Puritans from Uniformity to Toleration, 1662–89

Abstract

At first sight puritans should be easier to identify and trace after 1662 since they were now legally defined and systematically recorded as dissenters. But this is to make the false assumption that puritans and dissenters were the same thing. Far from it. In a situation reminiscent of the early seventeenth century, there were once again puritans inside and outside the Church of England. An arbitrary line drawn across the spectrum of English religious life had severed a broad-based parish puritanism leaving half of the ministers and their followers within the restored church and half outside. To further complicate matters there were many puritans among the ranks of dissent, but not all dissenters can legitimately be classified as puritans. As we have seen, the turmoil of the 1640s and 1650s threw up many non-puritan religious groups. On closer examination it becomes apparent that puritans did not sit easily within the category of dissent or within the religious situation of Charles II’s reign. Puritans did not relish being lumped together with Quakers and Baptists: ‘it is a palpable injury to burden us with the various parties with whom we are now herded by our ejection in the general state of dissenters’.¹ The author of this complaint saw himself as a ‘nonconformist’ — a subtle but significant distinction. For, while their adversaries labelled them all as dissenters, those, mainly the Presbyterians, who could not bring themselves to conform to the church as it now stood, but who hoped that things might change, preferred to describe themselves as nonconformists; on the other hand those who had willingly separated from the state church, the Independents, Baptists and Quakers, were proud to adopt the label of dissenter.