240 Chapter X
ans in the Irish disturbances was well known. In the Association movement of
1780 the Dissenters were very active; 2,000 of them signed the Yorkshire petition,
and they had a majority in the county meetings of Cambridgeshire and Kent. In
conservative eyes they were susceptible to all kinds of dubious causes; they seemed
antimonarchical and “republican,” until, as their historian puts it, “the progress of
events made ‘Jacobin’ a more modish form of vituperation.”^37
The abatement of true religious conflict, the sense of the enlightenment of the
age, the promulgation of American principles, the relief of Irish Presbyterians from
the Test Act, and the growing wealth and importance of the Dissenting commu-
nity, a byproduct of growth of the commercial classes throughout Western Europe,
all contributed to a mood of optimism among the Dissenters, who, at a great meet-
ing of deputies of the three denominations in January 1787, decided to attack the
barriers against them directly, by petitioning Parliament for repeal of the Corpora-
tion and Test Acts. Three bills to this effect were introduced, in 1787, 1789, and
1790.
The interesting thing, in the broad view, is that the English Dissenters, who had
originated for the most part as Calvinists a few generations before, had now come,
by the needs of their situation as they saw them, to use the language and concep-
tions of the European revolution. They thought of themselves as “unprivileged.” As
their sponsor (an Anglican) in the House of Commons put it on May 8, 1789, they
asked only “the usual privileges and general benefits of citizenship.” They wished
access to public office and honors, like the French Third Estate which met at Ver-
sailles in that same week. They insisted that they bore no grudge toward the Estab-
lishment, and declared that some established religion was good for society, again
like the French in 1789, but what they wanted was a secular state, in which reli-
gious belief, or lack of it, should have nothing to do with one’s role in the political
order. The deepest human community should be political, not religious. The de-
scendants of men who, a century and a half ago, as Calvinists, had thought that the
State should be under the guidance of a true church, now held that the church or
churches should be within and in a way under the state, a state which conferred
equal citizenship on its people, and derived its authority from their collective sov-
ereignty. The English Dissenters, or their leaders, had traveled the path of the Ge-
nevese Rousseau. They wished to be “children of the State” though not of the
Church—to forget religious difference, and “bury every name of distinction in the
common appellation of citizen.”^38
The years 1789 and 1790 saw heated controversy. Never had Dissenters of the
great towns, Leicester, Nottingham, and others, been so active in support of those
of London. The methods of the Associations of 1780 were revived; there was a
plan for a national convention of Dissenters, which never materialized, but contin-
ued to alarm the defenders of Anglicanism. In March 1790 the bill to repeal the
Test and Corporation Acts was defeated for the third time, 294 to 105.
Conservatism hardened, and it hardened in defense of the Test Act and the ex-
isting arrangements to protect the Church of England. The beauties of the British
37 Ibid., 256.
38 Ibid., 255.