The evolution of English thought which rendered Menasseh ben Israel’s enterprise possible is of considerable complexity, but its main features are easily distinguishable. The idea of Religious Liberty in England was due, in its broader aspects, to the struggle between the Baptists and the Calvinists. The Reformation established only a restricted form of Religious Liberty, and it was not until the Baptists found themselves persecuted as the Reformers had been before them, that the cry arose for a liberty of conscience which would embrace all religions. In the Separatist Churches, founded by English refugees in Amsterdam and Geneva, the idea grew and strengthened. The earliest noteworthy tract on the subject—Leonard Busher’s “Religious Peace, or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience,” published in 1614—was written under the influence of these exiles, and it is noteworthy that already in that work the extension of religious liberty to Jews was specifically demanded.[16] Amsterdam was at that time the seat of a flourishing Jewish community, some of whose members came into contact with the philo-Jewish refugees. In this way they probably learnt to understand the political significance of the successive rise of the Puritans and Independents, for at the very beginning of the Civil War the Royalist spies in Holland noted that the Jews sympathised with the Republicans, and even alleged that they had offered them “considerable sums of money to carry on their designs.”[17] The progress of Religious Liberty in the seventeenth century reached its highest point, when in 1645 the Independents captured the Army under the scheme known as the “New Model.” Meanwhile Roger Williams, the famous Baptist, who had already founded in America a community based on unrestricted liberty of conscience, had published his “Bloudy Tenent of Persecution,” in which he generously pleaded for the Jews.[18] In 1646 a reprint of Leonard Busher’s pamphlet was published in London, much to the joy of the Separatists in Amsterdam,[19] and a year later Hugh Peters, one of Cromwell’s Army Chaplains, wrote his “Word for the Army and Two Words for the Kingdom,” in which he proposed that “strangers, even Jews [be] admitted to trade and live with us.”[20] The question of the readmission of the Jews was, however, still far from taking practical shape. Although frequently referred to, it had only been raised incidentally as an illustration of the advanced tendencies of the advocates of Religious Liberty.