Abstract
The text under consideration is extracted from the book ?The Oxford Illustrated' by Tudor and Stuart Britain, published in 1996. It is an excerpt from an essay called "The Search for Religious Liberty, 1640-1690", written by Mark Goldie, a Lecturer at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. This essay deals with the birth of the concept of toleration and its consequences, referring to the Presbyterian experiment of the 1640s and the 1650s in England. To better understand the issues at stake here, one must first recollect the background of the History of Christianity in England. During the 16th century, the break with Rome led to the creation of the Church of England. Nevertheless, England's Protestant Identity was never a single clear one, as several religious strands struggled to dominate the established Church. Charles I, who reigned from 1625, attempted to tackle the thorny issue of multiple Kingdoms by trying to make England, Scotland and Ireland share the same faith and unite them in a single uniform kingdom, though each of these kingdoms had a different religious set-up.
