The World Turned Upside Down

When the bishops fell, so did the licensing of the press, and England spent two decades in an argument that no authority could close. Christopher Hill's history of the period gathered the movements that filled the gap: Baptists insisting on believers' baptism and gathered congregations; Levellers arguing for a franchise reaching to the poorest he that is in England; Diggers digging the common land at St George's Hill in 1649 on the argument that the earth was a common treasury; Ranters accused of holding that to the pure all things are pure; Fifth Monarchists reading Daniel and expecting the reign of Christ within the decade; and, from 1652, the Quakers, whose founder George Fox preached an inward light needing neither clergy nor steeple house and whose members went to prison in thousands for refusing oaths and hat honour.

The republic was more tolerant than anything before it and less tolerant than its radicals wanted. Cromwell's regime protected gathered churches, permitted Jews to return to England in 1656 after three and a half centuries of exclusion, and still passed a Blasphemy Act in 1650 and hounded the Quaker James Nayler for riding into Bristol as Christ had ridden into Jerusalem.

The Restoration of 1660 shut the opening. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 ejected some two thousand ministers who would not conform, and English Protestantism was permanently divided between church and dissent.