Oliver Cromwell and the Cause of Civil and Religious Liberty

Abstract

The period from the Revolution of 1688 to the outbreak of the Great War of 1914 is the Whig era of English history, when politics turned on Whig (or, from the mid-nineteenth century, Liberal) principles and on reactions against them. Through it there runs a favourite Whig catchphrase: ‘civil and religious liberty’ (together with a number of variations on it: ‘religious and civil liberties’, or ‘freedoms’, or ‘rights’, and so on). The terms served basic components of Whig or Liberal power: the alliance of a political programme with Dissent and Nonconformity, and the principle of religious toleration. When Whig historians described the seventeenth century, they applied the catchphrase to it. Until around the time of the Reform Act of 1832, when public enthusiasm for the memory of the parliamentarian cause of the Civil Wars began to rival the veneration for 1688, it was safer and more usual to associate the ‘blessings’ of ‘civil and religious liberty’ with the second upheaval, which had preserved the ancient constitution, than to the first, which destroyed it.2 In the eighteenth century it was mainly left to commonwealthmen and their friends, among them Catharine Macaulay and Cromwell’s biographer William Harris, to identify the opposition to Charles I as the cause of ‘civil and religious liberty’.3 In the Victorian age, however, it became a commonplace that the parliamentarianshad fought for ‘civil and religious liberty’.4 The nineteenth-century cult of Cromwell proclaimed that the protector ‘took up arms’ for the ‘blessings’ of ‘civil and religious liberty’.5 He was ‘the man who made civil and religious liberty possible’.6 He ‘carried into the practice of the seventeenth century that famous motto which is the glory of the greatest Englishmen of the nineteenth, “civil and religious liberty all over the world”’.7