ABSTRACT
Nonjuror divine, polemicist, and Jacobite agent, Charles Leslie (1650-1722) considered religion and politics to be of a piece. According to Leslie, religious heterodoxy played a significant, even causative role in the origins of political disaffection, heterodoxy, and radicalism in England. Socinians, deists, and latitudinarians were, for him, the religious counterparts to Commonwealthmen, Roundheads, and Whigs. Writing in 1695, Leslie asserted: 'There are none of these Latitudinarians that are not Commonwealth-Men: They are against monarchy in heaven or on Earth: And indeed against all government, if they could tell how: that is, all that is not in their own hands'.1 An apologist for the exiled Stuarts, Leslie offered one of the more explicit defences of traditional divine right monarchy during the Augustan age, strongly affirming the role the church played in sustaining that monarchy. Viewing the Glorious Revolution of 1689 as an attack on the monarchy, he concluded that religious heterodoxy, especially Christological and Trinitarian heterodoxy, provided the theological foundation for this assault on the divinely ordered political state, a state supported and sustained by a divinely ordered episcopal church.
