Indulgence, the Test Acts, and a Deathbed

In 1672 the king issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending the penal laws against both Protestant dissenters and Catholics. Parliament forced its withdrawal the following year, and the objection was as much constitutional as religious: a crown that could suspend a statute at will was a crown that did not need a parliament. The price of the retreat was the Test Act of 1673, which required officeholders to take Anglican communion and to deny transubstantiation by declaration, and its immediate effect was to expose his brother James, who resigned as Lord High Admiral rather than take the test and was thereby revealed as a Catholic heir.

What followed ran on that fear for a decade: the invented conspiracy known as the Popish Plot, the executions it produced, and the attempt to exclude James from the succession, which the king defeated by dissolving parliaments. He was received into the Catholic church as he was dying in 1685, by a priest brought secretly to the bedchamber. The atlas notes the shape of the reign rather than a verdict on it. A ruler personally inclined to toleration and privately attached to Rome presided over the statutes that made English dissent permanent, because in this period what a monarch believed and what a parliament enacted were separate questions.