Toleration and the Sword in the English Civil War

Abstract This article rethinks the assumption that early modern advocates for religious toleration sought a programme for peaceful coexistence in the face of irreconcilable religious division and hostility. It does so by re-examining the first significant controversy over religious toleration in English history, which took place amid the turmoil of civil war in the 1640s. From 1645 to 1649, this controversy became closely bound up with the New Model Army’s growing reputation as a nursery for sectaries. The article focuses on some of the army’s most zealous partisans, including Hugh Peter, Richard Lawrence, Christopher Blackwood and Samuel Richardson, whose support for tolerating outright heresies and ‘false’ religions was entirely compatible with military rule in England and acts of dispossession, enslavement and aggression in Ireland and England’s Atlantic colonies. This is because there was, in their view, one justifiable use of the temporal sword in religious matters: to liberate and protect peaceable people ‘of divers religions’ from their common enemies, who had been seduced by a ‘popish’ spirit of persecution. By turning our attention to this contested relationship between toleration and the sword, this article offers a different way to place the English Civil War within a much-debated narrative about the ‘rise of toleration’ in the seventeenth century.