Tolerance? Intolerable!
by Marcus Walker, The Critic:
National debate used to be encouraged by the Anglican state — but those days are fast disappearing.
And this is the law that I’ll maintain Until my dying day, sir:
That whatsover king shall reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.
Has any song more thoroughly lampooned the pusillanimity of the Anglican parson than “The Vicar of Bray”? If you don’t know it, Google it now; it will repay the effort. Our parson leaps from defending the Divine Right of Kings under Charles II, to wholeheartedly supporting first James II then William of Orange; he jumps from Toryism under Queen Anne to Whiggery under George I, until he says triumphantly at the end, “And so preferment I procured from our new faith’s defender …”
It’s a witty and brutal song that tells you more in six verses about that crucial moment of British history than you’ll learn in six chapters of a serious tome. But for all the mockery of the ever-flexible vicar, lurking behind the song is the brutal reality of seventeenth and eighteenth-century England: that if you hold the wrong view you might, at best, be put out of your job (as under William III, were those, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wouldn’t renounce their oath to James and were turfed out of their parishes and their homes) or even thrown in prison (where those who opposed James’s policies of toleration were put on trial, including the same Archbishop of Canterbury).
These disputes were themselves a fruit of the fact that you were forbidden to hold political office or military rank if you would not publicly affirm your belief in certain mandated theologies or perform certain public acts of conformity, as demanded by the Test and Corporation Acts — in short, if you were a nonconformist of either a Catholic or a Protestant flavour.
And yet the complexities of the Anglican settlement meant that within its warm embrace you were pretty free to say what you liked. The fact that the Church of England was born in dispute, and grew up trying to keep as many people as possibly within its boundaries, meant that debate was encouraged and furious and constant.
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