While English proponents of religious toleration welcomed the Toleration Act of 1689, few, then or since, thought it a sufficient piece of legislation. In the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Babington Macaulay reckoned that the act ‘approaches very near to the idea of a great English law’, but that it ‘will not bear to be tried by sound general principles. Nay, it will not bear to be tried by any principle, sound or unsound’. For the legislation neither repealed existing anti-dissenting statutes nor accepted the ‘sound principle … that mere theological error ought not to be punished by the civil magistrate’. Instead, ‘persecution’ remained ‘the general rule’, even if some dissenting sects were legally tolerated under certain restricted conditions. At the time John Locke himself lamented that it was ‘[n]ot perhaps so wide in scope as might be wished for by … those … who are true Christians’. The great achievement of Ralph Stevens's Protestant pluralism is to demonstrate not simply that many thought the act insufficient but that many at the time of its passage actually did not know precisely what the legislation intended or entailed. And, on Stevens's accounting, the third-of-a-century process by which both proponents and opponents of the Toleration Act worked out both the meaning and implications of the act resulted in a (Protestant) pluralistic England.

Stevens's excellent book addresses an obvious, but understudied, question: what were the Toleration Act's practical consequences for both Dissenters and the Church of England? In its focus on lived experience rather than on theories of toleration, it bears some resemblance to Alexandra Walsham's Charitable hatred (2006). Like Walsham, Stevens is alive to ‘ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion’, while still ‘highlight[ing] how the practical experience of toleration … generated new paradigms for the structuring of English society’. Protestant pluralism, as this suggests, is about England, not about Britain, and Stevens draws his evidence from both printed and archival sources, giving particular weight to manuscript material from John Sharp's papers in Gloucester, Edward Stillingfleet's in Dr Williams's Library and the Henry family diaries and correspondence in the Bodleian Library. The argument based on these sources nicely balances local case studies with national ones.

Protestant pluralism opens with a familiar account of the post-revolutionary parliamentary rejection of Nottingham's comprehension legislation, the rise of Dissent and the rival Church of England strategies for dealing with the new confessional competition. Stevens's sympathies seem to lie with the ‘moderate pastoral strategies’ of Gilbert Burnet and like-minded Williamite bishops rather than with the ‘subaltern opposition’ of those like Francis Atterbury and Henry Sacheverell. Stevens reads the established clerical divisions politically and prosopographically, rather than theologically, which is not a fatal flaw in this instance, though it makes him less alive than might be hoped to the fact that the post-revolutionary toleration debates were fundamentally about soteriology.

That quibble, though, does not detract from the considerable merits of Protestant pluralism's core chapters, in which Stevens tells the story of the Toleration Act's unfolding meaning through an examination of public office, the Reformation of Manners, education, baptism and contested chapels. Stevens illustrates how the Toleration Act unintentionally catalysed the transformation of Restoration Dissent's ‘partial conformity’ into the regularised occasional conformity of post-revolutionary Dissent. Occasional conformity, in turn, fuelled the ‘Church in danger’ fears and the early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’. And the confessional angst which characterised the post-revolutionary decades informed clerical opposition to the various Societies for the Reformation of Manners, opposition ‘triggered by the involvement of Dissenters in their work’. Moreover, the Toleration Act, in the minds of many, left it unclear whether or not unlicensed Dissenting academies were legally tolerable: the legislative efforts culminating in the Schism Act of 1714 were, on Stevens's reading, an attempt to ‘restore clerical control’, but, crucially, to restore it ‘without explicitly overturning any provision of the Toleration Act, precisely because Dissenting education had established itself upon silences and ambiguities in the 1689 education’. From the perspective of the established Church of England's most robust supporters, the Dissenters also took advantage of the Toleration Act's silences and ambiguities to administer baptism and to establish chapels within existing parishes. With baptism, as with so much else, the Toleration Act seems to have caused as many problems as it solved. As Stevens himself concludes, ‘[t]he key point to be drawn from this study is that the Toleration Act settled very little about the future relationship between the Church of England and Protestant Dissenters. The legislation was so vague on many significant points that it all but guaranteed a troubled transition to religious plurality’.

In the process of making this argument, Stevens demonstrates a command of the primary source evidence and historiography that is admirable. But there is none the less the sense that he might have thought a bit more concertedly about what precisely toleration entails. The sense one gets from Protestant pluralism is that the Toleration Act was bad legislation because it was unclear and insufficiently generous: the political troubles that caused that lack of clarity and ungenerosity were, then, unnecessary and avoidable. And yet, as John Dunn and others have shown, toleration necessarily entails restraint and coercion and, furthermore, toleration is not tolerance. The only question for anyone who wants to expand or to constrict legal toleration is who should be restrained and on what grounds. Modern liberalism reckons that pluralism is not just inevitable, but good. But that was not how most living in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution saw it. And, as Ralph Stevens shows us, that they ended up with a pluralistic world was the product not of design but of confusion, uncertainty and chance. That pluralistic world, like ours, was characterised not by concordia, but by its opposite, a fate, one suspects, that would have surprised few of the Toleration Act's opponents.