I

Controversy over the practice known as occasional conformity was a recurrent feature of party politics in England during the reign of Queen Anne. Occasional conformity, that is, the practice of Protestant nonconformists annually receiving the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in the Church of England in order to qualify for public office under the terms of the Test and Corporation Acts, was the subject of no less than six separate legislative efforts in parliament as well as a ferocious print controversy during the early years of the eighteenth century. Moreover, the themes adumbrated in that controversy, particularly the religious implications of the putative virtue of ‘moderation’, became enduring fixtures of English ecclesiastical politics well into the reign of George I. And yet, the occasional conformity controversy consistently merits only superficial consideration from historians of the period, very few of whom accord it anything approaching the intellectual depth or international resonance of contemporaneous controversies over religious toleration or the doctrine of the trinity; or the political urgency of the Sacheverell trial or the Bangorian controversy.Footnote ¹ Accounts of the controversy have generally presented it as a particularly bitter manifestation of the ‘rage of party’ between whigs and tories.Footnote ² This approach tends to treat the ideological struggles over occasional conformity as rather obviously and unproblematically synonymous with the issues that characterized parliamentary conflict. Its proponents rarely glean from the extensive pamphlet literature surrounding the controversy much more than mere confirmation of the monolithic and unchanging religio-political biases that putatively characterized the respective parties: in this case, whig solicitousness and tory antipathy with respect to Protestant nonconformity. Even those accounts that attempt to grapple with the content of the public debate still tend to view the occasional conformity controversy as epiphenomenal, an exchange that ‘enunciated and crystallized the ideological differences between the two parties’, but did not meaningfully alter or problematize their commitments.Footnote ³

Two of the most salient, though seldom noted, features of the occasional conformity controversy should warn, however, of something more complex at work. First, as most historians tend to attribute opposition to occasional conformity to a monolithic Anglican toryism or high churchmanship, it is seldom noted that the most prominent voices in the public controversy belonged overwhelmingly to the nonjurors.Footnote ⁴ The nonjurors, those churchmen deprived of office for their refusal to transfer their allegiance from the displaced James II to William and Mary at the consummation of the Revolution, cannot be readily subsumed within the mainstream of Anglican toryism. Indeed, many of their political, theological, and ecclesiological commitments were still at the turn of the eighteenth century, more or less, peculiar to their communion. Did the nonjurors enlist in the occasional conformity debate simply as mouthpieces for conformist toryism? Or did the nonjurors have some particular ideological investment in the discrediting of the practice of occasional conformity?

Second, it is not entirely clear from the extant historiography why the occasional conformity controversy assumed the form of a debate over the meaning of moderation. As Ethan Shagan has demonstrated, the claim of moderation was an exceedingly familiar trope of English religious and political polemic in the early modern period – even, indeed especially, on behalf of the most illiberal positions.Footnote ⁵ Yet, this was not the case this time. The occasional conformity controversy featured an almost unprecedented onslaught by nonjurors and their ideological allies against the very concept of moderation. More puzzling still was the extent to which the nebulous concept of moderation eclipsed the far more concrete development of religious toleration as the pre-eminent threat to the established church. Indeed, as many historians consider the occasional conformity controversy as part of a broader ‘conservative reaction’ against the ecclesiastical settlement of 1689, one would expect the issue of toleration to feature more prominently in the dispute.Footnote ⁶ That it did not was certainly not for lack of trying. Whig and nonconformist defenders of occasional conformity routinely attempted to brand criminalization of the practice as an infringement upon the Toleration Act. And yet, with a handful of notable exceptions, critics of occasional conformity consistently disavowed any interest in rolling back the indulgence. Their quarrel, they claimed, was with moderation, an altogether different social and political malady.

The occasional conformity controversy, this article will argue, was a referendum on religious modernity and the Glorious Revolution's role in its inauguration. The controversy laid bare the fundamental structural and ideological tensions underpinning the Revolution settlement in church and state. First, the Anglican confessional state, putatively salvaged in 1689, was exposed as a fiscal-military state, the ultimate logic of which was the social order necessary for raising revenue and waging war.Footnote ⁷ In the throes of the War of the Spanish Succession, the second of two global wars to defend the Revolution settlement, the demands of orthodoxy were firmly subordinated to those of security. Second, the stable religious indulgence ratified in the Toleration Act of May 1689, by which an Anglican confessional state merely suspended the application of violence in the pursuit of religious uniformity, was exposed as an unstable religious fluidity. Whereas toleration signalled a politically hegemonic religious establishment indulging the nonconforming practices of religious minorities, occasional conformity threatened a promiscuity of communion: men passing from one church to the next, moving from orthodoxy to schism and back again without penalty or pang of conscience. In the occasional conformity controversy, churchmen glimpsed the Church of England's vanishing points on either horizon: subsumption within the post-Revolutionary state and its fiscal-military logic of servicing global conflict; or dissolution within the post-Revolutionary civil society and its commercial logic of free association and exchange. The occasional conformity controversy thus raised the spectre of neutralization in post-Revolutionary England: the fear that the transcendent soteriological programme institutionalized in the Church of England might be emptied out in favour of the earthly imperatives of security, peace, and prosperity.Footnote ⁸ Cognates of this term did indeed, in fact, appear in the debate, as when one tory MP blasted ministers who ‘stand Neuter, in matters that nearly concern the Interest of the Church of England’, or the London cleric Philip Stubbs's cry of ‘No Neutrality in Religion’.Footnote ⁹

Yet, the prospect of neutralization in state and society was increasingly conceived under the sign of moderation, signalling not simply lukewarmness or a waning of affect (to borrow an expression from Fredric Jameson), but rather the kinds of religious indifference mandated by the post-Revolutionary order.Footnote ¹⁰ This moderation, it must be noted, may have had either positive or negative valence – as in the charitable indifference toward those adiaphora that needlessly separate churchman from dissenter; or the fatal indifference toward the historical and ecclesiological demarcations that separated orthodoxy from schism. But for good or ill, the concept of moderation captured something of the modernity of post-Revolutionary England. ‘Moderation’, one commentator noted sardonically in 1705, ‘is a virtue of a more modern Complexion, of a later and more correct Edition [of Christianity], calculated for the present state of things, a sociable and useful Vertue’.Footnote ¹¹ To the extent that the occasional conformity controversy turned on the question of moderation, it involved a fundamental religious question which transcended the partisan scramble for short-term political advantage, namely, the location of the church between a modern state preoccupied by war and empire and a modern society characterized by voluntary association and commercial exchange.Footnote ¹² The importance of such ecclesiological speculation has unfortunately been underdeveloped in an Enlightenment historiography that tends to reduce the ‘problem’ of religion in this period to one of heterodoxy or unbelief.Footnote ¹³

In the occasional conformity controversy, the concept of moderation appeared to its critics as what might be described as a loss of ecclesiality – a disappearance of the church and its norms and imperatives into other social forms. The controversy thus evolved into an interrogation of the morphology of religion itself, a dispute over religious individualism and the dispensability of abiding ecclesiastical communion to the Christian economy of salvation. From this perspective, it becomes a good deal easier to understand why the nonjuring Anglicans, the self-styled confessors of the true Church of England, and the foremost critics of the post-Revolutionary social and political order, found themselves in the vanguard of the opposition to occasional conformity – and to moderation in general. Their writings in this affair collectively comprise one of the most sophisticated and far-sighted critiques of religious modernity produced in eighteenth-century England. Indeed, they go some way towards further cementing the reputation of the nonjurors as the exemplars of a genuinely English ‘Counter-Enlightenment’.Footnote ¹⁴ At the conclusion of this article, there will be an opportunity to reflect briefly on the ways in which their performance in the occasional conformity controversy impacted not only the tenor and content of civil and ecclesiastical politics in this period, but the contours of the English Enlightenment itself.

II

The practice of occasional conformity was not particularly high on the list of Anglican high-church and tory grievances before the final years of the reign of William III. For much of the decade, debate surrounding the practice remained largely confined to nonconformist circles, where it had long comprised part of a larger discussion among Protestant dissenters concerning the desirability of reconciliation with the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁵ The outcry in 1697 against Sir Humphrey Edwin, the occasional conformist lord mayor of London, who qualified for office at parish communion in the morning, before repairing to the meeting-house that afternoon in full mayoral regalia, was somewhat louder among dissenters. Most memorable was, of course, that of Daniel Defoe, who decried the spectacle of ‘amphibious’ Christians, and famously accused the lord mayor of ‘playing Bo-peep with God Almighty’.Footnote ¹⁶ Anglican high-church indignation was not, however, sufficient to place the problem of occasional conformity on the tory political agenda. Though written before the Edwin incident, Francis Atterbury's 1697 Letter to a convocation-man, the distillation of post-Revolutionary clerical disaffection, does not even touch upon the issue.Footnote ¹⁷ For Anglican high churchmen, the primary problem at this point was the danger of toleration degenerating into theological licence, rather than it providing through the mechanism of occasional conformity a backdoor to political office.Footnote ¹⁸

In the last years of the reign of William III, Anglican high churchmanship began to assume a pronounced ‘country’ inflection.Footnote ¹⁹ Anglican high churchmanship, like post-Revolutionary toryism more broadly, reoriented itself away from a staunchly royalist political theology toward a more comprehensive constitutionalism, characterized by solicitousness for the lesser organs of governance and a newfound wariness of crown prerogative. The Anglican high churchmen, particularly among the lower clergy and the universities, set themselves defiantly against ‘the court’ – the Dutch Presbyterian king, the Williamite episcopate, the Junto whigs, the imagined panoply of state interests that threatened the so-called ‘liberties of the church’. The Church of England, the convocation, the universities, the cathedral chapters – bearers of the so-called ‘rights of the clergy’ – were all enshrined in an ancient constitution allegedly under assault by the unchecked royal supremacy, along with the ‘Leviathan whigs’, and Williamite bishops who colluded in its aggrandizement.Footnote ²⁰ This ‘country’ or constitutionalist mode of post-Revolutionary Anglican high churchmanship informed nearly all of the great ecclesiastical controversies of the final years of William's reign, not least the agitation to restore the dormant ecclesiastical assembly of convocation.Footnote ²¹

The Worcestershire MP and baronet Sir John Packington's March 1701 bill ‘for the preservation of the Protestant religion’, similarly embodied the growing fusion of high-church and country sentiments. Exercised by rumours of the bishop of Salisbury Gilbert Burnet's imminent translation to the wealthy see of Winchester, Packington sought to outlaw all such translations (save promotions to the archiepiscopal thrones) to diminish royal influence over the episcopate. At the behest of the intemperate country opposition figure Jack Howe (ironically, a former Revolution whig and a man reputed to be bereft of religious principles), a clause was inserted into Packington's bill to deny office to any found during their tenure frequenting non-Anglican places of worship after qualifying for office under the terms of the Test Act. The long tory campaign against the practice of occasional conformity thus began as something of an afterthought. Packington's bill did not get out of committee.Footnote ²² Instead, his bill succeeded in eliciting the wrath of several Williamite bishops – particularly that of his own diocesan, William Lloyd, bishop of Worcester, who ruthlessly (albeit unsuccessfully) campaigned against Packington during his 1702 episcopal visitation in the diocese.Footnote ²³

With the accession of Queen Anne in March 1702, occasional conformity emerged for the first time as a national political and religious issue. The accession of a staunchly Anglican queen invited high churchmen to abandon their ‘country’ inflected opposition to the court, and resume their traditionally royalist posture. Churchmen could now look forward to a genuinely devout bearer of the royal supremacy and (presumably) an episcopate of increasingly tory and high-church complexion.Footnote ²⁴ The prickly constitutionalism answerable to the alleged hostility of William's court to church interests could be relaxed somewhat in favour of a more thoroughgoing Erastianism. But, of course, the reconstruction of harmonious relations between church and state required, in the first instance, that the state be purged of hostile interests – whigs, so-called ‘low churchmen’, and, above all, Protestant nonconformists. Tories and Anglican high churchmen thus set about to repair the integrity of the confessional state, long compromised (particularly since the death of the devout Queen Mary) by the foreign king and his whig and nonconformist allies – as one of their clerical advocates put it, ‘to Restore and Establish a Declining Church and a Sinking Nation, in Their Pure Forms’.Footnote ²⁵

The issue of occasional conformity became prominent during the election season preceding Queen Anne's first parliament. At the outset of the parliamentary elections, the leading high churchman Francis Atterbury nervously awaited the results from London, fretting that ‘the spirit of moderation prevails to an immoderate degree’.Footnote ²⁶ At St Mary's, Oxford, that summer, the incendiary young Oxford divine Henry Sacheverell, fellow of Magdalen College, preached a politically charged sermon in which occasional conformity was singled out for condemnation. Sacheverell's sermon, The political union, a disquisition on ‘the Dependence of Government on Religion’, marked a spectacular return to the full-throated throne-and-altar integralism of late Caroline toryism.Footnote ²⁷ The viability of the ‘political union’ of throne and altar that comprised the English confessional state rested upon the legal establishment that distinguished the Church of England from ‘All that Confused Swarm of Sectarists that Gather about its Body’; and the maintenance of the sacramental Test which institutionalized this irreducible ecclesiological distinction within the political realm.

The demarcation that separated church from sect thus by a kind of synecdoche stood in for the general border that preserved the political nation from the general mass of English society.

The gravest threat to the confessional state thus came from those who colluded in blurring these vital distinctions. Foremost among them were the advocates of comprehension that dominated the episcopal bench, those ‘Shuffling, Treacherous Latitudinarians’ among the Williamite clergy that had tried unsuccessfully in 1689–90 to compromise the terms of Anglican communion to comprehend a greater number Protestant nonconformists within the ambit of the established church.Footnote ²⁹ The post-Revolutionary Anglican high-church movement was, it is not unfair to say, positively haunted by the (substantially unfounded) fear that the comprehension project would be imminently revived.Footnote ³⁰ Yet, barring any future enlargement of the terms of Anglican communion (and with them the right to serve in public office), churchmen would still have guard against occasional conformity. ‘We must’, thundered Sacheverell, ‘watch against These Crafty, Faithless, and Insidious Persons who can Creep to our Altars, and Partake of our Sacraments, that they might be Qualify'd, more Secretly and Powerfully, to Undermine Us.‘ With the accession of the pious Queen Anne and the prospect of a reliably ‘Church of England parliament’, Sacheverell could look forward to legislation in ‘the Interest of Church and State, as to Remove so False an Engine, that Visibly Overturns Both’.Footnote ³¹ In a subsequent pamphlet (written later that year in defence of Sir John Packington), Sacheverell was even more emphatic in his denunciation of occasional conformity, which he came to consider ‘the most pernicious and Destructive Principle that ever the Church of England suffer‘d under’.Footnote ³²

Anticipating the latter critiques of more sophisticated thinkers, Sacheverell's The political union actually grasped the double-sidedness of the problem of occasional conformity. Occasional conformity persisted not only where the state had relinquished the maintenance (or, at least, political privileging) of orthodoxy, but also where society cherished self-interest above all else. For a sermon that is often reduced to its single, ferocious, cri de Coeur to ‘hang out the Bloody Flag and Banner of Defiance’, Sacheverell's The political union was underpinned by a rather compelling critique of commercial society. At the heart of the sermon stands a lengthy exposition of what Sacheverell described as ‘Establishing Government upon Riches’, that rather quietly informs much of the otherwise fiery rhetoric. ‘Wealth and Treasure’, Sacheverell admitted, ‘are doubtless the Instruments of the Welfare and Propriety of government, They Sustain It in Peace and Defend It in War.’ But the body politic, like the body natural, ‘may be Overcharg‘d with Blood and Spirits, Glutted with Food, and Burthen'd with plenty, so that what should Tend to Its Nourishment may Turn into a Disease’. Against the orthodox polity of the confessional state, Sacheverell contrasted a society predicated upon interest, ‘Exclusive of True Piety, Justice, and Religion’, a society animated by ‘the Desire of Encreasing Estates, Enlarging the Bounds of Empire, and Extending either Publick or Private Dominion’. Though rarely credited as a thinker of any profundity, Sacheverell perceived clearly enough that the exigencies of war, trade, and empire exacerbated the neutralization that plagued post-Revolutionary England: a polity increasingly uninterested in or incapable of maintaining the distinction between church and sect, state and society – ‘an Universal Mart of Trade and Corruption, Propagated and Carried on, Both in Church and State’. Even as polarizing and partisan a figure as Henry Sacheverell was not wholly blind to the broader social implications of occasional conformity, which threatened to enshrine at the heart of social life not simply whiggery or Protestant nonconformity but rather ‘the Petty, and Scandalous Designs of a Secular Interest’.Footnote ³³

By the time Queen Anne's first parliament assembled in October 1702, occasional conformity had bounded to the top of the tory political agenda.Footnote ³⁴ Packington even pressed the speaker of the House of Commons Robert Harley to name Sacheverell as his chaplain, an entreaty the speaker perhaps wisely refused.Footnote ³⁵ The Oxford MP William Bromley introduced a bill to prevent occasional conformity on 14 November 1702. The bill imposed a fine of one hundred pounds for any sacramentally qualified civil or military office holder found attending a conventicle where worship was conducted ‘in other manner than according to the Liturgy and Practice of the Church of England’, plus an additional penalty of five shillings for every day thereafter that the malefactor continued in office. Failure subsequently to conform to the established church would result in a permanent disqualification from holding office.Footnote ³⁶ The bill passed the Commons by a sizeable majority before the end of the month, when it was dispatched to the upper house.Footnote ³⁷ There the bill encountered trouble. The Lords made numerous amendments to the bill, which substantially diluted its force. The Lords excluded municipal office holding from the purview of the bill; they reduced the fine to a one-time penalty of £20; the lifetime disqualification was eliminated; and the window of prosecution narrowed to a mere ten days after attending meeting. They included within the definition of conventicle any meeting that abstained from prayers for the Princess Sophia of Hanover (thus potentially netting nonjuring assemblies), while at the same time excluding the long-established Dutch and French Protestant ‘stranger churches’ of the metropolis. The Commons in turn rejected the better part of the Lords‘ amendments, and a series of increasingly contentious conferences between the houses were unable to reconcile the bills. Despite the still robust support of the queen and the ministry, the occasional conformity bill was effectively dead by the end of January 1703.Footnote ³⁸

Opponents of the bill responded to this tory initiative by attempting to cloak the practice of occasional conformity within the penumbra of the Revolution settlement. The Revolution settlement, in this fairly whiggish reading, effectively committed England to religious toleration; leadership of the international ‘Protestant interest’ against Bourbon France and Catholic aggrandizement; and, of course, the Protestant succession in the house of Hanover. The occasional conformity bill, its opponents claimed, was an assault on all three. The ban, it was widely protested, violated the terms of the Act of Toleration. This was certainly at the heart of the whig case against the bill in the House of Lords, in which the ‘Effects of the Toleration’ were held to have been of incalculable advantage to church and nonconformity alike.Footnote ³⁹ Simon Patrick, bishop of Ely, ‘looked upon the bill as making a manifest breach upon the act of indulgence, which had made great peace, quiet, and love among us’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Others suggested that the widening divisions in English Protestantism would demoralize the Protestant interest abroad, ‘especially the Dutch’, just as a new war against Bourbon aggression was intensifying.Footnote ⁴¹ And some, sounding what would become a whig leitmotif in the controversy, tarred the bill's proponents as Jacobites who sought to open the ranks of government to nonjurors and perhaps even forestall the Hanoverian succession. The purging of Protestant nonconformists, it was held, was but a prelude to overturning the Act of Settlement, the legislative guarantee of the Protestant succession, and, thereby, ‘bringing in the little Popish Master at St. German's’, the adolescent prince of Wales, James Francis Edward Stuart.Footnote ⁴² Nothing less than the Glorious Revolution itself, it was claimed, was at stake in the contest over occasional conformity.

This strategy culminated in Daniel Defoe's infamous The shortest-way with the dissenters, published in December 1702, a pitch perfect satire of high-church rhetoric, which called for the violent extirpation of English nonconformity. Defoe's Shortest-way pressed the anti-occasional conformity writings of Henry Sacheverell and the Irish nonjuror Charles Leslie to what he believed was their logical conclusion, the resumption of religious persecution and the repudiation of the entire post-Revolutionary order. His high-church persona heaped praise on the nonjurors, disparaged the house of Hanover, slighted the casus belli of the wars against Bourbon France, and generally lamented ‘the near Fourteen Years, that the Glory and Peace of the purest and most flourishing Church in the World has been Eclips'd’.Footnote ⁴³ The fact that Defoe himself remained personally opposed to the practice of occasional conformity goes some length to show how rapidly the controversy had escalated into a referendum on the Revolution settlement.Footnote ⁴⁴

The defenders of the occasional conformity bill were particularly sensitive to the imputation of Counter-Revolutionary motives. There was, they claimed, nothing in the occasional conformity bill that substantially abrogated the Revolution settlement. For all the whig encomia to the ideals of Protestant reconciliation putatively embodied in the settlement, the attempts at comprehending Protestant nonconformists within the established church had been an unmitigated failure; and the religious indulgence that actually passed had done nothing to dislodge the Test Act from the constitution. Indeed, preservation of the Test had been among the stated purposes of William's invasion.Footnote ⁴⁵ To pretend otherwise was a brazen exercise in historical revision. And as the legislative toleration that had actually made the statute book left the Test Act entirely intact, tories could go out of their way to disclaim any designs on it. The preamble to Bromley's bill (somewhat laughably) claimed that ‘Nothing is more contrary to the Profession of the Christian Religion, and particularly to the Doctrine of the Church of England, than Persecution for Conscience only’. And the tory managers from the Commons complained at the free conference with the Lords, ‘that nothing had been more Misrepresented, than this Bill, which did not, in any respect, intrench on the Act of Toleration’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The surprisingly robust tory defence of religious toleration was remarkable in and of itself, but it served to reaffirm the tory characterization of the indulgence as a fundamentally negative liberty.

Pamphlets penned in defence of the occasional conformity bill took great pains to distinguish between the negative liberty of religious toleration and the positive right to participate in public life. State non-interference with religious belief and worship outside the established church was not to be construed as state neutrality with respect to religion, by which confession would be wholly disregarded as a criterion for public office. The freedom of conscience effectively enshrined in the Act of Toleration (which, in actuality, did no more than suspend penalties on nonconformity) was recognized as ‘an universal Right of Human Nature’, while at the same time sharply differentiated from ‘a Right to be cloathed with Coercive Power, to Sit and Act in Civil Courts, and Exercise Secular Jurisdiction’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Whig and nonconformist opposition to the occasional conformity bill, it was claimed, proceeded from a confusion of the two.

admitted one writer. But the occasional conformity bill did none of these things; it merely reaffirmed the conditions of public service, ‘as has been in all Times at the discretion and disposal of the State’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The establishment of the Church of England in the state plainly warranted the restriction of public service to those of that communion.Footnote ⁴⁹ Only those who erroneously interpreted the toleration to entail the neutralization of the state with respect to religion – or at least, the varieties of Protestantism – could consider the conditions of office holding set by the test and occasional conformity bill as a renewal of persecution. Such men only discredited their case by hyperbolically comparing the mere ‘restraint from occular privileges and state employments’ to the Spanish inquisition and the French dragoons.Footnote ⁵⁰

In autumn 1703, the tories returned to the second session of Anne's first parliament with every intention of reviving the lost occasional conformity bill. However, after a year of bitter legislative squabbling between the houses and interminable pamphlet controversy, the court had decidedly lost its ardour for the measure.Footnote ⁵¹ In November 1703, the tory propagandist Charles Davenant published a collection entitled Essays upon peace at home and war abroad, the eleventh chapter of which contained a lengthy assault on the occasional conformity bill. Bearing the approval of Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin and a dedication to Queen Anne, Davenant condemned the bill in largely politique terms. Davenant's objective was to ‘preserve the union, which alone can make us powerful abroad, and strong at home’. Religious controversy was plainly a menace to political unity. Moreover, antagonizing English nonconformists in a time of war was plainly deleterious to national security. Davenant reasoned that though the dissenters possessed ‘but little strength in the Landed Interest’, they counted among them numerous wealthy merchants, many in the seafaring classes, and a considerable presence in the urban, middling sort, ‘the lower Tradesman, or Retailers, Artificers, Manufacturers, and Day-labourers’. They were thus an indispensable component of the fiscal-military apparatus. And as such sectors ‘addict themselves to Trade’, they were unlikely to be enticed into conformity by the prospect of offices in government, the armed forces, or the church. On the contrary, further restrictions would make the dissenters economically more insular and politically more unified, creating a bloc of powerful interests within the commonwealth capable of affecting policy. Only ‘Moderation’ and the ‘Terms of Neutrality’, claimed Davenant, would suffice to ameliorate religious differences and clear the commonwealth of the blockages that arose from political and sectarian faction.Footnote ⁵² Unsurprisingly, proponents of the occasional conformity bill found this logic appalling.Footnote ⁵³ It was precisely the persistence of religious and political divisions in the nation, the high-church industrialist Sir Humphrey Mackworth reasoned, that made it ‘absolutely necessary to preserve Uniformity in the State, as well as in the Church, and to Establish the administration of public affairs in men of one or the other persuasion’. A policy of so-called moderation would only immerse the state in the same ecology of sect, party, and interest that characterized civil society.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, Davenant's paean to ‘moderation’ seemed to signal unmistakably the court's growing distaste for any revision in the terms of the ecclesiastical settlement that might compromise the unity necessary for good governance and the successful prosecution of the war against France. As Bishop Burnet put it, ‘it was necessary to continue the happy quiet that we were now in, especially in a time of war, when even the severest persecutors made their stops, for fear of irritating ill humours too much’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Despite the court's waning enthusiasm, William Bromley managed to introduce a second occasional conformity bill on 26 November 1703.Footnote ⁵⁶ Sir John Packington spoke passionately in favour of the bill, railing against the collusion of ministers, bishops, and nonconformists that had wrecked its predecessor. He staunchly rejected the wartime politique opposition to the bill, put forward by Davenant and others: ‘Does the success of our Arms abroad, or the levying Money at home depend upon it?’ Packington pledged his support for the measure, ‘that I might not see such dismal effects of our pretended Moderation’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The second occasional conformity bill was carried in the Commons by 83 votes and delivered up to the Lords with great pomp by some 200 members.Footnote ⁵⁸ The opposition to the bill in the House of Lords drew liberally on the partisan aspersions of Counter-Revolution, that the bill was the work of Jacobites and nonjurors bent on undoing the Revolution settlement; as well as the politique rhetoric of expediency, that the bill would derogate from the war effort. Though distinct, these discursive frameworks could be mutually reinforcing: after all, those who would willingly jeopardize the fiscal-military machinery were vulnerable to charges of disloyalty.Footnote ⁵⁹ The bill fell twelve votes short of a third reading in the Lords. Significantly, fourteen Williamite bishops voted with the majority.Footnote ⁶⁰ The remainder of the parliamentary session culminated with the dismissal or resignation of several prominent tory Anglicans from the ministry. At the conclusion of the session in April 1704, Anne professed her deep disappointment that concord over the matter of occasional conformity remained elusive. Proroguing the parliament, the queen admonished the members to return to their counties, ‘so disposed to Moderation and Unity, as becomes all those who are joined together in the same Religion and Interest’.Footnote ⁶¹

The queen's admonition did not end the matter. In the final session of Anne's first parliament in late 1704, the tories heedlessly resolved to secure passage of an occasional conformity ban by ‘tacking’ it to a revenue bill. Such money bills were not only constitutionally protected from amendment by the upper house but, in the midst of a global war, they were virtually guaranteed passage. The tactic was too clever by half. Effectively confirming the whig charge that tories cared more about divisive religious legislation than supplying the war effort, the bill was crushed in the House of Commons, 251 to 134, with numerous prominent tories voting with the majority.Footnote ⁶² At the end of 1704, the Commons passed a third ‘clean’ version of the occasional conformity bill, but it failed to get even a second reading in the Lords.Footnote ⁶³ There, the legislative initiative rested for the time being. Tory Anglican political fortunes perceptibly flagged in the remainder of the decade, as the queen and the ministry increasingly came to rely on whigs and moderates to govern the church and prosecute the war. In the years before the tory revival of 1710, the issue of occasional conformity was subsumed into the political and ideological complex of grievances known as ‘the church in danger’, the vague but pervasive sense that the established church was imperilled by a combination of negligence at court and heterodoxy in civil society.

III

The terms and tenor of the occasional conformity controversy began to alter perceptibly in the second half of 1703. Whereas the earlier phase of the debate often simply rehashed the terms of the Revolution settlement – the competing claims of toleration and Test – the controversy soon passed into less familiar terrain. Contention came to focus increasingly on the meaning of moderation, which did not in this instance resume its traditional role as a rhetorical device, what Ethan Shagan brands, the ‘enabling logic for English religious conflict’.Footnote ⁶⁴ On the contrary, the concept of moderation became freighted with social and material significance: it served, for good or ill, as a means of grasping the whole of the post-Revolutionary social and political order. For the defenders of occasional conformity, moderation came to embody the principles of so-called ‘Catholic communion’, a charity well beyond mere tolerance, that is, an effectual willingness to join in worship with all sincere Protestants. For the opponents of occasional conformity, moderation threatened an indifference to all external communion. The focus on moderation also began to divert the controversy away from law (the Revolution settlement and the occasional conformity bills) and toward ecclesiology. The debate on moderation was, above all, a debate on the contours of the church, particularly the institutional dimensions of its soteriological function. A controversy over the confessional uniformity of the state, which occasional conformity legislation was designed to ensure, gave way to a controversy concerning the integrity of the communion of the Church of England. This development goes some length towards explaining the growing prominence of the nonjurors in the debate. After 1703, it was the nonjurors who occupied the vanguard of opposition to occasional conformity. Though party political motives should not be wholly discounted, the nonjurors came to the controversy not as residual tories, but as the proponents of a robust Anglican episcopal ecclesiology. Their vocal participation served to transform the occasional conformity controversy into a referendum on the nature of religious modernity.

Under the rubric of moderation, the argument on behalf of occasional conformity was evolving. From late 1703, whigs and low churchmen increasingly defended the practice of occasional conformity in terms of Christian catholicity rather than legislative toleration. Whereas moderation formerly suggested mere tolerance or abstention from persecution, the term was coming to convey a concept of so-called ‘catholic communion’. The former, of course, implies an acceptance of religious pluralism; the latter, however, ultimately reaffirms a universal church – or, at the very least, a capacious notion of Protestant solidarity. It had thus to be denied that the episcopal Church of England demarcated the national limits of the universal church. The universal church was comprehensive, including all theologically sound communions – established and nonconformist alike. Occasional conformity was thus only superficially a movement between churches. ‘Our Relation to the Church Universal’, explained the Shropshire Presbyterian James Owen in his 1704 work, Moderation still a virtue, ‘is constant and abiding … but our Relation to a particular Church is variable and occasional’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The occasional conformist was thus transformed from, at best, a tender conscience in need of indulgence (and, at worst, a time-serving hypocrite) into a Christian of boundless charity. ‘The Occasional Conformist, for whom I plead’, explained Owen in an earlier piece, ‘is one of Catholick Spirit and confines not his Communion to any one sect or party of Christians, but has an Universal and Comprehensive Charity towards all that belong to the Mystical Body’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Such a man, wrote the Irish-born lawyer John Hooke in his tract Catholicism without Popery, ‘believes the Holy Catholick Church, takes himself to be a Member of that Church and consequently believes it his Duty to refuse Communion with no Party of Christians, whose Communion does not necessitate him to Sin’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Similarly, the Shrewsbury nonconformist Francis Tallents in a work devoted to ‘Christian moderation and the communion of saints’ hailed ‘the true Catholick spirit’, which he defined as the ability ‘to communicate with Persons sound in the Faith, of all Communions, that impose or practice no sinful things’.Footnote ⁶⁸ These works comprised an extraordinary re-valorization of occasional conformity. The practice was not then simply to be excused as a lamentable necessity under the terms of the Revolution settlement: it was rather to be celebrated as the avant-garde of Protestant reconciliation and an affirmation of the comprehensiveness of the church of Christ.

The Anglican nonjurors began to mobilize against this new conception of moderation. Although the nonjuror Charles Leslie, denounced by Bishop Burnet in the Lords as the ‘Furiousest Jacobite in England’, had made important early contributions to the controversy over occasional conformity, most nonjurors did not begin to write extensively against the practice until 1703–4.Footnote ⁶⁹ At that point, however, nonjurors became conspicuous in the public debate. Nearly every leading nonjuring polemicist – Leslie, Henry Dodwell, Samuel Grascome, Thomas Wagstaffe, Robert Nelson, William Higden, Mary Astell – put pen to paper in opposition to occasional conformity in these years. By 1704, Viscount Barrington observed that ‘those who have wrote for the Occasional Conformity Bill are most of ‘em Jacobites and Nonjurors’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Rather than consider the nonjurors merely as operatives of a conformist tory Anglicanism of which they never wholly approved, we must consider the distinct and independent ideological investment nonjurors might have had in the repudiation of occasional conformity.Footnote ⁷¹

Nonjurors began writing extensively against occasional conformity just as the controversy was evolving from a question of polity to one of ecclesiology. Their scrupulous regard for ecclesiological orthodoxy and the peril of schism, which provided the constitutive rationale of their entire movement, made them particularly sensitive to this subtle ideological drift in the controversy. The demands for a religiously tolerant state seemed to be giving way to calls for a porous church, or, worse, a plural church. The nonjurors trained on what they deemed ‘the Modern Advocates for Moderation’.Footnote ⁷² In their telling, moderation was not charity but indifference. ‘To moderate in Religion’, explained Mary Astell, ‘is the same thing as to be lukewarm’. Such was the mark of the church at Laodicea, condemned by God in the book of Revelation for their comfort and temperance in the faith. ‘Laodicean Latitude and Indifferency in Religion, which God abhors … ’ railed Charles Leslie, ‘recommends it self to us, at this day, under the specious name of moderation.’Footnote ⁷³ Specifically, moderation entailed an indifference not toward faith per se, but rather toward the externality of communion, the mistaken notion that ‘a Man may Change Churches, and go from One to Another, Provided only that Christianity be Taught’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Leslie's estimation, the specious claim for Catholic communion was, in reality, nothing short of a repudiation of all ecclesiastical authority, in which the church

This nascent conception of moderation, which so exercised the nonjurors, seemed to imply, first, that the church of Christ was not only plural, but heterogeneously so, comprised of multiple communions organized and governed variously; second, that, provided a certain measure of theological orthodoxy, these multiple communions were alike in their soteriological efficacy and therefore possessed an equal validity; and finally, that the choice between them was ultimately a matter of preference – what Mary Astell contemptuously dismissed as ‘the Gratification of the Fancy’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Most importantly, this whiggish conception of moderation was fundamentally incompatible with one of the animating principles of the nonjuring movement: the gravity of schism. The movement, after all, was more than a mere rejection of the dynastic Revolution of 1688–9; it was a repudiation of the subsequent deprivation of the loyalist bishops with whom the nonjurors opted to maintain communion. For nonjurors, this enduring communion with the canonical bishops (rather than their political allegiance to James II) established their title to the true Church of England set off from the schismatic Revolution establishment. To the extent that this emergent conception of moderation seemed to attenuate the gravity of schism, it not only undermined the nonjurors’ exclusive conceit of orthodoxy, it entailed an ecclesiological radicalism in which churches within the body of Christ could diverge and proliferate endlessly without any diminution of legitimacy. This was the high road to religious voluntarism. ‘To separate from a Church with which we can communicate without sin is schism’, wrote Thomas Wagstaffe, a bishop in the nonjuring communion. ‘And if this be not the case, there can be no such thing as Schism in the world, nor no such thing as a church. ‘Tis only a voluntary Society which Men may enter into and recede from at pleasure.’Footnote ⁷⁷

The nonjurors saw, more clearly than most, that the threat occasional conformity posed to the church was more profound than that to the state. Indeed, this reorientation was unmistakably signalled in their habit of frequently referring to the practice as ‘occasional communion’, rather than occasional conformity, thereby highlighting the illegitimacy of the ecclesial relationship over that of the legal qualification. The nonjurors conceived of the church as a corporate and visible society, an order constituted by the lasting adherence of spiritual subjects to their spiritual governors, the clergy, and bishops. Occasional communion was thus, strictly speaking, an impossibility. ‘Dare our Occasional Conformist say’, asked the Irish nonjuror William Higden, ‘that when he received the Holy Sacrament as a legal qualification, he receives it as a member of the Church?’ Surely not, since membership required lasting adherence and obligation – in a word, communion – ever re-affirmed through faithful participation in the authoritative offices of the church. ‘His communicating with the Church upon some occasion no more makes him a Member of our Church than a Visit at my Neighbour's House makes me an Inhabitant, or my lodging once or twice at an Inn makes it my home.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, occasional communion was a veritable contradiction in terms, an oxymoron which could not be reconciled. ‘Communion denotes Church-membership, and an intimate and mutual union between the parts’ explained Thomas Wagstaffe, ‘but occasional denotes straggling and wandring and no union at all.’Footnote ⁷⁹ Occasional conformity thus undermined what might be called the sociality of the church, the notion of the church as a distinct and visible society possessed of its own divinely appointed form of government and maintained through the sacerdotal power of admission to and exclusion from the sacraments.Footnote ⁸⁰ Occasional conformity made a mockery of ecclesiastical sociality, assuming and relinquishing membership in this or that church as interest and preference dictated. And in rendering ecclesiology more or less ancillary to soteriology, occasional conformity threatened the neutralization of the church, ‘ruining all lasting and obliging Principles of Unity and firm Communion’, warned the eminent nonjuring scholar Henry Dodwell, ‘and leav[ing] all at liberty, whether they will or will not maintain any one Communion’.Footnote ⁸¹

Moderation, then, was, for the nonjurors, a more dreadful prospect than toleration had ever been. After all, religious toleration as a mere abstention from persecution was not, in the final analysis, incompatible with a notion of schism. The deficient meetings of the nonconformists were indulged, but indulgence did not convey orthodoxy. The legal indifference of the political establishment toward nonconformists’ worship did not, in any way, mitigate their error or absolve them of the ultimate consequences thereof.Footnote ⁸² From the point of view of orthodox Anglicans, religious toleration merely deferred punishment from this world to the next. Moderation, however, as it became implicated in the ideals of ‘Catholic communion’ and the practice of occasional conformity, fundamentally undermined the clear distinction between church and sect upon which toleration rested. Christians were invited to migrate between church and sect as individual preference or material interest dictated. Anglican high churchmen, observed one whig clergyman, now suppose that by moderation was ‘meant a perfect neutrality in religion’.Footnote ⁸³ All communion was rendered precarious by what one pamphlet derided as a ‘Yielding, Bending, Complying Anythingarian Religion that can Conform or Nonconform, as may best suit our Designs and Interests.’Footnote ⁸⁴ The gravest Anglican apprehensions about the waning of ecclesiality were no doubt confirmed by a pamphlet published in 1704, entitled The principle of the Protestant Reformation explain'd, in which the author insisted that ecclesiastical communion was ancillary to the Christian economy of salvation. ‘Supposing then, that all the English Protestant Communions do agree as to the necessary Points of Christian Faith and Morals’, the author opined, ‘a good Man may joyn himself to any of them.’Footnote ⁸⁵ The nonjuring gentlemen and philanthropist Robert Nelson penned a sharp reply, reaffirming the irreducible sociality of Christian soteriology and the superiority of binding ecclesiastical communion over the rather arbitrary and capricious church attendance recommended by the pamphlet.Footnote ⁸⁶

Picking up on a theme first adumbrated by Henry Sacheverell, many critics of occasional conformity suspected that moderation represented a commercialization of religion. Communion would ultimately be dictated by mere interest or preference; and a church would be no more than a sect or a club bereft of any obligation to adherence, ‘to which there goes no more than to be of this opinion; and they might change from one to another ten times a day, or, as a Man may change his lawyer or physician without any hazard or penalty’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The proponents of occasional conformity, wrote Robert Nelson, ‘speak of Churches, ‘tho of different Communions, as Gentlemen do of Seats in the Country, and choose one before another for Ease and Convenience sake’.Footnote ⁸⁸ This fear that communion would be infected with a kind of commercial logic, the consumer mentality of a ‘Mercantile Conscience’, permeated nonjuring tracts against occasional conformity.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a commercial society, religion itself would become commercialized. The nonjurors had thus navigated their way to the second disappearing point of the church: civil society, the sphere of life constituted by contract, exchange and voluntary association. Whereas the earliest Anglican critics of occasional conformity fretted over the sacrifice of orthodoxy to raison d’état and the logic of national security, the second wave led by the nonjurors found the church no less imperilled by the penetration of the market.

The partisans of the Church of England could now, perhaps for the first time, discern clearly the morphology of modernity and the church's place within it. Orthodoxy was to be held in suspension by a fiscal-military state concerned only with the social stability necessary for extracting revenue and waging war; or it was to be dissolved by the ‘Anythingarianism’ of a commercial society that prized, above all, individual preference and the fungibility of all social relations. These were the points of neutralization: the state that could not afford orthodoxy and the civil society that could not sustain it. And indeed, this realization dictated the agenda of the Anglican high-church movement, both juring and nonjuring, for the better part of two decades.

Setting its face against both Erastianism and voluntarism, Anglican high churchmanship in the early eighteenth century committed itself to the reconstruction of the ecclesial as a tertiary space of public life distinct from both state and civil society. Nearly every high-church cause célèbre in this period, from the revival of convocation through the Bangorian controversy, was overwhelmingly concerned with the refurbishing of an ecclesiastical authority, independent of both the state and the people. Increasingly taking its ecclesiological cues from the nonjurors, the Anglican high-church movement was seized in the early eighteenth century by a vigorous sacerdotalism, a virtually unprecedented regard for the autonomy and indispensability of clerical power that many thought transgressed the boundaries of Protestantism. Significantly, just as the occasional conformity controversy was beginning to subside in 1706, the freethinker Matthew Tindal published his extraordinary tract The rights of the Christian church asserted, against the Romish and all other priests who claim an independent power over it, a relentless frontal assault on the very notion of an ecclesiastical authority independent from state and society. In response, both juring and nonjuring wings of the Anglican high-church movement lined up to vindicate volubly the spiritual authority of the priesthood and the autonomy of the Church of England. Such confrontations set the rhythm and tenor of the early English Enlightenment, where freethinking publications of thoroughgoing anti-clericalism were answered with ever more intemperate assertions of priestly power.Footnote ⁹⁰

IV

The occasional conformity controversy comprised an evolutionary leap beyond the late seventeenth-century discourse of toleration, through which participants began grappling substantively with the modernity of English state and society and the place of the church therein. That such an engagement largely proceeded under the rubric of moderation has made it relatively easy for historians to assume that the controversy simply continued Revolution-era debates over religious toleration metonymically. But moderation, particularly in the estimation of the nonjurors, assumed a far more worrisome aspect. In the ‘modern virtue’ of moderation, critics of occasional conformity gleaned the negation of ecclesiastical communion in favour of a capricious religious voluntarism, by which Christians gadded from church to church as fancy and interest directed. These critics apprehended an outcome far more alarming than whig political hegemony: the disappearance of the church as a unique and binding sociality, disintegrated between the compulsory sovereign state and the manifold contractual relations and voluntary associations of civil society.

The occasional conformity controversy, and particularly the contributions of the nonjurors thereto, interjected the critique of moderation into the mainstream of Anglican toryism. In June 1705, the tory propagandist James Drake's incendiary Memorial of the Church of England used the failure of the occasional conformity bills and the exodus of the tory Anglicans from the ministry to proclaim the church in danger. Drake's screed wholeheartedly imported the language of the occasional conformity controversy, railing endlessly about the ‘Specious, Deceitful name of Mo[deratio]n’.Footnote ⁹¹ The hatred of moderation soon became part of the ordinary furniture of tory Anglican polemic.Footnote ⁹² Anti-whig poems such as William Shippen's Moderation display'd and the anonymous Moderation in masquerade grew increasingly commonplace in the public sphere.Footnote ⁹³ ‘A very rude Clamour has been raised against moderation’, observed the whig churchman William Newton, ‘as if it were an Engine to destroy the Church’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Indeed, the rhetoric of anti-moderation rapidly outstripped the cause with which it had been initially associated. By the time a watered-down occasional conformity bill was finally passed with little controversy in 1711, as part of the horse-trading surrounding the peace preliminaries to end the War of the Spanish Succession, the opposition to moderation had become indelibly intertwined with the entire tory Anglican rhetoric of ‘the church in danger’.Footnote ⁹⁵

As the occasional conformity controversy demonstrates, religious contestation in early Enlightenment England was hardly limited to questions of mere belief. Indeed, to assume it was is effectively to enlist on the side of those thinkers who already insisted that salvific faith constituted the whole of religion and could therefore be safely dissociated from ecclesiastical communion. And this is to misapprehend fundamentally the nature of religious controversy in the early eighteenth century. What was at stake in controversies such as that over occasional conformity was the nature of religion itself, whether it was to become a purely individuated matter of personal conviction or whether it was to retain some necessary social dimension – one not merely conducive to Christian salvation, but absolutely essential to it. The critique of occasional conformity, particularly that of the nonjurors, was a revolt against precisely the interiorizing of religion that characterized nearly all of Enlightenment thought, the relegating of faith to what John Locke famously called an ‘inward persuasion of the mind’.Footnote ⁹⁶ For the nonjurors and the Anglican high-church movement more broadly, religion was a matter not simply of believing, but of belonging, of adhering to an historical community through faithful participation in its offices. Their contribution to what may be called ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ thinking in England consisted in the recognition that religion in modernity was imperilled not only by unbelief (or heterodox belief), but by a want of zeal, which made such belief (however doctrinally sound) conformable to a widening array of religious communities or no community at all. The nonjurors were prescient in diagnosing the ecclesiological flexibility that is the true hallmark of religious modernity. This flexibility ultimately rendered all communion precarious. Accommodation, no less than heterodoxy, placed the church in grave danger.