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England and Religious Plurality:Henry Stubbe, John Locke and Islam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Nabil Matar
Nabil Matar*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

The Elizabethan Settlement identified religious conformity with political allegiance. Not unlike the cuius regio eius religio of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg in the Holy Roman Empire, from 1559 onwards subjects in England had to subscribe to the two Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, the first declaring the monarch as head of the state and the second determining worship under the monarch as head of the Church. In such an Anglican monarchy, there could be no legal space for the non-Anglican subject, let alone for the non-Christian. The few Marranos (Jews forcibly converted to Christianity) lived as Portuguese immigrants, at the same time that Protestant Dutch and Walloon traders congregated in stranger churches, and whilst they were allowed to worship in their own languages, they remained outsiders to the English/Anglican polity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 51: Christianity and Religious Plurality , 2015 , pp. 181 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015

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References

1 For a collection of essays on ‘strangers’ in England, see Vigne, Randolph and Littleton, Charles, eds, From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America 1550—1750 (London, 2001)Google Scholar; the essays in parts I and II focus on the stranger churches; the essays in partV focus on the non-Christian ‘others’. See also Walsham, Alexandra, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500—1700 (Manchester, 2006)Google Scholar; Andrew Spicer,’“Of no church“: Immigrants, liejhebbers and Confessional Diversity in Elizabethan London, c. 1568—1581’, in Karremann, Isabel, Zwierlein, Cornel and Groote, Inga Mai, eds, Forgetting Faith? Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe (Berlin, 2012), 199—220 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and references in Matthew Dimmock, ‘Converting and Not Converting “Strangers” in Early Modern London’, Journal of Early Modern History 17 (2013), 457—78.

2 For a summary of ‘the Principal Penal and Test Acts, 1660-1714’, see Skeaton, A. A., The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts (Cambridge, 1911), 335—40.Google Scholar

3 The best history of toleration in England until 1660 remains Jordan, W. K., The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 3 volumes (Gloucester, MA, 1965; first publ. 1932).Google Scholar See also Coflfey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant Englatid, 1558-1689 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar;Walsham, Charitable Hatred.

4 Coffey, , Persecution and Toleration, 179-82.Google Scholar

5 Leonard Busher’s treatise Religious Peace: Or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience, which had first appeared in 1614, was republished in 1646.The treatise had included a request to King James and to Parliament‘to permit all sorts of Christians; yea, Jews, Turks, and pagans, so long as they are peaceable’, to live in Britain: ibid. 6. Although the Presbyterian establishment denounced such toleration, there was support from sectaries and other non-establishment groups. A few months after the publication of the treatise, William Walwyn, one of the leaders of the Leveller movement, proposed toleration of all religions, including ‘Turks’ and pagans: William Walwyn, A Demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Crowth and Spreading of Heresie ([London], 1646), 3.

6 Anon, ., Liberty of Conscience Confuted: By Arguments of Reason and Policie. Delivered in a Discourse betwixt a Turke, and a Christian. Occasioned by a Letter written to a Peere of this Realme ([London], 1648), 15.Google Scholar Bodin’s Muslim interlocutor, Octavius, suggested the need for adjustment. As Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz notes, the manuscript of the Colloquium was rare in the seventeenth century, but Milton, John had a copy: Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime (Princeton, NJ, 1975), lxix.Google Scholar

7 The most complete study remains Katz, David, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the fews to England, 1603—1655 (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar

8 For some of the treaties, see Articles of Peace between his Sacred Majesty Charles II, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, and the City and Kingdom of Algiers (London, 1664); Articles of Peace between the Most Serene and Mighty Prince Charles II … and the Most Excellent Signors, Mahomet Bashaw, the Duan of the Noble City of Tunis … the fifth of October 1662 (London, 1677); Articles of Peace & Commerce between the most Serene and Mighty Prince Charles II … and the most illustrious Lords, the Bashaw, Dey,Aga, and Covernours of the Famous City and Kingdom of Algiers in Barbary (London, 1682).

9 Kamen, Henry, Tlic Rise of Toleration (New York, 1967), 197 Google Scholar, although the Edict of Nantes was specific to French Protestants.

10 Locke, John, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed.Leyden, W. von (Oxford, 1965), 243.Google Scholar

11 See the discussion of the history of ‘indifferent things’ in John Locke, Epistola de Tolerautia:A Letter on Toleration, ed. Klibansky, Raymond, transl. Gough, J.W. (Oxford, 1968), 157-9.Google Scholar

12 Locke, John, Two Tracts, on Government, ed. and intro. Abrams, Philip (Cambridge, 1967), 130.Google Scholar

13 See, however, Richard Simon, who had mentioned ‘habit’ specifically: The Critical History of the Religions and Customs of the Eastern Nations, written in French by the learned Father Simon (London, 1685), 161.

14 The most recent discussion of Locke and Muslims appears in Denise A. Spell-berg, Tliomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (NewYork, 2013), ch. 2. Spellberg points out that my statement in ‘John Locke and the “Turbanned Nations’”, Journal of Islamic Studies 2 (1991), 67—77, at 76, about Locke presenting the ‘first favorable pronouncement about the status of Muslims in Christian England’, should be qualified and should take account of Thomas Helwys (c. 1550—1616), the Baptist minister, in his A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (Amsterdam, 1612), and Roger Williams (1603—83) in his The Bloody Tenet of Persecution (London, 1644): both these works made passing remarks to ‘Turks’. See the discussion of English writers advocating toleration for Muslims in my ‘The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England: Practice and Theory’, in Laursen, John C., ed., Religious Toleration from Cyrus to Defoe:The Variety of Rites (New York, 1999), 127-46.Google Scholar Spellberg also engages with John Marshall,John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 371—96.

15 Anglim, John Gerald, Locke and Toleration (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 108.Google Scholar

16 Viano, Carlo Augusto, ed., Scritti editi e inediti sulla toleranza (Turin, 1961), 86.Google Scholar Bagshaw, however, had come to realize that the parallel between non-Christians and Dissenters was risky and in his sequel, The Second Part of the Great Question concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship (London, 1661), he disregarded it.

17 Henriques, H. S. Q., The Jews and the English Law (Clifton, NJ, 1974; first publ. 1908), 126 Google Scholar; see also my ‘John Locke and the Jews’, JEH 44 (1993), 45-62.

18 Viano, ed., Scritti sulla toleranza, 98.

19 The Constitutions of Carolina (London, 1670).

20 See my introduction to Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam (New York, 2013). The first edition of Stubbe’s work appeared in Lahore in 1911, edited by Mahmud Khan Shairani.

21 Boyer, Richard, English Declarations of Indulgence, 1687 and 1688 (The Hague, 1968), 24.Google Scholar

22 Parker, Samuel, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1670), 158.Google Scholar

23 Henry Stubbe, ed. Matar, 190.

24 Addison, Lancelot, West Barbary, or, A Short Narrative of the Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco (Oxford, 1671), 216.Google Scholar

25 These included the multiple wives of Solomon, the exterminatory violence of the Israelites against the Amalekites, and the descriptions of the 144,000 virgins in the kingdom of heaven: Henry Stubbe, ed. Matar, 201—4.

26 The Works of the reverend and learned Mr. John Gregory (London, 1665), 161.

27 Ibid.

28 Henry Stubbe, ed. Matar, 211.

29 Toland, John, Nazaremts, ed. Champion, Justin A. I. (Oxford, 1999), 58—9.Google Scholar

30 Ibid. 137.

31 Cotelerius, Johannes Baptista, SS Patrum qui temporibus apostolicis, 2 vols (Paris, 1972), 1: 9.Google Scholar

32 The Libros Phimbeos were plates of lead on which was inscribed Arabic writing. Only in 1682 did the Vatican officially declare them forgeries: for the history of these books, see L. P. Harvey, ‘The Literary Culture of the Moriscos, 1492—1609’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1958); see also T. D. Kendrick, St. James in Spain (London, 1960), ch. 5. For the translation and the controversy surrounding them, see Harvey, L. P. and Weigers, G. A., ‘The Translation from Arabic of the Sacromonte Tablets and the Archbishop of Granada: An Illuminating Correspondence’, Qurtuba 1 (1996), 59—78.Google Scholar Although the story goes that a priest, Fra Marino, found the Gospel of Barnabas in the library of Pope PiusV (1566—72), there was no reference to it until 1634, when the Andalusian exile Ibrahim al-Tayibi mentioned it, as Harvey and Weigers show.

33 Henry Stttbbe, ed. Matar, 179. Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) was a Protestant biblical and classical scholar whose writings Stubbe consulted regularly.

34 He also owned Blount, Sir Henry, Voyage into the Levant (London, 1650 edn)Google Scholar; Osborne, Francis, Political Reflections upon the Government of the Turks (London, 1656)Google Scholar; Addison, West Barbary; Sir Paul Rycaut, L’État present de l’Empire Ottomane (Rouen, 1677); and Humphrey Prideaux, The True Nature of Imposture fully display’d in the Life of Mahomet (London, 1697). See also John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke, Oxford Bibliographical Society (Oxford, 1965), entries 2008, 2064, 2073, 2075, 2128, 2145. Locke also had among his manuscripts ‘The Questions of Abdalla Ebn Salam the Jew and answers of Mahomet, written in Arabicke by Abdalla Ebn Abbas, and translated into English by J. G.’ (Oxford, Bodl., MS Locke c.27, fols 3r-9r). John Greaves was Locke’s friend and another pupil of Pococke’s.

35 It was published anonymously after the Revolution in 1689.

36 Houston, Alain Craig and Pincus, Steven C. A., A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (New York, 2001), 15.Google Scholar

37 See the references to the Anglican documents An Answer to the City Ministers Letter from his Country Friend (1688) and Some Queries concerning Liberty of Conscience (1688?) in Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 171, 320 n. 65.

38 In 1670, and writing in defence of toleration, Penn appealed to the examples of ‘the very Mahometans of Turkey and Persia’ where there was ‘variety of opinions’, yet they enjoyed ‘unity and concord in matters … of a civil importance’:‘The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience’, in Select Works of William Penn, 4th edn, 3 vols (London, 1825), 2: 128-64, at 155.‘The Turks themselves show us’, added Penn in 1686,’that both other religions, and divers sects of their own, are very tolerable with security to their government’: ‘A Persuasive to Moderation to Church Dissenters’, ibid. 2: 504—42, at 539. ‘Where do you read’, wrote George Fox in 1677, ‘that ever the Turks forced any Christians to observe any of their Holy-Dayes, Fasts, or Feasts?’: The Hypocrites Fast and Feast not God’s Holyday. Hat-Honour to Men Man’s Institution, not God’s (London, 1677), 10. For an overall view of Quakers and Islam, see Justin Meggitt, Early Quakers and Islam (Uppsala, 2013), especially ch. 6.

39 Constitutions of Carolina, articles 95 and 97, cf. article 96:‘that Jews, heathens, and other dissenters from the Purity of Christian Religion, may not be scared and kept at a distance from it, but, by having an Opportunity of acquainting themselves with the truth and Reasonableness of its Doctrines, and the Peaceableness and inoffensiveness of its Professors, may, by good Usage and Perswasion, and all those convincing Methods of Gentleness and Meekness, suitable to the Rules and Design of the Gospel, be won ever to embrace and unfeignedly receive the Truth’. For Locke and Native Indians, see Locke, John Farr, “Some Americans”, and the Discourse on “Carolina“’, Locke Studies 9 (2009), 19—96 Google Scholar; for a discussion of Locke’s views on slavery (of North American pagans), see Nyquist, Mary, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago, IL, and London, 2013), ch. 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Locke, Epistola, ed. Klibansky, 115.

41 Anon, ., Liberty of Conscience (London, 1689), 11.Google Scholar

42 Locke, Epistola, ed. Klibansky, 143.

43 Proast, Jonas, Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration, Briefly Consider’d and Answer’d (Oxford, 1690), 1–2.Google Scholar

44 Curiously, the ‘Minister of the Church of England’ who published a treatise at the same time as Proast defended toleration, if only by association. In his collection of references and citations from major Anglican divines, the author included Isaac Barrow’s treatise on the ‘Unity of the Church’, in which the latter called for ‘general Charity towards all good Christians [Dissenters] and for the pursuit of‘peace with all, without any exception, with men of all Nations, Jewes, and Greeks, and Barbarians’, : The Conformists Sayings: or, the Opinion and Arguments of Kings, Bishops; and seuerall Divines lately assembled in Convocation in Favour of those who Dissent from the present Ceremonies of Publick Worship (London, 1690), 35.Google Scholar

45 Proast, Argument, 1.

46 William Popple, A Letter concerning Toleration (London, 1689), imprimatur 3 October, 40 (‘civil rights’), 46 (‘civil right’). For a discussion of the translation of this phrase in the Epistola, see Spellberg, Jefferson’s Qur’an, 76. See Milton’s Readie and Easy Way (1660): The other part of our freedom consists in the civil rights and advanc’ments of every person according to his merit’, cited in the New Oxford English Dictionary. For Proast’s use of the English version, see John Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration, ed. and intro. James H.Tully (Indianapolis, IN, 1983), 33, 43.

47 ‘A Second Letter Concerning Toleration’, in The Works of John Locke, 10 vols (London, 1823, repr. 1963), 6: 59-137, at 62. Locke finished it on 27 May 1690.

48 Ibid. 64-5.

49 See Toomer, G. J., ‘Edward Pococke’s Arabic Translation of Grotius, De Veritate’, Grotiana 33 (2012), 88–105.Google Scholar Locke owned a copy of the 1680 edition of De Veritate, published in Amsterdam.

50 Quoted by Shireen Khairallah, ‘Arabic Studies in England in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1972), 50.

51 Later, in his Tliird Letter to Proast, he reminded the cleric that Christians had to unite: with all the rifts among Protestants in England, and with the polarization that Anglicans such as Proast and others generated, creating thereby a kind of exclusionary national Christianity, Locke recognized the limitedness of the appeal of Christianity to Muslims. A ‘rational Turk or infidel’, he wrote, could not be expected to convert to a Christianity that was expressed so differently by different denominations. Furthermore, it was not possible to practise ‘Des Cartes’s way of doubting’: no man, asserted Locke, could divest himself of his intellectual background and examine the truth of his religion without bias. For the Muslim was as convinced of his ‘Koran’ as his ‘divine revelation’ as the Christian was of his Bible: Locke,’A Third Letter for Toleration: to the Author of the Third Letter Concerning Toleration’, in Works, 7: 139—546, at 239.

52 ‘The king without parliament could not turn an alien into a subject for all purposes. He might for some, but not for all. This doctrine gave rise to the class of persons known as denizens — intermediate between subjects and aliens. The denizen was so made by the king’s letters patent, i.e. by an act done by the king without parliament. The limit to the royal power (as I understand it) was this: the person whom the king made a denizen of his realm became capable of acquiring lands by purchase or devise, and of holding them when acquired, and in general he became a subject of the realm, but the king could not make him capable of inheriting. An act of parliament might of course do even this, and Naturalization Acts (I believe) usually did it, but the king could not do it’: Maitland, F. W., The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge, 1926), 427.Google Scholar See also Max Kohler,‘The Doctrine that “Christianity is a part of the Common Law,” and its recent Judicial Overthrow in England, with Particular Reference to Jewish Rights’, Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society 31 (1928), 105-34, at 119. The most recent discussion of this subject is Irene Scouloudi, ed., Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639: A Study of an Active Minority, Huguenot Society Quarto Series 57 (London, 1985).

53 See the reference in Anon, ., The History of Naturalization, with some Remarques upon the Effects thereof, in respect to the Religion, Trade and Safety of his Majesties Dominions (London, 1680), 1.Google Scholar

54 S. H[ayne]., An Abstract of all the Statutes made concerning Aliens trading in England from the first Year of K. Henry VII (London, 1685), the opening letter to ‘Dread Soveraign’. As Hayne points out, he had planned to address the letter to Charles II. See also the lampoon against King Charles, [John Wilmot?], History of Insipids (London, 1676), stanza 4: ‘He like a politick Prince and pious | gives liberty of conscience tender, | And doth to no Religion tye us | Jews, Christians,Turks, Papists, he’ll please us | With Moses, Mahomet or J ------’. For a history of English views on Jews, see Marshall,Jolm Locke, ch. 12.

55 Act for Naturalization of Strangers (Edinburgh, 1669).

56 In 1687, for instance, King James endenizened ‘several French … lately got out of France’: Narcissus Luttrell,‘Diary’, in idem, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols (London, 1857), 1: 404.

57 Lucien Wolf,’Status of the Jews in England after the Re-Settlement’, fewish Historical Society of England Transactions 4 (1899—1901), 177-93, at 186.

58 Anon, ., Indulgence and Toleration considered: In a Letter unto a Person of Honour (London, 1667), 29.Google Scholar For the stranger churches in seventeenth-century England, see Nigel Goose, ‘The Dutch in Colchester in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, and Jean Tsushima,’Melting into the Landscape: The Story of the 17th-century Walloons in the Fens’, in Vigne and Littleton, eds, From Strangers to Citizens, 88—98, 106—16 respectively; Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Caluinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603-1642 (Leiden, 1989). For developments after 1685, see Robin D. Gwynn,’Disorder and lnnovation:The Reshaping of the French Churches of London after the Glorious Revolution’, in Grell, Ole Peter, Israel, Jonathan I. and Tyacke, Nicholas, eds, From Persecution to Toleration:The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), 251-73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 At the Court at Hampton-Court the 28th day offuly 1681 (London, 1681).

60 Anon., A Brief and Summary Narrative of the many Mischiefs and Inconveniences in former Times as well as of late Years, occasioned by Naturalizing of Aliens (London, 1690). 61 Anon., The History of Naturalization (London, 1680), 2 (article II).

62 Child, Josiah, A Discourse about Trade (London, 1690), 122-7.Google Scholar

63 Anon., History of Naturalization, 2.

64 Jonas Proust,A Tliird Letter Concerning Toleration (Oxford, 1691), 2—3: ‘IF therefore a just care of the Flock of Christ, requires us to exclude Jews, Mahometans, and Pagans from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth, because of their Religion; ‘tis plain, we may pray in earnest for their Conversion, though we so exclude them: Because though we are bound to desire their Conversion, and so to pray for it; yet we are bound to seek it, no further than we can do it, without endangering the Subjects of Christs Kingdom, to whom he has a special regard’.The italicized words are direct quotations from Locke’s treatise.

65 John Locke,’A Third Letter for Toleration’, in Works, 6: 139-546, at 390.

66 Ibid. 229—30. A treatise of 1689 had argued that it was an error for ‘a National Church’ to ‘compel all their Subjects to hear Instruction, and after a competent time, to conform their Professions to the Church’, Anon., Liberty of Conscience Explicated and Vindicated, and the Just Limits betwixt it and Authority, Sacred and Civil, Cleared (London, 1689), 9.

67 Locke,’Third Letter’, 230.

68 Ibid. 231.

69 Ibid. 232.

70 In 1693, Locke wrote about the economic advantages of naturalization in ‘For a generall naturalization’.’Naturalization is the strength & easiest way of increasing yr people’, and will encourage ‘Trade … manifacture [sic] … Carriage or Navigation’: Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Eng. 818.

71 Anon., History of Naturalization, 3.

72 Beer, Esmond S. de, ed., The Correspondence ofjolm Locke, 8 vols (Oxford, 1976— 82), 2: 612.Google Scholar

73 Paul Rycaut, Tlw Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668), 105. Locke had also read Withers, Robert, A Description of the Grand Signor’s Seraglio, or Turkish Emperor’s Court, ed.Greaves, John (London, 1650), of which he owned a copy.Google Scholar

74 Locke, Epistola, ed. Klibansky, 135.

75 Littirgiae Ecclesiae Anglicanae, partes pmecipuae … in linguam Arabicam tmductae (Oxford, 1674), no pagination.

76 Alexandra Walsham rightly criticizes the treatment of toleration in England from the exclusive angle of’history of ideas’ in Charitable Hatred; see also Coffey’s, John review,’Milton, Locke and the New History of Toleration’, Modem Intellectual History 3 (2008), 619-32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77 Kamen, Rise, 231.

78 Dunn, Richard S., The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1689 (New York, 1970), 218.Google Scholar

79 See, however, Duncan Ivison, ‘The Nature of Rights and the History of Empire’, in David Armitage, ed., British Political Tliought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2006), 191-212, at 200: ‘Locke’s argument for toleration is not addressed to the kind of pluralism we find in multicultural societies today’.

80 Bracken, Harry M.,’Toleration Theories: Bayle.Jurieu, Locke’, in idem, Mind and Language: Essays on Descartes and Chomsky (Dordrecht, 1983), 83—96, at 91.Google Scholar

81 Hill, Christopher, The Century of Revolution 1603—1714 (London, 1974; first publ. 1961), 257.Google Scholar

82 Locke, ‘Third Letter’, 229.