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1. It was not until the 1980s that
academic historians began to address some of the most central questions about
the eighteenth century Church of England for all areas of its activity. Before
the recent torrent of books, Anglicanism was neglected as peripheral, almost
unworthy of the scholar’s attention. Yet the Hanoverian bishops and clergy
crowned kings and harangued parliaments; controlled the universities and ensured
that none but those professing the national faith were eligible for public
employment; they secured popular acquiescence in the authority of most exclusive
ruling order in British history. As Jonathan Clark has pointed out in his English Society (1985), the political institution meeting the need of the
population in their everyday life was not the administration, let alone
parliament: ‘Elections were infrequent, contests less frequent still, the
franchise restricted, and access to MPs minimal for most electors’.
According to Clark,
The ubiquitous agency of the State was the
Church, quartering the land not into a few hundred constituencies but into ten
thousand parishes, impinging on the daily concerns of the great majority,
supporting its black-coated army of a clerical intelligentsia, bidding for a
monopoly of education, piety and political
acceptability.[1]
In contrast Hanoverian Britain had always
been represented as a quasi-industrial nation engaged in the pursuit of a
new-found material well-being, where all traditional authority in both Church
and State was affected, and finally destroyed, by the spread of empirical
enquiry and rational knowledge. Economic improvement and the advancement of
liberty and democracy were therefore exhibited as the only fruits of the long
century between the Glorious Revolution and the first Reform Act. As John H.
Plumb explained in his editorial foreword to the Penguin Social History of
Britain series, which commenced publication in the early
1980s,
As Britain’s national identity seemed
to be inexorably involved with the evolution of constitutional rights, with
liberty, freedom and, particularly, democracy, it is not surprising that an ever
growing number of professional historians should devote all their skills and
interests to constitutional, legal and political
history.[2]
On
their part Marxists historians emphasized social change. But the outcome was not
different. In the words of Christopher Hill, ‘spiritual desolation’
prevailed ‘as men contemplated the barren mechanical universe of Newton,
and the new dismal science of
economics’.[3]
In
fact it was mainly because Georgian Britain was depicted as essentially modern
that the Anglican Church could not but be described in turn as institutionally
enfeebled and intellectually sleepy. Both liberals and Marxists portrayed
religion in general and Anglicanism in particular as useless ornaments whose
displays of paternalism simply concealed their true, exploitative ambitions. As
a result successive generations of historians from Leslie Stephen to George M.
Trevelyan, from Basil Williams to Lewis Namier, have been anxious to diagnose a
condition of advanced moral decay in the body of the eighteenth century Church.
Their distaste for the political and social system of the old regime has been
enormously influential, and, when repackaged in 1950 in the alluring volume of
Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, remained
compelling:
Bishops became first and foremost
politicians, and politicians are rarely men of the spirit. There is a
worldliness, almost a venality, about eighteenth century prelates which no
amount of apologetics can conceal. The clerical duties of visitation,
ordination, and confirmation, were done only as political duties
allowed.[4]
For
Plumb the eighteenth century Church was little more than a mere distributor of
pensions and favours, pervaded by corruption in the guise of factionism,
nepotism and absenteeism:
The clerical life attracted increasingly the
younger sons of the nobility or gentry, and to help them collect an income equal
to their standing, non-residence was tolerated and plurality
encouraged.[5]
And
the obvious corollary of absenteeism in the Church was the growth of religious
indifference among the population especially in the new industrial
districts:
Evil and guilt, sin and redemption, the whole
personal drama and appeal of religion, was forgotten or rationalized away and
the eupeptic optimism of politicians pervaded the teaching of the Church. It was
not a religion which had much appeal to the men and women living brutal and
squallid lives in the disease-ridden slums of the new towns and mining
villages.[6]
Plumb
seemed to imitate John Wade, whose Black Book, a classic of radical
Whiggery, went through numerous editions between 1820 and 1835. On the eve of
the first Reform Act the Whig writers were able to create and propagate an image
of the Anglican clergy as dangerous parasites whose very presence enervated the
social fabric. Modern research has confirmed that in 1809 over 1,000 English and
Welsh parishes were without pastoral care, and that in some important areas less
than 15% of the population were communicants. Even in rural Lincolnshire at the
beginning of the nineteenth century only one in three had anything at all to do
with the Anglican establishment, and only one in six took communion. No wonder
therefore that the Church seemed to many contemporaries to be corrupt,
over-wealthy and over-powerful, even more so at the top where climbing the
ladder of preferment required political as well as pastoral skills. But the task
of Wade (a committed anti-Trinitarian) and his associates was to promote major
changes, not to make dispassionate assessment.
In this respect they exaggerated the estimates
of Church incomes and expenditure, and argued that most Church property was
public property usurped by a few rapacious clerics through the system of
non-residence and plurality. They also maintained that all ecclesiastical
appointments and promotions were motivated more by familial factors than by
merit. Lastly Wade denounced the Anglican liturgy as popish-like, while praising
the rival Dissenting Churches for both their ministry and
education.[7]
No one observed that plurality was the only means of assisting souls and
ministering sacraments in several remote portions of the country. In the same
way, the significant improvements in the exercise of ecclesiastical patronage
brought about by Tory ministers like Lord Liverpool in the 1810s and 1820s were
deliberately ignored. Encapsulated in the influential works of outstanding
philosophers and historians like James Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington
Macaulay, anti-clericalism imposed itself as a crucial element of the liberal
tradition, and, through liberal values, of the British identity as a
whole.
2. However, the ‘black
legend’ of the Anglican decay in the age of reason is by no means the
exclusive provenance of either liberalism or unbelief. If the eighteenth century
Church has long suffered bad press, the blame must fall also on critics from
within the Anglican side. The Altitudinarians were particularly active in
blackening the character of the religious establishment of the Hanoverian
period. As early as 1860 Mark Pattison noticed:
It is especially since the High Church
movement commenced that the theology of the eighteenth century has become a
byword. The genuine Anglican omits that period from the history of the Church
altogether. In constructing his catena partum he closes his list with
[the High Churchman] Waterland and [the Non-juror] Brett, and leaps at once to
1833, when the Tracts for the Times
commenced.[8]
Indeed
the building of the ‘black legend’ started with the Non-jurors at
the time of the Glorious Revolution, and was continued by Methodists and
Evangelicals later in the century. Still in the 1820s and 1830s High Church
divines joined forces with the radicals in attacking the presumed laxity and
inattention of the ecclesiastical hierarchies to various aspects of the
Church’s heritage. But no censure was more disparaging than that of the
authors of the Tracts for the Times.
These were a group of theologians based at Oriel
College, Oxford, who attempted to stir the established Church into new life.
They maintained a deep devotion to the Real
Presence; they emphasized the importance of the Fathers
as guides and teachers; they embraced the principle of penance and mortification
and stressed higher standards of worship. But for the Oxford movement not only
was the Church of England riddled with Latitudinarianism, it was also enslaved
by the State. Their theological conception drew with it a strong sense of
ecclesiastical continuity, of the unbroken connection between the apostolic
Church and the Church of
England, and of the total independence of the latter
from the ‘king in parliament’. The Anglican leaders at Oriel held
that since the Christian religion was superior to civil government, secular
powers had no right to interfere in spiritual matters whatever the cause.
Therefore they did not content themselves with opposing any cultural trend which
might threaten the Church’s status as a national institution, such as the
increasing agitation for disestablishment; they also resisted the doctrine and
practice of royal supremacy. No Anglo-Catholic could recognize the mandates of a
purely parliamentary court, such as the judicial committee of the privy council,
which, although it lacked spiritual authority, was the supreme court of
ecclesiastical appeal.
Consequently, when in 1833
parliament resolved to reduce the number of dioceses from 22 to 12, the
Anglo-Catholics launched their crusade for the resurgence of old rituals. As
John Henry Newman (a prominent representative of the Oxford movement until he
converted to Catholicism) wrote in one of the first Tracts for the Times,
the Church of England was a
direct descendant of the Christian Church settled by the
Apostles.[9] It followed from this that it was a part of the churchman’s duty to
struggle in resistance to secular authority in spiritual
affairs:
Choose your side. To remain neuter much
longer will be itself to take a part. [...] Abstinence is impossible in
troublous times. ‘He that is not with me, is against me, and he that
gathereth not with me scattereth
abroad’.[10]
The
Tractarians exerted a great influence, doctrinally, spiritually, and
liturgically throughout the entire Anglican Communion. In parishes fuelled by
Newman there gradually developed a recovery of Catholic ceremonial and vestments
in the celebration of the Eucharist; relevant changes were made in other Church
services; sisterhoods were founded.
But the
impact of the Tracts for the Times was felt in historiography with as
much liveliness. The Oxford movement could not but look with anger at the
religious establishment of the Hanoverian period. And the repercussions were the
more important in that all ecclesiastical historians used almost without
exception to be clergymen themselves. In 1874 Christopher Wordsworth (then
fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge) condemned the eighteenth century Church as an
indolent entity which ‘paralysed and obscured’ every Christian
virtue.[11]
Even the more moderate Charles Abbey and John Overton, in their English
Church in the Eighteenth Century (1878), ended up aligning with the
Tractarians. They considered the Nonjuring schism as a watershed in the history
of the Church of England: not only had the Anglican communion been deprived of
its ablest and most disciplined and cultivated ministers, but those who were
chosen to fill their places displayed no other motivation than climbing the
ladder of preferment. Who could swear allegiance to William III while no real
sign of abdication was ever manifested by James II? Abbey and Overton
contended:
The [eighteenth century] Church partook of
the general sordidness of the age; it was an age of great material prosperity,
but of moral and spiritual poverty, such as hardly finds a parallel in our
history.[12]
By
1887 Abbey had not changed his mind. In his massive survey of the lives of the
Georgian bishops, he alleged:
How quietly, and how apparently to all, the
bench of bishops did about this time lose its lustre and sink in general
esteem.
In fact, the only significant
adjustment in interpretation was the transition from the Glorious Revolution to
the Hanoverian succession as the mainspring of slumber and complacency in the
Church. Now Abbey explained that it was with the accession of George I that the
Anglican establishment had begun to deteriorate. Many Anglicans resented the
advent of a German Lutheran on the throne of England: thus, to hinder a
recrudescence of Jacobitism among
both churchmen and laymen, precedence at court was
given to prelates whose political views were in line with those of the new
dynasty, no matter how they performed their pastoral duties. Abbey
claimed,
In the Church of England the insidious
advance of indolence would no doubt have been greatly counteracted it its chief
rulers had been carefully selected for the qualifications which best beseem a
bishop.[13]
Canon
George G. Perry, in his History of the English Church in the Eighteenth
Century, which was also published in 1887, showed no less
hostility.[14] And as late as 1905 the staunch Tractarian William Hutton restated the old
thesis of the Hanoverian period as ‘an age of shackling conventions and
grovelling
aims’.[15]
This
not to say that the new century did not bring with it a certain degree of
relaxation in the opinion then generally received. Triumphally John Overton and
Frederic Relton, in their English Church from the Accession of George I to
the End of the Eighteenth Century (1906), announced major
innovations:
It has at last been recognised that a period
which produced such clergymen as Joseph Butler and Daniel Waterland, William Law
and Samuel Horsley, and such lay churchmen as Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson,
William Wilbeforce and William Stevens, must have been at any rate a period
worth studying.
But it was just a false
alarm. Overton and Relton preferred not to disengage themselves too much from
the grim perspective universally shared by ecclesiastical
historians:
It is true that a lover of the English Church
cannot study [the eighteenth century] without a blush. It is a period of
lethargy instead of activity, of worldliness instead of spirituality, of
self-seeking instead of self-denial, of grossness instead of
refinement.[16]
Alfred
Plummer’s Church of England in the Eighteenth Century (1910)
followed the same path. On the one hand, Plummer ventured to advance
reservations over the customary picture of the eighteenth century as a ‘dull, coarse, irreligious age’, in which ‘bishops were
place-seekers, who neglected all duties, except controversial
pamphleteering’, and all clergy were ‘ignorant, vulgar and
fanatical’. On the other hand, he kept on adhering to the usual
pattern:
It is true that the history of the English
Church during the eighteenth century is the history of a steady and grievous
decline.[17]
Victorian
clergymen saw the eighteenth century Church as a derelict institution managed by
secular-minded bishops thriving on the spoils of power and staffed by either
ruthless parsons fighting their way to the top or poor ill-bred curates
grappling for survival. ‘In this estimate’, Pattison had
successfully predicted, ‘the followers of Mill and Carlyle will agree with
those of Dr.
Newman’.[18]
3.
The Hanoverian Church had to wait until the post-World War I before it was the
subject of accurate reconsideration. The first signs of a renewal came from John
Wickham Legg’s English Church Life from the Restoration to the
Tractarian Movement (1914) and Aldred Rowden’s The Primates of the
Four Georges (1916). Both works displayed significant awareness that many of
the severe opinions relating to the Church of England under the Whig ascendancy
were without concrete foundation, the result of ideological prejudices most
notably on the part of the Tractarians. Particularly Wickham Legg’s
analysis marked a discontinuity in historical perception. In choosing the
Restoration as its term a quo, it stretched the boundaries of the
eighteenth century so much as to include the supposed golden age of the English
Church, when dissenting ministers were expelled and the purity of the national
faith vigorously safeguarded against all enemies. This meant that neither the
Glorious Revolution, nor the succession of George I, could be taken as a
milestone for the Anglican any more.
However it
was only with the appearance of Norman Sykes’s Church and State in
England in the 18th Century in 1934 that the reputation of the
Hanoverian Church began to be seriously rehabilitated. Albeit a clergyman, Sykes
was not committed to any religious party theologically or otherwise. In fact he
maintained that the eighteenth century Church of England should be judged from
within its own value system and historical circumstances, not by anachronistic
Victorian standards. Sykes was also one of the first writers on the Hanoverian
Church specifically trained in history. At Oxford in the 1920s he had learnt how
to search archives, and examine a vast assortment of manuscript sources never
before studied.
From this advantageous position,
Sykes broke much new ground. Church and State in England in the
18th Century demonstrated that many of the alleged abuses of the
Anglican hierarchies in the decades following the Glorious Revolution were in
fact age-old problems. For example plurality and non-residence, which so many
commentators still treated as distinctive of the archetypal Hanoverian parson,
were familiar since the middle ages and, indeed, well rooted among the Caroline
clergy so esteemed by the Tractarians. The eighteenth century Church deserved to
be cleared of the total slackness previously imputed to it especially it the
light of the difficulties under which it laboured. The Toleration Act of 1689
recognized the legal right of Non-conformists to freedom of worship outside the
established Church, and although the Dissenters were not granted full civil
rights, it undermined the attempts of the clergy to keep order within the
Anglican flock. Not only did the ministers of the Church of England have to come
to terms with potentially rival congregations meeting openly in their parishes,
but by weakening the ecclesiastical courts the Toleration Act also made the
exercise of pastoral discipline less effective, even over conformist laity. In
this picture, Sykes argued, it was an important achievement that the Church,
while not recovering its jurisdiction over lay morals, remained the primary
teacher of Christian
ethics.[19]
Sykes’s
researches are still regarded as the starting point for any study of religion
and society in England between 1688 and 1832. Why, then, should such a landmark
in Anglican historiography happen to exert so limited an influence throughout
the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s? Regrettably, much of Sykes’s work was
biographical, dwelling on some key figures rather than on the practice and
social context of the Church. Bishop Edmund Gibson and archbishop William Wake,
to whom Sykes devoted most of his energies, were extraordinary characters,
outstanding scholars caught in the toils of ecclesiastical statesmanship, and
could never be exhibited as representative of the religious establishment as a
whole.[20]
Besides
Sykes did not leave behind him a school of historians to develop his researches
into an alternative model of the English Church under the ancien régime.
Those very small number who walked in his footsteps dedicated themselves to
biographies of eminent prelates once again. As a result, when Sykes’s
ablest student, Gareth V. Bennett, issued his books on bishops White Kennett and
Francis Atterbury, the ‘black legend’ of Anglican corruption in the
eighteenth century still commanded universal assent. Bennett himself seemed to
validate the old Altitudinarian view. In his biography of Kennett (1957) he
decried the tendency of ecclesiastical historians to perceive the Church’s
past through the deforming glasses of the Oxford
movement.[21]
Yet, in his essay on the bishops of William III (1966) he agreed with the
Tractarians that the Glorious Revolution must be looked at as a primary divide
in the history of
Anglicanism.[22]
Furthermore, in his full length study of the Atterbury plot (1975) Bennett left
the reader with an impression that the final defeat of the Jacobites was
disastrous for the English
Church.[23]
In
the 1960s and 1970s ecclesiastical history was continuing to attract clergymen
almost exclusively. Sykes had indicated how to treat the Anglican establishment
not apart from, but in relation to the life and times of the nation: yet, for at
least two decades after his death, the English Church was to be kept outside
mainstream historiography, as if religion had nothing to share with the
political, social and economic developments of Hanoverian
Britain.
4. A decisive blow at the
pessimistic interpretation was struck by social historians employing new
quantitative techniques. Norman Ravitch’s comparative study of the French
and English
episcopates,[24] John Pruett’s investigation of the parish clergy of
Leicestershire,[25] and Daniel Hirschberg’s analysis of nominations to the Episcopal
bench,[26] all challenged some of the most conventional opinions amid scholars working in
the field. Particularly Hirschberg, in his doctoral dissertation presented at
the University of Michigan in 1976, provided huge evidence that the
monarchy’s success in controlling the placing of Church personnel was
never so total or so contrary to the wishes of contemporaries as many historians
influenced by the Oxford movement had maintained. The crown shared its role as
principal conduit for ecclesiastical preferment with other lay patrons as well
as with such Anglican bulwarks as the two universities and the several cathedral
and collegiate churches of England and Wales. Nor was the task of the
administration to subjugate the bishops and manipulate them for the promotion of
its own secular ends exclusively. Royal prerogatives were used for the benefit
of the Church as well. Even the Duke of Newcastle, one of the sharpest political
minds of Hanoverian Britain, and George II’s first advisor on matters
ecclesiastical, was a sincerely pious man who prided himself of fostering the
alliance between the throne and the altar. His clerical creatures recognised his
piety, and often declined to comply with him or obliged him to behave as they
saw fit.
Newcastle’s management of the
Anglican establishment was the subject of another pioneering dissertation,
Stephen Taylor’s
Church and State in Mid-Eighteenth Century
England, presented at the University of Cambridge in 1987. Again, the use of
religious patronage for mere political purposes emerged to have been neither as
pernicious nor as effective as had been thought. On his part the Duke put his
extensive personal connections at the disposal of the Church, and this could
prove invaluable at any time official channels were revealed inadequate. The
Church, in turn, provided education and charity, inculcating allegiance to the
crown at a time of dynastic threat. As Taylor argued, in the eighteenth century
the two institutions of Church and State were understood by most Englishmen as
different parts of the same whole. Involvement in politics, anxiety about income
and the search for preferment, therefore, could not prevent the bishops from
diligently performing the pastoral duties attached to their
office.[27]
Both
Hirschberg and Taylor used a structuralist approach to dismantle the old
Victorian judgement that the eighteenth century Church was somnolent because it
was enslaved by the State. Their not being clergymen introduced a further
element of disruption in the landscape of Anglican historiography. But in
comparison to the work of Sykes, it was the cultural climate of the 1980s that
had dramatically changed, turning up the earth of scholarly discussion, so that
the seed of historical revision could germinate abundantly. The traditional
touchstones of imperial identity had long collapsed, while the development of
the European integration process and the rise of ethnic based Celtic
nationalisms placed diverse and once unthinkable questions on the
historian’s agenda. ‘Simply to restate the myth of English
uniqueness is [now] unsatisfactory’, Jeremy Black urged in
1988.[28] At the same time, in Britain as elsewhere, the over-encompassing ideologies
(liberalism and socialism) of the classical nation State were waning. The very
idea of modernity was under heavy shell-fire from the advocates of the ‘new right’. As Maurice Cowling observed in a provocative writing
which was published in 1980:
It is from religion that modern English
intellectual history should begin. That it does not so begin, that it begins
with the history of political, philosophical, literary, critical, aesthetic,
economic or educational activity [...] registers historians’ reluctance to
give critical consideration to the culture to which they
belong[29].
A
clear sign of the revived interest in religion as a category of historical
explanation came from the unprecedented blooming of Jacobite studies. Many
scholars devoted their attention to the rediscovery of those subversive
legitimist groups which proliferated all over the British isles after the
revolution of 1688. In fact Jacobitism was multi-faceted, offering a
wide-ranging and often radical critique of English government and society.
Nevertheless, its strength and durability could not be elucidated but by
referring to the continued significance of religious principles (above all the
sacrality of the oath of allegiance to the exiled Stuart). According to Jonathan
Clark, the Jacobite revival produced a ‘domino effect’ whose
far-ranging consequence was the dissolution of the interpretative paradigma that
assimilated Hanoverian Britain to the condition of a modern representative
democracy based on proto-capitalist property relations:
If 1688 provoked only a ‘great
refusal’ on the part of the intelligentsia, the centrality of Whig values
as traditionally defined during the last three centuries of British history was
suddenly in doubt.
If Jacobitism could be
built into a serious, popular movement, then a number of hypotheses about the
paternalist character of Hanoverian politics became at once a sight more
plausible than they might otherwise remain. For the historian of the Jacobites,
eighteenth century England was an intensely religious society where the national
Church constituted the primary focus of the life of the great majority of the
population.[30]
But
the restoration of religion to a central place in the study of eighteenth
century England was by no means the distinctive character of Jacobite
scholarship only. Linda Colley’s account of the endurance of the Tory
party during its proscription from power, while ignoring Jacobitism, still
regarded the defence of the privileged status of the Church as an over-riding
political
factor.[31]
Similarly John A.W. Gunn emphasized the viability of Anglican teachings
preserved from any dynastic
intrusion.[32]
Jonathan Clark was more subtle:
Jacobites subscribed to four linked
doctrines: the divine [...] status of monarchy; the descent of the title to the
crown by indefeasible hereditary right; the accountability of kings to God alone
[...]; and the unequivocal scriptural injuction of non-resistance and passive
obedience [...]. To a Jacobite, these four principles had a necessary unit.
Ministerial Whigs [...] rejected the second and the third, but sought to salvage
the rest.
In depicting Jacobites and Whigs as
ideological twins, both conservative, monarchical and Anglican, Clark elevated
the Church to a rank above that of any other English institution in the period
between 1688 and 1832. For Clark, it was up to the Church to preach political
orthodoxy at that time, while, in turn, the State supported the legal dominance
of ecclesiastical
hierarchies.[33]
There
is much to argue with Clark’s English Society. At the practical
level it is a little difficult to sustain the thesis that eighteenth century
England was a confessional polity, even if it was still one in theory. Yet, few
recent books have caused more fluttering in academic dovecotes. Indeed at the
end of the 1980s scarcely one among professional historians of Hanoverian
Britain was averse to acknowledge the need to incorporate religion in his
work.
5. It is
not surprising, then, that ecclesiastical history should flourish over the last
25 years to an extent hitherto unknown in eighteenth century studies.
Expectedly, most scholars covering this subject have been peculiarly preoccupied
with vindicating the religious establishment from the condemnation heaped upon
it by Evangelicals, reformers and Anglo-Catholics. One author has gone as far as
to suggest that the established religion ‘in the first half of the
eighteenth century perhaps reached the zenith of its allegiance among the
population’.[34] Yet, although the rehabilitation of the Hanoverian Church ‘is now almost
an [historiographical] commonplace’ – as Boyd Hilton has warned
–,[35]
little or no consensus exists among experts on how such success was attained
under the political circumstances of the
day.
According to Frederick Mather the Church of
England was able to withstand the turmoils of the Glorious Revolutions and the
Hanoverian succession mainly because it was dominated by high-flying attitudes
which provided shelter from both the potentially dangerous implications of royal
supremacy and the challenges of modern science and philosophy. In a seminal
article, which appeared in 1985, Mather detected the resilience of traditional
rites in popular devotion. Old «Catholic gestures», dating back to the
reign of Charles I, or even earlier, to Medieval times, such as bowing to the
altar on entering and leaving church, or turning to the East in the Creed and at
the Gloria Patri, were still performed in the eighteenth
century.
For Mather this heritage was
particularly marked among the clergy. The clerical fondness for sacred vestures
was the most apparent feature of a State panoply whose aim was not only to
inspire sentiments of awe in the population, but also to forewarn the crown that
ecclesiastical authority was as much divinely-ordained as civil power. Copes,
destroyed under the Long Parliament, and restored in 1660, were worn at the
coronations of George II, George III and George IV. In 1727, at the accession of
George II, a few of the officiating bishops even carried mitres and placed them
on their heads inside Westminster Abbey.
But
nothing indicated the Altitudinarian ascendancy more than the significance
assigned to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. In Mather’s opinion
most eighteenth century churchmen did not understand the Eucharist as a mere
commemoration of Christ’s death, but as a spiritual offering to God.
Additionally Mather called into question the conventional view that quarterly
communion was the rule in the Hanoverian Church at large. It was only in few
areas, he maintained, that the Eucharist was celebrated four times a year (at
Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide and after the harvest). In other places the Holy
Communion was administered much more frequently. Not many Anglican parishes
could match the collegiate church of Manchester, which returned communion every
Sunday. But monthly communions, often with additional celebrations on the great
festivals (such as Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Ascension Day), or at least
communion from five to eleven times a year, were normal, in the north-west as
well as in the south-east. Mather produced evidence that weekly communion was
practised in at least six of the London parishes during the period 1770-1810:
‘Catholic inclinations weakened only gradually during the period’.
High churchmanship had to be much more than a single
faction:
If a revision is needed it must point not to
strength of a coherent High Church party [...] but to the diffusion of a
moderate ecclesiastical conservatism throughout the Church.
[...] Traditional
churchmanship [...] was more than the cry of a doomed order. It was part of the
outlook of moderate divines [...] who, as bishops, sought to preserve what they
could for the old, while laying their flocks open to the benefits of the
new.[36]
In
the wake of Mather’s essay, Nonjuring and High Church theology have proved
fertile areas. Robert Cornwall and Jeffrey Chamberlain have made essential
contributions to the debate on the continued viability of Altitudinarian ideas
after
1714.[37] Robert Hole, James Sack and Mather himself showed how the notion of the
existence of a divine sanction for the social hierarchy, as asserted by Tories
and Jacobites, became the official ideology of the Protestant constitution
during the reign of George III. Indeed, from the French revolution to 1815, ‘Church and King’ activism was prominent especially where public
life had a long tradition of Non-juror and Tory High churchmanship in the early
eighteenth
century.[38]
Other
historians explain the vigour of the eighteenth century Church with its capacity
to rejuvenate. The Toleraton Act of 1689 gave Dissent a legal and separate
status, and worse still, it was interpreted by many as sanctioning voluntary
Church membership. The suppression of the Convocation of Canterbury in 1717
likewise lessened the disciplinary authority of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction
over the laity. Thus, from the ambiguous position in which it found itself after
the Glorious Revolution, the Anglican establishment strove to recapture the mind
of the faithful. Tina Isaacs has underlined the importance of the religious
societies which sprung up in response to fears of moral degradation, such as the
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Clergymen presided over and controlled their
operations (which included distributing pious literature at home and abroad,
frequent meetings to bolster personal piety and supporting charitable missions
and schools). For that reason Anglican authorities gave them unreserved support: ‘any success they might achieve would only redound to the Church’s
credit’.
Even more representative of the
new political climate was the Society for the Reformation of Manners. Although
an Anglican undertaking at first, by 1694 the SRM started to welcome
Nonconformists as well. Besides, by denying the ecclesiastical courts the right
and the opportunity to act against swearing, lewdness, blasphemy, public
drunkenness and profanation of the Sabbath, the SRM contributed to erode
spiritual authority. In many senses, therefore, they should not be considered
extensions of the Church of England. Indeed several English clerics accused the
SRM affiliates of being vice-ridden hypocrites. Anglican ministers like the Tory
idol Henry Sacheverell were reluctant to join forces with the lay in
inter-denominational bodies, and aspired to recoup lost powers to have the
established Church remain the sole combatant in the national fight against
immorality.
However a significant part of the
clergy understood that they would benefit more by co-operating with the
Dissenters than by trying to resurrect Church rule. Terrified by the spectre of
popular indifference towards religion hundreds of ecclesiastics affiliated with
the SRM, exhorting erring parishioners to mend their sinful ways, and, if
necessary, notifying the secular magistrates about hopeless cases. The list of
English bishops who preached to the SRM or even distributed SRM materials at
their visitations comprised Gilbert Burnet, Simon Patrick, Nicholas Stratford,
William Lloyd, Edward Fowler, White Kennett, William Wake and William Nicholson.
In the end the alliance between the magistracy and the ministry was fruitful.
Little evidence survives as to precisely how many alleged sinners fell under the
axe of the SRM, but in 1738 their leaders claimed to have prosecuted at least
100,000 people for various nuisance crimes in 45
years.[39]
Adaptation as a key to success is a theme
further explored by intellectual historians. In his finest essay, Clergy and
Commerce. The Conservative Enlightenment in England (1985), John
Pocock traced the contribution of Anglicanism to the development of an ideology
of ‘politeness’ which would make England ‘at once the most
modern and the most counter-revolutionary of European societies’.
According to Pocock, Anglican clergymen asserted that religion must be
‘reasonable’ and ‘sociable’ in reaction to the traumatic
experiences of the civil wars. In this polemic against enthusiasts dogmatism and
mysticism had to be set aside, while secular learning, notably science, made its
way into mainstream Anglicanism. Thus, while in France the new philosophical
trends were often a weapon to be used in an attack on the privileges of the
clerical estate and the political order with which it was inextricably
intertwined, in England the Enlightenment was brought into a domesticated state,
and could become the instrument of ruling
groups.[40]
Following
on Pocock’s footsteps, John Gascoigne and Brian Young have shown how in
England rationalism and empiricism turned out to be part of the national
Church’s own intellectual armoury. Gascoigne has underlined the
eclecticism of the type of education offered to intending clergymen at
Cambridge, and, to a lesser, extent, at Oxford. The English universities, highly
clerical, were in some respects more impervious to Enlightenment values then
their Scottish counterparts. Notwithstanding this, a ‘holy alliance’
was formed in Anglican colleges between Newtonian natural philosophy and
Christian apologetics. In was mainly thanks to the ‘Latitude-men’ at
Cambridge, Gascoigne pointed out, that ‘there was nothing like the same
gulf in England as there was in France between a group of self-consciously
enlightened thinkers and the defenders of the established
tradition’.[41] In contrast, Young has suggested that the richest debates were not between
atheists or freethinkers and churchmen, but between churchmen themselves, who
quarrelled on important issues, such as subscription to the 39 articles, the
Church’s legal and canonical statement of doctrines including
Trinitarianism.[42]
Another
viable explanation of the Anglican forcefulness in the eighteenth century has
been propounded by William Gibson in his The Church of England 1688-1832 (2001). According to Gibson, High Church and Low Church were not well-defined
homogenous parties but rather blurred and broad streams within Anglicanism that
often merged, overlapped and coincided’. This is not to say that the
national Church was not shaken by transitory moments of division which
reverberated from the top to the bottom of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Yet by
focusing on conflict historians have obscured the fact the centripetal forces
within the eighteenth century Church were always more powerful than the
centrifugal. Not only did clerical attitudes incorporate elements of diverse
provenance (so that most Anglican clergymen could be both rationalist and open
to revelation, anti-dogmatist while ready to subscribe to articles of faith,
tolerant towards Nonconformists but impatient to bring them into the
establishment), but even in times of strife clergymen of differing parties could
find themselves holding similar opinions. Accord and unity, Gibson advanced,
helped the Church to face the difficulties of religious pluralism at an age of
growing urbanization and industrialization.
The fact that Robert Nelson and others
returned from Nonjury to the Church, which at that time also encompassed Samuel
Clarke and William Whiston, suggests an instinctive and emotional attachment to
the Church that was more important than absolute and rigid doctrinal
uniformity.[43]
Current
evaluations of the Hanoverian Church underline differences between dioceses
rather than divisions between parties. In recent years several studies have
emerged which argue a strong case for the multi-faceted appeal of the Anglican
pulpit at the local
level.[44]
6. The eighteenth century Church of England
has enormously benefited from the massive surge in scholarly productivity during
the past 25 years. However, ecclesiastical historians cannot be said to have
created a new synthesis yet. Besides the impact of local studies
has been one of differentiation rather then of unification. For instance Mark
Smith has discovered considerable potential for pastoral care and lay piety in
the late eighteenth century in industrialising communities such as Oldham and
Saddleworth, although this depended upon single initiatives and must be set in
the context of the persuasive appeal of combative Evangelical
preachers.[45] In contrast Micheal Snape demonstrates the Church’s long-term failure to
retain the loyalty and affections of many men and women in the new industrial
areas. In drawing attention to hitherto neglected issues such as the situation
of non-graduate clergy and the shortcomings of the ecclesiastical courts,
Snape’s detailed examination of the largest English parish between 1688
and 1832 (Whalley, in Lancashire) presents a post-revisionist case which
challenges the academic consensus on the Anglican fortunes in the eighteenth
century.[46]
In the same way Eric Evans has revealed that the Church of England also suffered
a decline in popular support in the south, as the clergy consolidated their
alliance with landed gentry, became more prosperous and self-confident, and,
regrettably, grew more distant from their
congregations.[47]
But more recently Donald Spaeth has showed that anti-clericalism was effectively
countered by the Anglican ministers in Wiltshire, where the alliance with the
gentry put the national Church in a particularly strong
position.[48]
Notwithstanding
this, the old Victorian prejudices are finally swept away. Plurality and
non-residence may well have been widespread in the Church of England prior to
the reforms of the 1830s and 1840s. Yet, historians are now aware that the
imposing of more restrictive dispositions should impede the religious
establishment from irradiating into several corners of the country. The very
imputation of careerism stops short in sight of those prelates who scrupled to
accept the burdens of a mitre for feeling themselves inadequate to cope with
them. William Gibson marshalls some powerful evidence in this regard: a
clearest sign, Gibson comments, that the Hanoverian clergy did not aim at
enriching themselves
exclusively.[49]
Eighteenth century Anglicanism must be set against the circumstances under which
it laboured, at a time when Church and State were so closely related that the
welfare of the former could not be promoted but by advancing the interest of the
latter.
References
[1] J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832. Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime, Cambridge, CUP, 1985, p. 277.
[2] J.H. Plumb, Editorial Foreword, in R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990 [1982], p. vii.
[3] C. Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1980 [1967], p. 279.
[4] J.H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990 [1950], p. 43.
[5] Ibid., pp. 43-44.
[6] Ibid., pp. 44-45.
[7] J. Wade, The Black Book; or, Corruption Unmasked, London, Printed by J. Fairburn, 1821, pp. 2, 46-48, 99, 101-132.
[8] Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750, in H. Nettleship (ed.), Essays by the Late Mark Pattison, Oxford, Clarendon, 1889, 2 vols., II, pp. 42-43.
[9] The Tracts for the Times, Printed for J.G.F and J. Rivington, London, and J. Parker, Oxford, 1840, 5 vols., I, pp. 2-3. For a recent evaluation of the Tractarian campaign see P.B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, Cambridge, CUP, 1994.
[10] The Tracts for the Times, op. cit., p. 4.
[11] C. Wordsworth, Social Life at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century, London, Bell, 1874, p. 2.
[12] C. Abbey, J. Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century, London, Longmans & Green, 1878, 2 vols., II, p. 4.
[13] C. Abbey, The English Church and its Bishops 1700-1800, London, Longmans & Green, 1887, 2 vols., I, pp. 367-369.
[14] G.G. Perry, A History of the English Church in the Eighteenth Century, London, Murray, 1890 [1887], pp. 1-10.
[15] W.H. Hutton, Burford Papers, London, Constable, 1905, p. 237.
[16] J.H. Overton, F. Relton, The English Church from the Accession of George I to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1714-1800), London, Macmillan, 1906, p. 1.
[17] A. Plummer, The Church of England in the Eighteenth Century, London, Methuen, 1910, pp. 3-4.
[18] Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, op. cit., p. 43.
[19] N. Sykes, Church and State in England in the 18th Century, Cambridge, CUP, 1934, pp. 2-5, 21-30.
[20] Cf. Edmund Gibson Bishop of London 1669-1748. A Study in Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford, Clarendon, 1926, and William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657-1737, Cambridge, CUP, 1957, 2 vols.
[21] G.V. Bennett, White Kennett, 1660-1728, Bishop of Peterborough. A Study in the Political and Ecclesiastical History of the Early Eighteenth Century, London, SPCK, 1957, pp. iii.
[22] G.V. Bennett, King William III and the Episcopate, in G.V. Bennett, J.D. Walsh (eds.), Essays in Modern English Church History. In Memory of Norman Sykes, London, Black, 1966, pp. 104-131.
[23] G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688-1730: the Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, Oxford, Clarendon, 1975.
[24] N. Ravitch, Sword and Mitre. Government and Episcopate in France and England in the Age of Aristocracy, The Hague, Mouton, 1966.
[25] J.H. Pruett, The Parish Clergy under the Later Stuarts. The Leicestershire Experience, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1978.
[26] D.R. Hirschberg, A Social History of the Anglican Episcopate 1660-1760, PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1976.
[27] S. Taylor, Church and State in Mid-Eighteenth Century England: the Newcastle Years 1742-1762, PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1987.
[28] J. Black, England’s ‘Ancien Regime’, “History Today”, XXXVIII, 1988, p. 49.
[29] M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Cambridge, CUP, 1980, p. xii.
[30] J.C.D. Clark, On Moving the Middle Ground. The Significance of Jacobitism in Historical Studies, in E. Cruickshanks, J. Black (eds.), The Jacobite Challenge, Edinburgh, Donald, 1988, pp. 177, 179.
[31] L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy. The Tory Party, 1714-60, Cambridge, CUP, 1982, pp. 25-51.
[32] J.A.W. Gunn, The Spectre at the Feast: The Persistence of High-Tory Ideas, in Beyond Liberty and Property. The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth Century Political Thought, Kingston e Montreal, McGill-Queens UP, 1983, pp. 120-193.
[33] Clark, English Society 1688-1832, op. cit., pp. 125 and passim.
[34] W.M. Jacob, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, CUP, 1996, p. 19.
[35] B. Hilton, Apologia pro vitis veteriorum hominum, “Journal of Ecclesiastical History”, L, 1999, p. 119.
[36] F.C. Mather, Georgian Churchmanship Reconsidered: Some Variations in Anglican Pulpit Worship 1714-1830, “Journal of Ecclesiastical History”, CXXXVI, 1985, pp. 257-261, 269-272, 282.
[37] Cf. R.D. Cornwall, Visible and Apostolic. The Constitution of the Church in High Church Anglicanism and Non-juror Thought, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1993, and J.S. Chamberlain, Accommodating High Churchmen. The Clergy of Sussex, 1700-1745, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1997.
[38] Cf. R. Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760-1831, Cambridge, CUP, 1989; F.C. Mather, High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733-1806) and the Caroline Tradition in the Later Georgian Church, Oxford, OUP, 1992; J.J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760-1832, Cambridge, CUP, 1993.
[39] T. Isaacs, The Anglican Hierarchy and the Reformation of Manners 1688-1738, “Journal of Ecclesiastical History”, XXXIII, 1982, pp. 391-411.
[40] J.G.A. Pocock, Clergy and Commerce. The Conservative Enlightenment in England, in R. Ajello, M. Firpo, L. Guerci, G. Ricuperati (eds.), L’età dei Lumi. Studi storici sul Settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, Napoli, Jovene, 1985, 2 vols., II, pp. 523-562.
[41] J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment. Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution, Cambridge, CUP, 1989, especially pp. 71-184.
[42] B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England. Theological Debate from Locke to Burke, Oxford, Clarendon, 1998.
[43] W. Gibson, The Church of England 1688-1832. Unity and Accord, London and New York, Routledge, 2001, p. iv.
[44] Cf. J. Jago, Aspects of the Georgian Church: Visitation Studies of the Diocese of York 1761-1776, Madison, Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1997; J. Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660-1828. Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese, Oxford, Clarendon, 2000; J. Chamberlain, J. Gregory (eds.), The National Church in its Local Identities, Woodbrige, Boydell & Brewer, 2002.
[45] M. Smith, Religion in Industrial Society. Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740-1865, Oxford, Clarendon, 1994.
[46] M.F. Snape, The Church of England in Industrialising Society. The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2003.
[47] E.J. Evans, Some Reasons for the Growth of English Rural Anti-Clericalism c. 1750-c.1830, “Past and Present”, LXVI, 1975, pp. 84-109.
[48] D.A. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger. Parsons and Parishioners 1660-1740, Cambridge, CUP, 2000.
[49] W. Gibson, The Achievement of the Anglican Church, 1689-1800. The Confessional State in Eighteenth Century England, Evanston, Mellen, 1995, pp. 75-89.
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