ABSTRACT
The depth of Protestant prejudice against Catholics meant that William's plan to grant them toleration was doomed from the start. Tolerationists had posed as reformers of European Christianity who were calling the church back to its roots. The pamphlets of seventeenth-century English tolerationists stand among the finest early modern defences of religious liberty. Seventeenth-century English tolerationists also shaped eighteenth-century American opinion through their writings and ideas. Historians have often spoken of 'the rise of toleration', but insofar as this suggests a gradual, inexorable growth of religious freedom, it is somewhat misleading. Toleration was not a uniquely English development, and if local and contingent factors determined the precise timing and character of particular toleration settlements, the eventual rise of toleration across the continent was arguably the result of longer-term trends. Instead, the Act of Toleration came about in a muddled fashion as a result of a series of political and religious contingencies stretching back half a century.
