He is said to have occasionally attended the Mill Yard Seventh Day Baptist Church in London.
The judge appears to have sought a means to acquit Elwall, because, at the start of the trial the judge, unusually, raised the legal technicality of whether or not Elwall had been provided with a copy of the indictment; he hadn’t.
Elwall’s trial and acquittal were frequently referred to by Unitarians throughout the eighteenth century, as an intimated legal precedent that might ward off their own arrest.
Like many Dissenters, Elwall objected to the Tithe system that maintained the Church of England.
In the seventeenth century, some Dissenters had advocated their Comprehension into the Church of England, and by implication their inclusion in the Tithe system.