The Birth of Religious Toleration

"Diplomacy and Domestic Devotion: Embassy Chapels and the Toleration of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe" by Benjamin J. Kaplan, in Journal of Early Modern History (2002: No. 4), Univ. of Minnesota, 614 Social Sciences, 267-19th Ave. S., Minneapolis, Minn. 55455; and "Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe" by Benjamin J. Kaplan, in American Historical Review (Oct. 2002), 400 A St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003.

In the aftermath of the Reformation, the religious division in European states caused a special problem for diplomats: Where was a Protestant ambassador to worship in a Catholic capital such as Paris, Vienna, Brussels, or Madrid? And where was a Catholic diplomat to worship in a Protestant capital such as London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, or The Hague? To deal with the diplomatic issue, and, more broadly, to keep domestic religious divisions from tearing countries apart, European states hit upon a distinction that allowed the furtive practice of religious tolerance.

The distinction they made, explains Kaplan, a historian at University College, London, was between public worship, in accordance with a community’s official faith, and private worship. Beginning in the 17th century, ambassadors were allowed increasingly to establish chapels inside their residences where they could practice their forbidden faith in private—as long as they did not visibly flout the sacral community of the host nation.

Parallel practices evolved outside the rarefied realm of high diplomacy with the gradual acceptance of what the Dutch called the schuilkerk, or clandestine church. Most schuilkerken were created inside homes, though some were inside warehouses or barns. But they shared a key characteristic, as did the embassy chapels: None looked like a place of worship from the street. In Amsterdam, Catholics maintained 20 such churches in 1700, while the Mennonites had six and other groups four. The Dutch schuilkerken, Kaplan points out, had thousands of counterparts elsewhere in Europe, with various names, including house churches, prayer houses, meeting houses, mass houses, house chapels, oratories, and assembly places.

The embassy chapels stirred a new issue: Could native religious dissidents attend services in an embassy? "For an entire century," writes Kaplan, "from the 1560s through the 1650s, this issue provoked clashes in London, some of them violent, between authorities and citizens, on the one hand, and the personnel of the Spanish, French, and Venetian embassies on the other." The 1583 "Throckmorton plot"— which involved the Spanish ambassador and an Englishman who aimed to restore Catholicism in England—seemed to confirm English suspicions about the foreign embassies of Catholic powers.

But despite frequent tensions and occasional violence, Kaplan says, most embassy chapels in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries effectively served "significant congregations that included native dissidents." And out of that practice developed the modern legal doctrine of extraterritoriality: the pretense that an ambassador and his embassy were on the soil of his homeland. Thus, embassy chapels did not violate the religious laws of a host country, and native dissidents who attended chapel services did not violate local laws. It was all part of a larger fiction, says Kaplan, "that enabled Europeans to accommodate dissent without confronting it directly, to tolerate knowingly what they could not bring themselves to accept fully...to go on living as if civic and sacral community were still one and the same."