The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The bishops were, of course, fond of proclaiming the Christian purposes of the confessional state in their sermons and in their speeches, but to what extent were their principles borne out by their practice? It is difficult to generalize about such matters, but there are indications that to a large extent they made honest attempts to live up to their precepts. There was certainly no decline in ordinations and visitations after 1714. Indeed, there is some evidence that there was, after the upheavals of 1689–1714, some improvement. When Nicolson was translated to Carlisle in 1702, he found that nobody had been confirmed in his diocese since 1684. During his first visitation, he confirmed no fewer than 5,449 individuals. Nicolson may have been exceptional, but under the guidance of Walpole and Gibson, the leaders of the church were chosen with great care – indeed, it was not in their interest to promote unpopular and incompetent bishops. After 1736 these responsibilities passed to the Duke of Newcastle, a devout Anglican. By then, although the quality of the bench as a whole remained high, there were signs of deterioration in the quality of the very highest appointments. Already, the tenure of Archbishop Blackburn at York between 1726 and 1743 was having distinctly unfortunate consequences. Moreover, the succession of two weak archbishops of Canterbury between 1737 and 1757, Potter and Herring, was to lead to a noticeable decline in episcopal standards in the second half of the century.

  On the second issue, to what extent was the Anglican church guilty of the catalogue of abuses repeated by generations of historians? These include the charges that many parishes had no resident priest and that the quality, and thus the reputation, of the clergy damaged the status of the confessional state. To what extent can these charges be justified? Recent work on the quality of pastoral care reveals enormous variations between different regions and even from parish to parish.9 Precise statistics covering the church as a whole are difficult to collect. At the beginning of the century, about one half of Anglican livings were worth less than £50 per year. The operation of Queen Anne’s Bounty10 did something to improve the position in just over 1,000 parishes, but with uneven consequences: the Midlands and East Anglia benefited more than Wales and the north of England. Indeed, in the dioceses of York, Chester and St David’s, nearly 70 per cent of livings were shown in the returns of 1736 to have stipends of less than £50, many of them much lower. Such miserable stipends bred pluralism and non-residence. Figures for a slightly later period (1780) suggest that only 38 per cent of parishes had resident incumbents, while no fewer than 36 per cent of the clergy held more than one living. The comparable figures for the middle of the century are likely to be lower but, even so, still serious. In 1743 only half the parishes in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire had a resident priest. It has been suggested that the poverty of the clergy accounts for holdings of more than one living, but it is most unlikely that this covers more than a part of the problem. The English clergy tended to be wealthier than their Welsh counterparts, but they were just as likely to be pluralist. ‘The fact of the matter is that neither wealthy laymen nor bishops had any great desire to alter a system from which they benefited.’11 The most scandalous aspect remained the dire poverty of assistant and stipendiary curates, especially in the more remote areas of the north of England and parts of Wales, just those areas of the country that were to face intensive ecclesiastical competition from Methodism in the second half of the century. It was here, in the backwardness of its parochial organization, that the church remained vulnerable to future demographic change and religious competition.

  Third, how seriously did these structural problems affect religious observance? Common sense would suggest that absence of a resident clergyman must have bred negligence and indifference among the congregations. Nevertheless, the basic pattern of worship seems to have been maintained without much change for some decades. In the north and the west of the country and in most market towns, two services were provided on Sunday. In the south and east, one service was more common. A similar pattern of regional observance is discernible with respect to weekday services. By the 1720s, however, contemporaries were noticing a drop in attendance at weekday services. Little is known about the frequency with which communion was celebrated in the eighteenth century, and local evidence varies enormously, a reflection of the willingness of individual clergymen to keep reliable records. Few places celebrated weekly communion, although there are remarkable exceptions, particularly in some of the larger towns. Perhaps a rough average for the country as a whole would be three to four times per year. Such evidence as we have, moreover, suggests a decline in the celebration of communion over the century, small and gradual in the first half of the century, thereafter accelerating rapidly.

  By some measures, therefore, the church exhibited worsening patterns of religious observance, although – it can hardly be stated too often – statistics on these matters need to be treated with great caution. On the other hand, local studies reveal the continuing vitality of the parochial structure of the Church of England and the extent to which it was interwoven with the rhythms and routines of local life. In very many cases, the Anglican clergy supervised the local school, organized poor relief and managed charitable activities. Consequently, we should not ignore the extent to which Anglicanism retained its late-seventeenth-century sense of mission. The schism of the non-juror bishops and clergy left the leadership of the church in the hands of latitudinarians who were appointed in their place. Under Tenison at Canterbury (1695–1715), under Stillingfleet at Worcester (1689–99) and under Patrick at Chichester and Ely (1689–1707), the low-church party ousted its rivals. Such men wished to work for a broad and comprehensive church, but they were much less willing than their high-church rivals to do so by using the power of the state. They wished, on the contrary, to mobilize the life of the spirit. The Church of England actively sought to spread the word of God to all the people and, in so doing, to transform itself into a genuinely popular, as well as prescribed, faith. Surviving manuals, catechisms and tracts demonstrate the very real attempts that were made to christianize the poor. It was this energy which lay behind the establishment and proliferation of the Society for the Reformation of Manners in the 1690s, whose prosecutions of immoral actions ranged from drunkenness to violations of the Sabbath; of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, founded in 1698 to spread the Christian message through the circulation of cheap religious literature; and, more generally, of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in 1701–2 to promote the work of overseas missions. It also provided much of the stimulus for the charity school movement. Established in the early eighteenth century, the movement swept the country, founding 600 schools by 1712 and more than double that number by 1725. The Church of England was closely involved in the activities of these societies in countless localities. Indeed, without its sponsorship of charity schools, the education of the poor would have been non-existent. However, by the middle decades of the century, the crusade to transform Anglicanism into a popular creed was beginning to lose momentum. Some of the clergy, at least, were beginning to lose their earlier confidence and enthusiasm. They complained about the immorality and irreligion of the people. They noticed, helplessly, the reluctance of the lower orders to attend services and even their continuing addiction to paganism, superstition and magic. As late as 1789, Hannah More complained of whole village populations estranged from the church.

  What explains this inability of the Church of England to launch an ultimately effective ministry to the masses and to sustain the energy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? It was not just the limitations of its archbishops and bishops, the extent of lay control of the church and the poverty of so many of its clergy, with its damaging consequences of pluralism and non-residence. Nor was it simply the inability of the church to make effective provision for the new urban populations. What took the missionary edge off the early-eighteenth-century Anglicanism and diffused its missionary zeal was also the prominence in ecclesiastical circles of rational religion or deism.
Few of the bishops of the middle and later decades of the century were unaffected by it. Deism weakened the expansionary, missionizing Anglicanism of the later seventeenth century and promoted an acceptance of the world as it was to be found. Deism was undogmatic, reasonable and willing to leave as much latitude (hence latitudinarianism) as possible to the conscience of the individual. Reacting against seventeenth-century extremism and enthusiasm, and profoundly influenced by the science of Newton and the philosophy of John Locke, deists stressed the virtues of toleration and moderation. Such qualities, admirable in so many ways, were not likely to maintain the missionary attitudes that would have been necessary to carry the Anglican message effectively to the masses. It may be that historians in the past have exaggerated the extent and influence of deism in the eighteenth-century church. Nevertheless, there can be no denying its steady and significant presence. While most clergy remained soundly orthodox in their views, later developments within the church were to challenge the idea and reality of a Confessional Church.

  Fourth, to what extent was a confessional state actually maintained in the first half of the eighteenth century? How thoroughly could the proposition be sustained that it was only through Anglicanism that citizenship and loyalty to the state could be promoted? The answer must be that, although prodigious attempts were made to sustain the uniformity that underpinned the confessional state, by the middle of the eighteenth century, they were showing signs of failure. This outcome could not have been predicted. The Test and Corporation Acts survived the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, and gave Anglicans a monopoly of national and local office. Consequently, the Whig state of the eighteenth century was embellished with Anglican privilege. Yet, in spite of protestations to the contrary, the ramparts of the confessional state were breached on a number of occasions during this period, and many contemporaries recognized that they lived in a society that, in religious terms, was becoming pluralist. No fewer than 3,900 Dissenting congregations were licensed between 1689 and 1710 and aroused Anglican fears of nonconformist expansion. It is true that the Toleration Act of 1689, while permitting certain categories of Protestant Dissenters to worship outside the church, retained civil penalties for their nonconformity. But the fact remains that the act introduced a dangerous element of voluntarism into religion, even if it did not recognize any denomination as a rival, still less as an equal, to the Anglican church. The Occasional Conformity Act of 1711 and the Schism Act of 1714 were intended to be the structural pillars of a confessional state, but both were repealed by the Whigs in 1718. Both of these acts, however, were party measures designed to strengthen the Tory Party rather than the Church of England. The first, in particular, was intended to place local government in the hands of loyal Tories and to exclude Whigs. The second would have excluded non-Anglicans from keeping a school. Furthermore, the enforcement after 1714 of the Test and Corporation Acts was undermined by a series of Occasional Indemnity Acts after 1726 whereby Dissenters outwardly conformed by taking communion once a year. Few ambitious Nonconformists found Occasional Conformity a problem. Those who did, the Quakers and the Baptists, formed self-sufficient communities and professed little desire to enter Anglican public life. In this manner, the half-century after the Toleration Act witnessed a notable increase in religious pluralism, voluntarism and, by the middle of the century, even signs of religious apathy. To have imposed Anglican uniformity by greater legislative force would have taken a superhuman act of political will and would surely have risked a religious reaction. At a time of potential Jacobite rebellion, such an initiative would have been dangerous, even foolhardy. The low-church party which was in the ascendant did not even contemplate it. Thus, a Whig political establishment was willing to accept voluntarism and even irreligion as a means of defeating high-church Toryism.

  The idea of a confessional state as an organizing principle for the political and religious history of the first half of the eighteenth century has been facilitated by the outward continuity in the forms of church establishment. Indeed, the experience of a common religion may be one element in the emergence of sentiments of an English national identity. (There was considerable resistance to the national church in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.) In fact, the position of the Anglican church may have appeared stronger to contemporaries than it really was, especially to those familiar with the somewhat more imposing confessional states of Europe to be found in Austria, Russia and, arguably, in France. The maintenance of its privileges depended upon a variety of factors, not least its own self-confidence. This magnificent exercise in self-belief and self-projection beguiled contemporaries as, to some extent, it has beguiled some recent historians. After all, the church in a confessional state cannot afford to admit or to anatomize its own weaknesses. If it does so, its status at once comes into question. Many people would not have seen the eighteenth-century church as an adjunct to the English law and society. There seemed no necessary distinction between the political and the spiritual sphere. Furthermore, it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which Anglicanism was the dominant intellectual force of the time. To many of those in positions of power in church and state, the official legitimacy of the regime might have been an Anglican one, but the perceptions of those outside were very different. Many contemporaries viewed the society of which they were a part less in terms of Anglican belief than in terms of their secular concern for their lives and careers, their security, their families and their property. Moreover, commercial values had widely penetrated British society by the middle of the eighteenth century, intersecting with values from other sources, such as law and politics. Popular culture, moreover, was imbued with secular elements which left little room, and often little sympathy, for Anglicanism. Even when individuals affirmed the role of theology and morality in their lives, it was not always in terms of a corporate theology but as a matter of individual conscience and personal responsibility.

  Finally, even when we have exonerated the Anglican church from the worst of the criticisms of its enemies, some elements of the old interpretation refuse to go away. The Anglican church was in political thrall to Whig politicians who had every interest in preserving a decent and respectable church as the first support to their power, but little or no interest in the much-needed structural reform of that church. Although the abuses have been seriously exaggerated, the fact remains that they did discredit the church and seriously weaken clerical initiative. Indeed, by the middle of the century – just when it was safe and secure from the (however distant) possibility of a Catholic restoration – the Anglican church was beginning to lose some of its earlier vitality. The biggest enemies of the confessional state were not the enemies without: secularism, science, urbanization and radical reform, but the enemies within: deism, lay control, complacency and, as we shall see later, Methodism and Evangelicalism. In the end, these occupied the attention of the church, drained the vitality of its missionary endeavour and weakened its will to undertake the vitally needed structural reform of its practices and institutions.

  A EUROPEAN REGIME?

  The concept of a confessional state is a helpful means of understanding the place of the Anglican church within Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century. But it will not deliver a comprehensive view of the Hanoverian regime more broadly. This may, however, be achieved by comparing Britain with her European neighbours, to emphasize the common features she shared with them and thus enabling us to avoid the mythology of Britain’s ‘exceptionalism’, the idea that Britain in the eighteenth century was already pursuing a unique and independent path to constitutional government, industrial revolution and imperial greatness, a mission that came of age in the nineteenth century. To liberate us from these assumptions enables us to view Britain as the traditional and hierarchical society which in most respects she undoubtedly still was. As J. C. D. Clark has insisted, the structural foundations of eighteenth-century society were the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church.12 Looked at in this way, Britain is seen in many
ways to resemble her European neighbours. And, indeed, the tendency among scholars in recent years has been to underline the European context within which Britain existed and to emphasize the links that bound Britain to the continent, and not least to Hanover. In such terms, then, Britain is presented as an ancien régime society, a society just like the other societies of the old regime in Europe in the days before the French Revolution of 1789 and increasingly an integral part of the European continent.

  This is very different from the image which eighteenth-century Britons tended to have of themselves. It cannot be irrelevant that eighteenth-century Britons felt themselves to be distinct and different from their neighbours. The eighteenth-century version of the Glorious Revolution flattered Britons by emphasizing the Whiggish virtues of toleration, restraint and constitutionalism which underpinned their political system. There was some justification for this. After all, in some ways Britain was unlike European states. She was an island perched on the north-western periphery of Europe; she was a naval rather than a military power, and her geographical position determined particular types of strategy in warfare. For long periods, she was able to achieve an unusual degree of political maturity, which was the foundation of her commercial growth and prosperity. Her common law system retained its distinctiveness and her version of Protestantism its character. During the eighteenth century, Britain achieved European economic pre-eminence, acquired global maritime superiority and established a (largely non-white) empire. No other country achieved all these things.