NONCONFORMIST SCHOOLS, THE SCHISM ACT, AND THE LIMITS OF TOLERATION IN ENGLAND’S CONFESSIONAL STATE

James E. Bradley

Following the Restoration and the Act of Uniformity (1662), the Anglican Church widely assumed that any form of religious dissent was schismatic and enforced religious uniformity with legal sanctions that oblige us to think of England at the time as a unitary, confessional state.1 “Noncon­ formists” or Protestant (principally Presbyterians, Indepen­ dents, , and ) began an extended if intermittent defense of their legitimate, non-schismatic status in the early that arguably witnessed some success in the religious compromise at the Revolution of 1689. Under the Toleration Act and throughout the reign of William and Mary, the Nonconformists enjoyed the limited freedom of legal toleration, though the Act merely suspended the legal penalties against Protestant Dissenters—Catholics and those who denied the Trinity were specifically excluded. During this period Nonconformist academies multiplied, even though their teachers endured numerous cases of prosecution. Under Queen Anne (1701–1714) this limited toleration was radically restricted, particularly through the Schism Act of 1714 that was designed to stop reli­ gious instruction in the Dissenting schools and academies and thereby contain, if not end, the growth of “schism.” This essay explores one aspect of the longer quest of Nonconformity for a legitimate, separate status of individual congregations and how that new status bore on a national, con­ fessing church and state. The repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts in 1719 has been quite thoroughly studied, but surprisingly little attention has been given to the controversy leading up to the Schism Act and how it related to the Toleration Act. While the broader political and religious contexts of the Act itself have also been examined in detail, the pamphlet literature has not been sufficiently explored.2 Here we will examine the public

1 I am very grateful Dr. David L. Wykes, Director of Dr. Williams’ Library, London, for his generous advice regarding the Schism Act, the many resources he made available to me, and for his helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of the essay. 2 David L. Wykes, “Religious Dissent, the Church, and the Repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, 1714–19,” in Religion, Politics and Dissent, 1660–1832, ed. Cornwall and Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 165–183; G.M. Townend, “Religious

598 james e. bradley debate over Nonconformist schools and look in passing at the debates in Parliament and Convocation in an effort to estimate the perceived threat to the toleration of the Dissenters.3 The attack on the Dissenters’ schools was part of a much broader controversy over the legitimacy of Dissent and the meaning and durability of the Toleration Act. During Anne’s reign, at every conceivable point the Dissenters’ religious identity was threatened, including the validity of Dissenting ordinations, the validity of baptisms, and the right to hold public office and vote. But it was the debate over the right to educate their own children that revealed most clearly the limits of the Toleration Act and the lengths to which the confessional state might have been carried under the leadership of a Tory administration and high- Church divines. It would be no exaggeration to say that in 1714 toleration was nearly terminated, even if by 1719 the limits of the confessional state itself had been clearly drawn and placed on a new, legal foundation. With the accession of Anne and the newly acquired authority of the Tories, the Nonconformists encountered a significant reversal of fortunes, and one of the first hints of trouble emerged from the Lower House of Convocation in 1702. In an appeal to enforce the law against the formation of “seminaries” by “ignorant and disaffected persons,” the lower clergy rec­ ommended to the House of Lords that the bishops strictly enforce the Act of Uniformity. Since “the numbers of non-licenced schools and seminaries are multiplied, and the danger arising from their daily increase” offers “no security to church or state,” but rather tends to “the subversion of both,” the bishops were admonished to use their “utmost authority” for “­suppressing such seminaries” in order to prevent the growth of schism and sedition. The academies, it was said, were not only prejudicial to the two ­universities, but they “tend to perpetuate the schism we now labor under, and to subvert the established constitution.”4 The last phrase omi­ nously implied the conviction that the Toleration Act was a temporary expedient.

Radicalism and Conservatism in the Whig Party under George I: The Repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts,” Parliamentary History 7 (1988): 24–44; Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, rev. ed. (London: Hambledon, 1987), 103–104; G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford: OUP, 1975), 176–179. 3 The study of Nonconformist schools is the subject of a major research project under the direction of Isabel Rivers and David Wykes. Here space does not permit the heretofore neglected matter of prosecutions under the Act, which did occur, nor will it be possible to go into any depth concerning the legal side of the Act, the actual formed opposition to it, and the technical matters of the movement of the Bill and its amendments through Parliament. 4 Edward Cardwell, Synodalia: A Collection of Articles of Religion, Canons, and Pro­ ceedings of Convocation, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 1842), 2:712–713, 718.