Liberty of Conscience as a Tool of Empire: England and Its Restoration Colonies, 1660-1689

Daniel K. Richter is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Religious freedom, the story usually goes, is something that oppressed people fled the “old world” to find in the “new”; liberty grew from a bottom-up struggle. Yet, on the eve of his restoration to the old English throne in 1660, it was none other than King Charles II who promised: “liberty to tender Consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted . . . for differences of opinion in matters of Religion.” Of course, as it turned out, few things caused more disquiet than the Stuart monarchs’ efforts to introduce their particular brand of religious liberty to the British Isles in the period leading up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. Similar, if less familiar, processes played out all around the English Atlantic. Everywhere from New Hampshire to Nevis in the late seventeenth century, the imposition of royal or royally-sponsored government brought with it the promise—or peril—of liberty of conscience. In some ironic ways during this period, religious freedom traveled from the “old world” to the “new,” and from the top down, and it was not always a welcome guest.