‘I hear, Mr Smith’, the Archbishop of York, a notable horseman himself, once said to him, ‘you do not approve of much riding for the clergy.’
‘Why, my Lord,’ replied Smith, who often fell off his own horse, ‘perhaps there is not much objection, provided they do not ride too well, and stick their toes out professionally.’9
Sydney Smith lived very well on his £400 a year exclusive of incidental emoluments and while this was much more than most country parsons received, there were now far fewer who were pitiably poor than there had been in the days of Cranmer and Laud. By the end of the eighteenth century there were only about 4000 livings worth less than £150 a year; and as methods of agriculture improved so the value of tithes and glebe farms rose.10
The Rev. James Woodforde – whose final diary entry typically records his dinner of roast beef despite his being so weak he could scarcely summon the strength to dress and go downstairs – lived very comfortably indeed on £400 a year at Weston Longueville, Norfolk. He was paid his tithes without too much complaint, and rewarded those who paid him with ‘a frolic … a good dinner, surloin of beef roasted, a leg of mutton boiled and plumb puddings in plenty’. He farmed his own glebe land profitably and provided his harvest men with beef, more of his ‘plumb pudding’ and ‘as much liquor as they would drink’. He was not over-zealous in the performance of his duties; and when he said prayers on Good Friday 1777 he was performing a duty with which he had not troubled himself before. There were many other parsons like him. ‘If a rector read the service on a Sunday,’ George Pryme wrote, remembering his youth in the 1780s, ‘and visited the sick when sent for, it was thought quite sufficient.’11
Woodf orde was a characteristic example of a kind of clergyman to be found in every English county. So was Samuel Johnson’s old friend, the Rev. John Taylor, whose ‘talk was all of bullocks’. There were others, of course, more learned, the Rev. Gilbert White, for instance, whose Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne has been published in numerous editions, and men like Henry Fielding’s Parson Adams who was
a perfect master of the Greek and Latin language … and had treasured up a fund of learning rarely to be met with in a university. He was besides a man of good sense, good parts and good nature … His virtue had so much endeared and well recommended him to a bishop, that at the age of fifty, he was provided with a handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year; which, however, he could not make any great figure with; because he lived in a dear country, and was a little encumbered with a wife and six children.12
But John Taylor, thanks to the acquisition of various appointments and preferments in addition to the valuable living of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, was richer than many of his landowning neighbours. He was chaplain to the Duke of Devonshire, through whose influence he was appointed to a prebendal stall at Westminster which, in turn, allowed him to obtain the post of Minister of the Chapel in the Broadway, Westminster, the perpetual curacy of St Botolph Aldersgate, as well as the appointment of minister of St Margaret’s. He eventually accumulated an income of some £7000 a year upon which he lived in ample comfort at his family home in Ashbourne in Derbyshire, paying infrequent visits to the parish in Leicestershire of which he was rector. Known as the King of Ashbourne, he was a justice of the peace, the owner of one of the finest breed of milch-cows in England, and a man whose habits, as Johnson was obliged to admit, were ‘by no means sufficiently clerical’. He was a selfish, childless man who was always on the look out for further ecclesiastical preferments, who never voluntarily paid a debt and who left all his money to a young page, his first wife having died and his second having left him. Johnson, without finding much to talk to him about, greatly enjoyed staying with him, being driven over from Lichfield in his host’s ‘large, roomy post-chaise, drawn by four stout plump horses, and driven by two steady, jolly, postilions’.
Taylor’s table was always laden with the best of English food, of which Johnson was frequently tempted to eat far too much – once so much, indeed, that it was feared ‘he would have died of over eating, and had not a Surgeon been got to administer to him without delay a glister he must have died’, a misfortune discreetly omitted from Boswell’s Life. Taylor’s house was large and comfortable, well cared for by servants, presided over by an ‘upper servant, Mr Peters, a decent grave man, in purple clothes, and a large white wig, like the butler or major domo of a bishop’.
Such clergymen were not, of course, expected to be evangelical and were likely to be disapproved of if they were. ‘We do not much like Mr Cooper’s new sermons,’ Jane Austen told her sister. ‘They are fuller of Regeneration and Conversion than ever.’13 Nor were parsons expected to be specially trained for their calling: a university degree was quite enough; there were no theological colleges until well into the nineteenth century. Nor did clergymen necessarily wear distinguishing clothes until, after Methodist ministers had begun to do so, the more serious clergymen in the Church of England followed suit.
Relations between Anglican clergymen and Methodists and Dissenters were usually friendly enough. Sydney Smith could not resist confiding in a humourless neighbour that he harboured one secret desire: he had always wanted ‘to roast a Quaker’. Quaker babies were an impossibility, he thought. There could be no such things: they must surely all be born ‘broad-brimmed and in full quake’. Yet, living in Yorkshire, where there were many members of the Society of Friends, he found it impossible not to admire them. Their behaviour during an epidemic at Thornton he considered worthy of the highest regard; and, after a visit to a prison with Elizabeth Fry, he remarked, ‘She is very unpopular with the clergy. Examples of living, active virtue disturb our repose, and give birth to distressing comparisons: we long to burn her alive.’ He once asked his York grocer, Joseph Rowntree, to recommend a Quaker nursemaid for the rectory at Foxton. Her faith ‘would in no way be interfered with’ while she was living in a clergyman’s family. ‘You,’ he said to Rowntree, ‘obtain something we do not.’14
Although not as broad-minded as Sydney Smith, the Church was generally inclined to be easy-going in its attitude towards Dissenters, as it was in other matters, though in some parishes, as in that of the Somerset rector, the Rev. John Skinner, rivalry was fierce. There was less tolerance of Roman Catholics. Sydney Smith felt himself to be a lonely figure when urging Catholic emancipation which was not to be granted until the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829. Nearly all his fellow-clergymen in Yorkshire, including his own curate, disagreed with him when he pleaded for ‘no modern chains and prisons under the names of disqualifications and incapacities … No tyranny in belief: a free altar, an open road to heaven.’15
In Somerset, John Skinner had just as much trouble with the Roman Catholics in his ‘detestable neighbourhood’ – which was ‘governed by attorneys, apothecaries and coal-heavers’ – as he did with the Methodists among his parishioners. Indeed, he and one particular Roman Catholic, a farmer and ‘artful fellow’ from whom he drew tithes, actually came to blows after a furious quarrel in a barley field.
He said I was a rascal [Skinner wrote in his journal]. I immediately struck him two blows in the face, one with my right hand, the other with my left. He did not return them but said, ‘This is what I have been wishing for.’ He then called out to the carter and said, ‘He has given me a bloody nose,’ and held down his head which was bleeding. I said he richly deserved what he had got, even had it been more, and added: I supposed he meant to take the law.
The man did take the law and Skinner was indicted for an assault at the Bath Assizes. He suffered it to go ‘by default’ and damages were assessed at £50. ‘The Catholics had expected more.’16
Skinner found some of the Methodists in his village equally exasperating. One day he followed one Smallcombe who had taken a scythe, pickaxe and shovel from the Glebe House, ‘to endeavour to ascertain whether they were his own’:
Mrs Smallcombe was in the house, and immediately began by asking what business I had on her premises. I
replied I had business to visit any place in my parish; that when her husband had been so ill, and I frequently called to see and relieve him, neither she nor her husband then found fault with me for coming on the premises. She replied, if I did come then she did not send for me and never should again, neither should I ever again enter her garden. The insolence of this woman increased and her fury became so violent and her countenance so distorted she resembled one of the witches in the painting of Sir Joshua Reynolds. ‘You a parson, a shepherd of the flock, to come here,’ she vociferated, ‘and insult a poor woman like me (because I called her ‘Beldame’). You will smart for this I assure you, I assure you.’ Tyler’s wife, a very rank Methodist, who was in the house, then began to join in the contest and asked whether I was not ashamed of myself to call such names: that I might talk about canting Methodists, but there never was a Churchman like me in a house but the Devil was there also. I then said ‘Woman, such expressions I might make you answer for in the Ecclesiastical Court, if you were not infinitely beneath my notice.’
I particularise these absurd scenes, not only because they are worth recording as curiosities but, in another point of view, they are indices of the malignity of these sectarists. I am heartily sick of the flock over which I am nominated and placed; instead of being a shepherd, as I told the methodistical beldame when she twitted me with the name, I am in fact a pig driver; I despise myself most thoroughly for suffering irritation from such vermin. Leaving these scenes of discord, I endeavoured to tranquilise my mind by visiting those more softened by sickness and sorrow.17
Skinner’s parishioners appear to have been particularly obstreperous. But elsewhere parsons were heartily disliked as tithe-gatherers and, although nearly everyone believed in God, the churches were not as packed in the eighteenth century as popular imagination likes to suppose. ‘I was at home all day,’ Thomas Turner, a Sussex shopkeeper, wrote in his diary one Sunday evening, ‘but not at church. O fye! No just reason for not being there.’18 Joseph Addison considered there was less religion in England than in any neighbouring country; and Montesquieu thought that it excited nothing but laughter.19 Lord Melbourne once said to the young Queen Victoria that his parents never went to church: ‘People didn’t use to go so much formerly; it wasn’t the fashion.’ He himself, he added, was afraid to go ‘for fear of hearing something very extraordinary’; but that was in the late 1830s. A sermon certainly afforded a very suitable opportunity to settle down for such a snooze as is enjoyed by the congregation depicted in Hogarth’s The Sleeping Congregation in which the parson preaches on the text, ‘Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give thee rest’, as the hour-glass-still attached to some pulpits in the late nineteenth century – marks by its dripping sand the tedious passage of time.
Most congregations, indeed, were as indifferent to their pastors’ sermons as that addressed by Hogarth’s short-sighted preacher. At the end of the eighteenth century only about 10 per cent of the population took Easter Communion in their parish church; and while in some areas there were churches dotted all over the landscape, in others there were far too few. In Manchester, with a population which had risen to 20,000 by 1780, there was only one parish church; and in London in 1812, though there were 186 Anglican places of worship – very few of them offering daily services – there were no less than 256 for Dissenters, even though Methodism, which had been intended by its founder, John Wesley, an Anglican clergyman, as a movement within the Church rather than a separate sect, did not yet have many committed adherents.20 Its influence, however, was growing year by year.
Wesley, the son of a clergyman who sent him to Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, was ordained in 1725 and became a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1726. At Oxford he joined a group known as the Oxford Methodists, which had been formed by his brother, Charles, the evangelist, hymn writer and friend of the Rev. George Whitefield, another highly gifted preacher. It was Whitefield’s example, as well as the reluctance of his fellow-clergymen to allow so uncomfortably zealous a preacher the use of their pulpits, that led to Wesley preaching in the open air, to huge crowds mainly of working-class people. By the time of his death he was said to have preached 40,000 sermons and to have travelled a quarter of a million miles; and there is scarcely a large village in England in which tradition does not point to a green, lychgate or a churchyard by which he is said to have addressed a wondering multitude.
It was not until after Wesley’s death in 1791 that the final break with the Anglican Church took place and Methodism became recognized as a religious belief outside it. Throughout his lifetime there were never many who considered themselves Methodists: in 1796 there were still no more than 77,000. There were also no more than 20,000 Quakers, whereas there had been nearly 40,000 at the beginning of the century. Then there had been as many as 58,000 Baptists, 59,000 Independents and 179,000 Presbyterians. But Dissenters had been falling in number ever since, by as much perhaps as 40 per cent in the first forty years of the century.21 And as people had turned back to Anglicanism so righteous fury with Nonconformism had abated. No longer was it likely that a High Churchman would interrupt the prayers of a congregation in a meeting house, as Justice Bradgate did at Lutterworth when he rode his horse through the door to thunder at the preacher that he lied.22 Provided they were prepared to show an occasional conformity to the established Church, Dissenters were not even debarred from taking their seats in the House of Commons to which nearly forty were elected during the eighteenth century. Nor did practising Jews, of whom there were about 10,000, find it impossible to enter public life.
Anti-semitism in the country had certainly not abated. Faced with furious opposition, much of it from country gentlemen, the government felt obliged in 1753 to repeal an Act which had recently been passed permitting the naturalization of Jews. And there were to be no Jewish Members of Parliament until late in the nineteenth century. As late as 1889, when Lord Rothschild was appointed to succeed the Duke of Buckingham as Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, many people were deeply shocked; and the Prince of Wales, who had several close Jewish friends, felt obliged to write to Lord Carrington, a strong opponent of the appointment, in support of it. Yet ever since the Jews, expelled from the country by Edward I, had been allowed to return by Cromwell, they had been slowly gaining influence in England and had become increasingly powerful in financial circles in the City. Sampson Gideon’s father, who had changed his name from the Portuguese Abudiente on settling in England, had been admitted to the Court of the Painters’ Stainers Company in 1697 and was a Freeman of the City of London. Sampson Gideon himself made an immense fortune as a fínancier and was the government’s principal mainstay for the raising of loans during the Seven Years’ War. It was considered impossible to grant him the baronetcy he desired; but this was conferred instead in 1759 upon his fifteen-year-old son then at Eton. Nathan Rothschild, who first came to England in 1797 and who founded the English branch of the great family business, was as useful to the government of his day, and had a son who was elected Member of Parliament for the City of London. By then there had been Jewish mayors of several English cities. In the 1790s Francis Place, who remembered a time when Jews were insulted in the streets, ‘hooked, hunted, cuffed, pulled by the beard and spat upon’, said they were now safe and believed that those ‘few who would be disposed to insult them merely because they are Jews would be in danger of chastizement from the passers-by and of punishment from the police’.23
Despite the fury of the Gordon Riots of 1780 in London – in which papists were, in any case, only one of many targets of the rioters – Roman Catholics in the country at large were also much less abused than they had formerly been. There were, for one thing, less of them, many families having converted to Anglicanism. The 115,000 Catholics of 1720 had been reduced to less than 70,000 by 1780; and few of these were ever attacked or insulted. ‘I have lived here about thirty years’, the Roman Catholic Sir Henry Arundel told Lord Hardwicke, ‘and thanks to the lenity of ye g
overnment, without ever having had the least molestation given me.’24
The life of such clergymen as John Taylor of Ashbourne was scarcely distinguishable from that of the squire he so much resembled. A portrait of the squire of Heslington was drawn by the rector, Sydney Smith:
In a fine old house of the time of Queen Elizabeth at Heslington there resided the last of the squires, with his lady, who looked as if she had walked straight out of the Ark, or had been the wife of Enoch. He was a perfect specimen of the Trullibers of old. He smoked, hunted, drank beer at his door with his grooms and dogs, and slept over the county paper on Sundays. At first, he heard I was a Jacobin and a dangerous fellow, and turned aside as I passed: but at length, when he found the peace of the village undisturbed, harvests much as usual, Juno and Ponto uninjured, he first bowed, then called, and at least reached such a pitch of confidence that he used to bring the papers, that I might explain the difficult words to him; actually discovered that I had made a joke, laughed till I thought he would have died of convulsions, and ended by inviting me to see his dogs.25
Men like this and like Fielding’s Squire Western, whose custom it was every afternoon ‘as soon as he was drunk, to hear his daughter play on the harpsichord’, shared a common passion for hunting as well as the bottle and roast beef: Horace Walpole referred to the East Anglian variety as ‘mountains of roast beef. They spoke in the same thick dialects as their tenants whose prejudices they shared. They were patriotic and stubbornly xenophobic, particularly disliking the French. They also disliked nabobs whose fortunes inflated the cost of country life and the great lords who were intent upon buying them out. They strongly approved of the sentiments of ‘Rule Britannia’, Arne’s setting to which was published in 1740, and of ‘God save the King’ which was first printed in 1744. They rejoiced in the victories of British arms which were haphazardly assembling an empire. They heartily agreed with one of their number, William Thornton of Cattel, Yorkshire, who violently opposed a proposal for a national census in the 1750s, a ‘presumptuous’ and ‘abandoned’ proposal which, if put into effect, would provide dangerous information for enemies abroad as well as enemies at home, ‘placemen and tax-masters’. The proposal in short was ‘totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty’ in the pursuit of which William Thornton, rather than provide an account of the number and circumstances of his family, would order his servants to give any interfering official of the government ‘the discipline of the horse-pond’.
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