Source/Credit: Liberty Magazine: July – August 2011

Editors’ note: This is the fourth in a series of five articles on the history of Christian persecution up to the end of the seventeenth century. The first, second, and third articles can be found here and here and here.

The millennium-old Christian consensus that religious diversity was an evil that ought to be crushed by the combined power of church and state, and that in each Christian polity there ought to be “one king, one law, one faith,” became increasingly untenable in the face of the Reformation reality of entrenched minorities in several nations. The number of people potentially subject to the violence of persecution greatly increased; this meant both that it could no longer be ignored and that it seemed increasingly unlikely that persecution really could solve the “problem” of diversity.

Strategies for Coexistence

From the late 1550s it seemed to many statesmen that new solutions to the “problem” of religious diversity were urgently needed, for in many nations it had become increasingly plain that diversity could not be overcome by violence. Those who began to argue for toleration did so partly because they recognized that resolving doctrinal disputes by violence was hardly Christlike, and partly because they foresaw that the end result of large-scale violent responses to religious heterodoxy might be political partition as well as religious division.

In England a Catholic queen, Mary I, had succeeded a Protestant king, Edward VI, in 1553, and then executed at least 287 people in 46 months from February 1555 to Mary’s death in November 1558. Her successor, Protestant Elizabeth I, made the Church of England Protestant once more, but was sensitive to the deep confessional divisions within her realm, with her subjects not split only between Catholic and Protestant but also between varieties of Protestant confessions. Her response was to require all her subjects to worship in her way, in her church, but to concede effective liberty of conscience and private worship.¹

In France, divided between a Roman Catholic majority and a considerable Calvinist minority, the first of eight wars of religion broke out in 1562, which were to last with short periods of peace until 1598. Beginning in January 1562 the crown issued a series of nine edicts of pacification, one before the wars began (and which partly prompted the first war) and eight treaties concluding hostilities. Each of these edicts granted a greater or lesser degree of concessions to the Huguenots (as members of the Reformed minority were known). These never amounted to more than what one eminent historian of the Huguenots calls “licensed coexistence,” rather than full-blown toleration.² Yet several edicts, including the first, only angered zealous Catholics; thus, conceding freedom of belief and limited freedom to worship led to war. Eventually, however, the ninth pacification, the celebrated Edict of Nantes issued by Henry IV in 1598, was universally (if grudgingly) accepted. France had embarked on a nine- decades-long “adventure in religious pluralism.”³ Full religious freedom did not exist, but Huguenots had complete liberty of conscience, and, even more vitally, they had, if only in certain towns and cities, liberty to practice their faith fully.

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