Worse still for the population was one respect in which the regime was not tidy-minded: it tolerated with different degrees of reluctance a variety of radical sects who were widely seen as offending against all convention. There were English Baptists, who took up the principle of adult or believers’ baptism like the Anabaptists of mainland Europe in the previous century; Baptists had been a tiny group before the civil wars began, but their numbers swelled in the Parliamentary army and in the country at large in its aftermath, causing huge offence to the vast majority who took it for granted
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