In 1662 two Quaker women stormed into a service at St. Paul’s in London. They wore sackcloth and left their hair unbound, rubbed ashes all over their faces and dumped blood over themselves. Blood poured down onto the altar. It was a very bad sign. There were many such inauspicious signs and omens witnessed in seventeenth-century England. The Reformation, begun a century before, had splintered into dozens of separate, self-governing communities of belief. In 1646 one London man described how his household of four now held four totally irreconcilable beliefs: he was an Anglican; his wife, a profound skeptic—she doubted “whether there be any church or no upon the earth”; their maidservant, a dissenter under the influence of the parliamentary army; their manservant, a member of a radical congregation where they “sing no psalms” and “keep none of our days of fasting.” The husband was baffled, but his household was a microcosm of the nation. By 1642 it was riven by civil war, divided between those who supported King Charles I and those who believed …