SOURCE: Wilding, Michael. “Religio Medici in the English Revolution.” In Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, pp. 89-113. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Wilding offers a critical reading of Browne's Religio Medici in the context of the English Revolution, especially as it relates to the breakdown of censorship during the time the work was composed.]

I

Not only radicals wrote in a coded, careful, cautious way. Sir Thomas Browne, generally deemed to offer an escape from the political strife of his age, emerges upon analysis, as so many supposedly apolitical figures so often do emerge, as deeply, committedly, and indeed polemically, conservative. Commentator after commentator has accepted Browne's statement ‘To the Reader’, which prefaces the authorized edition of Religio Medici (1643), that the work was written ‘about seven yeares past’ and thus has read it as a product of the 1630s, as a late metaphysical meditation.¹ Yet in this very stress on times past—and he repeats his assertion, ‘it was set downe many yeares past’—Browne is emphasizing times present, the time of publication, the time of his readers. In stressing how things may have changed, how ‘there might be many things therein plausible unto my passed apprehension, which are not agreeable unto my present selfe’, he is inviting a comparison between times past and times present, and any such comparison in 1643 inevitably invoked the circumstances of revolution and civil war.

There is no doubt about the 1640s context: the preface, as C. A. Patrides has pointed out, ‘supplies both the immediate context and the degree of personal involvement’:² ‘the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved, the writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted’. And Browne's complaint about the ‘tyranny’ of the press is the expression of a definite, partisan position in the political conflict. It followed Charles I's proclamation at the beginning of the revolutionary period, in February 1639: ‘For whereas the Print is the King's in all Kingdoms, these seditious Men have taken upon them to print what they please, though we forbid it’.³ A supporter of the King and of Archbishop William Laud might lament the ‘tyranny’ of the press, but the press, together with the pulpit and the petition, was one of the Puritans' main weapons of propaganda. For the Puritans, separatists, and radicals, the ‘tyranny’ had been the censorship and licensing of the press by Charles and Laud.

In 1637, by decree of Star Chamber, the number of authorised printers in London was reduced to twenty, and savage corporal penalties were denounced against illegal printing. All foreign books imported were to be vetted by the Bishops before they were put on the market. John Lilburne, later the Leveller leader, was flogged through the streets of London for breaking this regulation. No book was to be reprinted, even if previously licensed, without a new licence. Laud was alleged to have refused licences to print Luther's Table Talk, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Bishop Jewell's Works, and Bishop Bayley's Practice of Piety. The Geneva Bible, with its anti-authoritarian marginal notes, had to be smuggled from Holland.⁴

The breakdown in censorship after 1640 was a liberation: ‘Nothing gave more resounding emphasis to the overthrow of Laud's power in the state than the collapse of his power over the press’.⁵

Browne appropriated the outraged note of ‘tyranny’ for new purposes. Under the guise of complaint, he took the opportunity to reissue ‘a full and intended copy of that Peece, which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously published before’. The unauthorized edition had appeared in December 1642, a year from which George Thomason collected some 2,134 publications, ‘the highest total in any year up to the Restoration’, Perez Zagorin remarks, ‘a fact that sufficiently demonstrates the accelerated preoccupation with political-ecclesiastical issues in the first stages of the revolution's progress’.⁶

To situate Religio Medici in the context of the pamphlet war at the time of its publication, rather than in the mid-1630s when it was hypothetically composed, is to realize its ideological significance, and to see Browne's participation in the socio-political debate of the English Revolution. The changes between the 1642 and 1643 editions provide ready access to politically sensitive passages. As Simon Wilkin pointed out, ‘In all the manuscript copies are to be found, without exception, those passages of the surreptitious edition which have been omitted in that of 1643, but not one of the numerous additions nor of the most important alterations it contains’.⁷

Jean-Jacques Denonain calculated that Browne made more than 650 changes from the 1642 to the 1643 edition.⁸ Some of the changes involved a word or phrase, some involved additional passages, and four entire new sections (8, 28, 43, 56) were added in Part 1. The first of the four added sections occurs early: ‘That Heresies should arise we have the prophecy of Christ, but that old ones should be abolished wee hold no prediction’. Browne is not concerned with the nature of particular heresies, but with their multiplication:

even in Doctrines hereticall there will be super-heresies, and Arians not onely divided from their Church, but also among themselves: for heads that are disposed unto Schisme and complexionally propense to innovation, are naturally indisposed for a community, nor will ever be confined unto the order or œconomy of one body; and therefore when they separate from others they knit but loosely among themselves; nor contented with a generall breach or dichotomie with their church, do subdivide and mince themselves almost into Atomes.

(68-69)

‘Innovation’ was the contemporary term for revolution (‘revolution’ retained the sense of returning to the same point), and ‘separate’ alludes to the separatists, those who wished to separate from the Church of England rather than work for Puritan reforms within the Church. The language has its political specificities. Historians are agreed that the proliferation of sects did not occur until the impeachment of Laud on 18 December 1640. ‘Until 1641 separatism was numerically insignificant and without much influence upon religious life’, Zagorin wrote, but, as Brian Manning stated, ‘during 1641 the separatists increased dramatically in numbers and influence’.⁹ Both cite a report from Thomas Knyvett, dated 17 January 1641, on Browne's home town: ‘Conventicles every night in Norwich, as publicly known as the sermons in the daytime, and they say much more frequented’. Browne's correction of the 1642 text here is not the restoration of a passage that had been ‘by transcription successively corrupted untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the presse’ (‘To the Reader’), but a new observation written for the 1643 edition.

Both the sentiments and the imagery of atoms are similar to Bishop Hall's An Humble Remonstrance of January 1641:

But stay; Where are we, or what is this we speak of, or to whom? Whiles I mention the Church of England, as thinking it your honour, and my own, to be the professed sons of such a Mother, I am now taught a new Divinity, and bidden to ask, Which Church we mean? My simplicity never thought of any more Churches of England but one; Now this very dayes—wiser discovery tells us of more; There is a Prelaticall Church (they say) for one; and, which is the other? Surely it is so young, that as yet, it hath no name; except we shall call it indefinitely, as the Jews were wont to style the creature they could not abide to mention, That other thing; And what thing shal that be, think we? Let it be called, if you please, the Church Antiprelaticall; but leave England out of the style; Let it take a larger denomination, and extend to our friends at Amsterdam, and elsewhere, and not be confined to our England: Withall, let them be put in mind, that they must yet think of another subdivision of this division; some there are (they know) which can be content to admit of and orderly surbordination of severall Parishes to Presbyteries, & those again to Synods; others are all for a Parochiall absoluteness, and independence; Yea, and of these, there will be a division, in semper divisibilia; till they come to very Atomes: for to which of those scores of separated Congregations, knowne to be within and about these walls will they be joyned? and how long without a further scissure? …

Why will ye be so uncharitable, as by these frivolous and causeless divisions, to rend the seamlesse coat of Christ? Is it a Title, or a Retinue, or a Ceremony, a garment, or a colour, or an Organ-pipe, that can make us a different Church, whiles we preach and professe the same saving Truth …¹⁰

Joseph Hall was one of the twelve bishops the Commons impeached and sent to the Tower on 30 December 1641, after they had tried to reverse the vote of 28 December that it was still ‘a free parliament’, by complaining (correctly enough) that ‘they have been at several times, violently menaced, affronted, and assaulted, by multitudes of people, in their coming to perform their service in that honourable House; and lately chased away, and put in danger of their lives’.¹¹ Hall's participation in the political manœuvre to reverse the ‘free parliament’ vote and so invalidate its decisions indicates the ideological significance of his hostility to the separatist sects and to the politics of mass action—a crowd of more than ten thousand was estimated to have prevented all but one or two bishops from taking their seats in the Lords on December 28. After his release from the Tower on 5 May 1642 Hall took up the bishopric of Norwich, where he became acquainted with Browne. ‘My honord friend’ Browne called him in Repertorium.¹² Browne's hostility to the sects and the multitude can be read in the same ideological context. The destructiveness of sectarian schism is Browne's theme in this added section, as it is in another entirely new section (56) added in 1643, which concludes:

'Tis true we all hold there is a number of Elect and many to be saved, yet take our opinions together, and from the confusion thereof there will be no such things as salvation, nor shall any one be saved; for first the Church of Rome condemneth us, wee likewise them, the Sub-reformists and Sectaries sentence the Doctrine of our Church as damnable, the Atomist, or Familist reprobates all these, and all these them againe. Thus whilst the mercies of God doth promise us heaven, our conceits and opinions exclude us from that place. There must be therefore more than one Saint Peter, particular Churches and Sects usurpe the gates of heaven, and turne the key against each other, and thus we goe to heaven against each others wills, conceits and opinions, and with as much uncharity as ignorance, doe erre I feare in points, not onely of our owne, but one anothers salvation.

(130)

Wilkin quotes Gurney's Observations: ‘The spirit of charity which pervades this section is truly characteristick of its author’.¹³ But the whole passage is characteristic of Browne's university-educated, élitist contempt for the ‘ignorance’ of the clashing sects, for the ‘vulgarity of those judgements’ stressed in the opening line of the section, for the social implications of the theological belief of the radical sects. As Christopher Hill remarks, ‘in the early 1640s attitudes towards the lower-class heresy of Familism were almost the test of radicalism’.¹⁴ For the theological positions had their political implications:

The Family of Love and the Grindletonians had taught that prelapsarian perfection could be attained in this life. But before the 1640s such doctrines had been kept underground. Now nothing could be suppressed. Plebeian materialist scepticism and anticlericalism could express themselves freely, and fused with theological antinomianism. The result was a rejection of clerical control of religious and moral life.¹⁵

Joan Bennett, who at the opening of her Sir Thomas Browne declares ‘there is nothing in his published writings to remind us of the Civil War’,¹⁶ none the less recognizes that this ‘new section, explicitly attacking mutual exclusiveness and sectarian arrogance, was probably prompted by the increased animosities of the Civil War’; she stresses, however, that

this does not represent any change of mind since the composition of the work in 1635: the section formerly following upon 55 (now sect. 57) opens in the same sense: ‘I believe many are saved who to man seeme reprobated, and many reprobated, who, in the opinion and sentence of man, stand elected’.¹⁷

Browne's distaste for the sects is characteristic of the whole of Religio Medici. It is there from the beginning, appearing as early as Section 6 of Part I:

I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent my selfe: I have no Genius to disputes in Religion.

(65)

The addition in 1643 of ‘love to’ and ‘I hope … not’ (italicized in the following quotation) are additions of emphasis that underline the message of happy conformity to the established church:

In Philosophy where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxicall than my self; but in Divinity I love to keepe the road, and though not in an implicite, yet an humble faith, follow the great wheele of the Church, by which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the epicycle of my own brains; by this meanes I leave no gap for Heresies, Schismes, or Errors, of which at present, I hope I shall not injure Truth, to say, I have no taint or tincture.

(66)

The pacific note has often been remarked upon. But in the context of the book's publication, it is a tendentious peacefulness. The implication is that all would be well if heretics and schismatics and dissenters would stop being troublesome and disturbing the peace. Browne's peaceableness is the peaceableness of the conservative who is satisfied with the arrangement of society—an arrangement suiting his own class. All other opinions that disturb this peace are heretical, schismatic, dissident. And it is the peaceability of the élitist who argues that disputes in religion are not for everyone, not for the ignorant, not for those with ‘inconsiderate zeale’:

Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gantlet in the cause of Veritie: Many from the ignorance of these Maximes, and an inconsiderate zeale unto Truth, have too rashly charged the troopes of error, and remaine as Trophees unto the enemies of Truth: A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet bee forced to surrender; 'tis therefore farre better to enjoy her with peace, than to hazzard her on a battell.

(65-6)

The rejection of conflict employs the imagery of conflict; such imagery is rare in Religio Medici; Cecile Sloane has collected only a dozen such examples: ‘in literary practice, Browne's distaste for active conflict is reflected in his use of imagery. Within Religio Medici, either aggression is presented pejoratively or the value of non-aggression affirmed’.¹⁸ J. S. Morrill has shown that Norfolk was one of the counties that attempted a conservative neutralist stance when war broke out in 1642.¹⁹ And, as Lawrence Stone stresses, ‘There can be no doubt that the great majority of the propertied classes viewed the war with horror and apprehension’.²⁰

Browne singles out certain aspects of sectarian beliefs for specific rejection. Of the ‘Heresies, Schismes, or Errors’ that he is preserved from by following ‘the great wheele of the Church’,

I must confesse my greener studies have been polluted with two or three, not any begotten in the latter Centuries, but old and obsolete, such as could never have been revived, but by such extravagant and irregular heads as mine.

(66)

Following on from this, he opens Section 7 thus: ‘Now the first of mine was that of the Arabians, that the soules of men perished with their bodies, but should yet bee raised againe at the last day’ (p. 67). But this was no ‘obsolete’, obscure or purely foreign heresy.

Norman T. Burns, discussing Richard Overton in Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton, writes ‘Although Man's Mortalitie made a great stir among the Presbyterians when it appeared in late 1643 or early 1644, its doctrine was by then commonplace enough among many sectaries’.²¹ Discussing Milton's mortalism, Christopher Hill notes how ‘in the forties mortalism appeared above the surface. By 1644 it was alarming the House of Commons’ and ‘in 1648 two Royalist newspapers declared that the mortalist heresy had been partly responsible for the revolutionary nature of the Civil War’. Not only was mortalism current, it was specifically associated with the emerging radical Protestants: ‘nomenclature varies, but the radical tendency of the heresy, whose best-known spokesman was a Leveller leader, is clear’.²²

Similarly, Browne's anti-millenarianism and scepticism about Antichrist indicate his consistent opposition to the world-view of the radical sects, whose millenarian beliefs inexorably sought a political expression. Browne's scepticism about the possibility of millenarian prediction is associated with his sad amazement at the propensity of Christianity to produce sects:

And herein I must accuse those of my own Religion; for there is not any of such a fugitive faith, such an unstable belief, as a Christian; none that do so oft transforme themselves, not unto severall shapes of Christianity and of the same Species, but unto more unnaturall and contrary formes, of Jew and Mohametan, that from the name of Saviour can condescend to the bare terme of Prophet; and from an old beliefe that he is come, fall to a new expectation of his comming: It is the promise of Christ to make us all one flock; but how and when this union shall be, is as obscure to me as the last day.

(93)

He returns to the theme later, stressing the impossibility of predicting the end of the world:

Now to determine the day and yeare of this inevitable time, is not onely convincible and statue madnesse, but also manifest impiety; How shall we interpret Elias 6000 yeares … ?

… it hath not onely mocked the predictions of sundry Astrologers in ages past, but the prophecies of many melancholy heads in these present, who neither understanding reasonably things past or present, pretend a knowledge of things to come, heads ordained onely to manifest the incredible effects of melancholy, and to fulfill old prophecies, rather than be the authors of new. ‘In those dayes there shall come warres and rumours of warres’, to me seemes no prophesie, but a constant truth, in all times verified since it was pronounced: There shall bee signes in the Moone and Starres, how comes he then like a theefe in the night, when he gives an item of his comming? That common signe drawne from the revelation of Antichrist is as obscure as any; in our common compute he hath beene come these many yeares, but for my owne part to speake freely, I am halfe of opinion that Antichrist is the Philosophers stone in Divinity, for the discovery and invention whereof, though there be prescribed rules, and probable inductions, yet hath hardly any man attained the perfect discovery thereof. That generall opinion that the world growes neere its end, hath possessed all ages past as neerely as ours.

(118-19)

The assurance of the 1642 text that ‘no man’ had ‘attained the perfect discovery’ of Antichrist was typically softened in 1643 to ‘hardly any man’. As W. A. Greenhill remarked of the alterations, Browne ‘took the opportunity of modifying various positive and strongly worded propositions by the substitution of less dogmatic expressions’.²³ But Browne's overall scepticism about the Antichrist remained unchanged from 1642 to 1643. He never calls the Pope Antichrist, he assures us, and he declares that ‘that opinion, that Antichrist should be borne of the Tribe of Dan by conjunction with the Devill, is ridiculous, and a conceit fitter for a Rabbin than a Christian’ (65, 98). This scepticism is not without its political implications. Hill points out that ‘after Laud's rise to dominance the English church no longer proclaimed the Pope to be the Antichrist’.²⁴ Publication of studies of Daniel and Revelation was prevented. The traditional Protestant identification of the Pope with Antichrist was opposed by Laud and, Hill records, ‘it was not until December 1640 that London citizens could subscribe to the Root and Branch Petition complaining of prelates and others who “plead and maintain that the Pope is not Antichrist”. Next month a clergyman was denounced to Parliament for declaring positively that the Pope was not Antichrist.’²⁵ The Root and Branch Petition also ‘proposed the abolition of bishops as “members of the Beast”’ and ‘in May 1641 a libel was set up at the entrance to Parliament, denouncing bishops as limbs of Antichrist’.²⁶ The image of Antichrist was a highly political image.

Antichrist stood for bad, papal, repressive institutions: exactly which institutions was anybody's choice. This vagueness had security advantages. In the England of 1530-1640 critics of the hierarchy were in fact attacking the monarchy and the legally established government, as their enemies did not fail to point out. ‘The Beast’ was a much less specific enemy than ‘the system of church government approved by Queen Elizabeth’.²⁷

Browne not only rejects the Protestant identification of Pope and Antichrist, he is sceptical of all attempts at identification. A useful nationalistic propaganda image for Queen Elizabeth's regime, a focusing of hate on to the foreign papal enemy, Antichrist by the 1640s was out of control: ‘the peculiar political circumstances of the early forties, when Parliament needed to win popular support, led to an increasing stress on Antichrist's impending downfall, giving Messianic overtones to what had previously not necessarily been a revolutionary idea’.²⁸ The separatists had their own definition of Antichrist: ‘they thought the whole Church of England so permeated with the relics of Antichrist that it was impossible for the children of God to remain in communion with it’;²⁹ and after 1641 the sectaries were preaching in the open and spreading in influence. The emergence of Antichrist, identified with the great Beast of Revelation, indicated the world was in its last days. The destruction of Antichrist would mark the beginning of Christ's thousand-year rule. ‘The time-tables of Napier, Brightman, Mede, Archer put the rule of Christ on earth in the near future. This gave a utopian perspective for political action.’³⁰ The correct identification of Antichrist developed a political urgency. ‘Johann Hilten, a fifteenth-century prophet popular among protestants, had predicted the end of the world for 1651. John Swan in 1635 noted that some gave 1657 for the date, though he was not himself convinced.’³¹

Religio Medici appeared amidst a flood of millenarian speculations. ‘Thy Kingdome is now at hand, and thou standing at the dore’, Milton wrote in 1641 of Christ's Second Coming, attacking Bishop Hall in Animadversions Upon the Remonstrants Defence, Against Smectymnuus.³² The same year saw the publication of A Revelation of Mr. Brightman's Revelation …, and Brightman's Reign of Christ upon Earth, among others, and these were followed in 1642 by a summary of Johann Alsted's work, The World's Proceeding Woes, by Francis Potter's An Interpretation of the Number 666, and by Joseph Mede's The Apostasy of the Latter Times.³³ 1643 saw the publication of Alsted's The Beloved City, Or, The Saints Reign on Earth A Thousand Years and Mede's Key of the Revelation in English translation.³⁴ Grotius was told that eighty such treatises had appeared in England by 1649.³⁵ This was the context in which Browne derided computations of the end of the world as decisively as he did the identifications of Antichrist.

Browne's three references to Antichrist are in both in 1642 and the 1643 texts. And he deals with millenarian predictions in Section 43, added in 1643:

the whole world, whose solid and well composed substance must not expect the duration and period of its constitution, when all things are compleated in it, its age is accomplished, and the last and generall fever may as naturally destroy it before six thousand, as me before forty.

(114)

Denying the possibility of the computation in i. 46, in this new section he accepts ‘Elias 6000 yeares’ as 6,000 years. But this seeming contradiction is the expression of Browne's conservative consistency. Religio Medici now both tells us that the millennium cannot be predicted, but at the same time tells us it is due after 6,000 years—that is, c. ad 2,000, given the accepted date of Creation as 4004 bc. The political activism of his millenarian contemporaries is thus challenged. The end of the world cannot be computed and anyway it has been computed for years ahead, so predictions of 1653 or 1656 or 1666 are absurd. Browne's anti-millenarianism can hence be seen in its socio-political context: a conservative dismissal of that millenarianism developing into a radical activism among the sects. He even has a disparaging aside on the book of Revelation: ‘Saint Johns description by Emeralds, Chrysolites, and pretious stones, is too weake to expresse the materiall Heaven we behold’ (122). In the preceding sentence St Paul by contrast had been given a positive categorization, ‘that elegant Apostle’.

II

Part II of Religio Medici deals with ‘that other Vertue of Charity’, and its first section develops into a denunciation of the ‘multitude’. This hostility to mass action, directly following the rejection of the beliefs of the radical sects, establishes Browne's firm, anti-populist stance:

If there be any among those common objects of hatred I doe contemne and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, vertue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seeme men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, & a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra; it is no breach of Charity to call these fooles, it is the stile all holy Writers have afforded them, set downe by Solomon in canonicall Scripture, and a point of our faith to beleeve so.

(134)

Browne's condemnation certainly had a long tradition behind it. C. A. Patrides, discussing ‘the beast with many heads’, cites examples ranging through such writers as Barnaby Rich, Shakespeare, Lancelot Andrewes, Arthur Warwick, and Pierre Charron.³⁶ But, in the context of Religio Medici's publication, Browne's condemnation attained a new pertinence. J. S. Morrill says of 1640-1, ‘It is unclear whether rioting and violence were more extensive than hitherto, but most gentlemen certainly believed that they were. Disruption, often with an overt class bias, was certainly widespread.’³⁷ Discussing ‘the many-headed monster’, Christopher Hill remarks that Browne was ‘thoroughly orthodox in thinking it was “no breach of charity” to call the multitude fools’; but, Hill stresses, ‘this contemptuous attitude thinly concealed the fears of the propertied class’.³⁸

Brian Manning's study The English People and the English Revolution has documented the increasing involvement of the multitude in direct action from the huge crowds that in November 1640 welcomed the release by the Long Parliament of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick; ‘the first instance of popular intervention in the affairs of the Long Parliament’ described by Clarendon as ‘an insurrection (for it was no better) and frenzy of the people …’.³⁹ Fifteen thousand people signed the petition for the abolition of episcopacy ‘root and branch’ in November 1640 and it was delivered to the House of Commons by some one thousand two hundred to one thousand five hundred citizens.⁴⁰ Though the delivery was made without tumult or disorder, Lord Digby complained ‘I am confident, there is no man of judgement, that will think it fit for a parliament, under a monarchy, to give countenance to irregular, and tumultuous assemblies of people’, and he urged the house ‘not to be led on by passion to popular and vulgar errors …’⁴¹ But the mass action escalated. Laud was mobbed on the way to the Tower on 1 March 1641. Some 20,000-30,000 signatures were attached to a petition demanding justice against the Earl of Strafford and it was brought to London on 21 April 1641 ‘by a great multitude’ of 10,000 people. A crowd estimated at between 5,000 and 15,000 assembled at Westminster on 3 May 1641 demanding Strafford's execution, and Charles ‘who purposed to be at the House that morning … by reason of the tumult did not come’.⁴² The pressure of mass action led the Lords to condemn Strafford, and Charles to agree to his execution, which took place on 12 May 1641 amid widespread rejoicing and ‘breaking the windows of those persons, who would not solemnize this festival with a bonfire’.⁴³

Popular protest continued throughout 1641, the multitude threatening to kill the Spanish ambassador and burn down his house, and later attacking the houses of the French and Portuguese ambassadors. The Queen Mother asked for a guard against the multitude and in August she followed the Commons' advice and left England. In November there was a succession of demonstrations at Westminster, with citizens armed with swords and staves calling ‘Down with the Bishops—Down with Antichrist’.⁴⁴ On 9 December Charles ordered the London JPs and sheriffs to stop the ‘many riots and unlawful assemblies … daily made at the City of Westminster and within the City of London’.⁴⁵ The closing days of December 1641 were marked by sustained demonstrations and riots at Westminster, provoked by Lunsford's appointment to control the Tower. ‘Many hundreds of apprentices and others came down to the parliament, with swords and staves and other weapons’;⁴⁶ ‘ten thousand prentices were betwixt York House and Charing Cross with halberds, staves and some swords’.⁴⁷ On 28 December the crowd prevented the bishops from taking their seats in the Lords and some moved on to attack Westminster Abbey, and on 29 December parliament was again surrounded by an armed crowd calling out ‘No Bishops! No Popish Lords!’ as the members arrived.⁴⁸ The three days of rioting had died down when Charles on 3 January 1642 charged Lord Mandeville and the five members of the Commons with treason: one of the charges against them was having ‘actually raised and countenanced tumults against the king and parliament’ using ‘a multitude of Brownists, Anabaptists, and other sectaries about London’.⁴⁹ The result was massive direct action and a general strike of shopkeepers. When Charles dined with the Sheriff of London, the house ‘was beset, and the streets leading unto it thronged with people, thousands of them flocking from all parts of the city’ and afterwards Charles's coach was followed and mobbed and the Lord Mayor ‘plucked off his horse, and some of the aldermen’ returning from escorting the king.⁵⁰ On 10 January Charles fled from London.

The pattern of mass demonstration and marching on Parliament with petitions continued through 1642. Nor was the activity confined to London. Norfolk fishermen cast down salt-marsh enclosures, and rioting against Royalists and papist property-owners occurred on a large scale in Essex and Suffolk. The houses of the Countess of Rivers at St Osyth in Essex and at Long Melford in Suffolk, of Sir Francis Mannock at Stoke-by-Nayland in Suffolk, and of Sir John Lucas near Colchester were attacked and sacked.⁵¹

It was in this climate of direct action by the multitude that Religio Medici, with its attacks on the multitude, appeared. Hill points out that ‘Charles I in his Declaration of 23 October 1642 played on social anxieties by speaking of “endeavours … to raise an implacable malice and hatred between the gentry and commonalty of the kingdom … insomuch as the highways and villages have not been safe for gentlemen to pass through without violence or affront”’.⁵² One of Browne's resonant additions to the 1643 edition that might seem to be simply the philosophic play of metaphysical wit takes on a more specific paranoia in this context:

'Tis not onely the mischiefe of diseases, and the villanie of poysons that make an end of us, we vainly accuse the fury of Gunnes, and the new inventions of death; 'tis in the power of every hand to destroy us, and wee are beholding unto every one wee meete hee doth not kill us.

(115)

The passage had a particular relevance for a society divided by class hostilities and, after Charles raised his standard in August 1642, embroiled in civil war.

Browne's contempt for the multitude is one part of his thought that commentators have seen in some political context. Dunn, having earlier claimed that Browne ‘completely ignores the political situation’,⁵³ none the less sees a political significance here.

In other words the spectacle of English democracy in the making had turned Browne, as it had many of his generation, into something of a Stoic. He has retired from the tumult. He despises the whole tone of the society that was disintegrating the old social order, with its shifting standards of life, its fortune hunters, its political adventurers, and on the other hand its rising tide of raw plebeians with their uncouth religious and insolent political ambitions.⁵⁴

Edward Dowden and Joan Bennett both argue that in detecting ‘a rabble even amongst the Gentry’ (134) Browne showed that his antipathy for the multitude was ‘not a class-feeling’; the multitude was not ‘any particular class of men’.⁵⁵ Contemporary accounts of the crowds that assembled on 3 May 1641 at Westminster demanding the execution of Strafford were agreed that the crowds comprised ‘for the most part men of good fashion’; ‘many of them captains of the City and men of eminent rank’; ‘many thousand of the most substantial of the citizens’; ‘citizens of very good account, some worth £30,000, some £40,000’. The following day ‘the well-to-do demonstrators … sent their servants’; this ‘rabble amongst the Gentry’ remained involved.⁵⁶

Browne's inclusion of ‘gentry’ in the rabble, then, rather than demonstrating his lack of class feeling, can be seen as expressing a specific socio-political position, a reaction against the multitude that parliamentarians were suspected of manipulating. And though Browne includes gentry in his rabble, it is quite clear that his distaste and contempt for the multitude is a distaste for the style of the plebeians, the mechanics, the ‘ignorant’: ‘a sort of Plebeian heads, … men in the same Levell with Mechanickes’ (134). He cannot assert the wisdom of God without sneering at the ignorance of the ‘vulgar’, the crowd: ‘The advantage I have of the vulgar, with the content and happinesse I conceive therein, is an ample recompence for all my endeavours, in what part of knowledge soever’ (74). In 1643 he added to this passage a further ten lines on God's wisdom, ‘his most beauteous attribute’. He also toned down his élitism in that famous assertion of the value of intellectual inquiry, a passage arguing for the religious value of scientific investigation while at the same time condemning yet again the vulgar, the rude, the rustic:

The wisedome of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads, that rudely stare about and with a grosse rusticity admire his workes; those highly magnifie him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

(75)

In 1642 ‘small honour’ had been ‘no honour’, and ‘those highly magnifie him’ had been ‘those onely magnifie him’. The contempt for the unlettered remains in the 1643 version, but its finality, its intransigence, is slightly modified. It was always there with Browne, and we can find it again in Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

The literary tradition gave the weight of traditional authority to class prejudice and allowed contemporary events to be alluded to without any dangerous specificity, avoiding reprisal under the cover of generality. But just because there was a literary tradition we should not forget that opposite opinions were also expressed—and increasingly so at this time. In 1641, interpreting Revelation 19: 6, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory proclaimed that

The voice, of Jesus Christ reigning in his Church, comes first from the multitude, the common people. The voice is heard from them first, before it is heard from any others. God uses the common people and the multitude to proclaim that the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. As when Christ came at first the poor received the Gospel—not many wise, not many noble, not many rich, but the poor—so in the reformation of religion, after Antichrist began to be discovered, it was the common people that first came to look after Christ …

You that are of the meaner rank, common people, be not discouraged; for God intends to make use of the common people in the great work of proclaiming the kingdom of his Son.⁵⁷

And in April 1642 Milton in his final contribution to the debate on episcopacy between Bishop Hall and Smectymnuus, An Apology against a Pamphlet Called a Modest Confutation of the Animadversion of the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus, part of the controversy provoked by Hall's Humble Remonstrance ‘commended parliament for its considerate reception … of the petitions even of its humblest citizens’.⁵⁸

Insomuch that the meanest artizans and labourers, at other times also women, and often the younger sort of servants assembling with their complaints, and that sometimes in a lesse humble guise then for petitioners, have gone with confidence, that neither their meannesse would be rejected, nor their simplicity contemn'd, nor their urgency distasted either by the dignity, wisdome, or moderation of that supreme Senate; nor did they depart unsatisfi'd. And indeed, if we consider the generall concourse of suppliants, the free and ready admittance, the willing and speedy redresse in what is possible, it will not seeme much otherwise, then as if some divine commission from heav'n were descended to take into hearing and commiseration the long remedilesse afflictions of this kingdom …⁵⁹

The acceptance of the ‘meanest’ is a mark of ‘divine commission’. How unlike Browne's ‘charity’.

In The Causes of the English Revolution, Lawrence Stone notes that ‘the last peasant revolt serious enough to send the gentry fleeing from their homes in terror had been in 1549, when risings had taken place all over southern England. Brutal repression quickly snuffed out the fires of rebellion in all but the one county of Norfolk, but memories of this alarming experience died hard …’⁶⁰ Though Stone writes that ‘by 1640 … memories had grown dim’ he goes on to note how

On the very eve of the outbreak of open war, Simonds D'Ewes vainly warned his fellow members of Parliament: ‘We know not what advantage the meaner sort also may take to divide the spoils of the rich and noble among them.’ The looting of the houses of some Catholic noblemen in East Anglia by undisciplined mobs seemed evidence that D'Ewes' prophecy was coming true. It has even been argued that the Parliamentary Ordinance for the raising of troops—in practice against the King—was accepted by the Suffolk gentry as guarantee of the maintenance of internal order.⁶¹

That the poor, the propertyless, the ‘meanest artizans and labourers’ might take it into their own hands to acquire what was denied them was the great fear of the propertied. Stone cites Sir John Oglander's comments on 1642:

I believe such times were never before seen in England, when the gentry were made slaves to the commonalty and in their power, not only to abuse but plunder any gentleman …

O the tyrannical misery that the gentlemen of England did endure from July 1642 till April 1643, and how much longer the Lord knoweth! They could call nothing their own and lived in slavery and submission to the unruly base multitude. O tempora, o mores …⁶²

This fear of the multitude lies beneath Browne's contempt for the multitude. The social vision he asserts is one that requires the meaner sort to be firmly in their ‘place’.

Statists that labour to contrive a Common-wealth without poverty, take away the object of charity, not understanding only the Common-wealth of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecy of Christ.

(159)

A note in Wilkin's MS ‘W’ annotates the passage with ‘The poore ye shall have alwayes with you’—‘an unlikely adaptation of Luke 6: 20’, as Patrides remarks. Luke 6: 20, 21, if that indeed be the prophecy intended, declared ‘Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.’

Browne's rejection of the millenarian interpretations of his time is part of his rejection of any idea of the poor establishing God's kingdom on earth. ‘The poor existed as objects of the charity of the rich, Browne and many others tell us: but this charity must be reasonable, socially responsible. The assumption, sharply contrasting with early protestant hopes, is that poverty will continue.’⁶³ The poor exist to be the object of charity for the rich; they are part of the social hierarchy. Browne wrote:

Let us speake like Politicians, there is a Nobility without Heraldry, a naturall dignity, whereby one man is ranked with another, another Filed before him, according to the quality of his desert, and preheminence of his good parts.

(134)

Browne presents this social hierarchy as part of the natural order of things, ‘for there is in this Universe a Staire, or manifest Scale of creatures, rising not disorderly, or in confusion, but with a comely method and proportion’ (101). These may well be ‘time-honoured commonplaces’, as Patrides remarks (26-7), but Browne reasserts them with a credo that suggests their contemporary urgency: ‘I beleeve there shall never be an Anarchy in Heaven, but as there are Hierarchies amongst the Angels, so shall there be degrees of priority amongst the Saints’ (131). It is ‘the corruption of these times’ that has disturbed the orderly hierarchy of the ‘first and primitive Commonwealths’, but the hierarchical principle

is yet in the integrity and Cradle of well-ordered politics, till corruption getteth ground, ruder desires labouring after that which wiser considerations contemn, every one having a liberty to amasse & heape up riches, and they a license or faculty to doe or purchase anything.

(134-5)

The 1643 preface opened with a reflection on the ‘times wherein I have lived to behold … the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved’. The context was spelled out by which the reader could interpret ‘the corruption of these times’ in Section 1 of Part II as referring to the events of the 1640s.

With this reading of Religio Medici's hostility to the radical sects and to the multitude, it is worth reconsidering Browne's much-proclaimed toleration. W. K. Jordan claims that ‘the noble latitudinarianism and moderation which were being raised as the reply to bigotry are everywhere manifest in Browne's writing’.⁶⁴ But Browne's toleration of Roman Catholics is but part of his intolerance for the sectarians and his contempt for the multitude. It is all of a piece with his acceptance of Laudian ceremony and of the hierarchical, authoritarian, social meanings of that policy.

In the forms of worship, stress was laid on the revival of hieratic ritual and visual ornament, in ways which had not been seen for over sixty years. Communion tables were put back in the east end of churches, and protected by altar rails; the erection of organs and stained-glass windows was encouraged; the clergy were ordered to use the surplice and the laity to kneel at the altar rails to receive the sacrament.⁶⁵

Browne proclaims his ceremonialism and explains the social uses of it:

I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeale termes superstition … at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions, which may expresse, or promote my invisible devotion. I should violate my owne arme rather then a Church, nor willingly deface the memory of Saint or Martyr. At the sight of a Crosse or Crucifix I can dispence with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour; I cannot laugh at but rather pity the fruitless journeys of Pilgrims, or contemne the miserable condition of Friers; for though misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of devotion: I could never heare the Ave Marie Bell without an elevation … There are questionlesse both in Greek, Roman, and African Churches, solemnities, and ceremonies, whereof the wiser zeales doe make a Christian use, and stand condemned by us; not as evill in themselves, but as allurements and baits of superstitions to those vulgar heads that looke asquint on the face of truth, and those unstable judgements that cannot consist in the narrow point and centre of vertue without a reele or stagger to the circumference.

(63-4)

Ceremonials, then, are baits for the ignorant vulgar. But the ignorant vulgar were less attracted to the images of social control than was Browne. Hill remarks on ‘the popular iconoclasm which broke out whenever opportunity offered: in the late 1630s and 40s altar rails were pulled down, altars desecrated, statues on tombs destroyed, ecclesiastical documents burnt, pigs and horses baptized’.⁶⁶ The 1642 text contained a much more specific reference to this iconoclasm with its vocabulary of explicitly physical violence and its specific reference to the so breakable ‘church window’, which in 1643 became simply ‘church’: ‘I should cutt off my arm, rather than violate a Church window, then deface or demolish the memory of a Saint or Martyr’. The 1643 text allows the possibility of physical violence within its more abstract expression, but its language is not as unavoidably physical as the 1642 ‘cut off’ and ‘demolish’.

It may be that Browne wanted to avoid validating iconoclasm by giving expression to it; or it may be that by removing the specific terminology, he is allowing the reader to believe that he is speaking merely metaphorically, not referring to specific incidents. On 22 February 1641 ‘the Cathedral Blades of Norwich’ rushed to the defence of the cathedral, believing ‘the Apprentices … would have pulled down their Organs’.⁶⁷ Norwich Cathedral was in fact ransacked three years later, its windows broken, monuments torn up, and icons smashed. The Puritan feeling was there, and Browne may have cautiously preferred not to antagonize it; he did not remove the passage altogether, but simply made its unavoidable physicality ambiguously metaphorical. But the changes did not alter the basic standpoint, the reverence for the church building. It is in pointed contrast to the radical sectarian view we find in George Fox's revelation of 1646: ‘it was opened in me, “That God, who made the world, did not dwell in temples made with hands”’;⁶⁸ or in Paradise Lost where the ‘upright heart and pure’ is asserted as preferred before all temples (i. 18). ‘His people were his temple, and he dwelt in them’, as Fox put it.

Browne's comments on church music have to be seen in this politically charged context. Indeed Browne's tone becomes combative against those who ‘disclaime against all Church musicke’ (149). ‘All’ had been ‘our’ in 1642, and the number of other detailed changes in this passage suggest the political sensitivity of the topic. For it was highly sensitive. ‘Choral singing and the playing of organs in church were the work of Antichrist, introduced by the Pope in the significant year 666’, according to Henry Burton in a sermon preached before the House of Commons and published in 1641 as Englands Bondage and Hope of Deliverance and to William Thomas in a speech to Parliament in June 1641.⁶⁹ Against this radical puritan position Browne asserts that

Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaime against all Church musicke. For my selfe, not only from my obedience but my particular genius, I doe imbrace it.

(149)

‘From my obedience’ replaces ‘for my Catholike obedience’ of 1642, lest ‘Catholike’ should be interpreted as papist, and the implication of Laudian enforcement followed grudgingly which might be deduced from ‘I am obliged to maintaine it’ in 1642 is replaced by ‘I doe imbrace it’. It is one of the rare occasions that Browne's emendations make the 1643 text more challenging, more combative; and the reference a couple of lines further on to ‘my Maker’ in 1642 is changed to ‘the first Composer’, asserting the divinity of church music. Browne may be echoing Hermes Trismegistus here. Libellus XVIII of the Corpus Hermeticum speaks of ‘God, who is by nature a musician, and not only works harmony in the universe at large, but also transmits to individuals the rhythm of his own music’.⁷⁰ If Browne is alluding to the Hermetica here, it is an allusion with political resonance. The writer of Libellus XVIII declares:

The aim of my endeavour is the glory of kings; and it is the trophies which our kings have won that make me eager to speak. Onward then! for so God wills; and the melody that the musician makes will sound the sweeter by reason of the greatness of his theme.⁷¹

Not only is Browne inclined toward tolerance of ceremonial and various Roman Catholic practices such as ‘the prayer for the dead; whereunto I was inclined from some charitable inducements’ (67-8); compare 1642: ‘enclined by an excess of charity’. Negatively, the Puritan stress upon preaching finds no echo in his work. Preaching was central to Puritanism. Hill opens his chapter on ‘The Preaching of the Word’ in Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, with ‘Preaching is necessary to salvation, said Hus in 1412’.⁷² Hus is mentioned by Browne in a passage of studied ambiguity that, whatever its positive meaning, negatively removes Hus from any sure eminence of authority.

Now as all that die in warre are not termed Souldiers, so neither can I properly terme all those that suffer in matters of Religion Martyrs. The Councell of Constance condemns John Husse for an Heretick, the Stories of his owne party stile him a Martyr; He must needs offend the Divinity of both, that sayes hee was neither the one nor the other: There are many (questionlesse) canonized on earth, that shall never be Saints in Heaven …

(94)

Neither Protestant martyrs nor preaching find endorsement in Religio Medici. When preaching is mentioned, it is negatively:

those usuall Satyrs, and invectives of the Pulpit may perchance produce a good effect on the vulgar, whose cares are opener to Rhetorick then Logick, yet doe they in no wise confirme the faith of wiser beleevers, who know that a good cause needs not to be patron'd by a passion, but can sustaine it selfe upon a temperate dispute.

(65)

Preaching for Browne is identified with ‘those popular scurrilities and opprobrious scoffes of the Bishop of Rome, whom as a temporall Prince, we owe the duty of good language’ (65). The radical implications of encouraging disrespect for authority disturb him; implicitly he endorses the bishops' opposition to preaching. In September 1641 the Commons passed a motion, made by Cromwell, voting ‘general permission to the people of any parish to “set up a Lecture” and maintain a preacher at their own charge “to preach every Lords Day, where there is no Preaching; and to preach One week Day in every Week, where there is no weekly Lecture”’.⁷³ But preaching is no part of the Religio Medici; it is a significant absence. While the toleration for Roman Catholicism in a context of widespread fears of popish plots, documented by Manning,⁷⁴ similarly forms part of a hostility to radical, sectarian Puritanism. As Ruth Wallerstein wrote, Browne's ‘view of the Apostolic succession, his attitude toward Roman Catholicism, his whole tone, mark him as a Laudian Anglican, very susceptible to the traditions and instrumentalities of devotion’.⁷⁵

To place the components of Browne's ‘toleration’ against the grievances expressed in the ‘Root and Branch’ petition presented to Parliament on 11 December 1640 is to see his conservative, oppositional stance. The signatories complained, among other things, of:

1. … the want of preaching ministers in very many places both of England and Wales …
2. The hindering of godly books to be printed … the restraint of reprinting books formerly licensed, without relicensing.
3. The growth of Popery …
4. the prelates here in England, by themselves of their disciples, plead and maintain that the Pope is not Antichrist, and that the Church of Rome is a true Church …
5. The great conformity and likeness both continued and increased of our church to the Church of Rome, in vestures, postures, ceremonies, and administrations …
6. The standing up at Gloria Patri and at the reading of the Gospel, praying towards the East, the bowing at the name of Jesus, the bowing to the altar towards the East, cross in baptism, the kneeling at the Communion.⁷⁶

III

This reading is a preliminary attempt to situate Religio Medici in the context of the English Revolution, in the context in which it was published and first read. Browne's claim, which he perhaps too emphatically repeats, that the work was composed many years before publication in 1642, may be true; it may be that the work was begun many years earlier and progressively added to. Certainly the work was added to between the ‘unauthorized’ editions of 1642 and the authorized edition of 1643, with passages that relate to contemporary social upheavals; and contemporary readers could not have read references to ‘the present antipathies between the two extreames’ (64) without thinking of the antipathies between Charles I and Parliament. Religio Medici is not a work that puts forward an explicit or positive political position; but negatively, in its rejection of sectarianism, mass action, millenarianism, the multitude, and any manifestations of plebeian Puritan activism, it is possible to locate the work in a cautious, conservative, law-and-order context. Under the guise of religious apology and intellectual speculation, through ‘wit’, a political picture is presented. The attacks on the sects and the multitude are the iconography, the shared language, of the emerging conservative party of law and order that provided the basis of the Royalist movement,⁷⁷ but that was careful enough not to be too explicitly assertive. Who knew what forces might eventually dominate? I am not arguing that this is the only or the total meaning of Religio Medici; it is in part a covert meaning, but it is not an esoteric one. I have drawn my historical evidence from the standard historians of the period—Haller, Hill, Manning, Morrill, Stone, Zagorin—for Browne embodies a recognized, mainstream political response to the documented political circumstances and events of his time. In part, no doubt, this is why Religio Medici, apart from the eight extant manuscript copies—none in Browne's hand—went through five editions between 1642 and 1645 and, after an interval of eleven years, another three editions between 1656 and 1659.⁷⁸ But this is in no way to deny or reduce its spiritual meanings, though it may indicate some of the material, political uses to which spiritual insights can be attached.

Notes

1. C. A. Patrides, ed., Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 59. All quotations from Browne are from this edition.

2. Ibid., p. 24.

3. William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1955), p. 9.

4. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714, pp. 98-9. For a fuller discussion of the topic see ‘Censorship and English Literature’ in id., The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, (Brighton, 1985), i. 32-71.

5. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, p. 33.

6. Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution (New York, 1970), p. 204.

7. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Simon Wilkin (London, 1846), ii, pp. vi-vii.

8. Religio Medici, ed. Jean-Jacques Denonain (Cambridge, 1953), p. xxvii.

9. Zagorin, The Court and the Country, p. 232, and Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 51.

10. Joseph Hall, An Humble Remonstrance To The High Court of Parliament By A dutifull Sonne of the Church (facsimile reprint, Amsterdam, 1970), pp. 39-41.

11. Manning, The English People, pp. 100-1.

12. F. L. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne (Ann Arbor, 1962), p. 177.

13. Wilkin, The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ii. 82.

14. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 35-6.

15. Ibid., p. 166.

16. Joan Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne (Cambridge, 1962), p. 1.

17. Ibid., p. 94.

18. Cecile A. Sloane, ‘Imagery of Conflict in Religio Medici,’ ELN 8, (1971), 260-2.

19. J. S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War 1630-1650 (London, 1976), pp. 38, 95-7, 165-6.

20. Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1640 (London, 1972), p. 141.

21. Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 45.

22. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977), pp. 318, 321, 319. The Leveller Overton wrote Man's Mortalitie.

23. Religio Medici: A Facsimile of the First Edition, ed. W. A. Greenhill (London, 1883), p. xxvi.

24. Christopher Hill, Antichrist in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1971), p. 37.

25. Ibid., p. 39.

26. Ibid., p. 73.

27. Ibid., pp. 44-5.

28. Ibid., p. 78.

29. Ibid., p. 52.

30. Ibid., p. 163.

31. Ibid., p. 111.

32. CPW i. 707.

33. Hill, Antichrist, p. 26.

34. Ibid., pp. 28-9.

35. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958), p. 325.

36. ‘“The Beast with Many Heads”: Renaissance Views on the Multitude’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 241-6.

37. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces, p. 34.

38. Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1974), pp. 186, 189.

39. Manning, The English People, p. 15.

40. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

41. Ibid., p. 18.

42. Ibid., p. 24.

43. Ibid., p. 31.

44. Ibid., p. 66.

45. Ibid., p. 78.

46. Ibid., p. 91.

47. Ibid., p. 92.

48. Ibid., p. 97.

49. Ibid., pp. 105-6.

50. Ibid., p. 111.

51. Ibid., pp. 141, 182, 189-95, 205-6.

52. Hill, Change and Continuity, p. 196.

53. William P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne (Minneapolis, 1950), p. 14.

54. Ibid., p. 74.

55. Edward Dowden, Puritan and Anglican (London, 1900), p. 53; Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 99.

56. Manning, The English People, p. 25.

57. Stuart Prall, ed., The Puritan Revolution: A Documentary History (New York, 1968), p. 87.

58. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, p. 25.

59. CPW iii. 339-40.

60. Stone, Causes, p. 76.

61. Ibid., p. 77.

62. Lawrence Stone, Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640 (London, 1965), p. 126.

63. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1969), p. 281.

64. W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), ii. 447.

65. Stone, Causes, p. 119.

66. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, p. 29.

67. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne, p. 27.

68. George Fox, Journal (Leeds, 1836), i. 89.

69. Hill, Antichrist, p. 75.

70. Hermetica, ed. Walter Scott (Cambridge, 1924), i. 275-7.

71. Ibid., i. 279.

72. Hill, Society and Puritanism, p. 31.

73. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, pp. 24-5, 360.

74. Manning, The English People, pp. 33 f.

75. Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison, 1950), p. 245.

76. Prall, The Puritan Revolution, pp. 98-9.

77. Stone, Causes, p. 141.

78. Religio Medici, ed. Denonain, pp. ix-xxi, and Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne, Kt, M.D. (Cambridge, 1924), pp. 9-14.

Bibliography

Bennett, Joan, Sir Thomas Browne, Cambridge, 1962.

Denonain, Jean-Jacques (ed.), Religio Medici, Cambridge, 1953.

Haller, William, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution, New York, 1955.

Hill, Christopher, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England, London, 1971.

———Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England, London, 1974.

———The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714, Edinburgh, 1961.

———The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, vol. i: Writing and Revolution in Seventeenth Century England, Brighton, 1985.

———God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, Harmondsworth, 1972.

———Milton and the English Revolution, London, 1977.

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