In the early summer of 1689, after much parliamentary wrangling and debate, the statute of 1 William and Mary Caput 18 ‘An Act for exempting their Majesties protestant Subjects, dissenting from the Church of England, from the penalties of certain laws’ took away many of the legal restraints against religious conscience. Commonly called the ‘Toleration Act’, the statutory reform amounted to little more than the repeal of penalties against Protestant dissidents like Quakers, Baptists and other varieties of sectarian who refused to conform to ritual, ceremonial or doctrinal elements within the Anglican constitution. The passage of the Act has very often been linked with the intellectual defence of the liberty of conscience articulated famously by John Locke in his first, and subsequent, letters Concerning Toleration (1689). That there was a gap between Locke's radical defence of the rights of Christian conscience, and the mere taking away of certain penalties against religious worship, was clear to the man himself. As he wrote, in June 1689, to Phillip van Limborch in the Low Countries,