Few issues relating to the Toleration Act generated more controversy than ‘occasional conformity’. The Revolution did nothing to alter the sacramental test on public office set during the Restoration era, but after 1689 Dissenters were able serve in local and even central government through what was perceived of by many as a legislative loophole. Dissenters could attend parish churches occasionally to receive the sacrament of communion, thereby fulfilling statutory requirements for public office, but otherwise participate in their choice of tolerated Protestant worship. The first years of Queen Anne's reign would be dominated by a Tory crusade to exclude Dissenters from the political nation, which understandably looms large in standard accounts of the ‘first age of party’. The roles of the established clergy in the controversy, as polemicists and political actors, have received significant attention, but at the heart of clerical involvement lay a fundamental disagreement over pastoral strategy. The clerical cases for and against tolerating occasional conformity were as much spiritual as political.

Conformity and public office

The Revolution of 1688–89 did nothing to alter the religious tests for public office set in the Restoration period, but at the time hopes for change were high in some quarters. The fall of James II had abruptly ended his prerogative suspension of the ‘oaths or tests, that have been usually administered’, returning to force the 1661 Corporation Act and 1673 Test Act. The statutes demanded respectively that those entering ‘Imployment relating to or concerning the Government’ of borough corporations or any ‘Command or Place of Trust’ under the Crown receive communion in a parish church according to the Prayer Book liturgy. However, the oath of supremacy's denunciation of papal authority and the additional denial of transubstantiation required for Crown employment might on their own offer sufficient security against Catholics entering public office. The sacramental test could conceivably be fulfilled in Dissenting congregations as well as parish churches. Was the broadening of the political nation to encompass all Protestants the natural partner to ‘comprehensive’ ecclesiastical reforms and the toleration of those Protestants remaining outside the Church?