Notes

Historians have different views about how revolutionary, in the years to 1701, the Glorious Revolution was. Analyse and evaluate the extracts and use your knowledge of the issues to explain your answer to the following question.
How far do you agree with the view that England was no longer a confessional state in the years 1688-1701 as a result of the Glorious Revolution? (AS Level from the textbook page 124)

Extract 1
From C. Hill, The Century of Revolution (1961)
The Toleration Act of 1689 finally killed off the old conception of a single state Church of which all Englishmen were members. The parish became more exclusively a local-government area, whose officers regarded themselves as responsible to secular rather than to ecclesiastical authority. The attempt to punish ‘sin’ by judicial process was virtually abandoned. The laity had won its centuries-long struggle against the Church courts. In this respect too the Middle Ages were over … The Toleration Act served a political purpose. It was necessary for national unity and the safety of the regime that dissenters should be allowed freedom of worship. But they remained excluded from political life.

Extract 2
From J. Champion, ‘Toleration and Citizenship in Enlightenment England’ in O.P. Grell and R. Porter, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (1999)
To some extent, England remained a confessional state: the Toleration Act (1689) and succeeding acts in Scotland (1712) and Ireland (1719), while establishing rights to public worship to Protestant dissenters, did not break the connection between religious identity and civil rights. Penal laws removed did not enfranchise even Protestant dissenters to participate in local and national office: the Test and Corporation Acts (1673, 1661) meant that to be a fully competent subject all individuals had to swear oaths of allegiance and supremacy to the Crown and certificate that they had taken Anglican sacraments. These statutory requirements excluded not only the obvious minorities – Catholics, Quakers, Jews, Muslims, atheists – but also many of the more mainstream Protestant dissenters. This compromise between full toleration of a diversity of religious beliefs and the restriction of full civil liberties to the Anglican confession was the result of the theological origins of the Toleration Act itself. The statutory legislation of 1689 was the result of complex and careful negotiation between Anglican and dissenting interests rather than the conclusion of conceptual considerations about the rights of conscience. Such statutory provisions were calculated to avoid much more dangerous alternatives being advanced: the overwhelming imperative was to preserve the authority and legitimacy of the ‘true’ Anglican religion.