Conflicts of Conscience

Abstract

Much of the heat in Restoration politics was generated by religious argument. Purely theological issues, it is true, were no longer as great an element in political conflict as they had been before the Civil War; Sir Peter Pett claimed in 1681 that ‘the old way of arguing about speculative points in religion with passion and loudness ... is grown out of use, and a gentlemanly temper that men use in debating natural experiments has succeeded in its room’.¹ But the religious disputes of the Restoration were not principally over questions of salvation: they involved many of the deepest issues and anxieties of seventeenth-century, and particularly post-Civil War, England — the political effects of a diversity of religious belief; the security of the law; partisan animosity; social antagonism; and national identity.