Toleration Act 1688

Toleration Act 1688[1][a]
Act of Parliament
Parliament of England
Long titleAn Act for Exempting their Majestyes Protestant Subjects dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalties of certaine Lawes.[2]
Citation1 Will. & Mar. c. 18
  • (Ruffhead: 1 Will. & Mar. Sess. 1. c. 18)
Dates
Royal assent24 May 1689
Repealed30 July 1948
Other legislation
Amended by
Repealed byStatute Law (Repeals) Act 1969
Status: Repealed
Text of statute as originally enacted

The Toleration Act 1688[1][a] (1 Will. & Mar. c. 18), also referred to as the Act of Toleration or the Toleration Act 1689,[3] was an Act of the Parliament of England. Passed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, it received royal assent on 24 May 1689.[4]

The Act allowed for freedom of worship to nonconformists who had pledged to the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and rejected transubstantiation, i.e., to Protestants who dissented from the Church of England such as Baptists, Congregationalists or English Presbyterians, but not to Roman Catholics. Nonconformists were allowed their own places of worship and their own schoolteachers, so long as they accepted certain oaths of allegiance.

The Act intentionally did not apply to Roman Catholics, Jews, nontrinitarians,[5] and atheists.[6] Further, it continued the existing social and political disabilities for dissenters, including their exclusion from holding political offices and also from the universities. Dissenters were required to register their meeting houses and were forbidden from meeting in private homes. Any preachers who dissented had to be licensed.

Between 1772 and 1774, Edward Pickard gathered together dissenting ministers, to campaign for the terms of the Toleration Act for dissenting clergy to be modified. Under his leadership, Parliament twice considered bills to modify the law, but both were unsuccessful and it was not until Pickard and many others had ended their efforts that a new attempt was made in 1779.[7] The Act was amended in 1779 by substituting belief in the Christians' Scriptures for belief in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican churches, but some penalties on holding property remained. Penalties against Unitarians were finally removed in the Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813.

  1. ^ a b The citation of this Act by this short title was authorised by section 5 of, and Schedule 2 to, the Statute Law Revision Act 1948. Due to the repeal of those provisions, it is now authorised by section 19(2) of the Interpretation Act 1978.
  2. ^ These words are printed against this Act in the second column of Schedule 2 to the Statute Law Revision Act 1948, which is headed "Title".
  3. ^ Mews, John. The Digest of English Case Law Containing the Reported Decisions of the Superior Courts: And a Selection from Those of the Irish Courts [from 1557] to the End of 1897. Sweet and Maxwell. 1898. vol. 12. p. 101.
  4. ^ House of Lords Journal: 24 May 1689: record of royal assent British History Online; Text of the Act British History Online
  5. ^ Bromley, John Selwyn (1970). The new Cambridge modern history. Cambridge University Press. p. 210. ISBN 0-521-07524-6. OCLC 58643836.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Patrick was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ John Stephens, ‘Pickard, Edward (1714–1778)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 18 February 2010


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