In Shakespeare's day, English  law required that everyone attend church on Sundays and Holy Days. Those who failed to attend ("recusants") were subject to fines of £20 per month, were excluded from certain offices and could lose their lands.

Attendance at religious services other than those approved by the Church of England could also result in heavy penalties, including imprisonment.

Anti-Trinitarians, Ranters, Quakers and others who held extremely heterodox views were also penalized by local magistrates. Oliver Cromwell insisted that all ministers who received state support (that is to say, who held livings in the national church, and were maintained by tithes) should accept certain fundamental doctrines, and he set up "Triers" to investigate candidates for such jobs.

The Anglican fervor of Charles II's Parliaments and the inability of the Presbyterians and Bishops to work out a compromise at the Savoy Conference (1661) led instead to an exclusively Anglican settlement. Protestant Dissenters suffered various restrictions on their worship and civil rights until the Glorious Revolution,

The Toleration Act of May 1689 granted a limited toleration to Presbyterians, Independents Baptists, and Quakers; - they could worship freely but were excluded from public office. (Catholics and Unitarians were still liable to prosecution).

In 1615 an anonymous Baptist tract argued that all loyal subjects - even Catholics - should be allowed freedom of worship. Their position was very unusual but seventy-five years later it was widely accepted.

In the years before the Civil War, to the few puritan sectaries asking for a toleration of (most) religious beliefs, were added some Anglicans unhappy with Archbishop Laud's oppressive policies. These thinkers often met at the home in Great Tew of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland and so became known as the Tew Circle.

After the Restoration some of the Latitudinarians influenced by Tew Circle ideas became important in the Church of England - these included Jeremy Taylor.

Jeremy Taylor (1613-67) was another graduate of Cambridge University. Unlike Williams and Goodwin, he supported episcopal rule and was patronized by Archbishop Laud. During the Civil War and Interregnum, he lost his living and lived on the charity of various Royalist gentlemen. At the Restoration he was appointed to an Irish bishopric.
Taylor's important work on toleration was the Liberty of prophesying (1647), but he also wrote a number of very popular devotional works such as The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650), and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651).

Many of the arguments in favor of religious toleration developed by Goodwin, Taylor and others were repeated by John Locke. John Selden and Thomas Hobbes afforded the government generous powers to control the expression of beliefs liable to cause social conflict, but advocated intellectual freedom in general and were keen to curb the powers of clerical authorities to impose religious beliefs.