On 24 May 1689, an Act of Parliament received the royal assent of William and Mary in Westminster. Its formal title was An Act for Exempting Their Majesties’ Protestant Subjects, dissenting from the Church of England, from the Penalties of certain Laws. The historians who have shortened it to the Act of Toleration have not done it any injustice. With this single statute, the long, grinding, blood-spotted persecution that had hounded English Dissenters under the Clarendon Code came, in legal substance, to an end.
For the Friends, who had borne a heavier share of that persecution than any other body in the country, the Act was a release of a kind they had hardly dared expect. It did not give them everything they wanted. It was hedged about with conditions that other Dissenters could meet but Friends could not. It still left them outside Parliament, the universities, and the corporations of the great cities. But it ended the machinery of arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment that had sent some 13,500 Friends to gaol over the previous four decades. After 1689, an English Quaker could meet for worship, in a known meeting-house, in broad daylight, without breaking the law.
How did this happen? The short answer is: William Penn. The longer answer is more interesting.
The world before 1689
To grasp what the Toleration Act meant, one must remember what it replaced.
By the late 1670s, Friends in England were living under a body of law expressly designed to crush them. The Quaker Act of 1662 had named them; the Conventicle Act of 1664, renewed and stiffened in 1670, had outlawed their meetings; the Test Act of 1673 had shut them out of public office; the Five Mile Act of 1665 had restricted the movement of dissenting ministers; and the underlying Statute of Praemunire could be invoked, under certain pretenses, to confiscate the entire estate of an obstinate offender.
Enforcement was uneven, but in the worst districts and the worst years it was savage. London Friends in the early 1670s saw their meetings broken up week after week; boys of twelve and fifteen would gather quietly in the street outside locked meeting-houses and sit on the cobblestones in silence rather than disperse. (One famous occasion in Gracechurch Street ended only when the constables, having beaten and arrested the adults, gave up trying to dislodge the children.) Bristol, Norwich, Reading, and the Yorkshire West Riding all saw similar scenes.
The result by the late 1680s was that English Friends had become, in legal practice, a marginalized but visible minority — too numerous to ignore, too peaceable to fear, too obstinate to break. Even their fiercest opponents could see that the laws against them were now doing nobody any good.
What was needed was a political opening. It came, by an unlikely route, from the throne.
James II and the unexpected ally
Charles II died in February 1685. His brother and successor, James II, was a Catholic — and as such, faced exactly the same disabilities under English law as the Dissenters did. In a country which had been raised on the conviction that Popery was the great enemy, James needed allies among the religious minorities.
He found one in William Penn.
Penn was, by 1685, the most prominent Quaker in England and arguably the most politically connected Dissenter of any communion. He had grown up in court circles — his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, had been a confidant of the future James II since the days of the Restoration. The younger Penn had become a Quaker as a young man at Oxford, had been imprisoned for the faith at the Tower of London (where he wrote No Cross, No Crown) and at Newgate (where he was tried in the famous Bushel’s Case trial of 1670), and by 1681 had received from Charles II the charter of Pennsylvania — one of the very largest grants of land in English history, given in part to settle a debt owed by the Crown to his late father.
Penn and James II had a personal friendship. They were not natural allies. Penn was a Quaker; James was a Catholic; their theologies were almost opposite. But they shared two things: a commitment to religious liberty (each from his own minority position) and a degree of political realism. From 1685 to 1688 Penn was at court more often than in his own meeting. He used his access ceaselessly on behalf of imprisoned Friends.
In 1687 James II issued a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending the penal laws against Catholics and Dissenters by royal prerogative. Friends benefited at once: more than a thousand Quaker prisoners were released. Penn travelled the country preaching openly. New meeting-houses were licensed.
The trouble was that the Declaration was, constitutionally, a power-grab. James was using a royal prerogative to dispense with statutes of Parliament. Anglicans and constitutional Whigs alike, even those who otherwise sympathized with toleration, recoiled. By 1688 the country was unsettled. By November of that year, William of Orange had landed at Torbay; by December, James II was a fugitive in France. The Glorious Revolution had happened.
The Revolution settlement
This was, on the face of it, a disaster for the Friends. Their highest political protector had just been dethroned, and Penn was repeatedly arrested in the years that followed on suspicion of Jacobite sympathies. (He was, in fact, perfectly loyal to the new regime, but his old friendship with James II made him a marked man.)
Yet the new settlement, by its own logic, had to grant some form of toleration. William of Orange had come over with the support of English Dissenters. He had made known, before he set foot on the strand at Torbay, that he favoured comprehensive religious liberty for Protestants. The Whig majority that took the new Parliament was, in general, well-disposed to Dissent. And the irony of having ousted a Catholic king for religious tyranny only to maintain the same statutes against Protestant Dissenters was not lost on the political class.
The result was the Act of Toleration of 1689. Its provisions were modest by modern standards. It exempted Protestant Dissenters from the penalties of the Conventicle and Five Mile Acts, provided they
- registered their meeting-houses with the local bishop or magistrate;
- abjured the Pope’s authority;
- swore the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy; and
- subscribed to most of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (excepting those dealing with church government and infant baptism).
For Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, these were terms they could meet. For Quakers, they were not. Friends could not swear oaths; their entire testimony forbade it.
Penn, with characteristic patience, had foreseen this. He and the leaders of the Meeting for Sufferings in London had been pressing for years that Friends be allowed to affirm — to make a solemn declaration of truth, in the place of an oath. The Act of 1689 did not yet grant this. But it carved out an exemption: Friends could be required only to make a declaration of allegiance and to subscribe to the Articles by word, not by oath. By administrative practice, this proved workable.
Within a year of the Act, more than a thousand Quaker meeting-houses had been registered across England. A way of life that had been illegal in May was, by July, an ordinary feature of every English county.
What was won, and what was not
It is important to be clear about what the Act of 1689 did and did not do.
It did not give the Friends civil equality. They could not hold any public office, civic or military, that required an oath. (This was not finally remedied until the Affirmation Act of 1722, and even that did not fully equalize Friends with Anglicans until the nineteenth century.) They could not enter the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, which required subscription to the Articles in oath form. They could not, until much later, sit in either House of Parliament. They were, in short, second-class subjects.
It did not abolish the tithe. Friends remained legally obliged to pay one-tenth of their produce or income to the parish minister — to a man whose ministry they did not accept and whose maintenance they did not believe in. Refusal of tithe brought distraint of goods well into the nineteenth century, and the Tithe issue remained one of the great Quaker political grievances for two centuries.
It did not protect Friends in marriage. Not until well after 1689 were Quaker marriages, conducted in their own meetings under their own discipline, given full legal recognition; the Friends had to lobby case by case, and only by mid-eighteenth century did their marriage practice receive unambiguous statutory protection.
It did, however, do one essential thing: it ended the policy of the state crushing the Society of Friends. The constables stopped coming on First-day morning. The doors stopped being broken. The meeting-houses stopped being seized. Children of Friends could grow up without seeing their father dragged off to Ilchester or Lancaster gaol. The Society was free to do what no persecuted body has ever quite been free to do — to organize itself, educate its children, and consider what it wanted to become.
What the first generation thought of it
The Friends who had carried the movement through the worst years did not live, in most cases, to see the toleration they had won. George Fox survived the Act by less than two years; he died in London in January 1691. Robert Barclay had died in Scotland in 1690, aged forty-one. Edward Burrough, Francis Howgill, James Nayler, John Camm, John Audland, Mary Dyer — these were already three decades dead. Margaret Fell lived on at Swarthmoor until 1702, an honored dowager of the movement, and saw the Toleration Act take effect. William Penn lived until 1718, but the last decade of his life was clouded by financial ruin, political suspicion, and ill health.
What was their own view of the Toleration?
It was not exultant. Penn himself, writing in England’s Present Interest Discovered, used these words:
The liberties of the people of this kingdom have been bought at a very dear rate… Let us not be so ungrateful to our Saviour and ourselves as to be so easily parted with them.
That sentence carries the right note. The Friends had not won the Toleration Act; they had survived to see it given. The dearly-bought price had been paid by Burrough in Newgate, by Howgill in Appleby, by Mary Dyer on Boston Common, by the unnamed thousands whose goods had been distrained and whose health had been broken in the country gaols.
Those who lived to see 1689 were grateful. They were also sober. The peace was still hedged about with disabilities. The Spirit which had carried Friends through the dark years would still be needed in the easier years. The first generation knew, as their grandchildren did not always know, that an outwardly tolerated religion is not the same thing as an inwardly faithful one — and that the Society’s truer trial would come, not from the magistrate, but from prosperity.
It came. The eighteenth century, the century of Quaker quietism, of plain dress made elegant, of comfortable Friends and shrinking Meetings, would in some respects be a harder century than the seventeenth. But that is another story. This one ends, fittingly, in May of 1689, with the meeting-house door at last lawfully open, and a generation of grey-haired Friends sitting in silence together with their Bibles and their memories, waiting on the same Light that had lit them up in the marketplace at Sedbergh forty years before.