The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  By the end of the eighteenth century Evangelicalism was established as an important, if minority, movement within the Anglican church. In the 1780s, however, it was taken up by a number of individuals of considerable public importance who were to have a disproportionate influence on British society in the early nineteenth century. A cell of Evangelicals in Cambridge, notably Charles Simeon (1759–1836), who was converted in 1779, and Isaac Milner (1750–1820), influenced the minds of a younger generation of upper-class men. However, it was a group of Evangelicals in south London, the ‘Clapham Sect’, who made Evangelicalism a major force not only within the Church of England but also more widely in public life. It was led by the son of Henry Venn, John (1759–1813), who was rector of Clapham after 1792. Among the most prominent members of the Clapham Sect were William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the MP for Yorkshire, who was converted to Evangelical Christianity in 1785, Henry Thornton (1760–1815), MP for Surrey and John Shore (1751–1834), Governor-General of India, 1793–8. Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838), the father of the great Whig politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, had been governor of the non-slave colony of Sierra Leone in 1796, and he proceeded to edit the Evangelical Christian Observer after 1802. His strength of character and moral energies were essential to the abolition of the slave trade, which passed Parliament in 1807.

  The objective of the Clapham Sect was to encourage positive Christian action in order to achieve redemption for sinners. The Evangelicals were pious but they were not doctrinaire. Most of their leaders were uninterested in theological wrangling, professing instead a form of practical Calvinism which sought to do good in this world. The Evangelicals were reformers, advocating the freeing of the slaves, the reform of the penal system, the abolition of duelling, the improvement of the manners and morals of the upper classes and the keeping holy of the Sabbath day. In 1787, under the influence of Wilberforce, they established the Proclamation Society, which advocated the moral regeneration of the ruling elite and the restoration of its sense of responsibility. This society was similar in many ways to the much older Society for the Reformation of Manners (1692) but it was to be more successful and more effective. Its influence was to be felt long into the next century in its hostility towards popular entertainments, in the establishment of proper observance of the Sabbath (Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, in fact, refused to call parliamentary sittings on a Monday so that MPs from distant constituencies would not have to travel on the Sabbath) and in the censorship of plays and books which offended against modesty and political conformity. Such projects had an added urgency on account of the long years of war against France after 1793. It was widely believed that the French Revolution had occurred because of the atheism and immorality which had penetrated French society in the last decades of the life of the ancien régime. If Britain were not to go the way of France, then her social leaders ought to look to the example they were setting. One of the most famous and influential members of the Clapham Sect was Hannah More. She admonished the rich to set an example to the poor in her Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1787). In An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790) she went further, protesting against the conventional religion of taste, fashion and urbanity, advocating ‘a turning of the whole mind to God, a concentration of all the powers and affections of the soul into one steady point, a uniform desire to please him’. In the 1790s she sought to promote Evangelical Christianity as a counterweight to radical doctrines. Her collection of ‘Cheap Repository Tracts’ in 1795 was enormously influential, selling around 2 million copies. (Significantly, the Society for the Reformation of Manners proceeded against Paine’s anti-Christian Age of Reason in 1797.) In the same year Wilberforce himself published his inelegantly titled A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country contrasted with Real Christianity in which, in true Evangelical style, he called on the upper classes to set a decent, Christian example to the lower. In this vein, in 1802 the Proclamation Society changed its name to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a reflection of the strength of the conviction that vice, especially the vice displayed by the upper classes, might be productive of social disorder.

  Within a few decades, observers were commenting on the improvement on the styles of life of the upper classes and the middling classes, especially in the provinces. They noted the greater stress on family life, family prayers and family reading of the Bible in middle-class households. After the war ended, many habits and practices which had once been accepted unquestioningly were regarded more critically. Drunkenness and ostentation in dress were now much less acceptable. In polite society, respectable behaviour, self-discipline and orderliness were expected. Some, at least, of the famous values of the Victorians were making their appearance long before Victoria came to the throne.

  It was not for want of trying that the Society for the Suppression of Vice was unable to achieve a similar influence among the lower classes of society. The boisterousness, licence and disorder which accompanied popular festivity disgusted serious men and women who were motivated by a severe puritanism in their personal lives. To the Evangelicals, innocent amusement could be a deadly moral trap for the unwary. Yet moral exhortation and personal example could not persuade the labouring masses to abandon their festive culture. Nevertheless, there are signs that they had some influence and that they may have slowly mellowed the worst excesses of popular culture. For example, although the Evangelicals failed in 1809 to pass a bill outlawing bull-baiting, the sport was already declining, and popular habits thus changing, due in part at least to their efforts.

  The spread of the Evangelical movement within the Church of England was slow but steady. It was assisted partly by the energies of prominent individuals. Spencer Perceval, prime minister between 1809 and 1812, was sympathetic to the cause. Lord Harrowby, a cabinet minister, was an Evangelical. In 1812 he steered a bill through Parliament to establish minimum stipends in poor livings, graduated according to the size of the parish. In 1815 the first Evangelical bishop, Henry Ryder, was appointed to Gloucester, partly through Harrowby’s influence. By then the Evangelicals were at the centre of public networks of patronage which made them a formidable national force. Furthermore, the spread of the influence of the Evangelical movement also owed much to its ingenious organizational tactics. After 1815 Simeon began the practice of buying advowsons from a central fund to enable talented ministers to take livings in specified areas of the country. In this way, for example, Birmingham became a strongly Evangelical town. Yet the numbers of Evangelicals remained small. Many parishes remained unaffected and the movement had a limited organizational impact upon the church. Evangelicals were not able to remedy its serious structural weaknesses. On the whole, their analysis of the faults of the church was excessively spiritual, even if their faith and their energies did inject much-needed moral energy.

  Evangelicals were particularly active in spreading the word of God to the non-Christian peoples of the British Empire. In 1776 they founded the Society for Missions to Africa and the East (later known as the Church Missionary Society). Simeon, John Venn and Henry Thornton were all closely involved. In 1795 they founded a London Missionary Society on the basis of united action by all the churches. Other Evangelicals founded the African Association (1806) for the welfare of West Africans. The British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) also depended on Evangelical energies; it was also powerfully supported by Methodist and Nonconformist groups. In the first fifteen years of its existence, it distributed no fewer than two and a half million copies of the Bible. By 1815 every county in the land had its branch of the Bible Society. High Anglicans were furious, and continued to compete in the market of Bible distribution by continuing the work of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Evangelicals even dreamed of a Christian India. In 1813 they were involved in the appointment of a bishop and three archdeacons for the subcontinent. They even manag
ed to secure the insertion into the new East India Charter of 1813 of a clause enabling the Board of Control in London to overrule East India Company decisions which withheld licences to missionaries.

  If missionary work was a characteristic expression of the redemptionist Christianity of the Evangelicals, then the movement for the abolition of the slave trade enabled them to cooperate with other Protestant churchmen in one of most numerous and best-organized reform movements of these decades. Indeed, many abolitionists defined their work in missionary terms, slavery being perhaps the worst manifestation of the barbarism against which they were crusading. Indeed, the sheer extent of the slave trade is astonishing. Exports of slaves rose from 125,600 between 1700 and 1709 and then to 273,000 from 1750 to 1759. Between 1780 and 1800 the British exported an incredible 656,000 slaves. London merchants financed two-thirds of the expenses of the trade in the early eighteenth century but in the 1730s were challenged, first, by Bristol and then, in the 1750s, by Liverpool. Liverpool was ideally suited to the slave trade, with its low wage rates, its ties to Europe’s valuable East Indian trade and its superior geographical position, which made it much less susceptible to piracy and privateering than Bristol or London. After 1780, indeed, Liverpool merchants financed no less than three-quarters of slave voyages.

  Although certain long-term trends in eighteenth-century society were to challenge the extent and, indeed, the existence of the slave trade – enlightenment culture, humanitarianism and political reform – it was the loss of the American colonies which shaped the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. The years of the American war had witnessed an enormous amount of debate about freedom and slavery and provoked a profound discussion of Britain’s standing as a Protestant and imperial nation. The abolitionist movement arose out of the womb of the Quaker movement in 1783, before the establishment in 1787 of the London Abolition Committee. Corresponding committees sprang up in most counties and towns. Although the importance of the London committee has been disputed by writers who have underlined the cultural environment of abolitionism, especially the link between protest and reform movements in the provinces, there can be no doubt that the committee gave shape, continuity and political leadership to the abolitionist movement. William Wilberforce had already declared his intention to raise the issue of the slave trade in Parliament. Nevertheless, much of the impetus for the movement came from the Quaker churches. No fewer than nine of the twelve London Committee members were Quakers and all of them had links with the earlier committee. Between May 1787 and July 1788, the London committee printed and distributed no fewer than 85,000 pieces of propaganda. Meanwhile, Thomas Clarkson embarked upon a series of well-publicized tours of the country which kept up provincial pressure on the London committee. In 1788, 100 abolitionist petitions were presented to Parliament. They met with some modest, immediate success: an act of that year limited the number of slaves carried by each ship. The abolitionists moved up to a major attempt to abolish the slave trade, the House of Commons rejected Wilberforce’s proposal for early abolition and instead decided to hear its own evidence. This dragged on until February 1791 while the abolitionist campaign continued out of doors. The following year the Commons voted by 230–85 in favour of the ‘gradual’ abolition of the slave trade. Slowly, the energy of loyalism and the urgent priorities of wartime were sapping the strength of abolitionism and by the middle of the decade it had almost suspended its activities The prime minister, who had earlier been sympathetic to the cause now preached caution and delay.

  However, Wilberforce and his friends continued to struggle to obtain at least a partial or gradual abolition. Between 1800 and 1804, however, they suspended their parliamentary endeavours, knowing that they stood little chance of success while the war lasted. In fact, the intellectual case for abolition had long been convincing. Its implementation was now a matter of timing and circumstance. A few months before his death, Pitt forbade the importation of slaves into newly conquered colonies. By then the abolitionists had added to their humanitarian case a direct appeal to British national self-interest. Their argument – that slavery damaged the national interest by hampering economic expansion and that abolition would foster economic development – carried the day. Goaded and driven by a welter of public meetings and petitions, a majority of MPs during the ‘Talents’ ministry were persuaded to pass a bill abolishing slave trade in 1807. This combination of economic nationalism with humanitarian Christianity represented an early victory for middle-class reforming initiative. It was not to be the last.

  Even more impressive was the popular mobilization whipped up against the institution of slavery itself within the British Empire. In 1823 the Anti-Slavery Society was formed. In May of that year a motion for abolition was deflected by the Tories, who inserted the word ‘gradual’ into the motion, as their predecessors had done in 1792. Steadily the pressure for abolition mounted. By 1830 the Anti-Slavery Society was demanding immediate and total abolition. The extent of its agitation is impressive. Compared to the small score of abolitionist societies existing in the 1780s and 1790s, there were over 200 of them in 1814, 800 in the mid-1820s and no fewer than 1,300 in 1832–3. Indeed, over 4,000 anti-slavery petitions were received by Parliament between 1830 and 1833, compared with about fifty in favour. A clearer expression of national opinion would have been difficult to imagine. (Significantly, too, women took a prominent role. In 1833 a single ‘ladies’ petition’ was signed by no fewer than 187,000 names.) The few parliamentary candidates at the elections of 1831 and 1832 who were lukewarm about emancipation almost invariably failed to win their seat. At the general election of 1832 the abolition of slavery became part of the Whigs’ general programme of civil and religious liberty. Carried along by the reforming momentum created by the Reform Act of 1832, the bill to abolish slavery passed in 1833.

  In spite of their achievements, the Evangelicals were unpopular in many quarters. Their arrogance and their determination to interfere in the lives of other people caused great offence. Their alleged hypocrisy came in for much criticism, particularly their seemingly greater concern for some of the harmless entertainments of the masses rather than real social abuses such as poverty, industrial exploitation and the employment of children. They were, it was widely believed, prepared to exert themselves for the benefit of slaves and of heathen peoples in foreign countries while ignoring the sufferings of the underprivileged at home. Furthermore, their distaste for radical reformers and their support for successive governments failed to commend them to a growing army of converts to reform after 1815.

  Although their political ideology is often dismissed as Tory, the Evangelicals in their own way posed a potential threat to the establishment in the 1790s. Their values were a powerful critical commentary on the lifestyles of the aristocracy, the status of the Church of England, the beliefs, manners and morals of the country’s elite and the manner of the performance of its paternalist responsibilities. Moreover, the Evangelicals should not be dismissed as either reactionary or irrational. Many of them welcomed progressive developments in science and on social issues. Indeed, they accepted the Enlightenment theory that people were the product of their environment and could be changed and improved by the reform of public institutions, such as prisons, hospitals and workhouses. Evangelicals certainly accepted their own responsibilities for their own actions. Thrift and hard work would thus bring their own rewards. This amounted to a form of ‘spiritual capitalism’, as Boyd Hilton has put it,33 which nurtured the individualism that was frequently the dynamic of economic development. In this way, the personal morality of Evangelicalism fitted comfortably into the world of consumerism and capitalism.

  Methodists and Dissenters

  One of the major features of religious history in the second half of the long eighteenth century was the process by which Britain became a pluralist society, as the new Methodist and established Protestant Dissenting denominations came to rival the appeal of the Anglican church. These developments constitute one of
the great religious epics in the history of modern Britain, and one which is full of significance for our understanding of Hanoverian society. The rise of Methodism may be approached at three levels. At the first it may be seen as part of a European and Atlantic religious dynamic beginning in the 1730s and 1740s which expressed itself in a revival of religious enthusiasm, taking the form of Evangelical patterns of thought and worship. Many of the characteristic features of Methodism, for example, including class meetings and itinerant preaching, can be found in other countries. At the second level, it may be explained as a consequence of powerful social forces: the dramatic growth in population and drastic changes in people’s living and working environments in country and in town. Whether religious revivals have an internal dynamic of their own or whether they can be reduced to political or economic circumstances may be debated interminably. That the new Methodist form of religiosity had its own dynamic cannot be denied. At the third level, indeed, changes in religious practice were triggered by changes within religious structures and cultures. In this case, a changing pattern of religiosity can be treated not merely as a growing dissatisfaction with traditional Anglican patterns of religious provision but even as the revival of older patterns of high-church Anglicanism. Indeed, immediate pointers to the timing of the rise of Methodism came with the climate of ideas and sentiment generated by the publication of William Law’s influential work, Practical Treaties on Christian Perfection (1729). Law’s message – that communion with Christ was to be sought through faith and not through reason – generated ripples of commitment, especially among young Anglicans.