[Footnote 1:  Various Thomason Pamphlets of 1654-1656.  The Second Beacon Fired was published in Oct. 1654 by six London booksellers—­Luke Fawne, John Rothwell, Samuel Gellibrand, Thomas Underhill, Joshua Kirton, and Nathaniel Webb.  Two of them, Rothwell and Underhill, had published for Milton in former days.  The heretics chiefly denounced are Biddle, Dell, Farnworth, Norwood, Braine, John Webster, and Feake.  John Goodwin replied to the booksellers in A fresh Discovery of the High Presbyterian Spirit, or the Quenching of “The Second Beacon Fired,” published in Jan. 1654-5, and so found himself in a new quarrel.  There was a reply called An Apology for the Six Booksellers.]

A very fair amount of Liberty of the Press, though not to newspapers, nor to publications clearly immoral, seems to have been allowed by Cromwell.  Through 1655 and 1656 there were books and pamphlets of the most various kinds, and advocating the most various opinions.  There were Episcopalian books and Anabaptist books, arguments for Tithes and arguments against Tithes, Fifth Monarchy tracts, Quaker Tracts and Anti-Quaker Tracts, in extraordinary profusion.  Prynne would publish one day The Quakers unmasked and clearly detected to be but the spawn of Romish frogs, Jesuits and Franciscan Friars, sent from Rome to seduce the intoxicated giddy-headed English nation, and George Fox would print the next day The Unmasking and Discovery of Antichrist, with all the False Prophets, by the true light which comes from Christ Jesus.  Nor, of course, was there, any interference with the religious meetings of any of the ordinary Puritan sects, Baptists or whatever else, that chose to form separatist congregations.  Even those who so far passed the bounds that they were called Ranters or Fanatics were quite safe in their own conventicles; and altogether one has to conclude that much that went by the still worse names of Blasphemy, Atheism, Infidelity, and Anti-Christianism, had as quiet a life under the Protectorate as in any later time.  Practically, all that is of interest in the enquiry as to the amount of Religious Toleration under Cromwell’s Government lies in what is known of his dealings with five denominations of Dissenters from his Established Church—­the Papists, the Episcopalians, the Socinians or Anti-Trinitarians, the Quakers, and the Jews.

(1) The Papists. Papists might be Papists under Cromwell’s government in the sense that there was no positive compulsion on them to abjure their creed and profess another.  The question, however, is as to open liberty of Roman Catholic worship.  This question had passed through Cromwell’s mind, and the results of his ruminations upon it appear most succinctly in one of his letters to Mazarin.  After the Treaty made with France, the Cardinal very naturally pressed the subject of a toleration for Catholics in England, the rather as Cromwell was always so energetic for a toleration of Protestants in Catholic