resistance and self-defence. Langbaine’s
behaviour, like that of Addison in his terrae filius speech, demonstrates that
the Republic of Letters that royalists defended under the Cromwells was
not the same Republic of Letters they would defend under the Stuarts.
Once they regained control of the universities after the restoration of the
monarchy, they would promulgate another understanding of civility: the
notion that public discourse and education needed to be strictly regulated
through self-restraint (and if necessary, official coercion) in order to sever
the potentially destructive ties between letters and revolution. These con-
siderations, of course, were exactly what drove Owen and his allies to try to
crush the terrae filii in the final years of the Interregnum. Interpretations
of the norms of the Republic of Letters were predicated upon the political

101 Bodl MS Tanner 52, f. 60.

102 For a 1652 petition signed by Addison and others that displays a similar attitude to the visitors, see
QCA Reg. H, 130–32; Magrath, Queen’s College, I, 33. See also Bodl MS Rawl.lett.89, f. 108r.; MS
Wood F 35, f. 312r.
40 Foundations
positions of the men espousing those norms. It was, after all, the Indepen-
dent minister and fellow of Merton College, Nathaniel Sterry, who, when
asked in a 1652 Act disputation in philosophy, ‘Does the Republic of Letters
advance more by arms than it does by peace?’, argued that it does.103 It
should come as no surprise that the Cromwellians’ authoritarian gloss on
civility mirrored the one that Laudian royalist dons like John Fell would
espouse just years later. And it was equally predictable that in the same
period, Fell’s conformism would be met with appeals to civility, tolerance,
and freedom of conscience by former Cromwellians.
Like the Laudian Jeremy Taylor’s apparent plea for religious toleration
in 1647, the commitments and keywords of the later seventeenth-century
Republic of Letters were hardly expressions of nascent liberal values.104
They articulated general principles whose practical significance was hotly
contested in particular moments. They were used tactically, both to main-
tain the political status quo and to legitimize resistance to it.105 In the course
of the later seventeenth century, notions of civility, tolerance, and human-
ity were quite sincerely enlisted in support of a wide variety of personal and
ideological agendas. To be sure, those agendas included the occasional com-
mitment to scholarly amity above all other things. But such commitments
appear to have been both inconsistent and rare. And they sidestepped one
of the central dilemmas of the general European crisis of the seventeenth
century: the widespread awareness that while there appeared to be an insol-
uble bond between the public use of learning and the demise of civilization,
divine truths had to be defended at all costs. This dilemma helps to account
for the explosive mixture of licence and restraint that characterized public
politics in post-bellum England.106

103 OUA NEP/Supra/Reg Qa, f. 151r.: ‘respublica literaria maiora incrementa acceperit ex armis
quam ex pace?’ For a different discussion of policing in the Republic of Letters (and its ironic
consequences), see Mulsow, ‘Practices of unmasking’.
104 Taylor, ΘΕΟΛΟΓΙ Α ´ ᾿ΕΚΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ’; Milton, ‘Coping with alternatives’, 157–61. Contrast Marshall,
John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture; Goldgar, Impolite learning, esp. 174–218.
105 Contrast the more partial but compatible discussions in Malcolm, ‘Private and public knowledge’,
300–302; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 535–45; Mulsow, Die unanständige Gelehrtenrepublik.
106 For an example and further discussion, see Bulman, ‘Publicity and popery on the Restoration
stage’.
 ch a p ter 2

Empires, churches, and republics of the globe

By 1652 scholars in Oxford were already debating a classic Enlightenment

question that would be posed more famously by a Cambridge man, Simon
Ockley, half a century later: was the West superior to the East?1 That year
the same disputant who claimed that the Republic of Letters spread mostly
by force of arms, Nathaniel Sterry, was asked in the Act: ‘are Oriental
men more clever than Occidentals?’ He argued that they were.2 Addison’s
Oxford was subject to intense internal strife, but it looked outward as
well as within. The Republic of Letters of which it was a province now
brooked no borders whatsoever. Yet the vision of global scholarly exchange
that citizens of the Republic so proudly pursued was shot through with
commonplaces about the lost wisdom, corruption, and belligerence of
the Orient.3 Perhaps this was why Sterry could couple his esteem for the
Oriental mind with a military vision for a literary polity: beyond the seas,
the expanding Republic often looked more like an empire. Its paradoxes of
truth and power assumed novel forms. Its European members, who sought
wisdom in America, Asia, and Africa, did not leave their pious and political
goals at home; they went abroad to pursue those same goals in uncharted
territory. They were bound to be as ambivalent about the learned men they
encountered overseas as they were about their fellow scholars in Europe.
Humanist elites had always ventured abroad with tasks in mind. They
moved about their own continent and far beyond it to promote their faiths,
trade their goods, and serve their countries, or at least improve their ability
to do these things. Hardly any of them journeyed over long distances
simply to satisfy their curiosity. Travel was too costly in too many ways
to escape the demands of utility. Even those who did leave home out of
a rarefied desire to explore the great beyond were usually bound to put at
1 On Ockley’s question, see Hazard, Crisis of the European mind, 17.
2 OUA NEP/Supra/Reg Qa, f. 151r.: ‘homines Orientales sint Occidentalibus ingeniosiores?’
3 Hamilton et al. (eds), Republic of Letters and the Levant; Malcolm, ‘Private and public knowledge’,
297.

41
42 Foundations
least some of what they learned to political or religious use. Either while
abroad or once returned, they were expected, and usually compelled, to use
their knowledge for ends that were mostly determined by other people.
Nevertheless, the knowledge they and more plebeian travellers amassed
between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries triggered a profound devel-
opment, one that transcended (and would one day obstruct) the agendas
that had led them abroad in the first place. As they grappled with the
stunning diversity of customs, religions, and polities they encountered in
the course of their work, many of them felt inclined to relativize their view
of the world. They thereby fell deeper into the condition of elite secularity
that Europe’s own religious pluralism was already encouraging. They began
to hammer out a sort of rudimentary social science that allowed them to
understand all civilizations on the same terms, so better to manipulate
them.4 This symbiosis between the demands of empire and the science of
man put a global twist on the mutual sustenance of conflict and scholarship
in places like Oxford. Late humanist culture had no need of genuinely curi-
ous, institutionally independent, secularly minded, or empirically objective
travellers to become a staging ground for Enlightenment and the creed of
freedom and equality that often accompanied it.5
The alliance of Enlightened travel with the imperatives of church and
state has gone largely unnoticed by historians of early modern England and
its empire, because experts on Britain tend to write in an insular mode,
and students of its colonies rarely look east of America. From a holistic and
comparative point of view, though, it is clear that the island nation’s expe-
rience was a variant on a European tradition in which learning and empire
went hand in hand. Early English expansion in America, Africa, and Asia
took on a set of structures that had long been familiar to the Iberian empires
and Italian city-states, and were now also prominent features of French and
Dutch enterprise. England’s merchants, diplomats, governors, soldiers, and
missionaries assembled information that suited their economic, political,
and religious goals. Yet unlike the travellers of southern Europe, the English
quickly exposed much of the information they collected abroad to public
view at home. It moved quickly, in manuscript and in print, from the realm
4 Hazard, Crisis of the European mind, 3–28.
5 See also Champion, ‘“I remember a Mahometan story of Ahmed ben Edris”’. For the most sophisti-
cated version of the liberalization and secularization thesis about early modern travel and Enlighten-
ment (partly developed in reaction to Edward Said’s Orientalism), see Rubiés, Travel and ethnology;
Rubiés, ‘Oriental despotism’; Rubiés, ‘Travel writing and humanistic culture’; Rubiés, ‘Theology,
ethnography, and the historicization of idolatry’; Rubiés, Travellers and cosmographers. The argument
is moderated in Rubiés, ‘From antiquarianism to philosophical history’. A theoretical justification
for this approach appears in Stagl, History of curiosity, 8, 31, 47–9, 98, 100, 126–33.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 43
of missions, intelligence, and governance to a world of news, propaganda,
and public knowledge.6
Like Cromwellian Oxford and the conflicts it staged, the global Republic
of Letters and the contradictions it harboured were rooted in the norms of
the Renaissance. Most university students in early modern Europe even-
tually moved out of the medieval academies and sought admission to the
school of practical experience. Both men who yearned to continue their
education and men who hoped to escape from books forever took up
positions in the service of families, churches, and states. Addison was no
exception. Despite the lure of preferment in England, in May 1660 he
set off a second time for the continent, and settled in as chaplain to the
English colony of Dunkerque in Flanders, under the new governor, Andrew
Rutherford, Lord Teviot.7 By November 1662, Dunkerque had been sold
to the French. Addison followed Teviot and his regiment back to England
in March and finally, to the straits of Gibraltar, where he had agreed to
serve as chaplain to England’s newest colony, Tangier. The soldiers set sail
with their spiritual guide in May, and upon their arrival, Addison settled
in a large house in the northern corner of the ancient city. He quickly
took on a wide-ranging role in the colonial regime, as pastor, missionary,
secretary, and spy.8 To follow Addison from the walls of Oxford to the walls
of Tangier and beyond is to encounter the relationship between English
power and knowledge on the Restoration empire’s most understudied
frontier.
In Africa, Addison behaved like any other good late Renaissance trav-
eller: he sought out men of learning and experience and discussed letters
and governance with them. He hoped they would lead him to the texts,
informants, and experiences that might furnish intelligence for his superi-
ors, and later, a full-blown history of the region. His learning was enabled
and conditioned by his official duties. He later described his book about
Moroccan Jews, for instance, as ‘a plain account of the present customs
and religion of the Hebrew people, collected in some of those hours the
employment would spare me, which for several years I underwent, in
the public service of our religion, and in a latitude that yielded no few
opportunities for making these observations’.9 Even his free time and the

6 On the delayed publication of Iberian and Jesuit travel writings (especially those concerning South
Asia), see Rubiés, Travel and ethnology, 343, passim; Rubiés, ‘From antiquarianism to philosophical
history’, 339.
7 Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, col. 518.
8 TNA CO 279/2, ff. 11r., 40r.–59r.; CO 279/34, 130; MPH 1/1/25; BL Maps K.Top.117.79.11.TAB.
9 PSJ, ‘Epistle dedicatory’.
44 Foundations
opportunities for learning it afforded were dependent upon his status as
an agent of empire. The same goes for the other literary products of his
seven-year tenure in the Maghrib, which included a history of Morocco
and a biography of the Prophet Muhammad. Most of the time, his research
and his official duties were one and the same thing.
Britain’s ascendancy in oriental studies during the seventeenth century
was centred in Oxford, but it rested upon the island’s commercial and
colonial presence in the Mediterranean, the eastern Atlantic, and Asia. By
mid century, the Bodleian library had an impressive collection of oriental
manuscripts. The bounty to be found there was a direct result of English
trade in the East, especially in the ports of the Ottoman empire. Books in
Hebrew, Arabic, and other oriental languages began to flow into Oxford
shortly after the foundation of the library in 1602. Yet the manuscript
treasures that made the university central to European orientalism were
the 1,300 items acquired and donated by the archbishop of Canterbury,
William Laud, between 1635 and 1640; and the manuscripts owned by
the politician and scholar John Selden, which were available on request in
Oxford during the 1640s and donated after Selden’s death in 1654. Laud,
whose clerical aggression helped precipitate the English Revolution, was of
singular importance to English oriental studies. He had purchased many
of the Arabic manuscripts owned by the scholar William Bedwell, solicited
manuscripts from chaplains and diplomats working on the European con-
tinent, and convinced Charles I to command all English Levant Company
merchants to return from every voyage they made to eastern ports with one
Arabic or Persian manuscript in hand.10 In the rise of English orientalism,
the Church of England led the way.
Laud’s efforts truly bore fruit once there were Anglican divines serving
in the Ottoman empire who had taken an interest in oriental learning. The
greatest English orientalist of the day, Edward Pococke, was chaplain to the
Levant Company in Aleppo from 1630 to 1636. While ministering to his
congregation Pococke tirelessly pursued studies in Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac,
and Ethiopic, with help from a rabbi, a personal attendant named H . amı̄d,
a learned Muslim named Fath.allāh, and a number of Arabic-speaking
Christians. He even began to edit manuscripts while still abroad. On Laud’s
command, he supervised the acquisition of a great deal of the materials
eventually acquired for the Bodleian. After a short trip home Pococke
returned to the East in 1637. He settled in Constantinople as chaplain
to the English ambassador and was joined by the brilliant mathematician

10 See Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 42, 64, 70, 86, 108, 110.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 45
John Greaves.11 Pococke’s journeys inaugurated an important tradition.
Most of the best English orientalists of the century – including Robert
Huntington, Thomas Smith, Henry Denton, Isaac Basire, John Luke,
John Covel, and Paul Rycaut – served in the Muslim Mediterranean as
chaplains, diplomats, consuls, or secretaries.12 Most of what the English
knew about the current affairs of the region, from Fes to Constantinople,
had also been dependent, since the early seventeenth century, upon the
men who engaged in economic and diplomatic activity there.13 Addison’s
own work was a particularly revealing and well-documented episode in this
story.
The humanism of travelling orientalists in early modern Europe
amounted to a much narrower range of activities, writers, and texts than
the vast field surveyed by students of modern Orientalism. Works like
Addison’s were always partly historical, whether they treated the ancient
past or the contemporary world. They featured varying doses of erudition
and wider appeal, and they were usually intended as counsel or propaganda.
They scrutinized Islamic and Jewish history in order to assist servants of
the state and the church, or, occasionally, to stymie their plans. In this
context, at least, the dichotomy set up between scholarship and power on
all sides of the debate about Orientalism is beside the point. To be sure,
many Orientalist works were composed by well-meaning, curious scholars
who improved Western knowledge of Islamic societies, praised many of
those societies’ characteristics, and likened some of them to the charac-
teristics of European societies.14 But any study of orientalism in the early
Enlightenment must resist the idea that scholarly progress and the mobi-
lization of power were necessarily opposed or parallel processes. Addison’s
works, for instance, exemplify the relatively open-minded orientalism of
his day, but this did not prevent them from serving as effective political
instruments. The opposite was true. The content of orientalist works was
driven by their utility, legibility, and plausibility for European audiences;
the substantive and ideological content that fulfilled these criteria could
vary widely. Truth and falsehood, sophistication and crudity, orthodoxy

11 Toomer, Eastern wisedome and learning, 58, 108–11, 120–26, 130–38; Shalev, ‘Travel notebooks of
John Greaves’.
12 Toomer, Eastern wisedome and learning; ODNB.
13 For Morocco, see Harrison, Messiah already come; Harrison, Tragicall life and death of Muley Abdala
Melek; Castries (ed), Sources inédites, series 1, part 2, IV, 283–95; series 1, part 3, II, 441–596; series
1, part 3, III, passim; TNA SP 71/12.
14 Edward Said was well aware of this, but in isolation, it held little interest for him. See Said,
Orientalism, 55. The vast literature surrounding Orientalism cannot even be sampled here. A recent
revisionist work often cited as an alternative to Said is Irwin, For lust of knowing.
Figure 1 Map of Tangier, 1664. 
C British Library Board. BL Maps K.Top.117.79.11.TAB.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 47
and heterodoxy, likeness and difference, sympathy and antipathy, native
sources and armchair erudition – all could be crucial to the desired effects
of a text. The particular mixture of qualities present in any given orientalist
work depended upon the activities that work was meant to support.15

Scholar and spy

The early orientalists’ interest in Judaism, Islam, and the Islamic empires
helped transform the disciplines of late Renaissance scholarship into the
human sciences of the Enlightenment.16 One reason why England’s role
in this process remains so obscure is that its activities were centred in the
Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, a crucial realm of expansion and
cultural exchange that rarely features at all in histories of English empire
and Enlightenment.17 The fact that Britain’s first African colony, Tangier,
has not been the subject of a major study for over a century is perhaps
the greatest testament to this neglect. This fortified city, which sat at the
intersection of the eastern and western spheres of European expansion,
was one of the most costly and ambitious projects undertaken by the
English state in the entire early modern period.18 In a sense, as its first
modern historian assumed, it was an ‘Atlantic outpost’, a colony intended
for expanding settlement by soldiers, merchants, and other civilians.19
Yet Tangier was also a Mediterranean and ‘Asian’ city, focused on trade
and limited in territory. It epitomized the combination of commercial
and military empire that characterized England’s global presence in this
period.20 Charles II had acquired it along with another Asian outpost,
Bombay, from Portugal in the summer of 1661, as part of his marriage

15 Compare Marchand, German orientalism, xvii–xxxiv; Champion, ‘“I remember a Mahometan story
of Ahmed ben Edris”’; Dodson, Orientalism, empire, and national culture, 1–17; Dew, Orientalism
in Louis XIV’s France.
16 See Stroumsa, New science, for a general, teleological overview of the role of Islamic and Jewish
studies. Historians of the Renaissance roots of the Enlightenment study of religion tend to ignore
Judaism and Islam in favour of European writings about ancient and modern pagans. For the
literature on early modern understandings of modern paganism (focused on America and Asia),
see Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’; Sheehan, ‘Altars of the idols’; Rubiés, ‘Theology, ethnography,
and the historicization of idolatry’; Mulsow, ‘John Seldens De diis Syris’; Miller, ‘Taking paganism
seriously’; Stroumsa, ‘John Spencer and the roots of idolatry’; MacCormack, ‘Gods, demons, and
idols’; Mulsow, ‘Antiquarianism and idolatry’; Miller, Peiresc’s Orient, 273–94; Lach, Asia in the
making of Europe; Mungello, Curious land; Zupanov, Disputed mission; Zupanov, Missionary tropics.
17 On the importance of these regions for England’s early empire, see Colley, Captives, 23–134;
Kupperman, Jamestown project; Games, Web of empire; Stein, ‘Tangier in the Restoration empire’.
18 The regime invested nearly £2,000,000 in the colony (Colley, Captives, 29–30).
19 Routh, Tangier.
20 For a strongly military interpretation, see Webb, Governors-general.
48 Foundations
to Catherine of Braganza.21 The king and other imperial enthusiasts, who
seem to have been far more keen on the prospects of Tangier than the
distant appeal of an obscure Indian city, saw few limits to the importance
of a colony situated, as one of them put it, ‘upon the greatest pass in the
world’. Tangier was routinely depicted as a fortified hub for a global empire,
and the embodiment of a unitary vision of royal and imperial sovereignty.
The colony’s cheerleaders were sure that its population – a mix of
Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims of diverse origins – could sub-
sist on the fertile lands surrounding it, whose riches the Portuguese had
supposedly squandered. Once the colony was properly fortified and its har-
bour protected by a breakwater, Charles could base a squadron there that
would exact tribute from any vessel that passed through the straits, thus
domineering over the Spanish, Dutch, Moroccan, and Ottoman fleets. In
stark contrast to the supposed mercantilism and delegated corporatism of
the English empire embodied in the Navigation Acts and in colonial char-
ters, Tangier was a royal colony and a free port. It was to be an entrepôt
for goods from the Moroccan interior and the Spanish West Indies that
eclipsed the importance of the model Mediterranean port, Livorno, as well
as Cadiz and Seville. It might, Charles thought, even serve as a basis for
further inroads in Africa and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. While many
warned against attempts at further territorial expansion, other colonialists
envisioned an English African empire that stretched from Tripoli to Asfı̄, a
city on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.22
Once he arrived in Tangier, Addison set out quickly to support Charles
II’s imperial enterprise. One particular episode provides vivid insight into
how his civil service was translated into scholarship. In July 1663, to the
relief of Lord Teviot’s superiors back in England, the governor signed a
six-month truce with Ah.mad al-Khad.ir bin ʿAlı̄ Ghaylān, the mujāhid 23
who was gradually coming to dominate the northwest peninsula of the
21 Information on economic, military, ideological, and political topics not treated in this and later
chapters can be found in Games, Web of empire; Stein, ‘Tangier in the Restoration empire’;
Glickman, ‘Empire, “popery” and the fall of English Tangier’; Weiner, ‘Fitna, corsairs, and diplo-
macy’; Davis, Queen’s Royal Regiment; Routh, Tangier; Colley, Captives, 23–134; Hornstein, Restora-
tion navy; Corbett, England in the Mediterranean, II, 298–419; Israel, Diasporas within a diaspora,
421–48.
22 Cholmley, Account of Tangier, 10–13; TNA CO 279/1, ff. 26r., 29, 158–9; CO 279/2, ff. 130–31;
CO 279/8, f. 170; BL MS Sloane 1956, ff. 68–9, 78–83; MS Harley 1595, ff. 22–5; Charles II, A
proclamation declaring his Majesties pleasure; Anon., Description of Tangier; Corbett, England in the
Mediterranean, II, 307–12.
23 One who wages jihād. In the seventeenth century most Moroccan leaders who assumed control over
large territories were known by this title because they had protected the region from Christians.
Such a leader might also gain authority from his status as sharı̄f, a descendant of the Prophet, as
did the first ʿAlawı̄ sultan, Mūlāy al-Rashı̄d.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 49
Maghrib. But the English were still far from secure in North Africa. Later
in the summer, Don Diego Felipe de Palma, a knight of the order of
Santiago, sailed from Spain to its colony of Ceuta, on the Maghribi coast.
On orders from his master, Don Antonio Juan Luis de la Cerda, duke
of Medinaceli, he sent word to Ghaylān, telling him he had a message
from the king of Spain, Felipe IV. Ghaylān agreed to meet de Palma on 10
September at a point halfway between Ceuta and Tetouan. From his palace
in As.ı̄lah, on the west coast of the peninsula, Ghaylān organized a parade of
his best horse, which rode east to Tetouan, where Ghaylān’s father-in-law,
the muqaddim24 of Anjara, and ʿAbd Allāh Karı̄m al-Naqsı̄s, the qāʾid 25 of
Tetouan, met them with another sixty horse. On the appointed day, they
all rode north, met de Palma and his entourage, and rode in a formal,
music-laden procession back to Tetouan.26
Beneath the pomp and gaiety of this diplomatic visit lay a bitter struggle
for power over the peninsula.27 De Palma was visiting Ghaylān to solicit
his help in driving the English from the Maghrib once his truce with them
expired in January 1664.28 The previous January, Spain’s Council of State
had ordered Medinaceli, who was a member of the Council, to convince
Ghaylān to seize Tangier and return it to the Spanish crown.29 Since the
days of Elizabeth I and Felipe II, English–Spanish relations had been a
crucial element in relations between these two powers and Morocco. The
English knew from the outset of their gamble in Tangier that Spain, after
eighteen years of resisting Portugal’s repossession of the city, would not
accept England’s acquisition of territory that they still claimed was their
own, not least a place of such supreme strategic value.30
By the summer of 1663, the English had spies in nearby towns on the
lookout for Spaniards, and Addison was among them.31 When de Palma
arrived at his lodging in Tetouan, he was greeted by a delegation of local
Christians, including the Tangier chaplain and another Briton. Writing
eight years later, Addison recalled this initial encounter with a sarcastic
24 In this context, ‘one who comes before others’ – a local leader.
25 Local governor. 26 WB, 106–7.
27 On diplomatic and military relations among the European maritime powers and the Moroccan
kingdoms in the early modern eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, see Weiner, ‘Fitna, corsairs, and
diplomacy’; De Bakker, Slaves, arms, and holy war ; Coindreau, Corsaires de Salé; Yahya, Morocco
in the sixteenth century; Lloyd, English corsairs; Ricard, Études sur l’histoire des portugais; Corbett,
England in the Mediterranean, II, 298–419; Nékrouf, Amitié orageuse. On Moroccan political history
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Cour, L’établissement des dynasties des chérifs; Berque,
Ulémas, fondateurs, insurgés; Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc; Castries (ed), Sources inédites; Castellanos,
Historia de Marruecos; Abun-Nasr, History of the Maghrib.
28 TNA CO 279/2, ff. 142–66. 29 Castries (ed), Sources inédites, series 2, part 1, I, 65–7.
30 Davis, Queen’s Royal Regiment, I, 28–9. 31 TNA CO 279/2, f. 165.
50 Foundations
chuckle. ‘In this order was Don Diego conducted to his lodgings in
Tetouan’, he wrote, ‘where he courteously received the Christians that
came to give him the parabién to Barbary, and declared a great readiness
to serve my comrade and myself, whom he knew had no other concern
in those parts, but securely to travel and view the country’.32 Addison, of
course, was no wide-eyed tourist. In this period no Christian could travel in
Morocco without diplomatic credentials. He had in fact been in Tetouan
weeks earlier, intent on probing the full nature of the Spaniard’s machina-
tions, when de Palma’s representative came through the city with a Jewish
interpreter, on his way to an audience at Ghaylān’s palace in As.ı̄lah.33 As
the situation began to heat up, he wrote to Tangier and to London with
the intelligence he was gathering.34 Worried that as a European Christian
his access to events in As.ı̄lah would be limited, he asked al-Naqsı̄s to rec-
ommend a good spy to him. Once introduced to ‘a Moor versed in public
affairs’, Addison, his comrade, and their Maghribi informant followed de
Palma to As.ı̄lah.35 In the meantime, the English were going on the offen-
sive themselves. ʿAbd Allāh al-Dilāʾı̄ had offered them possession of the
qasbah36 of Rabāt.-Salā, which Ghaylān was threatening to seize. Teviot
and the Tangier commission were making plans to occupy it until Ghaylān
beat them there in May 1664, and predictably launched a massive corsair
offensive.37
That fall, a number of English spies noted that both Ghaylān and de
Palma were making the most of the occasion. Ah.mad al-Khad.ir, a servant
of Ghaylān who moonlighted as an informant for the English, wrote to
Tangier on 3 December, describing the visit. De Palma had arrived in
Tetouan with a massive trove of presents for Ghaylān – horses, jewels, and
other valuables worth 4,000 pieces of eight. He made his purpose obvious.
‘He came’, wrote al-Khad.ir, ‘with pages well-clothed and ostentation befit-
ting an ambassador to a prince of Barbary’, and brought with him another
man, his original messenger to Ghaylān, who many believed was a brilliant
military engineer who could assess the fortifications of the English city.
‘Without doubt’, al-Khad.ir concluded, ‘all is against Tangier’.38 Addison
also noted the political theatrics of the visit, spurred on by Felipe IV’s desire
to impress the Maghribis with Spanish might, and Ghaylān’s need to con-
solidate his authority in the area. ‘After two days refreshment at the Moors’
32 WB, 108. 33 TNA CO 279/2, f. 177r.; WB, 106.
34 TNA CO 279/3, f. 33r. 35 WB, 110. 36 Fortress.
37 TNA CO 279/2, ff. 130–32, 169–72, 183; CO 279/3, ff. 266r., 297v., 316r.; Weiner, ‘Fitna, corsairs,
and diplomacy’, 412–14, 419. On the projected English takeover of As.ı̄lah in 1667, see TNA CO
279/8, ff. 96, 170, 178–80.
38 TNA CO 279/2, ff. 177r., 178r. Al-Khad.ir was a herald, secretary, or interpreter under Ghaylān.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 51
charge’, Addison reported, ‘the Don began his march toward As.ı̄lah, but
first caused the horses to be richly trapped, and led in state through the
streets of Tetouan; which being done, they came to a plain a little out of
the town, where the people made a spacious circle, in which the Moresco
cavaliers showed their active horsemanship, and dextrous darting of the
lance’. The political performances came in many layers. ‘These desports
being finished’, Addison continued, ‘the envoy advanced his journey, and
found the ways crowded with spectators, invited there by Ghaylān’s politic
friends, who designed that the people might take notice of the honor done
to Sı̄dı̄ al-Khad.ir, and that his friendship was sought by the greatest of
Christian monarchs’. Once the procession reached As.ı̄lah, and de Palma
was settled in one of Ghaylān’s apartments, Addison’s Maghribi agent got
to work, and confirmed the chaplain’s suspicions. The informant noted
that de Palma was constantly inquiring about the condition of Tangier: the
number of soldiers, the size of its regular guard, the height and strength
of its walls, and the situation and number of its guns. In a final flourish
in tactics, Addison reported from As.ı̄lah, de Palma had even dressed as
a Muslim to go in secret with Ghaylān to observe the fortifications of
Tangier.39
Many of the details from Addison’s mission in 1663 only survive because
he later recorded them in his 1671 historical treatise on the northwest
Maghrib, West Barbary. In this work he used what had previously served as
political intelligence on de Palma’s scheming for an historical description
of the customary reception of foreign ambassadors in Morocco. Addison’s
scholarly publications on the Jews and Muslims of the Maghrib lay at the
end of a long story of politics and paperwork, in which his activities as
a travelling humanist were structured and enabled by his service to the
budding English empire and its struggling African colony. The anecdotes
that later became part of Addison’s scholarship began as intelligence,
propaganda, and counsel before ending up as scholarly polemic.40 They
rapidly worked their way from his mind to a series of manuscript and print
genres – from letters to superiors and newsmen, on to news in script and
print, and finally, into pamphlets and histories.41 His activities epitomized

39 WB, 108–10; TNA CO 279/3, f. 33r.

40 On the historical parallels West Barbary offered between the revolutions of Morocco and England,
see below, 121–8, 151–4.
41 On the intelligence-gathering and news-writing operations of the offices of the secretaries of state in
this period, see Muddiman, King’s journalist; Fraser, Intelligence of the secretaries of state; Sutherland,
Restoration newspaper; Marshall, Intelligence and espionage. These studies treat neither the cultural
basis of these activities nor their relationship to independent publication.
52 Foundations
the emerging culture of information management by absolutist states in
early modern Europe, which was itself a crucial setting for Enlightenment.42
After this mission outside the city walls, Addison appears to have spent
most of his time in Tangier. He pursued a wide variety of pastoral activ-
ities while continuing his service to the military government and their
masters in London as a spy, secretary, and propagandist.43 For instance,
in March 1664, six months after his encounter with de Palma, Addison
wrote to London about his recent work. He acquainted his friend from
the Queen’s College, Joseph Williamson, now undersecretary of state, and
the royal journalist, Henry Muddiman, with what had happened since
Teviot’s arrival in Tangier. Addison sent the letter to Williamson’s office
at Whitehall, but assumed it would first be passed on to the newsman
Muddiman before it was perused by the statesman.44 Addison offered a tri-
umphant account of Teviot’s rapid fortification of the city and his military
successes against Ghaylān’s forces. Later in the year, a small, propagandistic
news pamphlet, probably composed by Muddiman, was published about
Teviot’s first months in Tangier.45 Most of it was copied out of Addison’s
letter from March. It embellished a few sections and then weaved in addi-
tional information that seems to have come from other letters that were
sent from Tangier to London. Addison continued to write to Williamson
throughout his African tenure, and these letters then circulated in England
among his friends.46 He was part of a process much wider than the sphere
of his own activities, in which intelligence was gathered to advise the privy
council on Tangier and to furnish propaganda for the colony.47

Knowledge and intelligence

The full contours of the relationship between humanistic knowledge pro-
duction and the business of England’s imperial state can only be appreciated

42 For one of the few existing studies of this phenomenon, see Soll, Information master. See also
Popper, Ralegh’s History of the world, esp. 19–23, 36–9, 45–7, 53–69, 239–47.
43 See, for example, BL MS Sloane 3510, ff. 4–16. In the 1670s lieutenant governor Henry Norwood
appealed to Charles II to grant patronage to Addison as a reward for these activities (TNA SP
29/408, f. 319).
44 TNA CO 279/3, ff. 32r.–33r. This was common practice: see Muddiman, King’s journalist, 146–7.
45 [Muddiman], Brief relation.
46 Addison even crafted propaganda on his own that drew on his learning and his experience in the
Maghrib. In 1681 he published an adulatory account of Teviot’s governorship, The Moores baffled,
meant to curry support for funding Tangier during the Exclusion Crisis. See below, 236; Addison,
Moores baffled, sig. a2, 4, 7, 19–20, 26–7; TNA CO 279/2, f. 116r.; Caesar, Gallic war, 24–7.
47 TNA SP 29/195, f. 40; Fraser, Intelligence of the secretaries of state, 143.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 53
by again turning away from Addison to the more fully documented activi-
ties of Williamson. The secretary and his protégés were tasked with manag-
ing political information at Whitehall in the early days of England’s admin-
istrative revolution.48 Williamson’s intelligence and propaganda regime was
not as vast, formalized, or complex as that of his famed French contempo-
rary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert; but unlike Colbert, Williamson and another
Queen’s graduate and state secretary, Sir Robert Southwell, were scholars,
active citizens of the literary Republic. Their careers in England and Ire-
land epitomized the mature contribution of late humanist culture to early
modern statecraft.49 The slate of government posts Williamson held along
with his secretaryship paraded this connection: England’s Latin secretary
and keeper of the King’s Library was also keeper of the State Papers and
foreign affairs secretary to the privy council. His office, a multipurpose
repository and circulation centre for reports like Addison’s, embodied the
erudition of the state.
The intelligence gathered from travellers’ missives, secretaries’ spies, and
letters opened in the Post Office accounted for much of the information
the privy council used to make decisions. A great deal of it was also con-
verted into news and propaganda, and thus found its way into newsletters,
newsbooks, and pamphlets. Williamson himself operated a quid pro quo
newsletter system for the political elite. He solicited bits of news from
a select group of English and foreign correspondents in Europe, North
America, Africa, and Asia, assembled it all in a newsletter, and finally sent
the aggregate back to each of his sources. Before 1666 he only controlled
correspondence from abroad, and it was left to Muddiman to manage a
lucrative domestic system in which he charged those who did not feed
him news. A stream of much less sensitive information, mostly on for-
eign affairs, was thrown into newsbooks published by the secretaries of
state, who monopolized such pamphlets until 1679. They contained news
copied directly from the gazettes of Paris, Brussels, Haarlem, and Amster-
dam, along with snippets drawn from the ‘advices’ of English diplomats in
Paris and Madrid, dispatches from Tangier and other colonies, letters from
consuls, and missives from a variety of other English officials, gentlemen,
and solitary travellers.50 In order to hide England’s arcana imperii from
a wider public, domestic information was kept to a minimum. This was
all in keeping with traditional practice on the continent, where printed

48 Marshall, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson’.

49 Soll, Information master, 9; Barnard, ‘Southwell, Sir Robert’.
50 Fraser, Intelligence of the secretaries of state, 74.
54 Foundations
gazettes provided propagandistic information for general consumption,
and manuscript newsletters offered more select, confidential content.51
State information often came in the form of histories of the present or
the recent past sent to London by travellers.52 For instance, in 1675 William
Allestree, secretary to the English envoy in Stockholm, sent Williamson
his treatises on the trade, nobility, courts, and constitution of Sweden,
along with a Swedish councillor’s letter on the ‘true interest’ of his coun-
try. The letter, Allestree explained, was important because ‘the counsels of
those who were against the war in which Sweden is now engaged were
founded upon this discourse’.53 The secretaries collected and processed
a huge mass of this material. Williamson pored over manuscript trea-
tises like Allestree’s, along with better-known printed works, and entered
items of interest into a library of commonplace books on a wide range of
topics.54 By the time Allestree’s treatises arrived, Williamson had arranged
intelligence in his office in twelve cupboards, each with a bust of a par-
ticular Roman emperor on top. Material relating to Tangier, which by
this time probably included Addison’s letters and works on North Africa,
piled up in the Claudius cupboard, along with information on the Amer-
ican colonies and world trade.55 At Whitehall Williamson perpetuated a
tradition of learned Renaissance state administration that began in Italy,
spread to Spain, and was later adopted in the North by the Elizabethans,
Colbert, and others.56 Unlike Colbert’s state archive, though, Williamson’s
cupboards and personal library testified to a strong interest not only in
the empire he served, but also in the non-European states and societies it
confronted.57
Williamson also brought learning to the service of the state by sponsoring
the travels of talented youth. Among the beneficiaries of his support were a
number of future administrative innovators, including William Blathwayt,
Robert Yard, and James Vernon.58 He afforded these men the same sort
of experience abroad that had launched his own career in statecraft after
the restoration of the monarchy. By 1678, Williamson was both secretary

51 As part of this process, governors and other officials in Tangier exchanged news directly with
London or relied upon English diplomats in Cadiz and Madrid as intermediaries. Compare Fraser,
Intelligence of the secretaries of state, 70, 77.
52 On contemporary histories and the French state, see Jouhaud, Pouvoirs de la littérature, 151–250.
53 TNA SP 9/125, quotation on 60. See also TNA SP 9/142, 9/144, 9/146–7, 9/149, 9/203.
54 See TNA SP 9/8, 9/14–17, 9/21–31, 9/158–87.
55 Marshall, Intelligence and espionage, 43.
56 For an overview, see Soll, Information master, 13–33.
57 Soll, Information master, 113–19. For Williamson’s personal library, see QCL MS 42.
58 Marshall, ‘Sir Joseph Williamson’, 18.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 55
of state and president of the Royal Society.59 He never managed to build
Solomon’s House, the state research institute envisioned in 1627 by Francis
Bacon in his New Atlantis, but by assuming a leadership role in both
the Crown’s intelligence regime and its scientific academy, he was clearly a
man who hoped to merge research programs with state imperatives.60 That
year, at his own expense, he sent the future bishop and historian William
Nicolson on a journey to Germany. Though Nicolson lived in Oxford,
where he was a bachelor of arts, he spent considerable time in London,
where he met Williamson and the natural philosopher Robert Hooke, who
would both be crucial figures in his later scholarly career.61 Williamson
expected Nicolson to pursue work abroad in specific fields (his pet topic
was Anglo-Saxon) while studying to become a master of arts, just as the
secretary himself had done after his move to France in 1655. Nicolson’s
intended destination was the University of Leipzig, where it was thought
his linguistic studies might bear the most fruit. The journey was meant to
further his scholarship, gain him entry into the Republic of Letters, and
help prepare him for any career in which his learning might be useful.
But Nicolson’s itinerary also reveals how scholarly journeys could double
as intelligence missions. The young linguist was sent abroad during the
height of the Nijmegen peace negotiations that ended the Franco-Dutch
War. On the day in July 1678 when Nicolson set sail from Greenwich
for Holland, Williamson gave him a detailed set of instructions. This
was in keeping with the Renaissance tradition of systematic directions for
travellers, spies, and diplomats alike.62 In order to make his way to Leipzig,
Williamson advised, Nicolson needed maps, and if he could find one, a
modern humanist itinerary.63 These resources would enable Nicolson to
avoid making banal comments on what he saw. ‘Carry a table book in
your pocket’, Williamson wrote, ‘in which to note all that is memorable as
you pass up and down’. Every night, he counselled, ‘draw out that into a
journal book in plain English, etc., without fashion or curiosity, that the

59 On the Royal Society as an advisor and publisher of travel writing, see, for example, Frantz, English
Traveller, 15–29; Knox, Island of Ceylon.
60 See Soll, Information master, 98; Grafton, ‘Where was Salomon’s house?’.
61 James, North country bishop, 8.
62 James, North country bishop, 9. For another example, see Cameron, Aphra Behn, 34–5. For continental
precedents, see Queller, ‘Development of ambassadorial relazioni’; Cline, ‘Relaciones geográficas of
the Spanish Indies’. On the broader context of Italian state formation and information management
in which such traditions first developed, see among others Ianziti, Humanistic historiography under
the Sforzas; Mattingly, Renaissance diplomacy; D’Amico, Renaissance humanism in papal Rome; Burke,
‘Early modern Venice’.
63 Williamson recommended Zeiller, Itinerarium Germaniae. Compare Stagl et al., Apodemiken, 104;
Bacon, Major works, 375.
56 Foundations
style injure it not’. In general, he said, ‘write constantly and at large of all
you observe or learn that is curious of any kind’.64 Williamson wrote these
directions as a statesman and a scholar. Nicolson’s journal, an unadorned
record of curiosity, was fit for the service of both the English empire and the
Republic of Letters, and would later be converted into formats appropriate
for both settings.65
While Nicolson was to voraciously observe everything he could,
Williamson did note that some things were more important to see and
study than others. His advice for visiting towns, for instance, alternated
sentence by sentence in its concerns, between political utility and focused
curiosity. In fortified frontier towns, Nicolson was to ‘enquire who is the
governor, of what number the garrison consists; how the town is forti-
fied, what contributions they raise’. Yet Williamson also encouraged him
‘to see the churches, public buildings, and other things of curiosity in it’.
Williamson moved from towns to general advice for observing entire coun-
tries, setting out topics of political, economic, and simply scholarly interest.
Finally, he added a set of directions that were much more specific, more
characteristic of instructions for spies. ‘In passing through Nijmegen’, he
wrote, ‘endeavor all you can to see the several ambassadors and ministers
that are now there, the Pope’s nuntio, etc. Learn what you can of their
characters, abilities, etc.’.66 Williamson hoped that Nicolson’s close inspec-
tion of the peace congress would complement and confirm intelligence
gathered by the English ambassadors who were already there. But this visit
would also provide Nicolson with a chance to meet famed politicians and
begin his education in public life.
Nicolson was able to gain access to the powerful and learned men
of the areas through which he passed because of his relationship with
Williamson and the acquaintances he began to make with continental
scholars, including his travelling companion, the Wolfenbüttel librarian
David Hanisius.67 Nicolson reached Leipzig in September and stayed and
studied there until late February 1679. While his stay in Leipzig itself was
mostly for educational purposes, even here he was to combine his linguis-
tic studies with an occasional dip into the latest relationes on Germany, a
genealogy of the German nobility, and an annotated text of the 1648 treaty

64 Williamson, ‘Travel instructions’ (BL MS Add 41803, ff. 9–15), in Hoftijzer (ed), ‘A study tour’, 86.
Compare the two-notebook method in Erpenius, De peregrinatione gallica, 20; or the advice for
diary-writing in Bacon, Major works, 375. Generally, see Stagl, History of curiosity, 79.
65 Hoftijzer (ed), ‘A study tour’, 117–18. 66 Ibid., 85.
67 QCL MS 68, in Hoftijzer (ed), ‘A study tour’, 86, 106.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 57
of Münster.68 On the way from Greenwich to Leipzig, Nicolson had
become part of a continent-wide scholarly and political network, following
in Williamson’s footsteps two decades after the secretary’s own first journey
abroad.
Nicolson’s activities upon his return to London in March showed that
he understood well the purposes of his travels. He seems to have kept
a journal in Holland and Germany, as Williamson had recommended,
and he put it to multiple uses at home.69 He first wrote a report on his
journey fit for presentation to his patron. It took the form of two works
of the same sort, an Iter Hollandicum and an Iter Germanicum. The report
was probably bifurcated in this way because of the importance of political
categories to Nicolson’s travels. It was primarily organized as a humanist
iter or peregrinatio, in chronological steps, although some more evocative
sections led the reader through particular sites.70 For each place where
he had stayed, Nicolson provided a synchronic description that appeared
more like a Renaissance relatio, status, or descriptio.71 The details of the
itinera were geared more towards Williamson’s scholarly interests than his
political ones, filled as they were with details on the ancient monuments
and manuscript collections of the cities through which Nicolson passed.
This content reflects how essential travel had become to historical and
antiquarian research in this period. While abroad, Nicolson seems to have
seen most of the mundane state intelligence he gathered as more fit for
letters – swifter, more ephemeral communications that were better adjusted
to the rhythms of politics.72
Soon after Nicolson became a master of arts in July, he was elected
to a fellowship and a new lectureship in Anglo-Saxon at the Queen’s
College. But he could often be found in London with Williamson, who had
endowed his lecture post in Oxford, helping the secretary sort manuscripts
in the state paper office. He could also be found in the capital meet-
ing with Moses Pitt, a central figure in London’s scholarly book trade.
Pitt recruited Nicolson to become the primary contributor to a grandiose
cosmographical project, The English atlas, which benefited from the assis-
tance of Williamson and the rest of the Royal Society.73 For this work
Nicolson again made extensive use of his travel journal. From reading he
68 Ibid., 86. His reading was to include Pufendorf, De statu imperii Germanici; Rosenfeld, De
summa principum Germaniae potestate; Oldenburger, Notitia rerum illustrium imperii; Rittershausen,
Genealogiae imperatorum.
69 Contrast Hoftijzer (ed), ‘A study tour’, 77, 79. 70 See ibid., 118.
71 See Stagl, History of curiosity, 203. 72 Hoftijzer (ed), ‘A study tour’, 117–18.
73 James, North country bishop, 13–21; Taylor, ‘Robert Hooke’; Taylor, ‘The “English atlas”’. On the
ambitions of the project, see Pitt, English atlas, I, ‘Introduction’.
58 Foundations
wrote descriptions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, and from
his journey notes and other reading, he put together two volumes on the
German states. Pitt published all of this work between 1680 and 1682 as
part of his Atlas.74 Tellingly, the prescribed contents for each section of the
Atlas corresponded closely to Williamson’s original travel instructions for
Nicolson’s journey abroad.75 And when the first volume appeared, Pitt’s
introduction extolled the alliance between scholarship and the state that
ensured the publication and survival of so many English travel accounts.
‘Except care be taken to preserve what is already found out’, he wrote in
the dedication to Charles II, ‘all the advantage that should arise from the
dangers of the seaman, and the bounty of the prince, will determine with
the expedition; and the next age is to begin again, as if no advance had
been acquired’.76
At home, Addison’s travels in Africa bore much the same fruit as Nicol-
son’s ventures in Europe. When he returned to England and published West
Barbary in 1671, he dedicated it to Williamson as a work of intelligence
and counsel.77 It was also a significant scholarly event. West Barbary was
an early instance of the flowering of orientalist publications in post-bellum
Oxford that helped realize Laud’s original ambition to establish a learned
press at the university. It was also one of the first dozen books produced at
the Sheldonian Theatre, which Addison’s patron Williamson had worked
to turn into a printing venue, and perhaps the very first book printed

74 Hoftijzer (ed), ‘A study tour’, 76–8, 83. Nicolson also had a significant role in the sections on
Holland and the Ottoman empire.
75 See BL MS Sloane 1039, f. 6, quoted in Hoftijzer (ed), ‘A study tour’, 83 n. 21.
76 Pitt, English atlas, I, ‘To the King’.
77 WB, ‘Epistle dedicatory’. For other works of historical counsel in Williamson’s possession, see QCL
MS 42. During the two decades of English dominion in Tangier, numerous accounts of the colony
and the region flowed from correspondence to news and on to propaganda pamphlets and more
polished relations, just as Addison’s writing had. The most significant work on Tangier besides
Addison’s was Sir Hugh Cholmley’s study, which circulated in manuscript and was first printed in
1787. See Cholmley, Account of Tangier; Bodl MS Rawl.D.380; MS Rawl.A.341; BL MS Lansdowne
192; MS Harley 6007. Cholmley managed the building of the city’s breakwater and influenced
the administration of the colony. His writing was an extension of his activities as a counsellor
and propagandist. He focused on his expertise in military matters and offered ‘a discourse of the
nature of moles’ that traced their construction back to Nebuchadnezzar. Like Addison, he consulted
local Jews and Muslims to learn about Morocco’s recent political history. For more on Cholmley,
Tangier, and the more popular English literature that originated in English Mediterranean, see
Colley, Captives, 23–134. For other English works on the colony and the region, see BL MS Sloane
505; Philips, Present state of Tangier; WB, 71; Anon., Description of Tangier; Anon., Present interest
of Tangier; Anon., Present danger of Tangier; Anon., Exact journal of the siege of Tangier; Anon.,
Discourse touching Tangier; Anon., Particular relation of the late success; Anon., Last account from
Fez; Sheeres, Discourse touching Tanger; Cholmley, Short account of the progress of the mole; Franklin,
Letter from Tangier; Poseley, Letter from Tangier.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 59
at the Sheldonian that made use of the press’s new Arabic type.78 West
Barbary was originally sold in Oxford but soon hit the streets of London.
It was advertised there on 10 July 1671, and sold in St Paul’s churchyard
by Pitt, the publisher of the English atlas.79 In Pitt’s shop, West Barbary
would have eventually been sold alongside the Atlas and a series of sim-
ilar works that had in their own way also originated on the continent.
These included the English translations of François Bernier’s modern his-
tory of the Mughal empire, Roland Frejus’s account of North Africa, and
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s travelogues.80
In a sense, Addison and Nicolson crossed paths on the continent as well.
A year after Addison’s West Barbary and his study of modern Judaism, The
present state of the Jews, were available to Londoners, they were brought onto
the continent – just like the contents of Addison’s reports from Tangier
would have been during the previous decade, in sections of Williamson’s
newsletters – and translated into German. The German edition of The
present state was prominently placed in a compendium of orientalist works
along with the famous accounts of Bernier and Frejus. It was therefore
likely to be read in Germany with two of the same works that were being
sold next to West Barbary in London.81 In just five years, Addison’s insights
had been disseminated far beyond the confines of Williamson’s political
network. Like scores of other contemporary histories, the chaplain’s works
had been brought from their point of origin into the purview of at least a
section of the Republic of Letters. Other English travel writing produced in
similar circumstances circulated even more widely, and featured decisively
in the great dictionaries and encyclopedias of the Enlightenment.
The Renaissance tradition of travel, intelligence, and diplomacy made it
possible for Addison, Nicolson, and other young men of modest means to
launch wide-ranging careers in church and state while pursuing their schol-
arly interests. But it also tended to ensure that their scholarship reflected
the ideological commitments of the men who sponsored it. Innovative,
scholarly travel writing in this period was in no way dependent upon
freedom from the shackles of authority. In fact, the concentration of
European learning in the institutions of the church and the corridors
of the state encouraged just the opposite. While humanistic inquiry may
78 Madan, Oxford books, III, 229–61; Carter, History of the Oxford University Press, 34–54.
79 Arber, Term catalogues, I, 80.
80 See Pitt, English atlas, I, ‘Books printed at the Theater in the University of Oxford since 1672’
(unpaginated); Bernier, Late revolution; Tavernier, Six voyages. Pitt sold other similar works in the
period including Anon., Adventures; Georgirines and Denton, Present state of Samos; Palafox y
Mendoza, Conquest of China; Smith, Manners, religion and government of the Turks.
81 Addison, West-Barbarey; Addison, ‘Die gegenwärtige Beschaffenheit des Judenthums’.
60 Foundations

Figure 2 Frontispiece engraving for the 1672 German translation of Addison’s

West Barbary.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 61
have been intellectually transformed in the course of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, in political terms, it remained all too famil-
iar. Learned English travel writing in Addison’s day was in large part an
outgrowth of England’s state intelligence system, and reflected its concerns.
While the intimate relationship between the Enlightenment and the mod-
ern European empires has become an almost hoary truth, it is crucial to
understand that in England, at least, this relationship was present from the
beginning.82 The yoking of Enlightened travel and the insights it produced
to the prerogatives of missionaries and statesmen was not a belated betrayal
or hijacking of an essentially emancipatory phenomenon. It was what made
such travel and knowledge possible in the first place.83

Learning to spread the gospel

The concerns of scholars who partnered with empire were not all of this
world. Strict divisions between the domains of church and state, after all,
largely eluded them.84 Take Williamson’s protégé, Nicolson, who eventu-
ally moved from state service to a bishopric, or Williamson himself, who
appears to have been a candidate for the archbishopric of Canterbury at
the height of his power in Whitehall, and the lesson is clear.85 Addison,
for his part, spied and wrote for the military regime in Tangier, but he was
really there to save souls. Like his intelligence missions, his holy mission
extended far beyond his duties as chaplain. He appears to have spent much
of his time in Africa trying to convince its unbelieving inhabitants to place
their trust in Christ.86
Addison’s impulse to share his faith was also an impulse to learn. Schol-
arship fortified his efforts to convert Maghribi Jews and Muslims to Chris-
tianity, and his mission field became a research site.87 His path had first
been blazed by intrepid Catholic priests almost two centuries earlier. The
82 Contrast Drayton, Nature’s government, esp. 17; Bayly, Empire and information; Cohn, Colonialism
and its forms of knowledge. The humanistic side of this phenomenon was certainly more important
than natural science to the imperial regimes of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain,
but it has been neglected by historians.
83 For similar arguments about France and Spain, see Soll, Information master; Pagden, Fall of natural
man; Pagden, European encounters with the New World, esp. 51–88. Much travel writing in late
seventeenth-century England was clearly moulded by what Bernard Cohn would call an ‘inves-
tigative modality’ of the English state, church, and empire (Cohn, Colonialism and its forms of
knowledge, 5). On the connection between the investigative modalities of modern British India and
those under study here, see Bulman, ‘From anti-popery and anti-puritanism to Orientalism’.
84 See Turler, Traveiler, 27–36. 85 Bodl MS Smith 50, 77.
86 On his work as chaplain, see below, 210–19.
87 Addison seems to have realized the difficulty and possible danger of attempting to convert Muslims.
He argued with them over the merits of Christianity but seems to have been mostly interested in
62 Foundations
most consistent impetus for studying the cults, tongues, and peoples of
Europe’s new worlds in America and Asia had always been evangelical,
and missionary work had always produced fodder for the learned. Conver-
sion was also the primary motive for students of Hebrew, whether or not
they ever stood face to face with a single living Jew. Their intentions defy
any effort to describe them as either philo-Semitic or anti-Semitic. Even
the most empathetic and appreciative Christian portraits of Judaism were
etched in the hope that Jews could one day be led away from what was
considered to be a false, even pernicious religion.88
Joining an enterprise led and pioneered by the Jesuits, Addison consid-
ered himself part of a global ministry that began at home.89 Christians
had always taken evangelical work in Europe and overseas to be a single
endeavour. There were thousands of men and women in the European
countryside who still needed to be taught divine truths, just as there were
millions of souls in Asia, Africa, and America who had yet to be exposed
to scripture. This dual agenda drove Catholic renewal for two centuries
following the Council of Trent.90 The foreign missions of Anglican divines,
too, were entwined with their work in England and featured the same tech-
niques. Addison, for one, would later bring the lessons he learned in North
Africa to bear upon the pastoral care of his countrymen. His encounters
with infidels abroad, in person and in books, would also encourage him,
along with many others, to chart the future of the church with reference
to a universalist view of religion. Along the way, the Anglican missions
became a backdrop to the Anglican Enlightenment.91
In the usual story of the colossal missionary enterprise of the Church
of England and other English denominations in the modern world, the
evangelical zeal of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems to emerge
from nowhere.92 It is hard to tell whether the Church of England was capa-
ble of supporting a major expansion of Protestantism that kept pace with
empire before it could draw on the energies of voluntary associations. But
there is no doubt that the fires of missionary zeal were burning long before

exploring trans-confessional notions of piety and observing Islamic infidelities in silence. For
examples, see WB, 150–51, 190. The following account highlights his contact with Jews.
88 See below, 117–21. 89 On the Jesuit missions, see Clossey, Salvation and globalization.
90 Hsia, World of Catholic renewal. The parallels between the pastoral techniques of Addison and his
Catholic competitors were striking. See also below, 155, 167. On the Jesuit program, see O’Malley,
First Jesuits. On the European missions, see Châtellier, Religion of the poor.
91 See also Glasson, Mastering Christianity.
92 The relationship between missionary work and the seventeenth-century English empire has received
little direct scholarly attention. There is a huge body of work on later periods, including Porter, Reli-
gion versus empire?; Cox, Imperial fault lines; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of revelation and revolution;
Hall, Civilising subjects; Glasson, Mastering Christianity.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 63
the Glorious Revolution. Many of the English institutions and practices
that were essential to later forms of outreach had been present in one
form or another since the early seventeenth century. They first flourished
during the reign of Charles II, prompted by the example (and the threat)
of Catholic missions launched from the continent.93 The limited head-
way made early on in the establishment of Anglican worship among both
the English living overseas and the people of other nations, religions, and
Christian sects should not obscure the significance of the efforts that were
made. At the very least, it is worth registering their cultural consequences.
England’s evangelical project was a late variant on an early modern
tradition of cooperation between the zeal of churches and the global exten-
sion of European power and commerce.94 The earliest acts of cooperation
between Christian evangelism and English empire were focused on the
northwestern Atlantic littoral. The desire to bring the gospel to the orig-
inal inhabitants of America inspired the settlement of Virginia and the
foundation of the College of William and Mary.95 Further north, John
Eliot sought out Native Americans because he was convinced that they
were one of the lost tribes of Israel.96 Puritans like Eliot were bound to
prize preaching, and they began their missionary work in Massachusetts
by offering sermons to Indians in Algonquian. But even this teaching was
largely catechetical. Eliot, for one, sought only to enable willing Indians to
confess their faith.97
More fitful efforts were made in the Islamic Mediterranean at the same
time as these better-known missions in the West. In the early 1650s Isaac
Basire, a former chaplain to Charles I, travelled to Zante, Aleppo, Jerusalem,
and Constantinople, hoping to refine his biblical expertise while coaxing
eastern Christians into union with the Church of England. He preached to a
number of Christian congregations, but his primary tack was the translation
of the prayer book catechism into local vernaculars. Basire also planned
to travel to Egypt to meet with Coptic Christians, and he arranged for a
Turkish translation of the catechism to be distributed in Mesopotamia.98
The only English men and women who made unambiguous efforts to
93 For a more sceptical view of the institutional, practical, and ideological capabilities of the Restoration
church that de-emphasizes continuities with the early eighteenth century and argues for fundamental
shifts in the post-1688 period, see Sirota, Christian monitors, 223–51, esp. 223, 243, 251.
94 As a setting for missionary activity, empire should not be understood simply in terms of territorial
sovereignty. See also Sirota, Christian monitors, 224.
95 Stitt, ‘Indian education and missions’. For New York, see Haefeli, ‘Creation of American religious
pluralism’, 224–7.
96 Kellaway, New England Company, 83.
97 Ibid., 81–165. On less active, ‘affective’ approaches to evangelizing favoured by company chaplains
before 1660, see Wood, ‘English Protestantism in a maritime context’, 346–65.
98 Basire, Correspondence, 113–202; Brennen, ‘Basire, Isaac’; Neuecker, ‘From Istanbul to London?’.
64 Foundations
convert Muslims, though, were the Quakers. Between the late 1650s and
the early 1670s, they appeared on numerous occasions everywhere from
Cairo and Palestine to Izmir and Constantinople, only to have a large group
of their most persistent preachers condemned to death by the Ottomans.99
The doomed ventures of the Quakers were as anomalous as they were
precocious. Most English Christians had much humbler horizons. They
devoted themselves to furnishing a literary underpinning for the propa-
gation of the faith abroad. Much of this work was managed and directed
on a global scale by the Anglican philosopher of nature Robert Boyle. He
poured most of his energy into the New England Company, which he
governed for nearly thirty years. He and the ministers who served under
him agreed that the provision of educational books – including catechisms,
psalters, bibles, and other devotional works in indigenous languages – was
essential to spreading the good news with success. Eliot himself translated
the Bible into Algonquian and had it published in the early 1660s. Since
the production of many of these books would be impossible without pio-
neering linguistic expertise, a close partnership between the expansion of
erudition and the radiation of the Word became a routine necessity.100
Much the same occurred when Boyle looked east. He thought hard
about the missionary payoffs of orientalist labour, followed the projects of
fellow Protestants on the continent, and sought to collaborate with them.101
Indeed long before the founding of the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge (SPCK), a diverse group of English scholars and clerics came
together to promote Christianity in the Levant and the East Indies with the
cooperation of trading companies on the ground.102 In 1659, for instance,
Boyle persuaded Addison’s teacher Edward Pococke to produce an Arabic
translation of Hugo Grotius’s defence of Christianity, De veritate. Everyone
involved in the project paid close attention to the practical aspects of its
potential success. ‘We would gladly be advised’, Boyle began in a letter to
a fellow missionary enthusiast, Samuel Hartlib, ‘how it may be disposed
into several parts of the East, to the greatest advantage of the design which
he and I pursue in it’. Hartlib, in turn, wished that ‘the able translator
thereof would please add here and there as much perspicuity and force
as is possible’. Grotius’s book, he knew, would be of special value in the
Ottoman empire and beyond because it was ‘short, and very substantial’,

99 Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, 420–25; Matar, Islam in Britain, 132–6.

100 Kellaway, New England Company, 81–165.
101 Littleton, ‘Ancient languages and new science’.
102 For English missionary efforts in South Asia, see Stern, Company-state, 112–18; Penny, Church in
Madras, 92–117.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 65
and even more effective if it were clear and direct. Pococke himself was at
pains to show Boyle that the translation had been specifically designed ‘to
serve the church and your noble self’. The Regius Professor and others even
directed Boyle’s attention to the paratextual elements of the translation,
from the design of the title page to the construction of the binding. The
missionary’s Grotius was published in bilingual and Arabic-only editions
the following year. Boyle spoke with a chief member of the Council for
Trade and Plantations to have it disseminated, and another supporter of the
scheme, Richard Baxter, turned to the Levant Company, whose merchants
agreed to distribute it.103 Similar schemes were launched around the same
time to produce a Turkish Bible, an Arabic prayer book, and catechisms
in both languages.104 Meanwhile, in Oxford, the conformist John Fell was
working to establish a school where prospective missionaries could master
Arabic.105 The Restoration era teemed with efforts to direct orientalist
learning to evangelical ends.
The English nevertheless devoted their most serious attention not to
pagans, Muslims, or eastern Christians, but to Jews. During the later sev-
enteenth century, their interest in recovering the people of the old law for
the new made them more aware than at any time since the thirteenth cen-
tury of the presence of living Jews in their world. This entire phenomenon
has usually been associated with millenarians, who in the 1650s and 1660s
saw evidence that Jews were preparing to seize Palestine from the Turks.106
The rise of the pretended messiah Sabbatai Sevi was watched with wide
eyes all across Europe by men including Boyle and Henry Oldenburg, the
busy secretary of the Royal Society, who received regular updates from
contacts in the Ottoman empire.107 Yet there was a significant strand of
opinion within the Church of England – represented by the likes of Addi-
son, the Laudian Henry Hammond, and the learned layman John Evelyn –
that rejected a millennial interpretation of the restoration of the Jews to
Palestine before the second coming of Christ, and yet still prized the reset-
tlement of Jews in England and their eventual conversion.108 In Evelyn’s
103 Toomer, Eastern wisedome and learning, 217–18; Toomer, ‘Edward Pococke’s Arabic translation’;
Boyle, Correspondence, I, 382, 389, 391, 427, 445, 450; Grotius, De veritate.
104 On Pococke’s Arabic catechism and Book of Common Prayer, and William Seaman’s Turkish
catechism and New Testament, see Boyle, Correspondence, I, 384; II, 341, 353; Toomer, Eastern
wisedome and learning, 217–18, 282; Malcolm, ‘The translation of the Bible into Turkish’.
105 Littleton, ‘Ancient languages and the new science’, 160.
106 McKeon, ‘Sabbatai Sevi in England’; Katz, Philo-Semitism.
107 Boyle, Correspondence, I, 92, 110. On Sabbatai Sevi, see Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi.
108 This is recognized in Katz, Philo-Semitism, 165–7; Matar, ‘Idea of the restoration of the Jews’.
See, for example, Addison, Millennialism; Hickes, ‘Peculium Dei’; Hammond, Paraphrase and
annotations; Evelyn, Three late, famous impostors.
66 Foundations
view, the follies of the chiliasts only fed the Jews’ own delusion that their
saviour was yet to come.109
Since Jews were tolerated in Tangier, Addison was able to pursue a sus-
tained engagement with them.110 He exchanged house visits with many of
the Sephardim who lived and worked in the city, often to the dismay of his
Muslim acquaintances.111 He forged relationships with Jews not primarily
to conduct ethnographic research, but to bring them to Christianity, or
at least prove its truth. ‘To this end’, he confessed in The present state of
the Jews, ‘I ever labored to manage that conversation, which for several
years I held with the Jews in Barbary’. His scholarship was crucial but sub-
ordinate to his transcendent goal. He took Romans 11 to heart, pleading
in The present state that ‘the fall of the Jews ought to make us careful of
our own standing, and also to endeavor their recovery’. Jews, he believed,
should be objects of subtle zeal, not bitter condemnation; they best served
Christians as sources of introspection, not platforms for condescension.
‘We ought not therefore to insult over their infidelity’, he argued, ‘but
hasten their conversion; not to triumph in their downfall, but to labor
their restoration’.112
When he spoke with relatively educated Jews, Addison approached the
labour of conversion as one might have expected from a young man fresh
from Oxford: he tried to engage them in formal debate. But he met only
with frustration. Jews, he later claimed, tended to ignore the prophetic parts
of the Old Testament, and when they were forced to engage with these
passages, they neglected to follow ‘the laws of disputation’. Instead, he
sneered, they ‘usually confront text with text’, sidestepping the challenge
and replacing it with another. Other Jews, he claimed, were obsessively
loyal to their own learned traditions. ‘Upon a fair occasion’, Addison wrote
in 1675, ‘pressing a Spanish Jew with the evident danger he was in, if after
means of conviction he should obstinately die in his Judaism; he made no
other reply, but that he desired to be in no better state, nor to be counted
wiser than the sabios or wise men of his nation’.113 These exchanges left
Addison flustered. But they also led him to reflect upon the dynamics of
religious competition and pastoral power in England, across Europe, and
throughout the world, by considering why the Jews of Tangier were so
impervious to his efforts.
109 Evelyn, Three late, famous impostors, ‘To the reader’, 114. See, for example, Katz, Philo-Semitism,
166.
110 This was possible because both Addison and the Jews of Tangier spoke and understood Spanish.
Portuguese played a similar role in South Asia. See Stern, ‘“One body corporate and politick”’,
331–2, 335, 341–3.
111 WB, 178–9. 112 PSJ, 5–6. 113 Ibid., 15, 226–7.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 67
Addison was far from alone as he puzzled over the apparent futility
of disputation with educated enemies of Christianity and sought a better
means of leading them to the light. One prerequisite to success, he and
many other Europeans decided, was understanding other religions from
the inside out. Preaching and debate, of course, had been the preferred
methods of evangelization since the Middle Ages. As early as the thirteenth
century, though, Franciscans had realized that the aggressive sermons they
delivered in the open air were not the only possible means of converting
the Muslims of North Africa. More discreet behaviour would at least be
less likely to worry fellow Christians who lived nearby.114 Four centuries
later, when Boyle disputed with rabbis in London, he too despaired over the
results. ‘I doubt’, he wrote, ‘that much of the obstinacy we find in disputing
with the modern Jews, proceeds from our not taking the skilfullest way
of managing the controversy’. Disputation was inherently futile, because
‘persons prepossessed with an invincible prejudice against the Christian
religion should violently wrest the Scripture by their sophisms, and not fear
to make it say anything’. Boyle therefore altered his method of persuasion
and emulated the strategy once preferred by an ingenious friar, Ramon
Llull, whose works he knew well.115 He first asked rabbis to list for him
the virtues of Judaism, pretending that he was willing to convert. He
then replied to their catalogue of truths by explaining that Christianity
contained all these ‘excellencies’, only in a fuller, more perfect form.116
Addison found it difficult to convert even ‘the common sort of Jews’.
‘Bound to acquiesce in the judgment their rabbis’ on the meaning of every
verse in the Old Testament, they were, he later claimed, incapable of inde-
pendently deciphering the prophetic passages that he thrust in front of
them. When Addison told Jacob Israel Belgara that Haggai 2:7 proved
that the Messiah had already come, the man supposedly ‘eluded the whole
argument, by referring himself to the sentiments of their masters’. In any
case, Addison’s friend and rabbi Aaron ben Netas told him, when it came
to scripture, ‘the giving the sense thereof belongs only to the masters, in
whose interpretation of the text, the vulgar upon pain of excommunication
are bound to acquiesce’. The motor of education, once in motion, over-
powered even the primordial ability of all humans to discern rationality
in religion. Many ‘considerate and ingenious’ Jews understood, according
to Addison, that Christianity was ‘very conformable to the law of nature’.
But this amounted to nothing when they were faced with the prospect of

114 Tolan, Saracens, 218–19. 115 Ibid., 260–67; Boyle, Works, XIV, 252–4.
116 Boyle, Works, XIV, 252–4.
68 Foundations
pretending to more wisdom than their ancestors or seeming inconstant in
their beliefs.117
Addison’s failures led him to ponder the relationship between religious
knowledge and religious power. He became convinced that the success of
missions among the Jews depended upon unity among Christians, famil-
iarity with Judaism, and keen attention to the edifice of education that
sustained it in error. Once armed with the necessary information and
cohesion, though, Christians still needed access to the proper settings and
technologies of conversion itself. ‘There wants’, Addison wrote, ‘proper
means for the Jews’ conversion, as being vouchsafed neither competent
conversation, nor books for that purpose’. In England, he observed, ‘there
is no such competent familiarity or civil society held with the Jews, as in
any degree of probability may in ordinary course be sufficient’. The Tangier
chaplain condemned the expulsion of Jews from most areas of Europe dur-
ing the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and argued that Jews
should be tolerated throughout England and its empire. But he also wanted
the regime to go much further in its support of evangelization. He recalled
with a nod the efforts of Dominicans with Jews after their arrival in England
in 1221, and he urged Charles II to emulate Henry III’s establishment of
the House for Jewish Converts in 1232, which provided a stipend, housing,
and instruction in Christianity.118 Even if Jews were formally admitted into
European society again, only proper forms of interaction could ensure that
they would be successfully recovered for Christ.
Like others in Restoration England who tried to envision the restoration
of the Jews, Addison realized that neither social intercourse nor books of
conversion would ever come to anything without each other. Thus far,
though, the steps taken to produce and disperse literature to further the
cause were as risible as the efforts that had been made to repopulate Europe
with Jews. While ‘many learned treatises have been compiled upon this
theme’, Addison complained, ‘they have either been penned in languages
unknown to most of this ancient people, or in a method exceeding the
generality of their capacities’. In any case, he added, ‘no means have been
used to bring such books to their perusal’. The ultimate problem, in
every sense, was the distance of Jews from the books that were meant to
convert them. ‘Tracts against Judaism, or rather for Christianity’, Addison
explained, ‘have been composed by bookish and retired persons, who
undertook the confutation of such Jewish tenets, as the course of their
117 PSJ, 14–16, 226–8, quotations on 14–15, 226, 228.
118 Ibid., 230–32, quotations on 230. On the medieval missionary efforts, see Stacey, ‘The conversion
of Jews to Christianity’; Adler, Jews of medieval England, 279–379.
 Empires, churches, and republics of the globe 69
studies best enabled them to encounter’. But erudite homebodies were
bound to retain distorted and outdated views of any living religion. It was
no wonder they had ‘spent much oil and time in demolishing a fortress
which most of the modern Jews never undertook to defend’.119 Addison
had become convinced as a result of his work in Tangier that Hebraist
scholarship and missionary work had to be pursued in tandem, and in the
course of relationships with real Jews. Otherwise, the results were absurd.
It was in order to help the Christian world emerge from this predicament
that Addison sought to describe The present state of the Jews.120
The methods and concerns of Tangier’s chaplain and his late seventeenth-
century contemporaries foreshadowed the efforts of the SPCK and the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), which
were founded between 1699 and 1701. These organizations took cues and
inspiration from their Anglican predecessors and the Roman Catholics
who had first spread Christianity abroad. The divine usually cited as the
founder of both institutions, Thomas Bray, was a catechetical scholar from
Addison’s own diocese of Lichfield and Coventry. In 1695 he was named
commissary for Maryland, and while he worked to establish schools of
catechesis in and around London, he launched a campaign to ordain mis-
sionaries and provide them with libraries that would enable their ministry
among Indians and Quakers in America. The SPCK and SPG were origi-
nally conceived in 1697 as a single official body that would emulate Rome’s
Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Bray, like Addison,
was intensely interested in the missionary model of Rome. In one sermon,
he even looked to Islam as an exemplar of evangelization and empire, just
as Addison had a quarter century before.121
Perhaps the clearest link between the early Anglican missions and Bray’s
projects, though, was the role that learning was thought to play in address-
ing the practical challenges faced by anyone who hoped to spread the gospel
abroad. Like the early English empire, the missionary enterprise that fol-
lowed in its path testifies to the inseparability of European learned culture
from states, universities, and churches, and the fissures within and between
them. Without a reciprocal relationship with these institutions, Enlighten-
ment – whether clerical or lay, pious or impious, absolutist or republican –

119 PSJ, 232–3.

120 For the specific Catholic and local Protestant targets of Addison’s ire, see PSJ, 232–8; Harrison,
Late newes out of Barbary.
121 Thompson, Thomas Bray, 13–22, 36–7; Glasson, ‘Missionaries, slavery, and race’, 39–43. For a
survey of the SPCK, see Clarke, History of the S.P.C.K.; for the SPG, Thompson, Into all lands.
See also Sirota, Christian monitors, 110–48, 223–51.
70 Foundations
would never have taken the forms it did.122 In fact, a cultural phenomenon
so profoundly conditioned by encounters between travelling humanists
and the peoples of America, Africa, and Asia was bound to take on evan-
gelical, imperialist, and even authoritarian hues from the very beginning.
Enlightened orientalism, in particular, was based upon a set of intellectual
and literary tools that were originally crafted to help still relatively weak
European states and churches confront a range of formidable adversaries,
from Moroccan rabbis to the religiously and militarily dominant polities of
the Muslim Mediterranean. From this vantage point, at least, the frontiers
of European empire looked a lot like Addison’s Oxford, and the frontiers
of Christian evangelism looked a lot like English parishes. In no corner of
the early modern world was the repertoire of humanism, the memory of
religious war, or the Republic of Letters it inspired the preserve of men who
shared a single vocation or persuasion. The experience of bloodshed varied,
and learning conduced to many ends. Neither, to be sure, played favourites.

122 On the French Enlightenment’s alignment and frequent alliance with the absolutist state, see
Edelstein, Enlightenment, 79–103, and works cited therein.
part ii

Culture
 ch a p ter 3

Histories

The scholarly gambits launched on the imperial frontiers of the later sev-
enteenth century ranged widely, from mathematics to numismatics. But
when it came to the problems that plagued Europeans at home, no venture
abroad was more important than the study of the past. Addison and other
travelling historians counselled priests and kings, sparked new ideas, and
helped solve perhaps the central problem of intelligence collection, reli-
gious argument, and historical research in their day: the authentication of
facts. By looking over Addison’s shoulder as he collected materials for his
histories in North Africa and put his thoughts to paper in England, it is
possible to characterize this moment in the history of history while placing
voyagers and orientalists front and centre.1
As Europeans desperately sought out an epistemological and social plat-
form for a lasting peace, they naturally drew on the most tried and powerful
resources available to them. They pushed the techniques of Renaissance
humanism and Reformation polemic to the point of transformation. His-
tory was the lifeblood of their efforts.2 For this reason it is simply insuffi-
cient, and too often misleading, to try to grasp the structure, specificity, and
flexibility of discourse on religion and politics in this liminal moment with
recourse to the anachronisms of ‘political thought’ and ‘political theory’, or
with exclusive reference to formal theology, philosophy, and science. The
average engagé tended not to ponder or communicate in these modes. He
lived in a thoroughly rhetorical and historical world of thinking, utterance,

1 The role of orientalism in early Enlightenment historical scholarship has not been sufficiently
appreciated, because most scholars have focused on the humanist study of pagans and paganism.
For partial exceptions, see Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken; Hazard, Crisis of the European
mind, 3–52; Manuel, Eighteenth century confronts the gods, 15–20; Frantz, English traveller; Atkinson,
Relations de voyages; Stroumsa, New science; Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France.
2 See, for example, Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment; Hunter, Rival Enlightenments;
Pocock, Barbarism and religion; Hochstrasser, Natural law theories; Rubiés, ‘From antiquarianism
to philosophical history’; Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture; Soll,
Publishing the Prince; Soll, ‘Empirical history’; Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’.

73
74 Culture
and argument, and he knew that only in that world could stability be
secured, however elusive it might be.
The historical scholarship of the late seventeenth century was rooted in
the sixteenth. Around 1550, as better-known debates about philosophical
scepticism began to rage in Florence and Paris, Europeans began a series of
mostly isolated but often heated discussions of historical method. Writers
in the ars historica genre proposed a style of history that was more mindful
of method and more expansive in time, space, and topic.3 Some spoke
of ‘history’ in a fuller, ancient sense, as a sort of empiricism, a systematic
inquiry that proceeded by induction and could absorb information that was
human or natural, political or religious, with no geographical or cultural
limits. Such visions of ‘perfect’ or ‘universal’ history were panoramic in
content and method. It was time, many argued, to draw on a wider variety
of sources: personal observations, diplomatic dispatches, public archives,
antiquities, travelogues, private letters, and many other texts that were not
originally composed for historical purposes. One of the most innovative
historians of the age, François Baudouin, insisted that these three dimen-
sions of scholarly expansion were complementary. If an historian sought
to range far beyond ancient Greece and Rome in space and time, or he
wanted to study topics well beyond the political realm, he ought to adapt
his source selection to the recording practices of the period, nation, and
sector of society under study. Others demanded that their successors pay
closer attention to the procedures they used to evaluate whatever testimony
became available. Fides, or credibility, slowly became a quality that scholars
sought not in the character of the witness or the historian, as their prede-
cessors had, but in the testimony itself, and the manner in which it was
produced and procured.4
Practicing historians only slowly granted the wishes of the theorists. The
conduct of research, writing, and reading was occasionally precocious, but
it usually lagged far behind the demands of the ars historica. Isolated devel-
opments in the evaluation of testimony certainly occurred long before
the seventeenth century.5 But late Renaissance histories were primarily

3 On historical scepticism in the ars historica and elsewhere in the later sixteenth century, see Völkel,
‘Pyrrhonismus historicus’, 75–96; Franklin, Jean Bodin, 89–102. Contrast with the debates on scepti-
cism and certainty discussed in Popkin, History of scepticism; Van Leeuwen, Problem of certainty in
English thought.
4 Völkel, ‘Pyrrhonismus historicus’, 68–73; Grafton, What was history?, 21–32, 49–61, 77, 94–7, 105–6,
112–20; Soll, ‘Empirical history’, 300–301.
5 Stenhouse, Reading inscriptions; Cochrane, Historians and historiography, 366–77; Ianziti, Humanist
historiography under the Sforzas; Pagden, European encounters with the New World, 51–88; Cañizares-
Esguerra, How to write the history of the New World, 60–88; Popper, ‘Ocean of lies’.
 Histories 75
distinguished by their geographical, topical, and testimonial breadth. His-
tories of recent political and religious life proliferated, penned with recourse
to a wide variety of official materials. For the most part this was only
possible after the 1570s, once the major European states and churches
had constructed centralized archives. Ecclesiastical history – itself a rich,
ancient tradition with its own conventions, which included the excerpting
of primary sources within the text – was also a hotbed of methodological
change and innovation. But it would be a mistake to assume that writing
church history and writing about the religious past were the same thing. By
the early seventeenth century, religious history could be written on models
derived from classical antiquarianism, Eusebian church history, or political
history.6 Most scholars merged all three. Their work was limited neither
to narratives of kings and prelates nor synchronic accounts of ritual and
doctrine. Eventually, it also had unlimited geographical range.7
The theory and practice of the late sixteenth century raised the pro-
file of the travelling historian, who worked on the geographical frontiers
of the discipline and could strengthen its epistemological pillars. He wit-
nessed history unfold, discovered rare artefacts, and spoke to locals who
had done both.8 Even travellers who were not historians could be of use
to bookish students of the past sitting, reading, and writing in libraries
and studies throughout Europe. Many of the most famous examples of
humanist travel writing were not histories but epistles or autobiographical
narratives, which could be mined to fill the notebooks of cosmographers,
historians, philosophers, naturalists, and antiquarians. Homebound schol-
ars also interviewed untrained travellers when they returned to their home
countries, or maintained correspondence with them from afar.9
Yet these two-step processes by which the fruits of travel reached main-
stream European scholarship were neither the only means of transmis-
sion nor the most secure. By the time Addison set foot in the Maghrib,
6 The distinction between Renaissance antiquarianism and history was mostly relevant only to work
on ancient Greece and Rome: Momigliano, ‘Ancient history and the antiquarian’, 292–4. The
implausibly wide interpretation of what counted as antiquarianism seen in much recent work on
early modern studies of paganism has reinforced the tendency to neglect early modern studies of
Islam and Judaism.
7 Popper, Ralegh’s History of the world; Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini; Kelley, ‘Johann Sleidan’;
Pocock, Ancient constitution; Ditchfield, Liturgy, sanctity, and history; Lyon, ‘Plan for the Magdeburg
Centuries’; Backus, Historical method and confessional identity; Cochrane, Historians and historiogra-
phy, 445–78; Momigliano, Classical foundations of modern historiography, 132–52; Grafton, Footnote,
148–89.
8 For early awareness of this see, for example, Grafton, Scaliger, II, 108–9.
9 Prominent epistolary and autobiographical humanist travelogues that were translated into English
include Busbecq, Four epistles; Della Valle, Travels; Thévenot, Travels; Tavernier, Six voyages. For an
English example, see Haynes, Humanist as traveler.
76 Culture
many had come to believe that exchanges between unlearned travellers and
scholarly homebodies were inadequate for confronting mature historical
scepticism.10 Why should serious scholars trust what travellers told them?
By 1650, European undergraduates could be treated to a Latin world his-
tory textbook that dealt with the Incas, Aztecs, and Chinese.11 Yet gaping
holes remained in this newly expansive historical fabric, and the integrity
of most of the information that was available was itself increasingly open
to question. The century to follow was the era of historical Pyrrhonism.
This challenge to the possibility of knowing about the past conspired with
crises of truth in religion and politics to spur new, hard thinking about
historical methods.12 In this endeavour to place historical knowledge on
a more secure footing, learned travellers often preceded and accompanied
the famed antiquarians of the eighteenth century.
The English were laggards in this methodological awakening, but by the
later seventeenth century they played a leading role. They had long prized
history – researched, written, and read – as a vehicle for political counsel
and propaganda.13 Yet the realm’s learned counsellors seem to have only
become seriously concerned with the fides of testimony during and after
the Civil Wars.14 The conditions of conflict placed unprecedented pressure
on the authentication of competing accounts of the past, and the Restora-
tion establishment was well aware that the task of reconstruction would
benefit from an historical consensus. Amid ‘advances’ in method, however,
historical writing and criticism, in England and elsewhere, remained a fun-
damentally rhetorical enterprise, eminently suited to ideological combat.
After all, in antiquity, criticism was not an objective tool in itself, but a
branch of rhetoric marshalled to attack one’s enemies.15 The breaching
of new horizons and the development of new ways to validate claims to
knowledge turned histories into paper bullets of a higher calibre. Many, to
be sure, believed that the new tools could finally secure an epistemological
and narrative basis for peace. But in the end the detailed provisions of that
peace, implied in the pages of individual history books, remained as diverse
as England’s ideological landscape.

10 See, for example, the comments of the earl of Shaftesbury and the exchange between Edward
Stillingfleet and John Locke in Frantz, English traveller, 140, 146–7.
11 Grafton, What was history?, 179.
12 Völkel, ‘Pyrrhonismus historicus’, 68, 99–202; Borghero, La certezza e la storia. This field is under-
explored.
13 For England, see Woolf, Idea of history, 141–69; Jardine and Grafton, ‘“Studied for action”’; Sharpe,
Reading revolutions; Popper, Ralegh’s History of the world.
14 Woolf, Idea of history, 137–40, 204–42; Herbert, Life and raigne of King Henry the Eighth.
15 Grafton, Forgers and critics; Grafton, Defenders of the text, 1–22.
 Histories 77

The firm and the solid

Like other philosophers, historians, and theologians in his day, Addison
redrew the contours of the late humanist tradition he had inherited in a
manner that would have confounded the authors of his university text-
books. This was how he worked out an innovative methodology and epis-
temology of history. In his most original studies, he presented himself as
a credible witness, ‘a faithful reporter of matter of fact’.16 By identifying
himself this way, he joined a pioneering group of historians who merged
the notion of fact, traditionally employed by lawyers, with the broader
notion of a witness’s fides, a typical element of late Renaissance rhetoric
and dialectic.17
When he sat down to write West Barbary, Addison penned a preface to
the reader, where he explained why he thought what he wrote was true. He
took his readers back to Morocco, and to the muddled terrain of their own
rhetorical and dialectical training. ‘I have used an industry as probable to
ensure me thereof’, he began, ‘as the nature of the subject would give me
leave’.18 Here Addison was offering an Aristotelian commonplace about
fitting the method to the task, but he was also putting an interesting twist
on the issue of truth.19 It was not his testimony, he claimed, that was
‘probable’, but the ‘industry’ that produced it. In a striking break with
Renaissance tradition, he divorced his authority as a witness from his fame
or virtue, and attached it firmly to the manner in which he gathered the
materials for his testimony. Like many ancient and Renaissance historians
and travel writers who followed Herodotus and Thucydides, Addison was
appealing to autopsy, or eyewitnessing, to establish his fides. And when
first-hand knowledge was impossible, he appealed to a notion of public
knowledge.20 Yet unlike Renaissance writers, Addison deflected the reader’s
attention from himself to the procedures that were necessary to properly
eyewitness and procure public knowledge in specific settings. This was still

16 PSJ, 6. See also WB, 74. For different accounts, see Shapiro, ‘The concept “fact”’; Champion, Pillars
of priestcraft shaken, 25–52; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump; Shapin, Social history
of truth.
17 See also Serjeantson, ‘Testimony, authority, and proof ’, 89; Bacon, Advancement of learning, 26;
Hobbes, Leviathan, 39, 49, 98.
18 WB, ‘Preface’.
19 See Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, 4 (I.3).
20 Ward, Philosophicall essay, 92 (a typical late Renaissance formulation); Stagl, History of curiosity, 79,
180–82; Turler, Traveiler, 27–9; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2–3 (I.1); Schepens, L’
‘autopsie’; Tinguely, L’écriture du Levant, 153–88; Pagden, European encounters with the New World,
51–88; Momigliano, Classical foundations of modern historiography, 29–53; Momigliano, Studies in
historiography, 127–42.
78 Culture
a profoundly rhetorical approach. But Addison had extended the ambit of
rhetoric to the physical actions of the researcher.21
‘Having first traveled the country, and remarked as much as occasion
would afford’, Addison continued, ‘[I] then retained a conversation with
such persons, both Moors and Jews, as I found best able to amend and
increase my first remarks’. Addison thought this procedure made his work
more reliable than histories based on texts. Its truth was ‘the result of
conversation, and not of report’. He also distinguished his remarks from
the usual epistolary and autobiographical modes of travel writing, and the
late Renaissance cosmographies based upon them. ‘They are not barely
the occasionals of a journey, nor scrap’d up from casual discourses, but the
result of some years’ inspection into the people of whom I write’.22 Addison
had carefully sifted and compared what he learned with his senses and
gleaned from conversation with other witnesses. This was why he deserved
fides from the reader. His ‘inspection’ produced, he claimed, not singular
knowledge derived from his own experiences, but general knowledge about
Moroccan life. ‘That I might not disingenuously impose upon your belief’,
he explained, ‘I have not contented myself with a single test, but have
rejected several passages which have not had sufficient confirmation. It
being not my intent to be known for writing things strange and romantic,
but to be very civil to the world, in putting nothing upon them but what
is firm and solid’.23 Again Addison separated the truth of his history from
his gentlemanly status: his method itself led to acts of civility.24
Addison also distanced himself from romances, fabulous tales of travel,
and even most of the ornate side of rhetoric itself, by pointing to the plain
style in which he wrote. He pretended that his narrative was devoid of art, an
unadorned product of England’s intelligence and counsel regime. His prose,
like his adjudication between competing observations and testimonies,
supported a spectacular goal. ‘I conceived’, he wrote, ‘I was not to present
you with the customs of a nation as I made them, but as they were in
themselves, which could scarcely be done, but by exposing them (thus)
naked’.25 Here Addison stepped far away from his rhetorical training, and

21 See Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric.

22 Compare Rycaut, Present state of the Ottoman empire, ‘The epistle to the reader’.
23 WB, ‘Preface’ (quotations here), 23, 220–21. The standard of ‘firm and solid’ was typical in both
rhetorical and dialectical discussions of testimony. The notion of ‘testing’ here probably related to
the Latin term for witness (testis) but also to a term closer to the modern notion that came from
Old French (test).
24 Contrast Shapin, Social history of truth; Vickers and Struever, Rhetoric and the pursuit of truth; Dear,
‘Totius in verba’.
25 WB, ‘Preface’; PSJ, ‘To the reader’. Contrast Busbecq, Four epistles, 114.
 Histories 79
claimed that his testimony, because of the procedures that produced it,
could give his readers access to the things themselves.26 The fides of his
history ultimately rested on a conduit between his mind and events and
people in the Maghrib.
Addison’s methods were truly put to the test in his narrative of Morocco’s
civil discords, where his personal observations could do little for him, and
written evidence seemed sparse.27 ‘The narrative of the late revolutions’, he
acknowledged, ‘is that for which to some I may seem the less accountable,
because I insinuate a want of public records among the Moors, out of which
it was to have been collected’.28 Addison nodded to the demand of his con-
temporaries that public testimony be used as the basis for political history
whenever it was available. Yet he also realized, like Baudouin had, that his
method had to be adapted to the record-keeping traditions of the polity in
question. Without access to a public archive, Addison likened his task to
the toil of an antiquarian. ‘We find a commonwealth compared to a ship’,
he noted. ‘The western part of Barbary has fulfilled the allegory, not only in
respect of the intestine broils, wherewith it has been so long tossed . . . But
in this especially, that there remains no track, or impression, no registers to
acquaint us with what has passed, except ruins and devastations, the gen-
uine memories of a desolating war’. In this situation, Addison claimed, ‘the
best chronique [that] can be now compiled of their late changes, must for
the most part be collected from some grandsire’s memory; a frail founda-
tion to support an historical credit’.29 Here Addison merged the metaphor
of the ship of state with the image of the shipwreck, a perennial favourite
among Renaissance antiquarians, whose scholarship had long come to the
aid of those writing more complete, ‘perfect’ forms of history.30 Just as
the tale of an ill-fated voyage could often only be told by interrogating the
ruins of a ship, so the convulsive past of a state could often only be studied
by conversing with the material and human remains of battle.31
In this predicament Addison decided, like many ancient historians had,
to deal only with the recent past, which was ‘very fresh in the minds of the
Moors’. By making clear that the original sections of his history covered
26 This was nearly to erase the fundamental Renaissance distinction between testimony and res
ipsae. Compare Serjeantson, ‘Testimony, authority, and proof ’, esp. 122–4, 135–45. Addison offered
something close to Arnauld and Nicole, Logic, 227; but he seems to have differed from them in
associating probability with circumstances (industry), and in suggesting that probable circumstances
could transmit res ipsae to the printed page.
27 Addison was wrong about the absence of public written records in seventeenth-century Morocco,
as the Arabic histories written at Moroccan courts in the period make clear.
28 WB, ‘Preface’. 29 Ibid., 73–4.
30 Bacon, Advancement of learning, 65–6; Biondo, Italy illuminated, 5, 191–3.
31 Contrast the similar discussion in Bacon, Advancement of learning, 65–70.
80 Culture
only events witnessed by men who were still alive, Addison retreated to
nearly the same form of testimony that supported his reporting on Moroc-
can customs: the participation of himself and many Moroccans in the
events that he described. The proper witnesses here were not all Moroc-
cans, but only the ‘ancient observing Moors, who were actors in the late
revolves’, and those who had once seen public documents.32 As he narrated
Moroccan politics, Addison was forced to fall back on indirect access to
eyewitness observation and public records. Here and in his account of
Moroccan customs, Addison’s epistemology, his writing, and the ideology
they bolstered and conveyed all sat on an interstice between Renaissance
and Enlightenment, and presaged the more meticulous scholarship of the
eighteenth-century critics.33

To the sources
In Tangier, Addison had sought to practice what he later preached. Upon
his arrival in 1663, he set up a public library for the colony in the upper
chamber of a building next to his chapel, which sat on the south side of
the city at the end of the Rua de Misericordia, across from the cathedral
of St Dominic. The room was only a few yards from Tangier Bay, and
had a large window that looked out on the water. It eventually housed a
modest collection of European printed books, as well as a tiny assemblage of
Arabic manuscripts and printed materials on Jewish customs that Addison
had acquired in the course of his research.34 The library doubled as a
source repository and an attractive setting for interviews with veterans of
Morocco’s revolutions.
In the later 1660s, as Mūlāy al-Rashı̄d overwhelmed the northwest
Maghrib, Tangier played host to a number of Muslim political exiles.35
A man Addison called ‘Hamet Cogez’, who was qāʾid of the town of al-
Qas.r al-Saghı̄r until al-Rashı̄d overran it, was one of those who sought
refuge. While visiting the city he asked to see the public library, and
Addison was happy to oblige. The chaplain made sure to show off the one
Arabic manuscript he had found so far, the first chapter of Muhammad ibn
32 WB, ‘Preface’.
33 On later use of public records, see Barret-Kriegel, Historiens et la monarchie, II, 158–75.
34 Thacker, ‘Tabula’, engraving IX, BL Maps C.21.b.13. Nearly one hundred books survive from the
colony’s library. They were apparently given to Addison after the colony was abandoned, and now
form part of the Lichfield Cathedral Library.
35 BL MS Sloane 3510, f. 86. On Moroccan politics during England’s occupation of Tangier, see Mercer,
‘Palace and jihad in the early ‘Alawı̂ state’; Mojuetan, ‘Legitimacy in a power state’; Mojuetan, ‘Myth
and legend as functional instruments in politics’; Meyers, ‘Slave soldiers and state politics’.
 Histories 81
Ah.mad Ibshı̄hı̄’s al-Mustat.raf, a fifteenth-century anthology already known
to Addison’s Oxford teacher, Edward Pococke. Since this chapter was enti-
tled fı̄ mabānı̄ al-islām (‘of the fundamentals of Islam’) Addison took it
to be a Muslim catechism.36 ‘When I showed [‘Cogez’] a MS. in his own
character concerning their religion’, Addison would later recall in an Ori-
entalist boast, ‘he kissed, hugged, laid it to his brow, upon the crown of his
head, lifted it up to heaven, and in every circumstance appeared therewith
so much transported, that I could scarce rescue it out of his embraces’. In
1669, when the British ambassador Henry Howard was in Tangier awaiting
an audience with al-Rashı̄d, one of the sultan’s diplomats, whom Addison
referred to as a .tālib,37 was also given a tour. Addison showed him the
Ibshı̄hı̄ manuscript, and he ‘esteemed it so great a rarity, that he sollicited
the ambassador to beg or buy it from him at any rate’.38 It was in settings
like these that Addison began to gather the information that would later
go into his histories.
Addison’s text hunting did not end with al-Mustat.raf. He joined scores
of other orientalists from the period in an effort to get his hands on an
Arabic copy of the Qurʾan, but met only with failure. ‘At this day, it is
capital for a Moor to sell an Alcoran to either Jew or Christian’, he later
wrote. ‘In above seven years of conversation among the Moors, I could
not obtain the sight of one’.39 Addison’s political status was of little use
here. He also tried to obtain or consult other books related to Moroccan
Islam that were unavailable in England.40 He saw, for instance, a book
of ‘charms’ composed by a sufi marabout, whose contents he would later
report in West Barbary.41 He appears to have pursued Jewish texts with the
same alacrity. In search of written ‘forms’ of social practices, which might
reveal unchanging patterns of conduct that he could compare with existing
antiquarian scholarship on Jews, he acquired rabbis’ marriage blessings, a
dowry bill, a groom’s marriage consummation speech, a prayer used in the
brit milah,42 and more than one liturgy.43
36 PI, ‘To the reader’; Ibshı̄hı̄, al-Mostatraf; Pococke and al-Faraj, Specimen historiae arabum, 91, 110,
146, 159, 301–37.
37 Scholar (in this context).
38 WB, ‘Preface’. Howard evidently refused the offer, and in keeping with the tradition established by
Laud, Addison took the manuscript back to England with him and presented it to the archbishop
of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, in 1670. The manuscript Addison found is today catalogued as
Lambeth Palace Library MS 570, but it has apparently been lost. See Todd (ed), Archiepiscopal
manuscripts, 72.
39 FSM, 49–50, quotation on 49. See 50–52 for other scholars’ experiences (anecdotes taken from
Hottinger, Historia Orientalis, 313–14).
40 For this norm in the ars apodemica genre, see Lipsius and Stradling, Direction for travailers, sig. b4r.;
Dallington, Method for travell, sig. c1v.
41 WB, 162. 42 Circumcision rite. 43 PSJ, 25, 43, 50–51, 69, 106–7, 122, 179–80.
82 Culture
For the most part, though, Addison’s distance from the courts of Moroc-
can magnates severely limited his access to texts that would illuminate the
region’s political history. He tried to compensate by making use of the
documents he consulted in his unofficial role as a secretary for Tangier’s
military government. He studied letters sent to the English by Ghaylān
and other Moroccans that reported on the political upheavals raging south
of Tangier.44 He was also able to procure records from Moroccan visitors
to the colony. In 1666 a refugee he called ‘Hamet Algı́lo’ showed him a
letter in Arabic from a local leader named Ah.mad al-Shat.. Addison was
happy to see that it reported on recent military and political events in and
around Tangier and the small town of Anjara.45
Like any humanist, Addison thought texts were important. But he also
knew that his own observations and those of the participants in the history
he sought to capture might hold even greater rhetorical authority at home.
Most of his research in Tangier consisted of the eyewitnessing and inter-
views that his work and status in and around the city afforded him. His
best informant within the walls of Tangier was Joseph Messias, a former
secretary to the qāʾid of Tetouan, ʿAbd Allāh Karı̄m al-Naqsı̄s. In the win-
ter of 1667, when al-Rashı̄d conquered Tetouan and imprisoned al-Naqsı̄s
in Fes, Messias fled to the English enclave.46 He had studied Arabic mem-
oirs filled with details on seventeenth-century Maghribi history, and he
shared his knowledge with Addison.47 This was one of the most important
instances in which Addison’s situation in Tangier combined with the drift
of Moroccan politics to provide him with an unusual level of (indirect)
access to written sources.
Addison’s spying mission in the northwest Maghribi peninsula during
the summer and fall of 1663 offers a glimpse of the work he did out-
side the city.48 The journey provided a tiny but valuable sampling of the
Moroccan world. Just before sundown on 6 September, on their way to
Tetouan, Addison and his companion rode into Anjara, where Addison
met for the first time with what he would later call ‘the Moors’ hospitality’.
With their amān49 in hand, they approached the house of the muqaddim
of the area, H . assān al-Shat.. Addison found al-Shat. ‘sitting at his door,
environed with about twenty aged Moors of the neighborhood’. Addison

44 See WB, 57–9, 62–3, 67–8.

45 Ibid., 63–4. Addison, ‘Algı́lo’, or someone else eventually translated the work into English.
46 al-Zayānı̄, ‘al-Turjumānah’, 18; TNA CO 279/8, Henry Norwood to Lord Arlington, 28 Februrary
1667 (unfoliated).
47 WB, ‘Preface’. These sources probably explain much of the striking accuracy of Addison’s account.
48 See also ibid., 101–7. 49 Document of safe conduct.
 Histories 83
and his companion alighted from their horses, and presented their amān to
al-Shat., ‘who when he had perused [it], returned [it to] them with a grave
nod, the testimony of his approbation, and the signal of our welcome’.
They took off their shoes at the threshold – ‘not for religion, but cleanli-
ness’, Addison discovered – and were led into a small upper room of the
house. ‘At the upper end of the room’, Addison recalled, ‘was laid a velvet
cushion, as large as those we use in our pulpits, and it denoted the most
honorable part of the room’.
After resting there for an hour, they were served dinner on a small oval
table, twenty inches high. ‘For supper there was placed upon it an earthen
pot full of mutton, beef, cabbage, raisins, potatoes, berengenas, etc., all
boiled together, and extremely hot with dimicuto [sic] and garlic, which
is their immutable sauce. This hodgepodge’, Addison reckoned, ‘was in
imitation of the Spanish olla podrida, excepting that it wanted bacon’. After
the tajine it was time for rest. Twenty men slept together in the same room
in which they ate: two Christians, three Jews, and fifteen Muslims. ‘Every
one made his bed of what he wore, which made our English constitutions
to wish for the morning, which no sooner appeared but we quitted our
lodging, leaving our entertainer sans adieu, not tarrying to return thanks
for his hospitality, which could incur no displeasure, as conforming to
the style of the country’. As he moved on, Addison compared other acts
of Moroccan hospitality with his first encounter, and decided that his
experience with al-Shat. and his friends was typical.50 True to the method
he would later publicize, he used travel as an opportunity to observe and
interrogate.
By asking Maghribis like Messias to inform him of their history, and
by using his travels to investigate their customs, Addison was expanding
the source base of European historiography and perpetuating a shift in
the conventions that guided it. Many scholars before him had begun to
extend the methods and norms of humanist philology, antiquarianism, and
history to the study of Asia and the Middle East. Some were now insisting,
for instance, that Islam and its history were no longer to be described
in accordance with European traditions, but studied with recourse to the
writings and remains of the people who had lived in Islamic dominions
from the early conquests onwards. This required, in turn, a command of
Arabic and other Asian and Middle Eastern literatures. Many went even
further than this. As Pococke put it, writing to Robert Boyle in defence of
the changes he made to Grotius’s De veritate in his Arabic translation for

50 WB, 123–30, quotations on 123–6.

84 Culture
missionaries, ‘I thought it necessary to put no other things for matter of
history than will be acknowledged by the Mahometans’.51

The Orientals’ story

To satisfy Pococke’s demand for a portrait of the past that Muslims would
accept, scholars first had to take their inquiries far beyond the typical
linguistic, textual, and experiential horizons of the Renaissance. Then they
(or others) had to convert their findings into a history. As a result, only a
few travelling students of the Islamic world had managed to use interviews,
autopsy, and non-European texts in published histories before Pococke
settled down to his Oxford professorship in 1641.52 But by the time he died
half a century later, the documentary basis of Europe’s orientalist historical
corpus had been transformed.
When Addison returned from his own travels in 1670, took up his
lowly post in Wiltshire, and began writing, he applied his travel notes and
other texts to a variety of publication projects, all of which epitomized the
historical orientalism of his day.53 It will come as no surprise that in the
research agendas of those who worked in this field, the life and times of
the Prophet often held pride of place. The first state of Mahumedism, which
Addison published in 1678, was a largely derivative work, the first successful
attempt by an English writer to put together late humanist scholarship in a
synthetic account of the subject and get it into print. Like the next scholarly
treatment of early Islam to be published in English, Humphrey Prideaux’s
The true nature of imposture (1697), Addison’s history was derived from
the hard work of other, more learned orientalists on Arabic, Syriac, and
Persian manuscripts.54 While he peppered his account with information
taken from Moroccan informants, Addison mostly drew upon the labours
51 Boyle, Correspondence, I, 427.
52 Pioneering travelling historians before 1600 included Guillaume Postel, an historian of the Ottoman
empire; and Luis del Mármol Carvajal and Diego de Torres, who both wrote about Morocco. See
Postel, Histoires orientales; Postel, Republique des Turcs; Mármol Carvajal, Descripción general de
Africa; Torres, Relación. For the persistence of traditional Renaissance standards in a widely read
work of the early seventeenth century, see Knolles, Generall historie of the Turkes.
53 On the study of the languages and peoples of the Islamic empires in early modern Europe and its
many contexts, see, for example, Fück, Die arabischen Studien; Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s
France; Bobzin, Koran; Calabozo, Real Biblioteca; Wiegers, Learned Muslim acquaintance; Tinguely,
L’écriture du Levant; Atkinson, Nouveaux horizons; Vaumas, L’éveil missionnaire, 79–136, 325–54;
Frazee, Catholics and sultans, 67–152; Hamilton, Copts and the West; Hamilton, Bedwell; Bouwsma,
Concordia mundi; Hamilton and Richard, André Du Ryer; Russell (ed), ‘Arabick’ interest of the
natural philosophers; Toomer, Eastern wisedome and learning; Richard, Raphaël du Mans; Miller,
Peiresc’s Orient.
54 Prideaux, True nature of imposture. See also Stubbe, Rise and progress of Mahometanism.
 Histories 85
of those who came before him. His reading therefore provides a clear
glimpse of the state of research on early Islam in northern Europe at the
time.55
Addison’s main source was perhaps the greatest history of eastern reli-
gions yet written by a European, Johann Heinrich Hottinger’s 1651 Histo-
ria Orientalis.56 Hottinger was familiar with a wide variety of manuscript
materials in Arabic and Syriac, and his book drew from at least ten differ-
ent lengthy sources in these languages, including Qurʾans, commentaries
(tafsı̄r), and biographical dictionaries (t.abaqāt).57 Addison’s second most
important sources were much older histories of Islam written by Arab Chris-
tians. As he wrote, he had with him Thomas Erpenius’s 1625 edition of the
second part of al-Majmūʿ al-mubārak, written by the thirteenth-century
Coptic Christian and Ayyubid military officer Jirjis al-Makı̄n.58 Erpenius’s
edition had been a breakthrough, since it was the first printed and translated
history of the Arab conquests written by an Arab who (while a Christian)
was writing for a Muslim readership. It finally allowed Europeans to break
from the Byzantine chronicles on which all previous histories of early Islam
had relied. Addison also worked with the history of Islam written by the
Spanish convert to Christianity Juan Andrés, which had served pioneering
orientalists since the later sixteenth century.59 Besides these works, Addison
had on hand a few editions of the Qurʾan, Pococke’s famous commentary
on a brief text by the thirteenth-century Syrian Christian historian Abū
al-Faraj, and a few other useful volumes.
Addison liked to think that his labours yielded an ‘Oriental’ his-
tory whose terrestrial details ‘the Orientals’ themselves would accept.60
Throughout The first state of Mahumedism, he addressed himself to readers
less learned than the scholars he consulted, and railed against the insular
understanding of Islam that prevailed among them. ‘I have taken some
care’, he wrote, ‘fairly to report the things relating to Muhammad and his
doctrine, and to free both from many fabulous passages [that] have been

55 For an introduction to Islamic studies in southern Europe, which were centered on the Qurʾan
and tafsı̄r, see Hamilton, ‘The study of Islam in early modern Europe’, 178–82; Toomer, Eastern
wisedome and learning, 17–25.
56 See Loop, Hottinger.
57 Hottinger, Historia Orientalis. See also Hottinger, Bibliotheca Orientalis.
58 al-Makı̄n, Historia Saracenica. See Wiegers, Learned Muslim acquaintance; Fück, Die arabischen
Studien, 91–2.
59 Andrés, Confusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética. Postel, for instance, had used this text
extensively.
60 This did not mean, of course, that Addison accepted Islamic claims about God’s actions in history,
or that he expressed any of the moral approbation of the actions of the Prophet and his followers
that an acceptance of those claims would entail.
86 Culture
long current in their story’. The work, he boasted, was ‘free from many
ridiculous but usual stories concerning them both; which the present
Mahumedans laugh at, as the malicious inventions of the enemies of their
Prophet’. Addison repeatedly referred to ‘the European story of Muham-
mad’ only to correct popular misapprehensions about him. ‘The doctrine of
Muhammad’, he wrote, ‘is much otherwise reported by European authors,
than it is done here. But I have kept myself to the Orientals in this account,
and I am induced to believe they are the fittest to be our informers, as deal-
ing in their own story, and in such things as did most nearly concern them,
and in which we may imagine their care was to deal fairly’.61
It was here that Addison’s notes on contemporary Morocco could serve
him best in a work on the distant past. Those notes were, after all, filled
with first-hand evidence of what ‘the present Mahumedans laugh at’. His
interviews, for instance, allowed him to expose the ‘groundlessness of that
tradition, which makes Muhammad to be put into an iron chest that by
the force of lodestones hangs in the air’. For ‘speaking with one Sı̄dı̄ Abū
Salām upon his return from performing the h.ajj to Mecca, he told me it was
an idle fable exposed by the Mahumedists; who from their conceit of the
hanging tomb, upbraid the Christians with ignorance in their story’.62 On
occasion, Addison even used his sources to supplant information provided
by bookish Europeans as famous as Hottinger.63
Yet unearthing a history that Muslims would accept was not necessarily
a straightforward matter of finding reliable testimony on matters of fact.
Addison’s missionary impulse to understand Islam from the inside out
often drove him to adopt a slightly more relativistic tack. It nevertheless
captured the literal meaning of Pococke’s apology for the changes he made
to Grotius’s De veritate. In cases where a facet of Islam’s true history seemed
inaccessible to Europeans for the moment, it still seemed worthwhile to
recover and record what Muslims thought about it, whatever the reliability
of what they said. In his discussion of Muhammad’s parents, for instance,
Addison explained that he wrote ‘not to engage in the differences which in
this concern are to be met with, between the Saracen and Christian stories;
I shall throughout this whole discourse chiefly adhere to the former, as
being in all likelihood more competent to furnish us with Muhammad’s
legend’. Likewise, when he recounted the story of Muhammad’s birth and
visitation by Jibrı̄l, Addison made clear that the empirical truth of these
events was not his first concern. ‘Give me leave to take notice’, he wrote,

61 FSM, ‘The epistle dedictory’, ‘To the reader’, 99–100. 62 Ibid., 81–2.
63 Contrast ibid., 1–3 with Hottinger, Historia Orientalis, 2, 9–10.
 Histories 87
‘that whether such things really happened or not, it matters not much,
while they are confidently believed by the Mahumedans, and entertained
as no frail arguments to prove the excellency of their Prophet’.64 Addison
often prized the need to see the world through Muslim eyes over anything
else, even when it was possible that their views were based on ‘legend’.
The pious and political imperatives that drove orientalism forward
ensured that empathy and accuracy would not always be in lockstep.65 In
the end, Addison thought, simply capturing the views of Muslims would
be useful to anyone who hoped to confront their armies or their faith.66
Addison was far from alone in thinking that the writing of Islamic history
in terms that Muslims would accept was a more effective form of politi-
cal counsel than the traditional Renaissance alternative. For many prelates
and politicians, what Muslims thought about history could often be as
important as historical truth itself. In this sense, at least, Addison could
be confident that the decision he made to dedicate the work to secretary
Williamson was a wise one.67
Not everyone, though, agreed with Addison on what Pococke’s dictum
meant in practice. In fact, Addison may have only been so explicit about
his method in the opening pages of The first state of Mahumedism because
he had been forced to fend off a harsh reader’s report on an earlier version.
Addison’s book was meant as a middling work of history that could straddle
the scholarly and educated realms of readership.68 After he had completed
a draft of it in the summer of 1678, he sent the manuscript to his publisher,
William Crooke, in London.69 Crooke then met with a learned travelling
orientalist from Oxford, Thomas Smith, to solicit an evaluation of Addi-
son’s work. Crooke handed Smith the manuscript and asked him whether

64 FSM, 7, 9, 15–19, quotations on 7, 19.

65 On this, see also Bevilacqua, ‘Qurʾan translations of Marracci and Sale’.
66 Addison’s method was comparable to the one that furnished a more detailed and radically heterodox
account of the rise of Islam at the same time. This work, which circulated only in manuscript, is
usually attributed to the republican polymath Henry Stubbe and dated to around 1671. See BL MS
Sloane 35, f. 15v.; MS Sloane 1709, ff. 94–115; MS Sloane 1786; MS Harley 1876. For the manuscripts’
history, see Holt, Seventeenth-century defender of Islam; Jacob, ‘Authorship’; Jacob, Henry Stubbe;
Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken; Wilson, ‘Reading Restoration freethought’; Matar (ed),
Henry Stubbe. In 1675 Sir John Finch, English ambassador in Constantinople, used an early version
of the manuscript to contextualize both his travels and his counsel on the Ottoman empire (BL
MS Add 23215).
67 For Williamson’s ownership of this work, see QCL MS 42, 37.
68 FSM featured sustained historical parallels that were meant as interventions in England’s Popish
Plot crisis. See below, 231–7. On similarly revealing and neglected attempts at ‘popularization’ by a
far more accomplished scholar, Richard Simon, see Stroumsa, New science, 62–76.
69 On Crooke and his publishing ventures with Addison, Thomas Hobbes and other important
figures, see Bulman, ‘Hobbes’s publisher and the political business of Enlightenment’.
88 Culture
he would endorse it by writing a preface. In a letter written on 30 June,
Smith offered Crooke a stern and exacting response. He was scornfully
aware of the balances between rigor and appeal, and between truth and
utility that Crooke and Addison were trying to achieve. He refused to write
a preface and judged the text ‘capable of improvement’. ‘It would be a great
satisfaction’, he sneered, ‘if the Arabic names were better adjusted, and just
authorities cited, for want of which this account of the life of Muhammad
will pass only for a legend’.
Smith was venting scholarly and utilitarian concerns that excluded some
of the liberties Addison had taken. Smith was confident that the views of
Muslims could be squared with the facts in the case of Muhammad, as
long as Addison limited his choice of witnesses to men Smith called ‘grave
Mahometans’. The point at issue seems to have been whether the views
of other, more ordinary Muslims might also be useful to the men whom
Addison sought to counsel. Learned Muslims, to be sure, Smith insisted,
would find Addison’s draft to be blotted with howlers. ‘Out of respect to the
author, as well as to the public’, he explained, ‘I heartily wish that the whole
were reviewed, and some stories left out, which the Mahometans themselves
disown and laugh at as ridiculous, and other things added, which could
give the relation of them the just title and reputation of a history’.70 Smith,
too, had dedicated one of his orientalist works (a memoir on the Ottoman
empire) to Williamson, whom he served as a chaplain.71 He and Addison
were priestly counsellors to the same man, and yet they found themselves
on different sides of a dilemma faced by many orientalists in their day.
It was hard to decide how to evaluate the non-European testimony on
late antiquity available to them, and in particular, it was unclear whether
that testimony could be evaluated with the standards they had developed
for assessing testimony produced in European societies. What they and
many others could agree on, though, was that the testimony of Arabs and
Muslims on the history of Islam was superior to that of Europeans, because
of their proximity to what they described.

From cosmographies to field notes

Addison’s most original contribution to Islamic history was not his life
of Muhammad but his account of modern Morocco, West Barbary.
Many aspects of this work – its organization, its professed method

70 Bodl MS Smith 59, 337; MS Smith 63, 8.

71 Smith, Epistolae; Smith, Manners, religion, and government of the Turks.
 Histories 89
of cross-checking observations and interviews, and its disdain for the
itinerantly organized notes of the traveller – suggest that Addison might
have entered his travel notes, either while in Morocco or afterwards, into
some sort of commonplace book. That book would have realized a vision
of commonplacing originally espoused in some of the artes historicae,
where notebooks were described as repositories not simply for textual
extracts, but for the panoply of evidence that characterized the new histor-
ical writing.72 Once he sat down to write, Addison would have probably
drafted a basic chapter-by-chapter outline of West Barbary by pulling head-
ings from his notebook. The final version of the history was a two-part
volume. First came a political history, ‘a short narrative of the revolutions
of the kingdoms of Fes and Morocco’, and second, a synchronic ‘account
of the present customs, civil and domestic’. Both recorded matters of
fact.
West Barbary’s ‘short narrative’ reveals one shade in the spectrum of lit-
erary forms – from correspondence and intelligence to polished relations –
that conveyed political advice and propaganda in this period, and in so
doing perpetuated a number of Renaissance traditions.73 Addison slanted
its content toward his own areas of expertise – religion and politics – just
as a consul, for example, might focus on trade, or a soldier might focus on
warfare.74 Like The first state of Mahumedism, this book was dedicated to
secretary Williamson, explicitly presented as a service to the state, and fitted
to appeal to a wide educated audience.75 In addition to general political
advice, it offered an implicit commentary on the English Revolution.76 As
Addison explained in the text, West Barbary was appropriate reading for
a humanist statesman and travelling scholar like Williamson, who knew
better than most that there were lessons to be learnt from the histories of
all peoples.77
If it was going to merit the trust of his readers, Addison’s narrative
could only go as far back in time as the memories of Mauritania’s elderly
politicians could take him. He nevertheless decided to begin the book
long before their time, with what he called ‘the contexture of affairs’, so
that his readers could make sense of the credible core of his account.
72 Grafton, What is history?, 229–31. See also Yeo, Notebooks.
73 For explicit comments on the use of travel notes as the basis for political history and counsel, see,
for example, Rycaut, History of the Turkish empire, ‘Memoirs’, ‘To the reader’.
74 See, for example, ibid.; Busbecq, Four epistles, 360–411. For this directive in the ars apodemica, see
Turler, Traveiler, 59.
75 WB, title page. He referred to himself as chaplain in ordinary to Charles II, which identified him
as a clergyman with a promising career in service to the king.
76 See below, 151–4. 77 WB, ‘Epistle dedicatory’. See below, 128–32.
90 Culture
He opened West Barbary with ‘the notorious change, which happened
about the year 1508’: the rise of the Saʿdı̄ dynasty. Here Addison had
to rely on the cosmographical work that had probably done the most
to make the sixteenth-century revolutions of Fes and Morocco ‘notori-
ous’ in Europe: Giovanni Botero’s Relationi universali.78 As he wrote, he
also had a copy of Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie close by; he would turn
here when Botero’s account petered out. By drafting the first pages of his
history in this way, Addison joined a scholarly project that had begun
in the late sixteenth century. He sought to update, augment, and revise
some of the great cosmographies and universal histories of the late Renais-
sance, as well as the older, less methodical travelogues on which they were
based.
Addison followed Botero and Heylyn closely from 1508 into the early
seventeenth century. Yet at a few points Addison was led by his ideolog-
ical agenda and his familiarity with Maghribi Islam to subtly correct the
cosmographers. When paraphrasing Botero, Addison glanced sideways to
Heylyn, a fellow churchman whose rhetorical flourishes and commentary
supported Addison’s own interest in exposing the tendency of both schol-
ars and priests to abuse religion for political gain.79 Many of his more
scholarly emendations also served his political purposes. At one point, for
instance, in his description of the faqı̄h Muhammad ibn Ah.mad, who
founded the Saʿdı̄ dynasty and dubbed himself sharı̄f – a direct descendant
of the Prophet – Addison jettisoned Botero’s description of ibn Ah.mad
as an ingenious mathematician. Motivated by his basic familiarity with
the Maghribi traditions of Malikite law and sufism, Addison presented
the sharı̄f as a legal expert (faqı̄h) with a performative religious style. He
was forcing his more intimate knowledge of contemporary Maghribi Islam
on Botero, while also ensuring that this revision would make his story
of Muslim priestcraft more ideologically resonant. Ibn Ah.mad became
both a ‘Moorish priest’ and a Muslim with a puritan style.80 Addison also
corrected Botero’s unlikely transliterations of Arabic terms, and thereby
restored the rigor of the Italian’s own eyewitness sources, which had been

78 WB, 1. Addison used the 1595 Italian or 1596 Latin edition of Botero, along with Peter Heylyn,
Cosmographie, IV, 43–4. This section of the Relationi was itself adapted from Mármol Carvajal’s
pioneering Descripción general de Africa.
79 On Heylyn, see Milton, Laudian and royalist polemic. Heylyn read Botero through Purchas, Pil-
grimage, 523–5, which also incorporated earlier English accounts, including Anon., Fierce and cruel
battaile; Wilkins, Three miseries of Barbary; Cottington, True historicall discourse; Harrison, Late
newes out of Barbary; and (in later editions) Harrison, Tragicall life and death of Muley Abdala Melek.
See Heylyn, Microcosmus, 376.
80 WB, 1. For Addison’s awareness of the Malikı̄ school, see FSM, 55–6.
 Histories 91
written by Spaniards more familiar with the languages of the Maghrib.81
Here, at least, Thomas Smith might have been proud.82
Once Addison had exceeded the chronological limits of Botero’s account,
Heylyn took him to 1625, where the original portions of West Barbary
began. Addison again stuck close to his source but added charged com-
ments that may have originated in his interviews in North Africa.83 And
at the first possible moment, he produced an official written source from
the period, one that Heylyn had included in his Cosmographie. It was a
letter that the ruler of Mauritania, Mūlāy Zidān, had written to Charles
I in 1625, proposing a naval alliance against Algiers. This Eusebian move
added to the credibility of Addison’s account and vividly conveyed his pol-
itics, by connecting England’s royal martyr to a Moroccan ruler famous
for his prudence.84 In later sections, following ecclesiastical historians, ori-
entalists, and chroniclers of the English Civil War, Addison transcribed
other textual artefacts that he had collected from the papers of the Tang-
ier administration.85 He clearly considered these signs of his own political
access to be crucial to his authority as an historian.
When he began the original portions of his narrative, Addison set Botero
and Heylyn aside and picked up his field notes.86 He took care to bring his
method into the text, and warned his readers when he had not been able
to sufficiently confirm an element of his narrative. While he thought it
important, for example, to say something about the character of ‘Laella’,87
wife of the emperor Mūlāy Ah.mad Shaykh, he let it be known that this
information was simply a matter of general ‘report’, whose origin was
obscure. Addison also could not be sure how Laella ended up having her
husband assassinated. ‘She is reported to have essayed his death by sorcery’,
he explained, ‘in which wickedness (story tells us) that the Mahumetan
women have always been dexterous. But not precisely to determine, by
what way Mūlāy Ah.mad Shaykh came to his grave, it is certain that his
end was sudden and unexpected, and that he shut up his life before the
twentieth year of his reign’. Similarly, while Addison did not rely wholly
on his travel notes as he chronicled the recent tumults of Mauritania,

81 See Mármol Carvajal, Descripción general de Africa, book 2, f. 243r.

82 On Smith’s general regard for Addison, see Bodl MS Smith 63, 8. They appear to have met in
Tangier (MS Smith 141, f. 120v.).
83 WB, 7. 84 Ibid., 9–14.
85 Ibid., 57–71, passim. The documentary histories of the revolutionary period included Rushworth,
Historical collections; Nalson, Impartial collection; Whitlocke, Memorials of the English affairs.
86 Addison’s account corresponds with modern scholarly accounts. See, for example, Cour,
L’établissement des dynasties des chérifs, 165.
87 Spelled ‘Laı̄llı̄’ in Addison’s index of Arabic terms (WB, 17; ‘An index of the Moorish words’).
92 Culture
he often made clear when he departed from eyewitness accounts. He
had read Muhammad al-Wazzān’s famous sixteenth-century Description
of Africa closely, and kept it by him as he wrote. When he listed all the
military outposts in northwest Morocco in 1666, for instance, he included
the troop levies the mujāhid Ghaylān had placed in each locality. He
used al-Wazzān (known to most Europeans as Leo Africanus) to com-
pare Ghaylān’s power of military extraction to that of earlier Moroccan
rulers.88 Addison’s extensive use of al-Wazzān was particularly appropriate
to his project, since al-Wazzān was the original example of the bridging
of Arab and Renaissance literary traditions that Addison himself was try-
ing to achieve in his own work, by relying indirectly on Arab historical
literature.89
It is hard to know exactly what Addison did with what the Moroccans
told him about their history. He wanted to write a narrative that was as
credible as possible, but he was doing this in part to make its ideological
overtones all the more effective. These two goals were potentially in tension,
since Addison’s readers would not be able to easily corroborate many of
his claims. One way to get a sense of how Addison manipulated his oral
and eyewitness sources is to compare him with Maghribi historians of the
same time period. The most revealing comparisons emerge from setting
West Barbary aside the most famous surviving history of seventeenth-
century Morocco, ʿAbd Allāh Muhammad ibn al-H . ajj Muhammad ibn
ʿAbd Allāh al-Ifrānı̄’s Nuzhat al-h.ādı̄, which was written between 1720 and
1725. When Addison and al-Ifrānı̄ discussed the rule of Zidān’s eldest son,
ʿAbd al-Malik, for instance, they both offered similar depictions of his
personality, while al-Ifrānı̄ went into much more detail. They differed on
whether al-Malik was assassinated by his brother or by renegades. Here,
perhaps, al-Ifrānı̄ betrayed a desire to see recent converts to Islam as a
source of instability, or Addison tried to hide the activities of former
Christians.90 In describing the bloody rise to power of al-Malik’s brother,
Muhammad al-Shaykh, both Addison and al-Ifrānı̄ stressed al-Shaykh’s
ability to please the people. Al-Ifrānı̄ described this in neutral language,
while Addison, immersed in seventeenth-century Machiavellian discourse,
talked of ‘popularity’. With regard to the topics covered in both of their
books, the two historians agreed on the facts, and even a style of political
interpretation, but Addison often injected judgments that were consistent

88 al-Wazzān, De totius Africae descriptione; WB, 17, 19, 40–43, ‘An index of the Moorish words’,
quotation on 19. See also WB, 27–8.
89 Davis, Trickster travels. 90 al-Ifrānı̄, Nozhet-elhâdi, 405–6; WB, 16.
 Histories 93
with his ideology.91 At other points Addison either had more information
than al-Ifrānı̄, or al-Ifrānı̄ withheld some of the information he had. In any
case Addison had clearly tapped, if only ever so slightly, into the political
knowledge lodged in the memories of Moroccan and English politicians,
and recovered a bit of what was available to a court historian like al-Ifrānı̄.92

The many faces of the past

When Addison wrote the second part of West Barbary, he switched from
narrative to synchronic prose but continued to offer political advice. Like
many of his contemporaries, he saw the chronological and Herodotean
modes of historia as two forms of a single species of art.93 The topics he
covered here were certainly new: he suddenly ignored issues of war, revolu-
tion, and kingship, and moved on to legal institutions, religious traditions,
and social norms. Yet his was a world of politics and history writing in
which law, religion, and custom had become indispensable topics. Their
analysis was by no means confined to antiquarian publications, as it once
had been. Take, for instance, the ‘present state’ genre of counsel, whose
popularity boomed in the later seventeenth century. These snapshots of
contemporary states exemplified how history had become a master disci-
pline, one that encompassed the domains of antiquarianism, intelligence,
and travel writing, among others.94 ‘Present states’ regularly featured social,
religious, economic, and legal analysis, but they were in no way antiquarian
in spirit. They foregrounded politics and frequently delved into narrative,
and for all their diversity, they reflected no attempt, as the travel writer Jean
de Léry put it in the late sixteenth century, ‘to leave nothing out (if that
is possible)’.95 Addison, of course, was deeply concerned with the history
of religion as he poked around North Africa, but he seems to have been
uninterested in the characteristic activities of the antiquarian. While other
travelling historians from England who made their way to Tangier were
understandably eager to find Roman and Arab inscriptions and monu-
ments, Addison seems to have taken hardly any notice of them at all.96
91 al-Ifrānı̄, Nozhet-elhâdi, 408; WB, 17. See also WB, 20–21; al-Ifrānı̄, Nozhet-elhâdi, 427–8. For a
general comparison, see WB, 23–71; al-Ifrānı̄, Nozhet-elhâdi, 428–95.
92 On which, see al-Ifrānı̄, Nozhet-elhâdi, v, 406, 408–23, 431; Lévi-Provençal, Historiens des Chorfa,
114–15, 266–9.
93 WB, title page. Contrast the similar comments in Woolf, Idea of history, 15–16, 217–18.
94 See, for example, Philips, Present state of Tangier. For an introduction to these and similar texts, see
Shapiro, Political communication, 54–76.
95 Quoted in Pagden, European encounters with the New World, 31.
96 The only example is PSJ, 220. Contrast Philips, Present state of Tangier, 52–63; Toomer, Eastern
wisedome and learning, 244.
94 Culture
The early chapters of Addison’s account of contemporary Morocco put
the varieties of empirical history that were being written in his day on dis-
play. In practice, each species was eclectic but distinct. Addison first distin-
guished his own work from geography, with which he thought it was most
likely to be confused, and a geographer, al-Wazzān, whom he regarded as
the last great writer on North Africa.97 Addison recognized that al-Wazzān
himself had drawn on multiple scholarly methods and traditions.98 He
distinguished his project from al-Wazzān’s by pointing to its emphases,
limits, and modernity. ‘How far I have been from transcribing Leo Afer’,
he explained, ‘which some may suspect, will easily appear by comparing
what is contained in the remarks of West Barbary, with his Description of
Africa’.99 Besides being outdated, al-Wazzān’s work was too compendious
and too politically unfocused to serve the same purpose as Addison’s his-
tory. The Tangier chaplain encapsulated his position when he played upon
a simile common to both the Islamic and Christian traditions, a simile
that al-Wazzān himself had used to signify his own remarkable literary syn-
cretism. ‘These stories have betrayed me to an unintended length’, Addison
wrote in the final sentence of the preface to West Barbary, ‘for which I hope
to make some amends in what follows; in which I have endeavoured, like a
merciful executioner, not to protract your pain’.100 Addison’s polite brevity
was the result of strict attention to his religious and political agenda.
In the pages that followed his dance with al-Wazzān, Addison paraded
the way in which history was an expression of general learning that brought
many fields of inquiry to its service. He laid down an array of geographical,
zoological, botanical, economic, and geological information, but made
clear that he did so only in order to elucidate the civil history of Morocco.
His professed method of ‘inspection’, he implied, yielded facts of all sorts.
His autoptic rhetoric was more explicit. He bemoaned the tendency of
bookish historians to rely on ‘report’ and occasionally repeat the ‘fabulous’.
‘As for the fabulous abundance of gold reported to be found in Barbary’,
he sneered in the final sentence of the first chapter, ‘I leave its legend to
the poets’. In the second chapter, in a remark on the quantity of sheep and
cattle in Morocco, he noted that he ‘found the latter more numerous, yet
not to that quantity as report informed me’.101 His criticism here could be
applied to any mode of historia – religious, political, literary, or natural.

97 Accordingly, the ‘Index of the Moorish words’ at the end of West Barbary referred readers to specific
pages in al-Wazzān, De totius Africae descriptione, for further information on places mentioned in
Addison’s text.
98 See WB, 205–6; al-Wazzān, De totius Africae descriptione. 99 WB, ‘Preface’.
100 Ibid., ‘Preface’. On this, see Davis, Trickster travels, 109–10. 101 WB, 96. See also 97, 99.
 Histories 95
The snippets of natural history Addison provided, for instance, did
little more than bolster his arguments about more important topics, but
nonetheless reflected his broader methodological commitments. In one
passage, he described the vegetation of the Maghrib in order to confirm
the factual veracity of sections of the Bible.102 He was assessing the truth
of the holy text just as an historian using antiquarian techniques would
assess the truth of Tacitus’s Annals or any other ancient history. But his
work here was not quite antiquarian: the objects he found were not remains
of the past, but forms of life that he assumed had reproduced themselves
since biblical times. Addison investigated a tree he called an ‘alcaróbe’ (al-
kharūb). After describing how Moroccans made use of the tree’s fruit, he
noted that other scholars had argued that the fruit was called locusta in
Latin, and was eaten by St John the Baptist, as evident in the mention of
achrides in the book of Matthew. Yet Addison sided with ‘some judicious
critics’ who believed that locusts were in fact a kind of fly or grasshopper.
He corroborated this claim and the idea that locusts were a food source
with information from his interviews and his own analysis of Leviticus
11:22. Then he went on to identify the fruit of al-kharūb in the Bible,
arguing that it was the prodigal son’s ceratia, or husks, which had been
described by another biblical commentator.103 Addison’s talk of plants,
fruits, and grasshoppers was a vivid demonstration of how the study of the
Bible and the study of ancient and contemporary religions had become
entwined, and how eyewitnesses could intervene in the deliberations of
learned antiquarians and critics.104
Addison also applied natural history to the history of religion itself. In
his discussion of how Maghribis understood crop yields, he explained that
most of them linked agricultural tallies to rainfall levels. ‘But’, he added,
‘there is a sort of religionists among them, who measure the products of
the earth by the sins of their inhabitants, and who divine of the success
of their tillage from the observation of their Ramadan (or Lent) and the
due celebration of their Easter’. He went on to suggest that this religious
perspective had once been more dominant, and it would be all too easy for
a philologically inclined scholar to assume that this view was still in the
ascendant. One of the annual rains in Morocco, he explained, was ‘called

102 Usually seen as an innovation of high Enlightenment biblical scholarship, this practice had impor-
tant seventeenth-century precedents: see Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 186–211; Shalev, Sacred
words and worlds.
103 WB, 78–9, ‘An index of the Moorish words’. For other examples, see WB, 94–5; PSJ, 97–8.
104 On this and for precedents, see also Stroumsa, ‘Richard Simon’; Popper, Ralegh’s History of the
world, 172–3; Tinguely, L’écriture du Levant.
96 Culture
by a word meaning blessing’, and another was called ‘nasan or holy-water’.
Only a travelling scholar could learn what Addison had: these linguistic
clues were only the hollow remains of an earlier time when a theological
perspective on nature reigned. When Addison asked living Maghribis why
they used these religious terms for rain, he ‘could meet with no other
rationale but tradition’.105 Here Addison was hinting, as he often did, at
the weakness of antiquarian interpretations of religion, whether textual or
material, and at the strength of autopsy, and interviews with natives. Only a
careful traveller could avoid misattributing credal significance to linguistic
traces.
Addison’s confrontation in West Barbary with a world of late human-
ist religious studies that was still overwhelmingly based upon texts and
ancient artefacts was perhaps most evident in his remarks on the relation-
ship between his findings on Morocco and the current state of European
knowledge about Muslim societies more generally. After all, the Tangier
chaplain’s basic demand for an understanding of both Islam and Judaism
that present-day Muslims and Jews would accept was ultimately a criti-
cism of the tendency of an overwhelmingly philological and antiquarian
historical enterprise to produce useless, outdated propositions about the
contemporary world. By relying on empirical investigation in West Barbary,
as in The present state of the Jews, Addison was attempting to correct a set of
faulty generalizations Christians tended to make about their unbelieving
adversaries.
Sometimes Addison did set text against text. He understood Fridays, for
instance, to be the Muslim sabbath, and he recounted various opinions on
its origin. He rejected two arguments offered by Europeans, and expressed
a preference for another that derived from Arab historians. Here again he
was reading the cutting-edge orientalist scholarship of Hottinger, Erpenius,
Jacob Golius, and others in order to access Arab sources indirectly.106 Yet
most of the time Addison set his eyewitnessing in Morocco against bookish
generalizations about Islam. On one occasion, he mentioned John Selden’s
citation of a prayer used by Muslims, called ‘the prayer of Jesus the son of
Mary’, only to point out that he found no such prayer in use in Morocco.107
In a discussion of circumcision, he scoffed at those ‘who have asserted that
there is an inevitable time of circumcision among all the Mahumetans’. For
‘if they had lived in Barbary, they might have lessened the proposition’. In
fact, he explained, ‘the Moors circumcise their children when they please,

105 WB, 92–3. 106 Ibid., 163–4.

107 Ibid., 161–2; Selden in Eutychius, Ecclesiae suae origines, 58–9; Gregory, Notes and observations, 165.
 Histories 97
being by law not bound up to any particular day or hour’.108 When autopsy
was available, Addison insisted, it was often the ultimate arbiter of historical
debate. Addison’s insistence on Arab and Islamic sources, and eyewitness
materials and interviews, would have been completely foreign to an Italian
historian of Islam writing in the early sixteenth century.109 Only the deeply
political nature of his endeavour would have been familiar.

The Jewish nation

As West Barbary hit bookshops in London and Oxford in 1671, Addison was
already on his way back into the caverns of universal history. His second
work on North Africa, The present state of the Jews, appeared alongside West
Barbary four years later. It too was something of a scholarly landmark –
the first study of Moroccan Jews written by a European, and the first full
account of the contemporary Jewry written by an Englishman. Pitched as
a synthetic portrait of global Judaism, it merged Addison’s own autoptic
research on the Maghribi Sephardim with what he had found in the tomes
of other Hebraists. On the title page he clarified the task at hand with
a quotation from the fourth-century poet Ausonius: ‘one may discover
more than another’, Gratian’s tutor had written, ‘but no one can discover
everything’.110 Addison wrote in a Baconian spirit, aware of the futility of
one man trying to compile a universal history, or even a definitive history
of the Jews. These projects, he knew, were best seen as group efforts. Like
his other contributions to the history of the world – and indeed like most
‘present states’ that appeared in this period – Addison’s book on the Jews was
a work of political and religious counsel. ‘The Jewish nation’, as Addison
termed it, was of course no sovereign political entity (neither, after all, was
Islam), but it was still a subject of practical interest to European states and
churches, and to its dedicatee, Williamson.111 This is what made it a proper
subject for a universal historian, or for an orientalist. As the frontispieces
to the German and English editions of The present state suggest, European
readers were disposed to lump the ‘Jewish nation’ – or least the Jews of

108 WB, 199.

109 Meserve, Empires of Islam; Bisaha, Creating East and West; Hankins, ‘Humanist crusade literature’.
110 Evelyn-White (ed), Ausonius, I, 358 (‘Griphus ternarii numeri: Ausonius Symmacho’); PSJ, title
page: ‘alius alio plura invenire potest, nemo omnia’.
111 The usual categories used to classify such work – ‘Christian ethnographies of the Jews’, or more
broadly, ‘antiquarianism’ – are inadequate. For similar criticism, see Deutsch, ‘Polemical ethno-
graphies’; Deutsch, ‘“A view of the Jewish religion”’. Contrast Cohen, ‘Leon da Modena’s Riti’;
Manuel, Broken staff, 58; Hsia, ‘Christian ethnographies of the Jews’; Burnett, From Christian
Hebraism to Jewish studies; Burnett, ‘Distorted mirrors’.
98 Culture
the Maghrib – together with the other nations of the Orient, including
the Moroccans, Algerians, and Mughals, and to render them exotic in the
process (Figures 3 and 4).112
Like Renaissance images of modern paganism, early modern descrip-
tions of contemporary Judaism were usually meant to influence missionary
activity or state policy. Whether the author was a lifelong follower of Jesus,
a convert, or a Jew, the audience for every work of this sort was Chris-
tian. Scholars who were already members of the church wrote to further
evangelical goals. But they sought to do so only by improving would-be
missionaries’ understanding of Judaism, not by producing a text for Jewish
readers whom they hoped to convert directly. Again like many students of
indigenous Americans, these writers also grappled with the place of non-
Christians within Christian empires, and attempted to grace their works
with at least a dash of eyewitness authority.113 The Present state of the Jews was
entirely typical of the genre: replete with recommendations on the political
and social position of Jews within Europe and prompted by evangelical
imperatives.
Addison’s proselytizing impulses led him to make a distinction between
Jewish practices that were sanctioned by the Bible, and therefore
respectable, and a so-called rabbinic Judaism, which mirrored Catholicism
in its disingenuous departures from scripture. This move certainly made
for an Orientalized style of description, but it also yielded a more complex
portrait of Jewish history than many later Christians and philosophes were
willing to offer. Addison’s goals required a peculiar chronology, one that
moved from biblical times and late antiquity to the medieval world, and
then jumped quickly to the present day.114 As he constructed this purpose-
ful account of the distant Jewish past, he naturally kept his bible by his
side, but he also leaned heavily on Selden, who served as his rabbi when
he had nothing to go on from the rabbis of Morocco.
When Addison turned to the Jews of the present day, he surrounded
himself with many of the major Renaissance works on their most recent
history. As he considered each custom he had observed in the Maghrib,
these books allowed him to either declare an African practice universal or

112 It is unclear whether the engraver of Figure 4 meant to depict North African Jews as African natives
or as Native Americans. Addison himself would have been unlikely to endorse either move, but
many others at the time did believe, like John Eliot, that Native Americans were members of one
of the lost tribes of Israel.
113 For an early English example, see Sandys, Europae speculum, 2, 222. Addison seems to have
consulted Sandys. Compare, for example, PSJ, 234–5, with Sandys, Europae speculum, 220.
114 See, for example, PSJ, 11–12.
 Histories 99

Figure 3 Frontispiece engraving for a 1676 German anthology of travel literature on Africa
and Asia that included a translation of Addison’s Present state of the Jews.
Figure 4 Frontispiece engraving for Addison’s Present state of the Jews (1675).
 Histories 101
note differences by region and across time.115 His regular supplement was
the most important study of contemporary Jews written in early modern
Europe, Johann Buxtorf’s Juden Schul. At one point, Addison copied two
entire chapters from the Schul into The present state, because they matched
what he had recovered from Morocco and they had, of course, already been
written.116 When Addison was unable to confirm or deny the existence of a
Moroccan practice that corresponded with one observed by other scholars
in different places and times, he simply referred his readers back to his
predecessors.117 On other occasions, he made use of the original Jewish
texts that other Hebraists had inserted in their works, in an effort to make
global empirical statements. He compared his own copy of a Moroccan
dowry bill, for instance, with the bills he found in Bertram and Buxtorf,
and concluded that ‘there is but one form of dowry bill, or matrimonial
letters in present use among all the Jews’.118
When Addison went looking farther afield for ways to supplement his
notes on the Moroccan Jewry and clarify the broader import of his findings,
he confronted a diverse literature of Christian Hebraism, one that ranged
from contemporary histories like Buxtorf’s to accounts of ancient customs,
Aramaic dictionaries, and biblical commentaries.119 On this wider terrain
he again found scholarship that was overwhelmingly based upon textual
sources and confined to the ancient world.120 Even Buxtorf’s study of
Ashkenazic Jews had mostly been culled from texts composed long before
the seventeenth century; as a result, it tended to present Judaism as a more
or less timeless set of practices.121 The textuality and atemporality of this
115 See, for instance, ibid., 110, 116–17, 129, 177–80.
116 PSJ, 130–66. See also ibid., 206–10; Selden, De iure naturali, 508–10.
117 PSJ, 68–71; Selden, De iure naturali, 152; Estius, Annotationes, 93. For a similar example for bills
of divorce, see PSJ, 73–4, taken from Buxtorf, Grammaticae Chaldaicae et Syriacae, 399–400.
118 PSJ, 44; Bertram, Comparatio grammaticae Hebraicae et Aramicae, 437; Buxtorf, Grammaticae
Chaldaicae et Syriacae, 389–93.
119 On the early modern European study of ancient Judaism and the world of Christian Hebraism
more generally, see among others Grafton and Weinberg, ‘I have always loved the holy tongue’; Grell
and Laplanche (eds), La République des Lettres et l’histoire du judaı̈sme; Manuel, The broken staff;
Coudert and Shoulson (eds), Hebraica veritas?; Katchen, Christian Hebraists and Dutch rabbis;
Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment; Van Rooden, Theology, biblical scholarship, and rabbinical
studies; Ziskind, ‘Cornelius Bertram and Carlo Sigonio’; Stroumsa, ‘Antiquitates Judaicae’; Bell
and Burnett (eds), Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation; Carlebach, Divided souls; Jones, Discovery
of Hebrew.
120 Early modern works like these are also not necessarily best described as antiquarian. On this strand
of scholarship, see Mulsow, ‘Seldens De diis Syris’; Miller, ‘Taking paganism seriously’; Ziskind,
‘Cornelius Bertram and Carlo Sigonio’; Ziskind (ed), Selden on Jewish marriage law; Rosenblatt,
Renaissance England’s chief rabbi; Toomer, John Selden.
121 For personal contact with Jews among early seventeenth-century Hebraists, see Burnett, From
Christian Hebraism to Jewish studies; Coudert and Shoulson, Hebraica veritas?; Stroumsa, ‘Richard
Simon’; Deutsch, Judaism in Christian eyes; Grafton and Weinberg, ‘I have always loved the holy
tongue’, 253–90.
102 Culture
tradition was a limitation and an opportunity for Addison: while it offered
him only imperfect assistance when his eyewitness evidence was sparse, it
left a space for him to use his experiential findings to improve upon some
of the most learned and renowned works in the field.
As he read through Buxtorf and Selden, Addison struggled with their
claims for universality and continuity in Jewish history. Too often, he
thought, Selden had read about ancient Jewish laws and assumed that
the practices to which they referred existed in all times and places. The
Babylonian Talmud may have sanctioned polygamy, but did this mean
that all Jews were polygamists? Addison admitted that this permission
persisted in modern Morocco, but he cautioned that licence did not imply
indulgence. ‘The Jews of whom I now write’, he explained, ‘though they
greatly magnify and extol the concession of polygamy, yet they are not
very fond of its practice’. In fact they were ‘generally abstinent herein, not
out of religion but policy, as finding one wife at a time enough for their
maintenance and government’.122 Addison extended his admonition to
Selden’s readers and to other Hebraists. At best, the bookish Judaism they
knew was the Judaism that the rabbis wanted them to know. Only a more
intimate, practical, and current store of knowledge, Addison insisted, could
be relied upon to successfully restore Jews to Christ. Practical motives like
these did more than anything else to inspire a more tangible, diachronic,
and reliable history of religion, one founded upon the very distinctions
that could only elude scholars who trusted in texts and ignored the world
around them.123
Addison drafted The present state of the Jews, like West Barbary, with
recourse to a set of categories that had probably ordered his African com-
monplace book. The rubrics he chose were typical among European his-
torians who wrote about non-Christians living everywhere from Asia to
America. Addison began with the ‘condition’ of the Maghribi Jews: the
basic environmental factors that distinguished their way of life from that
of other Jews, past and present. He then described their ‘moral conversa-
tion’: the morality of their behaviour, their education in religion, and the
norms for disputation that education instilled. His third topic was the range
of Jewish theological opinions that were of special interest to Christians.

122 PSJ, 71–3, quotations on 72–3. Addison based his whole chapter on polygamy on Selden, De iure
naturali, 561–7. He then continued to follow the structure of De iure naturali by continuing on to
divorce, but abandoned Selden as a source, because he had evidence on marriage for periods after
antiquity.
123 Contrast the nevertheless similar example of Peiresc and his African correspondents in Miller,
Peiresc’s Orient, 273–94.
 Histories 103
The chapters that followed were devoted to specific social customs. Like
Buxtorf, Addison traced the life cycle of male Jews, and once he arrived
at adulthood, he described an array of Jewish religious practices and the
highlights of the calendar. After burying the dead, Addison wrapped up
his study with remarks on the conversion of the Jews, and appended a
description of the Talmud.
Addison gave meaning to much of his account of the present by clar-
ifying its relation to the past. Even when he was not assailing the Jews’
supposed deviations from the pristine cult of the Bible, he was keen to
set current Jewish practices against ancient customs, and to observe both
continuity and change.124 In one passage, Selden and a New Testament
commentator had furnished him with a description of ancient Jewish con-
cubinage, which he juxtaposed with his knowledge of modern customs.
The Jews of Morocco, he noted, ‘are generally herein very abstemious; but
when they make use of it, ‘tis with such rites as have been already men-
tioned’. He went on to explain their restraint. ‘We may easily imagine the
unsettledness of their condition’, he surmised, ‘to be the main reason why
they are so reserved in the use of this privilege – people of an ambulatory
state being usually very careful not to multiply their lumber’.125 Matches
between ancient and contemporary practice were also useful to Addison:
they confirmed the accuracy of the Bible and more recent histories of the
ancient world, and they delineated the extent to which Judaism remained
a true religion. As Addison assiduously assessed the biblical integrity of
Sephardic practices and captured bits of the relationship between modern
and ancient Judaism, he was driven by a desire to improve the reliability
of both universal history and the Christian missionary enterprise.126 His
entire examination of modern Moroccan life was ultimately motivated by
religious and political problems, and the scholarly puzzles they entailed.

Credible travellers
Perhaps the ultimate puzzle of the day was the crisis of historical epistemol-
ogy that had begun to grip European culture not long before Addison set
sail for Tangier. The discomfiting queries of René Descartes and Sebastien
La Mothe le Vayer were only part of the challenge historians faced: ‘sceptic

124 Another example not described here is PSJ, 199.

125 PSJ, 74–5, 77 (quotation); Selden, De iure naturali, 570–71. For a similar example, see PSJ, 67;
Selden, De iure naturali, 146.
126 PSJ, 42, 44–6, 63–5, 77. PSJ garnered the attention of Addison’s contemporaries in England. See,
for example, Wilkins, Discourse concerning the gift of prayer, ‘Ecclesiastes’, 118.
104 Culture
wrangler[s]’, as Addison called them, seemed to be everywhere, and the
mid-century broils in church and state had only deepened the uncertainty
that they had provoked. Anyone who hoped to say something believable
about the past had to develop an explicit procedure for producing credible
testimony. It is well known that a host of post-sceptical historians with skills
and interests that often differed radically from Addison’s eventually took
up the challenge. These men scoffed at their predecessors’ naive reliance on
literary sources, the Bible among them. They developed rigorous criteria
for examining official manuscripts, coins, monuments, inscriptions, vases,
statues, and reliefs, and some of them helped invent the double narra-
tive of footnoted histories. To an extent, Pierre Bayle, Jean Le Clerc, Jean
Mabillon, Bernard de Montfaucon, Scipione Maffei, Richard Simon, Jean
Hardouin, George Hickes, Richard Bentley, and others realized the efforts
that had mostly begun with theory in the later sixteenth century. They also
eventually offered new rules for source criticism that were more focused
on the evaluation of testimony than the artes historicae of the Renaissance.
They continued to do much of this in service to churches and states. What
occurred here, again, was not quite the outright rejection of Renaissance
humanist traditions and ideals, but the extension of these ideals to the
point of transformation.127
What has gone largely unappreciated in the annals of historical truth,
though, is that the new approaches to textual and material evidence made
famous by the critics of the eighteenth century were often preceded,
inspired, and complemented by the work of travelling historians in the
seventeenth. After all, one of Descartes’s most provocative claims had been
to insist that travel was as valuable a source of wisdom as humanist his-
tories, and the humanities more generally.128 Until the second half of the
seventeenth century, Europeans remained anxious about how to reconcile
their experiences in Europe’s new worlds to the descriptions of ancient
authorities.129 Works like Addison’s show a more or less complete break
from this dilemma in favour of autopsy and a set of complementary critical
methods for assessing a variety of source materials. Travelling humanists

127 MP, 12 (quotation); Momigliano, Studies in historiography, 10–20; Momigliano, Classical founda-
tions of modern historiography, 54–79; Grafton, Forgers and critics, 72–5; Grafton, Bring out your
dead, 181–207; Levine, Dr. Woodward’s shield; Levine, Battle of the books, 267–418; Grafton, Foot-
note; Barret-Kriegel, Les historiens et la monarchie; Gossman, Medievalism and the ideologies of the
Enlightenment; Pitassi, Entre croire et savoir; Grell, L’histoire entre érudition et philosophie; Grell,
Dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquité; Soll, Information master, 121; Hiatt, ‘Diplomatic arts’.
128 Descartes, Discourse, 10. This of course had earlier precedents: see, for example, Grafton, Footnote,
133–47; Grafton, What was history?, 229–30.
129 Pagden, European encounters with the New World, 56, 83.
 Histories 105
also claimed to offer more certain testimony than the unlearned travellers
who had long been interviewed and cited by cosmographers. Pierre Bayle
and other critical historians of the early Enlightenment, like the philosophes
later on, came to rely overwhelmingly on travel accounts written by human-
ists. They paid much less attention to the untrained men who wrote most
of the travelogues published before the seventeenth century.130
Addison was part of a troupe of scholars who stood between the
voyagers of the Renaissance and the so-called ‘philosophical’ travellers
of the Enlightenment.131 In the later seventeenth century other English-
men, including Paul Rycaut, Thomas Smith, and John Covel, all critically
described the Ottoman empire.132 At the same time, the Royal Society fig-
ures John Fryer and Robert Knox methodically investigated South Asia and
parts of the Safavid empire as servants of the East India Company.133 More
ambitious and sophisticated accounts of South Asia, Persia, and China,
however, came from the continent, in the critical histories of François
Bernier, Adam Olearius, Raphaël du Mans, Álvaro Semedo, Louis Le
Comte, and others.134 The English curiously remained without their own
scholarly history of America. But Spaniards such as Juan de Torquemada
and Garcilaso de la Vega had made major methodological advances in
the early seventeenth century, and Joseph-François Lafitau would conduct
methodical work on Canada in the early eighteenth.135 Nearly all of these
pioneers travelled in the service of churches, states, and well-armed trading
corporations.
Whatever its broader importance, the work of travelling historians like
Addison was only a part of the massive contribution of the English estab-
lishment in church and state to the cutting edge of historical practice in
the early Enlightenment. Similar stories about the intimate relationship
between intellectual innovation and political and religious counsel and
propaganda could be told about scores of England’s erudite homebodies.

130 Charnley, Pierre Bayle; Dodds, Récits de voyages; Atkinson, Relations de voyages; Duchet, Anthro-
pologie et histoire.
131 On this transition and the Renaissance and Reformation roots of Enlightenment ethnography, see
also Rubiés, ‘From antiquarianism to philosophical history’. Contrast Cañizares-Esguerra, How
to write the history of the New World, 13–59. For later but near-contemporary works by traveling
historians on Morocco, see Saint-Olon, L’empire de Maroc; Busnot, Histoire du règne de Moulay
Ismaı̈l.
132 Rycaut, Present state of the Ottoman empire; Smith, Epistolae; BL MSS Add 22910, 22912, 22914.
133 Knox, Island of Ceylon; Fryer, East-India.
134 Bernier, Late revolution; Olearius, Voyages and travels; Du Mans, Éstat de la Perse; Semedo, Great
and renowned monarchy of China; Le Comte, Mémoires sur l’état présent de la Chine.
135 Torquemada, Monarquı́a Indiana; Vega, Royal commentaries of the Incas; Acosta, Historia natural
y moral; Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains.
106 Culture
Most pioneering medievalists, classicists, Saxonists, canonists, and patris-
tic scholars, not to mention students of English political history itself,
either served the Church of England and the later Stuart regimes or, on
occasion, actively opposed them.136 Addison and other conformist mem-
bers of the church worked nearly everywhere on the forefront of historical
culture to promote their agendas and secure social stability. With pious
and political ends in mind, they helped to construct a new historical
epistemology and expanded the geographical and literary frontiers of his-
torical inquiry in unprecedented ways, long before the supposed separation
between erudition and ‘philosophical’ history that many associate with the
high Enlightenment.137

From history to politics in Morocco

Without the global expansion of historical erudition in the seventeenth
century, the historical philosophy of the eighteenth might never have
emerged. The methods, variety, and reach of late Renaissance historical
scholarship enabled changes in the nature of historical analysis itself. They
were gradual but nonetheless profound. Consider again the moment in
West Barbary where Addison compared the traditional source materials
available for his narrative to the remains of a ship. For him, and for many
of his readers, this image had a significance even more immediate than its
regular appearance in the works of Renaissance antiquarians. Just a few
years before the publication of West Barbary, the ship of state had surfaced
yet again in Paul Rycaut’s Present state of the Ottoman empire. ‘The small
impression or sign of track the floating habitation leaves behind it on the
sea’, he had written, ‘is a lively emblem of the various motions of good
government’, a virtue that ‘leaves little or no path in all the ocean of human
affairs’. In West Barbary Addison was practicing a style of history that his
fellow travelling historian had mastered: the rumination on past politics, a
streamlined form of political advice.138

136 See, for example, Douglas, English scholars.

137 New methods were on display, for instance, in the English version of one of the most important
episodes of the early Enlightenment, the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, in which
Addison and other churchmen often explicitly sided with the moderns. See Levine, Battle of the
books; Lecoq, et al., Querelle des anciens et des modernes; Edelstein, Enlightenment. For compelling
scepticism about the usual distinction between erudition and philosophy in the eighteenth century,
and about the supposed eclipse of erudition in Enlightenment histories, see Pocock, Barbarism
and religion, esp. I, 137–53; II, 159; Rubiés, ‘From antiquarianism to philosophical history’; Reill,
German Enlightenment and the rise of historicism.
138 Rycaut, Present state of the Ottoman empire, 1. Contrast Bacon, Advancement of learning, 70.
 Histories 107
Rycaut had called his work ‘a true system or model of the Turkish gov-
ernment and religion’.139 It stood between history and the newer discipline
of politics. It offered general causal knowledge about how political history
unfolded, by distinguishing between the elements of politics that were
peculiar to individual countries (including each state’s ‘ancient constitu-
tion’) and the elements that were not.140 Addison, too, was engaged in
what he called ‘researches into the Moors’ politics’.141 Unlike Rycaut, who
was able to work with public records in Turkish, Addison believed he was
studying a political vessel that had left no lasting archival impressions on the
ocean of the past. ‘The ancient model of the Morescoe polity’ was therefore
mostly obscure, and there was no way around the problem: Morocco had
experienced so many revolutions that ‘not many of its first maxims, nor
much of its old constitution, are visible in the present state’. So Addison
looked not for the basic principles that guided the Moroccan polity, but to
the causes of its recent political instability, the nature of revolutions, and
in particular, ‘the methods used to ascend to government by the aspiring
factions of the last age’.142
The lessons afforded by the spectacle of Moroccan politics reinforced
the ones Addison had first learned as a young man during the English Civil
Wars and Revolution. West Barbary even offered detailed historical parallels
between the recent tumults in both countries. In the war-torn Maghrib,
Addison was struck for the second time in his life by the explosive relation-
ship between literature and revolution. His response was again replete with
ambivalence. In the summer of 1667, for instance, he found himself in the
Tangier library conversing in Spanish with a new acquaintance, Ghaylān’s
former secretary, Muhammad bin ʿAbd Allāh. ʿAbd Allāh had fled to the
city earlier that year, when Ghaylān had escaped to Algiers in the face of
an invasion by al-Rashı̄d. An Andalusian convert to Islam who would later
also serve as secretary to the new mujāhid in the region, ʿAbd Allāh was
described by Addison as ‘attentive’ and ‘discerning’, and by their mutual
friend, the lieutenant governor Henry Norwood, as a man ‘of a subtle,
accurate understanding’.143 At some point in their discussion Addison and

139 Rycaut, Present state of the Ottoman empire, ‘Epistle to the reader’. On the relationship between
history and the seventeenth-century re-emergence of the genre of ‘system’, see Kelley, ‘Between
history and system’.
140 Rycaut, Present state of the Ottoman empire, passim.
141 Generally, see Soll, Publishing the Prince; Grafton, What was history?, 220–24; Levy, Tudor historical
thought, 237–85.
142 WB, 73–4.
143 BL MS Sloane 3510, f. 87r. (quotation); MS Sloane 1955, ff. 28–9, 100b; TNA CO 279/2, f. 178r.;
CO 279/8, Henry Norwood to Lord Arlington, 13 and 19 June 1667 (unfoliated); Péretié, ‘Le raı̈s
108 Culture
ʿAbd Allāh got to talking about Moroccan literature. Addison first repeated
what he had read in authors well known to Europeans like al-Wazzān: Fes,
he knew, was famous for its learning.144 ʿAbd Allāh politely updated him on
what had happened in the century and a half since the books Addison read
had been written. ‘Now’, ʿAbd Allāh told him, ‘the Moors were not very
fond of bookish inclinations, being generally addicted either to military or
mechanic employments’.145
Addison responded by turning to the shelves of the library. He picked
up a copy of the Spanish scholar Diego de Saavedra Fajardo’s Impresas
politicas, which had first appeared in 1640. Saavedra Fajardo was perhaps
Addison’s favourite travelling historian, and his work was similar in nature
to Rycaut’s. His English translator, James Astry, described the Impresas as ‘a
complete system of religious politics’.146 Addison read to ʿAbd Allāh from
the sixty-sixth impresa,147 which would have resonated with anyone living
in post-bellum England or revolutionary Morocco:
Men at first entered into society, for the mutual assistance of each other,
not for contemplation; more for the conveniency of action, than the subtlety
of nice speculation: the happiness of governments proceeds not from the
vivacity of the wit, but the activity of the hands. The leisure of studies is
employed in vices, and eternizes all those upon paper, which the wickedness
of the times shall invent; plotting against the government, and raising
seditions among the people. The Spartans thought it sufficient to learn
obedience, patience, and conquest. Too subtle and learned subjects are
always fond of novelty, continually reflecting upon the government, and
disputing the prince’s orders, and raising commotions among the people;
obedience should be prompt not ingenious, sincere not cunning. Ignorance
is the principal foundation of the Turkish empire. And the readiest way to
ruin it is to sow literature among the people.148

‘While I was thus reading’, Addison recalled, ‘[ʿAbd Allāh] broke out
into a sort of exultation, and called Mūlāy Muhammad to witness, that
he thought Saavedra (the author I read) was a Moor, or otherwise he
could never have so punctually described the humor, and sentiments of
the Moors concerning learning: adding withall, that if they who in their
present illiterature were so prone to sedition, they would be much more so,

el-Khadir Ghaı̈lan’; WB, ‘Preface’ (quotation). ʿAbd Allāh may also have been in Tangier in July
1663 when he served Ghaylān (BL MS Sloane 3509, f. 69r.).
144 Addison had read al-Wazzān, De totius Africae descriptione. 145 WB, ‘Preface’.
146 Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, I, ‘Epistle dedicatory’. 147 Emblem.
148 Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, II, 124. Addison paraphrased this passage from the Spanish in
WB, ‘Preface’ (see Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un principe politico Christiano, 496–7).
 Histories 109
if they were heated with bookish speculations, and had their black humor
chafed and quickened with subtilizing studies’.149
The impresa, like the rest of Addison’s reported conversation with ʿAbd
Allāh, resounded with the chaplain’s own attitudes on the ideal state of
learning, travel, and governance in England and its empire. The inclusion
of this exchange in West Barbary was classic Orientalism, but it amounted
to a near inversion of the critique of oriental despotism that dominated
later Enlightenment writings on Islam.150 Like Saavedra Fajardo, Addison
thought that European rulers needed to act a bit more like Muslim emper-
ors. His pledge to write history from Oriental sources took a peculiar form
here: a sort of double ventriloquism, in which ʿAbd Allāh’s understanding
of Morocco, glossed by a Spaniard, offered a veiled communication of
Addison’s own views on how to bring stability and glory to England. As he
put it in the paraphrase of the impresa that appeared in West Barbary, the
Civil Wars had convinced him that ‘all knowledge was superfluous, which
taught the people more than to obey, endure travel, and conquer’.151 He
now favoured an Enlightened absolutism and imperialism.
The few accounts of Morocco published in England before West Barbary
had treated the Maghrib’s tumultuous history as a source of providential
introspection.152 Addison departed from this pious tradition. He meant
instead to probe the nature of civility, a requirement for peace and order in
any polity. No one who mostly understood causality in providential terms
or only saw fit to study European societies, he suggested, was up to the task.
In order to identify civility in Morocco, Addison evaluated the extent to
which each regional custom was the product of reason and utility, and the
extent to which it was merely the result of tradition, climate, or law. Only
customs that were reasonable and useful, he knew, were marks of civility,
and only civil customs could or should be emulated.153 The Moroccans’
history was of course shaped in part by peculiar, inevitable forces, but that
portion of their past was irrelevant to statesmen who sought advice that
could be generalized.154
Like all other peoples, the Moroccans had what Addison called a partic-
ular ‘humour’ or ‘genius’, which was a partial reflection of the climate in
which they lived.155 Yet as ʿAbd Allāh had observed, education could fun-
damentally affect how the humour of a nation was expressed. Aware of how

149 WB, ‘Preface’. 150 See also ibid., 138. 151 Ibid., ‘Preface’.
152 See, for example, Wilkins, Three miseries of Barbary. 153 WB, 114, 123–4, 151, 189–90.
154 See, for example, ibid., 33, 101–2.
155 For ‘genius’, see WB, 101. See also 104, 113. Contrast Tooley, ‘Bodin and the mediaeval theory of
climate’.
110 Culture
knowledge could ameliorate or exacerbate the effects of their melancholic
temperament, the Moroccans had restrained their contemplative side in
the interest of political stability and imperial expansion.156 By making this
observation and many others, Addison belittled the causal importance of
indelible national traits, stressed the role of education and other products
of prudence, and thereby expanded the set of Moroccan customs that could
be emulated and engineered in other societies. He attributed the lack of
printing in Morocco, for instance, not to the naturally superior mechanical
abilities of northerners, but to Muhammad’s political wisdom.157 Even in
his discussion of vengefulness and jealousy – qualities that Saavedra Fajardo
had singled out as the basic enemies of princely prudence – Addison resisted
climactic determinism. All Moroccans, he wrote, whether Berbers or Arabs,
‘agree likewise in humour, for both are jealous and revengeful’. To an extent,
Addison argued, the Moroccans’ taste for revenge and their tendency to
envy were simply due to the endemic instability of the Maghrib. These
traits, however, were to be ultimately attributed not to chaos, but to the
Qurʾan. Moroccans were explicitly ‘taught by their Prophet’, for instance,
‘that revenge is a virtue’.158 In Addison’s view, the configuration of politics
was above all due to the interplay of prudence and education. This put it
well within the realm of human control.
The customs Moroccans derived from reason were usually the ones
Addison used to advise England’s rulers, sneer at the social corruptions
of his countrymen, and criticize earlier humanist counsellors who had
drawn on a more restricted frame of historical reference.159 At one point
in West Barbary Addison took aim at his country’s marriage customs and
its most famous utopian writers in a single set of remarks. He claimed that
a Moroccan scheme for allowing grooms to indirectly inspect prospective
marriage partners was exactly the one that had been recommended by both
Thomas More and Francis Bacon. While Bacon had extolled this custom
as an ideal mark of civility, Addison showed that there was nothing utopian
about it. On the contrary, it could be found among the most basic practices
of men and women whom humanists like Bacon had ignored, dismissed,
or derided as barbarians.160
While Addison found a great deal to admire in Moroccan society, he
was mostly content to depict Moroccan politics as a theatre of disorder,
pregnant with insights for any statesman who hoped to lead his country out
of a post-revolutionary predicament. Writing in the shadow of the Thirty
156 WB, ‘Preface’. 157 Ibid., 225.
158 Ibid., 27, 56–7, 104. Compare Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, I, 54–72.
159 See, for example, WB, 114. 160 Ibid., 181–2; Bacon, New Atlantis, 24; More, Utopia, 97–9.
 Histories 111
Years War, Saavedra Fajardo had insisted that the value of histories often
lay not in past examples of prudence, but in ‘the past as well as present
errors and miscarriages’.161 Both he and Addison were Tacitean in their
focus on corrupt politics and their preference for an unadorned style, but
Polybian in their search for ‘knowledge of causes’, the universal motors of
political change. Isolated examples, it was thought, were insufficient guides
to action, because they ignored historical peculiarities.162
In his own search for causes, Saavedra Fajardo had taken care to expound
upon the role of providence. He reminded his readers that to claim complete
causal wisdom was to blasphemously deny the ultimate role of God in the
rise and fall of states. Yet for all his pious admonitions, Saavedra Fajardo
was overwhelmingly focused on the human causes of political events.163
Addison ventured even further away from the pious Machiavellianism that
Saavedra Fajardo endorsed. He took no explicit account of providence (or
fortune) at all. West Barbary used the tumults of Morocco as fodder for
a commentary on the sources of political instability that bracketed divine
agency. It attributed causality only to material resources, local customs,
and the passions and interests of humans. Since Addison mostly dwelt
on political failure, he did manage to maintain a superficial association
between the utterly Machiavellian and the malign. But he nevertheless went
out of his way to recognize the potential utility and historical importance
of this style of politics. He may have felt safe in doing so not only because
his was a history of miscarriages, but also because the men responsible
for them were infidels.164 Writing about an Islamic society certainly had
other freeing effects. Most importantly, perhaps, it allowed Addison to
ignore the usual Christian distinction between clergy and laymen as he
diagnosed the tendency of all men to abuse religion for political ends. This
rendered his criticism of historians and polemicists who focused solely on
the machinations of priests all the more compelling.165 His choice of subject
matter helped make his writing both ideologically potent and strikingly
frank.
The narrative portion of West Barbary was above all a discussion of pru-
dence, in the Machiavellian or Bodinian sense.166 It explored the causes and
mechanics of revolution and highlighted the role of religion in tyrannies,
rebellions, corruptions, and intrigues. Addison described Moroccan polit-
ical life much as he described Moroccan society: it exhibited both North
African idiosyncrasies and strategic universals. Addison’s ideas about the
161 Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, I, 203.
162 Ibid., I, ‘Author to the reader’, 205–11, quotation on 205. 163 Ibid., II, 85–93.
164 WB, 44. 165 See below, 127, 144. 166 See Soll, ‘Empirical history’, 302.
112 Culture
ascent to government were founded upon the Machiavellian assumption
that rhetoric and prudence could be separated from moral virtue. Moroc-
can laws and customs offered both real motivations and plausible pretences
for the successful pursuit of naked ambition.167 Action was constrained by
the ‘genius’, geography, and political economy of the country.168 Addison
evaluated the forms of prudence at work in Morocco simply on the basis
of whether they enabled politicians to seize and retain power under the
particular conditions they faced.
While Addison had clearly departed from the explicitly Christianized
Machiavellianism practiced by Botero, Saavedra Fajardo, and some of his
other favourite writers, he joined other innovative historians of his day
in a long Renaissance tradition that criticized Machiavelli on his own
terms.169 He described three basic tactics for rising to power that he wit-
nessed in Morocco: conquest, court intrigue, and popular sedition inspired
by religious zealots. He made clear that each of these patterns of action
involved brutal violence, and the stories he told tended to involve all three
of them.170 Revolution, in his view, had become endemic to Moroccan
politics. Moroccan history itself had become every young revolutionary’s
primer. Rebels and assassins in every generation read from the book and
then edited its contents with their actions.171 Addison confirmed, as Saave-
dra Fajardo had, that treachery usually proceeded from false appeals to
popular justice and the common good. Calls for reform usually damaged
the state more than they improved it.172 Even the instigators of rebel-
lions eventually realized that their reformism was corrupt and overdrawn,
because it rendered their own hold on power unstable and short-lived.173
This suggested that the recurrent populism of Moroccan regimes was itself
a source of instability.174
The great story of military conquest in the Maghrib was the rise of
al-Rashı̄d, who eventually overran all of Morocco. The son of a prince,
Muhammad, and one of his concubines, this young man soon assumed the
title of sharı̄f, claiming descent from the Prophet.175 His revolution began
167 See WB, 16. Machiavellianism is understood here in broad accordance with Kahn, Machiavellian
rhetoric; Kahn, Rhetoric, prudence, and skepticism.
168 WB, 59–61.
169 Contrast Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician (I, 303–19; II, 134, 219–23) with the more thoroughly
Machiavellian Rycaut, Present state of the Ottoman empire.
170 WB, 26. 171 Ibid., 6–7. 172 Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, II, 182–92.
173 This was slightly different from Machiavelli’s schema. See Pocock, Machiavellian moment, 166–7;
Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, 27; Woolf, Idea of history, 4–10.
174 Compare Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, I, 234.
175 WB, 45. This was an instance of Machiavellian notions of imitation extended to an Islamic context:
see Machiavelli, Prince, 19; Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, 21.
 Histories 113
with religious imposture but extended to other forms of deception. When
he seized the great city of Fes, for instance, he constructed his own Trojan
horse, ‘knowing’, Addison remarked, ‘that he who aspires after nothing but
conquest, ought not to bind himself to the laws of a fair gamester’.176 Earlier
in his career, as he attracted support among the poor of southern Morocco,
al-Rashı̄d had taken a page from Saavedra Fajardo and made sure that
no one thought he was appropriating his subjects’ wealth.177 This tactic,
Addison recognized, might easily be vicious or virtuous in intent, but in
either case, the effect was the same.178 In the hands of al-Rashı̄d even justice,
another trait of Saavedra Fajardo’s ideal prince, served as an effective form
of imposture, ‘whereby he became both loved and feared’, as Botero would
have advised.179
Courtly intrigue, Addison believed, required similar skills. One spectac-
ular instance of it, the revolution that destroyed the Saʿdı̄ dynasty, began
right under the king’s nose, with lust. By 1655 Muhammad al-Shaykh,
himself a magnet for the people’s love and awe, had ruled the kingdom of
Morocco for nineteen years.180 But unpredictable circumstances, Addison
knew, could stymie even the most keen and successful manager of state.
While he never uttered the commonplace that ‘fortune is a woman’, Addi-
son played upon this image of contingency in his account of al-Shaykh’s
downfall by introducing the figure of Laella, one of the king’s wives, who
‘began to be exorbitant in her appetites, and to meditate disloyalty to her
husband’s bed’. She pursued an affair with one of her own relatives, Karı̄m
al-H. ājjı̄, an advisor to the sharı̄f. ‘This Karı̄m’, Addison explained, ‘was of
a popular inclination, and skilful in feeding the humours of the people. He
had been at Mecca in devotion, and of course received for that visitation
the title of al-h.ājjı̄’. Al-H. ājjı̄ took full advantage of his status: ‘by this,
and a great show of exterior religion, he had with men of all capacities
purchased a significant reputation’.181 At this point, he needed only to
arrange a surprise assassination in order to seize the kingdom.182 Addison
was certainly willing to associate religious imposture with short-lived rev-
olutions, but he was not convinced, like Botero and most other writers
in the Machiavellian tradition had been, that the effectiveness of feigned
religion could never endure.183 The history of Islam as a whole made such
176 WB, 52–3, quotation on 52. 177 Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, I, 185–6; II, 88.
178 WB, 47–50; Machiavelli, Prince, 20.
179 WB, 49; Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, I, 161–9. See also WB, 18–21, 54, 56–7, 65–6. Compare
Machiavelli, Prince, 30–34, 59; Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, 79–80.
180 WB, 16, 18. 181 Ibid., 17–18. Compare Machiavelli, Prince, 87.
182 WB, 18–21. Compare Machiavelli, Prince, 25–6.
183 On this strand of Catholic Machiavellianism, see Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, 74–5.
114 Culture
a position seem ridiculous. Addison’s views here brought him within the
Roman and Machiavellian tradition of civil religion.184 Even false piety, he
knew, could bolster political authority.
West Barbary offered a cold reflection on the nature of revolutions and
the best means of preventing them. Addison’s systematic political counsel
was part of a new chapter in the history of historical studies in early mod-
ern Europe, one which prefigured the flowering of nascent human sciences
and ‘philosophical’ approaches to the past in the eighteenth century. To be
sure, the Ciceronian commonplaces about counsel and philosophy taught
by example that structured historical writing in the Renaissance had been
challenged and exploited to the point of transformation from the early
sixteenth century onwards. And there is no doubt that the causal, philo-
sophical, comparative, and inductive goals behind early Enlightenment
historical writing had precedents in the artes historicae and the first Tacitean
and Polybian histories.185 But after 1650, the pace, scope, and complexity
of all these developments were unprecedented. So too was the intimacy
between the search for stable historical truths and the search for civil peace.
The methods and conclusions of the fact-finding historians who served
European churches and imperial states at home and abroad became central
to a variety of competing attempts to sever the links between learning
and destruction, and to dissolve the relationship between conscience and
disorder. Along the way, histories of kingdoms and faiths became empiri-
cal studies in politics and religion. Historiographical innovation became a
torch of Enlightenment.

184 Polybius, Histories, III, 436–9.

185 Soll, ‘Empirical history’, 301; Popper, Ralegh’s History of the world; Woolf, Idea of history, 11, 145–8,
181–6.
 c h a p ter 4

Universals

After over a century of violence that pretended to holiness, Europeans

could no longer ignore the problem of religion on earth. Many wondered
whether there was any way to break the bond between zeal and chaos when
every day people seemed to agree less and less on the nature of God and
his plans for the world. What sort of religion would be at once acceptable
to all and a prop to authority? To find out, it seemed essential to think
about doctrines and rites with keen attention to their necessity, functions,
and side effects. It also seemed prudent to pay little heed to the work
of God or Satan on earth. Hardly anyone did this to cast doubt upon
divine or diabolical agency: the idea was to bracket theological conflict
in order to address shared concerns. And hardly anyone who sought out
common ground in this way meant to be impartial: the idea was to more
successfully peddle the partisan. Students of religion in the late seventeenth
century were not friends to all mankind. They offered peace on their
terms.1
Civil and natural religions were the typical answers to the problem of
holy violence in the early Enlightenment. These cults of truth and peace
were occasionally described in philosophical treatises, but most of the
time, they appeared in stories about the past. These stories tended not to
be happy ones, since the easiest way for historians, antiquarians, exegetes,
and travel writers to identify a pure and orderly religion was to describe
what it was not. The historical study of religion had been driven forward
by confessional conflict, missionary zeal, and imperial aggression since the
sixteenth century. Catholics and Protestants alike were eager to spot idols,
superstitions, and other corruptions all over the world – among fellow
Christians and infidels, in the past and in the present, and at home and
abroad. Using the tools of the late Renaissance and Reformation, they
slowly cobbled together a global history of religious imposture, intrigue,

1 See Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment.

115
116 Culture
and ignorance.2 Yet they did not turn their full attention to the earthly
causes of error until the later seventeenth century. Only then were they able
to identify the universal features of religion gone wrong without turning
to the Devil for help.3
Here again the English story was a variant on the European one. Tudor
England was no hub of mission and empire, but it was certainly a spectacle
of religious struggle. Polemicists of all persuasions entered a marathon race
to the middle, in which they hoped to convince their contemporaries that
they stood somewhere between popery and puritanism.4 This fierce public
competition yielded two discourses of religious corruption, often called
‘anti-popery’ and ‘anti-puritanism’, which became sites for a proliferation
of Machiavellian rhetoric.5 They were malleable but meaningful modes of
analysis and critique that slowly took on a comparative dimension. Even
during the reign of Elizabeth, the ambit of anti-popery was unconfined to
the godly’s attacks on Catholics and their avowedly Protestant allies. The
queen’s conformist divines alleged that puritans and presbyterians them-
selves were popish, fusing anti-popery and anti-puritanism into a single
model of Christian error. By the beginning of James I’s reign, the ene-
mies of popery were also following a well-established continental practice
by comparing the putatively Christian religion of Rome to its pagan pre-
decessors in the same city and its idolatrous contemporaries in Asia and
America.6 By mid century, writers were regularly comparing puritans and
papists alike to Muslims and Jews.7 Eventually the English discerned a
hybrid of popery and puritanism that could be found anywhere in the
world. Some called it ‘priestcraft’; others spoke of ‘fanaticism’, ‘enthusi-
asm’, and imposture. Its diagnosis in the past and in the present became
perhaps the central task of England’s early Enlightenment. Only once cor-
rupt religion had been identified and eradicated, it was thought, would the
creation of a stable polity and a virtuous population be possible.8
2 Manuel, Eighteenth century confronts the gods, 15–23; Hazard, Crisis of the European mind, 3–28;
Frantz, English travellers, 81–99.
3 Rubiés, ‘Theology, ethnography, and the historicization of idolatry’; Sheehan, ‘Altars of the idols’.
4 Catholics and puritans, of course, also had other ways of delineating their via media.
5 Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, 85–166. For anti-popery, see Lake, ‘Anti-popery’; Milton, Catholic and
Reformed; Miller, Popery and politics; Pincus, Protestantism and patriotism; and for anti-puritanism
(before the Civil War), Lake, Anglicans and puritans?; Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical vitriol’; Lake, ‘Puri-
tanism, (monarchical) republicanism, and monarchy’; Collinson, Richard Bancroft. There are no
comparable studies of later Stuart anti-puritanism.
6 See Ormerod, Picture of a puritane; Ormerod, Picture of a papist; Purchas, Pilgrimage, 948–9; Milton,
Catholic and Reformed; Lake, Anglicans and puritans?; Lake, ‘Anti-popery’.
7 Sanders, ‘“A plain Turkish tyranny”’; McDowell, ‘Stigmatizing of puritans as Jews’.
8 This whole series of developments has yet to be charted in detail, and the central contribution
of Anglican apologists has been ignored. English discourse on priestcraft and imposture has only
 Universals 117
Since the study of religion in this moment was driven by a desire to
reconcile God’s truth with the demands of civil stability, it ought to come
as no surprise that most of those who led the way were pious servants of the
establishment. The divines who ran England’s church and counselled its
kings grappled with the lessons of the country’s bloody past and defended
their role in society by revealing the tendency of religious leaders to use
the power they wielded over ordinary people for their own gain, and at
the expense of truth and order. They had to add only one caveat to their
critique: a certain style of Anglicanism, it appeared, was immune to it.

Popish Jews
While the tendency of early modern Christians to stigmatize their oppo-
nents by comparing them to shared enemies is somewhat familiar, the
tendency of European orientalists to compare pagans, Muslims, and Jews
to erring Christians has mostly gone unnoticed. Yet only once comparison
flowed in both directions did a universalized understanding of religious
corruption emerge. Protestants, for instance, had always been particularly
fond of likening Jews to Catholics. These comparisons were as common
in the scholarly realm as anywhere else. Like their Romanist counterparts,
Hebraists who were aligned with the Reformation reiterated traditional
Christian concerns about Judaism as a non-biblical, anti-Christian reli-
gion. But they eventually abandoned Rome’s obsession with ritual murder,
took less interest in doctrine, and came to focus on the details of Jewish
religious customs and textual traditions. All this encouraged them to frame
their analyses more firmly than ever in terms of popish corruption. The
editor of the 1657 English version of Johann Buxtorf ’s Juden Schul, for
instance, added this note to the Basel Hebraist’s explanation of Talmudic
discussions of the afterlife: ‘surely the papists had their purgatory from
hence’. He went on to intervene at a number of other points in Bux-
torf ’s account, alleging that many other Catholic traditions also derived
from the Talmud, and that certain Jewish practices, in turn, were best
understood as ‘papistical’.9 Only gradually, though, were such comparisons
worked out in detail and stripped of their theological and demonological
content.
Addison’s 1675 study of the Jews epitomized this development. He used
anti-popery to explain why Jews remained immune to Christianity and
been considered a Whig universalization of anti-popery. See Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the birth of
Whiggism’; Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken.
9 Buxtorf, Jewish synagogue, 15, 218, 234, passim, quotations on 15, 234.
118 Culture
to offer a new scheme for converting them. He believed that while the
ancient Jews had received their religion directly from God, their successors
had transformed a divine cult into a mass of rabbinic traditions and super-
stitious rites. Addison had hoped to find in Morocco practitioners of ‘pure’
Judaism, but what he encountered was its opposite. ‘However they may
pretend the present Judaism, or that sort of religion and worship they now
profess, to be contained in the law and prophets’, Addison explained, ‘to
those who duly consider the ingredients thereof, it will appear to be patched
up of the traditions of the masters, and the opinions of old philosophers;
which are indeed so artificially interwoven with Scripture, that this last to
an unwary surveyor may still seem to be predominant’. In The present state
of the Jews Addison set out to expose a vast system of Jewish scholasticism
that needed to be reformed, just as medieval Christianity had been. The
main obstacle to this, he claimed, was the mental tyranny of the rabbis,
many of whom he had befriended in Morocco, in order to uncover what he
called the arcana Judaismi. ‘There is small hope, as things now stand’, he
wrote. ‘For the Bible, the rule of all reformation, though it be not denied
the people’s reading, yet the giving the sense thereof belongs only to the
masters’.10
Despite his occasional reverence for rabbinic testimony as an historian,
Addison reviled rabbinic wisdom as an edifice of religion. When rabbis
engaged in disputation, Addison recalled, they leaned much too hard on
the Talmud, just as Catholic priests clung to the late Church Fathers and
the medieval councils. ‘The Talmud’, he wrote, ‘is oftener brought in vin-
dication of their religion, than Moses, the prophets, and holy writings:
insomuch that they make it, and not the Old Bible, the touchstone of
their doctrine’. Addison was sure that the rabbis’ claim that the Mishna
was in fact given by God to Moses but only preserved orally until the
end of the second century after the birth of Jesus was nothing more than
anti-Christian trickery. ‘As to the reason why God would not suffer it
to be written’, Addison wrote, ‘it was the profound mysteriousness of its
nature, say the masters, which to have communicated it by writing to
the vulgar people, would have been no better than to give holy things
unto dogs’. Here Addison sniffed a variant on the Roman church’s distaste
for vernacular bibles. He also found it curious that none of the Fathers
of the church before Augustine had even mentioned the Mishna, despite
10 PSJ, 4, 11–12, 14 (quotation). Addison hoped to meet Samaritans in Africa because he believed
they practiced a genuinely biblical form of Judaism. For similar interest in Samaritans and Karaites
among other scholars in the period, see Stroumsa, ‘Richard Simon’; Sheffield RO, Hartlib MS
1/33/33B.
 Universals 119
their formidable knowledge of Judaism. The Talmud, he surmised, must
have been concocted as a tool of imposture. A single, massive fabrica-
tion allowed the rabbis to defend themselves against truth and control the
minds of their followers.11 While he was often willing to affirm the mystery
of Christianity, Addison clearly had no time for it in Judaism. Ordi-
nary Jews, he argued, had found themselves trapped in a complex web of
deception.
The basics of rabbinic religion, Addison reported, were transmitted to
young Jews through a rigorous system of catechizing only rivalled among
the world’s religions by the zeal of the Jesuits and other Catholic orders.
‘There is no youth under heaven’, he claimed, who ‘can at thirteen years
old give so exact an account of the rites of their religion as the Jewish’.
In this educational program, the rabbis’ anti-Christian glosses on the Old
Testament were supplemented by a number of well-crafted summaries of
Jewish doctrine, including the 613 precepts and Maimonides’s Ikkarim.
These inventions, Addison related, were taught to be an ‘immemorial tra-
dition’. They were ‘the sum of the present Judaism’ yet at the same time ‘not
so much a system of Judaism, as a cunning and malicious contradiction of
Christianity’. The system worked. If all else failed, ordinary Jews merely
ran to their rabbis, ‘to whom they make their last appeal, when pressed
with arguments too difficult for their own solution’. The creation and
dissemination of such traditions, Addison believed, was a universal char-
acteristic of popular religions. ‘For not only Cotta in Cicero’, he wrote,
turning to De natura deorum, a freethinker favourite, ‘but most men of any
parts or education, have thought themselves under no small obligation to
keep close to the traditions of their fathers, although no rational evidence
could be produced for the matter of the tradition’.12 The particular system
of religious indoctrination favoured by Jews was therefore not primarily
significant as a theological system, but as a source of power, a ‘fortress of
education’.13
In Morocco, Addison believed he had encountered a particularly strong
instance of Jewish popery. Like other students of manipulated sanctity in
his day, the Tangier chaplain was less interested in comparing theological
extravagancies than in locating corrupt practices and social relationships.
Similarities among the theological errors in different religions were impor-
tant for Addison only to the extent that they revealed how certain doctrines
11 PSJ, 240–41, 245, quotations on 240–41.
12 PSJ, 16, 24, 80–82, 86, 225–8, quotations on 16, 24, 86, 225–6; Cicero, The nature of the gods, 194,
196. Contrast Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken, 170–95.
13 PSJ, 12, 14–15, 227–8, quotation on 228.
120 Culture
had appealed to leaders in many religions as a useful means of dominat-
ing and misleading ordinary people. This explains why Addison generally
avoided discussions of Jewish doctrines, but still considered their beliefs
on salvation worth special attention. The Jews, he claimed, were essen-
tially Pelagians. To demonstrate this, he reported another discussion with
a Sephardic rabbi. ‘He did not expect the felicity of the next world upon
the account of any merits but his own’, Addison recalled. ‘He was certain
whosoever lived and piously kept the law, could not miss of being happy’.
This supposed perversion of scripture, of course, conveniently turned the
interpreters of the law into gods themselves.14
From cradle to grave, Addison claimed, the Moroccan Jewry practiced a
host of superstitious, enthusiastic rites that had been invented by their rab-
bis. While the Sephardim were rightly horrified at the idolatry of Catholics,
their own religion was magical, carnal, and equally irrational. ‘The rab-
bis’, Addison explained with the derision of a critical historian, ‘who too
much play the poets with all their rites, have not forborn even those of
childbirth, but have devised several fabulous stories and impertinent rites
concerning it’. One particular ‘conjuration’ was meant ‘to fortify the cham-
ber appointed for the teeming woman against all hags and goblins’. The
ritual of circumcision was no less inundated with mysticism. Addison even
sensed sartorial popery in the tzitzit or fringes on the corners of the tallit
or prayer shawl. ‘To this religious utensil’, he claimed, ‘no fewer miracles
are ascribed than to the cowl of St Francis: for the Jews say it can deliver
from sin, and make proselytes to their faith; and that it is an amulet against
sorceries, and preserves those from receiving any hurt from evil angels who
constantly put it on’.
Ritual practices like the use of the tefillin or phylacteries, in Judaism as
in Catholicism, resulted in a spiritually hollow, mechanical religion. The
tefillin were of course biblically sanctioned, but Addison insisted that they
had long ago fallen victim to the perversion of passages in Exodus and
Deuteronomy. ‘The superstition of this ornament’ in its current usage,
he explained, resulted from the fact that ‘the first, plain and wholesome
intent thereof has in course of time been much corrupted, chiefly by the
schismatical pharisees, who instead of binding them for a sign upon their
hands, and as frontlets between their eyes, hung them as charms about
their necks’. Since the Jews were a ‘carnal people, which have ever been apt
to turn all inward piety into outward form, and to make that matter of
ambition and ostentation, which was designed for humility and holiness’,

14 Ibid., 15–25, 33–6, quotation on 25. On purgatory, see 33–5.

 Universals 121
they understood ‘the precept concerning the phylacteries merely according
to the letter’. They were principally guilty of ‘affixing on God their own
carnal observation and frivolous ceremonies of these tefillin, as if they were
his own institution and appointment’. The tefillin, Addison alleged, had
in turn inspired a parallel Catholic practice. ‘At this day’, he added, ‘the
papists permit the wearing about their necks the beginning of St John’s
Gospel, as a defensative from evil’.15
The similarities Addison discerned between Catholicism and Judaism
ran deep. He went so far as to claim that the Jews’ popery made it
easy for them to pass unnoticed among Catholics in continental Europe.
‘Coming within the cognizance and power of the papal Inquisition’, he
explained, many Jews ‘can join themselves to a crucifix and rosary, as well
as to the tzitzit and tefillin’. He ended this discussion by entertaining an
even wilder claim. ‘Some’, he wrote, ‘have ventured to affirm that there
want not Jews among the very judges of the Inquisition; which may be
one reason why of late so few are convicted of Judaism by that dread-
ful tribunal’.16 Jews were so popish, and superstition so universal in its
nature, that the cleverest among them could infiltrate the highest reaches
of the Roman church and perfectly impersonate friars and cardinals. In
this and many other respects, Addison’s Present state of the Jews resembled
the early Enlightenment historian Jacques Basnage’s famous Histoire de la
religion des Juifs of 1706–7. Despite his frequently expressed admiration for
Judaism, Addison likened Jews and Catholics to one another in order to
ridicule both. In so doing, he contributed to a universal theory of religious
imposture.17

Puritanical Muslims
Addison believed that Islam, too, resembled Roman Catholicism. Like
every corrupt form of Abrahamic faith, it was a subtle mixture of truth
and error. While ‘there are many such pious doctrines in the Qurʾan’,
Addison admitted in his account of almsgiving, ‘they are but as so many
good ears of corn in a good field of tares, or as so many single grains lost in
a heap of chaff’.18 Every truth in Islam could be traced to plagiarism.19 Like
rabbis and bishops before and after him, the Prophet had grafted his own
inventions and those of impostors from the past onto a pure monotheism
and claimed that the entire concoction was divine. While Addison was
15 Ibid., 55–71, 100–104, quotations on 55–6, 58, 100, 102–4. For other examples, see 119, 126–7, 192.
16 PSJ, 30–32, quotations on 31–2. Addison cited a number of specific examples.
17 Elukin, ‘Jacques Basnage’. 18 WB, 143–4, quotation on 143. 19 FSM, 84.
122 Culture
aware of the importance of h.adı̄th in Islam, he did not criticize it in the
same way he did the Mishna. Unlike Judaism, he assumed, Islam was a
religion of human invention to its very core.20
This left Addison less concerned with Muslims’ textual traditions than
with their devotional practices. In general, he stood in awe of their piety,
but this did not stop him from identifying its popish defects. Despite their
aversion to idolatry, Moroccan Muslims indulged in mindless magical
beliefs. It was the sufi marabouts of Morocco whom Addison singled out
for his most severe criticism, since they seemed to preside over this world
of instrumental prayer. ‘There are few who are able to read, that want
manuals of private devotions’, he explained, ‘which are composed by the
morabitos, or marabouts, and are indeed rather to be termed charms, than
prayers’. These superstitions covered every aspect of daily life; they were
thought, for example, ‘to keep their cattle healthy, and make them fruitful’.
Even Ramadan evinced the popish carnality of Islam. ‘They place a great
sanctity in this fast’, Addison wrote, ‘which yet to a scrupulist, scarce would
seem to deserve that name, for the day is usually passed away in a loitering
sleepiness, and the night in a junketing. The one is at best a drowsy Lent,
and the other a luxurious Carnival’.21
Addison focused his attention on marabouts, fuqahāʾ, and other religious
experts who led ordinary Muslims into error because he was ultimately
interested in Islam, like Judaism, not as a slate of doctrines and rituals, but
as a source of power. In the most basic sense, of course, Addison agreed with
most of his contemporaries that the polities in which Muslims lived were
founded upon popery, since they fed on oppression and dreams of universal
monarchy. The Moroccan Jewry’s ‘present condition under the Moresco
government’, accordingly, was ‘no other than a better sort of slavery’.22 Yet
when he delved into the details of Moroccan political history, Addison was
most impressed by the resonances between Islam and puritanism, which
largely sustained the parallels he drew between the recent revolutions of
Morocco and England. ‘The Moors’, he put it bluntly, ‘are the puritans in
Mahumetism’.23 While Addison saw popery in the prayers the marabouts
composed, the sufi leaders themselves were like puritans, ‘a sort of Arabs
which are skilled, or pretend to be, in the law of Muhammad, severe in
their conversation, bearing a great ostentation of sanctity, pretending to
prophesy, or predictions’.24
20 FSM, 53–8, 84. Addison referred to h.adı̄th as the ‘Suné’ (sunnah).
21 WB, 161–3, 211–12, quotations on 162, 211. See also 92–3, 148. 22 PSJ, 7–12, quotation on 7.
23 WB, 180. For Addison’s descriptions of ‘precise’ Moroccan Muslims, see 124, 211–12.
24 Ibid., 162.
 Universals 123
In fact, the guile of the godly almost seemed coeval with the Qurʾan.
For while Muhammad ‘so well managed his ambition and injustice, under
the cloak of religion, as never any have yet proved his equal’, it was no
coincidence that ‘the nearest and most exact transcript of this great impostor
was the late Usurper’, Oliver Cromwell. Addison’s history of early Islam was
a showcase of both puritan and popish forms of holy trickery. Muhammad,
he claimed, was ‘the only great impostor that ever continued so long
prosperous in the world’. His success was directly tied to the skill with
which he managed to deceive. Muslims, for instance, were foolish enough
to believe that seven miracles occurred at his birth. But no Protestant reader,
Addison hoped, would be surprised to encounter such ‘palpable trash’. For
‘it need not create our wonder that the Mahumedan doctors be thus large
in the encomiums of their apostle, when as strange things are attested of
St Francis, by the friars of his order; and also the Dominicans, in praise
of their founder’. Islamic imposture ought to be familiar to anyone who
knew of its Roman kin.25
Likewise, anyone familiar with the antinomian tendencies of puritanism
would understand why Muhammad had invented a religion that was so well
equipped to indulge carnal appetites. ‘He denied himself in no instance
of lewdness’, Addison supposed, ‘but that he entitled God to a special
approbation thereof, and made it a divine testimony of the truth of his
apostleship’. By extending this same licence to his followers, the Prophet
earned a powerful following among the people, ‘to whom nothing was
more acceptable, than to have the indulgence of their vile affections to
be made an article of their religion, and a piece of their worship’. He
drew in the pagans of Arabia, for instance, simply by concocting a more
hedonistic religion than their own priests could offer.26 Islam, like Catholi-
cism and Cromwellian puritanism, was crafted for the pursuit of universal
dominion.
In the modern world, Islam remained an engine of empire, but it seemed
to threaten polities as often as it was used to consolidate them, trapping
the Muslim world in a bloody cycle of revolt and reconstruction. Addison’s
preoccupation with this dynamic was evident on the very first pages of West
Barbary, in his account of the rise of the Saʿdı̄ dynasty. ‘Near the time the
Marı̄n family27 approaching to its designed period and determination’, he
wrote, ‘it fortuned that a certain al-faqı̄h, or Moorish priest, in the province
of Dara, began to grow into great reputation with the people, by reason of

25 FSM, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, 12–15, 35, 122–5, quotations on sig. a2r., 15, 35.
26 Ibid., 27–30, 119–21, quotations on 28, 30. 27 The Marinids.
124 Culture
his high pretensions to piety and fervent zeal for their law, illustrated by
a stubborn rigidity of conversation and outward sanctity of life’. Addison
deviated from his source here in order to weave Malikite legal expertise
and sufi religiosity into a Moroccan form of puritanism. ‘Pretending to be
descended from their Prophet’, this ‘priest’, Muhammad ibn Ah.mad, had
‘caused himself to be called sharı̄f: a title which the kindred of that impostor
have appropriated to themselves, and made the character of that whole
family’. This ‘pretended pedigree’ was merely ‘another engine wherewith he
insinuated himself into the people’s liking, which together with his seeming
severity, made him of no vulgar esteem with a generation, who from time
to time have been fooled with such mountebanks in religion’.28 Just as
puritans dubbed themselves the true inheritors of the Reformation in
order to woo the people, ibn Ah.mad linked himself to the Prophet in order
to curry popularity.
Knowing that the performance of zeal was best ‘fit to advance him in the
estimation of the many’, ibn Ah.mad decided to send his three sons on pil-
grimage to Mecca and Medina. This, he hoped, would secure the long-term
stability of his fledgling empire. ‘Much was the reverence and reputation
of holiness, which they thereby acquired among the superstitious people’,
Addison remarked, ‘who could hardly be kept from kissing their garments,
and adoring them as saints’. Ibn Ah.mad’s sons were masters of puritan and
Jesuitical performance. ‘His admired sons failed not in their parts’, Addison
observed, ‘but acted as much devotion, as high contemplative looks, deep
sighes, tragical gestures, and other passionate interjections of holiness could
express; “Allah, Allah” was their doleful note, their sustenance the people’s
alms’. Ibn Ah.mad then deployed his sons to hatch revolution in all the
major principalities of Morocco. Two were sent to the court of Fes, where
‘the too credulous king’ made ‘the elder president of the famous College
Amadorac, and the younger, tutor of his own sons’. Ibn Ah.mad himself
was reported to have been a learned astrologer. Priestcraft, it seemed, was
often rooted in pretensions to a learned form of holiness.29
Ibn Ah.mad’s sons took their puritanism to the next level when they
offered to lead an army from Fes against the Catholics who occupied
outposts on the northern coast of Morocco. To make his point obvious
here, Addison included the dissenting voice of Nasr, the brother of the king
of Fes, who advised against the proposed military campaign, and ‘resisted
the petition, warning the king not to arm this name of sanctity, which being
once victorious, might grow insolent, and forgetful of duty in minding a

28 WB, 1–3. 29 Ibid., 3–4.

 Universals 125
kingdom. He told him likewise that war makes men aweless, and that
through popularity, many became ambitious and studious of innovation’.
The sons of ibn Ah.mad, Addison warned, ‘took up arms, not out of love to
their country and zeal for their religion, but out of a desire to rule’. Despite
Nasr’s advice, these young men’s ‘armed hypocrisy’ was allowed to proceed
apace. Before long, they had poisoned the king of northern Morocco while
on campaign and returned to secure the kingdom of Fes from the same
man who had given them the military power they wielded.30 Their puritan
revolution, born and executed in armed and feigned zeal against popery,
was complete.
In Addison’s account, the same pretences to religious authority that
created the Saʿdı̄ dynasty in 1508 brought about its demise in 1655. The
new contenders for power in northern Morocco – the mujāhid al-ʿAyāshı̄,
the sufi Abū Bakr, and the sharı̄f Ah.mad ‘Bocálla’31 – were ‘all great saints’.
Addison again picked up on phenomena – sufism, legal expertise, and
sharifian ideology – that had in fact shaped the region’s political fate,
and rendered them intelligible to western students of priestly politics.
Al-ʿAyāshı̄ and Abū Bakr, for instance, rose to prominence in the same
moment because ‘their outward sanctimony equalled them in the people’s
affection and esteem’. Al-ʿAyāshı̄ ‘had the learning of a .tālib, and the
sanctity of a marabout, by which he was esteemed as an oracle among
his countrymen, who upon all emergent occasions repaired unto him for
advice and instruction; which they received as infallible, and obeyed as a
law’. Abū Bakr, a sufi magnate, headed a zāwı̄ya,32 and ended his rivalry
with al-ʿAyāshı̄ by arranging his assassination at a feigned truce meeting.33
As Abū Bakr assumed control of the region, he took care to bring the young
sons of the local leaders he murdered or oppressed to live at his zāwı̄ya,
‘not’, Addison wrote, ‘as hostages of peace, but as pledges of his care,
whom being as yet in their nonage, he loved to print with the characters
of a peaceful acquiescence in his authority’. Like Addison and his model
historian Saavedra Fajardo, Abū Bakr knew that the religious education of
children shaped the political behaviour of adults.34
In the end, though, Abū Bakr could not evade the wrath of one of
his most able pupils, Ghaylān, who never forgot the wrongs done to his
father and to al-ʿAyāshı̄, his father’s friend. Ghaylān’s time at the zāwı̄ya
was cut short when he married a woman from his home town, and back

30 Ibid., 4–6.
31 The third contender mentioned may have been Bū H . assūn. See Cour, L’établissement des dynasties
des chérifs, 173.
32 A sufi lodge. 33 WB, 22–7.
34 Ibid., 30–31, quotation on 30. See also PI, 162; Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, I, 5; II, 121.
126 Culture
in his birthplace, he was re-educated in revenge. As a leader, Ghaylān
was gifted with a ‘plausible fortune and personage, zeal for their law,
and reservation of carriage’. In his legalism he followed his father, whose
‘greatest renown’, Addison wrote, ‘sprang from his zeal for the Mahumetan
law, an artifice which seldom fails, and a knack with which whosoever is
gifted, cannot want reverence among the Moors’. Ghaylān’s holy authority
was even further amplified because his wife was the daughter of a sufi
saint. He used these family ties to position himself as the leader of jihād
against the Spanish and Portuguese. ‘He first showed the Moors how
their Prophet, both by his example and doctrine, had taught them to
exercise their revenge against all oppressors of his law’, Addison explained.
‘Whoever should die in its defense or propagation, were assured of paradise’.
This call was strikingly effective, and ‘induced many to be his followers,
who otherwise would have eschewed his company’.35 His ensuing military
victories only confirmed his religious authority, ‘it being the genius of
this people’, Addison observed, ‘to make the prosperity of the action, an
undoubted argument of its justice, and the voice of heaven to approve
it’.36 Ghaylān, like many before him, had cleverly feigned zeal and placed
providence in the service of his ambitions, thereby unifying the people
under his direction.37 Moroccan history, Addison submitted, was a theatre
of imposture.
Only by venturing beyond the European sphere of English discussions
of religious corruption is it possible to see that by the later seventeenth
century, the basic categories of post-Reformation polemic were becoming
truly universalized. There was no longer anything inherently Christian
about popery, puritanism, or priestcraft, and there was no longer anything
inherently European about universal monarchy.38 Addison’s discussion of
Islam made this abundantly clear. Religious deceit, he claimed, was every-
where the engine of both rebellion and tyranny, and this lesson was no
more evident than in the recent history of the Islamic Mediterranean and
in the life of Muhammad. Nearly identical arguments appeared in a wide
variety of English and European works from this period that described
the Ottoman and Mughal empires and the rise of the Prophet.39 In the
long run, the extension of anti-popery and anti-puritanism to the study
35 WB, 30–37. 36 Ibid., 43.
37 See Saavedra Fajardo, Royal politician, I, 189–94; II, 182–92, 287–92.
38 Contrast Pincus, Protestantism and patriotism, 256–68; Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the birth of Whig-
gism’; Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken.
39 See, for example, Rycaut, Present state of the Ottoman empire; Osborne, Politicall reflections;
Smith, Remarks upon the manners, government, and religion of the Turks; Ovington, Suratt; Fryer,
East-India.
 Universals 127
of the Islamic empires and their inhabitants laid a foundation for modern
Orientalism in Britain.40
The ideological thrust of Orientalist texts written before Britain’s major
conquests in the Muslim world was, of course, fundamentally different
from that of their descendants. Yet while the distinctiveness of these early
works is now well appreciated, one of their most important qualities has
gone entirely unnoticed. The depiction of rabbis, imams, sufis, and sultans
as agents of religious corruption, rebellion, and tyranny had a particular
utility for English divines who sought to confront Whiggish critics of
Anglican priestcraft, and for any Enlightened Christian who pushed back
against the anticlerical Enlightenment. None of these Jewish and Muslim
leaders, after all, were actually priests, strictly speaking, as Addison seems
to have understood. He nonetheless purposefully defined the clergy or
priesthood in general terms, as a distinct order of men who administered
the exterior aspects of a religion. In the lexicon he used to translate Islam for
his readers, for instance, a Moroccan faqı̄h became a ‘priest’.41 This move
armed Addison and other English orientalists with a notion of clerical
authority and ‘priestcraft’ that was even more universal and relativized
than the one employed by radical, ‘Erastian’ critics of priestly power. This
meant that pious critics could begin to turn many of the central tenets
of freethinking upside down. Eventually, Addison and his allies were able
to amass hundreds of stories that demonstrated how laymen, too, were
able to manufacture religious authority and manipulate their sanctity. The
global history of lay and clerical imposture to which Addison’s studies
contributed certainly provided defenders of the Church of England with a
potent critique of their Catholic and puritan enemies. But it also allowed
them to argue that an ‘Erastian’ solution to the problem of public religion
was clearly insufficient. Priests and laymen, dervishes and sultans, bishops
and kings were all capable, alone or in concert, of employing superstition
and enthusiasm to further their political ends and make a mockery of
sacred truths.

40 Bulman, ‘From anti-popery and anti-puritanism to Orientalism’ (for this argument and discussion
of other texts from the period). Pre-modern European ‘views’ or ‘images’ of Islam and the Islamic
empires are like their modern equivalents the subject of a large but often unfocused and de-
contextualized interdisciplinary literature. See among others Daniel, Islam and the West; Schwoebel,
Shadow of the crescent; Hourani, Islam in European thought; Southern, Western views of Islam; Tolan,
Saracens; Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment; Matar, Islam in Britain (among many by this last
author).
41 WB, 1, 132–3, 138–9 (Addison often implicitly equated fuqahāʾ with ordinary imams). In MP, 6,
the clergy were defined a bit more strictly as ‘separate persons to whom was committed the power
and care of prescribing, directing, and administering the rites [of a religion]’.
128 Culture
The turn to describing religious corruption as a universal phenomenon
that could be explained without recourse to theology or demonology was
an important move from Renaissance and Reformation to Enlightenment.
But in ideological terms, it was an open door. The tendency of freethinkers
to apply the discourse of priestcraft to the entire Christian ministry was
intellectually insignificant, because it was nothing but a choice – mostly
devoid of innovation, if hardly devoid of courage.42 Less impious writers
made different choices, but they had nearly identical ideas. In England
Deists, defenders of the church, and many other elites of a variety of
political persuasions were all deeply concerned about the various forms of
priestcraft, enthusiasm, and fanaticism that surrounded them. What they
disputed was the identity of its most dangerous practitioners, and the best
means of stopping them. The rifts among them were largely ideological,
not intellectual, in nature.

Wise barbarians
The decision to wage a war on priestcraft instead of a war on popery was
the negative counterpart to the decision to set aside conflicting visions
of the divine and imagine a natural or civil religion that could take Eng-
land beyond civil war. It was more difficult, though, for a student of the
world’s religions to articulate positive ideals than it was for him to offer
sweeping critiques. In order to do so, he was often forced to praise religions
he considered false and civilizations he deemed inferior. This, in turn,
might imply challenges to some of the basic norms of Renaissance and
Reformation culture.
Addison’s earliest readers could see that he had broken from the traditions
on which he was reared. In 1671, once West Barbary had been printed at the
Sheldonian in Oxford, the lowly Wiltshire curate was anxious to get his
book into the hands of his main hope for preferment, Joseph Williamson.
At the Act that summer, Addison’s printer, Leonard Lichfield, had seen the
orientalist, astronomer, and mathematician Edward Bernard, who agreed
to present the work to Whitehall’s intelligence czar. Bernard and Addison
evidently knew one another, and they had a great deal in common beyond
the scholarly interests they shared. Bernard also looked to Williamson for
patronage, and in February 1669, with Williamson’s help, he had been
offered a chance to go to Tangier with the breakwater builder Sir Hugh
Cholmley, presumably in order to advise Cholmley on applied mathematics
42 Compare Kors, Atheism in France. For similar points about Enlightenment radicalism, see Malcolm,
Aspects of Hobbes, 383–431, 488–97.
 Universals 129
and pursue his own research.43 While he never made it to Tangier, in the
summer of 1671 Bernard would for many reasons have taken a keen interest
in Addison’s work on Morocco.44
Yet when Bernard had a look at West Barbary before passing it on to
Williamson, he was unimpressed, even angry. ‘I crave you to suppose
Mr Addison’s remote abode hindered a more welcome service, or moderate
presenting of his book’, he complained to Williamson when he sent the
book by post to London. ‘The treatise makes amends for the deplorable
illiterateness of peoples which never better deserved this name than now.
Yet the modest and reverend author had not given it this common light,
if not more provoked by his gratitude to your self, than the bare truth of
his relations’.45 Bernard might have taken particular offense at Addison’s
discussion with the Moroccan secretary ʿAbd Allāh, in which the colonial
chaplain agreed with his Maghribi friend that scholarly zeal was often
inimical to the interests of the state. ‘The city’, Addison had concurred,
‘may be taken, while the mathematician is delineating the fortification’.46
This remark almost seemed meant for Bernard himself, since it would
obviously apply to the mathematician’s intentions to go to Tangier and
assist Cholmley with the mole. Yet there was something more at work here.
Bernard, more of a university man and an active creature of the Republic of
Letters than Addison, seems to have been genuinely offended by one of the
central arguments of West Barbary: that learning and literary achievement
were not reliable markers of virtue, civility, or wisdom.47
Much like Michel de Montaigne, reading travel literature on America
as France descended into civil chaos in the previous century, Addison had
been convinced by his experiences of the civil wars and revolutions of
England and Morocco that one of the basic commonplaces of Renaissance
humanism – the dichotomy between barbarism and civilization – was
mere prejudice.48 ‘It was one of the pedantic vanities of the Grecians to
repute all barbarous but themselves’, he observed. ‘There are some who
have the same opinion of every thing that is diverse from the manners
and customs of their own country’, he snorted, referring to traditional
humanists. ‘Yet those who acknowledge humanity in all its habits, may in
perusing the remarks made upon these Barbarians meet with something

43 TNA SP 29/255, f. 202.

44 Throughout his career Bernard corresponded with English scholars serving as chaplains in the
Ottoman empire: see Bodl MS Smith 45, passim.
45 TNA SP 29/291, f. 163. 46 WB, ‘Preface’.
47 On this sort of attitude as typical of Enlightenment discourse, see Edelstein, Enlightenment, 79–85.
48 Montaigne, Essais, 208–21.
130 Culture
that may civilize the title, and induce them to think, that what is commonly
called barbarous, is but a different mode of civility’.49 By using the term
‘Barbarians’ for the men and women of the Maghrib, Addison played on
the rhetorical value of making his claims in a study of a region that early
moderns called ‘Barbary’. If the ‘Barbarians’ were not utterly barbarous,
who was? To ask this question was to explode the basic means by which
Islamic history had been understood in the Renaissance.50 Addison insisted
that true humanism demanded a universal science of man.
Williamson seems not to have shared Bernard’s objections to Addison’s
bold stance and the scholarship behind it, since he later congratulated
Addison on his achievement.51 The secretaries in Whitehall, after all, were
avid collectors of political counsel from travelling historians like Addison.
They seem to have agreed with him that political wisdom could be gleaned
from the history of any polity or people, whatever its literary prowess.52 In
fact, only three years before Williamson was presented with West Barbary,
his superior, Lord Arlington, had been the dedicatee of Paul Rycaut’s very
similar work, The present state of the Ottoman empire. There Rycaut had
made exactly the same point about barbarism and civilization.53
These striking claims, so often authoritarian in their implications, were
particularly likely to please Charles II’s counsellors, who were trying to
secure political order in England on a basis that transcended and neu-
tralized competing claims to religious truth. Appeals to the wisdom of
barbarians were also ironic effects of Addison’s and Rycaut’s immersion in
the late humanist culture of history and travel. The derision the ancient
Greeks displayed towards those who did not share their customs had been
occasionally criticized since the late sixteenth century.54 Originally, such

49 WB, ‘Preface’. See also 138. Compare Descartes, Discourse, 26. Hazard, Crisis of the European mind,
xviii, recognizes this sort of statement as crucial to his crise, but assumes that it inherently threatened
traditional institutions.
50 Meserve, Empires of Islam; Bisaha, Creating East and West; Hankins, ‘Humanist Crusade literature’.
Addison seems to have partly retained an Aristotelian definition of civility that had been popularized
by Erasmus. See Johnson, ‘Idolatrous cultures and the practice of religion’, 598. He also continued
the work of Postel, who had made a similar case about the Ottomans in De la republique des Turcs.
See Bouwsma, Concordia mundi, 202–3.
51 TNA SP 29/292, f. 156.
52 The late Renaissance ars apodemica prescribed this sort of counsel: Lipsius, Direction for travailers,
sig. b5r.; Devereaux, Profitable instructions, 90–91; Descartes, Discourse, 16, 45; Turler, Traveiler, 37;
Palmer, Essay of the meanes, 60–62.
53 Rycaut, Present state of the Ottoman empire, ‘Epistle dedicatory’. For an example from Madras,
see Stern, ‘“One body corporate and politick”’, 309 n. 56. Contrast the similar remarks in Smith,
Remarks upon the manners, government, and religion of the Turks.
54 See, for instance, the comments of François Baudouin in 1561, quoted in Grafton, What was history?,
117.
 Universals 131
sentiments would have only been construed in intra-European terms. But
once they were expressed by those who ventured to Europe’s new worlds
in the East and West, notions like civility and religion were bound to be
relativized in profound ways. The use of world history for political and
religious counsel could easily foster a transcultural understanding of the
qualities possessed by effective political and religious leaders.
Addison replaced the ancient dichotomy with a holistic framework.
To the extent that he made use of a distinction between barbarism and
civilization, it was a relatively cosmopolitan and spectral one.55 In his
scheme of counsel, no ingredient of civil peace in the present day – not
prudence, justice, virtue, or even religion – was peculiar to Christian
monarchies. ‘I know’, he wrote to Williamson, ‘that little worthy a polite
judgment can be gathered from a discourse of people famous only for
being barbarous. Yet if public affairs can spare you minutes enough to read
over these remarks, you may perhaps in them meet with so much order,
civility, and (according to their way) religion, as may somewhat refine the
name’.56 Addison suggested that Morocco exhibited, in many ways, more
prudence, justice, virtue, and religion than England did. ‘If I had any
[design] in publishing this besides your divertisement’, he told his readers,
‘it was chiefly to make the justice and religiousness of a people esteemed
barbarous, rude and savage, to reflect upon their enormities, who would
be reckoned for the only illuminati of both’. He aimed to ‘show that this
unlicked, uncultivated people agree with the wisest nations, in making the
care of religion and justice to suppress vice and encourage virtue, as the
only method to make a state happy’.57 The ‘Barbarians’, Addison quite
literally insisted, were a source of enlightenment. Their history mocked
the supposition of the English that they were the illuminati of the earth.58
There was a striking consequence to Addison’s search for virtue and reli-
gion in Moroccan history. On this terrain of learned research and political
advice, Christian revelation and providence simply had no significance. By
no means did this imply that Addison himself came close to denying the
reality or wider significance of either. He simply set out to show that the
wise management of churches and states did not require knowledge that
was particular to the Christian tradition. He affirmed that all peoples were

55 See WB, 138, where Addison observed a ‘growing stupidity and barbarism’ in Morocco that was due
to the apparent absence of ‘schools of science’ and ‘a lack of opportunity to study arts and sciences’.
This was itself due to poverty, with which ‘the politest nations will soon degenerate into ignorance
and rusticity’.
56 Ibid., ‘Epistle dedicatory’. 57 Ibid., ‘Preface’.
58 On a related literary tradition, see Pagden, ‘The savage critic’.
132 Culture
capable of instilling virtue and religion in their populations, whether or
not they accepted Christianity.59

The religion of mankind

Yet even when he wrote about non-Christian religions, Addison never
wholly abandoned sacred history. He believed that justice and piety were
possible outside Christianity in part because long ago, the basic tenets
of both had been revealed by God to everyone. These principles still
operated in all the nations of the modern world, but to varying extents. The
degree of civility to be found in a given country largely depended on how
successfully its inhabitants had preserved, communicated, elaborated, and
implemented this revelation with sound education and political prudence.
Addison revealed this deep background to his position on the relation-
ship between Christianity and civilization in the course of an attempt to
convince his own countrymen of the importance of catechizing. In The
primitive institution, which appeared in 1674, he argued that his favourite
pastoral technique was not simply primitive but primordial. In order to
demonstrate this he combined scraps of knowledge collected from a rabbi in
Morocco with his reading of John Selden’s work on the first human aware-
ness of natural law. Selden himself had drawn from scripture, Tertullian,
and the rabbinic teachings discussed in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah.60
The law of nature, Selden explained, had been given to Adam and Noah
by God in the form of a series of precepts. Addison and many others
believed that these so-called Noachide laws were also the basic elements of
natural and civil religion, and a source of both peace and salvation.61
Much like Selden and other scholars in his day, Addison argued that
‘all other nations must have recourse to the Jewish records, to clear their
genealogies, and attest their lineage’. He was sanguine about Selden’s Old
Testament and rabbinic evidence. ‘To the Jews’, he affirmed, ‘we stand
obliged for the original history of the creation, and that with indubitable
integrity they have delivered to us the infallible memoirs of all those passages
which happened before and after the Deluge’. Other sources were of little
59 Compare Taylor, Ductor dubitantium, 221; Frantz, English traveller, 100–119.
60 See Selden, De iure naturali, 95–129, esp. 99, 109–10, 119. On Selden and natural law, see Tuck,
Natural rights theories, 82–119; Sommerville, ‘John Selden, the law of nature, and the origins of
government’; Toomer, John Selden, II, 490–562; Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s chief rabbi, 135–
81; Parkin, Science, religion, and politics, 60–66. For early modern precedents to Selden’s discussion,
see Malcolm, ‘The name and nature of Leviathan’, 34–8.
61 The importance of these precepts in the early Enlightenment has probably been underestimated.
See also Stroumsa, New science; Toomer, John Selden.
 Universals 133
use. ‘The faint glimpses retained by other nations’, he added, ‘were wrapped
up in stories so notoriously fabulous, that they were fitter to evidence
the vanity of the pagan rhapsodies, than to confirm a truth of so great
an importance’.62 Much like his contemporary in the church, Edward
Stillingfleet, Addison assumed the centrality of the Bible as an historical
source, but went beyond it to incorporate Jewish traditions.63
The rector of Milston followed Selden closely, but tweaked his rabbi’s
argument with radical results. He did so only to emphasize just how indis-
pensable catechizing was. Here modern moves were made for traditional,
pious purposes. ‘Religion began’, Addison declared, ‘when God was Adam’s
catechist, and gave and instructed him in that law, in whose observation
consisted the main articles of his continuing in a state of excellent felicity’.
God’s oral command not to eat of the forbidden fruit logically subsumed
the ten commands that were later given to Moses and then reduced to
two heads by Jesus. More importantly, though, once Adam ate of the fruit,
God instructed him in six moral precepts, which explicated the ‘primor-
dial law’ of Paradise. They outlawed idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery,
and theft; and they commanded civil justice and obedience. Addison called
these six commands ‘a natural law’, ‘precepts of natural right, common to
the whole human race’, ‘the common law of all nations under heaven’, ‘a
complete scheme of duties toward God and neighbor’, and ‘the common
religion of mankind’. He recognized no distinction, chronological or oth-
erwise, between the first religion and either the law of nations or the state
of nature. God later responded to humans’ tendency to err with a more
detailed moral code, he explained, but this too was a natural religion.64
Addison insisted that Adam’s descendants could never have preserved
God’s law unless Adam had catechized his children, these children had cat-
echized their children, and so on.65 Human rational faculties were simply
incapable of independently deriving such laws or recovering them from
oblivion. Some traces of Adam’s catechizing had in fact survived in scrip-
ture. They were implied in his sons’ ‘deportment, when they brought their
62 PSJ, 1–2, 4–5. Here Addison clearly rejected the thrust of Isaac La Peyrère’s theory that there had
been men before Adam, and its notion of a society without religion, as nearly all scholars did. See
Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère; Grafton, Defenders of the text, 204–13; Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’, 54–5.
63 Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae.
64 PI, 14–24, quotations on 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24. For other discussions of this natural law see, for
example, Stubbe, Rise and progress of Mahometanism, 13, 24, 25, 180; Hickes, Posthumous discourses,
386–92; Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s chief rabbi, 9–10, 135–81; Ziskind (ed), Selden on Jewish
marriage law, Introduction; Toomer, John Selden, II, 490–562; Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale, 91–2.
For a more general account, see Müller, Tora für die Völker.
65 Here, as usual, Addison supplemented the work of learned antiquarians with his findings from
travel. See PI, 14–24.
134 Culture
offerings to God’s altar as testimonies of gratitude and devotion’. These
basic sacrifices, Addison insisted, ‘could not be the effect of mere natural
instinct, but of Adam’s pious diligence to bring them up religiously’, with
reference to God’s original commands. ‘Though mere natural reason may
teach man a belief and worship of God, yet to do it with the circum-
stances of the first two brethren, exceeds its power’.66 Religious worship
could take no specific or efficacious form without continuous institutions
of education.
What was true for worship, Addison surmised, must be true for all
six moral precepts. This resulted in a very worldly conception of sacred
history. ‘That which most imports the present subject’, he continued, ‘is
the manner how the first six precepts were instructed: which without doubt
was viva voce, or by an oral institution: for certainly of things unwritten,
there can be no other means to instill and propagate their knowledge’.
Here Addison dismissed the explanation favoured by Selden himself, who
had leaned upon the scholastic notion that each rational soul was endowed
with a faculty, the intellectus agens. Through it, many believed, the law
could be continually revealed. Selden had also adumbrated the view that
Addison had taken. He had admitted that it was implied by the rabbinic
texts he cited, but still ultimately set it aside.
‘These precepts’, Addison admitted, ‘contained such an apparent equity
and right, as could be by none denied, who therein had once been duly
informed’. But this was besides the point. ‘There was a necessity’, he
reminded his readers, ‘of competent means to procure this information’.
Addison’s own conception of the human soul could never admit of a notion
like the intellectus agens. ‘If the soul of man be at first as a book wherein
nothing is, and yet every thing may be written’, he explained, ‘then either
education or instruction, use or discipline must of necessity fill up this
blank’. At bottom, human cognition was passive. Educational diligence was
therefore the only way to secure civil peace and salvation. ‘The rasa tabula
of man’s soul, as it is most susceptive, so is it most concerned to be first
engraven with those things which indispensably respect his duties toward
God and his neighbor’.67 Here Addison floated an argument that was
similar to one being developed at the same time by John Locke, who would
later make it famous in his 1689 Essay concerning human understanding.68

66 PI, 15–16. Compare Stillingfleet, Works, II, ‘Irenicum’, 166–7.

67 PI, 26–8. On the intellectus agens, see Toomer, John Selden, II, 505–6. Compare this and Addison’s
catechizing project (below, 154–62), with Hobbes, Leviathan, 219–33, esp. 221.
68 Locke, Essay concerning human understanding, 48–103; Locke, Drafts for the Essay concerning human
understanding.
 Universals 135
For both of them, histories of true religion and happy states were above all
not stories of revelation or divine right but tales of proper education.69
This portrait of the precarious survival of saving knowledge on earth was
in a sense more extreme than the claim of Maimonides (itself avoided by
most scholars) that religions were so easily corrupted that idolatry dated to
only 235 years after Adam’s expulsion from Paradise. In Addison’s scheme,
not only false worship but a total abandonment of natural law was pos-
sible from the beginning of human history, and only averted by word of
mouth.70 Up until the time of Abraham, he argued, mankind had a com-
mon religion, based on its collective memory of the six precepts given by
God to Adam. This religion contained all that was necessary for salvation.
Its ubiquity could be seen in the piety of Job, who was an Idumaean (nei-
ther a native Israelite nor a proselyte), but still followed the six precepts,
and used his observance of them to demonstrate his integrity.71 Addison
joined the chronologists of his day – including John Marsham, author of
Chronicus canon (1672) – who retained the biblical regime of time while
making possible the cultural superiority and distinctiveness of pre-Mosaic
peoples.72 Like so many others in the following decades, Addison renego-
tiated the relationship between European and extra-European cultures and
their supposed Judaic origins, de-stabilized the centrality of the Bible as
a source for ancient history, and thereby established a framework for the
study of comparative religion, all while working within a fundamentally
pious framework.73
From the birth of religion Addison turned to the origins of religious
diversity. Noah and his descendants added precepts and ceremonies to the
natural religion of Adam, while other nations eventually failed in their
duty to educate and fell into idolatry, violating the first precept. According
to Genesis 9:4, Noah himself was given a seventh precept ‘against eating
the limb of a living creature’. Its purpose was merely functional: it taught
his people to avoid acting cruelly and sharing in the customs of idolaters.

69 The argument here was also clearly meant to rebut ‘enthusiastic’ ideas about the mysterious acquisi-
tion of divine knowledge, which conformists attributed to the Quakers and other nonconformists.
70 For similar claims made by other conforming Anglicans, see Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’, 53–5.
71 PI, 22. Again Addison was working from Selden, De iure naturali, 834–7. On this chapter in Selden,
see Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s chief rabbi, 155–7. Pace Nelson, Hebrew republic, 115–17, such
arguments did not imply tolerationism.
72 Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, 63. Rossi, Dark abyss of time shows that classic Enlightenment
problems on this front were broached from multiple theological and ideological perspectives before
the 1680s.
73 See Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’; Stroumsa, ‘John Spencer and the roots of idolatry’; Assmann,
Moses the Egyptian, 55–90. Contrast the similar remarks in Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment,
60.
136 Culture
Addison followed Selden and contended that this was not an essential
precept for all mankind, but a prudent response to historical circumstances.
Despite its divine origin, it was merely part of ‘Noah’s ritual of ceremonies’.
Job too had recognized that the seventh precept was peculiar to the needs
of one nation, and he paid no heed to it. Similarly, Addison continued,
when God gave Abraham the sacrament of circumcision, he did so only
in order to confer upon his people ‘an exterior badge of distinction’. This
eighth precept was the true beginning of ‘the great distinction of nations in
respect of worship’. Later, to further distinguish his people, Moses simply
added three more. ‘God at Mara gave them a statute and an ordinance’,
Addison noted, ‘and by spaces filled up their ritual’.74 While he ignored
arguments about the Egyptian origins of Jewish civilization that had been
broached by his contemporaries (he evidently believed they were based on
uncertain pagan traditions), he did emphasize the relative insignificance of
the Mosaic law. The Israelites continued to receive revelation, of course,
but from Noah’s time onwards, that revelation ceased to be intrinsically
essential to morality, religion, or salvation.
When Addison suggested that the last four divine precepts were not,
strictly speaking, necessary for salvation, but merely functioned to enable
it for God’s people at a particular moment in which they were surrounded
by religious error, he placed immense pressure on a central assumption
in post-Reformation Protestantism: the notion that the divine origin of
a command implied that obedience to it was necessary for salvation. He
was evaluating the salvific significance of religious institutions, apparently
even divinely ordained ones, according to time-bound, functional criteria.
Some divine laws might not be tests of human obedience, but props to
it. This stance could also be taken to imply that some religious customs
that were not of divine origin (or whose origin was obscure or disputed)
could be deemed (on functional grounds) to be at least as important to the
process of salvation as some divine commands. This implicitly rendered
the usual Reformation notion of adiaphora or ‘indifferent things’ much less
relevant to debates about religious customs, Christian or otherwise. The
line between religion and civilization was blurring. In practice, ceremonies
or customs that could not be traced to revelation could be as essential to
Christianity as ones that could. True religion could be found beyond the
realm of revealed truths, in the sacred function of civil commands.75 In the
hands of Addison and his allies, this series of arguments would amount
74 PI, 25–6. See also Hickes, Posthumous discourses, 386–92.
75 See also Hickes, Posthumous discourses, 253–90. Contrast Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer’; Levitin, ‘John
Spencer’s De legibus hebraeorum’.
 Universals 137
to an Enlightened justification for the ceremonial and ritualized style of
Christianity that had prospered before the Civil Wars under the guidance
of archbishop William Laud.76

The church of nature

Human efforts and institutions played a striking role in Addison’s deep
history of religion. But their importance and legitimacy ultimately rested
on what might be called their divine function: their ability to preserve
an original set of divine commands for posterity and ensure that these
commands were obeyed. Addison and his allies were well aware that many
of their contemporaries had little time for institutional arguments that
rested upon the claims of sacred history. ‘It is our hard lot’, Addison
observed, ‘to fall into those perilous times wherein not only some inferior
points, but the whole frame of religion is ready to be brought in question’.
The ‘unhappy genius of the age’ was best captured in the creed of ‘a race
of men who will not be coy and squeamish to make the calling of the
clergy, as well as the belief of a God, to be wholly grounded upon some
blind tradition, set on foot by some crafty politick’. On Addison’s mind
was something like the thesis of that famous Enlightenment tract, the early
eighteenth-century Traité des trois imposteurs, part of which may have been
in circulation as he wrote.77
When they addressed this ‘race of men’ Addison and his allies stepped
outside of sacred history altogether, and defended the church as a natural
and civil institution. They did this by drawing on the evidence of world
history without referring to divine action. Religions could be considered
‘natural’, Addison argued, to the extent that their content was the result of
men prudentially applying their reason. In the course of history, all religions
had come to share basic features that met this criterion. Together they con-
stituted ‘natural religion’, understood as a transhistorical phenomenon.78
‘There has ever been found a catholic agreement’, Addison explained in
West Barbary, ‘not only in the main article of the deity, but also in some
solemn manner of his worship’. These propositions of natural religion
matched two of the five ‘common notions’ that had already appeared in

76 See below, 175–95. Contrast Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer’, esp. 151.

77 The full work existed in manuscript form in the early eighteenth century and was first printed in
1719. See Berti et al. (eds), Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and free thought.
78 This scheme was consistent with Addison’s deep sacred history but presented independently of it.
In his view, all elements of both natural religion and the natural religions of history were consistent
with the six precepts that had originally been given to Adam by God.
138 Culture
the writings of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and would later be reproduced
in the internal, intellectual religion of the Deists. Yet Addison’s project,
unlike Herbert’s and those of many Restoration Platonists, was in no way
an elaboration upon the Renaissance tradition of identifying an ‘ancient
theology’ in the history of religious ideas.79 Addison moved on from these
two propositions to identify their practical consequences in history, a move
Cherbury and his followers would have dismissed as a nod to superstition
and priestcraft. ‘Upon which consideration’, Addison wrote, ‘there were rit-
ual circumstances established, for the more decent celebration of religious
ministers’. The circumstances were five: ‘a dedicate place, separate time,
solemn actions, prescript forms, and above all a distinct order of persons,
by whom the exterior religion is to be officiated, and to whom for the
power and sacredness of their function there have ever been decreed conve-
nient observances and revenues’.80 The institution of both a well-endowed
priesthood and the liturgical uniformity it ensured were part of the religion
of nature.81 From this point of view, many of Anglican Christianity’s most
controverted components could actually be considered part of its natural
core.
Arguments drawn from the universal practices of men, of course, dealt
only indirectly with the thesis that the original institution of the priesthood
was an act of imposture.82 While he considered the antiquity of the clerical
order to be as unquestionable as its ubiquity, Addison admitted that the
timing, nature, and circumstances of its invention were murky at best.
This made the thesis of universal priestcraft a difficult one to dismiss.
Addison pointed out, though, that his enemies had no more historical
evidence to support their position than he had to support his.83 Both sides
could only bring conjecture to their defence, and argue about whether or

79 Stroumsa, ‘Spencer and the roots of idolatry’, 2; Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’, 60–61. Contrast the
widespread tendency to understand historical diffusionism and the origins of comparative religion
in terms of Platonism, philosophy, heterodoxy, and deism. See, for example, Harrison, ‘Religion’
and the religions, 61–73, 131–8; Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken, 140–60; Hunt et al., Book
that changed Europe. For emphasis on the historical dimensions of Renaissance discussions of the
prisca theologia, see Popper, Ralegh’s History of the world, 91–8.
80 WB, 132–3; see also MP, 6, 18.
81 For similar Restoration arguments, see Hickes, Posthumous discourses, 338–51; Stillingfleet, Works,
II, ‘Irenicum’, esp. 200–219. For mostly simple, scriptural precedents in early Stuart and mid-
century Laudianism, see Lake, ‘Laudians and the argument from authority’; Heylyn, ΚΕΙΜΗΛΙΑ
᾿ΕΚΚΛΗΣΙΑΣΤΙΚΑ, ‘Of liturgies’, 51, 59–60, 79–90; Robartes, Gods holy house and service, 12–13.
82 Since Addison believed that the transmission of religious knowledge was precarious, he would not
have been surprised by the descriptions of communities of atheists that were common in early
modern travel writing. He simply maintained that atheism was not the product of reason. See Kors,
Atheism in France, 135–77.
83 MP, 12–14.
 Universals 139
not the original institution of a priesthood was a rational and therefore
natural act. For his part, in A modest plea for the clergy Addison offered an
argument for the necessity of a ministry that was ostensibly rooted in a
Hobbesian understanding of natural right and natural law. Addison called
it ‘a rational account’ of ‘the antiquity of the clergy’. It was a conjectural
history, something scholars usually associate with the following century.84
‘A custom or law’, Addison posited, ‘though it cannot be elder, yet it
may safely be supposed to be as old as its chief motive and reason’.85 This
assertion paved the way for an historical argument about the first erection
of a priesthood that bracketed the issue of divine institution. ‘Not to
meddle at present with the divine appointment of certain men for the
administration and defense of religion’, he explained, ‘we will conceive
upon what ground men herein, left unto their own reason, might be
induced to erect a clergy, or to constitute an order of men to appoint and
perform the public solemnities of religion, and to direct and determine in
emergent cases’.86 Addison set out to explain why a clerical order would
be erected in the state of nature. Hobbes, of course, had argued that a
sovereign and a priesthood would be erected in a single moment, united in
a single person. In Addison’s account, priest and sovereign were also born
simultaneously, but separately.
By the time Addison published his Plea, Hobbes was already notorious
for his claim that in the state of nature men were bound only by the law
of self-preservation, and not by the so-called ‘natural laws of good and
evil’ cited by his contemporaries.87 Addison set his own scenario for the
erection of a priesthood in just such a world, one in which all remained
free to enjoy their natural right to perfect liberty. Bound by no moral laws,
they had nevertheless somehow decided ‘so far to part with their liberty,
as to set over them an order of men, whom they knew from the design
and tenor of their function, would fill their minds with fear and awe, and
put a curb upon their carnal wills’. Their reasons, he surmised, must have
been ‘wonderfully clear and weighty’.88 To identify them, Addison added
to the Hobbesian state of nature a strong, extended version of Hobbes’s
own argument about why men were naturally inclined to religion.89 In this
way, he managed to smuggle the first two precepts of Adam into a purely
conjectural account.
‘We may imagine’, Addison wrote, ‘that the first motive thereunto was
a mature deliberation of the natural importance and design of religion
84 Ibid., 12; Phillips, Society and sentiment, 171–90. 85 PI, 200. 86 MP, 18–19.
87 See, for example, Tenison, Creed of Mr. Hobbes, 135. 88 MP, 15.
89 Hobbes, Leviathan, 62–6, 237–42.
140 Culture
itself; which was clearly seen to bind men to a solemn and regular worship
of the Deity’. Men gave up their liberty not because they were naturally
sociable, but in part because they were naturally religious. From here men
would have followed the same path they had in fact followed in the rest
of world history. ‘This worship (they saw) could neither be regular nor
solemn, if there were not select persons to make it so; for things cease to
be both, when they become common; and they must needs become com-
mon, when vulgarly mixed and transacted with profane, that is, common
utensils’.90 The erection of sacred and profane spheres and offices was a
foundational event in nature.
Men also needed priests to lead their worship, Addison suggested,
because while they were naturally inclined to worship God, they were
also inclined to do it badly. To explain this in Hobbesian but pious terms,
Addison ascribed to men in nature the ‘fallen condition of mankind’, as
many French Augustinians interested in Hobbes did at the same time.91
Mankind was ‘far gone in corruptions’ and thus ‘unfit for, and unprovided
of that sanctity which is required in religious addresses’. This implied that
‘some persons should be chosen, and by holy ceremonies set apart, and as
it were placed in a middle station between God and the people’.92 This was
nothing less than naturalist sacerdotalism. Addison elaborated by echoing
absolutist arguments for unitary political sovereignty. He explained that in
its need for clear, hierarchical, leadership, religion was no different than the
arts, the professions, and most importantly, the state.93 He equated oppo-
sition to clericalism with an endorsement of the dissolution of society.
If Addison’s readers accepted his rational account of clerical domination,
of course, little remained of the imposture thesis besides the claim that men
had not chosen to come under the authority of the clergy, but were instead
originally induced to do so by something other than reason, and in later
ages, by the influence of a ‘blind tradition’. On this level, Addison was
willing to grant any version of the imposture thesis and simply question
the force of it. Even if it were true that men had originally accepted priestly
authority as a result of mere guile and obfuscation, and had later done
so as a result of naive emulation, it would still be necessary to assess the
substance of this ‘blind tradition’, and its origins in nature. Past practice
was not to be discarded simply because it was tainted by deceit; in this
case, rationality, ubiquity, and utility were far more important criteria for
evaluating the historical record.94

90 MP, 19–20, quotation on 19. 91 Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 504–7.

92 MP, 21–3, quotations on 21–2. 93 Ibid., 20–21. 94 Ibid., 15–18, 24.
 Universals 141

The cult of the state

The wisdom of instituting a clerical order, Addison wrote, was ‘so univer-
sally observed by all nations moderately civilized, that it may seem to be
founded in the law of nature, and to have had none other but God for
its author’.95 He tended to speak of the civil and the natural in the same
breath. Since he understood civility as rationality in human customs (or,
in the language of sacred history, a series of prudent extrapolations upon
the natural law God gave to Adam), his understanding of civil religion
was very similar to his understanding of natural religion. He could simul-
taneously argue that the Church of England was both things. To defend
Anglican Christianity as a civil religion was simply to express the political
aspects of its natural function. Here Addison’s claims about barbarism and
civility came full circle, in rhetorical and substantive terms. ‘Not to render
due regard unto those who are known to be true ministers of Christian
religion’, he remarked, ‘is either to think them less worthy then the pagans
thought the ministers of their idolatrous ceremonies; or to show our selves
less civil, than the greatest barbarians’.96 Clerical grandeur was a minimal
mark of both true religion and civilization.
To fend off the claims of Hobbes and others for the secular domina-
tion of the church, Addison turned to many radicals’ favoured terrain in
antiquity.97 He argued that a separate priestly order, honoured by princes,
was essential to any effective polity. The ancient gentiles, after all, had
chosen to educate the sons of princes for the priesthood. Even their kings
exercised the office. And among the Romans, the king was initially assigned
a particular role in traditional sacrifices. The later, mature Roman arrange-
ment was a rational partnership between kings and priests, initiated by
the former. Addison drew particular attention to the freethinkers’ favourite
prince, Numa Pompilius, and glossed Livy to his own ends. ‘Numa’, he
recalled, ‘to give more splendor and credit to religion, established many
sorts of priests in the city’. The king feared ‘that in process of time the
kings might come to neglect their office about the sacrifices, by reason
of the weighty affairs of state, that might otherwise employ them’. So he
‘ordained the flamens to supply the king’s place, who bore the names of the
severate gods, to whom they were consecrate’. Indeed, ‘this officiating of
their kings was thought so necessary, that when they were banished Rome,
one of the priestly order had the name of king while he was doing his
95 Ibid., 18.
96 Ibid., 33–4. Compare Taylor, Clerus domini, 3–4. See also Frantz, English traveller, 72–99.
97 On Hobbes’s formulation, see Tuck, ‘Civil religion of Thomas Hobbes’.
142 Culture
function,98 lest the people should suspect anything to be lacking in the
worship of the gods’. This way the Romans ‘preserved royalty in religion,
when it was cast out of the state’.99 Addison used Numa not primarily
as an example of the cynical manipulation of religion by prudent politi-
cians, but as an early exponent of the power and benefits of a partnership
between royal and clerical authority, a partnership in which kings willingly
and wisely heaped prestige and duties upon the clergy, who in turn gained
credit from their association with the secular ruler. The fact that in the
Roman case rex was once sacerdos (and later, sacerdos was rex) did not pre-
clude Numa and his priests from serving as useful historical supports for a
clericalist agenda.100 The Romans simply thought it was good politics and
good religion to honour and support the priestly order.
While he focused on the high regard for priests in ancient Rome, Addi-
son insisted that the Persians, Egyptians, and Athenians only equalled or
surpassed the Romans in this respect. They all made priests ‘the guides
and counsellors of their kings, and judges and dividers in secular affairs’,
he said. ‘It were easy to be numerous in examples to this purpose, and by
an induction of all the nations in the world, to prove this reverence of the
clergy’.101 What was true for pagan antiquity was also true, he claimed,
if one considered ‘the modern and present state of the world’, and the
religions within it. ‘We shall find no nation so savage and uncivilized’,
Addison claimed, ‘as not to have some officers of religion, whom they treat
with civility, and make considerable in the interest of their state and gov-
ernment’. The organization of the Moroccan ‘church’ showed that even
in a case where religion was formally independent of the state, a close
partnership was the wisest policy.102
Addison’s fundamental claim was that whatever deception, trickery, and
fraud was attributed to the world’s religions and their leaders, a uniform,

98 Addison likely referred here to the so-called rex sacrificulus or rex sacrorum. For a similar discussion,
see Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, 201.
99 MP, 25–6.
100 On anticlerical discussions of Numa, see Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken; Champion,
‘Legislators, impostors, and the politic origins of religion’. For important earlier discussions,
see Machiavelli, Sweetness of power, 56–8; Livy, Livy, 66–73; Polybius, Histories, III, 436–9;
Plutarch, Lives, I, 205–74. On Numa, even in Machiavelli, as neither a republican nor monar-
chist example, but an example in utramque partem, see Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, 54–9. For
an explicit invocation of Machiavelli by a Restoration conformist with many Laudian views, see
Littleton, Sixty-one sermons, III, 10. On Numa in other theories of civil religion, see Silk, ‘Numa
Pompilius’.
101 MP, 25–30.
102 Ibid., 156–8. In Moroccan Islam, Addison claimed to have found a close-knit, mutual system of
support between priest and laity that put the English scene to shame: WB, 134–46, 198.
 Universals 143
priestly religion could still be defended on functional and political grounds,
in keeping with the most Machiavellian and Hobbesian of premises:
For if by an atheistical supposal it should be granted that religion is but a
meer engine of government, or a politic invention devised to awe the people
into subjection and obedience, and thereby very proper to turn the affairs
of the world: yet that religion may be able to effect these purposes, there is a
necessity of distinct persons to instill into the people a belief and fear of the
invisible powers, and this dismal apprehension of a future state, or world to
come; and to show them how that these invisible powers have decreed and
appointed that all sorts of persons should be subject to the visible higher
powers upon earth; and how that they will certainly and fearfully punish all
such as do otherwise. So that it now becomes the interest of the magistrate to
assert the credit and authority of those upon whose ministry so much of the
common welfare depends, and to take care that persons thus employed have
such a veneration and regard shown them, as may render them competent
to perform these good offices for the state.103
Freethinkers might believe that religion was an ancient trick, and they
might deny the existence of God, his justice, and his appointment of robed
successors on earth. They might, Addison conceded, even be right to deny
these things. But they could not deny that it was essential for ordinary
people to believe them. To do so would be to reject the concern over civil
peace that freethinkers supposedly shared with their enemies.
To refute the radicals, Addison simply accepted the terms of debate
they appeared to favour.104 He abandoned the insistence of other pious
authors in the Machiavellian tradition that sincerity in religion or in the
erection of a priesthood was necessarily more effective than feigning.105 The
divine calling of the clergy was, after all, a valuable source of reputation,
one of the many rhetorical constructs on which all political authority
rested.106 ‘Reputation’, Addison wrote, ‘goes further than power’. The
credit of the clergy was at the root of the social utility of religion. ‘There is
nothing more material in religion’, Addison insisted, ‘than that men should
be ascertained that their spiritual guides have their commission and calling
from God: because a doubting thereof must unavoidably prove no small
prejudice to their authority and success’.107 In this way, Addison made the
freethinkers’ distinction between the wise religious trickery of the ancients
and the imposture by which modern Christians were made docile seem
103 MP, 145–6. See also 12–14.
104 For the broader social and cultural context of this move, see Bulman, ‘Hobbes’s publisher and the
political business of Enlightenment’.
105 MP, 15–18, 24. See Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, 74–5.
106 Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, 82. 107 MP, 2–3, 34.
144 Culture
utterly misplaced. The iure divino case for the priesthood was not simply
consistent with the ideals of civil religion. In a Christian society, the divine
calling of the ministry was civil religion’s essential component.
However striking they may seem, Addison’s pragmatic arguments were
common in the apologetics of the Restoration Church of England. The
defence of Anglican Christianity as a civil religion can be found in the works
of both ‘latitudinarians’ and ‘high churchmen’. Many of these divines
were hardly shy about expressing their views.108 They were comfortable
protecting their status in society with recourse to both the rhetoric of
civil religion and sincere affirmations of their divine calling, in order to
address both mainstream and freethinking readers and critics. In the end,
their claim was that while the Church of England offered the material
advantages of the most effective civil religions in world history, it also
happened to yield something that most of these religions had not: salvation.
To Machiavelli’s suggestion that ancient Roman religion was superior to
Christianity because of the latter’s ill effects on political stability in Italy,
English divines replied with accounts of the expansive civil and spiritual
benefits of Anglicanism.
In their historical frame of vision these divines were not convinced, as
others seemed to be, that the radical subordination of the church to civil
authority was an obvious solution to the problem of religious imposture.
They knew all too well that throughout history, laymen had been just
as skilful in manipulating religious authority for their own ends as the
clergy had been. The fact that Oliver Cromwell and James II were the
most important objects of reflection on the role of religious imposture
in political life in this period makes abundantly clear how unimpressed
most contemporaries were with the ‘Erastian’ option. To argue that the
political struggles of later Stuart England were in essence a struggle ‘between
sacerdos and regnum’, exemplified by the competing claims to authority
made by bishops and kings, is simply to parrot the rhetoric of the church’s
enemies.109 The approach churchmen overwhelmingly favoured was not
to threaten the royal supremacy with insistent claims about the divine
origin of their office, but to espouse an historically grounded vision of
partnership, in which the clergy assumed their spiritual functions while

108 See, for example, Littleton, Churches peace asserted upon a civil account; Stillingfleet, Works, II,
‘Irenicum’, esp. 206–12; Gould, Conformity according to canon, esp. 12–13; Parker, Discourse of
ecclesiastical politie, esp. 31–2, 68–71.
109 Contrast Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken (quotation on 16–17). Other examples of this
misleading argument include Goldie, ‘Civil religion of James Harrington’; Collins, Allegiance of
Thomas Hobbes; Collins, ‘The Restoration bishops’.
 Universals 145
also serving as important counsellors to the monarch.110 It should not be
surprising that such an historical culture would position scholarly clerics
like Addison as advisors to the king. This was precisely the identity many
churchmen assumed for themselves when they dedicated their books to
patrons.
The prominence attained by discussions of civil and natural religion
in post-bellum England is perhaps the clearest sign of how the religious
struggles of the later Stuart period were fundamentally different from
the struggles of the pre-revolutionary era.111 In short, they were premised
upon an elite secularity. The power of the church in society was attacked
not on purely theological premises, as it tended to be before the English
Revolution, but by means of philosophical, historical, and political critique.
The social power of the clergy in general, and not simply the authority
of bishops, was a central concern. Even revelation and divine agency were
frequently called into question. Yet while the freethinker appeal to civil and
natural religion in this period is well known, historians have largely failed
to see that the church itself was defended with reference to identical ideals,
at the very same time. If anything, the rebirth of civil and natural religion
in the early Enlightenment was due more to the efforts of divines than to
the ingenuity of their enemies. Anglican Enlightenment was not a reactive
Whig invention of the eighteenth century. It was the immediate response
of conformists, absolutists, and imperialists to civil war in an environment
of global religious diversity. Among the many religious and authoritarian
strands of Enlightenment in early modern Europe, it was perhaps the first
to emerge.112

110 Rose, Godly kingship; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 132–65.

111 See also Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken; Champion, ‘“Religion’s safe, with priestcraft is the
war”’.
112 For discussions of Christian and authoritarian Enlightenment outside England not cited elsewhere
here, see, for example, Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment; Lehner, Enlightened
monks; Bradley and Van Kley (eds), Religion and politics in Enlightenment Europe; Scott (ed),
Enlightened absolutism; Paquette, Enlightenment, governance, and reform; Beales, Enlightenment
and reform; Blanning, Reform and revolution in Mainz.
part iii

Religion
 c h a p ter 5

The propagation of the faith

When Anglicans reached into the past to distinguish their cult from the
fabrications of impostors and enthusiasts and to expose its roots in the
ancient pieties of nature and civilization, they hoped to convince the world
that theirs was a religion of reason. In fact, most of their ‘rational’ argu-
ments for the truth of Christianity are better described as historical or
rhetorical ones. They were built upon the evaluation and use of testimony,
and the inductive scrutiny of what that testimony implied.1 ‘All that I
desire’, pleaded the church’s great spokesman for rational religion, Edward
Stillingfleet, in 1677, ‘is that you will give an assent of the same nature to the
history of the gospel, that you do to Caesar, or Livy, or Tacitus, or any other
ancient historian’.2 It was with this attitude to fides that leading divines
sought to propagate their faith. Their church had no ‘rational’ wing. The
thinking and writing that rendered Anglicanism ‘rational’ were common-
place among its apologists, and unconfined to rare pursuits like philosophy
and science. To say that the Church of England was ‘reasonable’ was simply
to express its famous claim to be ‘moderate’ in the idiom of method.3
By the time the church was re-established in 1660, its theology had
become a disciplinary muddle, a space where the efforts of antiquari-
ans, historians, philologists, orientalists, philosophers, scientists, scholas-
tics, and travel writers were somehow pieced together to form correct
notions of the way God was to be conceived and worshipped. For all its
eclecticism, though, this enterprise was overwhelmingly historical. While

1 See above, 73–106. See also Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae; Stillingfleet, Rational account; Glanvill, Essays.
Ample evidence for this point can also be found in existing secondary works, which nevertheless
tend to group and describe these ‘rational’ procedures under anachronistic or inaccurate headings
that include philosophy, science, ‘theory’, and ‘operations of the mind’. See, for example, Spurr,
‘“Rational religion”’; Carroll, Common-sense philosophy; Griffin, Latitudinarianism; Reedy, Bible and
reason.
2 Stillingfleet, Letter to a Deist, 27.
3 Contrast Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, which tends to take such claims at face value and associate
them with tolerance.

149
150 Religion
men like Addison looked to the entirety of world history to defend their
faith, others continued the church’s efforts to transform two old bulwarks
of confessional identity – biblical scholarship and patristics – into thor-
oughly historical enterprises. The publication of the Polyglot Bible in 1657
settled the church in its conviction that scripture could not authenticate
itself. Only diligent research on the ancient world could do the work.4
Alongside their orientalist labours, learned clergy undertook an intense,
critical evaluation of the historical testimony of the Fathers of the pre-
Nicene period. They took the practices and beliefs of the early Christians
to be rich sources of theological and ecclesiastical wisdom.5 The past was
where they innovated.
History, though, was not simply a tool of legitimation; it was also a source
of introspection. On both fronts, no topic of history was more important
than the English Revolution itself. This was true for both the Church of
England and its fiercest enemies. Reflection on the meaning of mid century
was the bedrock of political engagement in the era that followed it. When
England’s elites looked back to the triumphs and horrors of their recent
past, most of them developed a set of concerns about religious trickery and
enthusiasm, and a desire to redress those concerns. They differed only over
who ought to be identified as the latter-day perpetuators of old problems,
and over what remedies seemed best. This was the case within and without
the church. Memories of the Revolution helped its leaders understand
what Anglican Christianity should look like and how the gospel ought
to be promulgated in unprecedented circumstances. Their memories gave
them strong convictions about how the media of the pastorate – preaching,
catechesis, and public disputation – might help them reinvent and defend
the church. The same memories also taught them how to understand and
express the mediation of the visible church and its clergy between God and

4 Miller, ‘“Antiquarianization” of biblical scholarship’. For the broader context of these develop-
ments, see Shuger, Renaissance Bible; Laplanche, L’écriture, le sacré et l’histoire; Laplanche, Bible en
France.
5 Quantin, Church of England and Christian antiquity. In all areas of theological inquiry, there seems to
have been some correlation between methods and ideology. Puritans as different in their perspectives
as John Owen and Richard Baxter largely resisted the commitment to philology and antiquarianism
in Anglican biblical scholarship, exhibited extreme scepticism towards patristic evidence, and retained
a more scholastic approach to divinity. This at least distanced them from the form of Enlightenment
under discussion here. See Miller, ‘“Antiquarianization” of biblical scholarship’; Quantin, Church
of England and Christian antiquity, 252–67, 314; Wallace, Shapers of English Calvinism, esp. 14–16.
But see also the intriguing comments on the possibility of Baxterian Enlightenment in Goldie,
Roger Morrice, 268. To an extent this distinction seems to have also applied to latent divisions
between Calvinist and Arminian conformists. See Hampton, Anti-Arminians; Muller, After Calvin,
25–46.
 The propagation of the faith 151
his people. What these memories could not do, however, was bring them
all to agree on the way forward.6

An English Revolution
To see the Civil Wars and Interregnum as Addison saw them is to witness
how meditations on discord, bloodshed, and chaos prompted plans for the
future and a ready-made defence of those plans. The subject, to be sure,
was sensitive enough that most detailed accounts written at the time did
not reach the public until England’s second revolution had run its course.
Commentaries that did make it into print – from John Milton’s History
of Britain to Joseph Glanvill’s continuation of Bacon’s New Atlantis –
were usually hidden behind historical parallels and thereby graced with
plausible deniability.7 Addison’s writings on Muhammad and Morocco, for
instance, were more than ruminations on the timeless rhythms of revolution
and imposture. Prefiguring Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Addison used
orientalism as a vehicle for addressing dysfunction at home. By describing
Islamic politics in the languages of anti-popery and anti-puritanism, he
certainly meant to ease his readers’ travels into uncharted territory. But
he was also inviting them to journey back in the opposite direction, from
Arabia to England, and from Islam to Christianity.8 With a little sustained
attention they could find a history of the English Revolution embedded in
stories about the Prophet and his successors in the Maghrib.
That history, to be sure, began and ended with puritan popularity. West
Barbary opened with an image of men who sought favour at court and
among the people by parading piety and sanctity and seeming stern and
full of legalistic zeal. Yet a Machiavellian like Addison knew that guile
and ambition could not decisively rock the ship of state alone. Like the
rise of the Saʿdı̄ dynasty, the puritan revolution ‘must needs have proved
a very hypochondriacal design, had it not been assisted with a favourable
conjuncture of affairs’. Both early sixteenth-century Morocco and early

6 While the present study builds upon Spurr, Restoration Church of England, and explores common
ground among later Stuart Anglicans, it does not recognize, as Spurr does, a single ‘theological
definition and spiritual raison d’être’ or ‘central theological identity’ for the church (xiii). Nor does
it accept that ‘on public matters, the church spoke with one voice’ (xv) or that Anglican theology
was ‘commonsensical, non-controversial’, ‘a “middle way”’, or ‘primitive’ (283–4, 304).
7 This followed a long literary tradition in England and Europe that was particularly prominent in the
theatre. See, for example, Patterson, Censorship and interpretation; Bulman, ‘Publicity and popery
on the Restoration stage’.
8 For Addison’s explicit identification of Muhammad with Cromwell and Moroccan Islam with
puritanism, see above, 121–8.
152 Religion
Stuart England were plagued by internal divisions, fiscal pressures, and
foreign threats. The Moroccans ‘had a long time weakened themselves with
civil discords; and the Portugals taking that advantageous occasion, had far
advanced their arms’. The puritans’ cry for war against Spanish popery was
a copy of the Saʿdı̄s’ call for jihād against the Portuguese. It enabled them
to curry popular and royal esteem and position themselves for outright
revolt. ‘Puffed up with their successes, they forgot their obedience’, and
began to chafe at the king’s attempts at fiscal extraction. In both Morocco
and England, civil war ensued and the revolutionaries triumphed.9
To Addison’s mind, though, even the convergence of feigned godliness
and happy contingency could not make for a successful rebellion. It was
true of the puritans that ‘through popularity, many became studious of
innovation’, and the godly were certainly guilty of ‘forgetting that it is
safer to permit some inconveniences in the outer buildings, than to pull
the whole structure down, there being corruptions which may safelier be
continued than removed’.10 But corruptions there were. Addison’s history
of the rebellion was a tale of hubris and failure on all sides. Even a latter-day
advocate of the Laudian liturgical style could appreciate the role that the
bishops and their allies had played in exacerbating political conflict under
Charles I. Like Islam, puritanism was only able to triumph because God’s
church had paved the way for its enemies.
‘If we look into the condition of Christianity both before and at the
time of the breaking forth of Mahumedism’, Addison explained, ‘we shall
discern it miserably shaken and convulsed’. The ‘outward communion of
Christians’ had been ‘vilely confused and rent by the contesting prelates
of those days, who minded their own pride and preeminence more than
the peace and establishment of the Christian religion’.11 Addison’s readers
would have immediately identified this state of affairs with two moments:
the circumstances under which Addison was writing in 1678, and the
polemical and legal excesses of Laud and his minions in the 1630s. With
their love of ‘primacy and prelation’ and their taste for public controversy,
Addison suggested, the Laudian divines (along with their opponents on
the bench) had enabled the rebellion. On all fronts, ‘litigious disputations’
were ‘hotly pursued under the pretext of holiness, and a more perfect
knowledge of God, to the bitter disturbance of the church’. The greatest

9 WB, 1–6, quotations on 2, 5. 10 Ibid., 5, 7. See also PI, 185.

11 FSM, 126. For other versions of this Machiavellian narrative in early Enlightenment histories of
Islam written by Henry Stubbe and Henri de Boulainvilliers, see Champion, Pillars of priestcraft
shaken, 122–3.
 The propagation of the faith 153
error of the early Stuart church, Addison suggested, was that its leaders
‘made matter of controversy’ things ‘which before were never questioned’.12
Addison then went even further. Quoting from the ancient historian
Ammianus Marcellinus and shrouding his historical parallel in Latin, he
suggested that Charles I himself was partly to blame. In the fourth century,
he recalled, the emperor Constantius II had encouraged divines to explore
complex, superfluous theological problems, and worse, he had permitted
public disputations on these problems between the bishops and those who
aspired to their positions, allowing theological inquiry to become a tool
of ambition.13 In the long run this made Arabia ripe for Islam, just as
royally endorsed public theology had made England ripe for puritanism.
Addison’s Civil War was caused by what the freethinkers called priestcraft,
but priestcraft was not simply the work of the clergy, and it need not take
the form of divine right claims to clerical power. In the reign of Charles
I, though, it was most destructive once it took the form of a barbarous
engagement in public politics by prelates who were unable to distinguish
between doctrine that saved and doctrine that confused. In the end, both
priest and prince had drawn the laity into sedition by example.14
It was left to the earl of Essex and Oliver Cromwell to exploit these
opportunities. Like Karı̄m al-H . ājjı̄ in West Barbary, Essex had been a
trusted advisor to the king. But once the time was right, this master of
popularity absconded from court, deserted his sovereign, raised an army
against him, and had the nerve to interpret his victories in the field as divine
endorsements of his rebellion.15 Muhammad’s ‘conventicle in Mecca’, on
the other hand, brought to mind Cromwell and the Independents. Like his
predecessor in Arabia, Cromwell curried support by encouraging a religion
that could accommodate the most libidinous forms of antinomianism and
the most reckless interpretations of holy texts. Like the Qurʾan, puritan
exegesis was tailor-made for a sect master turned revolutionary.16 Cromwell
also imitated Muhammad by promoting religious toleration when his ene-
mies were strong, and then crushing them when he was able.17 Yet it was
armed force that ultimately ensured the triumph of the Independents, since
like Muhammad’s conquests, the New Model Army’s slaughter became ‘the
chief method of proselytizing’. In this world of perverted providentialism,
martial domination became the central argument for the divine calling of
the revolutionaries.18
12 FSM, 129. 13 Ibid., 126–7; Marcellinus, Historia, 245 (21.14), 407 (27.2).
14 FSM, 128–9. Addison also drew on Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, II, 159. 15 WB, 17–21.
16 FSM, 27–30, 38–9, 58, 189, quotation on 58. See also 40–42, 119. 17 Ibid., 91, 102, 115.
18 Ibid., 68–72, 76, 135, quotation on 76. See also WB, 43.
154 Religion
The explosion of heterodoxy that resulted from Cromwell’s victory was
only exacerbated by the educational disaster that followed under the aegis
of the young godly republic. In his treatise on catechizing, Addison argued
that while instruction had certainly been inadequate during the reign of
Charles I, it collapsed entirely in the 1640s. Until the restoration of the
monarchy and the established church, the people were either ‘destitute of
all catechizing’ or worse, ‘catechized only in such principles, as were good
for nothing but to establish the elder in a cursed schism and rebellion, and
to infect the younger with the same contagion’. As catechizing continued
to be ‘shouldered out by sermoning’ under the Republic, and preachers
claimed that hearing their words alone could ensure salvation, the church
became ‘but a visionary church, or a house upon the sand’. Ignorant men
and women, surrounded by sectarian preachers, were inevitably ‘shaken and
blown down with every wind of corrupt doctrine, vented by men crafty
to contrive deceit’. Taught by those ‘whom a mere conceit of knowledge
had tempted to assume and usurp the function of teachers’, the people
were ‘possessed with strange whimsies in religion, and hurried on by the
spirit of schism and sedition into all manner of villainies’.19 The puritans
may have had the aid of their enemies in starting the English Revolution,
but in its course, their vision of the Christian community proved its own
depravity: it resulted in the damnation of many and the near demise of
English civilization.

Imprinted on the mind

The sad fate of religious instruction during the Civil Wars and Interregnum
may have shaped the pastoral mission of the Restoration church more than
any other single revolutionary legacy. Its leaders knew that since antiquity
catechesis had sustained the church, won it proselytes, and in the age of
Martin Luther, restored it to purity.20 Addison believed that the practice
was coeval with religion itself. This helps explain why he and many others
thought of catechizing less as a vehicle of truth than as a technology
of power: it could bolster any faith or regime, whatever its veracity or
legitimacy. Addison had witnessed this in North Africa, where Jews and
Muslims could be found ‘imprinting religion upon the tender minds of
their children’ with such rigor and regularity that most teenagers there

19 PI, 36, 51, 59–62, 74–5, 110, 146–51, 219 (this last mispaginated), quotations on 60, 62, 74–5, 219.
See also Tillotson, Six sermons, 161–2; Ellis, Catechism, ‘To my parishioners’.
20 PI, ‘To the reader’, 14–54; Tillotson, Six sermons, 162.
 The propagation of the faith 155
had been rendered impervious to the gospel.21 He was also willing to
admit that catechesis explained the successes of the Counter-Reformation
in Europe and the gains made by Jesuit evangelists all over the world.22
Like the Society of Jesus, the Church of England quickly abandoned the
idea that elite disputation could best spread Christianity, and they began
to disseminate translated catechetical texts among ordinary people, aping
practices pioneered over a century ago among Tamil pearl fishermen by
Francis Xavier himself.23 Just as Catholics had successfully used catechizing
to vanquish infidels and heretics, Anglicans would employ it to confront
their rivals at home and abroad.
In the 1670s, each Sunday afternoon, when Addison came before the
young and ignorant of his parish in Milston’s church of St Mary for
quiet dialogues on the essential, saving truths of Christianity, there was
hardly a limit to what was at stake.24 After the English Revolution, basic
religious instruction was a central plank in the church’s mission against
Catholics, puritans, and sectarians. The utility of catechizing was equally
central to the church’s claim that it could be trusted to lead England
back to piety, civilization, and civil peace.25 Addison and his allies argued
that the coercive and educational forces of church and state were capable
of working in harmony to mould subjects who were both incapable of
sedition and assured of salvation.26 Because catechizing taught essential
moral principles and religious duties, it was a centrepiece of civil and
natural religion, part of a larger mechanism by which the church fostered
both truth and virtue in English society.27 It complemented the liturgy,
doctrinal articles, homilies, rubrics, and canons. ‘There is nothing wanting,
on the church’s part’, Addison concluded in 1674, ‘that may keep our
actions virtuous, and sentiments orthodox’.28 By insisting that religious
institutions were essential to the formation of good subjects, Addison subtly
bridged the ecclesiastical and civil spheres. His clericalism was devoid of
21 WB, ‘Preface’, 141–2; PI, ‘To the reader’; PSJ, 81–2; Bird, Catechism, sig. a2v.; above, 117–21.
22 PI, ‘To the reader’, 164–5, 168; PSJ, 226. Contrast similar remarks in Green, Christian’s ABC, 13.
23 O’Malley, First Jesuits, 71, 76, 188–92; Brockey, Journey to the East, 287–327. See above, 61–70.
24 Addison was also known in Tangier as an effective catechizer in church and in private. See TNA CO
279/12, ‘To the most reverend Father in God Gilbert Lord Archbishop of Canterbury his Grace’
(unfoliated).
25 See, for example, Sherlock, Principles of holy Christian religion, ‘The preface’; Cave, Primitive
Christianity, 299–352. Addison argued that what he took to be the relative political stability of the
Spanish monarchy was the best proof of the effects of diligent catechizing. See PI, 160. For the likely
source of this argument and some of Addison’s general views on education, see Saavedra Fajardo,
Royal politician, I, 5; II, 86, 121.
26 See, for example, Tillotson, Six sermons, 182–3; WB, ‘Preface’.
27 This is a view often attributed exclusively to ‘latitudinarians’: see Tillotson, Six sermons, 114, 119.
28 PI, 3–4. See also ibid., 1–2; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 279–330.
156 Religion
aggressive ecclesiology; instead it supported the typical Anglican vision of
a partnership between church and state.
Catechizing could easily be considered an arm of civil policy because
it was more a species of education than it was a Christian practice.29 The
word ‘catechism’, Addison explained, ‘signifies a familiar and easy method
of instilling the rudiments of any art, science or faculty’. It ‘is often to be
met with in secular authors’, he continued, ‘from whom it was adopted
into religion, and there retains the same notion and office’. It was ‘but
Greek for a peculiar manner of instruction’, and was ‘derived from a word
importing the reciprocation of the voice, after the manner of an echo’. This
transfer of a mode of instruction from the secular to the religious sphere
was entirely appropriate, Addison insisted, since religious knowledge was
equivalent to any other form of knowledge, ‘the ear being as properly the
door of religion, as of any other science’. Catechizing relied on the same
cognitive operations as other forms of learning. ‘In religion it is as requisite
as in humane arts, that the first lessons be framed according to the weak
and slender capacities of youngest beginners’. The church, in this sense,
was merely ‘God’s school’.30
The graduates of God’s school retained lessons that were both godly
and worldly, because catechizing wedded piety to morality. The catechism
confirmed that ‘the main design of our inspired Christianity is the entire
reformation of our lives, and to make us as good as our profession’.31 The
call for moral reformation in later Stuart England was neither the preserve
of puritans and ‘latitudinarians’ nor a product of the 1680s and 1690s.32 It
was an eclectic response to the bloodletting and chaos of mid century, which
was itself thought to be a providential judgment for the country’s sins.33
Catechizing was a manual for both national atonement and political loyalty,
a guide to the ethics and obedience that would ensure both individual and

29 Tillotson, Six sermons, passim. 30 PI, 10–14, 57–8, quotations on 10–14, 58.
31 Ibid., 70.
32 See below, 253–60; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 238–49, 284, 295; Spurr, ‘“Virtue, religion,
and government”’; Duffy, ‘Primitive Christianity revived’; Spurr, ‘The Church, the societies, and
the moral revolution of 1688’, 127–42; Barry, ‘Bristol as a “Reformation City”’. Sirota, Christian
monitors, emphasizes the importance of the later 1680s and 1690s as a turning point.
33 In Tangier Addison led an effort to bring the ‘manners’ of the soldiers in the garrison ‘to a
most comfortable reformation’ by focusing on ethics in sermons, avoiding doctrinal disputes, and
encouraging full attendance at rubrical Anglican services. He also pursued a series of charitable
activities, serving as a commissioner for the colony’s hospital and raising an endowment for the
education of orphans. See TNA CO 279/6, f. 122r.; CO 279/12, ‘To the most reverend Father
in God Gilbert Lord Archbishop of Canterbury his Grace’ (unfoliated); BL MS Sloane 3496,
ff. 62v., 65v., passim; MS Sloane 3510, f. 4r.; MS Sloane 3509, f. 144r. See also Luke, Tangier at high
tide, 33.
 The propagation of the faith 157
national salvation in the restored monarchy. The Decalogue, in this sense,
was the ultimate guide to the life of a virtuous subject.
The moral and political functions of catechizing made it the non-
coercive, irenic counterpart to England’s civil and church courts.34 It taught
the way to civil peace by urging silence on indifferent religious issues and
the civil management of differences.35 In the end, it was perhaps the only
reliable means of moulding men’s consciences.36 This was the ultimate
source of its civil utility. ‘Obedience’, Addison wrote, ‘is the crown and
pillar, the glory and strength of all government’, but it ‘can never be firm
and durable, if it be not founded in conscience’. Therefore conscience, he
concluded – with a frowning reference to the rhetoric of religious dissent
under Charles II – must be ‘regulated and instructed, that it may be no
less serviceable to peace and union, than it has been the pretence to carry
on dissension and schism’. For ‘a right conscience will as powerfully oblige
to peace, as an erroneous instigate to sedition’. Catechizing was the basic
medium of political stability, because ‘if men were once fully catechized in
the duties of the Second Table, they would no longer be able to resist the
ecclesiastic or secular power under the banner of conscience’.37 Here there
was no hint of the idea, usually thought to typify the conformist stance,
that punishment was the primary trigger for the edification of the recalci-
trant.38 If dissenters ignored the information conveyed by catechesis, they
were of course to be ‘devoted to the civil power’, as lawbreakers. But civil
coercion was a last resort: while it could not mould the conscience, even
indirectly, it did enforce a base form of obedience. It would, according to
Addison, ‘make that be done for wrath, which would not for conscience’.39

34 Ellis, Catechism, 66–8.

35 Barrow, Love of God, 239–69; Scott, Christian life, which recommends (‘The preface’, 385) for
further reading Allestree, Whole duty of man; Taylor, Holy living; Patrick, Mensa mystica; Patrick,
Christian sacrifice. For the origins of this irenicism in early Stuart Laudianism, see Davies, Caroline
captivity of the church; Sharpe, Personal rule of Charles I. Both accounts, however, tend to take these
professions at face value. On this, see Como, ‘Predestination and political conflict’.
36 For the broader importance of this theme in the early modern period, see Green, Christian’s ABC,
41–3.
37 PI, 162–3 (quotations), 172–3.
38 Contrast Goldie, ‘Theory of religious intolerance’. Goldie makes clear that what he calls the
‘theological’ case for ‘intolerance’ was only one of three or more strands of Restoration argument
in defence of religious coercion, but his measured intervention tends to be cited and used in ways
that ignore its precision.
39 PI, 100–103, 162–3, quotation on 102. These views were common among Anglicans who have been
described as both ‘latitudinarian’ and ‘high church’: see, for example, Spurr, Restoration Church
of England, 47; Lloyd, Seasonable discourse, 4; L’Estrange, Toleration discuss’d, 32–3. This view
circumvented questions often in dispute between conformists and nonconformists: whether liberty
of conscience referred only to the faculty of conscience itself (unknowable and untouchable by the
158 Religion
Remedial education, not penal rigor, pointed the way to the salvation
of the masses and the state in the wake of civil strife. Diligent catechesis
would remove the impetus to ‘fanaticism’ among the people and secure
‘their conversations and judgments from ungodliness and error, which
yields a fair probability of closing the present breaches, and preventing
future’. On the secular front, Addison continued, ‘the younger sort, who
are the hopes of a nation’ would ‘be duly educated in those principles, on
whose practice the safety and happiness of a state depends’. They would
‘grow up in a due conformity and obedience to the laws in being’, and this
would free the state ‘from the danger of being so easily obvious to alteration
and change’. This was ‘a point of incomparable force and moment for the
well-ordering and government of all kind of societies’. Because it was the
only sure way to control men’s minds, catechizing young people and their
ignorant elders was the linchpin of Anglican Enlightenment. Imprinting
them with holy and civilized principles would not simply mitigate the
effects of rebellion. It would reverse them.40
In Addison’s view, catechizing could only guarantee civil peace if it
taught the same things throughout the realm. A single catechism – the one
found in the Book of Common Prayer – had to be used by everyone.41 This
would prevent pastors from sharing their personal and partisan opinions
with the vulnerable, and thereby causing division instead of sowing the
seeds of unity. Both Rome and Geneva, Addison noted, saw it fit to
standardize the content of the catechism and regulate what portion was
taught each Sunday. The very etymology of the term ‘catechist’ implied
that the clergy were ‘not to sound their own words, but to echo and repeat
what the church has spoken’. Variant catechizing within the church was a
serious concern: it was thought to promote ‘fanaticism’ and a penchant for
superfluous, haughty theological rambling among conforming ministers.
Only the exclusive use of the prayer book text could make public religious
authority a reality, and thereby ensure spiritual and political unity.42
While the brevity of the church catechism was the usual target of its crit-
ics, conformists considered this feature essential to its unifying function.43
According to Addison, the church catechism taught the bare minimum

sovereign) or its exercise, and, if the latter were true, whether the free exercise of conscience should
be granted to adherents of any religion or sect.
40 PI, 46, 55, 158–60, 168–9, 173, quotations on 158–60, 169. On the church’s new emphasis on
catechizing people of all ages, see Green, Christian’s ABC, 75.
41 On this position during the reign of Charles I, see Davies, Caroline captivity of the church, 145–6.
42 PI, 164–7, 175–83, quotation on 166. See also, for example, Sherlock, Practical Christian, ‘To the
parishioners of Winwick’.
43 Green, Christian’s ABC, 71.
 The propagation of the faith 159
necessary for salvation and treated complex, divisive theological issues in a
‘short and orthodox’ manner that was appropriate to the capacities of the
catechumen. It left Christians prepared for more advanced forms of faith
while clarifying what was most important. ‘Catechizing’, he explained, ‘is
not only necessary upon the account of a regular entrance and increase
of knowledge in religion, but also to give us a clear intuition of those
particular truths whereof we cannot be ignorant, but with the peril of our
eternal happiness’.44 The Apostles’ Creed provided the essential beliefs,
the Decalogue the essential duties. The Lord’s Prayer enabled men and
women to ask for the grace that would enable them to fulfil their moral
obligations, and knowledge of the sacraments made it possible for them
to confirm their membership in the church and confer saving grace upon
themselves.45
While catechisms were usually designed to avoid explicitly controversial
statements, this did not prevent these implements of pastoral power from
serving as vehicles of conflict. The catechism was a largely unregulated
genre, rarely subject to effective publication restraints, and yet it stood at
the centre of grass-roots religious competition. Catechisms were probably
second only to bibles as the most important religious texts in daily life.
Catechizing had been generally neglected in the 1640s and 1650s, but it
had also been used as a weapon of the weak and a tool of control. During
the Interregnum, Anglican catechisms appeared regularly, while late in the
1650s Cromwell barely prevented presbyterians from making their own
catechism compulsory.46 Catechizing had become so familiar as a political
tool that the Civil War period witnessed the emergence of explicitly political
‘catechisms’. These included the parliamentarian Souldiers catechisme and
the royalist Souldiers catechism composed for the kings armie, as well as
the satirical Cavaliers catechisme and Round-heads catechisme of 1643. These
subgenres continued to be popular for the rest of the seventeenth century.47
Under Charles II, the Church of England contended with a wide vari-
ety of sectarian and dissenting catechisms, including both Catholic and
Socinian versions.48 Its major rival was the presbyterians’ Westminster
44 PI, 63–4. For similar expressions, see Sherlock, Practical Christian, ‘To the parishioners of Winwick’.
For the location of this gradual method in the primitive church, see Cave, Primitive Christianity,
210–11.
45 PI, 178–83; Patrick, Brief exposition.
46 Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 27; Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’,
226.
47 Green, Christian’s ABC, 86–7.
48 Addison devoted more space in PI to the problem of English converts to Catholicism than to
Protestant nonconformity, and argued that the prayer book catechism ‘doth obviate and oppose all
the main errors of popery, as they relate either to faith, or practice; to prayer, or doctrine’ (80).
160 Religion
Shorter Catechism. Supplements to the church catechism were also pub-
lished in great numbers after the Restoration, and they were a source
of tension among the clerical leadership.49 Edward Fowler, for instance,
complained that unofficial catechisms were among the primary weapons
of the church’s enemies. They ‘have become’, he wrote, ‘greater propa-
gators of some uncertain speculations, and even dangerous errors, than
furtherances of useful and necessary knowledge; and possessed the learners
of them both with a wrong notion of Christianity in general, and such
particular opinions as tend to enervate and make insignificant the whole-
some doctrine taught by them’.50 The very fact that catechisms seemed
to be anodyne and often official only meant that authors could use this
medium with great effect to normalize their own particular version of
Christianity.51
Even Addison’s minimalism on the appropriate level of doctrinal content
in catechisms was a veiled jab at the supposedly reckless scripturalism of
puritans and sectarians. He seems to have believed that free access and
diligent attention to scripture could never leave ordinary people assured
of their salvation, and might even endanger it. ‘The Scripture itself is so
spacious a field’, Addison claimed, ‘that even a wary traveller may therein
lose himself ’. It was nearly impossible for the unlearned to identify saving
essentials in the holy text: ‘the things necessary to be known by us in order
to our future welfare’, he wrote, ‘are in sacred writ so often mingled with
things that are otherwise, that it exceeds the generality of capacities to find
them out’.52 Prudent Christians should at the very least begin with the
catechism before they turned to the far more complex, perilous work on
which it was based.53 His position implied that direct access to the Word
was unnecessary for the salvation of the masses.54
It was nevertheless unclear how the church should confront the problem
of unofficial catechisms. Fowler, for instance, might have been led by his
fears about unofficial catechisms to support the church leadership’s efforts

49 Ibid., 86–90. 50 Worthington, ῾ΥΠΟΤ´ΥΠΩΣΙΣ ῾ΥΓΙΑΙΝ´ΟΝΤΩΝ Λ´ΟΓΩΝ, sigs. a4v.–a5r.

51 Contrast Green, Christian’s ABC, esp. 39–41. See also Achinstein, Milton, 114–15; and for a detailed
example, below, 253–60.
52 PI, 63–4, quotations on 64.
53 This reserved scripturalism was an extension of arguments offered originally in embryonic form by
Richard Hooker: see Lake, Anglicans and puritans?, 152–4.
54 Presbyterians, in turn, published catechisms that quoted extensively from scripture, refuted the
claim that Presbyterians disregarded catechizing for sermonizing, and alleged that conformist
catechisms twisted the meaning of scripture under the cover of simplicity. See Baxter, Judgment
of non-conformists, 106; Baxter, Infants church-membership, 397; Wadsworth, Last warning, ‘To the
reader’; Vincent, Explicatory catechism, ‘To the Christian reader’.
 The propagation of the faith 161
to secure secular legislation that would enforce attendance at parish cate-
chizing sessions.55 Yet he argued in public that the church should itself resort
to an unofficial catechism in order to supplant others, and in particular,
to rebut the dissenters’ claim that the prayer book catechism was an abuse
of scripture. In 1672 he recommended John Worthington’s ‘scripture cate-
chism’ – which was originally meant to supplement the church catechism –
for use by dissenters in place of the Westminster catechism. Here Fowler,
a divine who came from a presbyterian background, made concessions
to puritan scripturalism and argued that if dissenters used Worthington’s
text, they would at least never be led astray by still less reliable catechisms
and puritanical preaching.56 While after the Glorious Revolution Addison
himself would publish a sort of unofficial catechism, under Restoration-era
conditions this tactic would have made him nervous. Fowler and others
were also willing to stress the role of families in catechizing to an extent
that Addison would have avoided. They explicitly argued that the church’s
efforts at reading the scriptures and explaining doctrine would be inef-
fectual if catechizing was not also done at home.57 In the view of others,
domestic catechists might end up wresting the regulation of religious truth
away from the church and threatening civil order.
For the most part, though, Addison’s views on catechizing, its utility,
and its ultimate purposes were widespread in the Restoration church.58 His
doctrinal irenicism, his ethical emphasis, and his concern for the church
as an arm of the state would seem to identify him as a ‘latitudinarian’.
Yet his attitudes to Christian piety often took on strongly Laudian hues.
The dichotomous categories usually employed to understand differences
within the church and to describe individual churchmen are inadequate
and misleading. It was not in their positions on abstract ‘issues’ like epis-
copacy, ecclesiology, the sacraments, or formal theology that members of
the Church of England differed in the most significant ways. They differed
over priorities and practicalities, and over the subtle ways in which they
made connections between the many spheres of pastoral and ecclesiastical
life. They were united in their general views on the legacy of the English

55 Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 195, 288. Even without penal laws in place, catechizing was
supported by a coercive apparatus in canon law. See PI, ‘Preface’, 221; Bray, Anglican canons, 348–9.
On the church courts’ enforcement of catechizing and other forms of religious observance, see
Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 210–19.
56 Worthington, ῾ΥΠΟΤ´ΥΠΩΣΙΣ ῾ΥΓΙΑΙΝ´ΟΝΤΩΝ Λ´ΟΓΩΝ, sig. a3v.; Green, Christian’s ABC, 748.
See also Bird, Catechism, esp. sigs. a2r.–a3v.
57 See also Tillotson, Six sermons, 162–3.
58 For detailed and widely read statements of positions similar to Addison’s, see Comber, Church-
catechism; Ken, Exposition on the church-catechism. See also Green, Christian’s ABC, 406–97.
162 Religion
Revolution, but they could not always agree on the precise remedies that
legacy demanded.

Restraining dispute
While Restoration divines believed that a simple, peaceable means of ensur-
ing orthodoxy and order was the most appropriate response to the disasters
of the English Civil Wars and Revolution, their activism was hardly con-
fined to chats with children on Sunday afternoons. In fact, despite their
claims to the contrary, some of their other tactics looked eerily like the
ones that had just led to the same sort of calamity they were now being
used to prevent. Even Addison’s tract on the importance of catechizing,
The primitive institution, was an argumentative appeal to the public. He
and other future Tories were under no illusion that the suppression of
public speech on sensitive issues was a realistic or sufficient solution to the
problems of post-bellum public politics. There was no more of a battle for
and against free expression on this front than there was on the religious
one.59 The leaders of the church were nonetheless deeply concerned about
the deleterious consequences of strident and superfluous public dispute.
Their challenge, which had been evident to them since the days of war
and revolution, was to somehow promote civility in public discourse while
never yielding in their defence of the truth.
Even the church’s most notoriously fierce polemicist, Samuel Parker,
appreciated this problem. While he was willing to admit that his aggressive
and often obscene approach to public speech distinguished him from
many of his fellow divines, he still shared their misgivings. In November
1680, when he was about to publish a divine right manifesto, The case
of the Church of England, he wrote to the most learned lay defender of
the church, Henry Dodwell, for advice. The printed leaves of the book,
Parker said, would be ready next week, and he had ordered his bookseller
to deliver them to Dodwell and to William Lloyd, bishop of St Asaph,
another erudite and experienced polemicist. ‘Before I give leave for their
publication’, Parker wrote, ‘I would beg your advice, for some wise friends
think it not so prudent to publish anything upon such an argument, in this
hurry of things’. The fear of these ‘wise friends’, Parker explained, was that
‘the mere attempt, without considering the reason or honesty of the design,
may at least be an occasion of drawing me into needless and impertinent
trouble’.
59 See Bulman, ‘Publicity and popery on the Restoration stage’ and sources cited therein.
 The propagation of the faith 163
Parker seems to have thought that his book’s refutation of the ‘notion of
no ius divinum’ espoused in Edward Stillingfleet’s pre-Restoration work,
Irenicum, was polite, but perhaps ill-timed. ‘I have managed the controversy
civilly enough’, he claimed. Yet attacking Stillingfleet at this moment still
seemed imprudent, ‘because the presbyterian hounds are upon him’.60 Had
Parker been aware of the situation before writing the book, he complained,
he would have taken Stillingfleet to task ‘with more compliment’. Parker
realized that a norm of politeness was thought to govern prudent public
engagement. He also knew that even sweetly worded interventions should
be timed with due attention to their immediate polemical context. At this
moment Stillingfleet was the church’s leading public spokesman against
nonconformity. It was surely an inopportune time for a fellow conformist
to join dissenters in censuring him for views he had expressed in completely
different political circumstances. Parker was attempting to juggle a triad of
goals: stability, truth, and triumph.
In reply Dodwell pleaded with Parker to hold back. He reiterated the
author’s own concerns, but remained unsure of what Parker would think
the practical import of those concerns were. He at last decided to ask the
archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, to forbid Parker to publish,
and here Dodwell prevailed. To his relief, Parker complied. ‘I humbly
thank you for the stop you have given for a while to your book’, Dodwell
wrote to Parker in December, ‘which I believe will be very useful when
men are so disposed to read it as to be willing to receive conviction. I am
confident you cannot repent it. The danger of silence is not so great to the
public now as of a little unadvised freedom’. Dodwell was convinced that
prudent self-restraint was the key to managing public discourse. He knew
that silence and freedom were tactics, not principles.
Yet to Dodwell’s dismay, Parker had another project afoot: his Demon-
stration of the divine authority of the law of nature. ‘I could wish’, he asked
Dodwell later that month, ‘you and some other learned friends had the
perusal of it’. Dodwell was again happy to comply, but this time he offered a
lengthy admonition that recalled Parker’s divisive publication record. ‘I beg
one favor more from you, that you would be pleased to forbear all sharpness
and contempt, though deserved, of adversaries’, he implored. ‘Truth itself
of that kind has no authority as coming from an adversary’. Indeed, he
continued, ‘such truths are not only not beneficial; they do mischief also’,
for ‘they prejudge your readers against the strongest reasons you can bring
for your principal cause’. This meant ‘that they will not receive from you,

60 Parker referred here to Stillingfleet’s disputes with Richard Baxter.

164 Religion
which they would from others’. Parker, Dodwell observed, would do well
to recall ‘what a great part of their design the ancient orators made their
captatio benevolentiae’,61 for one ‘could never hope for success on them
who were not already kindly disposed to their persons’. Dodwell’s remedial
rhetoric lesson included a series of examples besides the Roman orators,
including St Paul. Yet Parker seems to have been undeterred. His attack
on Stillingfleet’s Irenicum appeared, he claimed in April 1681, because ‘the
greedy bookseller exposed [it] to sale not only without my consent, but
against my express order’, and an unrevised version of the Demonstration
also found its way into print. Parker’s excuse this time was that he had
been too ill to amend it. In the end, though, the most telling aspect of
this exchange was that Dodwell’s plea for restraint had been compelling
enough that even Parker, whatever his ultimate convictions, was unable or
unwilling to argue against it.62
Anglican pamphleteers and orators never tired of calling for violent dis-
putation and excessive preaching to be replaced by diligent catechizing
and humble homilies.63 Yet by publicly arguing against public argument
they partly perpetuated the very dilemma about confronting threats to the
church that their interventions were meant to resolve. Could the techniques
of disputation and declamation be modified, or must they be discarded?
If they ought to be discarded, should the church turn to punishment or
to friendly, private persuasion? Addison himself was convinced that dispu-
tation, however carefully it was conducted, would forever be suspect after
the violence of mid century. It was now ‘generally had under a jealous
aspect’ because it was ‘thought subtle and reaching, and intended rather
to celebrate a triumph, than to effect a conversion; and to advance the
disputer, not the truth’. It failed not simply as rhetoric but also as method,
‘it being so apt to mingle and blend with captious sophisms, and false
but specious ways of proving, that men are ready to account it impos-
ture, not conviction, that by such means is effected’. Dodwell would have
concurred.
As Addison had learned to his frustration in North Africa, even the
most brilliant disputant could never prevail upon an opponent who was
solely motivated by self-interest. In this case ‘the cure’, Addison argued,
‘must begin with the affections and not the judgment’. Religious wrangling

61 The securing of goodwill.

62 Bodl MS Cherry 23, 321–5. On the dispute with Stillingfleet, see Spurr, Restoration Church of England,
155–60; Rose, ‘Ecclesiastical polity of Samuel Parker’. Even decisions to engage in ostensibly private
disputes entailed complex dilemmas. See, for example, Bodl MS Rawl.lett.98, ff. 85r.–86r.
63 Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 275, 287–8. See, for example, Scott, Christian life, sigs. a3v.–a4r.
 The propagation of the faith 165
could be not only futile but positively destructive: ‘disputes on this subject’,
Addison wrote, ‘may have the ill luck to make some suspect the truth of all
religion, because it is so much controverted’. Similarly, disputes in England
between conformists and dissenters only promoted the interests of their
mutual enemies, the atheists and the papists. ‘There can come nothing of
our contentions’, Addison warned, ‘but the mutual waste of the parties
contending, till a common enemy dance in the ashes of us both’. Even the
Jews and Muslims Addison met in the Maghrib questioned the truth of
Christianity by pointing to the violent internal disputes about what it was.
If they were to convert, they joked, how could they possibly decide what
sect to join?64
When Addison argued that most disputation featured ‘specious ways
of proving’ and was therefore widely considered a form of imposture, he
was recalling the origins of disputation in university exercises. Was the
rhetorical and dialectical education of his youth inevitably inappropriate
and explosive when applied beyond the schools?65 Formal disputation,
it seemed, could not be successfully or safely transferred to the wider
world, unlike catechesis and other simpler forms of discourse. ‘Disputa-
tion’, Addison explained, ‘must be guided by terms and rules of art, which
when managed with the greatest plainness whereof they are capable, fall
short of that obviousness and familiarity which is natural to catechizing’.
The overwhelming majority of dissenters were ordinary people, ‘unable to
comprehend any profound and learned conclusions’, and ‘ignorant of their
own opinions’ because they had received them from wily preachers. They
were unable to grasp or benefit from the disputes they witnessed. Here
again, for Addison as for Dodwell, St Paul’s simple response to the gnostics
was an exemplar.66 Paul’s weapons, Addison argued, had been catechizing
and ecclesiastical discipline, and the church was meant to follow his lead.
When Addison thought of Paul, of course, he was also thinking back to his
missionary work. Those wishing to ‘convert’ dissenters, he noted, needed
to recognize that their errors were often the result of a perverse indoctri-
nation. ‘If the person has sucked them in with his milk’, he explained,
‘there is education in the case, upon whose account alone not a few stick
close both to truth and falsehood’.67 In these cases, disputation was either
useless or counterproductive.

64 PI, 116–20, 123–5, quotations on 116–17, 120, 124–5; PSJ, 228–30. See also Wiegers, Learned Muslim
acquaintance, 14; Stern, ‘“One body corporate and politick”’, 310–11.
65 See above, 20–23, 31–6. 66 PI, 108–11, quotations on 108–9.
67 Ibid., 113–16, quotation on 113; PSJ, 12, 14–15, 227–8.
166 Religion
Addison also believed that the subject matter of public disputes proved
them to be superfluous, and in a sense, seditious. Here his seemingly ‘lati-
tudinarian’ views on doctrine supported a rather authoritarian agenda. He
distinguished between the ‘dress and ornaments’ or ‘exterior appendages’
of religion, and ‘its body and essential parts’, or ‘the principles of reli-
gion’. Those things that were ‘absolutely necessary to salvation’ were ‘both
few and plain’. It was impossible to dispute a realm of universal consent
among Christians, and if these saving truths were found in all versions
of Christianity, ‘it may seem very vain to dispute and quarrel about the
rest’. To do so would be to forget that ‘there is a knowledge in religion
which many earnestly pursue, without which thousands have entered into
happiness’. Public disputes about the nature of justification and the divine
presence in the eucharist, for instance, were not worth the costs. When
ordinary people contemplated the doctrine conveyed in obscure parts of
scripture, Addison said, all they needed to do was to affirm that they sin-
cerely believed whatever God meant to convey. With this in mind, Addison
called for all disputes about ‘externals’ to be immediately and absolutely
proscribed. Catechizing in the fifth commandment should have prevented
them in the first place, if the disputants had actually been guided by their
consciences. Inessential matters of religion were matters of law, and like
other civil statutes, laws pertaining to ‘indifferent things’ were to be obeyed
without question. To say otherwise was to allege an absurdity: that every
government should allow every minor issue of state to be settled by open
argument.68 The memory of the Civil Wars and Revolution had encour-
aged many clergy to adopt an ultimately pragmatic attitude to theological
dispute.
Yet this stance implicated other divines, both conforming and dissenting,
who seemed to prize preaching and disputation over catechizing as means
of unifying Christians.69 To Addison, the use of the practices that had
caused the Civil War in order to avert another was inane. ‘Our keenest
arguments’, he recalled, had ‘only served to alarm the adversary into a
better provision for future resistance’. Here he took aim at a large swathe
of the Anglican pastorate, including many of its best-known preachers and
controversialists, often numbered among the ‘latitudinarians’, who would
assume prominent roles in the church after the Glorious Revolution. ‘If
the conduct of our debates were thoroughly considered’, he wrote, ‘we
might find this church complaining like the eagle in the Greek epilogue,70

68 PI, 99–101, 104–6, 112; GU, 20–24. 69 PI, 92.

70 Aesop’s fable of the eagle and the arrow.
 The propagation of the faith 167
which seeing her breast wounded with a feathered dart, cried out with
tears, “Alas! My own kind has destroyed me”’. Like Dodwell, Addison
recognized that ‘the pen-men’ appeared more interested in defaming than
convincing one another. Their arguments were either dismissed or taken
to be positively anti-Christian because they flowed ‘not from that spirit of
meekness wherewith the overtaken brother should be restored’. In the end,
they were not sincerely meant to restore peace and union.
At the very least, Addison urged, the conduct of controversial writers
needed to be reformed, rendered devoid of the hostile labelling of parties
and the conduct of personal disputes. The angry zeal of the church’s
enemies, Addison counselled, was best confronted not with censorship,
but with the civil self-restraint of Christ’s true servants. Here again there
were positive lessons to be drawn from the history of Catholic Europe.
‘It may be said of this particular church’, he wrote, ‘what was said of
the Catholic: that if she had stopped and dammed up the originals and
springs of controversies, rather than determining for one part, to give
them as it were a pipe and conduit to convey them to posterity, she
had not suffered that inundation of opinions with which at this day she
is over-run’. Here Addison again showed his strikingly relativistic and
Machiavellian view of political and religious processes: in order to advise his
fellow Anglicans, he was explaining how the Reformation might have been
prevented! Eventually, he explained, Catholics had learned their lesson, and
adopted self-censorship, ‘a policy still in practice in the popish countries,
where those books of controversies are scarce to be met with, wherein their
religion is maintained against Reformed churches’. Addison admitted that
disputation was a key element in the progress of the Reformation, but he
contended that public wrangling only benefited revolutionaries.71 Since
the Church of England was no longer in the same position it was in during
the early Reformation, it had to adopt a completely different set of tactics.
Addison, of course, never shied away from publicizing his views.72 Per-
haps the best evidence for his attitude to public speech is not the arguments
he made about disputation in The primitive institution, but the rhetorical
character of the book itself. Addison paraded the irenic norms of the early
Enlightenment and showed that he shared Dodwell’s esteem for captatio
benevolentiae. His proposal to ‘heal the distempers of this national church’,
he claimed, was originally produced for private consumption, but pub-
lished in a state of emergency. It identified a public good – the peace of the

71 PI, 92–7, 121–2, quotations on 94–7.

72 See below, 224, 229–31, 232–7, 249–51, 256–8, 261–2, 267–8, 271–4.
168 Religion
church – and legitimated a partisan argument for how it was to be pro-
cured with a rhetoric of peace, Protestantism, and restraint.73 In one telling
passage, Addison drew from William Chillingworth’s The religion of Protes-
tants, the classic text of ‘moderate’ English Protestantism on the eve of
the Civil War. There the hero of the Great Tew circle had complained of
‘deifying our own interpretations; and tyrannically enforcing them upon
others’. The ‘restraining of the Word of God from that latitude and gener-
ality, and the understandings of men from that liberty wherein Christ and
his Apostles left them’, he had observed, ‘is, and has been the only fountain
of all the schisms of the church, and that which makes them immortal’.
The solution was obvious. ‘Take away these walls of separation, and all
will quickly be one’, Chillingworth had said. ‘Take away the damning
of men for not subscribing to the words of men, as the words of God;
require of Christians only to believe Christ, and to call no man master
but him only’. Addison’s basic plea was for humility: the time had come
to ‘take away tyranny in opinions’. When he identified Chillingworth as
his source, Addison also identified the men whom Chillingworth himself
had relied upon for this passage: the tolerationist Jacopo Aconcio and the
Reformed theologian Girolamo Zanchi. He thereby evoked a broad, irenic
Protestant tradition that extended from England to the radicals and pre-
destinarians of the continental Reformation.74 Chillingworth’s peaceable
flourishes, Addison insisted, were perfectly compatible with his own coer-
cive and ceremonial agenda. The rhetoric of tolerance and moderation
was not the preserve of ‘latitudinarians’. It was a platform that Anglicans
and nonconformists with widely differing views could all attach to their
more specific goals in order to give them the appearance of an anodyne via
media.75

Preaching plainly
The Reformation, of course, had spread less by means of disputation than
through preaching. Here again Anglican divines had to square their uni-
versity education with the ugly revolutionary associations it had acquired,
and once more the basic issue, from the pulpit to the press, was the use and

73 PI, title page and ‘To the reader’.

74 PI, 71–4. See Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 198; Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early
Enlightenment culture, 320, 324. Addison also favoured another popular Reformation-era tolera-
tionist, Sebastian Castellio (Addison, Devotional poems, title page).
75 For some initial exploration of this understudied Restoration phenomenon, see Lake, ‘Reading
Clarke’s Lives’; Shagan, Rule of moderation, 288–325.
 The propagation of the faith 169
abuse of rhetoric. Conformists were convinced that over the course of the
English Revolution, ‘fanatical’ sermons had become the primary medium
of ‘rhetorical enthusiasm’.76 If preaching was not properly conducted, it
could lead to a host of dangers. The ignorant men and women who came
to hear sermons were easy prey for malevolent orators. Naive auditors,
Addison observed in a Hobbesian vein, ‘as greedily imbibe a false as true
doctrine, and are ready to change their opinion according to the impres-
sion which the affectionate noise of the last sermon has made upon their
senses’.77 It had become all too clear that in the eyes of ordinary people, in
a world where rhetoric was unrestrained, error could be more convincing
than truth, as long as it was properly adorned.78
By singing the praises of catechesis and exposing the perils of the pulpit,
Addison and his allies perpetuated a perennial conflict within English
Christianity over the essence of the ministry.79 Following in a long line of
anti-puritan argument that stretched from John Whitgift to Peter Heylyn,
they ridiculed the supposedly godly doctrine that the preaching of the Word
was the centre of the pastoral mission.80 Addison claimed that Whitgift’s
nemesis, the Elizabethan presbyterian Thomas Cartwright, and his modern
followers, the nonconformists, were all so obsessed with preaching that they
insisted that sermons were absolutely necessary for a proper celebration of
the sabbath, and that hearing them was absolutely necessary for salvation.
This was for Addison and many others a horrible delusion. It could easily
result in the notion that the preaching of the Word could be separated
from the liturgical life of the church.81 Against the ‘sermonists’ Addison
insisted that a Christian could easily attain salvation without hearing a
single sermon. ‘If a person who in his infancy has received holy baptism,
at years of discernment, shall by catechism be minded of all that he then
vowed and promised, and be careful to believe and do them’, Addison
explained, ‘I see not what such a person wants of being set in a state of
76 Heyd, ‘Be sober and reasonable’, 5; Casaubon, Treatise concerning enthusiasme, esp. 133–98 (a chapter
entitled ‘Of rhetorical enthusiasm’). On the Royal Society in this context see, for example, Vickers
and Struever, Rhetoric and the pursuit of truth; Schaffer, ‘Making certain’. Admonitions against
the abuse of pulpit and printed rhetoric, though, were of course rhetorical daggers themselves.
Conformists routinely misrepresented the practices and attitudes of their opponents, not to mention
their own.
77 PI, 151–2, quotation on 152; Worthington, ῾ΥΠΟΤ´ΥΠΩΣΙΣ ῾ΥΓΙΑΙΝ´ΟΝΤΩΝ Λ´ΟΓΩΝ, sigs. a3v.–
a4r., preface.
78 For another similar statement, see Stillingfleet, Fifty sermons, 709.
79 See, for example, Sherlock, Practical Christian, ‘To the parishioners of Winwick’.
80 For earlier, less radical critiques of puritans’ exalted view of preaching, see Lake, Anglicans and
puritans?, 162–4. Contrast the similar discussion in Davies, Caroline captivity of the church, 136–46.
81 On attempts to remedy this supposed abuse under Charles I, see Davies, Caroline captivity of the
church, 146–51.
170 Religion
salvation’.82 When Addison placed the sacraments and the catechism at the
centre of the Christian life, he implied that the presbyterians had it exactly
backwards.
What Addison meant to endorse, he claimed, was nothing more than
a return to the traditional, official practice of the church before the trou-
bles of the 1630s. Both Elizabeth I and James I, he observed, had assailed
the ills of ‘sermonizing’ Christianity, and insisted on its subservience to
catechizing as a mode of conveying divine knowledge. ‘Our ancestors’, he
noted in 1674, ‘were not ignorant of the necessity and benefit of what
is now most affectionately recommended’. For ‘Queen Elizabeth made
it her forty-fourth injunction, and King James his command, that after-
noon lectures should be converted into explanations of some necessary
rudiments of the catechism’.83 These royal campaigns in favour of cate-
chizing and against the puritans’ beloved lectures were motivated, Addison
argued, by ‘a prudent foresight’ that catechesis ‘would be more advan-
tageous to the people, than some ex tempore irruptions, or enlarging a
few contrived breviates upon desultory texts’. Addison’s attack on the
puritan penchant for extemporaneous or loosely organized, ill-prepared,
wandering sermons was not meant to dismiss the performative element
of preaching. It was meant to expose enthusiasm, a fundamental threat
to political order. Puritans and many among the multitude, he claimed,
appeared to believe that skill in preaching was the simple effect of grace,
when it was in fact dependent upon learning, seasoned judgment, and
practice.84
Rhetoric, of course, could never be eliminated from writing or preaching,
but it could be restrained, rooted in erudition, and focused on ethical exhor-
tation and essential doctrine. Divines like Addison certainly valued preach-
ing, and the views they expressed on it were far from purely negative.85
Deeply aware of its political dimensions, Addison defined preaching as
a public act, ‘an open, solemn and authoritative publication of divine
mysteries’. He urged the most restrained forms of pulpit oratory, and even

82 PI, 146–8. See also Casaubon, To whom it belonged anciently to preach, 21, 26, 33–5; Casaubon,
Generall learning, 124.
83 These were Elizabeth’s 1559 injunctions and James’s 1622 Directions on Preaching. See Green,
Christian’s ABC, 105–12. Charles II’s 1662 ‘Directions concerning preachers’ were in fact modelled
on the Jacobean commands (see Green, Christian’s ABC, 110). Addison probably omitted the similar
provision in the Royal Instructions of 1629 in order to avoid linking his recommendation to the
more controversial Caroline agenda.
84 PI, 220–21; Casaubon, Generall learning, 123–9.
85 Addison was an active preacher, from Tangier to Lichfield, and while he was never resident at court
after his appointment as a royal chaplain, he did preach there (BL MS Add 18730, f. 3r.).
 The propagation of the faith 171
provided an historical defence of the claim that the reading of the scriptures
was itself an honourable form of preaching.86 When pastors did compose
their own texts for sermons, he argued, they ought to focus on ‘discov-
ering and explaining what in sacred scripture is mysterious and obscure’
in the eyes of the uneducated. The point of doing so was not to engage
in controversial divinity but to complement ‘a seasonable application of
those things which are more obvious and evident’. For ‘no man’s ignorance
can be removed by rhetoricating harangues, pompous discourses, profound
researches, etc.’. What was needed were ‘humble and plain lessons, easy and
obvious rules, and such ABC rudiments, as fall under the comprehension
of the rude and unlearned, and which are proper to prepare them for higher
lessons’.87 To the extent that they conveyed religious knowledge, Addison
argued, sermons ought to aspire to little more than what catechizing already
provided.88
Addison’s recommendations for the style and purpose of sermons echoed
those usually attributed to ‘latitudinarians’. Yet the turn to a ‘plain style’ in
the Restoration period was not the preserve of a single party in the church.
It marked a departure not only from puritan enthusiasm, but also from
the Senecan, witty, and florid styles of many Jacobean and Laudian con-
formists, including Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor. Like so many
others, Addison insisted that sermons be plain, rhetorically restrained, and
methodically organized transmissions of moral lessons and basic doctrine.89
He recalled an evangelical model for the church that was centred on the
bare essentials of salvation.90 Sermons were, like catechisms, to be geared
towards the formation of the affections, not the judgment. Ordinary church
audiences stood ‘in more need to have their hearts and consciences wrought
upon for good life and conversation, than their understanding and appre-
hension with any curious piece of learning or science’.91 An advanced grasp

86 The practice was originally defended under Elizabeth when the church lacked an adequate preaching
ministry, but was more forcefully espoused by Richard Hooker: see Lake, Anglicans and puritans?,
163.
87 PI, 55–6, 135. John Wilkins argued, as Addison might have, that obscurity and a complex style were
in any case usually signs of ignorance. Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, 199–200.
88 See also Casaubon, Generall learning, 123.
89 Simon, Three Restoration divines, I, 39–67. For studies of this broad stylistic trend, see Rivers,
Reason, grace, and sentiment, I; Reedy, Robert South, 44–52; Hart, William Lloyd, 222–7; Cope,
Joseph Glanvill, 144–66; Williamson, ‘Restoration revolt against enthusiasm’; Jones, Seventeenth
century, 111–42; Mitchell, English pulpit oratory; Simon, Three Restoration divines, I, 1–74.
90 See also Tillotson, Six sermons, 164; Casaubon, The question to whom it belonged anciently to preach,
9, which notes that such sermons were, like catechisms, appropriate for the ‘conversion of infidels’.
91 PI, 138. On the supreme importance of moral divinity for ordinary preachers, see also Casaubon,
Generall learning, 121.
172 Religion
of doctrine was simply irrelevant to nearly all Christians.92 And in any case,
until ordinary Christians were well versed in the essentials of Christianity,
it was impossible for them to comprehend more complex notions.93
When composing sermons, Addison insisted, ministers should take care
to render them ‘agreeable’ to the church’s official homilies. These, he
argued, ‘were intended, not only to supply those who have not the gift
of preaching, sufficiently to instruct the people committed to their cure;
but also to be a wholesome rule by which even those who are able to
preach should guide themselves in that public ministry’.94 It was in fact the
homilies that pointed towards the doctrinal simplicity, ethical focus, and
irenic intent that ought to feature in every sermon. ‘In the pious sermons
of the church’, he explained, ‘we find principles of Christianity solidly
explained, rules and motives of honest and holy life clearly laid down, and
perorations and persuasions to continue therein, devoutly and charitably
directed and applied’. Addison’s reference to ‘perorations and persuasions’
made clear that he still viewed rhetoric as an essential aspect of preaching,
while he aimed to restrain its use. The homilies were also focused on
moral lessons fit for the times and the capacities of ordinary people. If the
homilies were exemplary, Addison suggested, then much of what passed
for preaching in his own day was nothing of the sort. ‘If discourses at this
day made in pulpits ought only so far forth be accounted preaching, as
they are agreeable to the church’s sermons’, Addison claimed, ‘then all is
not preaching which bears that name’.95 Addison believed that sermons,
like catechisms, ought to be broadly uniform and closely regulated by the
church leadership.
In the end, Addison’s concerns about sermons were political. ‘There
is more security in a homily than a lecture’, he explained, ‘as there is
in the learning, piety, and discretion of many, than in a single person’.
For ‘however the homilies may be decried through popular ignorance,
prejudice, and passion, yet no doubt but they are still necessary upon
their first design, which was to help the inabilities of some, to restrain the
indiscretions of others, and to take away those strifes about what is fitting
to be preached, caused by the variety of mens’ judgments, the extravagance
of their fancies, and the biases of several interests’. Sermons that Addison
92 Addison and many other commentators made clear, however, that whatever their support for such
preaching, they were not endorsing purely moral oratory. See Casaubon, To whom it belonged
anciently to preach, 3–6, 34–5.
93 Tillotson, Six sermons, 161–2.
94 John Wilkins made a similar suggestion: no preacher, he advised, should claim novelty for the
contents of his sermon (Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, 199–200).
95 PI, 136–7.
 The propagation of the faith 173
recognized as legitimate, which ‘contain a familiar orthodox instruction in
the whole body of Christian doctrine, and of all the capital duties therein
required’, would indeed serve as ‘no unlikely means both to regain and
preserve peace and unity in this church’.96 But when understood in the
usual way, he argued, preaching was an entirely inappropriate solution to
the divisions that plagued English Christianity.97
Here again, irenicism was not a ‘latitudinarian’ trait. It was a shared
value and a field of tension. Addison’s warnings about ‘sermonizing’ were
not aimed only at nonconformists. Conforming divines could never agree
amongst themselves about how exactly rhetoric ought to be restrained in
the pulpit and beyond the churchyard in the interest of peace and unity.98
Many of the most noted champions of reconciliation and plain speaking
in the ranks of the clergy were convinced that preaching was essential to
their mission against popery and dissent. Addison and others demurred.
They feared that aggressive preaching against these groups would only
reinforce the dynamics that had lost them for the church in the first place.
Sermons designed to bring in nonconformists would ultimately backfire
because they made conforming clergy complicit in the rhetorical abuse and
sermon-gadding that gave puritan piety its anarchic tendencies. Dissenters
who ‘ran to the lecture before they had been at the catechism’ were ‘like
unballasted vessels, liable to be tossed, torn, and blown about with every
gust of contrary doctrine vented by those who were crafty to deceive’. Men
and women with no doctrinal moorings could be won over for the moment,
but it was ridiculous to think that they could be kept in line for long.99 Even
the nonconformist preachers, those ‘pretenders to spiritual science’, could
only be ‘cured’ in their seditious maladies by catechizing.100 Here Addison,
who never published a single sermon, was in obvious disagreement with
many of his fellow clergy, who were willing to preach constantly against
Romanists and fanatics and to set their oratory in print. In the midst of
the political crises of the Restoration, he and others would have likely been
aghast at the behaviour of famed preachers who later assumed prominent
roles in the Williamite church, including John Sharp, Edward Stillingfleet,
and John Tillotson.
When Anglicans considered how best to propagate their faith in a res-
urrected church, they were preoccupied with the lessons of the Civil War
96 Ibid., 137, 142, 144. 97 Ibid., 145–57.
98 Simon, Three Restoration divines, I, 39–61.
99 PI, 148–51, quotations on 150–51. See also Sherlock, Principles of holy Christian religion, sig. a3v.
100 PI, 62–3. Addison’s commentary on the epistemological arrogance and instability of puritan
preaching emulated central aspects of Richard Hooker’s anti-puritanism. See Lake, Anglicans and
puritans?, 178, 222.
174 Religion
and Revolution, and to a certain extent, with the lessons provided by the
religious history of continental Europe and their own efforts to spread
the gospel abroad. History was the basis for their introspection and their
preferred medium of public persuasion. What remained unclear was the
exact nature of what the past was supposed to teach them, and the way
in which they ought to draw on their training in logic and rhetoric to
convey what they had learned. When they assessed what means of eliciting
fides would best conduce to spreading and strengthening Christian faith,
divines like Addison ultimately pointed to what was most certainly under
their control: the words they chose to imprint upon blank leaves of paper
and the minds of children. Others wondered whether the public conduct of
the clergy could ever be reformed. After all, as Addison would only admit
in the case of others, was it possible that within the church leadership
‘there was education in the case’, and it had already done indelible work?101
Divines who took this view were ironically forced to adopt a more san-
guine, short-term outlook on the problems everyone faced. They retained
more faith in the oratorical and dialectical weapons that had paved the
way for the Reformation and dominated their university educations. What
the judgments of the future would be on these competing sensibilities
remained, of course, unknown. What was clear to everyone, though, was
that there was no obvious way to simultaneously protect the truth and
bring peace to church and state.

101 PSJ, 113. See above, 66–9, 117–21.

 c h a p ter 6

The worship of God

If the catechism was the ideal medium for the message Anglican divines
conveyed to the laity, then the mature catechumen was its incarnation,
his very speech proof that it had been conveyed with success. Perhaps
thoughts like these prompted Addison’s decision in 1690 to publish a book
called The catechumen, in which an anonymous young man professed his
understanding of Christianity just before he first received holy communion.
Following the usual sequence of the catechism, the catechumen offered a
subtly partisan view of the Christian life. As he professed his faith, he
ignored Reformed motifs. With not a word about election or perseverance,
he insisted that God’s saving grace was available to all who believed. This
grace, he knew, could be resisted, to the peril of his soul, but as long as he
did not die wilfully and impenitently in a state of sin, he would ordinarily
be saved through the merits of Christ. To believe and to repent was to
act. ‘Faith’, he was sure, ‘will not profit to my justification without works
of obedience to the commands of Christ’. A young man so focused on
virtue professed to care little for the nice details of doctrine. He avoided
‘meddling with remote and learned inferences’ but was keen to ‘draw such
from each article as are near and familiar, short and edifying’. In the end,
he knew that his entire rearing in moral and divine truths was to proceed
only so far as it prepared him for his union with Christ in the Supper of
the Lord.1
The catechumen’s words would have pleased most Restoration divines.
They agreed that moral virtue or Christian obedience was the conditional
means by which humans were justified and thereby saved.2 And for all their
1 Addison, Catechumen, quotations on 9, 38. For Addison’s anti-Calvinism and ‘Arminianism’, see also
Catechumen, 10–11, 31–42; IS, 17, 19, 23, 72, 75; GU, 3–4. Hampton, Anti-Arminians, 15 n. 65, is in
error. On moral action as the centrepiece of catechizing in antiquity, see Cave, Primitive Christianity,
sig. a4r.
2 For example, Scott, Christian life, esp. ‘The preface’; Sherlock, Principles of holy Christian reli-
gion; Worthington, ῾ΥΠΟΤ´ΥΠΩΣΙΣ ῾ΥΓΙΑΙΝ´ΟΝΤΩΝ Λ´ΟΓΩΝ, 26; Lowth, Catechetical questions,
esp. 24–5. See also Hampton, Anti-Arminians, 49, 63; Sykes, William Wake, I, 16.

175
176 Religion
aversion to theological conflict, they professed neither bald ‘moralism’ nor
any sort of anodyne ‘practical divinity’.3 They drew inspiration from the
‘anti-Calvinists’ and ‘Arminians’ of the previous four decades, and above
all from three luminaries of mid century: Henry Hammond, Herbert
Thorndike, and Jeremy Taylor. They continued to do battle with their
‘Calvinist’ contemporaries within the church, and in the long run, they
emerged victorious. But their victory was achieved quietly. While under
Charles I credal conflict had helped bring on civil war, under his son formal
divinity became a political sideshow. Many divines had come to believe
that disputation and preaching on fine points of theology were inherently
suspect endeavours. Controversy did erupt within the church and in the
universities on occasion, but these squabbles were mostly shrouded in
Latin, and the participants mostly eschewed scholastic language when they
expressed their differences. They thereby avoided direct challenges to basic
Reformed theology. Besides, now that even many puritans preferred an
‘Arminian’ creed, the days when clear connections between soteriology and
ecclesiology could make for an axis of national struggle were long gone.
What most troubled conformists about traditional puritan divinity was the
tendency of ignoramuses and extremists to turn it into an apology for vice
and rebellion.4 This was less a strictly theological concern than a harrowing
memory of the English Revolution. Among the leaders of the church, it
tended to prompt not formal or polemical divinity, but constant appeals
to moral virtue as a centrepiece of England’s natural and civil religion.5
In any case, the attack on solafideist divinity in England had only ever
been truly explosive because so many ‘Arminians’ had decided that their
commitment to the primacy of works fit with an exalted view of Christian
ritual. Most Restoration divines would have nodded at the catechumen’s
suggestion that his ordinary life as a Christian was simply preparation for his
communion with Christ at the rails of an altar. They were eager to promote
the liturgical and artistic program first outlined by an Elizabethan, Richard
Hooker, and clarified by the ‘avant-garde conformists’ and ‘Laudians’ of
the early Stuart period. Yet while they fashioned their pastoral program

3 On ‘moralism’, see Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 307. Anglican teaching on soteriology
has already been discussed by other scholars to the extent that is necessary to support the analysis
here. See ibid., 279–330; Trott, ‘Prelude to Restoration’, 97–140; Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford’, 839;
Hampton, Anti-Arminians. Because of ‘anti-Calvinist’ divines’ positions on justification, it is partly
misleading simply to label them ‘Arminian’.
4 Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 320–36; Tyacke, ‘Religious controversy’, 601–12; Spurr,
Restoration Church of England, 280–81, 312–30; Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford’, 835–7; Hampton,
Anti-Arminians, esp. 33.
5 See, for example, Stillingfleet, Nature of superstition, 34, 43.
 The worship of God 177
with regard for the beauty of holiness and in reaction to the deformities of
the godly, they were keenly aware that Laudian harangues on the divine
origins of ritual had made it possible for puritans to show their true
colours in the first place, by precipitating civil war. They took care to
justify and implement their agenda with more restraint and finesse than
their predecessors. Nothing better attests to their success than the silent
triumph of the Laudian style in Anglican churches under the later Stuarts
and beyond.6
Yet the question was an exceedingly difficult one. How could a Laudian
in the Restoration era transcend the dilemma of his Caroline counterpart,
who had to choose or alternate between inflammatory claims for the divine
sanction of ceremony and lukewarm appeals to the magistrate’s right to rule
on ‘things indifferent’ in the interest of decency and order?7 How could he
plead for the positive and profound significance of ceremonial, sensual, and
embodied Christian worship without dabbling in the patristic and divine-
right dogmatisms that had infuriated so many in the past? Indeed it would
be a mistake to stop here, and to assume that his challenge was nothing
more than the resolution of an early Stuart problem, however perplexing
that problem might have been. Amid the unprecedented diversity in belief
and unbelief that the English Revolution had spawned, he could not even
assume that his auditors acknowledged the divine institution of either the
sacraments or the clergy administering them, for many freethinkers and
sectarians denied even this. His problem was not a riddle of the Reformation
but the predicament of secularity: how was it possible to persuade the pious,
the impious, the radical, and the orthodox, all at the same time?
The Laudians of the Restoration tried to do this by turning to historical
testimony. They hoped it could authorize specific prescriptions for public
worship in ways that appealed to all their intended audiences. Those who
came before them, of course, had also turned to the past for answers, but
6 Tyacke and Fincham, Altars restored, 305–53.
7 Lake, ‘Laudians and the argument from authority’. In the present work the term ‘Laudian’ is mostly
used as shorthand to refer to a coherent, distinctive constellation of expressed, positive attitudes
towards the religious significance of forms of worship that proved controversial in the early Stuart
church; to policies, practices and material objects that reflected those attitudes; and to clergy and
laymen who appear to have generally (but not necessarily consistently or categorically) held them.
On this usage and the caution that ought to accompany it, see Lake, ‘Laudian style’; Fincham and
Tyacke, Altars restored; Milton, ‘The creation of Laudianism’; Milton, ‘Anglicanism and royalism
in the 1640s’; Milton, Laudian and royalist polemic. Here the term does not refer to ecclesiology,
to the argumentative basis of claims about worship, or to attitudes about polemical engagement.
Its usage does not posit monolithic blocs within the church or in any way contradict the dynamic
model for understanding the variety of pastoral outlooks within the church summarized at the end
of this chapter. Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 337–50, downplays the prevalence of Laudian
attitudes in the period.
178 Religion
divines in post-bellum England worked with a set of facts and tools to
which Charles I’s servants had far less access. They were able to strike
a public pose that combined the pious energies of Caroline Laudianism
with the minimalist and supposedly liberal conformism usually associated
with William Chillingworth, John Hales, Lord Falkland, and the rest of
the Great Tew circle. They sought to extend their defence of Anglican
Christianity as a natural and civil religion to the details of the liturgy, the
material apparatus of the church, and the physical actions of worshippers,
all without demoting the sacred significance of the external realm of piety.
Their effort was one of the most fascinating long-run results of post-
Reformation England’s competitive scramble for middle ways.
Their idea was that ritualized, embodied worship was an essential form of
civilization whose Christian variant conduced to salvation. They shrugged
off the Calvinists’ warning that all external worship was inherently suspect
because idolatry was ultimately rooted not in specific physical objects but
in human cognition itself. Some of them also cast doubt on the popular line
that papists had fallen into idolatry in part because they had failed to cut
ties with paganism. Many others had no time for the reserved Protestant
refrain that ritual actions were at best outward confirmations of inward
states. In opposition to all this, they suggested that rituals modelled on
the rites of erring ancient societies should be celebrated for their lineages.
Properly understood, cautiously employed, and assiduously supervised,
rituals, ceremonies, holy objects, and holy postures with ancient pedigrees
could aid, secure, and exhibit the presence of pious and orthodox inward
dispositions. These practices might or might not be divine in origin or
intrinsically necessary for salvation, but in either case, their importance
went far beyond order, decency, uniformity, and state sanction. They at
least edified, in the fullest sense identified by Hooker nearly a century
before.8
In the course of these arguments, innovative scholarship came to the
aid of Anglican attempts to properly transact with the divine. It is no
coincidence that the learned underpinnings of Restoration ritualism are
unusually clear in the writing of John Spencer, a conformist cleric who
has also been dubbed the inventor of comparative religion. His influential
studies of ancient Judaism – Dissertatio de urim et thummim (1669) and De
legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus (1685) – identified him as
8 See also Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’; Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer’; Levitin, ‘John Spencer’s De
legibus hebraeorum’. The arguments made here were developed independently but their present
articulation draws on these articles. For the full Restoration case for edification through a Laudian
style of worship, see Beveridge, Sermon concerning the excellency.
 The worship of God 179
a scourge of religious enthusiasts. His main target was puritanism, while
his secondary target was that of all the Protestant Hebraists who preceded
him: the popery of modern Jews and Catholics.9 Spencer believed that
a proper grasp of ancient Jewish history was essential to an adequate
appreciation of modern Christian ceremony. After the Israelites had lapsed
into idolatry, he argued, God gave them a set of ceremonial and moral
laws derived in part from pagan practices. He did so not because these
laws were inherently good, but because they served a crucial series of
functions. God’s ‘accommodation’ to human weakness here turned the
Jews away from idolatry by helping them piously mediate their relationship
with him. Despite their origin, these laws helped the Jews to distinguish
sacred from profane, and Judaism from gentilism. Divinely ordained or
not, Spencer argued, rituals were functional in nature, and adapted to the
capacities and circumstances of particular peoples.10 They were ubiquitous
and apparently essential for transacting with the divine. This made them
not simply justifiable but in some form, necessary, even for a religion of
the spirit.11
‘Latitudinarians’ and ‘high churchmen’ alike rallied around this type of
argument in order to espouse both Laudian and more reserved styles of
conformism. They often did so within broader discussions of natural and
civil religion. But like Spencer, they also emulated the first Laudian apol-
ogists by emphasizing the close relationship between ancient Judaism and
primitive Christianity.12 ‘A large share of both Christian rites and doctrines
were derived from Judaism’, Addison argued in 1674, ‘which was not to
be laid desolate by Christianity, but completed and reformed; the primi-
tive Christianity being (according to Mr Selden) the lawful and prophetic
offspring of the old Judaism’.13 Here again, though, later Stuart divines
9 Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer’, 146–9, 153–4; Levitin, ‘John Spencer’s De legibus hebraeorum’, 61–2.
10 Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’, 48–59. For the recent scholarly literature on Spencer (who is usually
described inaccurately as a Socinian, Deist, or freethinker), see Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer’. For
similar general points about ancient Israel, see Parker, Ecclesiastical politie, 103; Parker, Reasons for
abrogating the test, 102, 108–9, 128–9; Thorndike, Epilogue to the tragedy of the Church of England,
book 2, 178. For partial pre-Restoration precedents, see Heylyn, ΚΕΙΜΗΛΙΑ ᾿ΕΚΚΛΗΣΙΑΣΤΙΚΑ,
‘Of liturgies’, 58.
11 This position is best described neither as objectively ‘moderate’ and tolerant (pace Stolzenberg, ‘John
Spencer’; Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’, 60, 62) nor as straightforwardly, traditionally, or inherently
adiaphorist (pace Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer’; Levitin, ‘John Spencer’s De legibus hebraeorum’). See
above, 132–45.
12 On the earlier period, see Guibbory, Christian identity, Jews, and Israel, 63–82; Lake, ‘Laudians and
the argument from authority’. For a basic continuity thesis, see Doll, ‘The architectural expression of
primitive Christianity’; Chaundy-Smart, ‘Moral shecinah’. See also Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London
churches.
13 PI, 38. See also Thorndike, Just weights and measures, 4–6. For an early Enlightenment view on the
continent, see Stroumsa, ‘Richard Simon’.
180 Religion
departed from the ways of their forebears. By emphasizing actual continu-
ities in the sacred functions of specific rituals, they were able to transform or
jettison many of the typological arguments that Hooker and the Caroline
Laudians had used to support their claim that Christianity was not a rejec-
tion but a refinement of the Judaism of the Temple.14 They thereby escaped
the predicament of many early Stuart divines, who had attacked puritans
for being scripturalist ‘judaizers’ while selectively ‘judaizing’ themselves in
the same way, in order to counter the puritans’ liturgical spiritualism.15
When they embraced properly historical links between Christianity and
the ancient religions that preceded it, they clearly set themselves against
puritan fears of pagano-papism and Jewish idolatry.16 Yet they were simul-
taneously adopting a method that a new band of enemies, the Deists,
would soon find congenial to their own purposes.17

The functions of a sacrifice

For Enlightened Anglicans, a religion without liturgical uniformity and
a priestly order was hardly worthy of the name. The Laudians among
them found it easy to go one step further and claim that along with the
priests that could be found in all civilizations came the ritual sacrifices they
performed. After all, sacrifice was apparently the most ancient and universal
form of religious worship; and it appeared to be founded in natural reason,
even if the specific forms it assumed in particular societies were not.18
No Christian who accepted these arguments, it seemed, could possibly
take offense at the sacerdotalist’s tendency to describe the sacrament of
holy communion as a ‘sacrifice’ performed on an ‘altar’ by ‘priests’.19 On

14 See, for example, Tenison, Idolatry, 341; Hickes, Posthumous discourses, 255–8, 268–83; Brevint,
Christian sacrament and sacrifice; Beveridge, Works, I, 26–58, 90–91, 102, 143–52; VIII, 477–531;
Beveridge, Sermon concerning the excellency, 26; Littleton, Sixty-one sermons, I, 311; III, 21; Smith,
Sermon about frequent communion; Dodwell, Discourse concerning the one altar, 296–7, 306. See also
Levitin, ‘John Spencer’s De legibus hebraeorum’, 74–7, 86–7.
15 Lake, ‘Laudians and the argument from authority’.
16 See, for instance, Littleton, Sixty-one sermons, I, 311.
17 See also Sheehan, ‘Sacred and profane’, 28–31. Contrast Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the religions.
For hostile Calvinist reactions to the hazards of this line of thinking in England and abroad,
see Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer’, 135–6. The church was certainly not all of one mind on this
front. Besides Calvinists, other sticklers for ultra-conformity described its significance in more
traditionally adiaphorist terms. See, for example, Horneck, Crucified Jesus, 32–3, 594–9 (Horneck,
incidentally, was educated in Heidelberg). Some differences may have also often been the result of
polemical context or genre. Contrast, for instance, Parker, Ecclesiastical politie, with Parker, Reasons
for abrogating the test.
18 See above, 132–40.
19 See, for example, Brevint, Christian sacrament and sacrifice, 71–129; Sykes, William Wake, I, 1–79;
Wake, Doctrine of the Church of England; Parker, Ecclesiastical politie, 100–103, 107; Laney, Six
sermons, esp. 15–16; Stillingfleet, Works, II, ‘Irenicum’, 202–4; Dodwell, Separation of churches from
 The worship of God 181
this view, Christianity’s links to the idolatrous pasts of ancient religions
were not grounds for suspicion, but sources of legitimation. It was not the
embrace of this lineage that was unnatural and barbaric, but the rejection
of it. The church’s sacrifices were properly and profitably understood as
purified forms of past superstition. Its ‘oblations without blood’ and ‘feasts
of first fruits’, Edward Stillingfleet insisted, were ‘very natural’, and dated
to the days of Cain.20
The Laudian interpretation of sacrifice weaved together sacred history
and the global history of civilizations. Both narratives pointed to a func-
tional interpretation of God’s decision to institute ritual sacrifice among
the Israelites after their escape from Egypt, where they had become fond of
the practice.21 ‘Seeing they must needs offer sacrifice’, explained the future
archbishop Thomas Tenison in his travel-literature-laden study of idolatry,
‘it pleased God to give them a law which might at once indulge them in
their inclination, and restrain them from sacrificing unto idols’. For this
reason, their sabbath permitted ‘eucharistical, and expiatory oblations’.22
While the age of levitical sacrifices was of course long gone, and Tenison
danced carefully around the implications of this interpretation of ancient
Judaism for Christians, its potential significance for understanding the
Lord’s Supper was nonetheless clear. By defending the notion of Christian
altar sacrifice in terms of both civil and sacred history, conformists were
able to appeal to all of their learned hearers at the same time.
Addison’s catechumen, however, would have known little or nothing of
these erudite deliberations. When Restoration clergy with Laudian atti-
tudes addressed more sympathetic or less sophisticated audiences, they
inculcated zeal for the Lord’s Supper by turning to practical and theologi-
cal arguments that did not contradict their historical ones, but ran parallel
to them. The catechumen’s devotion to the eucharist was in symbiosis with
his view that moral virtue was the primary means of his justification before
God. Mere education in proper doctrine and the importance of works, he
knew, was insufficient to prevent sin.23 The sacraments, too, were essential,
from the promises of baptism to their renewal in holy communion.24

episcopal government. For a slightly different view, see Owtram, Two dissertations on sacrifices, esp.
9–23. These arguments could be phrased in a way that supported a more traditional adiaphorist
position. For partial pre-Restoration precedents, see Heylyn, ΚΕΙΜΗΛΙΑ ᾿ΕΚΚΛΗΣΙΑΣΤΙΚΑ, ‘Of
liturgies’, 54–6; Robartes, Gods holy house and service, 4–5; Mede, Reverence of Gods house, 4.
20 Stillingfleet, Works, II, ‘Irenicum’, 203. 21 Contrast Sheehan, ‘Altars of the idols’, 669.
22 Tenison, Idolatry, 100–101 (quoting Cyril of Alexandria). See also Owtram, Two dissertations on
sacrifices, 24.
23 See, for example, Stillingfleet, Sermon preach’d before the king, 8–9.
24 Although scholars have tended to ignore it, ‘latitudinarian’, ‘moralist’, and ‘Cambridge Platonist’
divines were among the most spirited proponents of this view, and among the most popular and
182 Religion
When Addison and his allies explained ‘the chief force and virtue of
sacraments’ to their pious readers, they elaborated upon the theology of
grace that had originally been developed by Hooker, the ‘avant-garde con-
formists’, and the Laudians. From the 1640s onwards, Laudians usually
discussed the relationship between morality and the sacraments in terms
of the ‘covenant of grace’ between God and post-lapsarian humanity.25 In
this scheme, the Lord’s Supper provided an opportunity for Christians to
renew the covenant and the baptismal promises that applied it to every
individual whenever those promises were broken, as they inevitably were.
To prepare themselves for this renewal, though, Christians had to undergo
a process of self-examination and repentance that resulted in a sincere
renunciation of sin, and an embrace of faith, charity, and devotion. Only
after taking these virtuous resolutions were they worthy of the sacrament.26
Upon receiving it, Christians entered a second stage of moral fortification:
the eucharist conferred graces that augmented the communicants’ resolve
to do good beyond what they could ever manage on their own. When it
was received frequently, the sacrament became a perpetual, practical, and
spiritual engine of moral virtue – and ultimately, salvation.27
Yet the manufacture of morals was in no way the central function of the
Lord’s Supper. Its truly profound importance lay in the fact that it was the
way in which humans normally received the benefits of Christ’s passion.
Restoration divines with Laudian attitudes affirmed the ‘real presence’
of Christ in the sacrament, but they tended to insist that its specific
nature and location were mysterious, incomprehensible, and for the most

prolific English writers and preachers on sacramental and devotional themes. They stood out not
for their relative indifference to the ritual life of the church, but for the opposite. Much of the
evidence presented here is drawn from the record of their sacramentalist activism.
25 IS, 1–26. See also Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament, 12–15; Patrick, Christian sacrifice, 36–46,
60–64, 95; Hickes, Discourse to prove that the strongest temptations are conquerable; Allestree, Whole
duty of man; Horneck, Crucified Jesus, 9, 58, 198–220. For Addison’s detailed defence of aspects
of baptism along these lines, see Addison, Catechumen, 3–10; PI, 193–212. See also Hickes, Case
of infant-baptism, 64–6. On the combination of the sacramental theology of Hooker and ‘old
Laudians’ with covenantal interpretations in the 1650s, see Trott, ‘Prelude to Restoration’, 141–62.
For Hooker’s view with no covenant theology, see Barrow, Brief exposition, 212–30, 243.
26 IS, 1–2, 26–109. See also GU, 59–60.
27 GU, 48, 51, 62. See also Patrick, Christian sacrifice, 1–8, 29. Patrick condemned Quakers for not
understanding this basic aspect of the sacrament. Richard Sherlock and others extended the moral
significance of the sacrament to the political sphere, and described the eucharist as a preservative
against sedition, with reference to the Test and Corporation Acts. See Sherlock, Practical Christian,
11, 84–5, 175. For other exhortations to frequent communion on historical, moral, and theological
grounds, see GU, sig. a3r., 12–21, 30, 44–7; Smith, Sermon on frequent communion, 13, 34; Barrow,
Exposition, 261–3; Horneck, Crucified Jesus, ‘To the unknown benefactor’, 228–49; Nicholson,
Exposition of the catechisme, 204–5.
 The worship of God 183
part, irrelevant.28 A strident defence of the salvific significance of holy
communion did not require recourse to popish, scholastic understandings
of the real presence. It was only necessary to affirm Christ’s presence in
the eucharist in a manner that made sense of the transaction that occurred
there. It was enough, Addison’s catechumen knew, to ‘receive his most
precious body and blood, with all the benefits of his passion, without
amusing myself then about the manner of receiving him’.29 For what was
certain, as Addison put it, was that the sacraments had been intended by
God ‘to serve as conditional means, which he requires they should use,
to whom he imparts that saving grace, which he is willing to bestow on
all who duly observe the conditions on which he has promised them to
bestow it’. Saving grace, he explained, ‘is a genuine effect, and consequent
of sacraments, when they are rightly administered and worthily received’.
Sacraments were in this way ‘moral instruments, the use whereof is in our
hands, the effect in His’. God, of course, could save without sacraments,
‘but according to His ordinary course of saving, he has made the sacraments
necessary to salvation’. Humans had to choose not only to open themselves
to God’s grace, but actively to seek it. Through the sacraments they were
voluntarily ‘made partakers of the saving grace of Christ, and of all the
benefits of his death, without which, there is no room for hope of salvation’.
Addison implied that without frequent reception of the eucharist, salvation
was normally unattainable.30
These views were widely held. But they also reflected a series of confes-
sional and intra-confessional divides and tensions. Addison and his allies
of course abhorred what they viewed as the Catholic imposture by which
blasphemous priests claimed that they themselves could apply the efficacy
and merit of Christ’s sacrifice to particular people. They also rejected
what Addison called ‘the unreasonable, senseless, and unnatural doc-
trine of transubstantiation’. Like most other Protestants, they affirmed the

28 See also Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament, 7–10; Sherlock, Practical Christian, 180–81; Nicholson,
Exposition of the catechisme, 191–5. Some were even more explicit than Addison in making clear that
the bread and wine did become the body and blood of Christ, albeit ‘mystically and sacramentally’
(Smith, Sermon about frequent communion, 22).
29 Addison, Catechumen, 85. See also Cosin, Popish transubstantiation, 1–3.
30 GU, 6–12, 47, 62, quotations on 7–12; Addison, Catechumen, 70–72. For similar descriptions
with particular reference to the eucharist, see Brevint, Christian sacrament and sacrifice, esp. 36–55;
Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament, 21–53; Hickes, Case of infant-baptism, 65; Smith, Sermon about
frequent communion, 4–6; Sherlock, Practical Christian, 171–2; Lowth, Catechetical questions, esp.
98–127; Nicholson, Exposition of the catechisme, 164–5; Beveridge, Works, I, 66–87, 291; II, 20–24;
VIII, 544–5. For other uses of the language of ‘moral instruments’ and ‘moral efficacy’, see Smith,
Sermon about frequent communion, 23; Brevint, Christian sacrament and sacrifice, 19.
184 Religion
commemorative significance of the sacrament.31 But they were not content
to let the matter rest there. They condemned puritans for their hollow
estimate of holy communion and their attendant failure to recognize that
the entire liturgy was subservient to the Lord’s Supper. It was a serious
error, Addison claimed, to say that the sacraments ‘were appointed for no
other end, but only to teach you by seeing what the Word does by hearing’,
and ‘serve only to create in you a remembrance of Christ’s sufferings’. This
view rendered these rituals superfluous. ‘If you strictly enquire into the
first institution of public prayers and sermons among Christians’, Addison
insisted, ‘you will find them chiefly designed to produce in them an earnest
longing to be united to Christ, and to ensure unto them the benefits of
his sufferings’.32 Any other hierarchy of Christian practice threatened to
pervert or render ineffectual the central institutions of Christianity.
In more or less abandoning a sacrament that ought to be celebrated
frequently as the focal point of Christian life, Addison suggested, the puri-
tans had formed a strange union with the papists, whose priests allowed
the laity only ‘a half communion’ once a year. ‘As to fanaticism, when
it had the upper hand in this nation’, Addison snorted, ‘for thirteen or
fourteen years together, several parishes never so much as heard whether
there was any such thing as the Lord’s Supper’. This antechamber of
error, Addison and other conformists observed, led to the gamut of puri-
tan perversions and the sectarian excesses they engendered. Puritans’ hol-
low grasp of the sacrament fostered their obsession with sermons, their
neglect of moral virtue, their penchant for idleness, and their spectacular
fissiparousness.33
The Laudian attitudes of many Restoration clergy were also in tension
with the views of other conformist divines. The Laudians’ ‘Arminianism’,
of course, did not sit well with every son of the church, but neither did
their sacramental theology.34 Many other ‘Arminian’ champions of the
eucharist were so absorbed by anti-papal polemic, and in particular, by
the need to refute Rome’s claims about the ontological status and efficacy
of the eucharist, that they seemed to put little stress at all on its inherent
31 GU, 21; Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament, 14; Patrick, Christian sacrifice, 16–29; Smith, Sermon
about frequent communion, 27.
32 GU, 32. See also 51.
33 Ibid., 2–6, 28–9, quotation on 28; IS, 124–5. See also Smith, Sermon about frequent communion,
33; Horneck, Crucified Jesus, 237; Patrick, Christian sacrifice, sig. b1r.; Stillingfleet, Sermon preach’d
before the king, 8–11; Hickes, Discourse to prove that the strongest temptations are conquerable, esp. 1–2;
Hickes, Case of infant-baptism, 33–4, 49–50; Laney, Six sermons, 30–32; Sherlock, Practical Christian,
173, 177. Others refuted puritan claims by insisting that the eucharist was as much of a ‘converting
ordinance’ as the Word or prayer (Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament, 92–5).
34 See also Sherlock, Practical Christian, 11–12; Tyacke, ‘Religious controversy’, 601–2.
 The worship of God 185
significance, and took care not to describe it as an altar sacrifice admin-
istered by a priest. Other divines expressed their concern for recalcitrants
who remained outside the church by offering extremely reserved interpre-
tations of the sacrament as a remembrance and sign, sticking to the letter of
the Thirty-Nine Articles.35 Only anti-popish hysteria, Addison surmised,
could provoke these moves and others like them, which included attempts
to distance the notion of the real presence from the bread and wine and
reserve it to the communicant. The functional, Laudian understanding of
the Christian eucharistic sacrifice as a conduit of grace went well beyond
the church’s official position that sacraments were external signs of an
inward grace – if it did not flatly contradict it.36
Divines like Addison also pointed their fingers at conforming ministers
who had misleadingly described the power of the Lord’s Supper in an oth-
erwise laudable effort to stress the importance of doing good. Reticent like
Addison and others with Laudian views to make theological claims that
would ignite political conflicts,37 and committed, like them, to refuting
atheism and extreme forms of Calvinism, these divines had focused exces-
sively on the practical role of the sacraments in the cultivation of virtue.
The sacraments, they argued, were more than proofs of obedience, and
were perhaps pledges of grace, but above all, they were divinely ordained
props to morality.38 This position, many feared, risked encouraging ordi-
nary people to grossly underestimate the importance of the sacrament, and
even hazarded a fundamental misunderstanding of what it meant to be a
Christian.
For in the end, Addison and his allies reminded their audiences, it was
the two sacraments, not the cultivation of morality, that distinguished
Christians from other humans. Only they obeyed Christ’s command to
engage in the rituals of baptism and communion. These practices were
excellent vehicles of virtue, but they had no inherent moral content. Con-
sidered in terms of their peculiar characteristics, neither sacrament was
part of a religion of nature; each was a channel of grace reserved for God’s

35 See, for example, Worthington, ῾ΥΠΟΤ´ΥΠΩΣΙΣ ῾ΥΓΙΑΙΝ´ΟΝΤΩΝ Λ´ΟΓΩΝ, 44–7; Ellis, Catechism;
Stillingfleet, Sermon preach’d before the king; Lloyd, Sermon preached before the king, 17–18; Cud-
worth, Discourse concerning the true notion of the Lord’s Supper, 1–36; More, Brief discourse of the real
presence.
36 See also Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament; Smith, Frequent communion, 19; Barrow, Brief
exposition.
37 See, for example, Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament, 6–7; Barrow, Exposition, 215–16.
38 See, for example, Stillingfleet, Sermon preach’d before the king; Fowler, Principles and practices
of certain moderate divines; Fowler, Design of Christianity; Fowler, A catechism; Fowler, Libertas
evangelica; Fowler, Sermon preached before the judges.
186 Religion
people. On this view, there was no more obvious way to renounce Chris-
tianity than to reject its sacraments.39 It was precisely God’s institution of
baptism and communion that made it a gross error to speak of a solely
‘moral religion’ that was still Christian. ‘I am of opinion’, Addison wrote,
‘that one reason why so many who call themselves Christians do neglect
the receiving of the sacrament is their guiding themselves herein by mere
natural conscience’.40 It was simply crucial, Addison and others insisted,
to understand the function of sacraments in terms of both independent
human reason and divine justice. Other divines appeared to think that these
subtle distinctions obscured the practical importance of the sacraments in
the moral lives of ordinary people more than they clarified the essence
of Christianity. Such differences among the clerical elite were rarely the
subject of open debate within the Restoration church. But they could have
serious political consequences when they affected the way in which divines
engaged in wider controversies over the church’s future constitution.

Holy materials, pious bodies

Laudians believed that the most significant human transactions with the
divine should be aided and mediated not simply by the eucharistic sacrifice,
but by the entire material and ceremonial apparatus of the church, and
the bodies of the congregants themselves. Worship that was sensually rich
would not distract or mislead as long as it was properly organized, explained,
and understood. Indeed it was difficult for most people to reach God
without physical props, for pious mental states could ordinarily be achieved
only with the aid of material objects and bodily effort. The media of the
Laudian style thus extended well beyond the altar to the eyes, ears, mouths,
arms, and legs in the congregation, to every corner of the house of God,
and to every rite performed there.
The very identity of the resurrected Church of England, after all, was
bound up with the reconstruction, consecration, and beautification of
battered houses of worship in the wake of the English Revolution.41 Church
construction provided a space for the fitful flourishing of the Laudian style
after the monarchy was restored and after London was consumed by fire six
years later. In a 1678 letter soliciting subscriptions for rebuilding St Paul’s
cathedral, which had gone down in flames in 1666, Edward Stillingfleet
39 GU, 35–8; Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament, 45–53.
40 GU, 36. See also Laney, Six sermons, 30–32.
41 South, Twelve sermons, 321–2; Gunton, Ortholatreia, ‘Preface’; Cave, Primitive Christianity, 150;
Allestree, Works, part 1, 286.
 The worship of God 187
condemned ‘those who love a thrifty and parsimonious religion’ and anyone
who believed that ‘whatever is beyond the bounds and measures of necessity
and conveniency in the worship of God, is vain and superstitious, and
therefore deserves no encouragement at all’. No church splendour could be
found in the earliest days of Christianity, he admitted, but this was simply a
sign of the ‘poverty and persecution’ under which the church had laboured
in its infancy. For once the first Christians had ‘respite and ease’, Stillingfleet
recalled, they immediately ‘erected lofty and beautiful churches’.42 Other
divines looked for basic standards farther afield. The solemnity of Islam
in Morocco, Addison observed, began with the ‘reverend decency’ of their
mosques, ‘in which this country abounds, and to which the Moors perform
a great reverence and liberality, never suffering them to be profaned, nor
to want a competent stock to keep them in repairs’.43 Both the particular
history of God’s people and the global history of civilization pointed to the
need to approximate the divine majesty in places of worship to the tiny
extent that it was humanly possible.
In fact, the historical record left no doubt that natural law itself dictated
that ‘all things either pertaining to the immediate worship of God, or
belonging to the government of that society, be performed with the greatest
solemnity and decency that may be’, as Stillingfleet put it.44 Addison drew
the same conclusion in his studies of modern Judaism and Islam. He noted
that Muslims, for instance, ‘have in all their dominions made provision
for solemnity in their worship’, and he concluded that the basic need for
‘decent celebration’ had ensured that all civilizations exhibited the same set
of ‘ritual circumstances’: ‘a dedicate place, separate time, solemn actions,
prescript forms’. Each society had been induced to adopt these forms ‘by
the more lasting and regular principles of reason, or in imitation of some
people of another persuasion, which they esteemed wise and deliberate’.
This implied not only that these formal aspects of ritual were universal
and natural, but also that specific rituals could be legitimately and laudably
transferred across religions to the extent that they conformed to natural
law. The particular rites that moved from one society to another were
usually not the result of specific divine commands. But the fact that they
42 Stillingfleet, Sir, you may perceive, sig. a1r. Stillingfleet’s Laudian inclinations have gone unnoticed,
but elsewhere in his writings, he defended bowing towards the altar and used Laud’s Star Chamber
testimony as a supporting authority (Stillingfleet, Conferences, 211–13, 225–6). For another supposed
moderate with similar views, see Cave, Primitive Christianity, 139, 144. For early Stuart precedents,
see Lake, ‘Laudians and the argument from authority’.
43 WB, 134, 136. For a similar description of Moroccan Judaism as corresponding with Laudian ideals,
see PSJ, 89–93, 105–9.
44 Stillingfleet, Works, II, ‘Irenicum’, 212–13.
188 Religion
were, strictly speaking, indifferent things, did not necessarily detract from
their value, or the need to take the greatest care with them. Muslims, for
instance, understood this well. The Prophet, Addison argued, could never
be ‘blamed for not leaving decretals in the rites of worship, because their
nature is of so great an indifferency, that no religion doth acknowledge them
to be determined in every particular by any law meriting, or usurping,
the title “divine”’. Yet the profound functional significance of Muslim
rituals as both forms of civility and aids to commerce with God was not
necessarily attenuated by the fact that there was nothing ‘in themselves to
make them originally necessary’.45 Here again, Restoration Laudians were
using historical evidence to move beyond the mild adiaphorist arguments
with which many other churchmen remained content.
On the terrain of sacred history, these same divines tended to emphasize
the functional significance of ritual in Mosaic and Temple Judaism, and
then hint at the implications of this discussion for the proper conduct
of Christian worship.46 As Stillingfleet recalled in his letter on St Paul’s,
God had given the order to build Solomon’s temple ‘not merely for the
conveniency of that way of worship; but with all the splendor and greatness
which was agreeable to the majesty of that God who was worshipped
therein’.47 Within the temple, beautiful objects and ceremonies could
prompt worshippers to contemplate the divine presence and aid them in
doing so. Tenison provided an extremely vivid and suggestive account of
the ancient Israelite example in his 1678 treatise on idolatry. Ceremonial
circumspection was certainly wise, he said. But while the Reformers fell over
themselves to escape from the clutches of popery, they had lost themselves
in confusion. For all the dangers of ritual, it remained true that material
aids to devotion were necessitated by the very human trait that could lead
to idolatry: what Tenison termed ‘the natural inclination of the mind in
this body to help itself by sensible objects’.

45 WB, 132–4, emphasis added. See also Frantz, English traveller, 106–7. For a similar and more elaborate
and learned defence of the Anglican liturgy, sacraments, and ceremonies on similar grounds, with
more attention to the primitive church, see Falkner, Libertas ecclesiastica. For another discussion
of the universal characteristics of piety drawn from a theory of natural law and civility, see Cave,
Primitive Christianity, 124–5, 161, 285. Stillingfleet (Sir, you may perceive, sig. a1r.) argued accordingly
that to do away with decency in worship would make the English less civilized than Turks and
Scythians. For other examples, see Horneck, Crucified Jesus, 24–5, 86–8; and Gunton, Ortholatreia,
which refers explicitly to travel literature, and to a wide variety of Protestant authorities from Arthur
Hildersham and William Perkins to Laud, in support of a strong argument for the importance of
bodily worship.
46 See also Doll, ‘Architectural expression of primitive Christianity’; Chaundy-Smart, ‘Moral shecinah’;
Du Prey, Hawksmoor’s London churches.
47 Stillingfleet, Sir, you may perceive, sig. a1r.
 The worship of God 189
For the entire history of mankind, Tenison argued, God had enabled
his people to simultaneously avoid idolatry and cultivate an appreciation
for his presence by means of his shechinah, the divine ‘face’, ‘dwelling’, or
‘visible glory’. The shechinah assumed a multitude of forms, and appeared
with varying levels of immediacy to God’s people, depending on their
historical circumstances and civilizational capacities. The Mosaic ark of
the covenant was one of the earliest ‘instruments’ of the shechinah. It was
‘neither God nor his image’, certainly not, strictly speaking, an object of
worship; but it was a sacred object that brought people in mind of the divine
presence. The ‘fabric’ in the tabernacle likewise ‘help[ed] the imaginations
of the Jews, by a visible scheme of his throne and footstool’. Even the many
accoutrements of priests served this function. In Solomon’s temple, the
‘apparatus’ of the shechinah also included ‘the sacerdotal appendages of the
ephod and the breastplate’ as well as the Urim and Thummim of the high
priest.48
The potential implications of all this for Christian piety were clear,
but anyone who dared to explore them entered dangerous confessional
territory. ‘This argument of God’s shechinah may be many ways useful’,
Tenison concluded, ‘if intelligent persons draw such inferences from it as
it offers to their judgment’. Yet he would ‘only hint at some of them’.
‘In the point of making religious statues or pictures’, he was willing to
say, ‘if anything of the divinity be to be portrayed, we learn from hence
what it may be, not the Godhead but the shechinah’. To be sure, the
shechinah was now with Christ in heaven, no longer on earth, ‘and not
visibly in a church, as the shechinah was in the temple of the Jews’. Yet
‘the expressing of it with the best lights and shadows of art may therefore
be not unlawful’. Tenison admitted, though, that ‘I know not whether I
ought to plead for the expediency of it in common use’.49 Holy images,
it appeared, could in fact be used carefully to spur states of devotion, but
the risk of slipping into idolatry was severe. ‘When any such pictures hang
before us’, Tenison wrote, each worshipper needed to ‘exalt the phantasm
into mental astonishment, and not dwell on the mean portrait’. A holy
image was ‘an help to excite our mind’, not to limit its reach. Tenison
therefore embraced much of the physical apparatus of Roman Catholicism
while condemning the way popish priests and worshippers understood,

48 Tenison, Idolatry, 25, 314–15, 323–69, 389, quotations on 25, 315, 339, 343–4, 347, 368–9. See also
Stolzenberg, ‘John Spencer’, 157–8.
49 Tenison, Idolatry, 379, 382–3, 389. See also Tenison’s warning to the reader at the beginning of his
discussion (ibid., 315).
190 Religion
described, and employed it.50 Whatever Tenison’s caution here, there were
many other Restoration divines who would not have desired or dared to
go so far.
In all civilizations, these proponents of embodied piety observed, places
of worship whose material design called to mind their divine inhabitants
induced visitors there to comport themselves accordingly. They used their
own bodies, in conjunction with the material apparatus that surrounded
them, to help them honour, contemplate, and contact the divine presence,
both within the house of prayer and beyond. In Addison’s account, for
instance, the solemn setting of Moroccan mosques shaped the behaviour
of those who visited them. ‘When they come to the door of the jāmiʿ’,51 he
explained, ‘every one puts off his shoes at the threshold and then enters with
a slow pace, erect body, and eyes bashfully looking towards heaven: in this
posture they advance directly to the south side of the jāmiʿ, and they always
make their prayers towards that point, because in all their devotions they
are commanded to make them toward Mecca’.52 Such bodily significations
of honour were also natural and universal forms of religious and political
order. Their particular manifestations were diverse, wrote Samuel Parker,
but they might include ‘kneeling, lying prostrate, being bare-headed, lifting
up the hands or eyes’, ‘putting off the shoes, bowing the head, or bending
the body’. What else but natural piety and prudence, then, could have
prompted the Christian custom of bowing ‘the body, when we mention
the name of Jesus’?53 Herbert Thorndike, for one, could see no better
explanation. After all, he wrote, even the most simple heathen religions
exhibited an awareness that ‘man is compounded of soul and body, and the
worship of God, and prayer to God, is an act of the soul, which the body, by
the senses thereof, may divert the mind from, but cannot help forward it,
till by the motion and gesture of the body, the soul be engaged to attend on
that which the mind proposeth’.54 Here again Restoration divines argued
that physical forms of mediation between God and man need not lead
to idolatry. With regard to the ark of the covenant, for instance, Tenison
explained that ‘the heart was only to worship the immense God, appearing
in the shechinah; though in that act the reverence of the body could not

50 Ibid., 384, 386. On local conflicts regarding the use of images in Restoration churches, see Haynes,
Pictures and popery, esp. 102–35.
51 al-jāmiʿ (mosque).
52 WB, 149–50. Addison described a similar order, decency, and piety in Muslim rites concerning the
sick and the dead (ibid., 202–8).
53 Parker, Ecclesiastical politie, 107. See also Beveridge, Works, I, 94–6, 105.
54 Thorndike, Epilogue to the tragedy of the Church of England, book 3, 340.
 The worship of God 191
but pass towards the Ark’.55 Tenison explicitly extended this same principle
to the Laudian custom of bowing towards the altar.56 To refrain from these
practices would be to limit human devotional abilities and reject the most
basic civilizational standards of piety.
Despite their cutting-edge scholarly foundations, these arguments about
the physical dimensions of worship quickly made their way into the most
seemingly anodyne works of devotional guidance, and into the ears of
Addison’s catechumen.57 The frontispiece to Addison’s 1682 devotional
guide, An introduction to the sacrament, contained an engraving of gen-
teel worshippers kneeling to receive communion at the rails of an altar
table. Behind the altar appeared the shechinah, depicted as a ball of light
or fire surrounded by clouds (Figure 5). In Thomas Comber’s popular
guide to common prayer, the lesson was conveyed in far more spectacular
and symbolic fashion: an Anglican priest was shown performing a fiery,
smoky sacrifice of a human heart on a high altar, over which angels and the
shechinah appeared (Figure 6). Despite Tenison’s strictures, these images
muddled the issue of idolatry: they made it unclear whether readers were
to imagine churches in which the shechinah was depicted in chancel art,
actually present, or simply imagined. The text of both works, among many
other similar publications, confirmed that they were meant to normalize a
Laudian style of piety. Addison referred, for instance, to the reception of
communion at the rails of a table, and emphasized both the instrumental
and representational significance of bodily gesture. The posture of wor-
shippers embodied their eucharistic theology, delineated the sacred and
profane, and signified and helped produce their inward states.58
Many divines also extended their emphasis on the physical and temporal
dimensions of worship to prayer, a means of transacting with God that
assumed both private and public forms and reached into the daily life of
Addison’s catechumen and any ordinary Christian like him. God had never
enjoined prayer in a positive command, Addison admitted, but prayer was
nevertheless an immediate consequence of the human need to acknowledge
and worship him, and was therefore an element of natural religion. Here
again sacred and civilizational history aligned. Prayer was as old as religion
itself, Addison argued, because ‘the common light of nature sufficiently
55 Tenison, Idolatry, 344.
56 Ibid., 304. For a partial early Stuart precedent, see Swan, Profano-mastix, 19–21.
57 See among many others Smith, Sermon on frequent communion, 21; Sherlock, Practical Christian,
239–49; Glanvill, Invitation to the sacrament, 106–7; South, Twelve sermons, 323–4, 357–62, 368;
Comber, Companion to the altar; Comber, Short discourses; Beveridge, Sermon concerning the excel-
lency, 26–7.
58 IS, 113–14, 142–53. See also Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 332–3.
192 Religion

Figure 5 Frontispiece engraving for Addison’s An introduction to the sacrament (1682).

Figure 6 Engraving from Thomas Comber’s Short discourses upon the whole of common-prayer (1684).
194 Religion
directed all men to its performance’. The men of the antediluvian world,
he reminded his readers, ‘began to call upon the name of the Lord’ (Genesis
4:26), and from then on prayer remained a basic form of civilization. ‘As we
find no nation’, Addison explained, ‘was ever so barbarous as to deny the
existence of a God, so none was ever heard of who did not own themselves
obliged to pray to that which they acknowledged for their God’. Ancient
understandings of God may have at times been extravagant or idolatrous,
but even errant pagans ‘still invoked whatsoever they called their deity’.59
Restoration divines also considered prayer to be yet another indispens-
able engine of moral virtue. Addison expressed this sentiment in The
Christians daily sacrifice, a work he composed late in life.60 He may even
have agreed with John Worthington, who argued that prayer was not only
essential to the cultivation of moral habits but also an ordinary conduit
of God’s grace, and therefore absolutely necessary for salvation.61 Views
like these put immense pressure on worshippers to pray correctly, and they
seemed to demand strictures on prayer that many other divines would
have found to be excessively exacting and possibly alienating. Addison
insisted on standardized, delimited prayer, even in private. Christians were
to request from God ‘only such as he has in his Word promised to give’.
This meant that all prayer should be ‘restrained’ to the heads of the Lord’s
Prayer, ‘an absolute perfect form by which our imperfect prayers are to be
regulated, and to be an abstract of all we are to pray for’. The Lord’s Prayer
was essentially a petition for the ability to do those things commanded
in the Decalogue: to glorify God, establish his dominion in one’s heart,
and obey his will. It was yet another central aspect of Christianity that
had been inherited from ancient Judaism. Indeed the basic argument of
The Christians daily sacrifice was that prayer was the primary way in which
individual, ordinary Christians could and should emulate the sacrifices of
the Israelites on their own, and partake more generally in the virtues of
ancient Judaism. God ‘so ordered the composure of this prayer’, Addison
argued, ‘that it might differ as little as possible from the Jewish form’. The
prayer was ultimately linked, though, to the original religion of mankind
and the law of nature. ‘I think’, Addison declared, ‘there is none (of what
religion soever) who own God to be the Father, or maker of heaven and
earth, who may not pertinently make use of the Lord’s Prayer, and desire
everything that therein is set down’.62
59 CDS, 8–12, quotations on 8–9. See also 45–9, 93, 96 (96 is mispaginated).
60 See also Patrick, Brief exposition, esp. sig. a2v.
61 Worthington, ῾ΥΠΟΤ´ΥΠΩΣΙΣ ῾ΥΓΙΑΙΝ´ΟΝΤΩΝ Λ´ΟΓΩΝ, 37–8.
62 CDS, quotations on 108–9, 126–7. See also Barrow, Brief exposition.
 The worship of God 195
It was crucial to come to prayer with grace, zeal, and charity, but in
Addison’s view, purely mental preparation was insufficient. Here again, the
physical actions of worshippers were thought to be akin in their function
to the sacred objects in the church to which those worshippers’ devotion
might be directed. In this sense, the bodily dimension of correct Christian
prayer, in Addison’s view, was little different from the pious comportment
of the Jews and Muslims he had observed in Morocco. ‘The observance
the body ought to pay unto God in prayer’, Addison insisted, ‘consists in
such lowly, decent, and reverent gestures, as may testify the humility and
reverence of the soul. Bowing, prostration, and the like external acts of
religious worship, are a particular right belonging to God’. Devotion was a
condition of the mind, but the bodily dimensions of prayer, as in worship
more generally, had crucial significative and instrumental purposes. Such
gestures, though ‘the least considerable thing in prayer’, do ‘serve to express
and signify the sincere humility of the soul’. If Addison had stopped here,
there would have been few conforming divines who would have disagreed.
Yet he went on to suggest that like Christian ceremonies and holy objects,
prayerful postures could ward off wandering thoughts, which themselves
could become, in effect, a form of idolatry. And from a more positive point
of view, Addison concluded, ‘your gestures being thus conducted, they will
help to heighten inward devotion in your self, and be a happy means to
raise the devotions of others’.63 Gestures in prayer were devoid of intrinsic
importance, but their function was so profound that in practice, they were
essential to proper worship at home and in the house of God.64

Clergy by repute
At the centre of this entire vision of human transactions with God, of
course, was the priest, the man ‘placed in a middle station between God
and the people’, as Addison put it, ‘to present God with the people’s
petitions and to bring down his blessings upon them’.65 Conformist divines

63 CDS, 81–2 (mispaginated), 91–3 (quotations). See also Beveridge, Works, I, 106; Beveridge, Sermon
concerning the excellency, 8, 28. For an early Stuart precedent, see Robartes, Gods holy house and
service, 62–3.
64 For Addison’s use of Islamic and Jewish history to urge strict conformism in common prayer, see,
for example, CDS; WB, 137, 147–53. For a similar argument, see Beveridge, Works, VIII, 502. For
the presentation of this position as a via media between Catholicism and puritanism, see CDS,
sig. b1, 47–8. For a summary of shared Anglican perspectives on prayer in this period, see Spurr,
Restoration Church of England, 332–40.
65 MP, 22. On ministers as intercessors with God for the forgiveness of sins, see Addison, Catechumen,
35–6.
196 Religion
defended their role in much the same way they defended other forms of
pious mediation: a clerical order that claimed divine descent, they insisted,
was a natural, civil, and spiritual necessity.66 The clergy were keenly aware
that their central position in English society depended upon whether their
pastoral program was deemed to be useful and legitimate. They described
their relationship to the state and to the people in pragmatic and reformist
terms, and thereby avoided both provocative claims for priestly jurisdiction
and a purely defensive response to anticlerical sentiment.67 There may
have been latent theoretical conflicts between ‘Erastian’ and ‘divine right’
accounts of religious authority in this period, but most of the time, church
leaders simply did not address the issue from a theoretical perspective. And
while the leading spokesmen of the church were certainly clericalist in their
outlook, they were by no means reactionary.68
Despite Addison’s exalted view of the proper role of priests in both
secular and ecclesiastical affairs, his Modest plea for the clergy simply offered
a philological and historical argument for harmonious relations between
church and state, and a response to critics of the clergy that claimed to meet
them halfway. He addressed pious and impious readers of varying degrees
of acuity in the same work, by moving from arguments about natural
and civil religion to a basic account of the divine calling of the Christian
clergy and a series of sympathetic addresses to less sophisticated critics
of priestly authority. His historical defence of the divine and apostolic
appointment of the clergy was mostly unremarkable.69 The most telling
aspect of it was an absence: it contained none of the rabid episcopalianism
so often attributed to Restoration ‘high churchmen’. Addison suggested,
for instance, that there existed only scattered evidence for the forms of
ordination used in the early church. Even where there were clear primitive
patterns, he concluded, ‘the form of ordination being only of ecclesiastical
institution, the churches might inoffensively vary therein’. He made no
mention of the special role of bishops, and while he would almost certainly
have endorsed their status in England’s ecclesiastical hierarchy, he probably
would have done so on functional grounds.70

66 See above, 137–45.

67 See, for example, Womock, Moses and Aaron, 33–4. Rose, Godly kingship, 129–62, provides ample
evidence for this but nevertheless emphasizes instead that ‘several hints of restraints on the supremacy
by those who advocated iure divino episcopacy can be found’ (154). For a better general description,
see Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 164. Contrast Collins, ‘Restoration bishops and the royal
supremacy’.
68 For fuller discussion and full references to other commentaries from the period besides Addison’s,
see Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 166–233.
69 MP, 30–39. 70 Ibid., 40–55, quotation on 54.
 The worship of God 197
What alarmed Addison most was not the presbyterians who quibbled
about episcopal ordination, but the men and women who had been making
far more radical claims about clerical authority since the Civil Wars and
Interregnum: ‘the Socinian’, ‘the enthusiast’, and all those ‘who opine the
ministry to be a thing of labor rather than honor, and to which abilities,
without authority, are sufficient’.71 Even if one left aside the question of
how such abilities would be verified, Addison argued, this line of thought
had disastrous implications for religious and civil order. If it were accepted,
the pulpit and the scriptures themselves would become sites of ‘freakish
expositions’, and fall prey to ‘all the follies, dotages, and impostures of
the ignorant and confident’. This expository chaos would eventually lead
to moral anarchy, since it would no doubt resurrect the principles of the
antinomians, ‘who have expounded the Scripture out of its senses, and
have so commented the laws thereof until they have in them no manner
of obligation’. In time, deranged students of scripture would make ‘the
creation of the world an allegory, the redemption of man a metaphor,
and heaven and hell but a trope’. This breakdown in clerical authority
would then immediately spread to the state, because religious imposture
was a ubiquitous tool of rebels, and because the foundations of authority in
the ecclesiastical and political spheres were fundamentally similar. ‘When
everyone has a liberty to teach what and whom he pleaseth’, Addison wrote,
‘we may conclude from the natural pride of men, they will desire to raise a
sect and become head of a party’, claiming to do godly work for ‘the public
welfare’.72 At the same time, the principle that ‘the power and efficacy of
God’s ordinances’ depended ‘upon the holiness of those who dispense them’
would be extended to the authority of ‘earthly princes’, allowing everyone to
forget that kings’ ‘deportment, though it sink below their character . . . doth
no way evacuate the power of their commission’.73 Anyone who denied
clerical authority was likely to deny monarchical authority.
Addison’s penchant for analogies between ecclesiastical and civil insti-
tutions certainly reflected his belief that they shared a divine origin, but
most of the time, it simply betrayed the close attention he paid to the
worldly conditions for the perpetuation of the priesthood. In the end,
he believed, the social status of the clergy rested less on grace, power, or
law than on terrestrial authority and reputation.74 Addison believed that
‘reputation goes further than power’, and he insisted that no social group
better confirmed the truth of this adage than the clergy did. ‘The success

71 Ibid., 55–61, quotations on 55–6. 72 Ibid., 65–9, quotations on 66–8.

73 Ibid., 82–5 (quotations), 104–6. 74 See above, 141–5.
198 Religion
and belief of their office, and consequently the welfare of religion’, Addi-
son argued, depended to a great degree on ‘the credit of their persons’.
And yet no other order of men had been more ‘scornfully exposed’ in
public throughout history.75 The popular anticlericalism that had recently
descended upon England, he argued, was as ancient a presence in the world
as the honour paid by wise princes to their priests. It ‘has ever been the
practice of unreasonable men’, Addison wrote. ‘Scoffers and cruel mockers’
of the clergy were nearly always ‘persons of corrupt judgments – factious,
schismatical, and apostate’.76
While Addison was sure that open contempt for the clerical order was by
definition illegitimate because it mistook men for the office they occupied,
he did not mean to deny the truth of many anticlericals’ substantive
criticisms of individual clergy. He sensitively addressed a number of them
in the course of the Plea. He admitted that clerical pride, for instance,
was a serious problem, but he pinned it squarely on many bishops’ abuse
of their offices, in keeping with his views on the causes of the Civil Wars
and the course of ecclesiastical history itself. Christ, Addison argued, had
intimated that the ‘prelation and government which was to be in his church’
should not be of this world, ‘not a government whose dominion is despotic;
the coercion imperious; the laws externally compulsory; and the titles big
and swelling’. Instead the church ought to be ‘paternal and persuasive,
and the laws to be full of admonition, and the titles of the governors to
be significative of affections and labor, of burden and humility; and the
highest dignity, a meek ministration, and a laborious employment’. In the
end, Addison was willing to admit that all clergy were by the nature of
their office more prone to pride than other men.77
Equally receptive to outcries against ‘clerical splendor’, Addison went so
far as to report Godfrey Goodman’s interpretation of the English Revo-
lution as a providential judgment on the squandering of church revenues
by the conforming clergy.78 The clergy’s ‘eager hunting after preferments
and promotions in the church’, he admitted, was a serious, inexcusable
problem that exposed Anglican ministers to the ridicule of Catholics and
‘fanatics’ alike.79 Yet he insisted here and elsewhere that radical solutions
to clerical malfeasance were out of place. Reform was urgently needed, but
the behaviour of individual clergy had no bearing upon the authority they
wielded. Like so many of his allies in the church, Addison managed to
75 MP, 2–3. 76 Ibid., 71–8, quotations on 76, 78. 77 Ibid., 99–102, quotations on 99–100.
78 See Goodman, Two great mysteries, which was dedicated to Cromwell.
79 MP, 107–22, quotation on 115. Addison’s discussion here was partly drawn from Hooker, Works,
329.
 The worship of God 199
combine apparently sincere concern for priestly greed and pretence with
a vociferous assertion of clerical authority, both in his writings and in the
rest of his ministry.

The pastoral and the political

In Restoration England, nearly all questions of pastoral care slid immedi-
ately and almost imperceptibly into questions of power. This is surely part
of the reason why most experts now agree that religion was the prime mover
of politics in the reigns of Charles II and James II.80 Despite this consensus,
though, the descriptions of religious belief found in political histories of
later Stuart England tend to be paper thin. Attitudes to Protestant dissent
and theories of church governance loom as free-floating opinions or lan-
guages of ‘political thought’ that somehow gave political conflict much of
its shape and motivation. Meanwhile, deeply held convictions about the
proper worship of God and the everyday path to salvation, which were
clearly central to the lives of most political actors and usually determined
their attitudes to nonconformity and the constitution of the church, are
sidelined or dismissed.81 This way of proceeding reduces Christian poli-
tics to views on dissent and governance, or in other words, positions for
and against the basic juridical conditions for liberal religious freedom.82 It
distorts and underestimates the power and significance of religion in the
political realm, and it plays into the hands of scholars who suggest that
historians who study religious belief with recourse to mainstream human-
istic or sociological assumptions cannot properly understand it.83 This
approach also produces misleading categories of political analysis such as
‘Anglican royalism’, which serve only to reinforce the dominant, anachro-
nistic assumption among historians that this period was characterized by a
struggle for and against increased religious freedoms and progressive ideas
about church and state.
80 Miller, After the Civil Wars, 3; Scott, Algernon Sidney, 4–5; Harris, ‘Revising the Restoration’,
2; Goldie, Roger Morrice; Tyacke, ‘Introduction’, 1–26; Tyacke (ed), England’s long Reformation;
Harris, Politics under the later Stuarts; De Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration’; De Krey, ‘Between
revolutions’.
81 The rationale for this approach is usually left unstated, but it is occasionally explicit in the work of
even the best political historians. In a prominent review of Spurr, Restoration Church of England,
Harris (‘Review’, 1519) complains of how much space the book gives to ‘the rather dry topics of
piety and doctrine’. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 88, similarly dismisses ‘fussy, peripheral
disputes about liturgy and ceremony’. For a more recent example of this tendency, see Sowerby,
Making toleration. Miller, After the Civil Wars, 132–41, offers rare dissent.
82 Despite its revisionist stance against secular liberal scholarship, Clark, English society exhibits much
the same understanding of the religious context of politics.
83 For an example of this suggestion, see Gregory, ‘The other confessional history’.
200 Religion
Whatever its intuitive appeal, this take on political history does not
sit well with early modern worldviews. In general, the church’s leaders
did not approach or address issues like dissent and episcopacy in abstract,
schematic terms, or with primary reference to questions of liberty and
law. The situational judgments they made on problems of conformity and
relations between church and state were by-products of their general vision
of the Christian community, the priorities and linkages they imposed upon
Christian religious experience, and the cultural resources they employed to
express and sustain their outlooks and agendas.84 In the domain of politics,
theology was much more than a component of political theory. It often
determined when, where, how, and why men and women of faith thought
it was worth struggling for earthly things.
Only a wider and deeper perspective on the politics of religion can make
sense of the constantly mutating confrontation between the Church of
England and its challengers, and the persistent tensions within the church
itself. Anglican clergy considered, described, and defended their pastoral
vocations in a multitude of ways. Their implicit disagreements with one
another were mostly subtle matters of diverging emphases and priorities
present within a broader cultural, theological, and confessional consensus.
They rarely resulted in public debate, especially before the Glorious Rev-
olution. But they were all directly related to broader problems – dissent,
church government, irreligion, and public speech – that did. The crucial
issue, in the case of any individual minister, was not his attitude towards
specific pastoral tasks, but the place of each task within the general under-
standing of Christianity that bubbled up from the stew of his opinions
on particular topics. These composites came in far more varieties than
the usual dichotomy of ‘low’ and ‘high’ churchmanship could ever even
roughly accommodate. But in specific political moments, certain parts of
the Christian life were suddenly rendered more relevant than others. This
helped determine how leading clergy (and laity) responded to these sit-
uations, and how they fell into temporary groupings of the like-minded.
When they decided how to assert themselves in the political sphere, lead-
ing divines looked to where the most currently salient pastoral problems
fit within their broader understanding of what a Christian society should
look like.85
84 One very important aspect of this not directly addressed here is the tendency of churchmen to think
about about nonconformity in terms of the sin of schism. See Spurr, ‘Schism and the Restoration
church’.
85 What follows is a general presentation of this dynamic model for understanding the interface
between pastoral outlooks and political events. Specific examples are the subject of the next two
chapters.
 The worship of God 201
Potential cleavages lurked behind nearly every issue relating to the suc-
cessful propagation of the faith and the proper worship of God. Some
prominent Restoration clergy, for instance, were not nearly as invested
in the pastoral utility of cutting-edge forms of learning as most of the
church leadership seems to have been. Others were simply less willing to
engage directly with more subversive forms of Enlightenment in the task
of self-defence. They were loath to publicly admit, as Addison did, that
anticlericalism was ‘not the ruffianly and borish humour only of the rude
and less civilized, but even of many of those, who would be looked upon as
the great lights of deportment, and the refined and philosophical persons
of the age’.86 Divines who departed from Enlightened Anglicanism in these
ways sometimes emerged with distinct visions of Christianity, and distinct
preferences for defending and executing their pastoral agendas. Many of
them were willing to risk repeating some of the most explosive religious
conflicts of the early Stuart and Elizabethan periods. Similarly, since many
Restoration churchmen rejected ‘Arminianism’ and Laudianism, some of
the tension within the church amounted to a perpetuation of perennial rifts
within post-Reformation English Protestantism. Calvinist churchmen, or
others who were deeply committed to the fundamental importance of the
preaching of the Word, might be more hostile to Catholicism and more
sympathetic to nonconformists than divines who stressed the sacramental
life of the church. Many of these same divines also seem to have been
friendlier to scholastic divinity than their theological rivals. To this extent,
at least, the church was troubled by a rift between a more old-fashioned
Calvinist divinity and an English form of ‘Arminian Enlightenment’.87
For the most part, though, far subtler cleavages within the church
sparked the public religious conflicts of the later Stuart period. Many of
these pastoral differences arose from uncertainty about the precise lessons
afforded by the English Revolution, and the proper way of making the
case for conformity in specific crises.88 Divines who believed that cate-
chizing, for example, was the key to the recovery of the church, the state,
and the morals of the nation in the aftermath of war could easily strike a
stricter pose in politics than others. They were convinced that preaching,
disputation, conferences, and other confrontational forms of engagement
with nonconformists were comparatively ineffective, and even positively

86 MP, 4. Contrast Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 226–8, 249–69.

87 See Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce’; Pocock, Barbarism and religion, I, 13–71; Trevor-Roper, Crisis
of the seventeenth century, 179–218.
88 Compare Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 155–60; contrast Marshall, ‘Ecclesiology of the
latitude-men’.
202 Religion
destructive. Those who showed more enthusiasm for these alternative ways
of spreading the truth might become both more or less estranged from dis-
senters than divines like Addison, depending on what particular styles of
engagement they favoured. Many of the champions of catechizing were also
credal minimalists. This too could lead in more than one direction. While
Addison’s minimalism led him to argue for the wisdom of strict adherence
to the prayer book catechism, others pointed to the scripturally derived
doctrinal consensus among English Protestants in order to suggest that all
forms of catechizing – by conformists or dissenters, by laity or clergy, in
church or at home – were equally valuable. In specific situations, every one
of these lines of thought on catechizing and its relative importance could
affect a divine’s position on the issue of nonconformity.
The same attitudes towards catechesis could also help determine where
a divine stood on the proper management of public speech in the wake
of civil war. Those who believed that catechizing was an effective medium
for religious knowledge and political discipline but were wary of preaching
and disputation might, like Addison, urge self-censorship and more subtle,
‘civil’ forms of public address. Others with less confidence in all of these
techniques might favour more extreme forms of internal and external
restraint. Meanwhile, those who still deeply valued sophisticated preaching
and disputation might continue to plead for their utility, or even resolutely
defend the necessity of responding to the church’s enemies with angry
animadversion and aggressive censorship. These divines continued to see
no reason why their university training in rhetoric and dialectic should not
be directly transferred to the public defence of the church. The relationship
between education and politics remained a difficult issue on all fronts, and
it produced a dense constellation of Enlightened and non-Enlightened
approaches to publicity.
Even more central to the developing tensions within the church, per-
haps, were divergent understandings of the moral and ritual dimensions
of the search for salvation. The fashionability of anti-Calvinism and the
practical and providential lessons of civil war and revolution motivated
many divines to place immense stress on the problem of morality and its
role in the search for eternal happiness. Some became seemingly obsessed
with the antinomian tendencies of puritan piety, while others focused their
concern on atheism and irreligion. The way in which a churchman directed
his concerns about vice might help determine whether he saw fit to defend
the church as a civil religion. It could also shape the manner in which
he did so. A willingness to defend the church with reference to its civil
and moral utility could then lead a divine to abandon or slight a series of
 The worship of God 203
prevalent Anglican views on the absolute necessity of controversial institu-
tional structures and creeds. This might influence his attitudes to political
controversies over dissent and church government, and encourage him to
countenance comprehension and limited episcopacy, or at least tradition-
ally adiaphorist arguments for conformity. Yet the turn to civil religion
could also encourage a more comfortable attitude towards the necessity of
ceremony and ritual to religious experience, and thereby lead to a new sort
of Laudianism, and some degree of sympathy for Roman styles of piety.
Adiaphorist and Erastian arguments could be invaluable to all conformists
in specific polemical predicaments, but divines who placed great positive
value on the physical apparatus of worship were less likely to resort to them.
The impulse to moral renewal in the restored monarchy also fore-
grounded the questions of whether the resources of the church should be at
the centre of that renewal, and whether partnerships with extra-parochial
and even nonconformist initiatives were appropriate or necessary. Divines
who had immense faith in the role played by the sacraments in moral
regeneration were likely to think that traditional church institutions were
essential to moral reform, but they might still view extra-parochial efforts
as more complementary than threatening. The sacramentalism of others,
however, was so pronounced that they believed on theological grounds that
frequent reception of the eucharist from a properly ordained minister was
essential to moral virtue and salvation itself. Some even tended to prize the
sacraments to the extent that they sidelined the process of moral renewal,
which they knew often provoked excessive qualms about unworthiness
among parishioners, and led to less frequent reception of the sacrament.
In either case, moral reform initiatives undertaken outside of traditional
ecclesiastical institutions would be considered a threat. Other churchmen,
however, did not make holy communion essential to salvation or even
moral regeneration in the way Addison and most others did. This might
render them far more likely to countenance extra-parochial forms of moral
uplift and associations with dissent. Divergent responses to the dilemmas
of moral reform, like most of the other differences among leading divines,
remained largely implicit in the Restoration era. Only in the wake of the
Glorious Revolution, and in particular, during the reign of Anne, did they
become prominent public issues in themselves.

Enlightened Christianity
Whatever the fissures within the post-bellum Church of England, the
Enlightened Anglicanism that many of its leaders cultivated was clearly
204 Religion
one of the earliest instances of Enlightened Christianity in Europe.89 This
phenomenon is almost always described as a belated, eighteenth-century
adaptation of an essentially secularist Enlightenment. In fact, the Enlight-
ened Christians of the eighteenth century often took their cues not from
heterodox philosophers, but from leading Anglican divines. They drew, of
course, on the same late humanist culture, and took lessons from similar
memories of civil chaos. But the resemblances extended well beyond basic
tools and impulses. Anglican influence was most obvious in the Enlightened
Protestantisms of Geneva and Brandenburg-Prussia, which only prospered
once they had infiltrated the ecclesiastical and secular establishment –
an event that had occurred over half a century earlier in England. Like
Addison, Sir Joseph Williamson, and many other ‘Arminian’ Anglicans,
the great Genevan champions of Enlightened orthodoxy, Jean-Alphonse
Turretin and Jacob Vernet, were inspired by the theologians and biblical
scholars of later seventeenth-century Saumur. They also spent significant
time in England, emulated its church’s claims to natural religion and
moderation, attempted to establish civil norms for academic and public
discussion, stressed the moral example of the life of Jesus, and emphasized
the importance of catechizing.90
Even Enlightened Catholics shared common ground with their Angli-
can predecessors. This should come as no surprise, given the Restoration
church’s admiration for many aspects of post-Tridentine pastoral care.
Driven by a cultural and intellectual dynamism that partly predated the
anticlerical Enlightenment, many eighteenth-century Catholics waged war
against superstition, enthusiasm, philosophical dogmatism, and episcopal
and papal despotism. They moved away from systematic and polemical
theology in favour of ethical, pastoral, and devotional writing, and rooted
their arguments in natural theology, critical history, and erudite philol-
ogy. They often defended strict religious conformity as a form of moral
surveillance, and insisted that civility was best spread by catechizing. They
were thereby able to identify the utility of Catholicism for the welfare of
the state, and their rulers, much like English monarchs, welcomed many
of their reforms as tools of social and cultural transformation.91
89 For similar phenomena on the continent in the later seventeenth century, see Wall, ‘Religious
context of the early Dutch Enlightenment’; Touber, ‘God’s Word in the Dutch Republic’; Gierl,
Pietismus und Aufklärung; Ahnert, Religion and the origins of the German Enlightenment.
90 See, for example, Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 71–83, 128, 136, 142–9; Pocock, Barbarism and
religion, I, 50–71; V, 87–243.
91 See, for example, Lehner and Printy (eds), Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment, esp. 2–3, 11,
16–17, 27, 33, 37. On the Restoration church and Catholic Reformation piety, see Spurr, Restoration
Church of England, 372–3.
 The worship of God 205
In fact, early Enlightened Anglicanism was remarkably similar to the
Enlightened Catholicism that prospered in Germany. While they moved
more slowly than the English, priests and educated laymen in the Holy
Roman Empire reinvented their church and pursued pastoral renewal in
the shadow of the Thirty Years War, with considerable recourse to his-
torical learning. They stressed their independence from Rome and their
partnership with the state, while avoiding firm stances on the relationship
between civil and church authority. They were also willing to defend the
rightful authority of the church in a manner that did not depend on claims
about revelation. They described the church as an indispensable guardian
of religion, civilization, and morality, in order to withstand threats from
both learned critics of revealed religion and Protestant critics of the popular
superstition and traditionalist devotion of the baroque church of Rome.
They promulgated a vision of Christ as a teacher of virtue and a moulder
of good citizens. They insisted that this Christianity be disseminated by
means of catechizing, and secondarily, in simple sermons that utilized a
plain style. Virtue, they maintained, was best cultivated within the ritual
life of the church.92 Civil concord and worldly goods were best procured
within sacramental societies.
While Addison’s catechumen would hardly have concurred with every-
thing he encountered in catechisms written by Enlightened Catholics and
Protestants on the continent in the eighteenth century, he would have
found parts of them familiar, and much of their content worth appreciat-
ing. The Enlightened Anglicanism that had shaped his own upbringing as
a Christian was a pioneering phenomenon, coeval with ‘radical Enlight-
enment’ and inspirational for later pious Enlightenments on both sides
of the confessional divide. It was the product of a set of cultural condi-
tions and earthly agendas that prevailed all over Europe in the wake of the
religious wars and constitutional conflicts of the mid seventeenth century:
the ironies and ambiguities of late humanism, the imperatives of churches
and empires, the advent of elite secularity, the emergence of the human
sciences, and the recasting of nature and civilization. Only as it played out
on the ground in national and confessional power struggles was Christian
Enlightenment finally refracted into a spectrum.

92 Printy, Enlightenment and the creation of German Catholicism, esp. 1–2, 11, 25–31, 103–4, 145–55, 220.
See also Printy, ‘Intellectual origins of popular Catholicism’.
part iv

Politics
 c h a p ter 7

Restoration

Enlightened Anglicans were haunted by memories of how in their nation,

and in so many others, religious zeal and decay had led again and again to
civil chaos and tyranny. Their hopes for the future of Christ’s church and
their fears about what threatened it were shaped by these stories. No longer
confident of the abiding support of a state that had abandoned them,
persecuted them, and daily threatened to forsake them again, they took
comfort in the civil and spiritual benefits of a style of ministry and worship
that could prosper without the aid of the magistrate’s sword. They prized
diligent catechizing, measured preaching, restrained polemic, embodied
worship, a creed of virtue, and a clericalism that pretended to humility.
Yet they could never wholly agree on exactly what the English Revolution
meant for the fine-tuning of their pastoral agenda. Their commitments and
their uncertainties conspired to determine their central role in the political
struggles of post-bellum England.
The fact that Restoration-era politics were driven forward by religious
energies does not imply that this period is best understood as either the
final stage of England’s Reformation or the recurrence of an early Stuart
nightmare.1 As its more secularist interpreters have often insisted, super-
ficial continuities should never be allowed to obscure the unprecedented
ideological and practical conditions of political engagement in the reign of
Charles II.2 The novelties of mid century – material destruction, social dis-
location, sectarian proliferation, learned irreligion, common politics, and

1 Contrast Scott, Algernon Sidney; Scott, England’s troubles; De Krey, ‘Between revolutions’; De Krey,
London and the Restoration; Knights, Politics and opinion; Goldie, Roger Morrice, 150; Rose, Godly
kingship; Tyacke (ed), England’s long Reformation. For interpretations of the period that recognize the
centrality of religious commitments to political and intellectual life in the period but still attempt
to capture the fundamental novelty of these phenomena, see Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken;
Miller, After the Civil Wars; Apetrei, Women, feminism, and religion.
2 See, for example, Pincus and Houston (eds), Nation transformed; Pincus, Protestantism and patriotism;
Pincus, 1688; Knights, Devil in disguise; Knights, Representation and misrepresentation. These accounts
nevertheless tend to exaggerate or schematize the novelty of the period in a number of ways.

209
210 Politics
memories of godly rule, to name just a few – did not disappear when the
monarchy was restored.3 Each of them had to be digested and confronted
by everyone, and political conflict revolved around how this was to be
done. Despite the traditionalist rhetoric of the era, hardly anyone seriously
hoped to turn back the clock. Nothing better attests to this than the fact
that the country’s most ostensibly reactionary elites were willing to pursue
solutions to the intellectual, religious, and political challenges of the day
that their forebears would have struggled to recognize.4 This fact clarifies
another thing as well. There is only one way to efficiently sketch a thor-
oughly revised, ideologically neutral, and ultimately compelling narrative
of religious and political conflict under the later Stuarts. It is to reconsider
the pastoral and political practices of the Church of England, and their
place within that story.

Toleration in Tangier
Anyone who scratches the surface of post-bellum politics ought to notice
one particular novelty: the sporadic attempts by England’s rulers to secure
civil peace by officially permitting dissenting styles of Christian worship
either within or without the established church.5 This tack was first pursued
in earnest in the 1640s, codified by the Republic, announced by Charles II
even before he was crowned, and introduced by him for an entire year in
1672, a decade and a half before his brother’s far more notorious experiment
with it.6 Toleration quickly became a familiar political tactic. While it was
usually an Enlightened move, and typically defended with calls for peace,
moderation, civility, humanity, latitude, and charity, it was only very rarely
accepted as a political strategy or principle. It could be championed by
adherents of any ideology if the moment seemed right. For men at the
helm of the ship of state, toleration occasionally merited appreciation as
a means of control in moments of crisis. For the puritans, Catholics, and
Anglicans whom the state persecuted between the Civil Wars and the

3 On the emergence of ‘common politics’ in the revolutionary period and its perpetuation after the
restoration of the monarchy, see Peacey, Print and public politics, esp. 397–413.
4 See above, 73–205. Those who have acknowledged the novelty of the period tend to describe it
primarily in terms of the emergence of Whiggery: Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken; Champion,
‘“Religion’s safe, with priestcraft is the war”’, 548–50; Pincus, Protestantism and patriotism, 265–8,
441–52; Knights, Representation and misrepresentation, 20–21.
5 The following discussion focuses on toleration outside the church. On comprehension, or toleration
within the church, which was rarely taken seriously by conforming Anglican divines in this period,
see Spurr, ‘The Church of England, comprehension and the Toleration Act of 1689’; Spurr, ‘“Lat-
itudinarianism” and the Restoration church’; Thomas, ‘Comprehension and indulgence’; Goldie,
Roger Morrice, esp. 225–68.
6 On royalist clerics’ attitudes to toleration in the 1640s, see Milton, ‘Coping with alternatives’.
 Restoration 211
Glorious Revolution, toleration was a means of survival. For both the state
and its victims, toleration was nearly always a temporary means to a familiar,
strategic, and principled end: the achievement of an exclusive, conformist
religious settlement. Calls for toleration were symptoms of the weakness
of conformist projects at particular points in time, not early instances
of liberality and institutional secularity. Conflicts over toleration, by the
same token, were not struggles for and against increased religious freedoms
and ecclesiological progress, but rather battles in a war among competing
programs for achieving political stability and shepherding humans along
the path set by God.7
Toleration was an even more familiar experience for many English than
its official history at home would suggest, for in Charles II’s colonies, it
was the norm. Students of English toleration have always tended to focus
on the plight of persecuted minorities and policy changes in England, but
it is equally important to approach the issue from the opposite perspective.
When it is studied from an imperial vantage point, and with special refer-
ence to the supposed hub of English intolerance, the Restoration church,
toleration is suddenly shorn of the ideological significance usually attached
to it. Since the days of Laud, Anglican leaders had considered the future
of their church in global terms, and envisioned ecclesiastical and liturgi-
cal uniformity on the same scale. In most of the colonies that Charles II
ruled directly, uniformity was a stated goal, and in some places, it was
hotly pursued.8 Yet that uniformity, of course, prevailed nowhere in the
Stuart dominions: not in India, Virginia, Scotland, or England. In most
places, a de facto regime of toleration emerged instead, often with the
active support of Anglican clergy. The remarkable religious diversity of
the English colonies should not be taken to imply that colonial religion
and domestic religion were incommensurable and largely unrelated to one
another.9 To study them in isolation obscures their very similar structural
7 The available evidence concerning the arguments for toleration that proliferated late in James
II’s reign conforms to the analysis of earlier periods offered here. For further information with a
different interpretation, see Sowerby, Making toleration, esp. 57–78. Most revealing in this moment
was how tolerationists mixed libertarian and Enlightened rhetoric with the exaltation of monarchical
authority. See also Hunter, Secularization of the confessional state.
8 Bell, Imperial origins of the king’s church; Cross, Anglican episcopate; Carpenter, Protestant bishop;
Anderson, Church of England in the colonies; Russell, Fall of the British monarchies, 36–42. On
attempts to enforce conformity in Virginia, see Horn, Adapting to a new world, 394–5; Gregory, ‘The
later Stuart church and North America’, 151–3.
9 Nearly all scholars, however, have seen it this way, especially historians of England and its empire.
The rare exceptions are, revealingly, almost all studies of puritanism or Civil War-era sects written by
historians of North America who have developed expertise in English history. For exemplary work,
see Winship, Making heretics; Winship, Godly republicanism; Sutto, ‘Up in smoke’. The colonial
realm currently plays almost no role in scholarly understandings of the Church of England in the
seventeenth century.
212 Politics
underpinnings. Every locale, England included, is best understood from
a comparative and holistic perspective. From that point of view, while
the phenomenon of toleration becomes ubiquitous, the issue of toleration
becomes far less important.
Addison himself had a typical experience of colonial religious gover-
nance in the Restoration empire. The Church of England put down roots
in Africa in 1663, when Charles II sent orders through the privy council
committee that had been charged with managing the affairs of Tangier. The
king commanded the colony’s Scottish governor, Lord Teviot, to establish
uniform prayer book worship for his entire garrison.10 Addison and the
other clergy who served the colonial population were, strictly speaking,
military chaplains, and meetings of the vestry that managed the city’s
ecclesiastical affairs were called by the governor.11 For his most ambitious
imperial project, Charles II had settled on an approach to religious order
that consisted with his earlier decision to pursue uniformity in England.12
The only clear difference between religious policy in colonies like Tang-
ier and religious policy at home was the degree to which lay men and
institutions managed to dominate affairs abroad.13
The most significant variation across the empire was to be found not in
royal policy but in its execution. In Tangier a variety of economic, military,
diplomatic, and political considerations immediately stalled the regime’s
conformist project, and resulted in de facto toleration. The prerogatives

10 TNA CO 279/2, f. 75r. See also CO 279/1, f. 100r. For the larger context, see Griffin, Regulating
religion and morality.
11 TNA CO 279/1, f. 6r.; CO 279/6, f. 119v.; CO 279/34, 50, 130. Tangier’s chaplains were paid
through the military establishment that funded the colony, and given housing by the king. The
vestry operated from at least 1666. It appears that no bishop had a role in the ecclesiastical affairs
of the colony until the later 1670s. See Yeo, ‘A case without parallel’, 458–9.
12 On the restored church in England, see Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 29–61; Bosher, Making
of the Restoration settlement; Green, Re-establishment of the Church of England; Seaward, Cavalier
parliament, 162–95.
13 Whether or not prayer book worship was formally required, Anglicanism in the colonies was
often governed by means of a direct extension of the king’s prerogative, without the support of
canon law. This situation prevailed in royal colonies like Jamaica, Virginia, Carolina, Barbados,
the Leeward Islands, and Bombay, but also in chartered colonies with no Anglican establishment.
This local trend of secular religious governance was centralized between 1675 and 1690 in the
Lords of Trade and Plantation. See Manross (ed), Fulham papers, xiv–xix; Bennett, ‘English bishops
and imperial jurisdiction’; Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 17–36; Horn, Adapting to a new world,
381–418; Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism; Seiler, ‘Anglican parish in Virginia’; Gragg, Englishmen
transplanted, 68–86; Ames, ‘Role of religion in the transfer and rise of Bombay’; Haffenden,
‘Anglican Church in Restoration colonial policy’; Carpenter, Protestant bishop, 250–80; Cross,
Anglican episcopate, 25–51; TNA CO 279/12, ‘To the most reverend Father in God Gilbert Lord
Archbishop of Canterbury his Grace’ (unfoliated). Effectual episcopal intervention and formal
episcopal jurisdiction were both rare before the 1690s, despite the interest of Henry Compton and
many others in the extension of spiritual lordship to the colonies.
 Restoration 213
of empire-building clashed with the regime’s pure vision for a Protestant
colony. The government’s ambivalence was embodied in the governor
himself. Charles had chosen Teviot for his military and political experience,
but he had to square his decision with the uncomfortable fact that Teviot
was a Catholic, and no ordinary Catholic at that: before serving with
Addison in Dunkerque as Charles’s viceroy, Teviot had spent his entire
military career of eighteen years in the armies of Louis XIV. At first the
Tangier committee puzzled over how Teviot could lead an Anglican colony,
and some members suspected his loyalty.14 ‘I am sorry to see a Catholic
governor sent to command there’, wrote one of them, Samuel Pepys, late
in 1662, ‘where all the rest of the officers almost are such already’.15 In
fact, around half of the soldiers in Tangier looked to Rome for spiritual
guidance.16
Charles nonetheless ordered Teviot to enforce Anglican worship
throughout the colony and to ‘incline all your garrison to conform them-
selves therewith, by your own good example’.17 Tangier’s Catholic governor
was asked (and apparently agreed) to coax his soldiers into Addison’s con-
gregation by regularly attending Anglican services himself. While the polit-
ical loyalty of non-Protestants would indeed become the decisive issue in
Tangier’s religious politics, Charles believed that the governor, at least, was
worthy of his trust. In the king’s distinctively post-revolutionary approach
to leading the Church of England, this was the paramount consideration.
Teviot’s loyalty and skills would always trump his personal beliefs, as long
as he had no scruples about publicly promoting the king’s church and his
conformist policies.18
When Addison began his work in Tangier, he faced many more obstacles
to Anglican uniformity than the Catholicism of Teviot and other soldiers
who had joined him on his voyage there. In North Africa, as in Jamaica and
Bombay, the English did not settle an area uninhabited by Europeans; they
annexed an Iberian colony and absorbed a portion of its population. In
Bombay and Tangier the fate of this population was mostly determined by
the 1661 marriage treaty with Portugal, which ensured that all Portuguese
Catholic soldiers and civilians would be able to retain their property and

14 TNA CO 279/2, ff. 70r.–72v.

15 Pepys, Diary, III, 283. There was evidently some genuine cause for worry: as governor of Dunkerque,
Teviot had adopted a policy much more favourable to Catholics than his presbyterian predecessor,
Robert Harley. See Grose, ‘England and Dunkirk’; TNA SP 29/4, f. 54.
16 TNA CO 279/2, ff. 70r., 74v. 17 TNA CO 279/2, f. 75r.
18 On the Catholic loyalist claims Charles was implicitly accepting here, see Bulman, ‘Publicity and
popery on the Restoration stage’.
214 Politics
freely practice their religion.19 As long as some Portuguese remained in
Tangier, toleration would be a direct result of the diplomatic circumstances
of the colony’s establishment.
Most Portuguese in fact left when the English occupied the colony
in February 1662. But an important contingent of Catholics and Jews
remained.20 The Roman remnant eventually became part of a much wider
Catholic community, thanks to a convergence of diplomatic and military
necessities. Eighty Portuguese cavalrymen stayed in Tangier to serve in the
English army. They were joined by secular priests who served the diocese of
Tangier’s cathedral of St Dominic, and by a few Dominican friars who lived
in the monastery next door.21 The Portuguese were soon joined by Irish
and Scottish Catholic soldiers from the English army. Masses celebrated in
the cathedral drew together priests and soldiers from Portugal, England,
Scotland, and Ireland. As early as 1662, Irish and Scottish soldiers were
marrying Irish, Scottish, and Portuguese women there in equal numbers
to the Portuguese men entering into matrimony.22 These impromptu,
international gatherings in the African cathedral would have looked much
like the Roman services that were being held under diplomatic cover in
London chapels at the very same time.
The colonial regime also had to consider the status of the city’s Jews
and Muslims. Here economic and political considerations reigned, and
the English emulated the policies that had long prevailed in the Iberian
colonies of North Africa.23 Islam in Tangier was a minor issue. Few Muslim
traders seem to have resided there; Muslim diplomatic figures, spies, and
refugees seem to have visited only briefly; and Muslim slaves were probably
deemed unworthy of accommodation. There is no evidence of any Muslim
place of worship.24 Tangier’s Jewish question was more complicated and
ultimately more important. For centuries both European and Maghribi
Jews had been essential to the economic and political infrastructure of
19 Chalmers, Collection of treaties, 287–8. This mirrored the treaty’s provisions for the Portuguese in
Bombay and the household of the queen consort in England. See Foster, English factories in India,
38.
20 Davis, Queen’s Royal Regiment, I, 29–30. Evidence for the continuity of the Jewish population is
scanty but see TNA CO 279/2, f. 115r.; BL MS Sloane 3509, f. 221r.; Israel, Diasporas within a
diaspora, 158–9.
21 Davis, Queen’s Royal Regiment, I, 31; TNA CO 279/7, f. 159; CO 279/8, ff. 49, 71, 87, passim
(unfoliated).
22 Diocese of Tangier, Registos paroquiais, 456–9.
23 Israel, Diasporas within a diaspora. Jews in cities controlled by the Iberian powers, however, were
subjected to a complex ghetto arrangement modelled on the localities in Catholic Europe where
Jews were tolerated.
24 On the thornier issue of Christian slaves aboard Moroccan and Algerian ships in Tangier’s harbor,
see TNA CO 279/2, ff. 70r.–71r.; CO 279/4, f. 141.
 Restoration 215
North Africa. They enabled Christian–Muslim exchange and diplomacy
by coordinating trade as merchants and by serving every political power
in the region as secretaries, envoys, and spies.25 The English were well
aware that Tangier simply would not become an important and secure port
unless they could hire Jewish spies and convince Jewish merchants to reside
in the city.26 In 1663, while the Tangier committee pondered the position of
Catholics, it also stewed over the question of whether ‘it shall be permitted
the Jews to have a synagogue’. Once erected, Tangier’s synagogue was the
third to appear in the empire.27
The regime was aware from the beginning that a number of circum-
stances would retard the achievement of Anglican uniformity in the colony.
The privy council immediately added a proviso to their orders for Teviot to
enforce the Book of Common Prayer on a city filled with so many Jews and
Catholics. ‘Because the nature and situation of the place, and the persons
that are to resort to it and inhabit it, are not likely at first to conform there-
unto’, they wrote, ‘we are content that you connive at the Roman Catholic
worship for the satisfaction of those that shall be of that profession, as also
at a synagogue for the Jews in case they desire it, and that they be content
to exercise their religion without offence or scandal to the government’.28
The regime’s bottom line, here and elsewhere in the post-bellum empire,
was the relationship between religion and political stability. As long as these
non-Anglican populations remained quiescent under English rule (and in
certain respects, actively loyal), their temporary religious freedom was an
economic, diplomatic, political, and military necessity. Charles II adopted
similar policies in Jamaica, Barbados, Carolina, Madras, and Bombay, for
similar reasons.29
The king did have a plan for eventually achieving religious conformity
in Tangier, however unrealistic parts of it might have been. The Crown,
much like it did in Jamaica and Bombay, made a serious effort to limit
the future presence of Catholic clergy and worship in the colony. Their
policy was one of attrition, crafted to honour their agreement with the
25 On mercantile and political relationships between Jews and Christians in North Africa the best
account is Israel, Diasporas within a diaspora. On Jews living in Moroccan and Ottoman dominions
in North Africa, see Schroeter, Sultan’s Jew; Hirschberg, History of the Jews in North Africa; Serfaty,
Les courtisans juifs.
26 Bodl MS Rawl.A.255, f. 55v.
27 TNA CO 279/2, ff. 70r.–71r. The others were in London and Barbados. On Barbados, see Arbell,
‘Barbados’; Samuel, Review of the Jewish colonists.
28 TNA CO 279/2, f. 75r., emphasis added.
29 Haffenden, ‘Anglican Church in Restoration colonial policy’, 174; Stern, Company-state, 100–118;
Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 17–19; Penny, Church in Madras, 18; Ames, ‘Role of religion in the
transfer and rise of Bombay’.
216 Politics
Portuguese, but eventually render it irrelevant. Teviot was told to allow
the community of Portuguese priests to shrink as its current members
perished by refusing to replace them, and to confine Catholic worship to
the cathedral and the monastery. All other ecclesiastical properties were to
be confiscated and turned into military facilities or Anglican churches. The
regime’s plan for the Jews was to hasten their conversion, under Addison’s
leadership.30 Charles II promoted the eventual Anglicanization of the city
to the extent that it was consistent with his overall goals for the colony and
his promises to Portugal. Teviot was repeatedly reminded to pursue this
strategy and to insist on loyalty from the Portuguese. After the governor’s
death in 1664, this remained the regime’s explicit policy.31
While the Tangier authorities rarely questioned the political quiescence
of the Portuguese, they were constantly suspicious of the Jews, whose
presence in the city was always tenuous. The regime clearly placed strict
limits on its tolerance. While Maghribi Jews were economically and polit-
ically useful to the colony, they also served its military and political rivals
in the region. Their loyalty, Tangier’s leaders reckoned, could never be
assured. Even before he left England for Tangier, Teviot asked the com-
mittee ‘whether in case of war with the Moors the Jews shall be continued
in Tangier, being of little advantage to the garrison and very apt to give
intelligence to the enemy’.32 He made clear that for him, whatever the
value of Jews as informers, translators, and diplomats, their economic role
was paramount – and irrelevant in wartime. The governor was apparently
told to send the Jews away whenever he thought it wise. When hostilities
with Ghaylān were about to begin in 1664, he suspended trade with the
interior, removed all Moroccan Jewish and Muslim merchants from the
city, and seized their goods.33
When the king and his counsellors adopted a policy of evangelical
attrition towards the Jews of Tangier, they might have been thinking of
men at home like Augustin Coronel Chacon, a Jewish merchant and
government agent born in Portugal, who served Charles II before and after
his restoration and was knighted once he accepted baptism in the Church
30 See above, 61–70.
31 TNA CO 279/2, ff. 169v., 171, 183; CO 279/3, f. 14; CO 279/6, ff. 4r., 110r., 112, 122r.; BL MS Sloane
3509, f. 144r.; Davis, Queen’s Royal Regiment, I, 53. This policy was resisted by savvy Portuguese
clergy, who took their case to the royal courts of London and Lisbon. Former Portuguese residents
also later returned to the city and were allowed to reoccupy their dwellings. See Davis, Queen’s
Royal Regiment, I, 39; TNA CO 279/2, ff. 70r.–71r., 75; Haffenden, ‘Anglican Church in Restoration
colonial policy’, 173–4; Ames, ‘Role of religion in the transfer and rise of Bombay’.
32 Davis, Queen’s Royal Regiment, I, 39. For the committee’s initial suspicion of Jews, see TNA CO
279/2, f. 183r. The 1666 instructions for Lord Belasyse contained the same warning.
33 Israel, Diasporas within a diaspora, 426.
 Restoration 217
of England. Perhaps they also had in mind someone like Solomon Franco,
the rabbi who had taught Hebrew in Oxford since 1652 and converted
to Christianity in 1668.34 In fact, the Crown’s Jewish policy in Tangier
closely approximated its approach in England.35 Cromwell had condoned
the first legal recognition of Jewish communities in the kingdom since
1290, and in 1656, Jews in London felt sufficiently secure to rent a house
in Leadenhall Street and use it as a synagogue.36 A number of curious
Christians, including the Tangier commissioner Samuel Pepys, visited soon
after the synagogue was established. They were getting to know some
London Jews just as Addison became acquainted with the Sephardim of
Tangier. By 1663, with the connivance of the regime, there were nearly
one hundred Jewish families in the capital. They had recruited a rabbi
and drafted a set of regulations for their community modelled on those of
the Amsterdam Jewry.37 Their economic utility and their availability for
proselytizing were attractive to the English leadership in church and state
as long as they remained politically inert.
Perhaps even more revealing than Tangier’s religious regime was the fact
that Addison, a staunch conformist who publicly condemned tolerationist
policies for Christians at home, appears to have been a wholehearted
supporter of them abroad. He was, after all, responsible for serving the
mixed congregation of Anglican and Catholic officers that the Tangier
committee had recommended to Teviot. He seems to have relished the
role. On 27 March 1664, just before the governor’s death, Addison read
prayers and preached to Catholic and Anglican officers after a skirmish with
Moroccans outside the city walls.38 Two years later, when tensions between
Catholics and Protestants in Tangier had reached a boiling point, Addison
played the peacemaker. On 29 May 1666, after clergy of both confessions,
amid considerable conflict, agreed to share the church of St Dominic,
Addison held services attended by the Catholic officers of the garrison. ‘The
most considerable officers of the Catholic persuasion’, the Tangier secretary
John Luke wrote to undersecretary Williamson in London, were ‘infinitely
pleased at Mr Addison’s most seasonable discourse in a sermon’.39 Just
before his departure from Tangier, the colonial leadership formally testified
34 Hyamson, Sephardim of England, 21–2.
35 For an argument by a prominent conformist bishop for the toleration of Jews within English
dominions, see Barlow, Cases of conscience, part 5, ‘The case of the Jews’.
36 On this theme in general see, for example, Katz, Jews in the history of England; Katz, Philo-Semitism;
Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews.
37 Roth, Jews in England, 166–73; Hyamson, Sephardim of England, 10–52.
38 Addison, Moores baffled, 24.
39 TNA CO 279/6, f. 121A v. Contrast Luke, Tangier at high tide, 23.
218 Politics
to Addison’s irenic promotion of their policies. In 1669 they commended
him to archbishop Gilbert Sheldon and bishop Humphrey Henchman
of London by emphasizing ‘the signal care and industry he has taken in
establishing and propagating the Church of England in this place’. They
observed that ‘so great a moderation and peaceableness has appeared in all
his proceedings that even those of a contrary persuasion cannot deny him
a due commendation’.40 Addison understood well the practical virtues of
irenicism and tolerance in particular situations.
Yet neither Addison’s soft touch nor the regime’s patient strategy pre-
cluded Tangier from being riddled by a wave of conflicts between Catholics
and Protestants that eventually spilled back onto the shores of both
Portugal and England. Trouble first peaked during the administration
of John Belasyse, an English Catholic governor who like Teviot had served
as a warrior in France.41 On 10 May 1666, the Protestant inhabitants and
officers of the garrison protested to the lieutenant governor, Henry Nor-
wood, that the Portuguese priests had been so successful in holding onto
their properties in the city, in contravention of colonial policy, that Protes-
tants had been confined to a church too small to accommodate even a
third of those who wished to assemble there. Norwood, a veteran colonial
administrator who had previously served in Virginia and Dunkerque, was
a member of the Church of England and seems to have run the city’s
vestry for a time.42 To enable better church attendance, the Protestants
asked Norwood if they could be granted possession of a deserted church
located across the Rua de Misericordia from the cathedral.43 Norwood was
amenable to the proposal, but it was eventually defeated by a group of
Catholics led by the well-connected chaplain to Tangier’s Irish regiment,
Thomas Russell, who appealed to the Portuguese royal court for help.44
The persistence of Catholicism in Tangier ultimately brought the English
empire’s tolerant experiment in the Maghrib to an ironic end. It was crushed
not by impatient conformists in Africa, but by tolerationists in England.
In 1684, when Tangier was abandoned and its fortifications destroyed, it
had become a late casualty of the Exclusion Crisis.45 Four years earlier, at
40 TNA CO 279/12, ‘To the most reverend Father in God Gilbert Lord Archbishop of Canterbury his
Grace’ (unfoliated).
41 Hopper, ‘Belasyse, John’.
42 TNA CO 279/6, f. 121A r. On Norwood, see Harrison, ‘Henry Norwood’; Hardacre, ‘Further
adventures of Henry Norwood’; Webb, Governors-general, 35, 66, 128–9, 176–8, 218, 333–4, 468,
505–7; Webb, Lord Churchill’s coup, 21–4, 294–5.
43 TNA CO 279/6, ff. 121A r., 122r. See also BL MS Sloane 3509, f. 144r.
44 For the dispute, see TNA CO 279/6, ff. 119, 121A v.; CO 279/8 (unfoliated), Henry Norwood to
Joseph Williamson, 20 March 1667.
45 See also Glickman, ‘Empire, “popery” and the fall of English Tangier’.
 Restoration 219
the very moment Whigs in the House of Commons were trying to secure
legislation to permit nonconformist worship in England, the same men
rejected their king’s assumption that Catholics in Tangier could be loyal.46
‘Tangier is in ill hands’, warned the exclusionist MP Sir Henry Capel on
28 November, ‘in the hands of popery’.47 Other members referred directly
to the Catholic governors of the colony and the regime’s policy of gradually
phasing out Catholic worship in the city, which they claimed was certainly
a failure, and probably a ruse. They tied funding for the colony to the
exclusion of the duke of York from the royal succession, and thereby forced
Charles II to abandon his greatest imperial endeavour.48 The struggle over
toleration in England and Tangier in 1680 was, of course, nothing of the
sort. It was a dispute over the religious triggers of treachery and revolt.
Nearly everywhere in his dominions, Charles II’s religious policy was
essentially the same: conformist in its long-term goals, but by no means
devoid of tact.49 He insisted that at home and abroad, the religious, eco-
nomic, and political imperatives of the empire should be promoted simul-
taneously to the extent that it was possible. When it was not, the king put
economic and political stability first, if only because religious uniformity
was a lost cause without them. In Tangier, for instance, a swift, coercive
enforcement of Anglican worship was far more likely to result in political
instability, depopulation, and economic disaster than enduring religious
unity. Connivance, proselytism, and attrition seemed more likely to result
in long-term success on all fronts. Tangier’s founding and demise vividly
confirm to a degree impossible in an analysis focused solely on Britain how
post-bellum religious politics were ultimately driven not by a struggle for
and against religious freedom, but by competing attempts to reconcile the
demands of political stability and divine truth. The question of whether
the need for civil stability suggested a tolerant or authoritarian approach
to religion in any given moment was a contingent one. Even so-called
‘high churchmen’ like Addison were willing to endorse religious toleration
and pursue a conspicuously irenic agenda in specific circumstances, while
cracking down on dissent in others.

Conditions of indulgence
In the spring of 1672, not long after Addison had sailed home from Africa,
Charles II and his advisors decided that the time was right to bring
46 Horwitz, ‘Protestant reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis’, esp. 206–11.
47 Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, VIII, 105. 48 Ibid., VIII, 1–31.
49 See also Bolton, Southern Anglicanism, 17; Stern, Company-state, 100–118.
220 Politics
ecclesiastical uniformity to the imperial church with more vigour and
clerical clout than ever before. In April privy councillors, with at least
five bishops by their side, drafted letters patent to establish a bishopric
in Virginia with jurisdiction over all the American colonies south of New
England.50 They asked for a cathedral to be built in Jamestown, and they
ordered a full apparatus of canon law to be erected for the diocese. In
the letter, Charles reiterated his calls for uniformity and proselytism in
his dominions abroad, but this time he argued that clerical institutions
must spearhead the effort. ‘Nothing is more becoming or agreeable to right
order’, read the draft, ‘than that all of our churches wherever should be
brought under one form of church government, so that henceforth all our
people should share the same doctrine in sacred things, the same manner of
offering their prayers up to almighty God, and finally an uniform discipline
in things ecclesiastical’. It was the duty of the supreme head of the church
to establish Anglican worship ‘not only in our domains in those lands, but
also, relying upon the help of God, to extend it yet further’, in missions to
American Indians. To this end, the letter even extended the jurisdiction of
the archbishop of Canterbury to all current and future English dominions
throughout the world.51
Like every similar project in the following century, this scheme for a
streamlined imperial church failed. It may have proved impossible to col-
lect the customs revenues that were supposed to support the bishopric,52 or
the plan may simply have fallen prey to the disputes among Charles’s coun-
sellors over religious policy at home. Anticlerical and Catholic courtiers in
the king’s committee of foreign affairs were flattering his pretensions to
absolute power and counselling toleration by decree. In fact, just when
Charles was on the verge of formalizing a turn to episcopal rule in the
empire, he was forced by a military and political emergency to retreat
from his drive for uniformity in England. On 13 March, in league with
Louis XIV, he entered into war against his Protestant neighbours in the
Netherlands. To secure the political nation at home, the king moved quickly
to allay the concerns of Protestant nonconformists, who grimaced more

50 The bishopric would have included Bermuda as well, but perhaps not the Caribbean. On the
1671 plan for a bishopric in the Leeward Islands, see Haffenden, ‘Anglican Church in Restoration
colonial policy’, 177, 182.
51 WSA D1/27/1/4/21–2 (Seth Ward’s notes on a 22 April meeting of five bishops, with a draft of
the king’s letter); Brown, ‘Draft for the creation of a bishopric in Virginia’; Hawks, ‘Efforts to
obtain the episcopate before the Revolution’; Bell, Imperial origins of the king’s church, 13. Ward’s
notes are now transcribed in Gibson, ‘A bishop for Virginia’, 41. See also BL MS Harley 3790,
ff. 1–4.
52 See Gibson, ‘A bishop for Virginia’, 36.
 Restoration 221
than most at his apparent alliance with popery and the cessation of trade
the war would bring.
Charles’s declaration of ‘indulgence’ and ‘clemency’, issued two days
after the war began, was an abrupt retreat from the conformist tactics most
recently codified in the 1670 Conventicle Act. The declaration suspended
all penal laws against nonconformist Protestants and recusant Catholics.
While Catholics were permitted only private worship, Protestant noncon-
formists could meet in public if their ministers and teachers were licenced
by the Crown. The king’s insistence on formally regulating his indulgence
confirmed that the regime was using the measure as a means of control and
surveillance, as many of its critics feared.53 The declaration also registered
dissatisfaction with the results of the conformist policies of the previous
decade, and stressed that they were peculiarly inappropriate during a war
with the Dutch. ‘There is’, Charles observed, ‘very little fruit of all those
forceable courses’. The king explicitly argued that the indulgence would
bolster civil order, trade, and wartime immigration, but he also made clear
that it offered no room for diversity within the Church of England itself.54
The king’s return to toleration in England was generally met with alarm.
Most troubling was the latitude of its provisions and the stark choice it
offered between full conformity and complete separation. Conformists
were by no means the only observers who reacted with dismay and suspi-
cion. To be sure, many younger presbyterians were less concerned with the
spectre of schism than excited by the opportunity to safely cultivate godly
communities. They joined many congregational ministers and Quakers in
welcoming the move. Yet even these groups were concerned that the indul-
gence was intended to protect Catholics, inadvertently promoted atheism,
and mocked the constitution. Others had more varied and serious reser-
vations. Older presbyterians who still deeply valued a national church
struggled over whether to embrace the notion of separate congregations
and risk the sin of schism. They also wondered whether the indulgence
was nothing more than a scheme to collect information about dissenting
communities before crushing them. In general, though, it was the embrace
of the indulgence that made it such a momentous occasion. In the end,
no fewer than 1,610 ministerial licences were issued to dissenters.55 The

53 Spurr, 1670s, 25–6; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 121.

54 Charles II, Declaration, 1–8, quotation on 4; Bate, Declaration of Indulgence, 76–8, 106–7. See also
House of Lords, Journal, XII, 524–5 (5 February 1673).
55 De Krey, London and the Restoration, 122; Spurr, 1670s, 35–6; Spurr, Restoration Church of England,
61–2; Thomas, ‘Comprehension and indulgence’, 208–11; Goldie, Roger Morrice, 235–40; Spurr,
‘Schism and the Restoration church’, 409–10.
222 Politics
indulgence served to remind Anglicans that they could no longer take a
partnership with the state for granted, as they had under the first two Stu-
art monarchs. After nearly a decade of royal support, they were again left
without the aid of the civil courts in their struggle against nonconformity,
separatism, and irreligion.
The loss of civil sanctions crippled the church’s pastoral and political
program but hardly decapitated it. Leading divines had been well aware
that toleration might return. They did not wait until the later 1680s to learn
how to confront a state that was either religiously ambivalent or indulgent.
Their post-bellum strategy assumed a fluctuating level of secular support.56
Education, not punishment, was the centrepiece of their agenda –
and apparently the king’s as well. ‘I am particularly commanded by His
Majesty’, the archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, wrote on 27 Jan-
uary 1673 to Richard Sterne, archbishop of York, ‘to recommend to your
grace’s care (as to the rest of the bishops of my province) the due obser-
vance of catechizing. His Majesty is pleased and doubtless justly enough
to impute the increase of the now prevailing sects and disorders amongst
us for the most part to this neglect’. Charles and Sheldon believed that
neither coercion nor toleration could ensure religious and political order.
Only diligent catechizing could. ‘Certify me’, Sheldon asked Sterne and
the rest of his bishops, ‘whether this duty be so generally disused (in your
province) as is talked of, and if it will be so, what your grace conceives
to be the true ground and cause of this omission’.57 Anglican divines had
realized long ago that only their own efforts could secure the prosperity of
the church. They could never put their trust in either the support of the
state or a direct challenge to its religious authority.58
While Sheldon and his subordinates happily turned to competitive cate-
chesis in response to the indulgence, they differed over how exactly this was
to be done. In an edition of the church catechism he prepared in 1673, Ben-
jamin Bird complained to his parishioners that ‘one of you told me lately,
he would not send his children unless I would use the [Westminster]
Assembly’s catechism’.59 To use a presbyterian catechism, of course,
would be extremely controversial, not to mention illegal, and would have
probably alienated Bird’s other parishioners. But there were a number of

56 After all, even when civil statutes on dissent were in place, lay enforcement was uneven. See, for
example, Fletcher, ‘Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts 1664–1679’, 235–46; Spurr, Restoration
Church of England, 42–61.
57 BL MS Harley 7377, f. 41v. 58 Contrast Rose, Godly kingship, 130–37.
59 Bird, Catechism of the Church of England, sig. a2; Stationers’ Company, Transcript of the registers, II,
466.
 Restoration 223
alternatives for a conformist minister to consider. On 8 November 1672,
Sheldon’s chaplain, Samuel Parker, had licenced John Worthington’s unof-
ficial ‘scripture catechism’, with an introduction by Edward Fowler. It was
meant to compete directly with the Westminster Shorter Catechism.60
This tactic would have likely rankled Addison and other sticklers for the
prayer book catechism, who believed that any departure from a single
text opened the door to catechetical anarchy, and anarchy of other sorts
as well.
The church’s focus on pastoral outreach under conditions of indulgence
did not, of course, imply that it no longer sought the support of the state.
As the 1673 meeting of parliament approached, Sheldon worked feverishly
to orchestrate a return to civil punishments for dissent in the upcoming
session. He ordered his bishops to attend parliament at all costs and to
drag their leading clergy to London with them, so that these men might
influence the proceedings with conversations, sermons, and pamphlets.61
In the meantime, Sheldon insisted, the bishops needed to encourage civil
magistrates to prosecute unlicenced schoolmasters, so that children were
not catechized in dissent and sedition.62
Parliament finally met in February 1673, a year after the indulgence was
issued. The long succession crisis of the 1670s had begun, and Charles’s
religious and military policies were under severe scrutiny. His speech in the
Lords in defence of the indulgence, like the speech of his lord chancellor,
the earl of Shaftesbury, came to nothing.63 On the night of 7 March, the
king decided that his political and military priorities demanded a reversal
in tactics: anxious to secure parliamentary funding for war, he cancelled
his declaration.64 England’s religious settlement now reverted, on a formal
level, to the conformist regime of the previous decade. Yet this obscured
a more complex reality. The licences granted since the declaration had
not been revoked, and concerns about popery took public attention away
from the problem of Protestant dissent. Until the king’s ministry was

60 Worthington, ῾ΥΠΟΤ´ΥΠΩΣΙΣ ῾ΥΓΙΑΙΝ´ΟΝΤΩΝ Λ´ΟΓΩΝ.

61 BL MS Harley 7377, f. 39; Bate, Declaration of Indulgence, 106, 121. See also BL MS Harley 7377,
f. 48v.
62 BL MS Harley 7377, f. 42v. For a local response, see Bird, Catechism of the Church of England, sigs.
a2r.–a3v. Sheldon also reminded his bishops that catechesis was supported by canon law and could
in theory be enforced by the ecclesiastical courts (BL MS Harley 7377, f. 41v.).
63 House of Lords, Journal, XII, 524–7 (5 February 1673); Bate, Declaration of Indulgence, 106–7.
Shaftesbury, an anticlerical administrator, colonial magnate, and prominent architect of Charles II’s
change of course in England the previous spring, would have been unlikely to support the Virginia
bishopric.
64 House of Lords, Journal, XII, 549 (8 March 1673); Spurr, 1670s, 38; Bate, Declaration of Indulgence,
123.
224 Politics
shuffled, the war ended, and the alliance with France dissolved, dissenting
ministers were able to confidently wage local struggles with conformists to
maintain their congregations. Persecution did resume, but unless a local
justice or bishop was extremely active, prosecutions tended not to go
forward.65
The primitive institution, Addison’s treatise on catechizing, went to press
in this ambiguous state of affairs. First advertised on 26 May 1674, it expli-
cated and defended every detail of Sheldon’s royally sanctioned plan to
make catechesis the ultimate instrument of a return to social and religious
order after the dislocations of mid century.66 Addison paraded the tra-
ditional partnership between church and monarch that was now on the
mend after tottering in 1672. All that was necessary for bringing peace
and union to the country, he argued, was a simple revival of the church’s
institutions – its liturgy, its homilies, its rubrics, and its canons, especially
the fifty-ninth, which commanded its priests to catechize.67 Like Sheldon’s
directives to his clergy in 1672, Addison’s remarks to his readers in 1674
implied that the fault for the disorderly state of English Christianity lay
ultimately with the clergy. This was a cautious sort of clericalism. Addison’s
appeal to ‘handsome’ worship, plain sermons, and assiduous catechizing as
cures for the nation’s ills was presented as a critique of pastoral neglect, a
scheme of reform and reconstruction, and sign of union with the state.68 At
the same time, Addison openly condemned his king’s experiment with tol-
eration, but did so on pragmatic grounds. What was necessary in Tangier
was clearly a failure at home. ‘We need not be told’, he assured his readers,
‘how indulgence and clemency, acts of amnesty and grace, have been so
far unable so much as to work us up to a good humor, that like fresh
pastures to unruly beasts, they have only served to strengthen us for a
sturdier resistance’. He went out of his way to censure not only the indul-
gence but the protections Charles had afforded to individual dissenters
since his restoration.69 Addison extolled cooperation between church and
state, but made clear that it could assume tactical forms to which he
objected.
That same summer, Sheldon was keen to capitalize on the church’s
return to royal favour in order to bolster his pastoral mission. In July he
wrote to bishop Peter Mews of Bath and Wells, who had complained to
the archbishop that without civil support for catechizing in his diocese,
65 Spurr, 1670s, 42, 61; Thomas, ‘Comprehension and indulgence’, 214–16; Spurr, Restoration Church
of England, 64–7; Humfrey, Plea for the non-conformists, 8.
66 Arber, Term catalogues, I, 168. 67 PI, 1–5.
68 Ibid., 76–7. 69 Ibid., 91–2, quotation on 91.
 Restoration 225
the practice would remain nothing but an object of neglect and contempt.
He had asked Sheldon whether justices of the peace could be ordered to
enforce catechesis, implying that church courts were impotent to do so.
Sheldon preferred that the bishops turn to parliament instead. ‘The best
expedients for preservation of unity both in church and commonwealth’, he
agreed, were the regulation of schoolmasters and the practice of catechesis.
But it ‘was not so proper’, he argued, ‘to reinforce these duties by way
of the justices of the peace’. Instead, it was imperative ‘to procure an act
(the next session of parliament) for confirmation of the church’s power in
that behalf’.70 Parliament, however, did not meet again until the spring of
1675.71
In the meantime, Sheldon continued to urge his clergy to pursue the
broad, strict, and inward-looking agenda detailed in The primitive insti-
tution. ‘That which seems to me of most moment and importance’, he
wrote to Addison’s superior in Wiltshire, Seth Ward, in September 1674,
‘is that the clergy be kept up (as much as may be) to an unblameable
conversation, and a regular conformity to the doctrine and discipline of
our church: that divine service and public prayer be performed with that
decency and exactness which the rubric requires; and lastly that the duty
of catechizing be reinforced’. Religious instruction, in particular, was ‘the
most effectual means to prevent the further increase of the growing sects
and disorders amongst us’. Catechizing was the cornerstone of a pas-
toral revival that was meant to confront anticlericalism, nonconformity,
and sectarianism, all of which Sheldon believed were partly due to the
sloth of the established church. As he explained to another prelate
the following day, since parliament would not meet again until spring,
the bishops had do what they could amid the haze of the current legal
regime. Only later might it be possible to specify in parliament the sanctions
the church had at its disposal. When spring finally came, Sheldon anxiously
urged the spiritual lords and their subordinates to flock to London once
again.72
Even before then, in October, the prelates had an opportunity to seek a
better understanding with the king, when he summoned them to London
to advise on the church. Sheldon, Ward, and a number of other bishops
attended the meetings, and they produced a letter of advice in January.
The pastoral vision they shared with the monarch was not focused on
the need to punish dissent and preserve episcopacy. Instead they offered a
70 BL MS Harley 7377, f. 53v.
71 Parliament was immediately prorogued when it met on 10 November 1674, until 13 April 1675.
72 BL MS Harley 7377, ff. 55, 58r., quotation on 55r.
226 Politics
wide-ranging, nuanced description of the moral and spiritual deficiencies
of the country, and a similarly sophisticated account of the remedies to
be applied. Their most serious concerns, they insisted, were three great
post-bellum maladies, all of which were curable by catechizing: atheism,
profanity, and immorality. Catholic and Protestant dissent were secondary
problems.73 In the following month, Charles ordered local justices to work
more diligently against conventicles and dismiss all claims from dissenters
that they held royal licences from 1672 for their activities.74 Yet amid
these stern royal warnings and orders from Sheldon to his clergy to gather
intelligence on Protestant and Catholic nonconformity, all parties realized
that the key forum for effective action was the spring parliament. Popular
religious ignorance and indifference persisted, and many began to fear that
the problem was being compounded from above, by increasing irreligion
and anticlericalism among the elite.

Moses and Aaron, Castor and Pollux

The king’s meeting with his bishops in the fall of 1674 had signalled the
potential of a renewed alliance between Crown and church at court and
in parliament. The bishops had made clear to Charles that the greatest
problems of the age were not the excesses of puritans or papists, but
outright hostility to religion itself, and the anticlericalism, atheism, and
immorality that attended it. They shared this diagnosis with dissenting
divines. In a sense, the mistrust and animus faced by the clergy was the
defining element of this religio-political moment. Anticlericalism assumed
both popular and elite forms, and it amounted to a sustained attack on
the efforts of Anglican divines to sustain and expand their role in English
society. It was the true antithesis of the church’s plan for national recovery.
At the same time, the failures cited by the church’s enemies were part of
what had inspired the church’s reforms in the first place.75 Public debate
about the clergy had exploded in the beginning of the decade, and by 1675

73 The letter also requested coercive measures on all fronts: the prosecution of libertines, the revocation
of ministerial licences, and an end to the protection of Catholics from prosecution. Further meetings
with royal ministers at Lambeth resulted in a plan to ban the mass; eject all priests, recusants, and
seminarians from the country; and exclude Catholics from court.
74 (For the entire paragraph) Spurr, 1670s, 61–2; Bate, Declaration of Indulgence, 140–41; Spurr, Restora-
tion Church of England, 68–9; Browning, Thomas Osborne, I, 147–8; Thomas, ‘Comprehension and
indulgence’, 217–18.
75 Restoration anticlericalism still needs detailed study, but see Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken;
Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the birth of Whiggism’; McNulty, ‘Priests, church courts and people’; Spurr,
Restoration Church of England, 219–29.
 Restoration 227
it could be heard all across London, in the theatres, the bookshops, and
the coffeehouses.76
When spring came, the bishops and the king’s chief minister, the earl
of Danby, moved swiftly in parliament to cement their relationship and
destroy their enemies. On 15 April, Danby’s brother-in-law, the earl of
Lindsey, brought into the Lords a ‘bill to prevent the dangers which may
arise from persons disaffected to the government’, which would require all
members of parliament and holders of office to swear that taking up arms
against the king was never lawful and that they would never attempt to
alter the government of the state or the church. This blatant attempt to
create a conformist hegemony by making anti-puritanism the law of the
land was widely despised. It provoked intense debate in both Houses, and
many wondered aloud whether the bishops supporting Danby’s agenda
were usurping authority in secular affairs. The controversy over what some
dubbed the ‘bishops’ bill’ revealed that many politicians were convinced
that the church was devoted not to Christian charity but to persecution
and ‘prelacy’, and that some form of toleration might better conduce to
civil stability under these conditions. The test bill nevertheless passed in
the Lords, with Danby managing in person, Charles II sitting in on all the
debates, and Shaftesbury and other peers formally protesting the vote. The
measure was only stalled in the Commons, in the midst of attacks on Danby
and the earl of Lauderdale and a number of other heated discussions. On
9 June Charles prorogued the parliament until October, and the fall session
was so refractory that he again postponed further meetings to February
1677.77
Danby’s manoeuvres in 1675 had inspired a brilliant public attack on the
church–court alliance and the anti-puritan narratives that legitimated it. A
letter from a person of quality, written by either Shaftesbury or his former
secretary, John Locke, had appeared on 8 November, while parliament was
still sitting. It turned Danby’s anti-puritanism on its head by sketching the
history of a conspiracy that had been hatched since the Restoration not by
puritans and republicans but by ‘by great church men’. The majority of the
most famous political conspiracies in world history, the tract argued, had
emanated from the same sector of society. When the Letter turned to the

76 For printed polemic, see among others Eachard, Contempt of the clergy; Eachard, Vindication of
the clergy from the contempt; Marvell, Prose works, I; Parker, Bishop Bramhall’s vindication; Hirst,
‘Samuel Parker, Andrew Marvell, and political culture’.
77 Browning, Danby, I, 152–3; Goldie, ‘Danby, the bishops, and the Whigs’, 82; Haley, Shaftesbury,
372–402; Spurr, 1670s, 63–76. On Danby’s legislative program between 1673 and 1677, see Browning,
Danby, I, 146–84. See also Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 70–71.
228 Politics
recent past at home, divines as diverse as James Ussher, Robert Sanderson,
and George Morley were rendered indistinguishable from each other and
from the likes of Laud and Sheldon. The present aim of the priests, the
Letter alleged, was ‘to make a distinct party from the rest of the nation of
the high episcopal man, and the old cavalier’.
This particular conspiracy had supposedly begun with the 1662 Corpo-
ration Act, but its centrepiece was Danby’s test bill, a ‘design to have the
government of the church sworn to as unalterable, and so tacitly owned to
be of divine right, which though inconsistent with the oath of supremacy,
yet the church men easily break through all obligations whatsoever, to
attain this station, the advantage of which, the prelate of Rome has suffi-
ciently taught the world’. Despite appearances, though, this popish project
was no threat to monarchical power. Instead, the Letter insisted, ‘in requital
to the Crown’ the clergy ‘declare the government absolute and arbitrary,
and allow monarchy as well as episcopacy to be iure divino, and not to be
bounded, or limited by human laws’. This plot, which hearkened back to
‘old Laud’s time’, was in the last analysis an attempt to separate church and
state, but only in order to erect, in a moment, both spiritual tyranny and
civil despotism – not one idol, but two. The leaders of the Church of Eng-
land, ‘the most dangerous sort of men alive to our English government’,
dreamed ‘that priest and prince may, like Castor and Pollux, be worshipped
together as divine in the same temple by us poor lay subjects’.78
Royal courtiers and their clerical allies moved to fortify themselves
against attacks like Shaftesbury’s between the 1675 and 1677 sessions of
parliament. As usual, the regime manipulated public politics by simultane-
ously gathering, controlling, and disseminating political information and
invective.79 On 29 December 1675, the privy council issued an order to
suppress all the coffeehouses of London. Amid vocal protests the council
eventually agreed to postpone the enforcement of the measure for nearly
eighteenth months. The council did, however, force house owners to agree
to exclude seditious and scandalous reading material from their premises.80
At the same time, the Compton census of 1676 confirmed the numerical
dominance of Anglicanism in the country, and suggested that nonconfor-
mity was a tiny and divided force, with roughly equal numbers of Baptists,
Quakers, Presbyterians, and Independents. This information encouraged
the regime to continue their alliance with the bishops even while the

78 [Shaftesbury?], Letter from a person of quality, 1–5, 7, 21, 24, 34 (mispaginated), quotations on 1, 7,
34.
79 See Bulman, ‘Publicity and popery on the Restoration stage’.
80 Browning, Danby, I, 194–5. More generally, see Cowan, Social life of coffee; Pincus, ‘“Coffee politi-
cians does create”’.
 Restoration 229
church’s ailing leader, Sheldon, moved out of the spotlight. It also allowed
Danby and his allies to focus their efforts on partial conformity and irreli-
gion.81 Preparation for the following parliamentary session was intense and
detailed on all sides.82
It was in this situation that Addison’s Modest plea for the clergy originally
went to press. The Wiltshire cleric’s strong sense that the social status of
the pastorate was ultimately based on the laity’s estimate of it required a
carefully calibrated appeal on the clergy’s behalf. He pitched the book not
only to distinguished scholars like Hobbes but primarily to the wider body
of educated, sceptical laymen who were both readers of learned anticlerical
writing and some of the most important members of the political nation.
In particular, Addison meant to convince many older presbyterians among
the laity to conform fully to the church by absorbing most of their agenda
and attaching it to a conformist and ultimately clericalist position. The
crucial move Addison made in framing the tract was to keep his name
from it, and to give the impression throughout that the author was a
layman, by referring the clergy in the third person. This ruse epitomized
the choice of Addison and many others in the clerical leadership to address
anticlericalism on its own terms, and to highlight the partnership between
priests and laymen that supposedly enabled the clergy’s pivotal role in
reforming English society.83
Just as Sheldon’s call for catechizing in 1672 had revealed the extent to
which the church’s outlook was not focused on state coercion, the church’s
constant resort to officially sponsored public appeals in the middle of the
decade revealed that its approach to public politics was no simple campaign
of repression. In the Plea, Addison’s broad arguments for the necessity of
a single, ordained clergy served as a backdrop to his intervention in more
specific matters that were of pressing importance in the current session of
parliament.84 The Plea was first advertised in London on 12 February 1677,
just three days before the Houses reconvened.85 Later in the month, it was
one of the few books highlighted in the official government newspaper, The
London gazette.86 In William Crooke’s bookshop it carried an imprimatur

81 Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 72; Spurr, 1670s, 79–80.

82 Browning, Danby, I, 185–211, esp. 199. 83 See above, 141–5, 195–9.
84 Many aspects of the Plea can be linked directly to bills introduced in the session that were the
products of years of discussion among the bishops. These bills enforced baptism, catechizing, and
sabbath observance; suppressed atheism and blasphemy; and sought to discourage clerical pluralism.
See MP, 116–22; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 73–4, 193–4; Grey, Debates in the House of
Commons, I, 319–21; IV, 148–59; House of Lords, Journal, XII, 695–7; XIII, 15–22, 30–34, 44–9,
54–6, 58–60, 95–8, 132–5, 141–4, 187–8, 243–4, 270–71.
85 Arber, Term catalogues, I, 268; House of Commons, Journal, IX, 382.
86 London gazette, no. 1177 (26 February – 1 March 1677).
230 Politics
from William Jane, chaplain to Henry Compton, the bishop of London,
and it was dedicated to Williamson, who was at this point secretary of
state for the north, and a major player in Danby’s campaign. The Plea
was clearly meant to influence the parliamentary session on behalf of the
church–court alliance. As Addison explained in the dedication to
Williamson, the work was ‘honestly designed for the vindication of that
order of men, toward whom your respects are constantly manifested; and
through the sides of whose contempt both church and state have ever
received their deepest wounds’. The quotation from Tacitus on the title
page was a favourite of radical Erastians in this period, and it made Addi-
son’s agenda clear. ‘The dignity of the priesthood’, it read, ‘is the support
of political power’.87
At points the Plea was a direct riposte to the fashionable anticlericalism
of wits at court. Like many other divines in the period, Addison argued
that since priests were above all guardians of morality, the guardians of
debauchery were bound to hate them.88 Yet by the standards of the day
the Plea was irenic and restrained. Addison returned again and again to
what the laity would have seen as the basic solution to anticlericalism: the
clergy, he warned, exactly like Sheldon a few years earlier, simply needed ‘to
give no occasion to their enemies to speak evil of them’. They could take
no solace in the hope all laymen would distinguish between individual
ministers and the divine authority they carried with them, since it was
widely believed that priests used their divine pedigree as an excuse for
sloth and vice. Hypocritical clergy who ignored the Christian duties they
urged on others lent credence to the narratives of imposture that their
enemies promulgated. Their conduct, Addison concluded, ‘may create in
the laity a sturdy suspicion, that the whole matter is but a holy cheat’.89 He
was convinced that no official campaign against immorality and profanity
could succeed without a careful effort to restore the credit of the conforming
clergy. The ministry was both the country’s best potential weapon against
vice and irreligion and a prop to the stability of the monarchy. Addison
urged magistrates to ‘not suffer the clergy to be condemned, if not for
the sake of their function, yet for the peace and safety of the state’. He
insisted that it was in the interest of even the most Machiavellian, scoffing
politicians to pay heed to the church’s clericalist agenda.

87 MP, title page, ‘Epistle dedicatory’; Tacitus, Histories, 190–91: ‘honor sacerdotii firmamentum
potentiae’.
88 MP, 125–30. See also, for example, Stillingfleet, Sermon preach’d before the king; Crossman, A sermon
preached in Christs Church Bristol; Sprat, Sermon preached before the king.
89 MP, 154–5, 160–61, 164.
 Restoration 231
The Plea also explicitly defended the norms for public utterance that its
pages embodied. Aggressive and defensive engagement with critics of the
church such as Andrew Marvell, Addison argued, merely confirmed their
contention that priests – hardly the meek, Christ-like men they pretended
to be – spent more time writing polemic and abusing their position for
political gain than serving their congregations. The conformist clergy’s
indulgence in personal attacks on dissenting ministers and their pen-
chant for superfluous theological polemic, Addison added, were also basic
sources of anticlericalism. This behaviour was therefore ‘both un-Christian
and unpolitic’.90 Addison’s stance clearly set him against conformists like
Samuel Parker, men who had repeatedly responded to anticlerical vitriol
with their own venom since the 1660s. Addison wrote the Plea in the
midst of the furore over Herbert Croft’s Naked truth, a bishop’s appeal for
toleration within the church, and Marvell’s attack on Croft’s assailants in
Mr. Smirke.91 Critiques of the clerical order were still being deflected in
an aggressively dialectical fashion as Addison put pen to paper. The same
apologetical works also tended to highlight the coercive and episcopalian
aspects of the church’s mission.92 The controversies of the 1670s publicized
the simmering tensions among leading divines over how best to sever the
link between public dispute and civil chaos without forsaking, at the same
time, what they took to be divine truths.

Plots feigned and true

By 1677 it was clear that the public religious politics of the reign of
Charles II turned on a competition to identify the true agents of reli-
gious imposture by constructing persuasive Machiavellian narratives that
associated the methods of priestcraft with the practices of specific groups.
The contours of this struggle would only be clarified further over the next
three years, in the later stages of England’s succession crisis. The leaders of
the church were preparing for the ascent of a Catholic, the duke of York, to
the throne long before some better-known schemes for preserving Protes-
tantism were proffered by their enemies. The bishops’ preferred approach
was in keeping with their insistence on a partnership between the civil and

90 Ibid., 123–4, 142–4, quotation on 143.

91 See among others Marvell, Prose works, II; Croft, Naked truth; Turner, Animadversions; Gunning,
Lex talionis.
92 See, for example, Arderne, A sermon preached (Arderne’s sermon was, however, delivered at a
visitation by the Ignatius scholar and bishop of Chester, John Pearson, and featured late humanist
learning). Contrast Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 225.
232 Politics
spiritual wings of the state in which clerics served as religious and political
advisors. Others, though, were convinced that the details of the prelates’
schemes gave the lie to their constant talk of harmony between throne and
altar.
The basic thrust of the bishops’ proposals was educational. In early 1676,
on the suggestion of the bishop of London, Henry Compton, the king
ordered that York’s daughter, Mary, was to be prepared for confirmation
by Compton himself. A year later, the spiritual lords also asserted their
role as protectors of the church and experts in matters of the spirit by
asking that convocation again meet regularly after having conducted no
important business since 1662. They then joined Danby in an effort to
secure the future of the realm by force of statute. The archbishop of York,
John Dolben, introduced a bill whereby any king who did not take an
oath against transubstantiation would have his children’s education and
his episcopal nominations deputed to Anglican bishops, and his crown
patronage managed by the bench and the lord chancellor. This move was
easily branded as an outright attack on the royal supremacy and linked to
Danby’s 1675 test bill. Despite a swift passage in the Lords, the measure
was buried in committee by the Commons. Another bill introduced by
Dolben and passed in the Lords, which offered a scheme for dealing with
Catholic recusants, was openly attacked in the lower House for doing as
much to promote popery as to suppress it. Suspicion of the intent of the
church leadership continued to abound in 1677, and it only intensified in
the coming year.93
By the early summer of 1678, when parliament was again in session,
Addison had completed a draft of his history of early Islam, The first state
of Mahumedism. The news of a popish plot against the government that
circulated in the fall, along with Thomas Smith’s reader’s report, probably
prompted further revisions to the manuscript.94 The political importance
of Addison’s work had suddenly eclipsed its scholarly potential. He must
have known his fellow Dunkerque and Tangier chaplain, the deranged
Israel Tonge, who first related part of Titus Oates’s plot narrative to the
king in August.95 Addison therefore no doubt shared the scepticism about
the supposed revelations of Tonge and Oates expressed privately by his
patron, Williamson, and a minority of other statesmen from the beginning
of the crisis. The sceptics, however, completely lost control of the situation
93 Miller, James II, 80; Spurr, 1670s, 244; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 73; Haley, Shaftesbury,
422–3; Goldie, ‘Danby, the bishops, and the Whigs’, 84–6; Lathbury, History of the convocation,
307–12.
94 On Smith’s report see above, 87–8. 95 Marshall, ‘Tonge, Israel’.
 Restoration 233
when parliament reconvened, and Edmund Godfrey, the justice to whom
Oates had made sworn statements of his plot narrative, was found dead
in a ditch at the foot of Primrose Hill on 23 October. The Commons
unanimously endorsed the plot on the last day of the month, and the
Lords followed the next morning.96 William Crooke had The first state of
Mahumedism licenced the same day.97
The front matter to Addison’s history of early Islam revealed his asso-
ciations and intents. The title page was graced with an imprimatur from
George Thorpe, chaplain to the new archbishop of Canterbury, William
Sancroft; and it was followed by a dedication to Williamson, perhaps the
greatest plot sceptic on the privy council. Addison reminded the secretary
that Muhammad was of great use to historically minded students of pol-
itics because he was ‘the only great impostor that ever continued so long
prosperous in the world’. A consideration of the Prophet’s ‘mean origi-
nal, sudden progress, and present grandeur’, Addison hoped, would ‘justly
awaken all Christian magistrates into a timely suppression of false teachers,
though never so despicable in their first appearance, lest, like Muhammad,
they second heresy with force, and propagate enthusiasm with conquest’.
Addison could hardly have made more obvious his fear that the impos-
ture of London’s latter-day prophets, Tonge and Oates, and the incredulity
of the populace, would have similarly nefarious and revolutionary con-
sequences unless the duo was immediately suppressed.98 His historical
parallel was one of the earliest public dismissals of the reality of the plot.
By employing a literary form that gave him plausible deniability, Addison
was able to boldly articulate a position that would only become mainstream
in 1681 (once it had been popularized by Roger L’Estrange and others),
elude censure, and discourage open controversy. For the rector of Milston
it was not papists, haughty courtiers, or prelatical bishops who posed the
gravest threat to England. Instead that distinction belonged to their most
vociferous opponents in parliament. Oates, Tonge, and their allies were the
true exemplars of religious imposture. The partnership between Catholic
and Protestant enthusiasm they represented showcased the compatibility
of popery and puritanism.
Addison’s alternative conspiracy theory was easily mapped onto the com-
bination of popish and puritanical tactics he had identified in the life of
Muhammad. The story of the infancy of Islam, Addison argued, was one of
deception, ambition, and hypocrisy. Like Oates and Tonge, Muhammad

96 Kenyon, Popish Plot, 45–90. 97 Stationers Company, Registers, III, 74.

98 FSM, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, ‘To the reader’.
234 Politics
had inauspicious origins: he was descended from zealous idolaters, who
had ‘sunk very low’ socially. And like the former Jesuit seminarian Oates in
particular, Muhammad made his name by repudiating the idolatrous reli-
gious milieu from which he emerged. His revolutionary iconoclasm made
it possible for him to ‘set up for an impostor and tyrant’. The substance
of Muhammad’s religion mirrored the antinomian excesses Addison saw
in revolutionary Calvinism: like Oates, Muhammad crafted a cult that
claimed to be an antidote to idolatry, but was nothing more than an apol-
ogy for carnal indulgence. Addison’s parallels amounted to an assault upon
the impostors, nonconformists, and ‘country’ parliamentarians who were,
he alleged, using a sham plot to hatch a real plot. After Muhammad had
concocted the false revelations of the Qurʾan, Addison wrote, he ‘held a
conventicle in Mecca’, and began to attract proselytes. Progress was slow –
much like the progress of Tonge, Oates, and the dissenting schoolmasters –
but the Prophet was as patient as his latter-day emulators. Like Tonge at
the English court, he could make only limited gains by ‘his private preach-
ing’. He craved a wider popular appeal and ‘competent power to put the
pretended divine law in execution’. Just as Oates worked to sway Danby
and other members of the House of Lords and benefited from the support
of Shaftesbury and his allies, Muhammad slowly infected the nobles of
Mecca with his lies. He was, however, eventually booted from the city,
once the nobles ‘perceived, that under pretence of religion, he designed an
empire; and he was a prophet in show, but a tyrant in project’.99 Addison
was pleading that Oates’s enemies take quick action against him and his
allies before it was too late.
After the publication of the tract Addison would have only seen the
full extent of his fears realized. Because Danby was so strongly linked to
the church leadership, the attack on him in parliament became a forum
for anticlerical sentiment. Addison took this to be an orchestrated attempt
to use the plot, the succession crisis, and a series of other controversial
political issues to destroy the power and unity of the church. Meanwhile,
tensions among the churchmen themselves had again surfaced in their
disparate responses to the plot. Addison’s history contained implicit crit-
icisms of other divines ‘who minded their own pride and pre-eminence
more than the peace and establishment of the Christian religion’.100
Addison had responded to the news of the plot by publishing a scepti-
cal but coded treatment of it. In parliament, most of the bishops were
defending Danby. Other prominent churchmen, however, seem to have

99 Ibid., 7–11, 31–2, 58–63, quotations on 10–11, 58–9, 63. 100 Ibid., 126–8, quotations on 126, 128.
 Restoration 235
been mostly animated by the heightened threat of popery, and at least
in comparison to Addison, they were following and fuelling the popu-
lar frenzy. Along with Oates himself, preachers like William Lloyd, John
Tillotson, and Edward Stillingfleet were drawing massive crowds, and they
and others were publishing anti-papal polemic that contributed to the
explosion of controversial publications in late 1678 and 1679. The differ-
ences among the public styles of leading divines were becoming clear in the
varying responses to the plot, responses that are too often described solely
and superficially in terms of varying levels of concern over popery and
dissent. These implicit disagreements over the proper conduct of public
politics became only clearer after the lapse of the licensing act in June 1679.
Addison’s vision of restraint in the interest of Protestant unity was also
challenged by rival conceptions of the same ideal. Yet the calls for toleration
and comprehension that rang out in the spring of 1679, along with the
Scottish Covenanter uprising in June, eventually emboldened many other
conformists to join Addison in arguing in public that the true plot was a
conspiracy hatched between papists and dissenters. They feared that the
election of nonconformists to parliament in August was a prelude to open
rebellion and the destruction of the church.101 The second edition of The
first state of Mahumedism appeared at this juncture. The book, which now
identified Addison on the title page as a royal chaplain, was advertised
in July by the government’s Gazette, immediately after the king dissolved
the parliament on the tenth of the month and announced that a new
parliament would not meet until 7 October. The tract therefore gained
semi-official status just as the church and the court were seeking to reshape
the political atmosphere before a new round of elections. It was to be sold
not only at Crooke’s shop in the Strand, but also at Henry Rogers’s stall
at the sign of the Bible in Westminster Hall. By this point its dedicatee,
Williamson, had taken a serious political fall: he had become a symbol of
the excesses of anti-popish demagoguery, and the king’s frustration with
it. On 18 November 1678, immediately following the appearance of the
first edition of Addison’s work, Williamson had been thrown in the Tower
by order of the House of Commons, after signing military commissions
for Catholic recusants. He was released hours later by an irate king. By
February 1679, Williamson had resigned from his office, and many efforts
similar to Addison’s were afoot. As early as September a bookseller had
101 (For this and the previous paragraph) Spurr, 1670s, 262–85; Browning, Danby, I, 298; Knights,
Politics and opinion, 29–77, 200–202, 206–8, 214–15, 223; Harris, London crowds, 108–29; Spurr,
Restoration Church of England, 76–8; Haley, Shaftesbury, 461–551; Goldie, ‘Danby, the bishops, and
the Whigs’, 88–91, 97–9.
236 Politics
been jailed for publishing a satirical account of the plot and the witnesses
to it.102
During the rest of the Exclusion Crisis, Addison’s allusions in The first
state of Mahumedism would have only become clearer to his readers. Charles
II’s angry reaction to the petitioning of the winter of 1679–80 was followed
up by a rigorous assertion of monarchical authority on all fronts, and some
popular backlash against those who organized the petitions. There was
also a campaign, led by L’Estrange, that emphasized the links between the
current fomenters of disorder and the ringleaders of the Civil War and
Revolution. By the spring it was said that most of the populace, even in
London, was no longer concerned with the plot. A Tory spin on anti-
popery, in which rebels, sectarians, and dissenters were the henchmen
of Rome, was already gaining ground. Charles used the Gazette to print
addresses of abhorrence against the petitions of the winter and to deny
marriage rumours. Addison reinforced these efforts by venturing into print
once again before the meeting of the 1681 Oxford parliament. His propa-
ganda tract on Tangier, The Moores baffled, which focused on its former
Catholic governor, Teviot, addressed the fact that funding for the colony
had been tied by the Whigs to exclusion. Obsessive fear of the loyalty of
Catholic servants of the Crown, even military men, the tract argued, was
absurd. Addison’s Tangier was a symbol of the excesses of the two final
parliaments of Charles’s reign: their members, he suggested, were willing
to sacrifice a jewel of empire in order to obstinately insist upon radical
proposals for exclusion and association.103 From around this time many
political figures joined Addison in frowning upon the excesses of parlia-
ment and rallying around the king. His work presaged and reinforced this
development, which brought on the Tory ascendancy of the 1680s and a
shift in royal policy.104
Addison had used his portrait of early Islam to turn a mirror on the
Whigs and their own lurid histories of popery, priestcraft, and tyranny,
which were flying off the presses as he wrote. His sceptical response to the
Popish Plot is a perfect example of the way in which the religious politics of
the period were structured by early Enlightenment historical culture, and
in particular, by the identification of religious imposture on all sides. His

102 Plomer, ‘Westminster Hall and its booksellers’, 386; London gazette, no. 1424 (10–14 July 1679);
House of Commons, Journal, IX, 542; Marshall, ‘Williamson, Sir Joseph’; FSM, ‘Epistle dedica-
tory’; Spurr, 1670s, 284–5.
103 Addison, Moores baffled.
104 Horwitz, ‘Protestant reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis’; Spurr, 1670s, 288–98; Knights, Politics
and opinion, 78–106, 227–347; Harris, London crowds, 130–55; Harris, ‘“Lives, liberties, and estates”’.
 Restoration 237
response also makes clear that later Stuart elites saw religious corruption as
a blight that could originate in civil society and the state just as easily as it
could emerge from the upper reaches of the church hierarchy. In this way
the often heavy-handed proposals of the bishops for protecting the English
church during the reign of a Catholic monarch become more intelligible.
The period becomes not a struggle for and against priestcraft, but a struggle
to identify the darkest corners from which imposture tended to emanate,
and the ecclesiastical and political scheme that could best protect the nation
against it.

The Tory revival

The advent of Charles II’s personal rule in the spring of 1681 transformed
Addison’s career. Just before the opening of his Oxford parliament, the
king created a commission for ecclesiastical promotions, led by archbishop
William Sancroft.105 The venture indicated how important divines like
Addison would be to Charles’s new approach to governance. At the time,
Addison was still serving his small congregation in Milston, but he had
recently been buoyed with confidence that he would at last be rewarded
for his work in Tangier and the fruits of his pen. Charles had just promised
him the deanery of Salisbury once it became vacant, and his brother-in-law,
William Gulston, bishop of Bristol, was pushing for Addison to be made
dean in his diocese.106 In 1682 Addison recommended himself to Sancroft
yet again with his seventh publication, An introduction to the sacrament,
which became one of the most popular devotional works of the period.107
It guided readers in their preparation for holy communion and summoned
a vision of ritual piety and moral renewal that sat well with Sancroft’s own
inclinations (Figure 5).108 Still, nothing materialized for Addison until 1683,
the crucial year for the promotions commission, in which it named five
new deans and four new bishops.109 In May, Addison was recommended
for the deanery of Lichfield, and in early July, he was installed.110
With every decanal appointment it made, Sancroft’s commission pub-
licly endorsed the pastoral agenda that Addison and much of the clerical
105 Beddard, ‘Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions’, 17.
106 Gulston and Charles described these as Addison’s main qualifications for preferment (Bodl MS
Tanner 34, f. 22; LRO D30/1/2/5).
107 New editions appeared in April 1683, 1686, 1691, and 1700, with reprints in 1693, 1695, and 1718.
108 IS, frontispiece, 109.
109 For the preferment information, see Beddard, ‘Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions’; ODNB.
110 TNA SP 29/424, f. 95; Hamilton, ‘Addison, Lancelot’; Le Neve, Fasti, X, 7; Savage, Lichfield
Cathedral, 13.
238 Politics
leadership had pursued over the previous decade. Each of the seven deans
named by the commission extolled Laudian piety, urged moral reform, and
diagnosed religious corruption with sophisticated scholarship. The main
differences among them had to do with their attitudes to public dispute,
and to an extent, the importance of episcopacy to their outlooks.111 The
church’s flurry of activity in this moment was not a desperate wave of per-
secutory rage based on Augustinian claims for the instrumental edification
of punishment.112 In fact it was such a clear continuation of the conformist
Anglicanism of the 1660s and 1670s that it seems misleading to depict it
as part of a Tory ‘reaction’, as most scholars have. There was a wide gulf
between the truly violent, stridently absolutist, and often legally dubious
strand of Tory politics in this period, and the reformist agenda that pre-
vailed in the church.113 To many Anglicans and Tories alike, forceful tactics
seemed not only morally repugnant but politically imprudent in a period
dominated by party mantras of the rule of law and the unity of Protestants.
Addison got to work quickly in Lichfield to realize his own vision of
the Christian community. He formed a close partnership with Sancroft
from the beginning, and less than two weeks after he was installed, he had
already begun to reform practices within the cathedral and in his other
jurisdictions. He had completed a visitation of Lichfield’s churches by
14 July, and then moved on to improve and regulate catechesis throughout
the city.114 He catechized regularly at St Michael’s church and visited petty
schools to ensure the orthodoxy of teaching there.115 He also encouraged
preaching, despite his distaste for ‘sermonizing’ puritans. After learning
that St Michael’s had been destitute of a preaching minister and could not
afford to maintain one, he preached there himself every second Sunday of
the month, encouraged his canons and prebends to complement his efforts,
and eventually found the sermons ‘to have a comfortable influence upon

111 For the views of the lesser-known clerics among these appointees, see (in addition to works cited
above) Arderne, Kingdom of England; Arderne, Matter and style of sermons; Arderne, Conjectura;
Arderne, Dean of Chester’s speech; Crossman, Young mans monitor; Crossman, Young man’s calling;
Brevint, Missale Romanum; Brevint, Saul and Samuel at Endor; Brevint, Caroli Secundi. For a
broader account of Laudian reforms in this period, see Tyacke and Fincham, Altars restored, 305–
53; and for discussions of the politics of religious imagery, see Haynes, Pictures and popery; Haynes,
‘Politics of religious imagery’.
112 Contrast Goldie, ‘Theory of religious intolerance’, in which the only episcopal or decanal
appointees of the commission who make an appearance are George Hickes and John Sharp,
men who are in any case not cited with reference to this doctrine.
113 For a slightly different account, see Gregory, Restoration, reformation, and reform. For more evidence
on the pastoral program of the 1680s and its political utility, see Sirota, Christian monitors, 18–68.
114 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 81.
115 LRO Ex D & C B/V/3, cathedral visitation book, f. 5r.; Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 89.
 Restoration 239
the place’.116 Frequent communion was the dean’s third immediate priority.
By mid November, he had begun to administer the eucharist every month
in the cathedral, and by April he had begun to celebrate it weekly.117 The
importance Addison accorded to the sacrament was reinforced by other
reforms he instituted. In order to better sanctify the cathedral services with
singing, Addison worked to ensure that choristers and vicars choral were in
regular attendance.118 He and Sancroft also corresponded regularly about
the need to strictly observe prayer book rubrics and other customs in the
mother church of the diocese.119
Addison extended what he called ‘the reformation which through God’s
grace has been so comfortably begun’ to the material condition of the
cathedral and the churches under his control.120 Here he continued a
campaign that had begun soon after the restoration of the monarchy,
during the episcopate of John Hacket. The cathedral had been one of
the most serious material casualties of the Civil Wars, and this made it
ripe for Laudian projects. Hacket himself had been a well-known critic
of Laud’s original reforms; he therefore made no effort to restore altars in
the diocese.121 Instead, initiative appears to have come from below. In the
early 1660s, seats in Lichfield’s church of St Mary were removed from the
chancel, and rails and a new communion table were introduced.122 In
the cathedral, the most significant action dated from the primacy of San-
croft. In the late 1670s the dean, Matthew Smalwood, organized the erec-
tion of an elaborate altarpiece that was a slightly diminutive copy of the
reredos in the royal chapel at Whitehall.123 Addison, Sancroft, and their
allies in the diocese sought to continue these efforts in the following decade.
In 1684, William Dugdale happily noted to his fellow Laudian and anti-
quarian local Elias Ashmole that ‘they are now setting up an organ in one
of the churches of Coventry, at which the Whigs take great offence’.124
Sancroft, for his part, required that all altars in the diocese be railed in.125

116 Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 89, 152, quotation on f. 89. LRO Ex D & C B/V/3, cathedral visitation
book, ff. 3r., 5r. Addison also asked the other cathedral clergy to preach in other churches under
the cathedral’s jurisdiction.
117 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 83; MS 32, f. 20. 118 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 81.
119 Bodl MS Tanner 34, f. 228. 120 Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 89, 113, quotation on f. 113.
121 Tyacke and Fincham, Altars restored, 158–9, 161, 276, 286, 303–4, 317–18, 320, 323.
122 Page et al. (eds), History of the county of Stafford, XIV, 134–55.
123 Savage, Lichfield Cathedral, 6–9. 124 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 119.
125 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, 329, and the references in n. 108. Institutional records for
Addison’s archidiaconal and decanal visitations do not survive, but he presumably enforced this
same practice in these churches, since he consulted Sancroft when deciding on procedures for his
visitations (Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 152, 158). For the acta from Addison’s dean’s court in the early
1680s, see LRO D/C/1/2 (unfoliated).
240 Politics
Addison’s main complaint to his superior was that the cathedral church-
yard ‘lies so rudely that all sorts of people are offended at it’. ‘Loathe to see
things so slovenly without, while within our celebrations are exactly rubri-
cal’, the dean worked ‘to bring things about this cathedral to a decency in
some measure agreeable to God’s house’.126 The sanctity of the churchyard
complemented the beauty of holiness within the walls of the church.
Addison’s esteem for catechesis and holy communion guided his
approach to dissent and irreligion. No theory of indirectly didactic pun-
ishment played a part. The dean certainly believed that coercion was a
necessary measure in some circumstances, but he considered it a last resort,
and prized admonition and persuasion over violence. ‘I have so thoroughly
practiced the dissenters, as to bring them all to the holy communion,
except three or four Anabaptists, and one Quaker’, he wrote to Sancroft
on 23 February 1684, describing his visitation of rural churches under his
jurisdiction. ‘And as to the careless in religion’, he continued, ‘I am endeav-
oring, through God, to bring them to a better mind’.127 In November, he
was alerted to ‘a great country parish’ where ‘differences among some of
the chief parishioners’ had led to irregularities in ‘the holy public celebra-
tions’. To restore order, the dean visited the parish, preached on the theme
of ‘peace and union’, and spoke privately to a number of parishioners in
the same vein. He celebrated the sacrament and directed the local min-
isters to follow him in an ‘exact observance’ of the prayer book rubrics
and canons.128 Addison seems to have mostly used coercion to confront
separatists whom he failed to reconcile to the church through conversation.
‘The dissenters appear to be very few in this city, and of inconsiderable
quality’, he wrote to Sancroft on 23 July. ‘Yet if let alone, I am afraid of their
leaven; so that we have them all under a legal prosecution, to which I make
bold to join the sweet and gentle methods of persuasion’.129 Addison con-
tinually ‘practiced’ dissenters, even as he initiated legal proceedings against
them. In the Sancroftian reforms of the 1680s, irenicism and conformism
went hand in hand. Even when they were in the ascendant, the Anglican
leadership’s pastoral and political project was fundamentally a matter of

126 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 117.

127 Ibid., f. 89. ‘Practiced’ here (in the MS, ‘practised’) is revealingly mistranscribed as ‘punished’
in Hamilton, ‘Addison, Lancelot’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are two
obsolete meanings for this transitive usage of ‘practice’, which amount to the same thing in this
context: to ‘frequent or habitually visit (a place); to be intimate with (a person)’ or (in a non-
pejorative sense) to ‘influence or persuade (a person) into some course of action, esp. an evil one; to
corrupt’.
128 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 171. 129 Ibid., f. 113.
 Restoration 241
persuading the laity and the ministry to embrace their understanding of
the Christian community.
The greatest task Addison faced early on in his decanal career was an
encounter not with dissent, but with the evils of prelacy, which he had
subtly denounced in his earlier writings.130 When Sancroft chose Addison
for Lichfield, he may have had in mind the match between Addison’s
concern with haughty bishops and the notoriety of the diocese. Its bishop,
Thomas Wood, completely ignored his duties. He was known as both
an advocate for nonconformists and the greatest exemplar of prelacy in
the Restoration church. Sancroft relied on Addison to help deal with the
bishop as soon as the new dean arrived in Lichfield. In letter after letter
in 1683 and 1684, Addison revealed to the primate the disastrous effects of
Wood’s negligence, and began to reform the widespread abuses the bishop
had condoned in his diocese.131 Addison shortly became a sort of proxy
bishop there.
Wood himself had been named dean of Lichfield in 1663, on the strength
of his patronage at court. Both his superior, John Hacket, and the cathedral
canons under him immediately complained that he spent nearly all his time
in London. When Wood was in Lichfield, he could be found encouraging
dissenters and stealing money from the chapter. ‘I never met in one man
such an ingredient of maliciousness, pride, rudeness, covetousness, and
ignorance’, Hacket wrote to archbishop Sheldon. ‘I must endure him as an
affliction sent by God’. In 1668, Wood faced a long list of formal charges
from his subordinates as well. The canons alleged that he had declined
to call chapter meetings, ransacked the muniments, removed documents,
and refused to confirm a list of preachers drawn up by the residentiaries on
his own instructions. He repeatedly avoided appearing before Hacket to
answer the charges, and upon his last summons, he locked the doors of the
chapter house against the bishop. Hacket was compelled to force his way
in, and he excommunicated Wood on the spot. Afterwards, in a stunning
display of the use of ecclesiastical courts for political gain, Wood managed
to have Hacket himself excommunicated by the court of Arches.132 The
dean was then absolved by Sheldon, and by the end of January he had been
reconciled with the chapter. He nevertheless continued to ignore the life
of the cathedral entirely. Finally, in 1671, to the astonishment of his fellow

130 In the following description of Addison’s views and activities, the term ‘prelacy’ is occasionally used
(as it was in the period under study) as shorthand for the abuse of episcopal office. For Addison’s
equivalent usage of the term ‘prelation’, see FSM, 129.
131 See, for example, Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 82–3, 91, 113.
132 Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 190–91; Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 24–30, 45.
242 Politics
clergy, he was chosen to succeed Hacket as bishop, again riding a wave of
favour at court.133
The honour did not incline Wood to finally settle in at Lichfield. The
episcopal palace there had suffered damage and dilapidation during the
Civil Wars and Interregnum.134 When Hacket arrived in his diocese in 1662,
he leased a prebendal house from the chapter. Wood, however, looked down
upon such humble accommodations, and pretended that his almost total
absence from the diocese was due solely to the lack of a fitting residence
there. In 1672 he sued Hacket’s son and executor Sir Andrew for repairs
to the palace, and a complex legal battle dragged on for over a decade. In
the midst of it, archbishop Sheldon considered suspending Wood but died
before he could.135 In 1684, Sancroft finally decided to arbitrate the dispute
and deal with Wood’s outrageous behaviour in the same proceedings, after
being prompted to do so by Addison. On 18 June two bishops chosen by
Sancroft as arbitrators ordered both Hacket and Wood to pay large sums for
the upkeep of the diocese and the reconstruction of the episcopal palaces
at Lichfield and Eccleshall. The arbitrators also ruled in a criminal suit that
had been filed against Wood in December 1683, and after collecting a series
of depositions on Wood’s ‘absence from his diocese and the neglect of his
duty’, they recommended that he be suspended.136 Sancroft complied on
19 July 1684.137 Addison greeted the move, reported to him by Sancroft
three days later, with the enthusiasm of a reformer. ‘All sorts of people’, he
wrote to the archbishop, ‘seem greatly satisfied with the procedure, and I
hope it will in time have the intended effect upon my lord bishop himself’.
On Sancroft’s orders, the dean proceeded to manage the sequestration of
Wood’s incomes and publicly declare his suspension in Lichfield.138
After taking a leading role in ridding his diocese of prelacy, Addison
moved on to confront the effects of Wood’s neglect, beginning with vacan-
cies and absenteeism in the cathedral chapter.139 The bishop had also
completely derailed the diocesan system of educational and sacramental
administration that Addison so deeply valued, and this quickly became the
dean’s main concern. In July he noted that the basic problem in the city
and the entire diocese after a decade of inaction was a mass of young cat-
echumens who could not be admitted to communion because the bishop
133 Benedikz, ‘Wood, Thomas’; D’Oyly, Life of William Sancroft, 116; Page et al. (eds), History of the
county of Stafford, III, 166–99.
134 LRO D30/11/76, letter of H. Archbold and James Alleny, 10 July 1671 (unfoliated).
135 Benedikz, ‘Wood, Thomas’.
136 Savage, Lichfield Cathedral, 10; LRO D30/5/40; Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 84, 91–2, 95, 101–5.
137 LPL MS 934, no. 40. 138 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 114.
139 Savage, Lichfield Cathedral, 15; Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 82–3, 113–14; MS 34, f. 228; MS 32, f. 20.
 Restoration 243
had not confirmed them.140 As Addison would have predicted, Wood’s
pastoral failures had also fuelled hostility to the church hierarchy among
dissenters and others. The dean was willing to attribute even the most
inappropriate actions of the local laity to the effects of prelacy. In a peculiar
jurisdiction in Shropshire, for instance, Addison found two laymen who
had been licenced by local church officials to read prayers in chapels.
One had even preached on multiple occasions. Wood, Addison told
Sancroft, was partly to blame: one of the men who had been reading
public prayers had always wanted to be made a deacon, but never had the
opportunity because his bishop was never around.141
The bishop’s consistory court was to meet in the fall, but Addison
and Wood’s lay assistants were unsure of how to proceed during the
suspension.142 Sancroft eventually decided to set up an alternative adminis-
trative arrangement, and by August 1685 John Lake, bishop of Bristol, was
tapped to exercise Wood’s functions.143 Lake undertook a visitation of the
diocese and worked to remedy the sacramental and educational problems
posed by Wood’s negligence. He conducted confirmations and ordinations
throughout the area.144 A year earlier, though, Sancroft had already has-
tened reform in the diocese by naming Addison archdeacon of Coventry.145
Archdeacons held the same legal authority as bishops, though of course
their jurisdiction extended to only part of the diocese, and anyone they
successfully prosecuted could appeal to the bishop’s court. The appoint-
ment nevertheless allowed Sancroft to begin his reforms in the absence of
direct episcopal endorsement. As dean and archdeacon, Addison controlled
a large portion of the parishes in the diocese. This allowed him to make a
significant impact on the state of the church there.
Sancroft’s confrontation with Wood in Lichfield and his rush to put
Addison in a position of power show how misleading it can be to describe
the religious struggles of Restoration England as a series of conflicts between
‘prelacy’ and conscience. Puritans, freethinkers, and ‘latitudinarians’ were
not the only enemies of corrupt spiritual lords. After all, men like Wood
could often find better friends among courtiers, dissenters, and Catholic
kings than among their fellow Anglican divines. Sancroft seems to have
known as well as his most determined adversaries that haughty and exces-
sively confrontational bishops had helped bring devastation to England
at mid century. He certainly knew that his pastoral program would never
succeed if prelates or their patrons stood in the way. During the reign of
140 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 113. 141 Ibid., f. 91; MS 32, f. 20. See also MS 131, ff. 157, 179.
142 Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 119–22. 143 LRO D30/1/4/20.
144 Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 166–8; Poole, ‘John Lake’, 224–7. 145 Le Neve, Fasti, X, 9.
244 Politics
Charles II, the vision of reformation he shared with Addison was being
pursued across England and its empire, from Lichfield to Tangier. It had
been inspired and enabled by the learning of the church, and by hard
thinking about how it was possible to honour the kingdom of God with-
out hazarding kingdoms on earth. Nowhere was this problem more vexing
than in a land where God’s servants could no longer trust in the steadfast
support of their prince.
 c h a p ter 8

Revolution

In the early months of 1685, James II was quick to reassure those who had
prospered in the final years of his brother’s reign that their program might
continue unabated under a Catholic monarch. Lichfield’s parliamentary
election, where four Tory candidates competed to do the king’s business,
captured the national mood. Addison himself canvassed for Elias Ashmole
and helped to remodel Lichfield’s corporation.1 Confident of James’s sup-
port for the church, the dean launched a visitation of his new archdeaconry
at the same time. His goal, he told Sancroft, was to work with ministers
and churchwardens to render the churches under his jurisdiction ‘con-
formable with the cathedral at Lichfield’.2 He took ‘care for God’s house’
by inspecting the physical condition of local churches. And while he could
tell Sancroft that ‘the people begin to regard the sacrament more than they
have done’, he nonetheless urged his clergy to celebrate communion more
frequently, in hopes of ‘a great amendment’ in local piety.3 When he had
to deal with Catholics and dissenters, he continued to favour consultation
over punishment. In the summer of 1686, for instance, he reinstituted
services at a church that had ‘laid desolate for above forty years’ and con-
vinced ‘one stiff papist’ there to return to the Church of England. He also
held a consistory court at Coventry. ‘Several dissenters were presented for
not coming to church and communion’, he told Sancroft, but they had
‘promised amendment’. His only regret was that ‘no good [could] be done
upon Quakers and Anabaptists’ with either exhortations or ecclesiastical
censures.4 His last resort was civil prosecution.
For all his zealous conformism, the dean remained focused on clerical
sloth and greed. In perhaps the greatest irony of a highly ironic career,
1 George, ‘Parliamentary elections and electioneering in 1685’; Elias Ashmole, IV, 1759–81; Henning,
House of Commons, 385–6; Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 156; Tyacke, Altars restored, 303; Beddard, ‘The
church of Salisbury and the accession of James II’.
2 Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 152, 158, 173. The use of cathedrals as a model for local churches was, of
course, a typical Laudian objective: see Tyacke and Fincham, Altars restored, 313–16.
3 Bodl MS Tanner 30, f. 26. 4 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 204.

245
246 Politics
his revolt against the prelacy of Thomas Wood culminated in his central
contribution to the material grandeur of the English church. After Addison
sequestered Wood’s incomes, he used them to rebuild Lichfield’s episcopal
palace, despite the fact that Wood had never shown any desire to reside
regularly in the city.5 The disgraced bishop tried to manoeuvre around the
dean by telling episcopal tenants that he had been restored and sending his
agents to collect rents, but Addison foiled his plans. He dispersed his own
men into the countryside to spy on Wood’s, explained to the tenants that
Wood was still suspended, and commanded them to make payment to the
dean and chapter instead. The old bishop’s residence was torn down at the
end of 1685, and work on the new one began immediately; within twelve
months, the exterior was complete.6 From then on, the lavish episcopal
dwelling stood as an enduring symbolic affront to prelatical avarice. Once
he was finally restored to the bishopric 1687, Wood played his part by
continuing in his old ways. He ignored his episcopal duties, tried to use a
diocesan collection for Huguenots to defray the cost of the palace, and ‘at his
own table, in the company of fanatics’, Addison told Sancroft, ‘inveighed
against’ his dean, ‘upbraiding me with the smallness of my income and
preferment’. Wood’s fanatical and prelatical table talk told Addison all
he needed to know of ‘what assistance and encouragement I am like to
meet with from my diocesan’.7 The dean, however, had the last word. In
October 1688, he presented Wood with the keys to the new palace, ‘which’,
Addison told Sancroft, ‘he with some seeming unwillingness received at my
hands’.8

Reform and revolt

By then, however, more serious threats to the church had diverted Addi-
son’s attention from prelacy and dissent. The duke of Monmouth’s rebel-
lion in the summer of 1685 had made James II more aware than ever of
his vulnerability. He decided to retain the forces that had suppressed the
revolt, with eighty-five Catholic officers among them, as a standing army.
Anglicans’ confidence in their king began to ebb. The second session of
parliament, which began in November and was quickly prorogued, was
consumed by the Tories’ disquiet over James’s violation of the Test Act and
their shock at his dismissal of their concerns.9 In February 1686, in the
5 Ibid., ff. 114, 166–8, 182; LRO D30/11/76.
6 Bodl MS Tanner 131, ff. 125, 133, 152, 159, 160, 163, 165, 179–83, 189, 192, 194, 199, 204, 208, 210.
7 Ibid., ff. 174–5, 188, 204–9. 8 Bodl MS Tanner 28, f. 201.
9 Sowerby, ‘Tories in the Whig corner’.
 Revolution 247
face of vociferous anti-Catholic preaching all over the realm, James reis-
sued his brother’s directives against seditious and controversial sermons.
A month later, he promulgated a general pardon that appeared to nul-
lify all pending religious prosecutions and dismantled all legal proceedings
against Quakers. That summer, he began to employ Catholics in civil-
ian positions and worked to convert clerics whom he allowed to keep
positions in the church and the universities. The royal judges’ decision
in Godden v. Hales on 21 June recognized his right to dispense with the
penal laws. In July, he set up an ecclesiastical commission to control future
ecclesiastical appointments. On 22 August, he nominated to the bishoprics
of Oxford and Chester two ultra-loyalist adversaries of Sancroft, Samuel
Parker and Thomas Cartwright, who had for some time been blocked
from preferment.10 In October, he created a Catholic-dominated council
committee to inspect local commissions of the peace. By the end of the
year, many congregations were being granted dispensations from the penal
laws, and when in January 1687 the committee issued 455 new commis-
sions for justices of peace, nearly two-thirds of them were Catholics. In
February James issued a declaration of indulgence in Scotland, and on
4 April he issued one for England. Over a period of two years, the king
had transformed his relationship with Addison, Sancroft, and the rest of
the Anglican clergy.11
Addison’s behaviour in Lichfield was transformed in turn. He strove
on all fronts to thwart what he saw as the king’s developing program of
tyrannically Catholicizing the country. When a lay vicar in the cathedral
handed him James II’s declaration, he simply told the vicar to keep it until
he was asked for it.12 And despite his long-held attitudes to worship, during
the first four months of 1687 Addison seems to have managed an all-out
attack on any semblance of popish piety in the cathedral. He prohibited
vicars from singing the litany in the cathedral, reversing an old tradition;
and he forbade the canons, vicars, and choir from bowing towards the altar
unless they were entering the sanctuary. One day he led the entire choir
into the cathedral library, locked the door, and revealed his reasoning.
‘He told them’, reported a witness, ‘that these were ticklish times, and
that bowing towards the altar gave great offence, and that therefore he
would have them forbear it for the future’. Bowing towards the altar was
a cathedral custom that the clerk-vicars were bound by statute to follow,
10 Beddard, ‘Bishop Cartwright’s death-bed’.
11 For further details on the progress of James’s pro-Catholic measures, see Miller, James II, 135–87;
Miller, Popery and politics, 196–263; Beddard, ‘James II and the Catholic challenge’.
12 LRO Ex D & C B/V/3, cathedral visitation book, f. 13v.
248 Politics
but Addison pointed to higher authorities. ‘Purely papal’, he called the
practice, ‘contrary to the Act for Uniformity, and nowhere required by our
church’. In fact the Act, Addison claimed, ‘cashiered’ the cathedral statutes,
and ‘utterly condemned’ ‘all arbitrary usages of kneeling down, using some
ejaculation coming into church, bowing at the name of Jesus, saying thanks
be to the Lord, and very particularly the canon in 1640 commending this
usage of bowing towards the altar’. The following year, Addison went on
the offensive and deliberately installed new seats in the cathedral ‘in the
very alley over against and near to the one side of the rails of the altar’. This
may have obstructed views of the altar, and would have generally sullied
the sense of holy order conveyed by the former setup.13 Like many other
divines, Addison led a campaign of active and passive resistance to James’s
agenda that was clearly meant to appease dissenters.14
Many of the dean’s sudden moves antagonized the clerics in the cathedral
and the laity in the city, and led to accusations that he, not James, was
playing the tyrant in the name of God.15 Yet as the national crisis mounted,
the cathedral chapter mostly banded together to oppose the king. In July
1687, the ‘bishop and clergy’ of the diocese of Lichfield and Coventry
produced a brief, reserved address to James thanking him for protecting
the Church of England in his declaration. Bishop Wood would not have
allowed scruples over popery or the encouragement of dissent to endanger
his bishopric again. But the names of the cathedral’s dean and prebendaries
were apparently absent from the document.16 Meanwhile, the cathedral
chapter’s register, Anthony Nichols, was aging, and it was feared that upon
his death, he might be replaced by a Catholic nominated by the king. The
chapter moved quickly to draft a new patent for the position that made it
pass directly from Nichols to his son.17
Despite Addison’s partial retreat from Laudian piety in the cathedral,
his behaviour in the late 1680s, like the behaviour of most other leading
Anglican divines, was not so much a break from the past as it was a per-
petuation of the reform program he had pursued in the previous reign. He
continued, for instance, to approach the problem of dissent with recourse
13 LRO Ex D & C B/V/3, cathedral visitation book, quotation on f. 25r.; LRO D30/1/2/75–6
(unfoliated).
14 See also, for example, the efforts of Sancroft’s friend and Addison’s associate during Wood’s suspen-
sion, bishop John Lake (Harris, Revolution, 248).
15 LRO Ex D & C B/V/3, cathedral visitation book; LRO D30/1/2/75–6 (unfoliated).
16 London gazette, no. 2258 (7–11 July 1687). When possible, all the other diocesan addresses to James
II explicitly noted support from the cathedral dean, and some explicitly mentioned the cathedral
chapter or prebends. See nos. 2246 (26–30 May), 2243 (16–19 May), 2283 (3–6 October), 2256
(30 June–4 July 1687).
17 LRO Ex D & C B/V/3, cathedral visitation book, f. 10r.
 Revolution 249
to admonition and persuasion, even when he had other options. ‘I have
had no small solicitude to keep this city free from conventicles’, Addison
wrote to Sancroft from Lichfield in August 1687, ‘which I praise God, I
have hitherto effected’. In the same letter he reported on a related problem
in the countryside, ‘the carriage of one Moushall, minister of Merrival in
Warwickshire, who has and does permit nonconformists to preach in the
parish church of Merrival, by which irregularity the service of the church
is excluded, and the whole become conventicle’. To confront Moushall,
Addison wrote to him as archdeacon of Coventry.18 While his efforts to
persuade this erring Anglican cleric failed, as late as the fall of 1688 the
dean was able to report to Sancroft that ‘I have been last week visiting my
archdeaconry, and found the clergy, and all things, in very good condition.
I do not find that we have lost any ground by the toleration’.19 He and the
church’s other leading divines were prepared to deal with sudden tactical
decisions by English rulers to abandon their traditional alliance with the
church.
Addison, to be sure, was like most Anglicans reluctant to stand up to
James directly. On the evening of 31 August 1687, the king paid a visit
to Lichfield and stayed in the deanery. He was ushered into town by city
leaders and presented with a purse containing £10 as a gift from the corpo-
ration. The next morning, in the cathedral, James touched for the king’s
evil. Addison, like other locals, took care to hide his opposition. ‘The king’,
Addison wrote to Sancroft on 3 September, ‘was pleased to lodge here at
the deanery, and has taken particular notice of your grace’s buildings here’.
Addison had evidently kept James ignorant of the simmering discontent
over the dean’s aggressive anti-papal policies. ‘I had all things in very good
order’, he told Sancroft, ‘and the king left us very well pleased’.20
Yet by the time James visited Lichfield, Addison had already brought
his resistance to the national stage, if only under the cover of allegory.
While meeting with Sancroft in London in May 1687, he also met with
his publisher, William Crooke, and managed to arrange a third edition
of The first state of Mahumedism.21 What had once served as a takedown
of anti-popery was now being used to skewer a Catholic king. Even the
meaning of the book’s original dedication to Williamson was inverted. It
had originally signalled scepticism about the Popish Plot and opposition
to Exclusion, but it now stood as an emblem of James Stuart’s ingratitude:
18 Bodl MS Tanner 29, ff. 59, 74. 19 Bodl MS Tanner 28, f. 201.
20 Bodl MS Tanner 29, f. 74; Harwood, Lichfield, 308–9. The city itself did not even produce an
address following James’s visit (Harris, Revolution, 230).
21 LRO D30/11/76 (unfoliated).
250 Politics
Williamson had just been dropped from the king’s Irish privy council for
refusing to countenance the repeal of the Test Act.22
This incarnation of Addison’s history of early Islam suggested that only
Cromwell and Muhammad rivalled James II in his attempts to use religion
as a prop for tyranny. Like Muhammad, the king had begun to secure
power by courting adherents of true religion in a divided society. Upon his
accession James found England ‘enlightened with the gospel’, and ‘though
it was greatly shaken with intestine heresies, yet there was still zeal and
union of its professors, and power and activity of civil magistrates’. With
the possessors of truth in so formidable a position, James, like Muhammad,
‘could not hope to affright them into compliance’ with his own religious
agenda. So he patiently feigned modesty instead. The Tory alliance between
clergymen and civil magistrates, Addison suggested, had been enough to
temporarily hold James back. Likewise, ‘during the first and weak state
of Mahumedism, its author put on a modest countenance and plausible
aspect’. When the Prophet faced magistrates who favoured true religion,
he put them at ease. ‘When a grandee who was a Christian came to visit
the Prophet’, Addison explained, ‘he stood up to him in token of respect;
and being by some of his followers rebuked for so doing, he told them,
“the Christian was a magistrate among his people, and honor is due to
men of that quality”’. The parallels here to James’s initial decision to
court conformist Anglicans must have jumped off the page. The scheme
had been as effective in England as it had been in Arabia.23 And while
England’s Protestants were beginning to see things for what they were,
Addison feared that they might, like the Koraishites of antiquity, learn
their lesson too late.
The centrepiece of Muhammad’s intermediate strategy, Addison insisted,
was religious toleration. ‘That which some have reckoned for a main engine
to advance his religion’, he wrote, ‘was his not suffering it, like Moses his
rod, to turn to a serpent, and devour all the rest’. Instead, like James, ‘he
granted a toleration’. ‘To testify to the world that his design was not to
oppress or ruinate their religion’, Muhammad made an agreement with
the men he sought to dupe. In this ‘solemn league and covenant’, he
promised ‘to repel those enemies which are offensive to them and me, and
stoutly to oppose them both in my person, by my servants, and all others
of my people and nation’. Bishops and judges, Muhammad promised,
would be defended, not removed from their offices, and no impositions or

22 Marshall, ‘Williamson, Sir Joseph’.

23 Addison, First state of Mahumedism, 3rd edn, 102–3 (mispaginated).
 Revolution 251
forced loans would be imposed. Yet for Muhammad and the puritan and
papist tyrants of England who later imitated him, clemency was nothing
more than a way of stalling for time. Toleration, Addison observed, was
‘among the artifices made use of by that great politique to assist his infant
empire, which as soon as he saw grown strong’, the Prophet added to the
Qurʾan ‘the chapter of the sword, and another of the battle, where all his
promises of toleration and indulgence to the Christians in their religion,
was changed to a harsher style’. He now commanded his servants to ‘cut
off the infidels’ heads, take them prisoners, enslave them until you think
fit to grant them their liberty, or make them pay their ransom’. Much like
Muhammad, James would ultimately be able to move against Protestants
because of their own internal divisions and weaknesses. In any land where
‘Christians fell to persecute one another with hatred and contumelies, and
mutually to wound themselves with petulant tongues’, an impostor was
likely to triumph.24
Addison intended for his historical parallel to aid the church in its
efforts to convince dissenters to oppose James. The king, claimed the dean,
could never be trusted to preserve any form of Protestantism in the realm.
The basic arguments of The first state of Mahumedism were familiar from
more famous tracts, such as the marquis of Halifax’s Letter to a dissenter,
which appeared at the same time. Addison’s narrative captured the general
outlook behind the Anglican clergy’s decision to revolt. The annals of
world history had shown them that no political or religious leader who
attempted to introduce drastic or illegal changes in the settled religion of a
country or empire under the banner of religious toleration actually had this
in mind as a final goal.25 The ultimate end of such behaviour, they knew,
was always the eventual suppression of all competing religious persuasions.
Every seemingly noble struggle against persecution was really an attempt
to reverse the direction in which blood was flowing. The alliance between
James and many dissenters seemed to confirm this estimate of the king’s
intentions, and signalled its equivalence with the mid-century knavery of
the puritans. In later Stuart England, toleration was not just consistently
used as a political tactic; it was generally assumed to be one.

24 Ibid., 102–6, 115, 126–8, quotations on 102 (mispaginated), 106 (mispaginated), 115, 128 (Addison
quoting Eusebius).
25 Pace Goldie, ‘Political thought of the Anglican Revolution’, this view was drawn from the gamut of
late humanist historiography; it was not a simple revival of traditional martyrological and patristic
perspectives developed in much earlier periods. It is also uninformative to account for the church’s
opposition to James by referring to intolerance when hardly anyone in the country understood
tolerance to be a political principle.
252 Politics
Halifax, of course, had behaved more confrontationally than Addison in
his resistance to James II, and so had many of the leading clergy. London’s
pulpits rang with violent anti-papal oratory, and vitriol against the popish
menace poured from the city’s presses. Amid increasingly vigilant efforts by
Catholic missionaries throughout the country to convert Protestants, the-
ological polemic again became a staple of public discourse. Many of those
who were most active in aggressively confronting these emissaries of Rome
and escalating political conflict in the process were later tapped to lead
the post-revolutionary church. William Lloyd, John Sharp, Edward Still-
ingfleet, Thomas Tenison, William Wake, Gilbert Burnet, John Tillotson,
Edward Fowler, and Simon Patrick all played very similar roles.26 Addison,
of course, had a different view of how to properly engage in public politics.
This might be part of the reason why his career stalled after the Revolution
had run its course.
Yet while he did not join the future Williamite bishops in playing a
prominent role in the polemics of 1687 and 1688, Addison did share with
them and with the rest of the Anglican leadership a more basic conviction.
He knew that an intense pursuit of the church’s preexisting pastoral mission
was the best way of hindering James II’s project.27 In July 1688, Sancroft
issued articles to his bishops that amounted to a blueprint for a pastoral
campaign to secure the country against the effects of royal policies. Addison
later wrote to the archbishop to inform him that he had done his best to
promulgate the articles, despite the fact that his superior, Wood, had refused
to do anything with them. Without permission from the bishop, Addison
explained, ‘I could only import them, as private advice, which the clergy,
who in this conjuncture are all steady and resolved, received with great
respect and approbation’.28 Sancroft urged the clergy to fortify themselves
with the vows and oaths they had taken in support of the church, to
continue to pursue the pastoral reforms of the past two decades, and to
increase the frequency of public prayers. He asked them to grace their
efforts with subtly politicized but canonical sermons that urged passive
obedience to the Crown and resistance to the agents of Rome. At the same
time, they were to confront Catholic missionaries and exhort the laity to
remain steadfast in their allegiance to the church. Addison could not have
been more pleased with these directives.
Sancroft went on to urge what Addison had once described to him
as the ‘practicing’ of dissenters. ‘Neglect not frequently to confer with

26 See, for example, Sirota, Christian monitors, 36–7, 40–42, 50–52, 66–7.
27 Contrast Sowerby, Making toleration, 153–92, esp. 173. 28 Bodl MS Tanner 28, f. 201.
 Revolution 253
them in the spirit of meekness’, he wrote, ‘seeking by all good ways and
means to gain and win them over to our communion’. As Addison had
done earlier in the decade, the clergy were to ‘visit them at their houses,
and receive them kindly at their own, and treat them fairly wherever they
meet them, discoursing calmly and civilly with them’. These discussions
were supposed to disabuse dissenters of their fears that some bishops had
sympathy for Roman Christianity. The clergy were to ‘warmly and most
affectionately exhort them to join with us in daily fervent prayer to the God
of peace, for an universal blessed union of all Reformed churches, both at
home and abroad, against our common enemies’.29 Even in this charged
moment, Sancroft sought an engagement with dissenters that promoted
the unification of English Protestants but did not recognize the need for a
comprehension of variant forms of worship within the national church.30
A rather familiar conformist message was still seen as an effective means
of assuring dissenters that the leaders of the Church of England were
implacable enemies of Catholicism and staunch allies of other Protestant
communities of the faithful, both in England and on the continent.
Enlightened Anglicans responded to James II’s attempt to destroy the
pastoral reform program they had championed since the restoration of the
monarchy by pursuing that program with more vigour than ever before.31
The weapons they wielded against their king were the same ministerial
practices and the same strains of Enlightenment that had supported their
pastoral mission from the beginning. Yet at the same time, the exigencies
of the Anglican revolt began to force latent tensions among the church’s
leaders into public view, and they also opened a space for dissenters to
mobilize in support of their own alternative visions, on both sides of the
conflict. That room for manoeuvre had not been present for a decade and
a half, and while hardly anyone could have expected it at the time, it would
never again slip away. Much the same might be said of the rifts emerging
within the Church of England.

The struggle to do good

When the English parliament exempted all trinitarian Protestants from
the penal laws against dissent on 24 May 1689, the established church had
29 Sancroft, Articles (quotations here); Bodl MS Tanner 28, ff. 114–30; Sirota, Christian monitors, 62–3;
Cardwell (ed), Documentary annals, II, 370–76.
30 Addison rallied the cathedral chapter behind a puritan Whig candidate for parliament at the same
time (Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, 466; Morrice, Entring book, IV, 187).
31 Pace Sirota, Christian monitors, the forms of pastoral outreach that figured so prominently in the
later 1680s were common in the reign of Charles II, and hardly confined to the metropolis.
254 Politics
already been labouring in an atmosphere of open credal competition for
two years. In a sense, the Glorious Revolution lightened its burden, because
Roman proselytism had been crushed and William III’s effort to extend
toleration to private Catholic worship had failed. Yet the challenge faced
by the established church was acute. Many dissenters who still hoped to
join it had been driven away by the failure of a comprehension scheme
in the 1689 convocation. At the same time, the Test and Corporation
Acts were increasingly attenuated by the practice of occasional conformity,
whereby the same dissenters took Anglican communion once a year in
order to qualify for public office. And while dissenting schoolmasters were
still subject to punishment, it was becoming difficult to prosecute them.32
Finally, like all Christian subjects of William and Mary, Anglicans were
faced with yet another fearful prospect, one that had roots in England’s
first revolutionary moment. It was widely feared that ordinary people were
using toleration not to attend nonconformist gatherings, but to neglect the
Christian life altogether.
The spectre of irreligion, the prospect of vice, the need for unity, and the
revolutionary signs of providence all conspired in this moment to provoke a
national effort to promote moral virtue among the people. Enthusiasm for
this ‘moral revolution’ brought together elites of all political and religious
persuasions, but it also led to struggle.33 Every specific moral initiative
implicitly endorsed not only a particular view of the most effective means
of inculcating good behaviour, but also a broader vision for the proper
organization of a Christian society. These competing prescriptions eventu-
ally exposed some of the latent tensions within later Stuart Anglicanism,
and by the middle of Anne’s reign, there were even hints of a cleavage
between ‘high’ and ‘low church’ understandings of moral reform.34 The
campaign to encourage ordinary people to do good became one of the
most important sites for religious politics after the Glorious Revolution.
The moral reformers of the 1690s drew on a number of traditional tem-
plates for their work that hailed from the conformist and puritan campaigns
of the past. Some well-worn tools were coercive: both church and civil
courts could be used to discipline vice. Other familiar resources were edu-
cational and rhetorical: they included catechizing, preaching, and a number
32 Tyacke, ‘The “rise of puritanism” and the legalizing of dissent’, 40–45.
33 Bahlman, Moral revolution, 14, 70, 83–7; Craig, ‘Movement for the reformation of manners, 1688–
1715’, 4; Claydon, William III. Contrast Rose, 1690s; Rose, ‘Origins and ideals of the SPCK’,
172–90.
34 Sirota, Christian monitors; Isaacs, ‘The Anglican hierarchy and the reformation of manners’, 401–6;
Rose, ‘Origins and ideals of the SPCK’; Burtt, ‘Societies for the reformation of manners’; Burtt,
Virtue transformed.
 Revolution 255
of other literary schemes.35 From the very the beginning it was clear that this
movement, like its ancestors, would involve simultaneous appeals to force
and exhortation, and draw on both religious and secular institutions.36
King William himself urged the 1689 convocation to consider the refor-
mation of manners, and in February 1690 he wrote to Henry Compton,
the bishop of London, to encourage the Anglican clergy to preach against
sin and read civil statutes against blasphemy in the pulpit.37 Late in the
summer Edward Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester, exhorted his diocesan
clergy to preach and catechize with an eye to morality.38 In December
1691, thirteen bishops revealed their interest in a partnership between
church and state when they petitioned William to issue a proclamation for
the implementation of laws against vice.39 Almost immediately, a compe-
tition to co-opt the energies and rhetoric of the movement emerged.40
The success of all these efforts, from catechizing sessions to blasphemy
prosecutions, ultimately depended upon ordinary people opting in. In fact,
what most distinguished the moral revolution of the 1690s from its fore-
bears was the level of lay voluntarism it featured and the extent to which
that activity was purposefully channelled and institutionalized.41 The first
society for the reformation of manners, which formed around 1690 in
London, was a group of conforming lay Anglicans who hoped to gather
information on bawdy houses and initiate prosecutions. A more nationally
oriented society formed in the Strand in 1691.42 The earliest groups perpet-
uated a Restoration tradition of Anglican religious societies devoted to the
ideal of primitive Christianity.43 Despite widespread enthusiasm among
their members for using church courts to enforce morality, civil prose-
cutions eventually took centre stage. As the societies for the reformation
of manners became increasingly associated with dissent, a certain irony
developed: these informers and the often zealous judges with whom they
worked hunted down the allegedly vicious with the same weapons that had
been used by Tories against nonconformists in the previous decade.44 By
the end of the century, there were about twenty societies in the country.
35 Most accounts of the movement focus exclusively on coercion, and usually on the civil courts: see
Bahlman, Moral revolution; Craig, ‘Movement for the reformation of manners’.
36 Spurr, ‘The church, the societies, and the moral revolution of 1688’, 128–9.
37 Bahlman, Moral revolution, 22; Craig, ‘Movement for the reformation of manners’, 17–18.
38 Bahlman, Moral revolution, 22–3, 59–60. 39 Rose, ‘Origins and ideals of the SPCK’, 161.
40 On such attempts at court, see Claydon, William III.
41 On previous Anglican voluntarism, see Spurr, ‘The church, the societies, and the moral revolution
of 1688’. For a puritan case study, see Underdown, Fire from heaven.
42 Bahlman, Moral revolution, 31–4. 43 Duffy, ‘Primitive Christianity revived’.
44 See Bahlman, Moral revolution, 18–21, 48–9; Craig, ‘Movement for the reformation of manners’,
41–61.
256 Politics
The Anglican clergy only slowly recognized the utility of co-opting this
institutional form. In 1699, archbishop Thomas Tenison encouraged his
bishops to establish clerical reform societies, and the newly founded SPCK
explicitly associated itself with Tenison’s initiative. It began to direct local
societies for the reformation of manners, and in the process, managed to
shift their focus away from coercion.45
Addison himself pursued an intriguing course in this contest for moral
reform. In late 1689, he was a member of the lower house of convocation,
whose members seem to have generally opposed comprehension, and while
he swore allegiance to William III, he seems to have organized a petition
from the clergy of his diocese to the king on behalf of Sancroft and the
other bishops who had been suspended since August.46 None of these signs
of discontent with the revolutionary settlement in the church prevented
him from helping to spearhead moral reform, in keeping with the pastoral
focus of his earlier career. In early December, as he sat in convocation,
there appeared in William Crooke’s shop in the Strand a pocket-sized book
entitled The catechumen, or an account given by the young person to the
minister of his knowledge in religion, upon his first admission to the Lord’s
table. This was Addison’s initial attempt to attach the nation’s need for
moral regeneration to his own spiritual agenda.
Inserted in the book before the catechumen’s words were what Crooke
called ‘the epistles of two eminent divines of the Church of England’ –
commendations of the work written by Addison and the London minister
John Scott, rector of St Peter le Poor and prebend of St Paul’s cathedral.
The catechumen had been licenced on 2 December – two days before
convocation began – by Zacheus Isham, who was another prebend of
St Paul’s, and chaplain to Henry Compton, bishop of London.47 Isham,
Scott, and Addison were all popular devotional writers, and Isham and
Scott, at least, were close friends.48 The book’s prefatory apparatus linked
it to Compton, and to London clergy like Isham and Scott, prominent
divines who were, like Addison, somewhat discontented with the emerging
religious settlement. The title page and the letters also gave the impression
that the body of the tract was the spontaneous creation of an average,
properly catechized Anglican boy, probably from Addison’s diocese, who
sent his treatise to Crooke to ask if it might be published. The book was thus

45 Bahlman, Moral revolution, 23–7, 37–8, 70–77.

46 LRO Ex D & C B/V/3; LPL CONV I/2/4, ff. 9r., 10r. Bishop Wood would have been unlikely to
organize such a petition.
47 Addison, Catechumen, title page; Arber (ed), Term catalogues, II, 297.
48 ODNB; Fawcett, Liturgy of comprehension, 28, 30; Long, Vox cleri, 60–62.
 Revolution 257
meant to stage and advertise a specific form of lay Anglican voluntarism.
Yet the content of both the letters and the boy’s essay leave little doubt that
the entire tract was either written or heavily edited by Addison himself. It
appears to have been an orchestrated attempt by Addison and Scott (and
perhaps Isham and Compton as well) to promote a specific understanding
of Christian piety and moral renewal just as members of the two houses
of convocation struggled over the future parameters of communion with
the Church of England. The catechumen apparently sold well, and a second
edition was printed in the new year.49
Its readers first encountered a letter from Addison to the young man,
who supposedly sent his essay to Addison for review before the dean passed
it on to Crooke. The catechumen eagerly sought clerical approval for
his pious activism. Addison responded by emphasizing, as he had since
the 1670s, the pivotal importance of orthodox catechizing and eucharis-
tic communion to a life of virtue.50 He sought to channel and promote
Anglican voluntarism as a vital component of his Laudian style of Chris-
tianity by employing a literary medium that would have been familiar to
the early members of the SPCK. Far from being an anodyne statement of
faith, as Scott’s letter suggested, the catechumen’s statement insisted upon
a style of piety and moral renewal that was yoked to strict standards of
Anglican uniformity. Readers were taught that their own zeal for virtuous
behaviour was insignificant and feeble in its own right: it meant little and
would achieve less if it was not fortified by the liturgical, sacramental,
and clerical resources of the national church. The catechumen’s life as a
Christian was ultimately focused not on the morality he cultivated, but on
the rituals that sustained it, and the priests who mediated between him
and his God.51 This sacramental vision would have had a charged political
significance for readers who were concerned with the threat that occa-
sional conformity posed to the church. Addison clearly meant to bolster
the tottering Test Act by insisting that England’s moral revival depended
upon the frequent reception of the sacrament from properly ordained
ministers.52
By May, the dean was again at work in Crooke’s shop, trying to
strengthen the potential of The catechumen to promote his understand-
ing of moral reform. That month he published the second edition of his

49 The book had reached a fourth edition by 1693 and a fifth by 1700.
50 Addison, Catechumen, sigs. a3r.–a4v. 51 Ibid., 2–11, 31–42, 45, 70–72, 77–8, 85.
52 For Addison’s Tory political activities after he returned to Lichfield following the 1689 convocation,
see Hayton, et al., House of Commons, II, 533–4; Longleat House, Thynne MSS, XII, f. 283; TNA
SP 44/97, f. 274; BL MS Add 28880, f. 90.
258 Politics
1674 treatise on catechizing, The primitive institution.53 Once again Addi-
son had reissued one of his works with an eye to its topical import. He was
well aware of the similarities between the church’s current predicament and
the challenges it had faced almost two decades earlier. ‘This is a season’,
read the book’s old dedication to the late Seth Ward, ‘which not only war-
rants, but exacts our greatest endeavors to persuade to such things as may
beget, restore, and establish truth and union among us’.54 The book had
originally been published in the context of one particular attempt to secure
such a union – Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence – and explicitly
condemned it.55 The second edition again dismissed the effectiveness of
toleration as a tactic. It insisted instead that only diligent catechesis and fre-
quent eucharistic offerings by conforming ministers could bring dissenters
back into the church and ensure the moral improvement of the people.
By November, visitors to Crooke’s shop had access to Addison’s full state-
ment on the proper relationship between God’s church and the reformation
of manners in England’s second revolutionary moment. Crooke was now
selling The Christian’s manual, an Addison anthology that included The
catechumen, The primitive institution, and the fourth printing of Addison’s
popular guide to receiving communion, An introduction to the sacrament.56
By 1693, the Manual had already been printed in at least four editions.
It confirmed the intent behind Addison’s continuous work with Crooke
since late 1689, by combining Addison’s politicized discourse on catechizing
with the devotional treatise that the catechumen himself had recommended
in his essay. As Crooke explained in an advertisement inserted after The
catechumen, the catechism was properly considered a prelude to the knowl-
edge relayed in the Introduction to the sacrament. In other words, religious
knowledge and morality were in a sense simply instruments for the worthy
reception of the eucharist, and at the very least, these three dimensions
of Christianity could only be separated from one another at the hazard of
one’s soul.57 The Manual sought to yoke the cause of moral reform to the
sacramental life of the established church.
The clerical strand of the devotional and moral revival of the 1690s
did not, of course, point only in a Laudian direction. This fact became
horribly clear to Addison between July 1693 and March 1694, when his

53 Arber, Term catalogues, II, 318, 325.

54 Addison, Catechumen, ‘To the reader’. 55 See above, 219–26.
56 Arber, Term catalogues, II, 341; Addison, Christian’s manual, ‘Introduction to the sacrament’, sig.
a4v.
57 Addison, Christian’s manual, title page, ‘Advertisement’ (unpaginated, between ‘The catechumen’
and ‘An introduction to the sacrament’); ‘Introduction to the sacrament’, imprimatur.
 Revolution 259
new episcopal superior, the moral reformer William Lloyd, conducted a
visitation of Lichfield Cathedral. Lloyd had little time for Addison’s pious
preferences or his style of leadership. The dean had managed Lichfield’s
cathedral with a heavy hand, consistently provoking the ire of its canons.
Led by the precentor, Henry Greswold, these clerics campaigned to restore
the chapter’s statutory right to be consulted by Addison on a wide variety
of matters that he preferred, in accordance with custom, to manage alone.
Greswold had been a prebendary in the cathedral since 1662, and Lloyd, his
close friend, had tried to secure the deanery for him in 1683. The precentor
clearly held a grudge against Addison, who considered Greswold to be a
wealthy, non-resident subordinate who was unworthy of his attention. Life
in the cathedral was beset by a complex mixture of personal, local, and
political animosities. After fruitless attempts from 1686 onwards to appeal
to Wood and to confront Addison directly, the canons decided to look
outside the diocese for help in putting a stop to Addisonian autocracy. In
November 1689, they wrote to Lloyd himself, then bishop of St Asaph, for
help, and outlined their grievances. Lloyd may have already been looking
askance at Addison as he pondered the request of the dean’s enemies, since
in December Addison sat in the assembly that stymied Lloyd’s efforts to
comprehend dissent within the established church. While Lloyd decided
not to intervene this time, once he was translated to Lichfield and Coventry
in 1692, he was bound to become more active in his friend Greswold’s
cause.58
When Lloyd began a visitation of the cathedral in July 1693, Greswold
and his allies led an attack on the dean. Lloyd had recently emerged as a
prominent champion of moral revival.59 From the beginning, the correc-
tion of scandalous behaviour by the clergy had been an essential part of
the movement, and the bishop’s visitation was therefore an integral part
of his wider pastoral agenda. Addison’s enemies were only too willing to
come to their diocesan’s aid. In private interviews with Lloyd one of the
canons, John Willes, openly questioned Addison’s loyalty to the monarchy,
by claiming that he had allowed a nonjuring divine to preach twice in the
cathedral. He then relayed other less plausible aspersions that cunningly
played on Lloyd’s reformism. He claimed that when Addison had forbid-
den bowing towards the altar in the late 1680s, he had commanded the
canons to bow to him instead. Along with the prebendary William Baker,
58 Bodl MS Tanner 131, f. 114; Bodl MS Tanner 34, f. 24; LRO D30/1/2/74–6; Page et al. (eds), History
of the county of Stafford, III, 166–99; Savage, Lichfield Cathedral; A. Hart, William Lloyd, 141–5.
59 Craig, ‘Movement for the reformation of manners’, 64. See also Isaacs, ‘Anglican hierarchy and the
reformation of manners’, 400.
260 Politics
Willes provided a scandalous portrait of Addison’s vices, painting him as a
hypocrite who was if anything the antithesis of moral reform. They claimed
that their dean could often be found yelling and swearing at members of the
cathedral, while obviously intoxicated. Baker chimed in that the dean ‘is
not only fierce and violent in his disposition, but also very revengeful and
implacable’. In addition, Baker claimed, ‘the dean has several times been
disordered with drink’, and ‘he has also frequently heard the dean swear
in earnest, talking where there was neither drink nor provocation’. On one
occasion, Baker added, Addison had been drinking all day in Coleshill, ‘and
as he came home, disburdened his stomach out of the coach’. Despite the
fact that most of the evidence against the dean was secondhand or produced
by a single witness, and there was obvious personal animus involved in the
charges, Lloyd seriously investigated the complaints, and accepted many
of them.60
Divines like Addison found themselves in difficult positions following
the Glorious Revolution, but they were no more disoriented than anyone
else. The dean’s schemes and struggles in the early 1690s show the earliest
stages of a competition to determine the proper relationship between the
Church of England and the pious voluntarism that flowered after the
overthrow of James II. The ‘moral revolution’ was by no means solely
‘puritan’ or ‘latitudinarian’ in orientation. It was a diverse wave of activity
that had in fact been anticipated by the Restoration Church of England
and was incorporated during the 1690s into a wide variety of religious
and political strategies. Contrary to what is usually assumed, the tolerant
tactics of the Williamite regime were not a severe shock to clergy who
valued strict uniformity and sacramental community. They were utterly
familiar. Addison’s strategic exhortations to virtue in the early 1690s were
more than simply redolent of a pastoral agenda that had been articulated
in the Restoration period and adapted to Charles II’s own experiment with
toleration in 1672. They featured a literal re-publication of that agenda.
He and other divines responded to the religious crisis of the Glorious
Revolution with persuasive guides to thought and behaviour that were
specifically crafted to make an ethical life and the zealous cultivation of a
controversial form of Anglican piety seem inseparable. In so doing, though,
they helped force into the open tensions that had mostly remained latent
in the pastoral activity of leading divines over the past three decades.

60 LRO Ex D & C B/V/3, cathedral visitation book, quotations on ff. 23v., 25v.; Hart, William Lloyd,
141–5; Savage, Lichfield Cathedral; Page et al. (eds), History of the county of Stafford, III, 166–99.
 Revolution 261

Vicious heretics and public truths

In Williamite England the politics of moral turpitude were never far
removed from the politics of doctrinal error. Heresy was regarded as a
symptom of vice. And the truly divisive question about orthodoxy within
the church, as in the case of morality, was of course not whether to pro-
mote it, but how best to do so. Here again Addison’s career kept pace
with national developments. At some point in 1693, reeling from William
Lloyd’s descent upon Lichfield Cathedral, the dean attempted a bit of pub-
lic vengeance against his episcopal superior. He adopted his usual sideways
posture, publishing an anonymous, scathing critique of chiliastic readings
of the book of Revelation called Millennianism.61 Lloyd, like Addison, was
an avid historian, but one with different and partly embarrassing inter-
ests. He was a keen chronologer, and at times, his studies veered towards
prophecy. Many of Lloyd’s fellow chronologers had similar interests, includ-
ing Isaac Newton, one of the bishop’s frequent correspondents. Yet they
were generally less willing than Lloyd to specify how their interests in the
prophetic books of the Bible related to knowledge of future events. Lloyd’s
obsession with predicting the future, which became more evident as he
aged, was a constant source of both ridicule and admiration in his day.62
In the wake of the Revolution, hoping to use his erudition in defence of
the Williamite regime, he published studies of God’s means of disposing
of kingdoms and the prophecy of seventy weeks in the Book of Daniel.63
While the supposedly ‘latitudinarian’ prelate tended to pursue his unusual
interests in more or less private settings, he did approach politics in part as
a prophet.
Addison’s Millennianism sought to make nonsense of his diocesan’s
opinions. Since the book was anonymous and did not mention Lloyd by
name, the settling of scores it accomplished would have only been noticed
in select circles. The explicit target of Millennianism was premillennialism,
the form of millenarian doctrine endorsed by Lloyd and most other divines
in his day, including many other Williamite bishops. It taught that Christ’s
second coming would occur before a period of a thousand or more years
in which he would reign on earth. Addison was a postmillennialist or
preterist. To him it was clear that the millennium had begun over 1,300 years

61 Addison, Millennianism. For attribution, see CDS, ‘Books written by the Reverend L.A. D.D. dean
of Lichfield’.
62 Hart, William Lloyd, 235–9, 245–6; Manuel, Isaac Newton, 295–6.
63 Lloyd, Exposition of the prophecy of seventy weeks; Lloyd, Discourse of God’s ways of disposing of
kingdoms.
262 Politics
ago: Satan had been shackled when heathenism was destroyed throughout
the Roman empire. A neat thousand years, Addison observed, separated
Constantine’s Edict of Milan from ‘the rising of the Ottoman family,
and bringing of Asia and Greece to Mahometanism’, which obviously
signified when ‘the fettered Devil was to be let loose’.64 Addison’s sneering
study of premillennialism intervened in the wider chiliastic controversy of
early Williamite England, which was itself part of the wave of providential
introspection that swept across the country after the Glorious Revolution.65
The dean’s sobering critique may also have had yet another general
target. There is a certain image of not only Lloyd, but the entire Williamite
episcopate he represented, that emerges from Addison’s description of this
particular theological terrain. Millennianism evoked a group of learned
but foolish men who were so consumed by the task of arguing in public
and private with conformists and heretics about ultimately unknowable
things that they neglected their basic pastoral duties. In this sense, they
were outdoing the Laudians of the reign of Charles I in the commission
of old sins. Prelates like Lloyd claimed to be champions of their church
and their king. But in reality they were using theology to serve their own
political interests, while unwittingly edging themselves and many others
towards heresy and enthusiasm. In this sense, the millenarian debate called
to mind a concurrent but far more troubling theological controversy: the
angry disputes over the existence and nature of the Trinity that engulfed
the revolutionary church for more than half a decade. Here too Addison
intervened, in 1696, with a tract called Christos autotheos, or, an historical
account of the heresie denying the Godhead of Christ.66
The trinitarian controversy of the 1690s was neither a pivotal moment
in Christian theology nor an opening salvo in an Enlightened, rationalist
assault on Christianity.67 English divines had been reading, discussing, and
debating ‘Socinianism’ for nearly a century, and ‘rational’ theology had
become a staple of Anglican apologetics.68 The controversy was primarily

64 Addison, Millennianism, quotations on 36, 46, 62, 74–5. One of Addison’s sources was Amyraut,
Du regne de mille ans. His line of interpretation was also associated with Hugo Grotius, and in
England, with Henry Hammond and Richard Baxter. Note that here Addison clearly described
Islam as a diabolical force, while he neglected to emphasize this in his non-providential studies of
Islamic history.
65 On this controversy and on apocalypticism in the later seventeenth century, see Johnston, Revelation
restored.
66 This tract does not figure in any existing accounts of the trinitarian controversy.
67 Even Pocock, Barbarism and religion, tends to overstate the intrinsic importance of Socinian theology
in the early Enlightenment (for example, I, 60; V, 16–17).
68 On Socinianism in England, see McLachlan, Nonconformist library; McLachlan, Socinianism;
Wilbur, Unitarianism; Mortimer, Reason and religion; Lim, Mystery unveiled.
 Revolution 263
significant not for purely intellectual reasons, but because it demonstrated
like no other event in the decade how a central legacy of the English
Revolution – the need to attend to both truth and stability in the search
for divine knowledge – led to spectacular public rifts within the church after
its revolt against James II. The problem of public theology was a central
Enlightenment problem. But it was a problem of scholarship, institutions,
and order, not a Manichean clash between progressive and backward ideas.
It was also much more than a simple jurisdictional dispute. The attempts
that trinitarians and their enemies made to prevent theological discourse
from destroying civil order were not limited to opinions and decisions about
the proper nature and extent of legal and formal means of institutional
restraint.69 They also required hard choices about the most appropriate
scholarly underpinning for religious argumentation and the best rhetorical
mode of public appeal. When a participant in this controversy chose to
adopt a specific form of scholarly argument and engage in specific literary
strategies, his choices were closely related to his wider views on what media
and formal institutions were capable of promoting truth, unity, and order.
Implied in his approach to public divinity was his general attitude to
Enlightenment.
The anti-trinitarians of late seventeenth-century England were willing
to argue in a philosophical or dialectical mode, but they usually did so
only in a negative manner: they deconstructed the scholastic terminology
that some conformists imposed upon scripture or claimed that the Trinity
was absurd when considered abstractly. Most of the time, they relied on
the tools of late humanism. They preferred an anti-philosophical, literal,
and plain reading of scripture. When interpreting a particular passage,
they sought aid in the wider scriptural context, their expertise in bibli-
cal languages, and patristic writings from the first three centuries. They
insisted that if a conflict between scripture and reason arose, their pri-
mary allegiance was to scripture. Yet in practice, when the commonly
received sense of a passage seemed to conflict with dialectical reasoning,
they spent considerable effort searching for a meaning that would con-
form to it. Like other Anglicans, they usually identified metaphors in the
literal sense and interpreted them accordingly, by making the meaning of
the metaphor, not the metaphor itself, the basis of doctrine. Yet they did
admit that a situation might arise in which the literal sense might con-
flict with what reason allowed, and in such a case, they usually turned this
69 The following account of the controversy is selective. In focusing on the importance of scholarly
methods and literary practices to public politics it is meant to complement Sirota, ‘Trinitarian
crisis’.
264 Politics
sense into metaphor, or suggested an amendment to the received text. They
tended to argue that apparently unitarian sections of scripture were textu-
ally uncorrupted, and to claim that apparently trinitarian sections were the
products of poor copying, bad translation, or monkish tampering. The dif-
ferences between the exegetical methods of Socinians and many conformist
Anglicans were narrow and subtle.70
The most significant development in later seventeenth-century anti-
trinitarian argument was the extent to which it came to rely on historical
scholarship.71 This indicated what lay at the core of the controversy. Anti-
trinitarian histories challenged the ability of both church and state to
adjudicate orthodoxy by producing alternative histories of true religion,
sound learning, public debate, and institutional authority from antiquity
to the present. This was a diverse strand of writing. It could be a mainly
patristic exercise in determining when early Christians held the doctrine
of the Trinity and asking whether it was a Platonist invention. But it could
also take the form of more Machiavellian narratives. Writers tended to
adopt this tack in order to turn their readers’ attention away from purely
theological issues to institutional and political ones.72 This is how anti-
trinitarians turned the history of what passed for orthodoxy into a history
of priestcraft.
The defenders of orthodoxy were not of one mind on how to respond
to heresy. A number of learned divines who were not bishops – including
William Sherlock and the Calvinists Robert South, John Edwards, and
John Wallis – engaged in vitriolic public disputation on the Trinity. They
employed dialectical and philosophical forms of argument, both ‘ratio-
nalist’ and ‘anti-rationalist’, that many other churchmen associated only
with the perpetuation and aggravation of religious discord. These writ-
ers were nevertheless convinced that their way of proceeding was a useful
remedy for heresy, despite the fact that it largely ignored the methodolog-
ical commitments of the heretics.73 The church’s new episcopal leadership
70 Reedy, Bible and reason, 121–4. Observers have consistently exaggerated and oversimplified these
differences ever since the controversy itself. In particular, while they have tended to depict the
anti-trinitarians as peculiarly ‘rational’ or ‘philosophical’ theologians, heterodox argument was in
fact very often founded upon an historical critique of the ‘philosophization’ of Christian doctrine
in late antiquity. See, for example, Lim, ‘Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity’.
71 Reedy, Bible and reason, 124, 129, 133; Lim, Mystery unveiled, 217–70; Champion, Pillars of priestcraft
shaken, 99–118; Mulsow, ‘Radical uses of Arabic scholarship’; Haugen, ‘Trinity doctrine’; Quantin,
Church of England and Christian antiquity, passim.
72 See, for example, Long, Answer to a Socinian treatise; Hickes, Discourses upon Dr. Burnet and
Dr. Tillotson; Edwards, Preservative against Socinianism; Fullwood, Socinian controversie; Tillotson,
Concerning the divinity and incarnation; Aretius, Valentinus Gentilis.
73 See esp. Nicholls, Answer to an heretical book, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, ‘The preface’; Long, Answer to a
Socinian treatise, ‘The preface’; Edwards, Preservative against Socinianism, ‘The preface’. Here again
 Revolution 265
held a different view. Many of the most prominent Williamite bishops –
including Stillingfleet, Patrick, Burnet, and, astonishingly, archbishop
Tillotson himself – joined Sherlock and the Calvinists in directly engag-
ing the anti-trinitarians in print. Yet they largely preferred the same late
humanist methods as their heretical opponents. Their ‘rational’ defence of
orthodoxy was rooted above all in an evaluation of testimony, and they went
out of their way to attack the approaches adopted by other trinitarians.74
As Addison would have predicted, scholastic, philosophical, and other
aggressive forms of intervention accounted for much of the initial escalation
and complication of the controversy. In 1691, Thomas Long and William
Nicholls published detailed animadversions on Arthur Bury’s The naked
gospel, which was generally considered a ‘Socinian’ tract, while William
Sherlock and John Wallis offered disputative and occasionally original
defences of the Trinity that used philosophical learning to buttress the
uncertain textual basis for orthodoxy. In 1693, Sherlock himself was the
target of scholastic animadversions from another professed defender of
orthodoxy, South, who argued that Sherlock’s idiosyncratic resort to phi-
losophy had ended in heresy. The Socinians too fell prey to angry, dispu-
tative assaults from Francis Fullwood, John Edwards, and Edward Fowler
in that year and the next. For the most part, these writers ceded no ground
to the Socinians, berated them with epithets and dismissive rebukes, and
affirmed that a wide gulf separated their scholarly and theological perspec-
tives. Those, like South, who eschewed a philosophical approach, tended
to resort to an explicitly anti-rationalist and anti-historicist defence of
Christian mysteries.75
Burnet, Stillingfleet, and Tillotson were equally explicit in offering the
opposite perspective. They admitted the similarities between their methods
and those of the Socinians, and the difficulty of answering the questions
to which they were being applied. For the most part, they responded
to the Socinians on their own terms and offered a reluctant defence of
Christian mysteries. Their ‘rationalism’ was clearly distinguishable from

Calvinist divines, well aware of how late humanist approaches to theology could play into the hands
of freethinkers, appear to have eschewed Enlightened styles of engagement in religious controversy.
See above, 27 n. 47, 150 n. 5, 180 n. 17.
74 Tillotson, Unity of the divine nature, 16–17; Reedy, Bible and reason, 127; Reedy, Robert South,
129–32.
75 Bury, Naked gospel; Long, Answer to a Socinian treatise; Nicholls, Answer to a heretical book; Sherlock,
Holy and ever blessed Trinity; Sherlock, Apology for writing against Socinians; Wallis, Theological dis-
courses; South, Animadversions upon Dr. Sherlock’s book; Fullwood, Socinian controversie; Fullwood,
A parallel; Edwards, Preservative against Socinianism; Fowler, Certain propositions. See also Sherlock,
Defence of Dr. Sherlock’s notion of a Trinity; Sherlock, Defence of the dean of St Paul’s apology; Reedy,
Robert South, 137–51; Reedy, Bible and reason, 125.
266 Politics
the ‘rationalism’ preferred by philosophically oriented conformists and
Socinians, and from the anti-rationalism of divines like South.76 They
compared the enduring mysteries of Christianity to the mysterious aspects
of the natural world. Their argumentation was epistemologically reserved.
It was founded on the idea that there were realities, like the Trinity, to which
scripture provided the grounds for assent, but whose manner of existence
could not be adequately described on any basis, scriptural or otherwise.77
In practice, Tillotson and Stillingfleet also used late humanist historical
scholarship to render mysteries somewhat less mysterious, if not actually
to explain them.78
Most importantly, the bishops seem to have been committed to defend-
ing orthodoxy by means of public argument at all costs, against even
the most insignificant of adversaries. They considered ostensibly charita-
ble, humanistic intervention by the learned governors of the church to
be the best means of resolving the controversy in its favour. The tracts
they published in the early 1690s perpetuated their long-held faith in
early Enlightenment scholarship, controversial sermons, and theological
polemic. This sort of behaviour, of course, was common in the Restora-
tion church, and it typified what these divines had done in lesser offices
earlier in their careers, and in particular, during the revolt against James
II, when they had recommended themselves to William of Orange. But
this style of churchmanship was almost unheard of among Restoration
prelates, who largely abstained from wrangling in print. The trinitarian
publications of William and Mary’s spiritual lords amounted to a novel
attempt to govern the church by polemic, and it failed miserably. By implic-
itly endorsing the public rebuttal of heresy, the bishops put in motion a
violently escalating spectacle of theological conflict in which defenders of
the Trinity were soon accusing each other of heresy, and thereby expos-
ing serious doctrinal uncertainty within the church itself. These dynamics
served the interests of Socinians and freethinkers, to be sure, but they also
benefited Addison and other conformist critics of the Williamite bench,
who had their own preferred approaches to the management of public
theology.79

76 Reedy, Robert South, 129–51.

77 See, for example, Burnet, Four discourses, 96–7; Stillingfleet, Mysteries of the Christian faith, 30–31;
Tillotson, Unity of the divine nature, 27. Socinians also accepted the notion of mysteries, but insisted
that they continued as such only for specified periods and in specific places.
78 Contrast Reedy, Bible and reason, 134–5.
79 For heterodox critics of the church using the controversy to expose the disagreements among
conforming divines, see Tindal, Letter to the reverend the clergy; Howard, History of religion.
 Revolution 267
Addison’s Christos autotheos was probably the most explicitly historical
intervention in the trinitarian controversy. It separated the issue of judging
heterodoxy from the assessment of its propositional truth. ‘We may know
the better how to determine of the opinion which denies the divinity of
our Savior’, Addison wrote in explaining the purpose of his treatise, ‘if
we pursue it through its whole history’. Controversies over the Trinity, he
complained, always centred on disputes about the primitive doctrine of
the church. Both sides argued that ‘all the ancients, and the very apostles
themselves received and taught the same things that they asserted’. Addison
thus largely sidestepped patristics, which was indeed a very common source
for orthodox historical argument. In place of histories of truth and histories
of heresy, he offered a history of heretics. His book described a succession of
men who had denied of the divinity of Christ from the time of Jesus to the
Nicene Council. This historical approach allowed him and other orthodox
authors to evade the Socinian charge that the only support for trinitarianism
lay in late patristic innovations and conciliar endorsements.80 But it also
led to arguments for the Trinity and against heresy that refused to assess
the intrinsic truth of either.
Addison made this negative case for orthodoxy by taking up an old trope
and insisting that the Trinity had never been denied out of a sincere belief
that it was false doctrine. Heresy had always been spoken in the service
of priestcraft and prelacy. It was never anything more than a cloak for
immorality and megalomania, less a theological stance than a symptom
of vice.81 Addison’s critique dovetailed with the refrain of the Williamite
bishops that Socinianism fatally divorced morality from devotion.82 It also
mirrored the historical argument of John Toland and other heterodox
critics that trinitarianism itself only existed because ambitious priests had
once seen fit to deviate from the pure, ‘Nazarene’ form of Christianity in
order to more effectively dominate the populace.83 The entire historical
vein of the controversy demonstrated the close relationship between the
question of heresy and the question of moral reform. For Addison and
others, Socinianism was essentially a form of ‘speculative’ atheism that was
both cause and consequence of the ‘practical’ atheism of immorality. The
spread of both forms of unbelief was commonly taken to be a consequence
of the tolerant religious settlement of the Revolution. Both threats even-
tually helped spark a fierce post-revolutionary debate over the appropriate
institutional forms of moral and doctrinal discipline.

80 Addison, ΧΡΙΣΤ´ΟΣ Α ᾿ ΥΤ´ΟΘΕΟΣ, quotations on 1, 7–8. 81 Ibid., 5–7, 10, 21, 25–7 (a sample).
82 See, for example, Burnet, Four discourses, iii–iv. 83 See Champion, Pillars of priestcraft shaken.
268 Politics
If anti-trinitarianism was at bottom a matter of vice and politics, Addi-
son suggested, then any public debate over the doctrine of the Trinity was
ultimately a problem of public order. The dean’s views were likely shared
by many who chose not to make public statements, but they were given
a full, explicit airing by yet another prelate who intervened in the contro-
versy: Edward Wettenhall, the bishop of Cork and Ross in Ireland. Like
Addison’s writings in the 1670s, Wettenhall’s 1691 Earnest and compassionate
suit for forbearance adopted an historical perspective and advocated neither
the complete suppression of public theological speech nor unrestrained
polemical vitriol. The bishop observed that public, scholastic disputes
on theological matters that could not be addressed with any significant
degree of probability always had deleterious consequences. In particular,
the addition of new philosophical terms to theological discussions moved
them farther and farther away from the biblical text, and thereby created
new spaces for dissension. ‘The more men draw the disputatious saw’,
he complained, ‘the more perplexed and intricate the question is’. Like
Addison he deplored this approach to confronting heresy, as well as futile
attempts at censorship, and recommended self-restraint instead. By pub-
lishing their novelties and neologisms, he insisted, Sherlock, Wallis, and
other divines were exacerbating problems already inherent in the liturgy,
where scholastic terms proliferated. The duty of ordinary Christians, in
any case, was not to grasp the arcane workings behind notions like satis-
faction and the Trinity, but to devoutly adhere to the notions themselves.
These doctrinal topics were best understood as matters of authority, not
subjects of righteous speculation. Public debate sent exactly the wrong
message. Wettenhall argued instead that all clergy should be required to
give ‘negative assent’ to the doctrine of the Trinity: ‘an agreeing so far to a
thing, as not to contradict it, or teach contrary to it’. The essential point
for divines like Wettenhall and Addison, who were primarily concerned
with religious and political peace and harboured some epistemological
scepticism, was that men ‘be required quietly to acquiesce in the public
determination’.84
If Wettenhall’s intervention indicated the first-order importance of
ostensibly second-order issues in the controversy, the response he received
from Sherlock only confirmed it. In his angry Apology for writing against
Socinians, published in 1693, Sherlock simply insisted that unlike Wetten-
hall, he was willing to defend his faith. He accused the bishop of harbouring
a Hobbesian attitude to public theology. Sherlock went on to openly defend

84 Wettenhall, Suit for forbearance, quotations on 3, 4, 6, 9–10.

 Revolution 269
scholasticism and its utility in theological studies, and to endorse the util-
ity of disputation in the promotion of Christianity. Wettenhall penned a
rejoinder the same year, insisting that Protestants could stand together in
defence of the Apostle’s Creed without eventually accusing each other of
heresy. They had only to state the doctrine of the Trinity with authority, in
the language of scripture, and leave the matter to rest. Sherlock responded
yet again in 1694, with another disputative defence of disputation.85 There
could hardly be better evidence of a divide within the church on the man-
agement of public theology. And there could hardly be better evidence
that these internal divisions cannot be captured by a dichotomy of pub-
lic censorship and dialectical deliberation. There was certainly a cleavage
between Enlightened and non-Enlightened approaches to the trinitarian
controversy, but that cleavage did not fall along a liberal–illiberal axis. And
even the cleavage between Enlightened theologians and their opponents
fails to fully capture the nature of the divisions within the church. Leading
orthodox clergy contested the Enlightenment as eagerly as they struggled
for and against it.
Figures like Wettenhall were not alone in criticizing the Williamite
bishops of England for their attempt to order the church with their pens.
They were joined by both scholastically inclined conformists and nonjuring
divines in their insistence that the dispute must be ended with much firmer
and clearer expressions of public authority.86 Yet this common ground in
opposition did not yield a consensus on how to solve the problems of pub-
lic speech raised by the trinitarian controversy. Instead, it was the starting
point for a broader conflict over what form of public authority was best
equipped to quell theological conflict in English society, a conflict that
stretched well into the following century. It is usually supposed that from
1689 or even earlier, conforming divines were divided on this question
between a ‘high church’ preference for the use of ecclesiastical institutions
(universities, church courts, and convocation), and a ‘latitudinarian’ pref-
erence for a state-led solution. In fact this dichotomy, to the extent that it
existed at all, was the long-term result of the trinitarian controversy, not its
cause.
In the early 1690s, most of the so-called ‘latitudinarian’ bishops seem to
have believed that the polemical erudition of the governors of the church,

85 Sherlock, Apology for writing against Socinians; Sherlock, Defence of the dean of St Paul’s apology;
Wettenhall, Antapology of the melancholy stander-by.
86 For the nonjurors, see Hickes, Discourses upon Dr. Burnet and Dr. Tillotson; Leslie, Charge of
Socinianism against Dr. Tillotson considered; Leslie, Brief account of the Socinian Trinity; Leslie,
Querela temporum.
270 Politics
not the power of the state, was most fit to resolve theological controversies,
while others, like Wettenhall, clearly disagreed. So-called ‘high churchmen’
were hardly of one mind either. Many appeared to believe that doctrinal
controversies ought to be adjudicated solely by ecclesiastical institutions,
while others, like Addison, stressed the role of secular authorities and
resisted exalted appeals to priestly authority. Even Robert South could not
see church censures as a simple substitute for state action, and he remained
sceptical about the efficacy of church assemblies in the destruction of heresy.
Thomas Long, too, observed that ecclesiastical courts could do nothing
against ‘such as wilfully excommunicate themselves’.87 These views are
usually ignored in favour of the assumption that conforming ‘high church-
men’ were for the most part ideologically inarticulate, and tended to borrow
their ideas from Charles Leslie, George Hickes, and other nonjurors.88 This
assumption does not square with the available evidence, and it seems all the
more implausible because the nonjurors’ positions on ecclesiological issues
clearly resulted from their peculiar political and ecclesiastical predicament
in post-revolutionary England. Critics of the bishops who had taken oaths
to William and Mary had no need to vigorously assert the independence
of the church from the state or challenge the royal supremacy, even if, like
their Restoration predecessors, they could not count on cooperation from
the prince.
Tellingly, it was Tillotson’s death in November 1694 that marked the
demise of the attempt to rely on episcopal divinity to resolve the trini-
tarian controversy. A year later the University of Oxford proceeded with
one alternative approach, when it formally condemned the notion that
there were three infinite, distinct minds and substances in the Trinity, in
response to a sermon delivered in Oxford the previous month by Joseph
Bingham. The decree also obviously applied to the writings of Sherlock
and his defenders. Sherlock claimed in response that the university was
illegally usurping the right to determine matters of heresy, while Oxford
insisted that it had simply published a declaration against error. The uproar
provoked Tillotson’s successor, Thomas Tenison, another so-called ‘latitu-
dinarian’ who clearly differed from his predecessor on many fronts, to
weigh in and to promote yet another approach to the problem.89 It was
the precise opposite of Tillotson’s reliance on the wisdom and wit of lead-
ing divines. In December 1695 Tenison told Oxford’s vice-chancellor that
87 Long, Answer to a Socinian treatise, quotation in ‘Epistle dedicatory’; Nicholls, Answer to a heretical
book; Reedy, Robert South, 146.
88 See, for example, Goldie, ‘Origins of the convocation controversy’.
89 On Tenison’s Laudian tendencies, see above, 181, 188–91.
 Revolution 271
in the view of royal judges, its proceedings had usurped the royal pre-
rogative. In February, he convinced William III to issue directions to the
bishops on how to properly preserve church unity on the topic of the
Trinity.90
Royal power took over at an archbishop’s insistence. In commands issued
by his secretary of state, Shrewsbury, in February 1696, the king described
the conflict as a useless battle of words among clerics, and explicitly noted
the second-order nature of much of the dispute. ‘There have of late’, he
wrote, ‘been some differences among the clergy of this our realm about their
ways of expressing themselves in their sermons and writings, concerning the
doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, which may be of dangerous consequence,
if not timely prevented’. His commands offered an implicit account of
the mechanics of proliferating public dispute. To confront it, the king
ordered a partnership between civil and church leaders, backed by judicial
authority on both sides. The church, he suggested, had powerful resources
for maintaining the received doctrine without further acrimony, and had
only to make use of them. In both sermons and written works, they were to
show self-restraint: they were to explicate the Trinity without any recourse
to novel terminology, and deliver only doctrine that was both contained
in scripture and consistent with the three creeds and the Thirty-Nine
Articles. The king also ordered the church to make consistent use of its
own disciplinary apparatus, by paying heed to its fifty-third canon, which
forbade public opposition between preachers, and by using the church
courts to prosecute laypeople who spoke, published, or circulated anything
concerning the Trinity. In a gesture of cooperation, he said he would
command civil magistrates to do the same.91
Addison’s history of heretics was published in this particular context. It
largely accorded with Tenison’s position. It implicated not only Socinian
vice but the way in which Sherlock, South, and the episcopal leadership
under Tillotson had sought to defend orthodoxy. Many of the first anti-
trinitarians, Addison explained, had practiced a backwards, opportunistic
exegesis. ‘They neglected the holy Bible, and instead of enquiring into its
meaning, they labored to obscure the light thereof, bestowing their pains
in finding out such schemes of argumentation as might confirm the sys-
tem of their impiety’. Even their textual scholarship was corrupt. ‘They
adulterated the sincere authority of the divine scriptures’, he explained,
‘saying that it ought to be corrected; they put out several copies of the

90 For more detail on the Oxford controversy, see Sirota, ‘Trinitarian crisis’, 49–50.
91 William III, Directions to our arch-bishops, 3–7, quotation on 3–4; Sirota, ‘Trinitarian crisis’, 50–51.
272 Politics
Bible, which . . . were found to be very disagreeing’. The early heretics
were also guilty of recklessly applying learning in logic and philosophy
to the holy text. ‘If any proposed unto them a text of the divine scrip-
tures’, Addison sneered, ‘they examined whether a connex or disjunctive
proposition might be made out of it; and instead of studying the word
of God, they applied themselves to geometry’.92 This explicit criticism of
heretical methods was also an implicit reflection upon every defender of
orthodoxy who had applied similar techniques, including Tillotson and
his suffragans.93 Dialectical and philosophical approaches to theology were
inherently inappropriate, Addison suggested, and even humanist philology
was bound to fall prey to bad faith.
The dean believed that Christian clergy in antiquity had been unable
to regulate their own conduct. They failed to confine their theological
disputes to halls of learning, and they also proved unable to discipline
each other in the public wrangles that ensued. Deniers of Christ’s divinity
flourished when the church was without state support, because heretical
clergy were free to simply ignore orthodox polemicists and ecclesiastical
censures. When possible, Addison suggested, the church did better to
establish a partnership with the state and rely upon it to enforce order in
emergencies. The lesson had been clear throughout antiquity. In the third
century, for instance, only when orthodox bishops petitioned the Roman
emperor Aurelian to work on their behalf was the heresy of Paul of Samosata
effectively suppressed.94 Anti-trinitarianism then remained largely dormant
until the reign of Constantine, when the church learned its lesson yet
again. The tactless behaviour of Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and his
defender, Dionysius, provoked the preaching and disputation of Arius.
Alexander called an episcopal council, pronounced Arius and his followers
heretics, and circulated a letter outlining the council’s proceedings. But
the collective judgment of a select group of priests could never have its
intended effect. Alexander’s council, which Addison’s readers might have
compared to the Oxford decrees or a lower house of convocation, was
widely viewed as a faction in itself. Its rulings could only result in further
division and acrimony. This result was all the more likely because Arius had
powerful friends. In a stinging allusion to Tillotson’s supposed sympathy
for anti-trinitarians and William’s support for his archbishop, Addison
pointed out that Arius’s most powerful ally, Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia,
had attracted the favour of Constantine at court.95 The plight of the

92 Addison, ΧΡΙΣΤ´ΟΣ Α ᾿ ΥΤΟΘΕ´ΟΣ, 6, 12–13.

93 See also ibid., 29–31. 94 Ibid., 8–9, 15–31. 95 Ibid., 31–41.
 Revolution 273
Christian church in the year 324, the dean suggested, was eerily similar to
the plight of the English church in 1694 and 1695.
Like William, though, Constantine finally distanced himself from unre-
liable bishops, and on the advice of more tactful priestly counsellors, took
matters into his own hands. In a letter to Alexander and Arius written in
the same spirit as William’s Directions, the emperor even-handedly con-
demned the prelacy, priestcraft, and superfluous public theology that all
sides had been guilty of practicing. The only effects of publicly inquiring
into the intricacies of trinitarian doctrine, he insisted, were faction, vio-
lence, schism, and the frustration of efforts to spread the gospel among
pagans. Christ’s divinity, Addison suggested here, was a fundamental article
of doctrine, but to require assent to a single statement of its intricate work-
ings was to court disaster for no good reason. ‘The same communion may
be retained’, Constantine had insisted, ‘although there may be amongst
you a great diversity of sentiments in things of smaller significancy’. Yet for
all his tact, Addison explained, the emperor’s irenic epistles were ultimately
‘ineffectual’, because ‘the minds of the contenders were so embittered one
against another, that exhortations to mutual peace and goodwill, had little
other effect than to enrage and enflame them the more’.96
At this point Addison went on to narrate a future course of action
for England. Constantine, he recalled, ‘thought of a general council, as
the likeliest cure for such distempers’. This ‘lively representation of an
apostolical choir’, a mirror of primitive Christian practice, was neverthe-
less only effective under royal supervision. A convocation or council in
England, the dean was implying, would have to be managed in a similar
manner. In the early days of the council, a number of aggressive clergy
almost wrecked the proceedings. But a respectful cooperation between the
priests and their emperor soon emerged. Addison went out of his way to
describe the choreography of this relationship. ‘All the bishops were con-
vened’, Addison explained, ‘after whom came the emperor, whose respect
and reverence was so great for the clergy, that he stood in the midst of
them, and would not take his seat, until such time as the bishops signi-
fied that it was their desire that he would sit down and take the chair of
state’. Constantine proceeded to exhort the clergy to concord, and mas-
terfully presided over the proceedings in such a way that eventually, after
hot discussions, all parties were brought to agreement. ‘By his prudent and
temperate ménage’, Addison noted, ‘he at length made them all of the
same mind in the matters concerning which they had before disagreed’.

96 Ibid., 43–53, quotations on 47, 52–3.

274 Politics
The result was the Nicene Creed.97 Doctrinal dispute did continue into
the late fourth century, Addison admitted, but only because bishops had
continued to insist on a scholastic, precise, and provocative rendering of
Nicene simplicity.98
Addison was trying to stake out a middle position in the major eccle-
siastical controversy produced by England’s trinitarian disputes. However
it might be adapted to the English constitution, the dean’s Nicea was, in
general, an example of the ideal means of resolving doctrinal controversy.
The prince ought to call together his clergy, and while he also ought to
honour them, he nevertheless had to preside over them: for to allow the
clergy complete control over their own proceedings was only to court fur-
ther discord. Other leading divines continued to strike similar poses well
into the reign of Anne. But doing so became more and more difficult, as
the church became increasingly divided between bishops who seemed all
too cosy with the regime, and a body of observant, angry lower clergy who
were dismayed by the conduct of their superiors and sympathetic to some
of their nonjuring brethren.
The dean would surely have been disappointed to see that after the
trinitarian debate had subsided, the church’s internal struggle over how to
confront heterodoxy grew into an open confrontation between champions
of royal and ecclesiastical authority. In the controversy over convocation
that concluded the reign of William III, pastoral questions continued to
determine the structure and incidence of more obviously political conflicts
over the relationships among church, state, and civil society; and historical
argument again took centre stage. Any attention that Addison’s late con-
tribution to the struggle over the Trinity might have garnered was quickly
seized late in 1696 by Francis Atterbury’s Letter to a convocation-man. Atter-
bury channelled rancour over the bishops’ management of the trinitarian
controversy into an appeal to his readers to accept that the ‘latitudinarian’
prelates were in league with heretics and freethinkers, and that the only
way to save the church was to resuscitate convocation, the true bulwark of
orthodoxy.99 Tenison responded to this rejection of his own alternative to
Tillotsonian churchmanship by sponsoring William Wake’s learned rebut-
tal of Atterbury, The authority of Christian princes over their ecclesiastical
synods. Wake attacked all claims for independent ecclesiastical authority
and argued that the pre-publication licensing system that had lapsed in
97 Ibid., 53–72 quotations on 53, 54, 56, 57. 98 Ibid., 91–107.
99 Atterbury, Letter to a convocation-man. This controversy has been neglected. See Bennett, Tory crisis
in church and state, esp. 48–56; Sirota, ‘“The leviathan is not safely to be angered”’; Goldie, ‘Origins
of the convocation controversy’.
 Revolution 275
1695 had to be re-established in order to confront heterodoxy.100 While
the licensing initiative failed, the agenda of Tenison and his allies was con-
spicuously implemented in the Blasphemy Act of 1697. For the remainder
of William’s reign, the dilemma over how best to preserve religious order
became an increasingly polarized discussion over the most proper and effec-
tive institutional means of official restraint. The closely related problems
of moral and doctrinal error had both raised the question of the proper
role of ecclesiastical institutions, public discourse, and state sanctions.
During and after the convocation controversy, critics of the episcopal
bench grew louder and louder in their insistence that church courts, con-
vocations, and universities were the proper institutional settings for the
preservation of religious order. They insisted that anyone who denied this
was a ‘latitudinarian’ or ‘low churchman’ in league with outright enemies of
the church. The bishops and their agents, in turn, were more likely to cast
doubt on the political loyalty of ‘high churchmen’ and rank them with non-
jurors and Jacobites as enemies of the state. Amid all the partisan rhetoric,
though, the reality remained more complex. The Williamite bishops were
implacable enemies of the radical English Enlightenment and took far too
serious an interest in pastoral renewal to qualify as time-servers. Their
critics, likewise, targeted not the monarchy but their episcopal superiors’
support for aggressive state initiatives, and maintained their intellectual
and ideological autonomy by drawing not on radical claims for ecclesias-
tical independence but on more familiar historical arguments, including
‘country’ critiques of courtly aggression and evocations of natural law and
natural religion. The mutability of the situation became only clearer once
Anne Stuart, a better friend to critics of the Williamite bench, ascended to
the throne in the spring of 1702. So-called ‘high churchmen’ immediately
renewed their well-worn appeals to a partnership between monarch and
clergy that was consistent with sacerdotalism, and once again they fortified
their position with historical erudition.101
Long after its second revolution, England remained preoccupied with the
questions posed by its first. What intellectual, institutional, and practical
schemes and arrangements could secure civil peace and human flourishing
by producing virtuous subjects and effectively managing public discourse
in an age of ever-increasing religious and metaphysical diversity? Who
or what stood in the way? The leadership of the Church of England
100 Wake, Authority of Christian princes. On Wake’s self-restraint during the Socinian controversy, see
Sykes, William Wake, I, 57, 60.
101 See also the slightly different account in Sirota, ‘“The leviathan is not safely to be angered”’, 47–54;
Sirota, ‘Occasional conformity controversy’.
276 Politics
broke these basic questions down into a number of particular queries
about their pastoral mission. How could the church employ its intellectual
and institutional power in the defence of holy truths and civil stability
without risking or perpetuating disastrous public conflicts? How could it
best pursue its ministry to the English people and its evangelical mission
abroad in cooperation with an imperial state and a commercializing society
that only partially took its interests to heart? How could it make a case for
the leadership of the church in English life in terms that audiences of widely
varying forms and degrees of belief and unbelief could possibly accept? In all
these ways, the basic conditions and questions of Enlightenment remained
essentially the same into the early eighteenth century. But the responses of
the church and its rivals to those conditions and questions were changing,
if only ever so slowly, as religious toleration became a persistent fixture
of the political landscape. The struggles over the organization of moral
reform and the management of the trinitarian controversy that troubled
the church in the wake of the Glorious Revolution were early signs of flux.
But the reign of Anne would run much of its course before it became clear
how the dizzying dynastic, institutional, and theological spectacles of the
1690s had initiated a realignment in English religious politics.
 Conclusion
From pastor to spectator

As the leaders of the Church of England grew accustomed to mutual

recrimination, the middle way that men like Addison had crafted since
the Restoration became less tenable on every front. Perhaps this was why
the dean stepped away from the public eye in the final years of his life.
After sending his history of heretics to press in 1696, he turned squarely
to his pastoral duties, and over the next three years, he penned a tract
on the sacraments, a manual of prayer, and a book of devotional poems.
Growing frail amid the effort, he was confined by sickness to his deanery
in 1702, and on 20 April 1703, he died.1 He left behind his second wife
and daughter, both named Dorothy; and his three sons, Gulston, Lancelot,
and Joseph. Each son took up some of his father’s pursuits. Gulston chose
travel and empire, and rose through the ranks of the East India Company
for fifteen years, only to die young in Madras, not long after he had been
named governor of Fort St George in 1709. His brother Lancelot exhibited
a talent for the classics in Oxford, but left Magdalen College in 1707 for
India, where he too died in search of riches, just a year after Gulston.2
Joseph, the dean’s eldest and longest-lived son, emulated and surpassed his
father in almost every respect, but came to prefer the toils of a statesman
to the burdens of the priesthood. His storied career in letters and politics
indicates the fortunes of Anglican Enlightenment at the dawn of a new
century.3
Joseph’s education, to be sure, would have been entirely familiar to his
father. He arrived in Oxford, as Lancelot had, on the heels of a revolution
and in pursuit of general learning. He had a penchant for classical literature,

1 Hamilton, ‘Addison, Lancelot’; GU; CDS; Addison, Devotional poems.

2 ODNB; Addison, Letters, 199; Smithers, Life of Joseph Addison, 182–3. The dean had been a friend
of Sir Benjamin Bathurst and George Bohun, two Tory governors of the East India Company (GU,
sig. a2r.; CDS, ‘To the honourable Sir Benjamin Bathurst’).
3 Joseph is a central, characteristic figure in many of the most strident defences of the importance of
the British Enlightenment. See Porter, Enlightenment; Himmelfarb, Roads to modernity, 10.

277
278 Conclusion
but no clear preference for a career in church or state until around the time
he left Magdalen in 1699 for nearly five years of European travel. On the
continent, as he honed his literary talents and prepared for state service, he
perpetuated the same humanist tradition of journeying, historical inquiry,
and political apprenticeship that had nurtured another future secretary
of state, Joseph Williamson, fifty years earlier.4 He returned home with
views on rhetoric, reason, and religion that Lancelot, too, had embraced
after similar experiences abroad. As a stylist and a commentator, he sought
to balance erudition and utility.5 He ventured beyond the confines of
scripture – to pagan, Jewish, and patristic texts – in order to defend the
truth of the Christian religion. He praised the divine cult of nature by
sketching conjectural and empirical histories of the universal markers of
piety and civilization.6 He could insist at the same time, though, that the
natural religion of the Deists was best compared to a ‘half-naked country
wench’.7 Joseph’s vision of Christian Enlightenment was very much his
father’s, and so was his sense of what stood in its way. He never declared
for either the ancients or the moderns, but like Lancelot he extolled the
virtues to be found in Europe’s new worlds and rebuked the ancient Greeks
for their dismissal of foreigners.8 He scoffed at the sect masters’ zeal and
enthusiasm, the freethinkers’ denial of ‘everything that is not capable of
mathematical demonstration’, and the impostures of papists and foreign
priests. None of them, he alleged, seemed to grasp the moral utility of a
traditional, primitive cult like that of the Church of England. Even the
most heterodox heathens of the ancient world had known better.9
While Joseph’s opinions were rooted in the Restoration world into which
he was born, the environment in which he articulated them was no longer
the same. By the time he returned to England in 1704, Anglican Enlight-
enment had already become somewhat less compatible with the Tory and
Laudian commitments of his father. The opening furore of Anne’s reign
vividly confirmed it. In the course of a fierce battle in print and in parlia-
ment over the practice of occasional conformity, angry cries of a ‘church in
danger’ were soon accompanied by outright attacks on all ‘moderation’ in
religion. Only a studied concern with the practical consequences of defend-
ing the Anglican sacramental community on Enlightened grounds after
over a decade of limited religious toleration could have brought so many

4 Smithers, Life of Joseph Addison, 11–88. See above, 23–7. 5 Addison, Works, II, 7–23.
6 Ibid., II, 406–18, 427, passim. 7 Spectator, II, 288.
8 Ibid., I, 211–15; III, 527–31. See also Levine, Battle of the books, 283–7.
9 Spectator, I, 229; II, 227–9, 233 (quotation); IV, 187, 571; Tatler, II, 170, 306; Addison, Freeholder,
82–7.
 From pastor to spectator 279
churchmen to so explicitly reject a rhetorical staple of post-Reformation
Protestantism. They feared that the clergy’s continued resort to a bulwark
of the old conformist via media under Charles II – the claim that Anglican
Christianity was a civil and natural religion – now threatened to spiritually
evacuate the church. They hastened to position themselves not between
puritans and papists, but between the men of ‘latitude’ and the nonjurors.
Under intense polemical pressure from the latter, they came to treat any
defence of Anglican ‘moderation’ as solely what the defenders of occasional
conformity were making it: a valorization of the established church’s mem-
bership in a much broader Christian community, one that extended beyond
Anglican parishes and could draw nothing but strength from the free move-
ment of God’s people between conforming and dissenting congregations.
The defence of moderation and latitude risked the absorption of the church
as a distinct form of sociability into the state, civil society, or both.10
Once this horrifying spectre had been identified, it became much less
feasible for conforming Anglicans who valued a church united in priestly
authority and sacramental communion to pursue an Enlightened agenda.
Even during the Tory resurgence of the second half of Anne’s reign, juring
critics of the ‘low church men’ often insisted on defending themselves solely
with recourse to either the vague throne and altar revanchism of Henry
Sacheverell or the most radical ecclesiological arguments of the nonjurors.
Reeling from the freethinkers’ dogged attempts to hijack the learning of
the church to campaign for its destruction, ‘high church men’ stuck closer
than ever to patristic learning and tended to abstain from touting the
universality or worldly utility of nations united in ritual. The value of these
sorts of arguments, it seemed, was quickly becoming the basic problem
with their world.11
The plight of Enlightened sacerdotalism in Augustan England is per-
haps most clear where this book began: George Hickes’s face-off with his
former student, Matthew Tindal, one of the early heroes of the anticlerical
Enlightenment. Despite its heft, Hickes’s initial response to Tindal’s Rights
of the Christian church, the Two treatises, went through two editions in its
1707 debut. It marshalled late humanist learning to argue ‘as a matter of
fact’ that Tindal had been wrong to charge Anglican priests with priestcraft.
Hickes rebutted radical Enlightenment with much the same erudition he
and others had employed over the previous half century. Yet his approach
10 Sirota, Christian monitors, 151; Sirota, ‘Occasional conformity controversy’.
11 See also the slightly different account in Sirota, Christian monitors, 149–222. This must remain a
rather tentative summary pending further work on the intellectual content of high churchmanship
in this period.
280 Conclusion
this time was recognizably different. He avoided explicit references to the
roots of the church in nature and civilization, and declined to derive his
clericalism from Tindal’s own premises and methods. He made very clear
why. ‘I am almost old enough to write an history of the rise and progress
of latitude, were it worth the while, in my own time’, he explained. ‘I have
now lived so long, as to see the comble of it in an almost utter waste of
all principles’. Hickes’s testimony here was not that of a mere bystander. ‘I
will farther confess to you, and all the world’, he explained, ‘that my first
notions, for want of knowing better, had too much of latitude in them’.
Those days, he assured his readers, were long gone. He now realized where
latitude and moderation led. In the Two treatises he proudly identified as
a ‘high church man’, a ‘high flyer’, an ‘enslaver of mankind’, and a prac-
titioner of ‘priestcraft’ – all rightly understood, of course.12 He stuck close
to the Church Fathers as he built his arguments, and he expressed outrage,
again and again, that Tindal had dared to besmirch the character of the
holiest men in antiquity by rejecting their historical testimony.13 Instead
of urging a partnership between pastor and prince, he mostly saw fit to
describe the church as a separate society, one governed by divinely ordained
priests and bishops and independent of the state.
Despite himself, though, Hickes could not wholly deny the power of
Anglican Enlightenment to refute Tindal and his ilk. Ever ‘since I espoused
the principles I now defend’, he further confessed, ‘the law in my members,
as the Apostle calls the inclinations of flesh and blood, would have me throw
them off’.14 In reality, the constant temptations faced by the convert to fall
back into latitude came as much from his intellect as from his passions.
At points in the Two treatises, he relapsed completely. Drawing on his
mastery of antiquarian and philological scholarship, which had few rivals
in England, he led the reader through a comparison of ancient religions in
order to supplement his patristic arguments.15 While he almost never said
so explicitly, he was defending priesthood and sacrifice as both hallmarks
of primitive Christianity and universal characteristics of civilization. Like
so many Anglican apologists before him, he implied that the difference
between true sons of the church and men like Tindal was hardly intellectual
at all. For libertines, the improbable claim that all the great religions of the
world and all the priesthoods that governed them were fabrications and
impostures was simply irresistible, since it freed them to indulge in their
12 Hickes, Two treatises, ‘Epistle to the author of The rights of the Christian church’, sigs. a4r.–a5r.
13 Contrast one of Hickes’s Restoration sermons: Hickes, Posthumous discourses, 338–51.
14 Hickes, Two treatises, ‘Epistle to the author of The rights of the Christian church’ (unpaginated).
15 Ibid., first treatise, passim.
 From pastor to spectator 281
basest desires.16 Hickes went on to offer a string of analogies between the
nature of religious and political offices in order to turn Tindal’s impiety
into sedition.17 He was even willing to point out that two of the great
Whig freethinker favourites of antiquity, Julian the Apostate and Numa
Pompilius, had been well aware that a powerful sacerdotal order was not
only politically useful, but perfectly legitimate.18
This was all well-trodden ground. Hickes admitted that a host of Angli-
can divines – from Laudians like Jeremy Taylor, Peter Heylyn, and Daniel
Brevint to Williamite bishops like Gilbert Burnet and Edward Stillingfleet –
had made the same claims from the English Revolution onwards. He even
linked the depiction of Anglican Christianity as a civil religion to the litur-
gical program of his hero, William Laud.19 While he avoided references to
John Spencer, Henry Dodwell, and other Restoration conformists whose
work had become tainted with heterodoxy, many sections of the Two trea-
tises read like compendious expansions of the Enlightened Laudianism of
the reign of Charles II.20 Hickes’s nagging desire to bring Anglican Enlight-
enment in through the back door is also what must have driven him to
re-publish Lancelot Addison’s Modest plea for the clergy two years later. He
left his readers to discover in Addison forms of argument that he did not
want to avow himself. The style of apologetics that readers could find in
the early pages of the Plea was coming to be associated with what Hickes
had already condemned as the half-hearted defences of the church offered
by the time-serving clerics of the Whig establishment. During and after
the Bangorian Controversy of 1716–21, these ‘Church Whigs’ would offer
increasingly strident depictions of the authority of priests and their essen-
tial role in the polity. Faced with the anticlericalism of the radical Whig
bishop Benjamin Hoadly and his allies, they positioned themselves between
low churchmen and radical high churchmen, and thereby perpetuated the
clericalist Enlightenment under the banner of Whiggery.21
Joseph Addison seems to have known which way the wind was blowing.
He learned of his father’s demise while abroad, and in August 1703, after
hearing the news, he wrote from Amsterdam to the bishop of Lichfield and
16 See ibid., xxiv–xxv, xl (quotation), xliii–xlviii, and 60, among many other similar passages.
17 Ibid., lxv. 18 Ibid., xxi–xxii, 20. 19 Ibid., xxxi, liii–lxi, ccxxxviii–ccxxxix.
20 For Hickes’s ambivalent use and treatment of William Owtram’s De sacrificiis and his attack on
both Owtram and Ralph Cudworth for knowing more rabbinic than patristic literature, see Two
treatises, esp. 3, 65–6, 70–71, 79, 107–8.
21 Starkie, Bangorian Controversy. Two prominent, later results of this shift might be Warburton, Divine
legation of Moses; Warburton, Alliance between church and state. The full intellectual contours of
‘Church Whiggery’ remain unclear. But see, for example, the case for continuity in archbishop
William Wake’s views from the Restoration (when he was a protégé of the Oxford arch-conformist
John Fell) to his primacy in Sykes, William Wake.
282 Conclusion
Coventry, John Hough. The hero of Magdalen’s revolt against James II
was a prominent Whig churchman. Hough had still been president when
Joseph arrived at the college in 1689, and the young man still looked to him
for support. But Addison the elder, who never got along with his episcopal
superiors in Lichfield, had recently found himself at odds with his newest
diocesan. This put Joseph in an awkward position. While the report of
the dean’s passing, he told the bishop, was naturally ‘the most melancholy
news that I have yet received’, it was all the more troubling because ‘I am
informed that he was so unhappy as to do some things, a little before he
died, which were not agreeable to your lordship’. Pleading that his father
‘had his spirits very much broken by age, sickness, and afflictions’, Joseph
reassured Hough that ‘in a letter, not long before his death’, the dean had
‘commanded me to preserve always a just sense of gratitude for the bishop
of Lichfield, who had been so great a benefactor to his family in general,
and myself in particular’. Because it was written ‘at a time when men
seldom disguise their sentiments’, Joseph argued, this letter proved ‘the
due respect he had for your lordship’.22 Joseph surpassed his father in tact
among many other things. On this occasion, while he took care to properly
honour his erstwhile provider, he was mostly anxious to excuse Lancelot’s
perennial prickliness in order to smooth things over with a Whig prelate
and patron. Even before he clearly identified as a Whig himself upon his
return home in March 1704, Joseph sensed the earliest vibrations of the
seismic shift in English religious politics that coincided with his father’s
death.23
Lancelot might not have appreciated being enlisted in Hickes’s volumi-
nous, disputative response to Tindal’s Rights, given his long-held attitudes
to the conduct of public controversy. In fact the Tory dean would probably
have taken much more kindly to the innovative approach to periodical
writing that his son inaugurated in the same year, despite the fact that it
was what made Joseph one of the primary architects of Whiggery dur-
ing the reign of Anne. The basic principles behind Joseph’s approach to
publicity sat well with his father’s. He turned Lancelot’s commitment to
measured writing for audiences of varying levels of learning into a clas-
sic eighteenth-century scheme of Enlightenment. He famously sought to
disseminate the fruits of ‘philosophical’ learning in order to edify a wide
readership.24 He also became perhaps the most storied proponent and
practitioner of ‘civility’ or ‘politeness’ in his time. Of course politeness, like
22 Addison, Letters, 45.
23 On Joseph’s partisan allegiance, see Smithers, Life of Joseph Addison, 24–5, 29, 34, 37, 79–80, 96,
100–103, 128.
24 Spectator, I, 44.
 From pastor to spectator 283
Enlightenment, had become a terrain of intense contestation by the time
the first issue of the Tatler appeared. It was employed by writers of all polit-
ical and religious persuasions, including Hickes himself. In every one of
its ideologically specific formulations, though, politeness denoted patterns
of agreeable, mutually pleasurable social interaction that ensured political
and social stability. Like many of his political enemies, Joseph believed
that politeness was best expressed in simple, natural forms of speech that
accommodated argument but proceeded from a benevolent disposition.25
He claimed that politeness and commerce were the two bonds that could
hold English society together in a post-revolutionary world. One was not
necessarily related to the other; nor was the world of merchants opposed
to the world of the court, where Joseph, of course, found considerable
gain for much of his life. But in tandem, and graced with moral virtue,
commerce and politeness could guide and govern social peace.26 Joseph
added an economic dimension to his father’s scheme for civil stability and
human betterment, and attached it all to a style of Whig politics that had
hardly existed before Lancelot’s death.
Joseph’s Enlightenment also took the form of a new medium through
which morality and social order could finally be properly inculcated and
enforced. His periodical in the coffeehouse was his father’s catechism in the
church, an ostensibly voluntary mechanism for the impression of moral-
ity on tabulae rasae that found its home in civil society. Mr Spectator,
the fictional author of Joseph’s second venture with Richard Steele, was
conceived as a vast improvement upon Lancelot’s local parson: he could
compensate for his fictionality with an impression of anonymous, constant
surveillance that no priest could provide.27 His eagle eye for deviance and
the sociability his essays were designed to support speak far more to the
perfection of pastoral power in secular form than to a triumph for free
speech in a literary public sphere.28
Whigs and Tories had always agreed that public speech tended to be
irrational and deleterious, and that it must be restrained. They differed only
over how this was to be done without betraying the truth. Untrammelled
public dispute was precisely what Joseph, like his father, feared most in the
maintenance of social order. In their spectacularly successful collaboration,
Addison and Steele sought to discipline and reform public sociability in

25 Peltonen, ‘Politeness and Whiggism’.

26 Ibid., 409 (on the paucity of evidence that politeness was seen in either the Tatler or Spectator as
characteristic of merchants or engendered by commerce).
27 Spectator, I, 46.
28 On Addison as a political liberal, see Bloom and Bloom, ‘Joseph Addison and eighteenth-century
“liberalism”’.
284 Conclusion
places like the coffeehouse through periodicals that exposed improper
conduct to the public eye, with recourse to a team of invisible informants
who roamed the city. Addison and Steele’s goal was to induce private
citizens to choose to conform under the threat of shame. They attacked
newsmongering and the other forms of licence they detected in public
settings just as Sir Roger L’Estrange and a long line of other Tories had done
before them. They aimed to counteract vice, as L’Estrange did, by offering
observations on social life that they insisted were neither news nor political
rhetoric. On the contrary, their essays were vitally necessary responses to
emergencies, emergencies spawned by active attempts to corrupt public life.
They wrote only to restrain others in the name of freedom. ‘In a nation of
liberty’, Steele wrote in the Tatler, ‘there is hardly a person in the whole
mass of the people more absolutely necessary than a censor’. If ‘I observe
upon things which do not fall within the cognisance of real authority’, he
asked, ‘I hope it will be granted, that an idle man could not be more usefully
employed’. The younger Addison concurred: ‘I took upon me the title of
Censor of Great Britain’, Mr Spectator announced, in order to conduct
surveillance on the city and correct the manners of the people.29 Spectators
and coffeehouses could thus become the great moral allies of the state, just
as Joseph’s father had hoped priests, churches, and catechisms would.
Despite their professions of disinterest, the project Addison and Steele
began in 1709 was also a partisan scheme for weathering the Tory resurgence
with which it coincided. Their enemies’ fortunes continued to rise amid
the preaching and trial of Henry Sacheverell, the Whigs’ electoral failures
in the autumn of 1710, and the fall of the ‘junto’ ministers – and Joseph
himself – from office. Like his father, Joseph preached and practiced civility
in discourse as an alternative to strident partisan wrangling and the other
rude habits of the English political nation. He firmly identified these habits
with his adversaries, singling out the unrefined ‘zeal’ of dissenters and high
church Tories alike. In the Church Whig via media he championed, faith
could never be strengthened by the books of controversy that poured from
Tory and dissenting presses. These tracts merely destroyed people’s ability
to have any religious convictions at all, thus leaving morality, too, in their
wake.30 Only a proliferation of properly disciplined spaces for associational
life, including coffeehouses and churches, could ensure the moral uplift
of society. High church Tories, in particular, were utterly deluded in their
insistence that only ecclesiastical institutions could foster moral discipline,
and in their penchant for vicious polemics and dissolute newsmongering.

29 Tatler, III, 160–61, 255–7, quotation on 255; Cowan, ‘Mr. Spectator’; Gordon, ‘Voyeuristic dreams’.
30 Spectator, IV, 141 (quotation); II, 233.
 From pastor to spectator 285
Ultimately, the disjuncture between their talk of moral reform and their
own vicious behaviour in public exposed them as hypocrites.
While Joseph’s disciplinary scheme was certainly Whiggish, and
undoubtedly rooted in civil society, its ideological core was the Enlightened
Anglicanism that his father had cherished.31 Joseph embraced a rational reli-
gion, but he rejected the sufficiency of reason stripped of devotion. The
material apparatus of the church, he knew, was a technology of virtue.
‘Religion itself’, he wrote, ‘unless decency be the handmaid that waits
upon her, is apt to make people appear guilty of sourness and ill humour’.
Decency in the house of God, he affirmed, ‘shows virtue in her first original
form, adds a comeliness to religion, and gives its professors the justest title
to the beauty of holiness’. It was not decorous piety and handsome worship
but ‘enthusiasm and superstition’ that Joseph identified as ‘the two great
errors into which a mistaken devotion may betray us’. Superstition resulted
from either ‘devotion, when it does not lie under the rock of reason’, or
from unbound zeal. The only proper form of zeal was that of St Paul: a
passion for ‘advancing morality, and promoting the happiness of mankind’.
This worldly zeal and its benefits could only be secured by the active cate-
chizing of youth. Such virtuous energy, Joseph was sure, ‘seldom dies in a
mind that has received an early tincture of it’. Even unbelievers, he argued,
ought to admit this, if they had any care for the health of their country. For
even if Christianity was false, it produced ‘habits of virtue in the mind of
man’. It was, in this sense, the ultimate civil religion, for ‘no other system
of religion could so effectually contribute to the heightening of morality’.
Extreme sacramentalists and Calvinists, too, would do well to recognize the
interdependence of morality, religion, civil peace, and worldly betterment.
Only those who believed that morality was central to the Christian life
could be trusted in society, because only they believed that it was in their
interest to do right by others in order to secure salvation.32
Joseph’s insistence on the centrality of moral virtue to Christianity,
which echoed the refrains of his predecessors in the Restoration church,
ensured that his Whiggery was combined with an abiding antipathy for
dissenters and their puritan ancestors, who supposedly downplayed the
role of good works in the face of Antichrist. In fact, Joseph’s attacks on
Calvinism, godliness, and sectarian enthusiasm were far more severe than
his comments on Roman superstition, and his anti-puritanism often outdid

31 On Addison’s religious attitudes, see also Bloom and Bloom, Joseph Addison’s sociable animal,
151–202.
32 Spectator, II, 229, 231–2, 287–9; III, 40. Belief in providence, Joseph argued, was also particularly
useful for secular reasons: ibid., III, 42–6; IV, 49–51.
286 Conclusion
his father’s in its savagery.33 He was, he confessed to the readers of the
Tatler, not zealous enough a Christian to name the Pope and the Devil in
the same sentence.34 Those who did so, the presbyterians, practiced a ‘sickly
and splenetic’ Protestantism. Deprived of the cheer and moral uplift of the
beauty of holiness, they were constantly melancholic and discontented.
The histrionic anti-popery they used to attack the Church of England
only proved that they were in league with sectarians.35 Their sedition was
therefore equal to that of the schismatic enthusiast, who was an automatic
threat to the state. ‘Once she fancies herself under the influence of a divine
impulse’, he sneered, ‘it is no wonder if she slights human ordinances’.36
In the end, Joseph insisted, all the avowedly Protestant enemies of church
and state could be lumped together because they shared a birthplace: the
godly republic of the 1650s. In the Spectator he shared an anecdote from
a ‘gentleman who was lately a great ornament to the learned world’. It
recounted an episode from this gentleman’s student days in Oxford, when
he was ‘a young adventurer in the Republic of Letters’. It presumably took
place during the Interregnum, when the man had been taught by gloomy
puritan dons. The story could have easily come from Joseph’s father, and
it recalled the very complaints about the godly that Lancelot’s college
head, Gerard Langbaine, had relayed to John Selden in 1653.37 When Mr
Spectator’s gentle friend was examined by the head of his college, ‘instead of
being asked what progress he had made in learning, he was examined how
he abounded in grace. His Latin and Greek stood him in little stead; he was
to give an account only of the state of his soul, whether he was of the number
of the elect; what was the occasion of his conversion; upon what day of the
month, and hour of the day it happened’.38 Puritanism, Joseph suggested,
was far more than a threat to public order. It was a barrier to civilization.
Unlike his father, though, Joseph believed that the great face of religious
imposture in his time was not toleration, but persecution, and that the
greatest impostors in England were not the puritans, but the Tory high
churchmen who haunted the countryside. It was these men who were the
true successors of the two great impostors of post-bellum England: Oliver
Cromwell and Charles II. ‘The late cry of the church’, Joseph argued in
the Freeholder, was ‘an artifice of the same kind with that made use of by
the hypocrites of the last age’, a fatal mixture of godly zeal and vicious
licence.39 True Church of England men were supposed to know better
than anyone that no dogma could contradict morality, and yet this was
33 Ibid., II, 289, 331–4. 34 Tatler, II, 409–10. 35 Spectator, III, 40; Tatler, IV, 306.
36 Spectator, II, 289. 37 See above, 38–9. 38 Spectator, IV, 251–3, quotations on 251, 252.
39 Addison, Freeholder, 202. For Joseph’s caricatures of (especially country) Tories, see ibid., 202,
262–3.
 From pastor to spectator 287
exactly what the high church men ignored when they sought to persecute
others for following their consciences on dubious points of doctrine and
practice.40 In reality it was only ‘interest’, Joseph wrote, that ever ‘sets
a man on persecution under the color of zeal’. Whether presbyterian,
Cromwellian, or Anglican, ‘none are so forward to promote true worship
by the sword, as those who find their present account in it’.41 Lancelot
would have agreed, but he would have said the same of toleration, and
denied, of course, that all forms of coercion in the name of religious truth
amounted to persecution. This was the crucial difference between Joseph’s
Enlightened Anglicanism and that of his father. It was not the difference
between a creed of control and a script for freedom, but rather a question of
media and utility. Joseph was convinced that the institutions of the Church
of England and religious restraint by the state would never be capable, alone
or in concert, of ensuring moral virtue, civil peace, and human happiness.
As a vital complement to the non-coercive resources of the church and
the non-religious weapons of the state, Joseph offered the gaze of Mr Spec-
tator. He brought his ideals to life by cultivating polite literary sociability in
his favourite London haunt, Button’s coffeehouse, and by having his papers
read in other coffeehouses all over the country. In Joseph’s view, coffee-
houses were to be spaces for polite and fundamentally consensual repartée
on morality and politics. They were not places for fashion and partisan
heat. At a time when the Tory state and its bigoted supporters were going
to do nothing, in Joseph’s view, to promote political and social stability,
only the vigilance of private subjects and their collective humiliation of the
vicious could do the work. As Addison and Steele’s writings were digested
and discussed all over the land, the orbit of shame would expand, and
the shamed would internalize and disseminate the lessons of their public
condemnation. The ultimate result would be universal self-governance, the
most effective form of public restraint and the most reliable promoter of
political stability.
Even when the state was not being manned by the vicious, Joseph
believed, the auto-surveillance of civil society was essential. During the state
trial of Henry Sacheverell, for instance, he and Steele implicitly rejected the
Whig strategy behind the proceedings. They largely ignored the constitu-
tional issues at stake and deemed the proceedings a silly distraction. They
certainly meant to belittle the Tories’ cause and ignore the issues and debates
that played to their enemies’ advantage, but they also meant to admonish
their co-partisans, who tactlessly sought to use a trial to manipulate public
opinion and dissociate Whiggery from constitutional radicalism. Addison

40 Spectator, IV, 118–20. 41 Ibid., II, 228.

288 Conclusion
and Steele were proffering the moderate, polite, oligarchic Whiggery of
the future. Their approach would also later be mimicked by the Tories
in opposition. The son of Lancelot Addison was well placed to help turn
Whiggery into such a diverse notion that it could never be contrasted
directly with the Toryism of the previous generation.42
Joseph, of course, was also a statesman, and his implicit criticisms of
the Whig ministry’s heavy-handedness in 1710 and his support for limited
toleration in no way led him to harbour a distaste for state power. After the
accession of George I, Joseph adopted a much more fiercely partisan stance
in the Freeholder, where in February 1716 he endorsed the Whig suspension
of habeas corpus following the Jacobite rising. ‘In these times of danger’,
he argued, this measure made it possible for the king ‘to seize and detain
the persons of such who he had reason to believe were conspiring against
his person and government’. It was justified by its ‘expedience and reason-
ability’ and arguments drawn ‘from the first principles of government’. It
was obvious to any student of government, he surmised, ‘that there must
be in each particular form of it an absolute and unlimited power; and that
this power is lodged in the hands of those who have the making of its laws’.
It made nonsense of any notion of political power ‘to imagine that those,
who have the authority of making laws, cannot suspend any particular law,
when they think it expedient for the public’, for ‘without such a power
all government would be defective, and not armed with a sufficient force
for its own security’. Since ‘public safety is the general view of all laws’, it
was natural that when ‘any law does not conduce to this great end’ and
its very enforcement ‘would endanger the community, that law ought to
be laid asleep for such a time’. In fact ‘the very intention of our Habeas
Corpus Act, namely, the preservation of the liberties of the subject’, Addi-
son claimed, ‘absolutely requires that Act to be now suspended’, because in
the end, the rebellion threatened ‘our civil rights, and everything that can
be valuable to a free people’. Addison went on to instance the temporary
dictatorships of republican Rome and the powers given by the Senate to
the consul during conspiracies. He added that unlike tyrants, the English
king was only permitted to act under the suspension of law ‘but for a few
months’.43 Freedom, Addison insisted, could never survive without limits,
and could only thrive in moderation. By the same token, the state had no
properly political power whatsoever unless it could decide on exceptions
to the laws it had made.44
42 Cowan, ‘Mr. Spectator’; Gordon, ‘Voyeuristic dreams’. 43 Addison, Freeholder, 107–9.
44 Compare Bates, States of war, 93–133, esp. 129–30; Shagan, Rule of moderation, esp. 335–41. See also
Edelstein, Terror of natural right, esp. 271–5; Schmitt, Political theology; Schmitt, Concept of the
political; Agamben, State of exception; Agamben, Homo sacer; Halliday, Habeas corpus.
 From pastor to spectator 289
The tensions and concerns that Joseph addressed with his own scheme
of Anglican Enlightenment were the same ones addressed by his father. The
problems they confronted together were also problems with which polities
of all sorts still grapple today. What forms of expression and suppression
threaten the existence and flourishing of political societies? How can those
threats best be neutralized? Like the Addisons, most political liberals have
attempted to delimit a realm of basic public consensus beyond which
threats to social and political stability lie, and accordingly restrain public
discourse. This was the project of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, and it was
also the project of the conformist Anglican Enlightenment. It was what
motivated Anglican divines to describe the English church as the protector
and guarantor of a natural and civil religion. These men were keenly aware
of the varieties of theology and piety that surrounded them. With that
diversity in mind, they sought to outline what many liberal theorists today
call an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. They
believed that in their particular society, this consensus was best embodied in
the establishment of the Church of England in partnership with the state.
The consensus they promoted was not a simple modus vivendi. It was a font
of solidarity. It contained within itself a moral core that could provide a
basis for the production of social goods, including prudent public speech,
the cultivation of virtue, and complacency with the existing regime.45
The fundamental political struggles of early Enlightenment Europe were
premised upon a wide acceptance of this rationale, not a struggle for and
against it. They revolved around competing conceptions of the content
of that consensus, and the proper institutional and theoretical means of
perpetuating it.
Today much of the debate about the promise and perils of liberalism
and liberal democracy centres on their moral and religious implications and
dilemmas.46 The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries ought to
remain an historical focal point for these discussions. But many more
aspects of this period are relevant to them than historians and other stu-
dents of politics and religion tend to assume, and the usual topics of
interest – from the canon of political thought to the Enlightenment
45 Rawls, Political liberalism, 134, 147.
46 The relevant literature here is overwhelmingly massive and diverse, even within the field of liberal
political theory. Important recent works and others that are particularly relevant to the discussion
here and not cited in the Introduction include Raz, Morality of freedom; Sandel, ‘Political Liberalism’;
Audi, Democratic authority; Wingenbach, ‘Priority of stability’; Garsten, Saving persuasion; Fortier,
‘Can liberalism lose the Enlightenment?’; Roover and Balagangadhara, ‘Predicament of liberal
toleration’; Carter, Culture of disbelief; Manent, Intellectual history of liberalism; Foucault, Birth of
biopolitics; Fish, ‘Mission impossible’; Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity; MacIntyre, Whose
justice?; Žižek, ‘Tolerance as an ideological category’.
290 Conclusion
itself – are still widely misunderstood. To appreciate this, it is first necessary
to move beyond a self-congratulatory (or condemnatory) pose when the
period’s contemporary significance is being considered. It is also neces-
sary to move beyond the persistent assumption that liberalism is solely a
discourse of freedom, and that in its origins it was primarily a project of free-
dom. As students of later periods of history – and above all, British history –
know perfectly well, liberalism is also a discourse and an institutional
project of power. What is crucial to recognize is that it was so from the
beginning. The questions that prompted it, like the questions that trig-
gered the Enlightenment itself, were ultimately questions of security and
rule.
The persecutors who led the Church of England out of its mid-century
miseries knew this well, whatever one might think of them now. In early
Enlightenment Europe, classic political liberalism emerged not primarily
from attempts to protect individuals from the powers of church and state,
but from attempts to enable the state to more effectively establish its
authority, after an era in which religious zeal had exposed its very serious
weaknesses, and in a moment where new forms of pluralism promised ever
more complex problems in the future. The early Anglican Enlightenment
was another such attempt to secure civil peace, one that brings out in sharp
relief some of the tensions within today’s liberal projects. It is, of course,
no longer of interest as a solution to consider, despite the persistence of
an extremely attenuated version of it in England today. Its interest lies in
how Anglicans once identified, explored, and grappled with an abiding set
of problems. In an age of strident public religion and widespread malaise
in liberal polities across the globe, much the same might be said of later
Stuart England and its empire as a whole. Its importance lies not in the
nascent liberalism that emerged within it, but in the enduring questions,
problems, and struggles to which that liberalism was simply one of many
imperfect answers.
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 Index

ʿAbd Allāh, Muhammad bin 107–9 Addison, Lancelot (1680–1710) 277

absolutism 52, 109, 145, 220, 238 adiaphora 136–7, 157, 166, 177, 178, 180 n. 17, 188,
Aconcio, Jacopo 168 203
Adam 133–4 Ah.mad, Muhammad ibn 90–91
Addison, Gulston 277 Alexander, bishop of Alexandria 272, 273
Addison, Joseph 277–90 Amyraut, Moı̈se 27, 29
Anglicanism of 285–6 Andrés, Juan 85
coffeehouses and 283, 284, 287 Andrewes, Lancelot 171
dissemination of philosophy and 282 Anglican Revolution 246–53
education of 277–8 Anjara 82
on persecution and toleration 286–7 anti-Calvinism
on politeness and civility 282–3 see Arminianism; Calvinism; Laudianism
the political and 288 anticlericalism 4, 12, 127, 195–9, 201, 204, 224,
publications 225, 226–31, 234, 279, 281
Freeholder 288 see also clergy; freethinking
Spectator 283–6 antinomianism 153, 202
Tatler 283–6 anti-popery
on restraint and social discipline 283–5, 287–9 see popery
Addison, Lancelot (1632–1703) anti-puritanism
basic biographical information 2–3, 17, 20–21, see puritans and puritanism
23, 34, 43, 84, 237, 243, 277 antiquarianism 30, 83, 93, 96, 149, 280
publications distinguished from history 75 n. 6, 97 n. 111,
Catechumen 175, 256–7 101 n. 120
Christian’s manual 258 historical epistemology and 104
Christians daily sacrifice 194–5, 277 history of politics and 79, 106
Christos autotheos 267, 271–4 history of religion and 75
Devotional poems 3, 277 learned travellers’ criticism of 81, 96
First state of Mahumedism 84, 232–7, 249–51 travel and 57, 76, 95
Genuine use and necessity of the two anti-Semitism 62
sacraments 277 see also Judaism
Introduction to the sacrament 237 Appleby 17, 19–20
Millennianism 261–2 Appleby Grammar School 17–19
Modest plea for the clergy 1–3, 4, 5, 12, 137, Arabic 65, 82, 83, 84, 85
139, 198, 229–31, 281 Book of Common Prayer translated into 65
Moores baffled 236 books and manuscripts in 44, 80, 82
Present state of the Jews 59, 66, 69, 97–103, Hugo Grotius’s De veritate translated into 64
117–21 instruction in 28
Primitive institution 132–7, 154–74, 224, 258 printing in 59
translations of, German 59 archives 38, 54, 74, 75, 79, 80, 107
West Barbary 51, 58, 59, 77–80, 81, 88, Aristotle 23, 77
106–14, 128, 137, 151–4 Arius 272, 273

330
 Index 331
Arminianism 175–6, 184, 201, 202 Capel, Sir Henry 219
see also Calvinism; Laudianism Cappel, Louis 27
ars apodemica 24 Carolina 212 n. 13, 215
ars historica 74, 89, 104, 114 Carvajal, Luis del Mármol 84 n. 52
Ashmole, Elias 239, 245 Casaubon, Meric 28 n. 58
Asia, South 64, 105, 211, 277 catechisms and catechizing 18, 64, 69, 154–62,
As.ı̄lah 49, 50 175, 201, 202, 209, 222–6, 238, 242, 254,
atheism 33, 138 n. 82, 143, 165, 185, 202, 221, 226, 283, 285
267 Enlightened Christian 204
Atterbury, Francis 274 Jesuit 119, 155
Augustine, St 238 Jewish 67–8, 119, 154
Ausonius, Decimus Magnus 97 missions and 63, 65
autopsy 75, 77–80, 82, 84, 92, 94, 97, 98, 102, 104 Muslim 81, 154
natural law and 132–5
Bacon, Francis 55, 97, 151 primordial 132–5
Bainbrigg, Reginald 17 as response to toleration 222–6, 258
Bangorian Controversy 281 see also preaching
Baptists 228, 240, 245 Catholics and Catholicism, Roman 98, 167, 189,
Barbados 212 n. 13, 215 203, 221, 245, 247
barbarism 128–32 during reign of James II 247, 252
see also civilization; civility; civil religion Enlightened 204–5
Barlow, Thomas 27, 28 n. 58 missionary work of 61, 62, 69, 155
Basire, Isaac 45, 63 in Tangier 48, 213, 214, 215–16, 217–19
Basnage, Jacques 121 see also Dominicans; Franciscans; Jesuits;
Bathurst, Ralph 38 popery
Baudouin, François 74, 79 censorship 167, 202, 268, 284
Baxter, Richard 28 n. 58, 65, 150 n. 5 see also restraint
Bedwell, William 44 certainty 22–3, 74, 104
Belasyse, John 218 see also credibility
Bermuda 220 n. 50 Chacon, Augustin Coronel 216
Bernard, Edward 128–9 Charles I 44, 153
Bernier, François 59, 105 Charles II 236, 237, 286
Bertram, Corneille 101 religious policies and tactics of 210, 212, 213,
Bible 66, 67, 103 215, 216, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226,
Algonquian 64 227, 237, 258, 260
London Polyglot (1657) 27, 150 Cherbury, Edward Herbert, first Baron Herbert
scholarship on 95, 103, 149–50, 263 of 138
Turkish 65 Chillingworth, William 29, 168, 178
Bird, Benjamin 222 Cholmley, Sir Hugh 58 n. 77, 128
Bodin, Jean 111 Cicero 114, 119
Bombay 47, 212 n. 13, 213, 215 civil religion 12 n. 27, 141–5
Botero, Giovanni 90–91, 112, 113 Anglican Christianity as 141–5, 178, 202, 203,
Boyle, Robert 64–5, 67, 83 279, 281, 285, 289
Brandenburg-Prussia 204 bracketing of theological conflict and 128
Bray, Thomas 69 catechizing as centrepiece of 155
Brevint, Daniel 281 centrality to Enlightenment 115
British empire importance of ritual to 179
see empire, English; orientalism and iure divino priesthood as essential to 141–5, 196
Orientalism moral reform as centrepiece of 176
Burnet, Gilbert 252, 265, 281 political utility of religious imposture and 114,
Bury, Arthur 265 141–5
Buxtorf, Johann 28, 30, 101–102, 117 civil society 4, 62, 237, 274, 279, 283, 285, 287
Civil Wars, English
Calvin, Jean 29 see English Revolution
Calvinism 35, 176, 178, 185, 201, 234, 264, 285 civility 109–10, 128–32, 141, 204, 282–3
see also Arminianism barbarism and 128–32
332 Index
civility (cont.) counsel
in historical method 78 history as 45, 51, 58, 73, 76, 87, 93, 106, 114,
in public discourse 162, 284 130, 131
as rationality and utility 109–10 role of clergy in 2, 73, 142, 145, 273
Republic of Letters and 38, 39–40 Covel, John 105
see also civilization; civil religion Coventry, archdeaconry of 243
civilization 205 credibility 74, 76, 77–80, 103–5
Anglicanism as 137–45, 149, 205, 280 see also testimony; eyewitnessing
civil war destructive of 20, 40 criticism 30, 76, 80, 104
divine accommodation and 189 Croft, Herbert 231
Laudianism as 137–45, 178, 180–181 Cromwell, Oliver 153–4, 217, 250, 286
nature and 137–45 Crooke, William 87–8, 249, 256–8
puritanism destructive of 154 curiosity 25, 41, 42, 45, 56
religion as 136, 137–45, 278
see also civility; civil religion Danby, Thomas Osborne, first earl of 227, 228,
clergy 209, 226–31, 283 229, 230, 232, 233, 234
basis for authority of 195–9 Danvers, Daniel 32–3
counsellors to kings 2, 73, 142, 145, 273 deism 1, 128, 138, 180, 278
essential to natural and civil religion 2, Descartes, René 104
137–45, 280 despotism, oriental 109, 122
universal definition of 127 dialectic
see also anticlericalism; power, pastoral see logic
coffeehouses 283, 284, 287 al-Dilāʾı̄, ʿAbd Allāh 50
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 53, 54 disputation 31–6, 66–8, 118–19, 152, 155, 162–8,
colonies, English 176, 201, 202, 209, 261–76
see empire, English dissent
Comber, Thomas 191 see nonconformity
Common Prayer, Book of 31, 34, 67, 154, 155, divinity
168–73, 176, 201, 202, 209, 224, 238, 239, see theology
240, 252, 254, 266, 271 Dodwell, Henry 28 n. 58, 162–4, 165, 167, 281
missionary translations of 63, 65 Dolben, John 232
commonplacing Dominicans 68, 123, 214
see notebooks Dugdale, William 239
communion, holy 175, 176, 180–86, 191 Dunkerque 43, 213 n. 15
frequency of 239, 245, 258
Laudian understanding of 180–86, 191, 203 East India Company 105, 277
moral reform and 182, 256–8 ecclesiology 10, 156, 161, 176, 199, 200, 203, 270,
as sacrifice by priest on altar 180–86 279, 280
shechinah and 191 education 109, 110, 125, 181, 202
see also sacraments grammar school 17–19
comparative religion 10, 135, 178 Jewish 67, 68
comprehension 253, 254 see also Judaism; rabbis
see also toleration see also catechizing; travel; Oxford, University
Compton, Henry 228, 230, 232, 255, 256, 257 of; theology
Conant, John 35 Edwards, John 264
conformity, occasional 254, 257, 278, 279, 325 Eliot, John 63, 98 n. 112
conscience 157 Elizabeth I 170
liberty of 37, 39, 40, 243 empiricism 74
see also toleration empire
Constantine the Great 272, 273–4 English 47–52, 277
Constantinople 44, 63 orientalism and 43–7
Constantius II 153 religious policy in 210–20
convocation Tangier in 47–51
of 1689 256, 257 travel and 42–3
controversy over 272, 273, 274–5 see also specific colonies
Corporation Act 228, 254 Enlightenment and 58–61
 Index 333
missionary work and 61–70 geography 94
Republic of Letters and 41 Germany 55, 56, 57, 58, 59
English atlas 57–8, 59 Ghaylān, Ah.mad al-Khad.ir bin ʿAlı̄ 48–51, 82,
English Revolution 17–20, 44, 76, 150–51, 176 92, 107, 125–6, 216
histories of 151–4 Glanvill, Joseph 151
Enlightenment globalization
Christian 203–5, 278 historiographical 74, 76, 106, 115, 187
radical 205, 279 imperial 47, 63
enthusiasts and enthusiasm 116, 128, 135 n. 69, religious 10, 62, 63, 145, 211
149, 150, 169, 170, 179, 197, 204, 233, 278, scholarly 41, 42
285, 286 Glorious Revolution 246–54
episcopacy 161, 196, 197, 200, 203, 204, 225, 228, Anglican episcopate and 166, 252, 265, 269,
231, 238 275
imperial 219–20 English Enlightenment and 4
see also prelacy Laudianism and 260
epistemology, historical missionary work before 63
see credibility public religious dispute and 200, 203, 276
Erastianism 127, 144, 196, 203, 230 toleration and 254
Erpenius, Thomas 85, 96 grammar 17–18
Essex, Robert Devereaux, third earl of 153 Grand Tour
ethnography 66 see travel
eucharist Great Tew circle 168, 178
see communion, holy Greaves, John 45
Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia 272 Greswold, Henry 259
Eusebius of Caesarea 29, 75, 91 Grew, Obadiah 35–6
evangelism Grotius, Hugo 64, 65, 83, 86
see missionaries Gulston, William 237, 277
Evelyn, John 65–6
Exclusion Crisis 219, 236 Hacket, John 239, 241, 242
see also Popish Plot Hacket, Sir Andrew 242
eyewitnessing Hales, John 178
see autopsy Halifax, George Savile, first marquis of 251
Hammond, Henry 65, 176
Faber, Tanaquil 26 Hanisius, David 56
facts 73, 77–80, 89, 279 Harmar, John 33
Falkland, Lucius Cary, second Viscount Hartlib, Samuel 64
178 Hebraism, Christian 62, 69, 97, 101–2
fanaticism 116, 128, 158, 169, 173, 184, see also Hebrew; Judaism
246 Hebrew
al-Faraj, Abū 85 books in, at the University of Oxford 44
Fathers, Church education of the English in 18, 21, 28, 30, 44,
see patristics 217
Fell, John 40, 65 see also Hebraism, Christian
fides Henchman, Humphrey 218
see credibility Henry III 68
Fowler, Edward 160, 161, 223, 252, 265 heresy 261–76
France, travel in 23–7 Herodotus 77, 93
Franciscans 67, 123 Heylyn, Peter 90, 169, 281
Franco, Solomon 217 Hickes, George 1–3, 104, 270, 279–81, 282
freethinkers and freethinking 1–2, 12–13, 119, 127, high churchmanship 1, 254, 275, 280, 281, 284,
128, 137, 142–4, 145, 153, 177, 209, 243, 287
266, 278, 279, 280, 281 as category of historical analysis 7, 144, 179,
Frejus, Roland 59 196, 219, 269, 270, 275, 279
history (scholarship on, reading and writing of )
Gassendi, Pierre 34 73–114, 115–16, 149–54, 174, 204, 264,
Geneva 204 266, 267, 275, 278
334 Index
history (cont.) 1672 221–2, 224, 258
ecclesiastical 75 1687 247
natural 95–6 see also toleration
philosophical 114 intelligence, political 43
political 75, 106–14, 151–4 histories as 51–2, 58, 73, 93
see also English Revolution; Maghrib; scholarship and 52–4, 55–6
popery; puritanism travel and 56, 61
religious 84–8, 97–103 Interregnum 20–40, 154, 159, 286
see also Islam; Judaism; paganism interviews 75, 82, 84
sacred 137 Ireland 214, 218
see also Laudianism irenicism 4, 6, 157, 161, 167, 168, 172, 173, 218,
universal 97, 103 219, 230, 240, 273
see also travel irreligion 200, 202, 222, 226, 229, 230, 240, 254
Hoadly, Benjamin 281 see also freethinking
Hobbes, Thomas (and Hobbism) 1–2, 23, 30, 31, Isham, Zacheus 256
139, 140, 141, 143, 169, 268, 289 Islam
Hooke, Robert 55 Christian missions and 61, 69
Hooker, Richard 29, 176, 182 described as popery and puritanism 116, 121–8
Hottinger, Johann Heinrich 85, 86, 96 European historiography, study, and views of
Hough, John 281–2 29, 84–8, 96–7, 121–8, 151–3, 154, 187,
Howard, Henry 81 188, 190, 195, 233–4, 249–51
humanism 17–18, 30, 59, 70, 75, 82, 96, 129, 130, millennium and 262
263, 265, 266, 272, 278, 279 in Tangier 48, 214
see also antiquarianism; ars apodemica; ars Istanbul
historica; history (scholarship on, reading see Constantinople
and writing of ); Renaissance
Jamaica 212 n. 13, 213, 215
Ibshı̄hı̄, Muhammad ibn Ah.mad 81 James I 170
idolatry 189, 190, 191 James II 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252,
ancient 135, 141, 179, 181, 194, 234 253, 260, 263, 266
aversion to, among Muslims 122, 234 Jane, William 230
Calvinists and puritans on 178, 180 Jesuits 62, 119, 124, 155
Noachide precept concerning 133 Jesus 133
prayer and 195 Jews
Roman Catholic 120, 178 see Judaism
study of 115, 116, 181, 188 Judaism
al-Ifrānı̄, ʿAbd Allāh Muhammad ibn al-H . ajj Christian missions and 61, 62, 65–9
Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh 92–3 described as popery 116, 117–21
imposture, religious 113, 121, 138, 140, 143, 149, European Christian historiography, study, and
150, 151, 197, 230, 233–4, 280, 286 views of 29, 80, 81, 97–103, 154, 178,
Christian 183, 278 179–80, 194, 195
civil religion and 142–4 millennialism and 65–6
diagnosis of, central to Restoration politics Orientalism and 98
and Enlightenment 231, 236, 237 in Tangier 48, 214–15, 216–17
disputation and preaching as 164, 165
history of 115, 116, 127 al-Khad.ir, Ah.mad 50
Jewish 119 King, Henry 34
lay 144
Muslim 84, 113, 123, 126, 233–4 L’Estrange, Roger 233, 236, 284
Independents and Independency 36, 37, 153, 221, Lake, John 243
228, 287 Langbaine, Gerard 27, 38–9, 286
see also puritanism latitudinarianism 181 n. 24, 279, 280
India as category of historical analysis 5, 7, 12, 144,
see Asia, South; East India Company 156, 161, 166, 168, 171, 173, 179, 243, 260,
induction 74 261, 269, 270, 274, 275
Indulgence, Declaration of Laud, William 21, 44, 58, 281
 Index 335
Laudianism 177 n. 7, 176–91, 201, 203, 262, 278, moral virtue and 112
279, 285 prudence and 111
as cause of English Revolution 152 rhetoric and 78
moral reform and 256–8 Madras 215, 277
natural and civil religion in 137–45 Maghrib 43–4, 47–52, 58–9, 66–9, 77–84,
Tory reaction and 237, 246 88–103, 107–14, 117–21, 122–8, 129–31,
Leeward Islands 212 n. 13, 220 n. 50 151–3, 154, 165, 212–19
Leo Africanus al-Makı̄n, Jirjis 85
see al-Wazzān, Muhammad Maimonides 119, 135
Léry, Jean de 93 manners, reformation of
Leslie, Charles 270 see reform, moral
Levant Company 44, 65 marabouts 81, 122
liberalism, political 4, 289 Marcellinus, Ammianus 153
Church of England and 289 Marsham, John 135
Enlightenment and 289 Marvell, Andrew 231
in historiography 3, 4, 11, 199 Maryland 69
Republic of Letters and 37, 40 Massachusetts
restraint in 289 see New England
toleration and 211 Mediterranean 44, 47, 70
in trinitarian controversy 269 Messias, Joseph 82
Lichfield and Coventry, Anglican diocese of Mews, Peter 224
69, 237, 246, 247–9, 252–3, 256, millenarianism 65, 261–2
258–60 Milston, Wiltshire 155, 237
Lichfield Cathedral 239–40, 245, 247–8, 249, Milton, John 151
259–60, 261 missions and missionaries 43, 61–70, 86, 98
Lichfield, city of 245, 249 moderation
Lindsey, Robert Bertie, third earl of 227 attacked during reign of Anne 278, 280
Livorno 48 Church of England’s claim to 149, 168, 204,
Livy 141 277, 279, 284
Lloyd, William (1627–1717), bishop of Worcester freedom and 288
162, 235, 252, 259, 260, 261, as rhetorical and political tool 168, 178, 210
262 toleration and 210
Llull, Ramon 67 in Whiggery 288
Locke, John 76 n. 10, 134, 227, 289 monarchy, universal 122, 126
logic Monmouth’s Rebellion 246
in clerical education 22–3 Montaigne, Michel de 129
fides and 77 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron
politics and 31, 162–7, 174, 202 de 151
study of 18, 22–3 Moral Revolution
in trinitarian controversy 263, 264, 272 see reform, moral
see also disputation moralism 176
London morality
Jews in 217 see catechisms and catechizing; communion,
rebuilding of churches in 186 holy; nature, law of; reform, moral; civil
London gazette 229, 235, 236 religion; natural religion; sacraments
Long, Thomas 265 Morley, George 228
Louis XIV 213, 220 Morocco
low churchmanship 254, 275, 279, 281 see Maghrib
Lowther, Richard 21–3 Moses 133, 136
Muddiman, Henry 52, 53
Machiavelli, Niccolò (and Machiavellianism) 92, Mughal empire 98, 126
111, 113, 151, 167, 230, 231, 264 Muhammad, Prophet 44, 84–5, 233–4, 249–51
Christianity and 111, 112, 144 see also Islam
civil religion and 143, 144 Muslims
immanent critique of 112 see Islam
imposture and 143 mystery 265–6
336 Index
al-Naqsı̄s, ʿAbd Allāh Karı̄m 49, 82 nonjurors 256, 259, 269, 270, 274, 275, 279
Native Americans 63 North Africa
natural religion 132–40 see Maghrib
Anglican Christianity as 132–40, 178, 204, Norwood, Henry 107, 218
279, 280, 289 notebooks 55–6, 84, 86, 88–9, 91
bracketing of theological conflict and 128 Numa Pompilius 141–2, 281
catechizing and 132–40, 155
centrality to Enlightenment 115 Oates, Titus 232, 233, 234, 235
clerical education and 29 Ockley, Simon 41
Enlightened Catholicism and 204 Oldenburg, Henry 65
Joseph Addison on 278 orientalism and Orientalism 44–7
Laudianism as 187 Anglican theology and 149
morality as centrepiece of 176 clerical education and 30
necessity of ritual in 179 early modern versus modern 45
prayer as part of 191, 194 English politics and 232–7, 249–51
priesthood as essential to 137–45, 196 European expansion and 44–7, 70
sacrifice as part of 180 historical scholarship and 73, 77–114
nature, law of 67, 132–40, 187 Judaism and 117–21
see also natural religion oriental despotism and 109
Netherlands 55, 57, 220 popery and puritanism and 117–32
New England 63 power and politics and 44–7, 70
New England Company 64 Republic of Letters and 41
news 51–2, 53–4, 58 Ottoman empire 44–5, 126, 262
Newton, Isaac 261 Owen, John 27, 32, 33, 38, 150 n. 5
Nicea, Council of 273–4 Oxford, University of 17, 20–40, 43, 70, 270–71,
Nicholls, William 265 277
Nicolson, William 55–8, 59, 61 Act
Noachide precepts 132–7 see terrae filius
nonconformists and nonconformity Bodleian Library 44
Anglican approach to characterized by Convocation 35
persuasion and education not coercion curriculum 21–31
157, 238, 241, 245, 248 press 58
Anglican attitudes to 199, 200, 202, 203, 226, Queen’s College 20–22, 27–8, 34, 57
228, 235, 284, 285 Sheldonian Theatre 58, 128
Anglican Revolution and appeasement of 248, see also education
251, 252, 253
catechizing and 159, 161, 165, 202, 223, 225 pagans and paganism 33, 65, 98, 117, 123, 141, 178,
comprehension and 254, 259 194, 273
concern over irreligion, atheism, and Palma, Don Diego Felipe de 49–51
anticlericalism 226 Paris 25–7
conscience and 157 Parker, Samuel 162–4, 190, 223, 231, 247
Declaration of Indulgence (1672) and 220, pastoral power
221, 224 see power, pastoral
disputation and 165, 201 Patrick, Simon 182 n. 27, 252
encouraged by prelacy 243 patristics 29, 118, 150, 177, 263, 267, 279, 280
James II and 251 patronage 32
moderation as rhetoric as tactic and 168 Pepys, Samuel 217
moral reform and 203, 255 persecution 37, 286–7
as popish 236 philology 26–7, 83, 149, 204, 272, 280
Popish Plot and 234, 235 philosophes 98, 105
preaching and 169, 173, 201 philosophy
punishment of 157, 223, 225, 226 Anglican theology and 149
supported by corrupt bishop Thomas Wood as category of historical analysis 73
241, 243, 248 civil and natural religion and 115
toleration as rhetoric and tactic and 168 erudition in Enlightenment and 106
 Index 337
history and 114 priestcraft 90, 124, 138, 153, 264, 273, 279, 280
late humanist theology and 30 heresy as 267
scepticism in 74 shared concern in Restoration politics and
travel and 105 Enlightenment 128, 231, 236, 237
in trinitarian controversy 263, 264, 265, 266, as universalization of popery and puritanism
268, 272 116, 126, 127
Pitt, Moses 57, 58, 59 see also freethinkers and freethinking;
Platonism 264 imposture; Judaism; Islam; popery;
Pococke, Edward (1604–1691) 27, 28, 37–8, 44–5, puritans and puritanism
64, 65, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86 priests
politeness see clergy; Laudianism; priestcraft
see civility propaganda
political, the 288 from travellers 43, 53–4, 58
politics historical scholarship as 51, 52, 76
public 40, 153, 162, 228, 229, 235, 252 orientalist works as 45
as scholarly discipline 107, 108 providence
Polybius 111, 114 bracketed in Enlightenment discourse 115
Polyphemus 35 Machiavellianism and 111
popery 116, 278 Maghribi history as indirect evidence of 109
Anglican Revolution and 252 moral reform and 254
in Restoration politics 226, 231–7 as political tool 126, 153
James II’s 247–8 puritans and puritanism 39, 116, 151–2, 153–4,
Jewish 117–22, 179 177, 184, 226, 227, 233–7, 243, 285–6
Muslim 121–2, 123, 124, 151, 233 as popery 233
nonconformity as 236 moral reform and 176, 202, 254, 260
versus priestcraft 128 Muslim 122–7, 151, 233–7
see also Popish Plot preaching and 63, 169, 170
Popish Plot 231–7 scripturalism of 160
scepticism about 232, 233, 234, 236 see also nonconformists and nonconformity;
popularity presbyterians and presbyterianism
in English Revolution 151–2 Pyrrhonism, historical 76, 103–4
James II’s 249–51
Moroccan 92, 112 Quakers 64, 135 n. 69, 182 n. 27, 221, 228, 240,
Muslim 233–7, 249–51 245, 247
in Popish Plot crisis 233–7 Qurʾan 29, 81, 85, 153
see also puritanism see also Islam
Portugal 47, 48, 49, 126, 213, 214, 215–16, 218
Postel, Guillaume 84 n. 52 rabbis 67, 98, 132
power, pastoral 2, 66, 159, 283 see also Judaism
see also clergy al-Rashı̄d, Mūlāy 80, 82, 112–13
prayer 191–5 rationalism and rationality
prayer book Anglicanism’s claim to 149, 285
see Common Prayer, Book of as categories of historical analysis 6, 7, 149,
prelacy 227 264, 265, 266
Anglican opposition to 152, 241–4, 245–6, in conjectural history 139, 140
267 in trinitarian controversy 262, 264, 265,
cause of English Revolution 152 266
in trinitarian controversy 267 usually historical and rhetorical in nature 149
presbyterians and presbyterianism 116, 159, Rawlinson, Richard 21, 23, 38 n. 99
160 n. 54, 161, 170, 197, 221, 228, 229, reform, moral 156 n. 33, 253–60, 283–90
250, 286, 287 civil society as agent of 283–90
see also nonconformists and nonconformity; intra-Anglican conflict and 203, 253–60
puritanism Laudian version of 156, 253–60
present state genre 93, 97 Moral revolution and 260
Prideaux, Humphrey 84 Tory reaction and 238
338 Index
Reformation 167, 168, 174 rationality and 149
Christian Hebraism and 117 restraining 162–74
Enlightenment’s relationship to 73, 115, 126, ritual
128, 178 see Laudianism; natural religion; civil religion;
irenicism in 168 worship
Long, as category of historical analysis 11, 177, Rome 24, 25
209 Royal Society 55, 57, 105
Renaissance royalism 17, 19, 34, 37–40
barbarism and civilization as understood in Anglican 38, 199
129 Russell, Thomas 218
clerical education and 17 Rycaut, Sir Paul 45, 105, 106–7, 130
global Republic of Letters and 43
Islamic history as understood in 130 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de 108–9, 111, 112, 113
roots of Enlightenment historical scholarship Sacheverell, Henry 279, 287
in 73, 74–5, 77, 80, 90, 98, 106, 115 sacraments 170, 180–86, 201, 203, 258
versus Enlightenment 77, 78, 84, 97, 104, 105, see also communion, holy; Laudianism
114, 128, 130 Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the
see also humanism Faith 69
Republic of Letters 36, 41 sacrifice 180–86
as an empire 41 see clergy; communion, holy; Laudianism;
in France 24, 26–7 power, pastoral; natural religion; civil
in Germany 55, 59 religion
globalization of 41 Safavid empire 105
ideological and vocational open-endedness of Sancroft, William
70 against prelacy 241, 242, 243
norms of 20, 36, 41 articles to bishops (1688) 252
Orientalism and 41 leader of Charles II’s commission for
politics and 36, 41 ecclesiastical promotions 237
as response to religious and civil war 20 support of Laudian reformism in 1680s 237,
violence, freedom, and restraint in 36, 41 238, 239, 243, 252, 253
restraint 37 suspension 256
civil society as means of 283–90 Sanderson, Robert 228
combination of licence and, as characteristic Saumur 23, 25, 26–7, 204
of later Stuart public politics 40, 231, Saʿdı̄ dynasty 90, 113
234–5, 261–76, 282–90 scepticism
disputation and 162–74, 209, 262–75 epistemological 268
periodicals and coffeehouses as means of historical 76
283–90 see also Pyrrhonism, historical
of public speech 202 philosophical 74
in Republic of Letters 39–40 scholasticism
of self 39 in Anglican theology 149, 176, 201
trinitarian controversy and 262–75 in clerical education 30
rhetoric in trinitarian controversy 263, 265, 268, 269
as cause of political conflict 31–6, 162–74, 202 science 73, 149
as characteristic of Enlightenment discourse human 42, 129–30
73 natural 61 n. 82, 95–6
in clerical education 18, 22 social 42
disputation and 162–74 Scotland 19, 211, 214, 235
in Enlightenment historical scholarship 76–9, Scott, John 256, 257
80 secularity
grammar school education in 18 as bracketing of theological conflict 145
as training for politics 31 as condition for Enlightenment and
in trinitarian controversy 263 environment of later Stuart politics 42,
in university education and exercises 22, 31–6 145, 177, 205
Machiavellian 78, 112 as consequence of religious pluralism 177
 Index 339
natural and civil religion and 145 Stillingfleet, Edward 133, 149, 163, 164, 173, 181,
orientalism and 10 235, 252, 281
persuasion and immanent critique of diverse Laudian inclinations of 186–7, 188
groups as response to 177 moral reform and 255
traditional understanding of 11, 42, 211 in trinitarian controversy 265, 266
travel and 25, 42 Stubbe, Henry 87 n. 66
Selden, John 38, 39, 91, 286 sufism 81
on Judaism 98, 102
on natural law 132–6 Tacitus 111, 114, 230
orientalism and 27, 44, 96 Tangier 3, 43, 46, 52, 80–82, 128, 232, 237, 244
on relationship between Judaism and Exclusion Crisis and 218
Christianity 179 public library 80–81
Sevi, Sabbatai 65 religious settlement of 10, 66–9, 212–19, 224
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl significance in English empire 47–51
of 76 n. 10, 223, 227, 234 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 59
Sharp, John 173 Taylor, Jeremy 28 n. 58, 40, 171, 176, 281
Shaykh, Mūlāy Ah.mad 91 Tenison, Thomas
shechinah 189–90 in controversy over convocation 274
Sheldon, Gilbert 225, 226, 228, 229, 241 Laudian inclinations of 181, 188–90, 191
against prelacy 242 moral reform and 256
importance of catechizing to 222, 224, 225, on the shechinah 188–90, 191
229 preference for controversial preaching 252
measured, critical clericalism of 224, 225, public theology and 275
230 in trinitarian controversy 270, 271
response to Declaration of Indulgence (1672) terrae filius 32–6
223 Tertullian 29, 132
Sherlock, Richard 182 n. 27 Test Act 246, 250, 254, 257
Sherlock, William 264, 265, 268, 269, 270, testimony 74, 77–80, 86, 88, 91–3, 265
271 see also credibility; eyewitnessing; rhetoric
Smalwood, Matthew 239 Tetouan 49, 50, 82
Smith, Thomas, orientalist (1638–1710) 28, 45, Teviot, Andrew Rutherford, first earl of 43, 48,
87–8, 91, 105, 232 52, 212, 213, 236
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge theatre 33
(SPCK) 64, 69, 256, 257 theology
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in advanced education in 28–31
Foreign Parts (SPG) 69 ancient 138
Socinianism 159, 197, 265, 267, 271 Anglican 175–99
see also trinitarian controversy interdisciplinary nature of 149
South, Robert 32, 34–5, 264, 265, 271 as category of historical analysis 73
Southwell, Sir Robert 53 Jewish 102
Spain 49–51, 126, 214 in trinitarian controversy 261–76
speech, freedom of 37 undergraduate education in 21
see also civil society; liberalism; restraint Thirty Years War 111, 205
Spencer, John 178–9, 281 Thorndike, Herbert 27, 176, 190
Spinoza, Baruch 1, 2, 4, 289 Thucydides 77
spying Tillotson, John 173, 235, 252
see intelligence in trinitarian controversy 265, 266, 270, 271,
St Mary the Virgin, church of, Oxford 32, 33 272, 274
St Mary, church of, Lichfield 239 Tindal, Matthew, and anticlerical
St Michael, church of, Lichfield 238 Enlightenment 1, 2, 8, 12, 279–81, 282
St Paul’s Cathedral 186, 188 Toland, John 267
state, confessional 4, 12 Toleration Act (1689) 253
Steele, Richard 283, 288 toleration, religious 210–22, 286–7
Sterne, Richard 222 Anglicans’ familiarity with, before 1689 260
Sterry, Nathaniel 40, 41 as deceit 250–51
340 Index
toleration, religious (cont.) Vernet, Jacob 204
in English colonies 210–22 via media
of Jews 68 see moderation
in later Stuart historiography 5 Virginia 63, 211, 212 n. 13, 219–20
Muhammad’s 250–51 voluntarism 255, 257, 260
in Republic of Letters 37
in Restoration England 210–22 Wake, William 252, 274
supported by conformists 68, 210–22 Wallis, John 38, 264, 265, 268
as tactic and slogan, not principle or Ward, Seth 38, 225
long-term strategy 37, 40, 68, 210–22, al-Wazzān, Muhammad 92, 94, 108
250–51 Westminster Shorter Catechism 160, 223
in Tangier 210–22 Westphalia, Peace of 20
see also Indulgence, Declaration of Wettenhall, Edward 268
Tonge, Israel 232, 233, 234 Whigs and Whiggery
Tories and Toryism 236, 245, 250, 279, 284–5, Church 281, 284
286, 287, 288 Enlightened 4, 127, 145, 281
on anti-popery 236 establishment 281, 283, 288
compatibility with Enlightenment 278 historical polemic of 236
Torres, Diego de 84 n. 52 Whitehall 53, 54, 57
Tory reaction 237, 246 Whitgift, John 169
Traité des trois imposteurs 137 Willes, John 259, 260
travel 41–3, 48–61, 278 William III 254, 271, 273
autopsy and 77–84 Williamson, Sir Joseph
as education 23–6 candidate for archbishopric of Canterbury 61
empire and 41–3 citizen of the Republic of Letters 23–7
Enlightenment and 41–3 opponent of James II 250
historical scholarship and 41–3, 48–61, 73, orientalist 28
75–6, 77–84, 93, 104–5 patron 53–8, 87, 88, 89, 97, 128–32, 230, 232,
philosophical 105 235, 249
Republic of Letters and 41–3, 48–61 Popish Plot sceptic 233, 235
social science and 41–3, 130 Royal Society president 54
structured and enabled by political, economic, scholar 23–7, 53–8, 89, 128–32
and religious imperatives 41–3, 48–61 secretary of state and intelligence czar 52,
theology and 149, 181 53–8, 59, 89, 128–32
see also missions and missionaries; orientalism traveller 23–7
and Orientalism tutor 21–2, 23–7
trinitarian controversy Wood, Thomas 241–4, 246, 248, 252, 259
as intra-Anglican conflict over conduct and worship 180–95
regulation of public theology 262–76 Worthington, John 161, 223
intellectual insignificance 262
Turretin, Jean-Alphonse 204 Zanchi, Girolamo 168
Zidān, Mūlāy 91
Ussher, James 28 n. 58, 228 Zouch, Richard 38