Parliamentary History, Vol. 40, pt. 2 (2021), pp. 343–361 ‘State Whiggs, but such Bigotted Church Toryes’: The Irish Toleration Act of 1719 and the Politics of Religion * ROBERT G. INGRAM Ohio University This article examines the origins and implications of the Irish Toleration Act of 1719. It makes three related arguments. First, it highlights what Britons during the early 18th century thought religious toleration was meant to achieve and to whom and under what circumstances reli- gious toleration might be extended. Second, it demonstrates the steady desacralisation of post- revolutionary British politics,even in a country like Ireland so obviously riven along confessional lines.Finally,it contends that both the arguments for and against the Irish Toleration Act illustrate that the established churches in the composite post-revolutionary British state were functionally civil religions. Keywords: anti-popery; civil religion; Dissenters; established church; Ireland; occasional con- formity; sacramental test; toleration 1 In late December 1718, White Kennett, bishop of Peterborough, wrote to the Irish bishop of Meath, John Evans, justifying recent legislation (5 Geo. I, c. 4) to repeal the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts. 1 Kennett explained that after the Glorious Revolution, ‘our best Church Men [had] thought reasonable’ to support extending ‘Toleration by Law’ to Protestant Dissenters, so not ‘to leave them to the cry of Persecution or to the Arbitrary Humour of Princes, who had sometimes made Church Men the Tools of Persecution, and had at other times without Law indulg’d the Dissenters only to cover the Papists’.That ‘Legal Toleration’ had continued through much of Queen Anne’s reign; but in 1711 and 1714 Tories had pushed through legislation targeting occasional conformists and Dissenting education. 2 After 1714, though, George I had been ‘well satisfed that the Body of Dissenters had been true to his Protestant Succession’; and he was therefore sympathetic to restoring * Spellings have been modernised. I particularly thank David Hayton, William Gibson, Ian McBride, Rachel Hammersley, Alex Barber, Max Skjönsberg and Carys Brown for their helpful comments on this article. 1 BL, Lansdowne MS 1034, f. 10–11: Kennett to Evans, 30 Dec. 1718. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this paragraph draw from this letter. Cf. G.V. Bennett, White Kennett, 1660–1728, Bishop of Peterborough (1957), 148–50.Kennett had known Evans from Evans’s time as bishop of Bangor. 2 Northamptonshire RO, MS FH/F/A/E/0281, f. 3–6, 6–10, 15–16: earl of Nottingham to Anne Hatton Finch, 6, 20, 26 Dec. 1711, recounts the parliamentary wrangling that enabled the passage of the Occasional Conformity Act.Brent S.Sirota,‘The Occasional Conformity Controversy,Moderation and the Anglican Critique of Modernity, 1700–1714’, HJ, lvii (2014), 81–105, best anatomises the ideological debates regarding occasional conformity,though he rejects the notion that it was an issue which clearly and cleanly pitted Whigs against Tories. © The Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust 2021