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A Preface to Swift's Test Act Tracts

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Ian Higgins The Australian National University, Canberra A Preface to Swift’s Test Act Tracts Abstract. There are seven securely canonical polemical works by Jonathan Swift that are primarily concerned with opposing Whig attempts to repeal the Sacramental Test in favour of Protestant Dissenters in Ireland. They are occasional prose works, polemical interventions in topical controversies over the repeal attempts of 1707–9 and 1732–33. In his Test Act tracts, and in other polemical and satirical writings, Swift responds to an array of Dissenting arguments arraigned against the Sacramental Test. One of these Dissenting anti-Test argu- ments was that temporal rewards for religious conformity and penalties for Nonconformity encouraged religious hypocrisy. Swift’s response to this argument has become notorious. This essay will offer a short view of Swift on the Sacramental Test and hypocrisy. It will notice the kinds of general argument Swift drew upon in defence of conformity and for imposing civil disabilities on Dissenters. I The Sacramental Test, in Swift’s words, “obliges all Men, who enter into Office under the Crown, to receive the Sacrament according to the Rites of the Church of Ireland.”1 The Test Act had been imposed in England in 1673 after the forced withdrawal of Charles II’s Second Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. It required “that all and every person or persons … that shall bear any office or offices, civil or military” must take “the Sacrament of the Lords Supper according to the usage of the Church of England.” The Test Act of 1678 further required all Members of Parliament to make a declaration against the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.2 After the passing of the Toleration Act in 1689, the Test Acts were the principal bulwark of the Anglican confessional state or at least of the Anglican monopoly of public office. The Sacramental Test was imposed in 1 The Advantages Propos’d by Repealing the Sacramental Test, Impartially Considered (1732), in Prose Works, XII, 245. 2 25 Car. II, cap.2: “An Act for preventing dangers which may happen from Popish recusants” (1673) and 30 Car. II, st.2, cap. I: “An Act for the more effectual preserving the King’s person and government by disabling Papists from sitting in either House of Parliament” (1678), The Stuart Constitution, 1603– 1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 461–62, 465–66; English Historical Documents, 1660–1714, ed. Andrew Browning (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966 [1953]), pp. 389–94. The Statutes of the Realm are also readily accessible in full via British History Online. 226 Ian Higgins Ireland in the “Test Clause” in the Irish Popery Act of 1704, at High Church Tory instigation, principally it seems at the Earl of Nottingham’s insistence and when the Tory second Duke of Ormonde was Lord Lieutenant in Ireland.3 Irish Anglicans, and particularly Archbishop William King, were said to have lobbied for the insertion of the Test Clause. King and other Church of Ireland bishops had long pressed for the imposition of the Sacramental Test in Ireland as in England.4 The Test was soon understood to be the underpinning of the Church of Ireland ascendancy. The Irish Anglican reaction to rumours in 1707 that a parliamentary attempt would be made to repeal the Test prompted Sir Richard Cox, the Tory Lord Chancellor of Ireland, to compare “the zeale which appeard on this occasion to nothing less then what [he] saw at the Tryall of the 7 Bishops.”5 Protestant Dissenters in Ireland sought liberty of conscience: the free exercise of their religion and the removal of the Test which disabled them from serving the Crown and country. They argued that the removal of the Test for Dissenters was in the interest of Protestantism in Ireland. Civil disabilities should only apply to Roman Catholics. The Established Church opposed the removal of civil disabilities, especially because Scots Presbyterians, who were numerous in the north of Ireland, were perceived to be the heirs of the Civil War Puritans and to be still committed to the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) and the extirpation of episcopacy. The Scots Presbyterians had abolished episcopacy and rabbled the episcopal clergy when they had political power in post-Revolution Scotland.6 Swift’s animus in writing and action against the Dissenters’ free exercise of their religion cannot be in doubt. In ATaleofaTub, published in 1704, the year of the imposition of the Test in Ireland, a Dissenting preacher is equated with a mountebank and consigned 3 2 Anne, cap.6. 4 Philip O’Regan, Archbishop William King of Dublin (1650–1729) and the Constitution in Church and State (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 140; Philip O’Regan, “William King as Bishop and Parliamentarian, 1691–7,” Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context, 1688–1729, ed. Christopher J. Fauske (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 73–105 (especially 78–82). 5 Cox to Edward Southwell, 15 July 1707, British Library, Add. MS. 38155, fol. 79. 6 For a succinct account, see Phil Kilroy, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, 1660–1714 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), especially pp. 43, 188–93, 252. There were political differences between Irish Anglicans on the events in Scotland. For example, the Jacobite Charles Leslie shared the Whig William King’s hostility to the Dissenters, but like Swift, and unlike King, put the blame for the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland on the Presbyterians and William III. King blamed the Presbyterians and the Jacobitism of the episcopal clergy there for the abolition. See [Charles Leslie], “Tothe Reader,” An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The State of the Protestants in Ireland under the Late King James’s Government (London, 1692), sigs a1r–e2r; Swift, Prose Works, V, 290; Archbishop King to Swift, 12 August 1708, Correspondence, ed. Woolley, I, 201. On the importance of events in Scotland on Swift and the Church of Ireland, see especially Christopher Fox, “Swift and the Rabble Reformation: A Tale of a Tub and the State of the Church in the 1690s,” Swift as Priest and Satirist, ed. ToddC. Parker (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), pp. 102–22..
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