Peter Chamberlen's Case of Conscience

Abstract

Prominent physician, enthusiastic Baptist, notorious eccentric, Peter Chamberlen hardly represents the typical Londoner of his day, but he does figure the urban, dissenting, professional man caught between the Interregnum and the Restoration. Physician in Ordinary to Charles I, Chamberlen hoped to serve the restored monarch in the same capacity, but the law required that he subscribe to the Oath of Supremacy and Allegiance in order to resume his place at court. This Chamberlen would not do because the Oath infringed the freedom of conscience that the Interregnum taught dissenters to expect. A Case of Conscience, which has remained an unpublished manuscript since Chamberlen wrote it in 1661,1 does more than record Chamberlen's objections to the Oath: it compactly dramatizes the struggle between two legally incompatible tenets of his belief, loyalty to the monarch and inviolable submission to Christ in religious matters. Chamberlen stands out among his fellow dissenters because unlike them he could not compromise, but he could attempt visibly to reconcile these competing principles. The Quakers, for instance, cared more for confrontation than reconciliation on this issue. Chamberlen's more pragmatic view marks a point of contrast, but also represents the attitude of many whom the restored monarchy accommodated, in spite of their dissent. Chamberlen did regain office, partly because of A Case of Conscience and the revised oath he appended to it. His victory over the law and the demands of hostile royalist partisans represents the quiet success of thousands of Englishmen like himself.2 In A Case of Conscience Chamberlen is uncharacteristically sane. In 1661, as he walked from the Baptist meeting-house in Lothbury Square to his home in Coleman Street, the Londoners who passed him, if they recog-