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Protestant
Pluralism The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689-1720
Ralph Stevens
Studies in Modern British Religious History, vol. 37 Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018 Hardcover. xiv + 201 p. ISBN 978-1783273294. £65
Reviewed by John Coffey University of Leicester
It is often said thatthe Elizabethan Settlement settled nothing, or nothing much. In this fine
monograph, based on his Cambridge doctoral thesis, Ralph Stevens demonstrates
that the 1689 Toleration Act ‘settled very little about the future relationship
between the Church of England and Protestant Dissenters’ [163]. Stevens does
not agree with historians who downplay the significance of the Act – it ‘dealt
a severe blow to the Protestant confessional state’ [2] and marked the
foundation of enduring legal religious pluralism in England’ [1]. Revisionist
historians ‘risk obscuring the extent of the paradigm shift’ it signalled [5].
Nonetheless, its significance lies partly in the fact that it instigated a
battle over its meaning and application, due in no small part to ‘the sheer
ambiguity of the statute’ [9]. This book is the definitive guide to that
contest in the generation after 1689. Basic orientation is
provided in a chapter on ‘Religion after the Revolution’, but thereafter the
book’s chapters focus on key fields of controversy: Public Office, the
Reformation of Manners, Education, Baptism, and Chapels. In each of these,
Stevens breaks new ground. He covers Henry Sacheverell and the familiar ‘Tory
crusade to exclude Dissenters from the political nation’, but chapter 2 also explores
the ‘disenchantment’ of John Sharp, archbishop of York, whose early reputation
as a ‘moderate’ did not stop him parting ways with the Williamite bishops and
becoming the perceived head of the high church party. Raised in a puritan
family, and a protégé of Henry More, Sharp had once supported comprehension,
but he came to feel that Dissenters were now ‘very Uppish’, to the extent that
they were jeopardising the mission of the established Church. Chapter 3 on ‘The
Reformation of Manners’, reveals how the new reformation societies fell under
clerical suspicion due to the extent of collaboration they fostered between
conformists and Dissenters. Chapter 4 on ‘Education’ re-examines the Tory
campaign against Dissenting academies that culminated in the Schism Act of
1714, showing how the Toleration Act fostered dispute by leaving the legal
status of Dissenting schools and academies ‘fundamentally uncertain’ [81].
Chapter 5 explains the less familiar controversy over the administration of baptism,
which many churchmen felt should be a monopoly of the established clergy.
Finally, chapter 6 studies the tug-of-war over chapels, tracing the process
whereby Presbyterians were increasingly ousted from ‘usurped’ chapels and so
pushed towards becoming a separate denomination. Stevens notes the irony: the
churchmen who campaigned against Dissenter use of chapels ‘were in fact helping
to usher in the very Protestant plurality which so appalled those attached to
old orthodoxies’. Each case was ‘a microcosm of the final sundering of English
Protestantism’ [150]. London, where
Dissenters represented as much as a fifth of the population, may be at the
centre of the book, but Stevens surveys evidence from across the country, and
we are taken on eye-opening excursions to many different locales from
Nottingham and Chester to Devon and Lancashire. Protestant Pluralism is
most illuminating on the Presbyterians, but it does not neglect Congregationalists,
Baptists and Quakers. It is also a very good guide to the fierce factionalism
within the established Church. The book is a model of clarity and balanced
judgment. Based on a wealth of printed sources and on research in a dozen
archives, it is impeccably researched. It can be paired with another excellent
new volume: Negotiating Toleration : Dissent and the Hanoverian
Succession, 1714-1760, edited by Nigel Aston and Benjamin Bankhurst (OUP,
2019). Together, these two works throw a flood of new light on the status of Protestant
Nonconformity in the reigns of William III, Queen Anne, and the first two
Georges. They show how debates over the Act of Toleration shaped the identities
of Church and Dissent.
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