THE PENALTIES FOR DISSENTING FROM THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH
The Clarendon Code was a series of statutes passed by Parliament in the immediate aftermath of the monarchy’s restoration. The aim was to exclude Puritans from playing an active part in religious and public life.
During the 1650s Anglicanism had suffered a similar fate as befell its supreme governor, Charles I. In alliance with Scottish Presbyterians, Parliament had abolished episcopacy during the Civil War. Meanwhile, toleration of most Protestant sects was introduced. Paradoxically, this widening of religious liberty often had the consequence of emboldening the more intolerant forms of Puritanism. The repression of essentially harmless activities and traditions that were not explicitly condoned in the Bible (including, in some cities, the celebration of Christmas) did much to give the name Puritan its pejorative, killjoy connotations.
During the life of the English republic, about 2,000 of the 9,000 church benefices were held by Puritans. In many cases, they had gained their benefices from traditional Anglican clergy who had been forced into hiding or exile.
With the Crown’s restoration in 1660, one of the first tasks was to decide the Church of England’s future form. Not all Puritans were necessarily opposed to a state Church so long as it either followed Presbyterian principles or readopted bishops only in a heavily modified role acceptable to moderate Puritan opinion. The talks broke down without agreement, and in consequence episcopacy was revived. With Parliament devising means to restore the displaced Anglican clergy to their former benefices, the incumbent Puritans were faced with a stark choice: accept the readoption of the old Anglican doctrine and liturgy, or get out.
The new king, Charles II, was not personally devout and had no reason to indulge a narrow view of Anglican triumphalism. After all, he owed his life to English Catholic sympathizers and foreign Catholic powers. Like Elizabeth I at her accession just over one hundred years previously, Charles II’s instincts were for a doctrinally broad-based Established Church. In this, he had the support of his lord chancellor, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. In contrast, Parliament – bent upon punishing past Puritan excesses – was less prepared to be so accommodating and wanted a Church settlement that divided and ruled. Clarendon duly found himself lending his name to laws that went further than either he or his royal master intended.
From the Corporation Act, 1661
III. That all persons who upon the four and twentieth day of December one thousand six hundred sixty and one shall be mayors, aldermen, recorders, bailiffs, town clerks, common council men and other persons then bearing any office or offices of magistracy, or places or trust or other employment relating to or concerning the government of the said respective cities, corporations and boroughs, and cinque ports and their members and other port towns, shall, at any time before the five and twentieth day of March one thousand six hundred and sixty and three, when they shall be thereunto required by the said respective commissioners or any three or more of them, take the oath of allegiance and supremacy and this oath following:
I, A. B., do declare and believe that it is not lawful upon any pretence whatsoever to take arms against the king, and that I do abhor that traitorous position of taking arms by his authority against his person, or against those that are commissioned by him. So help me God.
And also at the same time shall publicly subscribe before the said commissioners or any three of them this following declaration:
I, A. B., do declare that I hold that there lies no obligation upon me or any other person from the oath commonly called the Solemn League and Covenant, and that the same was in itself an unlawful oath, and imposed upon the subjects of this realm against the known laws and liberties of the kingdom. . . .
IX. Provided also, and be it enacted . . . that from and after the expiration of the said commissions no person or persons shall forever hereafter be placed, elected or chosen in or to any the offices or places aforesaid that shall not have within one year next before such election or choice taken the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper according to the rites of the Church of England, and that every such person and persons so placed, elected or chosen shall likewise take the aforesaid three oaths and subscribe the said declaration at the same time when the oath for the due execution of the said places and offices respectively shall be administered; and in default hereof every such placing, election and choice is hereby enacted and declared to be void.
Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon (1609–74).
The 1661 Corporation Act forced town officials to swear an oath of allegiance to the king. This was to be expected, but it also required them to take Anglican communion. What was more, the Act of Uniformity the following year instilled a form of Anglicanism noxious to most Puritans. Having been banned during the republic, the Book of Common Prayer was reintroduced as the only Church liturgy. All clergy had to be ordained by a bishop and subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Rather than comply, about 2,000 clergymen, mostly Baptists, Presbyterians and independents, resigned their livings. Initially referred to as Dissenters, they were later known as Nonconformists.
Not content to drive them out of the Established Church, the Clarendon Code was also determined to prevent them publicly practising their beliefs at all. Although the Dissenters’ faith was acknowledged as lawful, it was to be conducted in private. The 1664 and 1670 Conventicle Acts made it an offence (punishable by a fine or imprisonment) to attend a service of worship that did not use the Book of Common Prayer. The 1665 Five Mile Act prevented dissenting ministers from living within five miles of either their former parish or of any corporate town, unless they first swore an oath of non-resistance. A separate statute, the 1662 Quaker Act, imprisoned more than 1,000 Quakers for their beliefs.
What the Clarendon Code did to Dissenters, the 1673 and 1678 Test Acts did to Roman Catholics. The Test Acts barred Catholics from accepting military or civil office and prevented them from sitting in Parliament. An exception was made for James, duke of York, the heir presumptive to the throne, who had converted to Catholicism. He survived a protracted ‘Exclusion Crisis’ in which ‘Tory’ politicians upheld his right and ‘Whigs’ unsuccessfully tried to block his right to succeed. This dividing issue is often seen as one of the milestones in the creation of Westminster’s two-party system.
Taken together, these measures aimed at ending the strife and upheavals of the Civil War period by creating an Anglican state for an Anglican people. Not only were the official churches only for Anglicans, so were the schools and the two universities. Undoubtedly, the legislation had some success in quelling the scale and visibility of dissent, but it also produced unintended consequences. Unable to enter public life or take part in formal education, the Protestant Dissenters did their own thing and found more profitable avenues to explore. Disproportionate to their numbers, they provided the next generations of bankers, inventors and manufacturers. In any case, far from withering on the vine, by the end of the eighteenth century the number of Nonconformists had swelled thanks to the decision of John Wesley’s Methodist followers to break away from the Church of England.
By then, the Clarendon Code had proved less successful than its zealous sponsors hoped and was being largely discarded. The Conventicle Acts were difficult to administer and fell into disuse. Following the Glorious Revolution, Dissenters were allowed, by the 1689 Toleration Act, to form their own congregations. The Five Mile Act had fallen into abeyance long before it was taken off the statute book in 1812. Imprisonment of Quakers ended with the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence. True, measures were passed during the devoutly Anglican Queen Anne’s reign to close up the ‘occasional conformity’ loopholes through which non-Anglicans had come to hold office and to prevent them opening their own schools. However, the crackdown did not long outlast the arrival of the Hanoverian monarchy and was scrapped in 1719. From 1727, annual indemnity acts allowed many non-Anglicans to hold local office.
Finally, in 1828 the Test and Corporation Acts were repealed, making Nonconformists free to hold municipal and state office. Catholics were similarly emancipated the following year. The dismantling of the Restoration’s Anglican supremacy was effectively completed between 1868, when mandatory Church rates were abolished, and 1871, with the removal of the last restrictions to non-Anglicans at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
