THE NECESSARY CROMWELLIAN INTERLUDE:

Crawford Gribben, Professor of History at Queen's University, Belfast:

There weren't very many puritan societies, and none of them were especially enduring, but they were often better than the kinds of societies that they replaced.

The key word here is 'often'. In the 17th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, puritan societies developed with different aims and objectives and different relationships to other peoples and cultures. Some puritan societies, such as that which developed in Massachusetts in the 1630s, were organised around the demands of biblical law, while others, like the one that emerged in Rhode Island, worked towards a religiously neutral state. Some puritan societies, including that of Scotland in the 1640s, seem to have enjoyed widespread popular support, while the emergence of a puritan society in Ireland in the 1650s was the expected outcome of the suppression of religious difference and resulted in ethnic cleansing.

Some of the most careful thinking about the character of a puritan society took place in Cromwellian England. Administrators made strenuous efforts to restrict the range of capital crimes, to introduce one of Europe's most generous systems of religious toleration, to secularise marriage and divorce - and, of course, to introduce republican government. Cromwellian legislators took biblical law extremely seriously, but this often worked to introduce greater freedoms than had previously been known.

Puritans made their greatest contribution to social theory after their revolution failed. It was after the Restoration that erstwhile republicans such as John Owen began to consider the rights and responsibilities of religious minorities. During the Glorious Revolution John Locke, his former student, put those ideas to work as he defined the principles of classical liberalism.

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