One issue which fostered both collaboration and rivalry between churchmen and Dissenters was that of national moral reform. Concerted attempts to better England's moral character certainly predated the Revolution of 1688–89, but the particular methods employed in the 1690s presented new challenges in a world of legal religious pluralism. Moral reform was strongly associated with the vocation of the clergy and the work of the ecclesiastical courts, although by the later seventeenth century there was an established history of secular involvement through the workings of the criminal justice system. To what extent were tolerated Protestants now to share in the work of national moral correction? The ‘societies for the reformation of manners’ which emerged in London and the provinces during the 1690s have received a great deal of attention, but the linked themes of toleration, Protestant identities, and emerging denominational status have only rarely been drawn together. The national reformation movement was to be undermined significantly by the controversial involvement of Dissenters in its work.

Protestants and moral reform

‘Reformation of manners’ was and is a phrase with many meanings. In the context of early modern England, it has usually been used by historians to denote concerted campaigns for the punishment of activities which were believed to offend God as much as man: drunkenness, sexual transgression, swearing, blasphemy, and the ‘profaning’ of the Sabbath. Reformers of manners often sought, through regulation of external behaviour, to alter the internal moral character of their subjects; ‘manners’ could even refer to the perceived moral climate of the entire nation. The phrase was particularly used by moral activists from the 1690s to the 1730s to describe their efforts to reform English society, but social historians have highlighted how the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods also witnessed significant efforts to exert what has variously been called ‘social discipline’, ‘social control’, and ‘reformation of manners’. There is broad agreement among historians that ‘reformation of manners’ was one element in the disciplining of English society through both ecclesiastical and secular channels. Martin Ingram has called it an ‘almost continually persistent … feature of English social life over several centuries’. The ‘societies for reformation of manners’ established in the 1690s were only the latest incarnation of a long-standing impulse for social discipline, fortified by the conviction that immorality would draw God's punishment down upon England.