Liberty of Conscience and the Whitehall Debates of 1648–9

Abstract

As an episode in the history of Puritan ideas on liberty of conscience, the importance of the Whitehall Debates has long been acknowledged. Their publication at the end of the last century by Sir Charles Firth, who discovered them among the Clarke MSS., and their republication in the 1930s by A. S. P. Woodhouse, who made extensive additions to the original text, are evidence of their high regard. As Professor Woodhouse saw them, the Debates dealt with one of ‘the most significant issues of Puritan political thought:…the question of religious liberty’. Other historians have attributed even greater value to the Debates, acclaiming them as a major contribution to Puritan thought on this subject. W. K. Jordan, in his monumental study of religious toleration in England, hailed them as ‘momentous’; and, more recently, Christopher Hill has coupled them with the debates concerning James Nayler as ‘the two great set debates on religious toleration’ which survive from the revolutionary period. In view of this long-standing recognition, it is paradoxical that there exists no coherent and comprehensive discussion of the Debates: or rather, of the debate on 14 December 1648, this being the only day for which a detailed account survives. Although the arguments of various speakers have been summarised, no attempt has been made to offer an interpretation of the debate as a whole, on the grounds of the ‘confused and fragmentary’ state of the records.