Between the demands of those who believed that there was only the one true religion, and those who believed that God wished all to practise their religion freely, there could be no easy reconciliation. That Fairfax had even attempted to steer a middle course reflected the fact that, as Lord General, he held a more pre-eminent position of authority in the Commonwealth than any civilian. The true victory in the war against the king had gone not to parliament, but to the army. To command it was – inevitably – to be charged with attempting to square a circle. By 1650, Fairfax had had enough. A man much happier in the saddle than in the council chamber, he resigned his commission. His replacement was a man altogether more comfortable in the exercise of power, and who also, unlike Fairfax, was no Presbyterian: Oliver Cromwell. When, in late 1653, he was appointed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, he ruled both as a military autocrat and as England’s first-ever Protestant head of state to support liberty of conscience. A civil war that had been fought between two rival programmes of authoritarian rule was recast by his propagandists as a struggle for freedom. The founding constitution of the Protectorate made this explicit. ‘Such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ,’ it proclaimed, ‘shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and the exercise of their religion.’11
A ringing declaration – but shadowed by ambivalence. Who precisely were to be defined as those professing faith in God by Jesus Christ? Not Catholics, that was to be sure. In May 1649, on the eve of Cromwell’s expedition to Ireland, leaflets had circulated among the mutineers at Burford, lamenting the slaughter that was to come. ‘We have waded too far in that crimson stream (already) of innocent and Christian blood.’12 Here was an expression of the same revulsion and despair that on the continent, the previous year, had helped at last to end thirty years of slaughter. By terms of a series of treaties signed in the German territory of Westphalia, a ‘Christian, general and permanent peace’13 had been brought to the blood-manured lands of the Empire. The princes who signed it pledged themselves not to force their own religion on their subjects. Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists: all were granted the freedom to worship as they pleased. This formula, far from an attempt to banish religion from the workings of the state, constituted the precise opposite: a project to establish a properly Christian order. Rather than a betrayal of Christ, who had urged his followers to love their enemies, and to turn the other cheek, it expressed a conscious ambition to measure up to his teachings. Toleration of religious difference had been enshrined as a Christian virtue.
Cromwell, victorious in his own wars to a degree that no general on the continent had succeeded in matching, and confident of God’s backing because of it, had felt no call to extend a matching toleration to the Catholic rebels in Ireland. His campaigning there had been obedient to the same rules of war that had brought such ruin to Germany; but Cromwell himself, far from lamenting its horrors, had exulted in his role as an instrument of divine justice. As Lord Protector, he was similarly unbending. Papists, while free to believe what they liked, could not be licensed to practise their ungodly rituals. That there were Protestants in England bold enough to condemn this as hypocrisy did not sway him. Arguments such as that made by a one-time publisher of Milton, that ‘a Protestant sermon is as idolatrous to a Papist, as a Popish Mass is to a Protestant’,14 only provoked his indignation. Radicals, when they pushed at the limits of what he regarded as acceptable opinion, bewildered and aggravated him. They were, he declared, ‘a despicable and contemptible generation of men’.15
Revolution had come to England amid the tumult of battles and executions. Nevertheless, throughout Cromwell’s protectorate, it wore as well a more sober aspect: that of a trade-off. Between the yearning of Presbyterians for a purified commonwealth, and the demands of radicals for an absolute liberty of religion, the Lord Protector trod a delicate path. When an anti-trinitarian was sentenced to exile, and a Quaker who had impersonated Christ to mutilation, neither side was satisfied. Yet it was clear, from Cromwell’s personal interventions to ensure that both were spared the death penalty, and his readiness to allow the blasphemy ordinance of 1648 to wither on the vine, where his convictions ultimately lay. It was not – as it had been for the diplomats who had drawn up the treaties of Westphalia – the need to patch up a peace with his enemies that prompted him to accept toleration as a Christian duty. Rather, it was his sense of himself as a vessel of the Spirit, and his attentive reading of scripture. ‘You, then,’ Paul had demanded of the Romans, ‘why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we will all stand before God’s judgement seat.’16
Cromwell, despite the ambition that had helped to raise him from provincial obscurity to the rule of Britain, was a man far too conscious of God’s prerogatives ever to contemplate usurping them. He had rather see Islam practised in England, he declared, ‘than that one of God’s Children should be persecuted’.17 Books might be burnt; but not the men who wrote them. Even papists, despite Cromwell’s loathing for their religion, were known to be guests at his table. In 1657, in a particularly startling gesture, he moved to ensure that the son of the founder of Maryland – a colony established in the New World specifically to provide a haven for English Catholics – should not be deprived of his rights to the province. Toleration, then, was a principle that even God’s most faithful servants might opt to uphold in a range of ways. The illumination of the Spirit was not always easy to translate into policy. On occasion, rather than in an ecstasy of certainty, it might need to be answered with compromises. Godliness, it seemed, might sometimes be expressed through ambiguity.
No Other Teacher but the Light
When Cromwell joked about Islam, he could afford to be insouciant. There was not the remotest prospect of Muslims wishing to settle in England, of course. Nevertheless, the issue of whether a godly Commonwealth should tolerate those who did not acknowledge Christ as Lord was a topical one. In 1655, a rabbi resident in Amsterdam arrived in London. Menasseh ben Israel had come with a request. Appealing directly to Cromwell, he begged that Jews be granted a legal right of residency in England. The ban imposed in 1290 had never been rescinded. There were plenty of Protestants who thought it never should be. Christian hostility to Jews, far from being moderated by the Reformation, had in many ways been refined by it. Luther, reading Paul’s letter to the Galatians, had found in it a direct inspiration for his own campaign against the papacy. The Spirit was all. Those who denied the primacy of faith as the way to God – be they papists, be they Jews – were guilty of a baneful legalism. Desiccated and sterile, they blocked the panting sinner from the revivifying waters of the truth. To Luther, the enduring insistence of the Jews that they were God’s Chosen People was a personal affront. ‘We foolish Gentiles, who were not God’s people, are now God’s people. That drives the Jews to distraction and stupidity.’18 If anyone had been driven to distraction, though, it was Luther. By the end of his life, he had come to nurture fantasies of persecution that went far beyond anything the papacy had ever sanctioned. The Jews, he had demanded, should be rounded up, housed beneath one roof, put to hard labour. Their prayer books, their Talmuds, their synagogues: all should be burned. ‘And whatever will not burn should be buried and covered with dirt, so that no man will ever again see so much as a stone or cinder of them.’19