It is true, sadly, that in the following 12 decades the political persecution of Catholics and non-conformists was intermittently brutal. Nevertheless, even during that long period of sectarian hostility, civil war and government repression, the Church of England managed to generate and sustain a liberal tradition. I refer immediately to the intellectual community that the convivial Lucius Carey, Second Viscount Falkland, gathered around himself at his Oxfordshire home in the politically tense 1630s. Alarmed at the rising stridency of rival certainties and appalled by the ensuing violence, this "Great Tew Circle" championed the use of reason in matters of religion, followed Erasmus (and St Paul) in distinguishing between fundamenta and adiaphora, advocated tolerance on matters indifferent, and looked for the reunion of Christendom. The reasonable and pacific temper of this body of lay Anglicans is well expressed by Falkland himself in his discourse, Of the Infallibility of the Church of Rome: 

"[...] it is plaine, that he [the emperor Constantine] thought punishing for opinions to be a mark, which might serve to know false opinions by [...] I am sure Christian Religions chiefest glory being, that it encreaseth by being            persecuted; and [...] me thinks [...]               everything is destroyed by the contrary to what settled and composed it... I desire recrimination may not be used; for though it be true, that Calvin had done it, and the Church of England, a little (which is a little too much) [...], yet she (confessing she may erre) is not so chargeable with any fault, as those which pretend they cannot, and so will be sure never to mend it; [...]

"I confess this opinion of damning so many, and this custome of burning so many, this breeding up those, who knew nothing else in any point of religion, yet to be in a readinesse to cry, to the fire with him, to hell with him [...] These I say, in my opinion were chiefly the    causes which made so many, so suddenly leave the Church of Rome

"[...]If any man vouchsafe to think, either this [discourse], or the authour of it, of value enough to confute the one, and informe the other, I shall desire him to do it [...] with that temper, which is fit to be used by men that are not so passionate, as to have the definition of reasonable creatures in vaine, remembering that truth in likelyhood is, where her author God was, in the still voice, and not the loud wind; [...]