Church of England 1688-1832: Unity and Accord

276 Pages·2000·1.14 MB·English

by  Dr Willi Gibson

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
1688–1832

This book is a wide-ranging new account of a key period in the history
of the Church in England, from the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–89 to
the Great Reform Act of 1832. This was a tumultuous time for both
Church and State, when the relationship between religion and politics
was at its most fraught. The Church of England 1688–1832 considers the
consequences of these important events and the rapid changes it brought
to the Anglican Church and to national politics.
Aspects of the social history of the Church are discussed, including
the role of the Church in eighteenth-century culture and the development
of nationhood. Anglican attitudes to European Protestantism and
Methodism are also evaluated.
Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, The Church of England
1688–1832 presents evidence of the widespread Anglican commitment
to harmony between those of differing religious views and suggests that
High and Low Churchmanship were less divergent than usually assumed.
This is both a detailed history of the Church in the eighteenth century
and a fresh and stimulating re-evaluation of the nature of Anglicanism
and its role in society.
William Gibson has written widely on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Church and society. He is currently a senior manager at Basingstoke
College of Technology and a Hartley Fellow of Southampton University.

THE CHURCH OF
ENGLAND 1688–1832
Unity and Accord
William Gibson
London and New York
First published 2001
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
© 2001 William Gibson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gibson, William, 1959–
The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and Accord/William Gibson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Church of England—History. 2. England—Church history. I. Title.
BX5070 G53 2000
283´.42–dc21 00–036635
ISBN 0 415 24023 9 (pbk)
ISBN 0 415 24022 0 (hbk)
ISBN 0-203-13462-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-18010-0 (Glassbook Format)
CONTENTS

Preface and acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Historians and the eighteenth-century Church 4
2 The Anglican Revolution 28
3 The development of the Church’s relations with the
state: from the Convocation controversy to Catholic
emancipation 70
4 Church leadership in the aftermath of Toleration 115
5 The Church and culture 148
6 The unity of Protestants 182
7 The Church and national identity 216
Conclusion 241
Bibliography 246
Index 265

v
PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is one of the luxuries afforded the author of a book to anticipate the
criticisms that reviewers will make. Doubtless one of these will be that
this book is wide-ranging and broadly-woven. This is undoubtedly the
case, and necessarily so. For if the argument presented in this book is
valid (that the unity and accord which characterised the Church of England
in the eighteenth century has been neglected and overlooked by historians)
then it needs to be considered in a range of contexts. Indeed in an earlier
version the typescript of this book was significantly longer than its present
length. The reader will therefore find that from time to time this book
‘rides two horses at once’: establishing a sufficient narrative framework
for a study of over a century and secondly developing the central argument.
This book has had something of a chequered history, having first been
commissioned by UCL Press, before its acquisition by Taylor and Francis,
and before the latter had absorbed Routledge. I am therefore in the rare
position of having a number of editors to thank: Stephen Gerrard and
Aisling Ryan at UCL and at Taylor and Francis, and Heather McCallum
and Vikki Peters at Routledge. I also owe a debt of thanks to three colleagues
who were generous enough with their time to read and comment on the
book in manuscript: Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University, Dr
Grayson Ditchfield of the University of Kent, and Robert Ingram of the
University of Virginia. All three made valuable and incisive comments,
but the responsibility for the errors and weaknesses in this book remain
my own. I also wish to record my gratitude to the University of Wales
Guild of Graduates for supporting a visit to the Ransom Research Center
at the University of Texas, Austin, and to the Hartley Institute at
Southampton University for appointing me to a fellowship for 1999–
2000 in support of this project.
William Gibson
Chandlers Ford
February 2000
vi
INTRODUCTION
Less than twenty years ago historians bemoaned the absence of studies
that would place the eighteenth-century Church in a clearer and truer
perspective. Today that imbalance has largely been corrected with a number
of studies of the Church between 1689 and 1832. In fact Boyd Hilton
has suggested that the rehabilitation of the eighteenth-century Church
‘is now almost a commonplace’.1 For ecclesiastical historians of the
eighteenth century that proposition is surely true; but it is less of a cliché
for writers who consider the eighteenth-century Church from other
perspectives.2
Almost without exception the recent studies of the eighteenth-century
Church have redressed the traditional view of bishops, clergy and laity.
However most of these works have viewed the Church from within a
traditional framework, which assumes that the eighteenth-century Church
was irrevocably divided and fractured by controversy. Yet a thorough
reading of the work of churchmen of the century suggests that divisions
between them have been exaggerated. Certainly the division between High
and Low Churchmen of the eighteenth century was narrower than that
between Laud and the Puritans and the Tractarians and Low Churchmen
of the nineteenth century. Moreover the historical attention given to the
fleeting moments of controversy in the eighteenth century has masked
the widespread and profound commitment to peace and tranquillity among
both the clergy and the laity. The same applies to divisions between Anglicans
and Dissenters; not only did most live in peace with one another, but in
many ways they did not see themselves as separate and discrete.
The unity of the Church stemmed from the Glorious Revolution. While
the Revolution was the cause of the departure of the Non-jurors from
the Church, it also established a providentialism that was a corner-stone
of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. For the most part the Revolution of
1688 ensured that unity of the Church by emphasising the continuity of
the monarchy and ecclesio-political doctrines like that of the divine right
of kings. In turn the Church ensured that the Revolution was in Steven
Pincus’s words ‘a national revolution’.3 But the Revolution of 1688–9
1
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 1688–1832
also demonstrates the inadequacy of the categories of churchmanship
that historians have, for the most part, been happy to use. High Church
and Low Church were not exclusive categories of thought and
churchmanship. They were blurred and broad streams within Anglicanism
that often merged, overlapped and coincided. The mistaken assumption
that these were hard and fast categories helped to construct an appearance
of division and disunity. As a result, moments of controversy and division
have become archetypes for the Church in the eighteenth century. Instead
of seeing the Convocation, Sacheverell and other episodes as untypical,
transitory moments, historians have seen them as symptomatic of divisions
that reached from the top to the bottom of the Church. Yet there is little
evidence for this; and far more that the political relationship between
Church and State pacified and united society. The alliance between Church
and State under Robert Walpole and Edmund Gibson neutralised Jacobitism,
and by the second half of the century militant High Churchmanship had
evolved into a movement for doctrinal orthodoxy that was mobilised to
defend the State from Dissent and radicalism.
In part the ecclesiastical commitment to unity and peace was a response
to the Toleration Act, which created competition in worship. Clergy
walked a narrow path between attracting worshippers to the Church
and correcting the behaviour of their parishioners. But it also created
higher and uniform standards of pastoral care, better training for the
clergy, sustained moral regulation and a buttress for orthodoxy in the
universities. One of the ways in which the Church gave effect to its
commitment to unity and peace was its participation in culture. The
engagement of the Church in both popular and elite cultures suffused
society in the Anglican values of politeness, civic humanism and social
reconciliation. The Church’s doctrine of unity was also reflected in its
commitment to the unity of Protestant Christendom. Anglican leaders
were instinctively attracted to unity with foreign Protestants; and they
felt an equally strong call to co-operation and amity with Dissent. The
same is true between Anglicanism and Methodism— indeed paradoxically
the antagonism between the Church and Methodism arose from a hatred
of schism and separateness.
National identity in eighteenth-century England was also indivisible from
Anglicanism: government was a religious construct and Anglicanism was
welded into the structure of the establishment. This identification of religion
and national identity was both a potent cause and a consequence of national
conflicts abroad. The effect was that in most shared national experiences—
worship, lore, education and charity—Anglicanism was ever-present. Its
gift to national identity was to drench nationhood in tradition and in the
Anglican values of moderation and restraint.
2
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this book is to take a slice through the eighteenth-century
Church to recover a neglected theme. The theme is the sense of unity
and accord that pervaded the Church in the eighteenth century and which
has been largely neglected by historians. Eirenicism, the doctrine of peace
and unity within the Church, was a powerful presence in much of the
eighteenth century. Indeed Stillingfleet’s Irenicon was the motivation for
Wesley’s attempt to remain within the Church of England. The flight
from the damage of the ecclesiastical and political divisions of the
seventeenth century is a recurring theme in the sermons and treatises of
the period, and churchmen repeatedly sought strategies that would avoid
divisions and schism. Yet historians have tended to focus on the moments
of furious controversy and division, indeed a recent discussion has asserted
that ‘the Church of England was bitterly divided’ after 1689.4
If as J.H.Hexter claims, history, and particularly ecclesiastical history,
is divided into ‘splitters’ and ‘lumpers’ this book is clearly a work of
lumping.5 But it does not assume that Anglicanism was a universal solvent
in the eighteenth century. Undoubtedly there were divisions in the Church,
the question is how profound were they and did they blight the effectiveness
of Anglicanism. Was the principal identity and instinct of Anglicanism
toward division or unity? This work seeks to advance the view that division
was not the principal feature of the eighteenth-century Church; peace
and unity were stronger forces in the minds of churchmen.
Notes
1 B.Hilton, ‘Apologia pro Vitis Veteriorium Hominum’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,
1999, vol. 50, no. 1, p. 119.
2 Though the Daily Telegraph’s series AD 2000 Years of Christianity asserted of the
eighteenth century that ‘the Church was by no means ineffective in the parishes’
and on the clergy ‘the evidence of Bishop’s Visitations indicates a generally high
standard’. AD 2000 Years of Christianity, Part 5, 1999, p. 29. In contrast, John Brewer’s
recent book The Pleasure of the Imagination, London 1997, fails to see the significance
of religion in the eighteenth century. And Frank O’Gorman recently claimed that
the spiritual needs of the people ‘were not being met’. F.O’Gorman, ‘Eighteenth
Century England as an Ancien Regime’, S.Taylor, R.Connors, C.Jones (eds.), Hanoverian
Britain and Empire, Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, Woodbridge, 1998, p. 32.
3 S.Pincus, ‘“To Protect English Liberties”: the English Nationalist Revolution of
1688–9’, T.Claydon and I.McBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity, Britain
and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850, Cambridge, 1999, p. 102.
4 K.Robbins, Great Britain, Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness, London, 1998,
p. 113.
5 J.H.Hexter, On Historians, Cambridge Mass., 1979, pp. 241–3. I owe this reference
to Robert Ingram of the University of Virginia. Hexter wrote: ‘…Instead of noting
difference, lumpers note likenesses; instead of separateness, connection…’.

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