Ideas and Ideals: The Eighteenth-Century Church; Latitudinarians, High Churchman and Non-Jurors

This is the eighth of a series of articles describing formative movements and ideas in the history of the church. These were the crises of thought and conviction which brought us to where we are.

The Revolution settlement of 1689, following the overthrow and exile of the Catholic James II the previous year, led to a fundamental change in the relationship between the Church of England and English society as a whole. It led to an official acceptance of some measure of religious pluralism and ended the Church's attempt to impose ecclesiastical conformity upon the entire nation. Between the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the passage of the Act of Uniformity in 1662, more than two thousand former Puritan clergymen had refused to conform to the restored church and its prayer book, and were ejected from their livings or college fellowships as a result. They and many members of their congregations formed the first institutional separation of Dissent from the Church, as distinct from a Puritan (usually Presbyterian) tendency within it. They included men such as Samson Horne at Chilham and John Osborne of Benenden. In Kent they were sustained by a much older nonconformist tradition, especially in the Wealden area.

Only with the Toleration Act of 1689, one of the first measures passed by Parliament under the new monarchy of William and Mary, were these Dissenters granted limited freedom of worship. The Toleration Act was restrictive in its provisions: it excluded Catholics and those Dissenters who denied the doctrine of the Trinity; it left unrepealed all the persecuting laws of the 1660s and 1670s; it gave no relief from the obligation to pay tithes to the Church and it did not allow non-members of the Church of England to hold public office. In effect, the Toleration Act amounted to a measure of parliamentary indulgence, more durable and more acceptable than the Declarations of Indulgence by prerogative issued by James II.

Most Dissenters were of a moderate Presbyterian disposition, whose most representative figure was Richard Baxter. They were willing to consider a re-union with the Church if their concerns over liturgy and ceremonies could be met. Such a re-union was known to contemporaries as 'comprehension', and was also favoured by some leading members of the Church hierarchy. Schemes for the comprehension of moderate Dissenters were accordingly devised; the Toleration Act was designed for that minority of recalcitrant Dissenters who, it was supposed, would not accept re-union. The failure of comprehension in 1689-90, explained partly by Anglican anxiety about the Dissenters' political ambitions and by the memory of the regicide and the attacks on the Church in the 1640s, meant that, contrary to the original intention, the Toleration Act applied to all Dissenters. It became embedded, nonetheless, as a central feature of the post-1689 régime, in which a privileged national Church with a near-monopoly of public office co-existed with Protestant denominations outside it. In the early eighteenth century Dissent as a whole formed only about seven per cent of the English population; it has been estimated, for instance, that of all the English counties, Kent contained the highest proportion of General Baptists, yet those General Baptists constituted only 1.88 percent of the county's population. However, Dissenters exerted influence beyond their numbers in the world of commerce, and especially in the financial institutions of the City of London. Their political importance, accordingly, could not be overlooked.

The need to adapt to the new conditions following the Revolution of 1688 and the accession of George I after the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, in 1714 strongly influenced the development of opinion and 'party' groupings within and beyond the Church. It is probably more appropriate to speak of mentalities or tendencies of opinion, rather than organised parties, although during the years of tension over the succession during Anne's reign (1702-14) the organisation of the main bodies of opinion had a 'party' appearance. The dominant group in the Church after 1689 might be described as Latitudinarian, consisting of men who were distinguished by their endorsement of the post-1689 and post-1714 régimes and who initially owed their positions to the favour of William III and the politicians whom he appointed to high office.

A feature of Latitudinarianism was an aspiration towards a union of moderate Protestants in the face of a perceived international and internal Catholic threat. The success of the Counter-Reformation by 1700 had driven Protestantism to the northern fringes of Europe, while Charles II and James II had sought - the former by subtle, the latter by more direct means - to re-impose Catholicism upon England. A leading exemplar of Latitudinarianism was John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1691-94. His sermons, published in large numbers and much imitated during the following century, emphasised moderation, together with disapproval of anything redolent of religious fanaticism. Latitudinarians appealed to reason as reinforcement for revelation in defence of Christian truths, and accommodated themselves to the theories of Locke and Newton and played down the more mystical elements of the Church's teaching. They identified themselves in politics with the Whigs, although they were prepared to resist attempts by Whig ministries, such as that of Lord Shangoher in 1719, to abridge the privileges of the Church. Edmund Gibson, bishop of London from 1723-48 and a favourite of Sir Robert Walpole's ministry, broke politically with his patron in 1736 when he successfully opposed Walpole's bill to ease the tithe laws as they affected Quakers. Benjamin Hoadly (bishop, successively, of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury and Winchester between

1716 and 1761), who favoured something approaching a state of near-equality between Church and Dissent, was an extreme case and typical of Latitudinarianism as a whole. The principal figures in the Church during the middle years of the eighteenth century sought to preserve the Church's established position, while adopting an eirenic approach towards Dissent and towards continental Protestantism. Indeed, two archbishops of Canterbury, John Potter (1737-47) and Thomas Secker (1758-68), came from Dissenting backgrounds. Moderation characterised the policy of these years. The laws against Dissenters were not regularly enforced; an Act of Parliament in 1749 allowed the Moravian Church to operate in the British North American colonies; trials for witchcraft ceased after the 1730s. A major challenge, however, was posed to these moderate attitudes by the wider repercussions of rebellion in America (1775-83) and, in the 1790s, by revolution in France.

Although those broadly sympathetic to Latitudinarian values commanded the senior offices in the Church, a majority of the lower clergy retained high church loyalties, which in many cases corresponded to a Tory view of politics. Excluded by Whig ministries from most of the benefits of patronage, they nonetheless enjoyed considerable support from the Anglican gentry and looked to Oxford University, where many of them had been educated, as their spiritual home. To high churchmen, the legitimacy of temporal power rested upon divine sanction, not the rights of the people or Lockean contract theory. They regarded Charles I as a martyr for the Church and observed the anniversary of his execution, 30 January, as an occasion for preaching upon the evils of rebellion. In Tunstall under the Church of King Charles the Martyr became a centre of his cult. High churchmen had difficulty in coming to terms with the Revolution of 1688-89, since they regarded James II as a legitimate, divine right monarch; they accommodated themselves to it by arguing that God, and not human resistance, had providentially dethroned James II, as unjust kings in the Old Testament had met with divine retribution. Some high churchmen adopted a non-Newtonian interpretation, known as Hutchinsonianism, of the nature of the universe. Many of them were deeply disturbed by the spread of heretical opinions, notably deism and Arianism, following the non-renewal of the Licensing laws in 1695, and by the Whig ministry's suspension of Convocation in 1717 (when the Tory majority in the Lower House threatened a prosecution of Bishop Hoadly). A few, notably Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester from 1713-23, resorted to the desperate expedient of Jacobite conspiracy, in the hope of protecting the Church from the designs of a secularising Whig state. Atterbury was deprived of his see and exiled in 1723. Thereafter, high churchmen concentrated upon moral reformation and pastoral efficiency; some of them, notably John Wesley and his brother Charles, reacted against the apparent worldliness and 'dry sermons' of the Church's leadership by embarking upon campaigns of popular preaching, often in the open air. It was no coincidence that many early Methodists were products of Oxford University. During the second half of the century, there was something of a high church revival, as the importance of the traditional values of obedience and respect for authority became increasingly apparent in an age of revolution. High Churchmen could rally around George III, the first English-born Hanoverian king, a devoted Anglican and a symbol of stability, after his accession in 1760. Important high church leaders in Kent included William Jones, Rector of Pluckley from 1765-77, and George Horne, who went to school in Maidstone, and was appointed Dean of Canterbury in 1781 and bishop of Norwich nine years later.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was fashionable in educated circles to praise the Revolution of 1688-89 as a peculiarly English triumph, balancing political stability and constitutional liberty in a manner unknown to the absolute monarchies of continental Europe. There were many, however, for whom the Revolution had been a disaster. They included the small Catholic minority, which gained no relief from the Toleration Act, was suspected of treason during the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 and did not receive legal freedom of worship until 1791. They also included a body of clergy and laity whose loyalty to James II forbade them from taking the oaths of allegiance to William and Mary. These Non-Jurors, though relatively few in number, possessed considerable intellectual influence, through writers such as Jeremy Collier, Charles Leslie and William Law, and were privately supported by many high churchmen who, though equally dubious about the new régime, could not afford to relinquish their church livings and thus ruin their careers. The Non-Jurors who were deprived of their positions in the aftermath of the Revolution included the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft and six of his fellow-diocesans; ironically, five of these seven bishops had been among the 'immortal seven' who famously had opposed James II over his Declaration of Indulgence in 1688. Some 400 lower clergy followed them into internal exile. The Non-Jurors, believing that they were the rightful holders of their offices, and reinforced by those who refused to take oaths of loyalty to George I in 1714, maintained a shadowy episcopal succession throughout the eighteenth century. A prime example of the non-juring tradition was the Brett family of Wye, one member of which, Thomas Brett, formerly Rector of Betteshanger, became a non-juring bishop. A natural resort for Non-Jurors was the Jacobite movement, to which they contributed substantially in terms of propaganda; but the Catholicism of the Jacobite claimants to the throne was a serious obstacle to the prospect of a Stuart restoration.

By 1800 the Non-Jurors as a body had almost ceased to exist. The Latitudinarian and the High Church mentalities still existed and could still engage in mutual antagonism. However, the challenges posed by the threat of revolution, both internal and external, the lengthy wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the rising numbers of Dissenters and the threat to the parish clergy posed by the spread of unlettered evangelical preaching led to an enhanced sense of defensive unity within the Church which was to characterise the first half of the nineteenth century.

G.M. Ditchfield Reader in Eighteenth-Century History University of Kent

Suggestions for further reading:

• G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688-1730. The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975)
• J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1660-1832. Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 2000)
• Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660-1828. Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese (Oxford, 2000)
• G.M. Ditchfield and B. Keith-Lucas (eds), A Kentish Parson. Selections from the Private Papers of the Revd Joseph Price, Vicar of Brabourne, 1767-1786 (Kent County Council, 1991)