THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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tion. Plainness and practicality later proved to be the keynotes of a new sensibility.
Varieties of Religious Writing in the Restoration Period
When Charles II was restored to his throne in 1660 the Church of England was restored with him. Despite the fact
that he had taken the Presbyterian Covenant in 1650 in an attempt to secure the support of Scottish Protestants and
had followed the leanings towards Roman Catholicism of the Stuart court in exile, Charles attempted to maintain a
double policy of support for the national Church and its bishops as an ideal of religious toleration. His attempts were
always awkward. In the ‘Declaration of Breda’, prudently published immediately before his restoration, Charles had
pronounced ‘liberty to tender consciences’ in matters of religion and in his two later ‘Declarations of Indulgence’
(1662, 1672) he reiterated the principle of tolerance towards Dissenters from the Church of England, both Roman and
Protestant. Yet as ‘Defender of the Faith’ he faced sustained opposition to a policy of tolerance from an Anglican
Parliament and from the newly reinstated and triumphalist bench of bishops. Both bodies were intent on enforcing
uniformity in the guise of religious and social consolidation. The Corporation Act of 1661, for example, required all
members of municipal corporations to declare that they had received the sacrament according to the rites of the state
Church; the Act of Uniformity of 1662 reinforced the use of the Book of Common Prayer and required assent from all
ordained ministers to its exclusive use; the Conventicle Act of 1664 declared illegal all dissident religious meetings in
private houses; and finally the Test Act of 1673 required all holders of office under the Crown to conform to Anglican
usages and beliefs. The one glory of these otherwise repressive Acts of Parliament was the final revision of the Book
of Common Prayer. Apart from its lectionary based on the 1611 translation of the Bible and a new service in solemn
commemoration of the ‘martyred’ Charles I (abandoned only in 1859), the 1662 Prayer Book confirmed the uses,
translations, traditions, and innovations gradually evolved from historic sources since the time of Cranmer. It
remained the unchallenged pillar of Anglican worship until the abortive, but essentially conservative, attempts at
reform in 1928 and until the introduction of the flat, flabby, but arguably more flexible, ‘Alternative Service Book’ in
1965.
The imposition of the conditions of the Act of Uniformity on St Bartholomew’s Day 1662 reminded one
distinguished Puritan divine, Richard Baxter (1615-91), of the infamous massacre of Protestants in Paris in 1572.
Baxter estimates in his memoirs, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), that some two thousand non-conforming ministers
‘were silenced and cast out’ by being deprived of their parishes and pulpits. The effects of Carolean legislation
moulded the distinctive early radicalism of Nonconformity. They did more than confirm
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that English religious affairs were plural rather than uniform; they ultimately determined the nature and future role of
dissent in British political life. Although Baxter had been appointed to a royal chaplaincy in 1660 and had been
offered, but had declined, the bishopric of Hereford, he felt that he could conform neither to the definitions of the
Prayer Book nor to the traditional conception of the rule of bishops in the Church. Baxter, who had been distressed by
the sectarian schisms within Cromwell’s army, was no proponent of narrow definitions or of theological nit-picking;
he was, rather, an early advocate of basic ecumenism, a multiform union of Christian believers regardless of credal
distinction. His benign influence ran through English Nonconformist thought in the eighteenth century and bore a
hybrid fruit in the religious ideas of his Anglican admirer, Coleridge, in the nineteenth century. Baxter’s moderate,
reasonable ecumenical strain, one which he types in his autobiography as an inclination to ‘reconciling principles’, is
evident both in his life and work. It had determined his deep suspicion of Cromwell’s civil and religious policies and
his distaste for fragmentary and disputatious Puritan sects; it also moulded his devotional writings, in particular, his
once vastly popular treatise The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650). In this treatise he writes of the operation of grace on
the individual as a reasonable process, not as one of sudden inspiration or irrational personal conviction: ‘Whatever
the soul of man doth entertain must make its first entrance at the understanding; which must be satisfied first of its
truth, and secondly of its goodness, before it find further admittance. If this porter be negligent, it will admit of
anything that bears but the face of truth and goodness ...’ Baxter is scarcely a coldly dispassionate writer, as his tribute
to his dead wife A Breviate of the Life of Margaret Baxter written ‘under the power of melting grief’ in 1681 amply
demonstrates, but his memoirs consistently point to the importance of temperate thoughtfulness. The battles over
episcopacy in the reigns of both Charles I and Charles II were, he suggests, lost and won (depending on which side
the arguer stood) due to an ignorance of the spirit of reconciliation and a rejection of ‘true moderate healing terms ...
by them that stand on the higher ground, though accepted by them that are lower and cannot have what they will’.