History, Theology and Tolerance: Grotius and his English Contemporaries

Abstract

Drawing on letters of Grotius and his English hosts as well as on work of modern scholars, the first part of this article considers the origins, conduct and outcome of Grotius’s mission to England in April and May 1613. Ostensibly part of a trade delegation, his real purpose was to win the support of King James I and senior English churchmen for the policy of Oldenbarnevelt and the States of Holland in the worsening religious and political conflict of the United Provinces; and his failure to achieve this purpose was one factor which led to the writing of the treatise Ordinum Pietas soon after his return to the Netherlands. In the short term, Grotius’s treatise was no more successful in winning English support than his diplomacy had been. But in the longer term, as the second part of this article seeks to show, its impact was more positive. The arguments for tolerance put forward in Ordinum Pietas were reinforced in later works of Grotius: in his Verantwoordingh (1622) and in De veritate religionis Christianae (1627), the most accessible, popular and widely-translated of all his writings. And these works, together with the emergence of a more tolerant policy in the Netherlands from the years around 1630, left their mark on Britain. They resonated in English writings on toleration, from the pamphlets of Henry Robinson and Richard Overton in the 1640s to Locke’s Letter on Toleration of 1689. In doing so, they contributed not only to the growth of more liberal religious attitudes in Britain but also to the measures which enshrined those attitudes in law, the toleration acts of 1650, 1689 and 1695.