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The Test Acts were a series of penal laws originating in Restoration England, passed by the Parliament of England, that served as a religious test for public office and imposed various civil disabilities on Catholics and nonconformist Protestants.
The underlying principle was that only people taking communion in the established Church of England were eligible for public employment, and the severe penalties pronounced against recusants, whether Catholic or nonconformist, were affirmations of this principle.[1]
Although theoretically encompassing all who refuse to comply with Anglicanism in a dragnet approach, in practice the nonconformist Protestants had many defenders in Parliament and were often exempted from some of these laws through the regular passage of Acts of Indemnity: in particular, the Indemnity Act 1727 relieved Nonconformists from the requirements in the Test Act 1673 and the Corporation Act 1661 that public office holders must have taken the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in an Anglican church.[2]
An exception was at Oxbridge, where nonconformists and Catholics could not matriculate (Oxford) or graduate (Cambridge) until 1871.
Similar laws were introduced in Scotland with respect to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and also in Ireland, where the minority Anglican Church of Ireland had penal laws set up in its favour to allow the Anglo-Irish minority to maintain control of land, law and politics as part of the Protestant Ascendancy.
- ^ One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Test Acts". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 665–666.
- ^ E. Neville Williams, The Eighteenth-Century Constitution, 1688–1815: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 341–343.
