1. Radicalism and the English revolution

Mario Caricchio

Glenn Burgess

Ariel Hessayon

Nicholas McDowell

Nigel Smith

2. Britain 1660-1714: competing historiographies

Giovanni Tarantino

Mark Knights

Yaakov Mascetti

3. The Church of England in the eighteenth century

Guglielmo Sanna

William Gibson

Robert G. Ingram

Robert D. Cornwall

4. Non-British readings of the English revolution

Stefano Villani

Gabi Mahlberg

Pietro Messina

5. Rediscovering radicalism in the British Isles and Ireland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries

David Davis

Jared van Duinen

Chloë Houston

Manfred Brod

Levente Juhász

Cromohs Virtual Seminars

The Eighteenth Century Church of England in Historical Writing

Guglielmo Sanna
Università di Sassari

G. Sanna, "The Eighteenth Century Church of England in Historical Writing",
in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-6
<http://www.fupress.net/public/journals/49/Seminar/sanna_church.html>



 

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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