ABSTRACT
First published in The Companion, I, 14 May 1828, pp. 257–61; see headnote above, pp. 49–50. The Corporation Act (1661) and the Test Act (1673) were statutes designed to reassert Anglican supremacy after the Restoration (1660), and obliged persons holding municipal office to take communion with the Church of England. The Acts were a source of discontent throughout the eighteenth century and were finally abolished by the Duke of Wellington’s Tory government in February 1828. Hunt was delighted, for he regarded it as a sign that the liberalism he had long championed was finally beginning to take hold: ‘a great gain has been acquired’, he asserts in the present essay. ‘The advancement is going’ (see below, p. 79). But for all his optimism, even Hunt could not have predicted the ‘advancement’ that was soon to come, for in the next four years British politics were transformed by the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), the first Whig government in a generation (1830), and the passage of the Reform Bill (1832).
