Two Parliaments Escape Reform 239
eighteenth- century among Independents, Presbyterians, and Baptists. About a
sixth of all English clergymen were Dissenters, but the Dissenters were a much
smaller proportion of the whole population. They were most numerous in the towns
and among merchants and business people, though many of the latter were Angli-
can. Rare among the Anglican gentry, and with few followers among the poor,
whose inclinations to Methodism were still held within the established church, the
Dissenters as a group were self- consciously and self- righteously middle- class. They
had been tolerated since 1689, in that their belief and worship were not interfered
with. They were also free to vote for members of Parliament, and to sit in the
Commons, though few did.
Dissenters, however, by the Test Act, could lawfully hold no office by appoint-
ment of the crown in the civil government or in the army and navy. They could
not, by the Corporation Act, belong to any municipal corporation in the boroughs
or hold even the lowest of town offices. Hence they played little part in local poli-
tics, and were unlikely to be sent to Parliament by boroughs in which the Anglican
corporation named the members. No admitted Dissenter could take a degree from
either of the two universities. Though predominantly a business group, Dissenters
were forbidden, by extensions of the Test Act, to occupy positions of management
in the Bank of England, or in the East India, South Sea, and Russia Companies.
The rigors of the law were softened by the easygoing attitudes of the time, for in
fact a certain number of Dissenters held forbidden posts, either by occasional and
purely formal communion in the Anglican church, or because the authorities paid
no attention. Though subject in such cases to the dangers of denunciation and
punishment, they seem not to have lived in fear. Nor, as a prospering group, did
they have much strictly economic grievance. It seems likely that they came to feel
a sense of indignity—to object to discrimination.
The same legal disabilities applied even more effectively to the Catholics. There
were both Dissenting and Catholic leaders who, by the 1780’s, conceived of a civil
state in which all of them, along with Jews, might enjoy the same rights without
regard to religion. They could not, however, lead their followers in this direction.
Most Dissenters still felt the old horror of popery, and usually thought, in urging
recognition for themselves, that they strengthened their case by dissociating it
clearly from the Catholics. The inability of the Dissenters to combine with Catho-
lics, or even to stay combined with each other, together with the lack of heavy
material grievance, naturally weakened the assault on entrenched Anglicanism.
There still clung to the Dissenters, in the majority view, an unpleasant odor of
the old Puritanism and the king- killing of 1649. They were felt not to have the
right attitude toward the national institutions, to harbor a sour- faced disaffection
in church and state. Actually, like the French Protestants, who lived under even
worse disabilities until the Revolution, the Dissenters were patriotic and loyal.
About 1760, however, they began to exhibit a new political consciousness. In 1771
a group of Cambridge undergraduates petitioned for relief from the Thirty- Nine
Articles; they were refused. Dissenters were prominent among English sympathiz-
ers with the American Revolution, and especially with Puritan New England. Few
except Dissenters expressed any interest in the new American constitutions, with
their separation of political rights from religious affiliation. The role of Presbyteri-