2 - Restoration churchmanship and the ‘Essay on Toleration’

Summary

Setting the agenda for much political and religious conflict throughout the Restoration, when the Church of England was re-established in 1662, shortly after Locke's second tract on government, it was restored as a severely defined episcopalian regime retaining ceremonial forms thought by many to incline to ‘popish’ superstition. Instead of achieving an uniform religion in the nation, this resulted in severe divisions. Over seventeen hundred of the clergy resigned or were ejected from their parishes. Estimates of those who followed them and worshipped as nonconformists in the Restoration varied, but there were probably at least several hundred thousand – somewhere between 5% and 20% of the population. Most of those who became nonconformists were presbyterians who agreed with Anglicans that they were separated by ‘indifferent matters’ but thought that these ought to be removed because they limited their ‘edification’, at least as important a requirement of worship as ‘decency and order’. For many other nonconformists, including some of the Independents, the next largest nonconformist group, nothing ought to be commanded as necessary to communion but what was recognised to be expressly commanded in the Scripture, and a devolved rather than hierarchic church authority was required by Christianity.

The strict episcopalian settlement was supported by many Anglican clerics for whom the central ecclesiastical message of the Civil War was that ‘the same hands … took the crown from the king's head and the mitre from the bishops’.