‘Incompatible with the very name of Christian’: English Catholics and Unitarians in the Age of Milner

Abstract

The confessional state in England during the eighteenth century defined itself in terms of Trinitarian Protestantism. The exemption from the penal laws conferred by the Toleration Act of 1689 specifically excluded the Catholic religion and the public profession of Unitarianism. Each could lay claim to an history of martyrdom; just as Charles Butler enumerated 319 Catholic martyrs in England since the Reformation, Arians had been burned during the reign of James I and the denial of the Trinity featured prominently among the charges of blasphemy for which Thomas Aikenhead was executed at Edinburgh in 1697. While the proscriptions and penalties enacted against and sometimes inflicted upon Catholics far exceeded those for non-trinitarianism, the public excoriation of the latter was further enshrined in the Blasphemy Act of 1698. Legal toleration for Catholic worship in England was enacted in 1791, in Scotland in 1793; Unitarian worship was not legally tolerated until 1813 in Britain, until 1817 in Ireland.