ABSTRACT
For many other reformers besides Paine, the half-dozen years between the ending of the American war and the outbreak of the French revolution were relatively quiet. At the end of the 1780s, however, religious reform again became a heated issue in Britain when the Dissenters renewed their efforts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. From the Restoration of 1660, those who dissented from the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England (perhaps 6 to 7 per cent of the population in 1790) suffered under restrictive legislation, including being prohibited from election to Parliament or local government posts or receiving a university degree at Oxford or Cambridge. Quiescent though most Dissenters were throughout the eighteenth century, many remained both strongly Whiggish and intensely aware of these disabilities. Encouraged by American independence, Dissenters in London, Manchester, Birmingham and elsewhere surged forward in 1787–90 to petition Parliament to redress their grievances. Concurrently some helped found the Revolution Society, nominally to celebrate the centenary of 1688, but equally to revive reform and repeal the Test and Corporation Acts (which finally occurred only in 1828). 1
