The Toleration Act 1688 (1 Will & Mary c 18), also referred to as the Act of Toleration, was an Act of the Parliament of England. Passed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, it received royal assent on 24 May 1689. The Act allowed for freedom of worship to nonconformists who had pledged to the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and rejected transubstantiation, i.e., to Protestants who dissented from the Church of England such as Baptists, Congregationalists or English Presbyterians, but not to Roman Catholics. Nonconformists were allowed their own places of worship and their own schoolteachers, so long as they accepted certain oaths of allegiance. The Act intentionally did not apply to Roman Catholics, Jews, nontrinitarians, and atheists. It continued the existing social and political disabilities for dissenters, including their exclusion from holding political offices and also from the universities. Dissenters were required to register their meeting houses and were forbidden from meeting in private homes. Any preachers who dissented had to be licensed. Between 1772 and 1774, Edward Pickard gathered together dissenting ministers, to campaign for the terms of the Toleration Act for dissenting clergy to be modified. Under his leadership, Parliament twice considered bills to modify the law, but both were unsuccessful and it was not until Pickard and many others had ended their efforts that a new attempt was made in 1779. The Act was amended in 1779 by substituting belief in Scripture for belief in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican churches, but some penalties on holding property remained. Penalties against Unitarians were finally removed in the Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813. Background During both the English Commonwealth and the reign of Charles II, nonconforming dissenters including Roman Catholics, were subject to religious persecution and precluded from holding official office. Following the restoration of Charles II, Anglican leaders debated in correspondence and public sermon the extent to which the Anglican church should allow doctrinal latitude; this debate was related to the corresponding debate on broadening church membership and tolerating dissenters. The succession of the Roman Catholic James II was challenged on religious grounds prior to his accession in what became known as the Exclusion Crisis and after he took the crown in 1686 in the Monmouth Rebellion. However, the Tory leadership of the Anglican church initially supported his right to rule based on the theology of active obedience to the monarch. James II