[Footnote 24]: Charles I., James II., William III.
[Footnote 25]: On the 16th of July, 1604, the Puritan clergy within the Church were required to conform on or before the 30th of November on pain of expulsion. On the 4th of December Whitgift’s successor, Richard Bancroft, was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. He strictly carried out this order, and declared every man, cleric or lay, to be excommunicated who questioned the complete accordance of the Prayer Book with the Word of God. On the 6th of September, 1620, the Mayflower left England with the first freight of English families that sought freedom of worship where they came to be the founders of a New England across the sea.
[Footnote 26]: Charles II. unconstitutionally suspended the penal laws against nonconformists and recusants in 1679.
[Footnote 27]: The story of the Rye House Plot was used for bringing Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell to the scaffold.
[Footnote 28]: James II. unconstitutionally suspended the penal laws against nonconformists and recusants by Declarations of Indulgence in 1686 and 1688.
[Footnote 29]: The oath taken by Tories against the legal right of the Pretender to the crown was said to reserve the question of his divine right of succession. Divine right was unchangeable, but laws were liable to change—and so far as they go, what to-day is treason may be loyalty to-morrow.
[Footnote 30]: The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was signed on the 17th of October 1685. All Protestant churches were to be demolished, and their ministers who would not be converted were to leave France within a fortnight. Fugitive reformers who did not return within four months would have their property confiscated. Lay Reformers were forbidden to leave France, on pain of the galleys for men and confiscation of body and goods for women. Those who remained were exposed to cruelties of the soldiery. The King thought that his way of conversion by dragoons had reduced a million and a half of French heretics to twelve or fifteen thousand; but between the Revocation and the time when Defoe wrote this pamphlet, it has been estimated that 250,000 French Protestants left France to establish homes in England and elsewhere.
[Footnote 31]: John Howe, in his answer to Defoe’s request for a statement of opinion from him on Occasional Conformity.