Voices for Tolerance
In an Age of Persecution

The restoration of Charles II should have brought general religious toleration to England. This is what the king promised at Breda on the eve of his accession in 1660. Parliament and political necessity, however, forced him to accept the dominance of a rigid Anglican state church and, with the Clarendon Code and the Test Acts, a rigorous program of religious exclusion that resulted in discrimination against Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers. While many dissenting groups suffered, the Quakers endured the harshest persecution-ironically, under an Anglican regime, members of which had suffered themselves under the Puritans. Experience of oppression, however, did not lead to empathy and the renunciation of intolerance. In fact, it seems to have reinforced, in the eyes of some, the necessity of persecution.