Toleration Act 1688

The Toleration Act 1688 (1 Will. & Mar. c. 18), also referred to as the Act of Toleration or the Toleration Act 1689, was an act of the Parliament of England. Passed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, it received royal assent on 24 May 1689.

The act allowed for freedom of worship to nonconformists who had pledged to the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and rejected transubstantiation, i.e., to Protestants who dissented from the Church of England such as Baptists, Congregationalists or English Presbyterians, but not to Roman Catholics. Nonconformists were allowed their own places of worship and their own schoolteachers, so long as they accepted certain oaths of allegiance.

The act intentionally did not apply to Roman Catholics, Jews, nontrinitarians, and atheists. Further, it continued the existing social and political disabilities for dissenters, including their exclusion from holding political offices and also from the universities. Dissenters were required to register their meeting houses and were forbidden from meeting in private homes. Any preachers who dissented had to be licensed.

Between 1772 and 1774, Edward Pickard gathered together dissenting ministers, to campaign for the terms of the act for dissenting clergy to be modified. Under his leadership, Parliament twice considered bills to modify the law, but both were unsuccessful and it was not until Pickard and many others had ended their efforts that a new attempt was made in 1779. The act was amended in 1779 by the Nonconformist Relief Act 1779 (19 Geo. 3. c. 44), which substituted belief in the Christians' Scriptures for belief in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican churches, but some penalties on holding property remained. Penalties against Unitarians were finally removed in the Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813 (53 Geo. 3. c. 160).