Since the 17th century there has been much discussion about whether or not the English Revolution brought with it greater religious toleration. Much of the discussion centers on whether or not the Acts of Parliament passed were due solely to the paranoia surrounding Catholicism or reflected contemporary ideas about religious freedom and individual liberties. Research has led this writer to believe that, although during this period, ideas about religious freedom and basic human rights were certainly diverse and not as widespread as they would later become, they were certainly not unheard of and there were individuals who espoused many of these ideas. Already. However, many historians suggest that this was an evolutionary process in which progress moved directly from point A to point B, but this was also not true at all. It would appear that, although it was not the intention of British legislators, they helped people cultivate ideas about religious freedom that would change the way religious tolerance was perceived. To understand the basis of this argument, it is necessary to understand that these ideas were framed in tensions between Catholics, Protestants, and the English crown. These tensions first emerged during the reign of Henry VIII, then intensified while Elizabeth and James were in power, and then exploded into full-blown civil war during Charles' rule. It was only in this period, also known as the Puritan Revolution, that the debate over England's religious alignment led to the emergence of ideas regarding religious plurality. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Since the break with Rome during the reign of Henry VIII in 1530, the English people have had an extremely tumultuous relationship with Catholicism. Of course there were people who wanted to stay the course and reconcile with the Catholic Church, which had so long been inseparable from the English state, but most people simply decided to comply to avoid the wrath of the law. Over time, more and more laws were created to dissuade would-be Catholics from practicing their religion, and by the end of the 16th century the majority of Englishmen were practicing Protestants. At that time religion was compulsory; everyone belonged to one religious group or another. However, during the reign of Elizabeth I, the focus was on religious uniformity. Elizabeth's sister Mary Tudor, who sought to reunite the crown with Rome, was known as an extremely brutal and ferocious ruler due to her fanatical religious zeal. He was responsible for burning nearly three hundred men and women at the stake for holding views contrary to those of orthodox Catholicism. After Mary's death and Elizabeth's rise to power, he focused on re-establishing Protestant control and enacted many laws to make this so by the early 1550s. The best known of these became known as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, these laws re-established Protestantism in England after the reign of her strictly Catholic sister Mary. The two laws that constituted the agreement were the Act of Supremacy of 1559 and the Act of Uniformity. The Act of Supremacy was responsible for re-establishing the Monarch as head of the church, while the Act of Uniformity of 1559 established the order of worship established in the second Book of Common Prayer of 1552. While Elizabeth and her supporters were satisfied with the changes moderates created by the aforementioned Acts, a growing group of dissidents who believedthat the Church of England should eliminate all traces of Catholicism, the Puritans did not agree with this point of view. Led initially by the preacher Thomas Cartwright, the Puritans and the queen found themselves constantly at odds. After the dismissal of Edmund Grindel, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1578 for disagreeing with his views, breakaway congregations began to emerge in greater numbers in London. The emergence of these radical sects, however, was due to the Puritan desire for further reform of the Church of England and in no way represented a movement for total separation from the Church. Due to the increase in Puritan writings, however, in 1593 the Conventicle Act was passed, this act made anyone who refused to attend their parish church or participate in a Puritan conventicle punishable by exile and if the offender returned, he would have been hanged. The emergence of numerous Protestant sects during the reign of Elizabeth I, although repelled in the final years of her reign, would ultimately destroy the monarchy of Stuart King Charles I. King James I was responsible for widening the rift between the monarchy and the Puritans with its persecution of sectarian groups. However, this did not prevent the first Armenian Church from being founded in London in 1611, nor did it prevent offshoots from emerging in the 1620s. Towards the end of James's reign she married her son, Charles, to a French Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, and suspended the recusal laws, arousing Protestant suspicion of a "popish plot". Only the appointment of the Armenian Thomas Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury served to reinforce Protestant fears. Laud attempted to suppress Puritanism but failed, instead provoking a reaction from Protestants, culminating in the English Civil War. It was in this era, between 1640 and 1660, also known as the Puritan Revolution, that many debates about religious acceptance took place. The key outcome of this particular era was that the conversation was no longer about how to please as many groups as possible within the Church of England, but rather about how to allow other groups to exist outside the Church of England . Separatists became more common because the Civil War was drawing attention away from them. Due to the rise of separatist groups, the issue of toleration came to the fore in 1644. Historian John Coffey was convinced that the concept of toleration involved two main elements: disapproval and moderation. These two components were important because religion was a very serious issue and everyone had an opinion about everyone else's religious affiliation. Equally important was the idea that acceptance of this incorrect position was necessary. Beyond the simple definition, there were also multiple contexts in which tolerance was used. The main context explored here was that of polemical tolerance. Argumentative tolerance involved engaging in an argument with the aim of altering another person's opinion. In Coffey's words, "Faced with an alternative set of beliefs and practices of which they disapproved, early modern believers...felt they had a solemn duty to attack false religion with argument." Parliament calls for “freedom of conscience” or religious tolerance. Two years later, a writer identified only as JC responded harshly to this letter. The first author argued for religious toleration by comparing England to the Jewish and Christian nations that had preceded it. His argument compared the English state to the Kingdom of Israel as described in the Bible. He stated that the Kingdom of Israel was home to many people of different religious faiths, some of whom were “like thatfar from… the Mosaic Law, which for them to observe was equivalent to death”. He says it was not difficult to compare England to Israel, citing that neither had a standing army, both were under a monarchy with sensible rulers (mentioning Solomon and David in particular), and the latter even had God as its founder. He also mentioned that there were several sects of Jews whose beliefs differed as much as those of English Protestants, yet the Jews could live in peace and God never told the magistrates that pluralism was illegal or that it would be responsible for the downfall of the state. Since this article was written in 1668, the writer was still very hostile towards Catholicism and was very careful to mention his disdain for "popery" several times throughout the article. The author of the second pamphlet wrote "Intolerable Tolerance". as a direct response to the previous letter. He opened with a section specifically targeting the author of the previous letter with an attack, speculating that the writer was not a member of the Church of England and commenting on how small his book was to cover such a long and important topic. She then spent the rest of the introduction insulting him for how poorly he argued his point. After insulting the previous author, the author of the second pamphlet, JC, attempted to deconstruct his rival's argument. In response to the previously cited argument regarding the comparison to the Kingdom of Israel, JC, states that “Why does it not make it appear that those who were granted Freedom (if it ever was) were men…[as dangerous as ours]… Dissenters…the case is not the same…”[ He also argued that because Christ commanded unity to his subjects, the acceptance of multiple religions was, more than anything else, “destructive to Christianity.” He believed that the disunity promoted by these many different sects was neither good for people's individual souls nor for the good of people in general. There was much debate as to whether toleration was the correct course of action before and even after the demise of the Tolerance Act of 1689. This act was responsible for creating legal toleration towards dissenting groups in England. The act itself expressly states that it was “an act to exempt the Protestant subjects of their dissenting majesties from the Church of England from the sanctions of certain laws”. Religious tolerance has been a subject of debate by historians for years and popular trends of thought have emerged as a result. There are those historians who believe that the transition from intolerance to tolerance was a linear process, these are considered Whig historians. There are also those historians who believe that religious tolerance was totally and completely due to the fear of Catholicism being re-established in England, these historians are known as revisionist historians because this movement began as a reaction to the Whig historians. There are also those historians whose opinions fall somewhere between the two main camps. John Coffey lays out the basic beliefs and texts that make up what he calls “the history of Whig toleration.” Whig historians primarily saw the benefits of the Toleration Act; they considered it a landmark achievement that was a triumph of liberalism. They saw in the Puritan Revolution and the work of Oliver Cromwell the authors of the project of an act that would drastically change the status quo. While not at all blind to the negative aspects that still existed, they associated this triumph, in the words of SR Gardiner, "with the beginnings of democracy, economic individualism and modern English prose". Some historians and.