The Church of England 1688-1832: Unity and Accord

302 Pages·2000·2.2 MB·English

by  William 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
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
Introduction
1.Historians and the Eighteenth-Century Church
2.The Anglican Revolution
The Development of the Church’s Relations with the State: From the
3.
Convocation controversy to Catholic emancipation
4.Church Leadership in the Aftermath of Toleration
5.The Church and Culture
6.The Unity of Protestants
7.The Church and National Identity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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
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 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—