Sowerby, Scott. Making Toleration.

Simpson, Peter

SOWERBY, Scott. Making Toleration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 416pp. Cloth, $49.95--The theme of this book is nicely stated on the fly leaf: "[This book] overturns traditional interpretations of James II's reign and the origins of the Glorious Revolution [of 1688]. Though often depicted as a despot who sought to impose his own Catholic faith on a Protestant people, James is revealed as a man ahead of his time, a king who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression. It was a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained."

James's fault, it transpires, was that he was too tolerant and too liberal. He wanted to give freedom of religion to all in his kingdom, not just to Protestants who did not conform to the ruling Anglicanism of the day, but also to Catholics. His opponents, predominantly the Tory high churchmen and the Anglican establishment, wanted no toleration but everyone to be forced to be part of the Anglican Church.

The laws in effect when James II came to the throne excluded from public office anyone who refused to take the sacrament in the Church of England, and required all officeholders to renounce the doctrine of transubstantiation. James wanted to remove all such restrictions and allow full access to public life for all nonconformists--Protestants and Catholics. Sowerby is at pains to show that James's policy enjoyed wide and enthusiastic support among the people. James's supporters are gathered together under the name of "repealers" (those who wished to repeal the laws against nonconformists), and Sowerby's book is an extended discussion of these supporters and of the steps taken by James to realize their joint aim.

The attempt failed. Not, however, because James was too autocratic or too Catholic and wanted to make the country Catholic again, but because he wanted to go beyond what the Tory and Anglican establishment was willing to accept. It was they who engineered James's overthrow and his replacement by William of Orange. Even so, they were forced under William to accept some toleration though nowhere near as much as James wanted. Specifically, they prevented any toleration of Catholics. Most Protestant groups, however, including even the Quakers, were granted release from the laws requiring conformity to the Church of England.

The Tories would have preferred none of these concessions, but they preferred them to what James and the repealers had wanted. The Glorious Revolution was not the replacement of autocracy and religious repression by freedom and toleration, but the replacement of unlimited freedom of religion by limited and grudging freedom. Tory intolerance toward dissenters continued well into the next century, when Anglicans would, if they could, ignore the grant of toleration and prevent Protestant dissenters from building churches or meeting houses in their towns. Nevertheless, as the years passed, toleration, at least of nonconformist Protestants, became progressively real in practice. Such nonconformists eventually came also to enjoy access to public office, and toleration was even extended to Unitarians. Catholics, by contrast, had to wait much longer, and even to this day it is the law of the land in the United Kingdom that no Catholic may ascend to the throne.

Those who have read and admired Locke on toleration will come away from this book wondering whether he deserves the admiration. Locke, like the Tories and many of the Protestant nonconformists, did not, under any circumstances want to tolerate Catholics. As Locke said, echoing a common opinion at the time, "that Church can have no right to be tolerated which is constituted on the basis that all who enter it do ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince [that is, the Pope]." Contrast Locke with one William Petty, also an Anglican (but with long experience of Catholics in Ireland), who had no objection to Catholics serving in public office and who had argued as early as 1687 that "there be an act for taking away all tests, oaths, penal laws and incapacities depending on religion." Petty, and not Locke, shared the vision of toleration espoused and promoted by James. That Locke and his limited ideas prevailed in the UK rather than the expansive ones of Petty and James was thus not a success for toleration but a defeat.

This book is a work in history, in intellectual as much as political history. Its surprising conclusion is that we should see James II, not Locke, as the first proponent and hero of genuine and principled religious toleration. In thus detailing the failure of James's efforts, the book corrects another of the many myths that cover with so pleasing a veneer the harsh and cruel truths of Anglican history.--Peter Simpson, Graduate Center, City University of New York.