English provincial engagement in religious debates: the Salisbury quarrel of 1705-15

From 1705 until his death in 1715, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, was embroiled in a series of disputes in his diocese. The origins of the disputes lie in Burnet’s support for the toleration of religious dissent. But the disputes spread into the issue of the legitimacy of the Glorious Revolution and resistance to tyrants. The disputes provide an insight into the ways in which provincial and national controversies interacted. The actions of the mob, the electorate, the clergy and tract writers of all persuasions in London and Salisbury were the cause and consequence of this complex interplay of national and local identities. Salisbury was in some ways a microcosm of the issues that confronted people in the quarter century after 1688, but in the intensity of the conflict it was unique