More than 300 Roman Catholics were put to death by English governments between 1535 and 1681 for treason, thus for secular than religious offenses.[14] In 1570, Pope Pius V had issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis, which absolved Catholics from their obligations to the government.[16] This dramatically worsened the situation of the Catholics in England. English governments continued to fear Popish Plot. An English act of government from the year 1585 declared that the purpose of Jesuit missionaries who had come to Britain was “to stir up and move sedition, rebellion and open hostility”.[17] Consequently Jesuit priests like Saint John Ogilvie were hanged. This somehow contrasts with the image of the Elizabethan era as the time of William Shakespeare, but compared to the antecedent Marian Persecutions there is an important difference to consider. Mary I had been motivated by a religious zeal to purge heresy from her land, and during her short reign from 1553 to 1558 about 290 Protestants[18] had been burned at the stake for heresy, whereas Elizabeth I of England “acted out of fear for the security of her realm.”[19]
Even more to the point, perhaps, just by the numbers given here, Mary’s kill rate of Protestants was about 9 times that of Elizabeth for Catholics.
But what has any of this got to do with your original question about attitudes to Arianism (a heresy to both Catholics and the vast majority of Protestants), at a much later period, that was separated from the times of both Mary and Elizabeth not only by many years and several other reigns, but by the enormous further religious and political upheavals of the English Civil war and Interregnum?
Yes, I did go off topic there, but my overall interest is to find out how tolerant the English government really was towards non-conformists in before, during and after Cromwellian England. Newton life straddles all of these periods. I wasn’t quite sure why (if at all) he his his religious views apart from the obvious fact that it wouldn’t have done him any favors in terms of his career.
davidmich
Arianism isn’t a form of ‘Protestantism’. It’s it’s own thing, and predates Protestantism by twelve hundred years.
The closest thing to modern neo-Arianism today (loosely considering the essence of Arianism to be ‘Jesus was a created being, inferior to God the Father’) would be, I guess, the Unitarians or Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Well, there’s a big difference between “during” and “after” the Commonwealth, obviously.
The Restoration, which followed the Commonwealth, was generally a period of relative tolerance. Personal unorthodox belief was not generally a big problem, except to someone in an occupation like Newman’s, where at least outward conformity to the doctrines and practices of the Church of England was expected or required. But it was problematic to be involved in any kind of organised religious movement in opposition to the Church of England. That issue didn’t arise for Newton because, while he had Arian beliefs, there was no Arian church attacking the Church of England.