The toleration controversy during the English revolution

One of the defining features of the English Revolution is ‘its astonishing intellectual fertility’. In contrast to other contemporary upheavals in Scotland, Ireland, France and Spain, the revolution in England generated an unprecedented volume of print and an extraordinary range of competing ideas. Pamphlet wars were fought over a multitude of issues, but few debates were so fierce, so protracted and so seminal as the controversy over toleration. After its full-scale eruption in 1644, the toleration controversy surged on throughout the revolutionary years and into the Restoration era. Nowhere else in seventeenth-century Europe, with the possible exception of the Netherlands, produced such a rich literature on religious toleration. [Opening paragraph]