29. More gilded than golden?

29. More gilded than golden?

When we last took a look at the so-called golden age of Charles II, we talked about the persecution of Catholics and, in particular, the witch hunt launched against them during the Popish Plot craze launched by Titus Oates's fabrications.

But Catholics weren't alone in being given a lousy time. Puritans, the more fundamentalists of Protestants, were also targets. They were seen as the main architects of the English republic that had just ended. They were also seen as dangerously unorthodox, when conformity was viewed as the right way to go. This was the last time, indeed, when anyone made the attempt to impose a single faith on Britain. So Episcopalians, the trend within the Church of England that was as close to Catholicism as you could get without giving up on Protestantism altogether, also persecuted Dissenters and Non-Conformist Protestants. And it wasn't a nice sight either...

So this was another group of people for whom the age wasn't terribly golden.

Ultimately, that was something that also revealed the relative loss of power of the king, and the emergence, notably in parliament, of tendencies of opinion opposed to each other, for or against the king. Religion and politics melded. And, for our next episode, we're going to see how that led to the beginnings of the party system.

Illustration: The martyrdom by drowning of Margaret Wilson, a Scots Presbyterian who refused to bow to Episcopalian authority. Engraving from a nineteenth-century drawing by J E Millais.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

Episoder(274)

273. From a humble address to a royal arrest

273. From a humble address to a royal arrest

Well, we’re living in curious times.For the first time in four centuries, a member of the British royal family has been arrested in connection with a criminal investigation. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor...

22 Feb 14min

272. What a fine mess you've got us into

272. What a fine mess you've got us into

This is the last episode in this main series of A History of England. I may add others on specific topics – by all means use the comments to suggest any you’d like me to examine – or in response to in...

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271. Breaking records

271. Breaking records

Following the rather grim comedy of Boris Johnson, the Conservatives gave Britain the even more ridiculous spectacle of Liz Truss. She proceeded to push the British economy to the edge of the abyss, a...

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270. Phenomenal Boris

270. Phenomenal Boris

It’s the time of Boris. This episode tracks Boris Johnson’s character, starting with a less than complimentary report from his housemaster at Eton to this parents, through his time in the rich kids’ B...

30 Nov 202514min

269. Brexit

269. Brexit

In 2015, Cameron returned to office with a majority of his own even if it wasn’t particularly huge. At least it meant he no longer needed to be in a coalition with the Lib Dems, who’d taken a terrible...

23 Nov 202514min

268. The winners and the damned: peacetime coalition

268. The winners and the damned: peacetime coalition

It’s 2007, and Tony Blair is out. In his place is Gordon Brown, who’d proved his capacity as a Chancellor. Sadly, he was now to show that promotion to Prime Minister was one step too many , since he s...

16 Nov 202514min

267. Bliar

267. Bliar

As the title of this episode suggests, this is where we look at how Tony Blair’s reputation was wrecked by the growing awareness that he’d produced infamously bad justifications to launch Britain into...

9 Nov 202514min

266. A time of dodgy dossiers

266. A time of dodgy dossiers

When Tony Blair took Britain to war in Iraq in 2003, as part of a US-led and rather limited coalition of nations, it was against the will of large numbers of Brits expressed in possibly the biggest de...

2 Nov 202514min

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