The 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 limited religious plurality. The issues highlighted in previous chapters stemmed not just from profound disagreement among clergy about how the Church should relate to tolerated Protestants, but in large measure from the shortcomings of the 1689 law itself. Unexpectedly shorn of the parallel measures for Comprehension, without which loopholes and ambiguities emerged, the Toleration Act was not entirely undeserving of the charge from a Tory critic that it was ‘full of nonsense and tautology’. It was at the very least a piece of legislation immediately under severe strain, applying to perhaps four times as many ‘Protestant Subjects’ as had been envisaged and doing something it was never intended to do.

This is not to diminish the immense significance of the statute. It secured freedom of worship according to conscience for Protestants, embedding limited religious diversity in English society. The legislation marked an official acceptance, pragmatic or positive, that the long campaign to coerce the nation to be of one religion had failed and that Protestant pluralism was unavoidable. It should be appreciated, though, that the religious stability apparent by the 1720s had developed during a period of transition in which the practicalities of denominational coexistence were debated and often bitterly contested. A lasting pattern of Protestant pluralism, secured by Hanoverian rule and Whig government, emerged from experience of the Toleration Act's deficiencies and the working out of issues it conspicuously failed to address. Toleration was conceded in the immediate aftermath of a revolution and in the name of political stability, but what this would mean in practice depended on the experience of toleration as a political and social reality. It was a process of adjustment as much as a constitutional moment.

This process deserves a nuanced understanding. The fundamentally binary nature of the ‘first age of party’, Tory against Whig, makes it easy to view the decades following the Revolution as a struggle between supporters and opponents of a religious settlement enacted alongside a political one.