The English Parliament, however, suspected that their king favoured Roman Catholicism, and compelled him to withdraw this declaration in favour of religious freedom - putting in its place the first of the Test Acts (1673), which required anyone entering public service in England to take the Anglican sacrament.
When Charles II's openly Catholic successor James II attempted to issue a similar Declaration of Indulgence, an order for general religious tolerance, this was one of the grievances that led to the Glorious Revolution that ousted him from the throne.
William acted in cooperation with Parliament issuing a royalDeclaration of Indulgence rather than acting unilaterally as had James II in 1687 and 1688 and Charles II in 1672.
The licensing provisions of the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 gave Calvinists in a region like the West Country of Devon and Cornwall an institutional cohesion--established congregations--that they had hitherto lacked, but politically motivated persecution and prosecution during the turmoil of the following decades reduced Calvinist Nonconformity to a largely urban phenomenon by 1692.
English Calvinists legally began forming congregations around licensed ministers and meeting houses separate from those of the Church of England in 1672 when Charles II issued a Declaration of Indulgence in an attempt to garner political support against the increasingly obdurate Cavalier Parliament from Puritans excluded from Anglican Church offices by the acts of 1661-65.
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