Eighteenth Century Britain

Religion and Politics 1714-1815

Nigel Yates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317866473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The church of the eighteenth century was still reeling in the wake of the huge religious upheavals of the two previous centuries. Though this was a comparatively quiet period, this book shows that for the whole period, religion was a major factor in the lives of virtually everybody living in Britain and Ireland. Yates argues that the established churches, Anglican in England, Irelandand Wales, and Presbyterian in Scotland, were an integral part of the British constitution, an arrangement staunchly defended by churchmen and politicians alike.

The book also argues that, although there was a close relationship between church and state in this period, there was also limited recognition of other religions. This led to Britain becoming a diverse religious society much earlier than most other parts of Europe. During the same period competition between different religious groups encouraged ecclesiastical reforms throughout all the different churches in Britain.

Chapter 1
Three Kingdoms, Two Establishments

The British Isles of the eighteenth century comprised three very different areas, in their history and in their administrative arrangements: England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland; together with the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands these formed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. England had been effectively united as one kingdom by the ninth century; from the twelfth century it had absorbed parts of Wales, a conquest finally completed by the end of the thirteenth century, though it was not until 1536 that Wales was divided into shires on the English model and its government fully assimilated with that of England. Attempts had been made to conquer Ireland as well in the twelfth century but here the process of conquest and assimilation was a much longer one. The whole of Ireland was effectively under English rule by the early seventeenth century but it retained its own separate administration and parliament, and the latter, but not the former, was not fully integrated into a British parliament until the Act of Union which became operative from January 1801. Thus for the major part of the period covered by this book Ireland was a quasi-independent country with its own lawmaking powers. Scotland was a completely independent country, despite attempts by successive English rulers to annex it between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, until 1603 when James VI of Scotland became James I of Great Britain and Ireland. Although it ceased to have its own separate parliament in 1707, it still retained its own judicial system and other independent administrative arrangements which separated it from England and Wales. The Isle of Man did not become a possession of the English crown until 1765 when the British government bought out most of the rights of its then ruler, the Duke of Atholl, in order to prevent the island being a haven for smugglers, but the duke retained some of his rights, including the right to present to the bishopric, for another 60 years. The island, however, retained its own parliament, Tynwald, as it does to this day. The Channel Islands are the sole remaining part of the Duchy of Normandy, otherwise surrendered by the English crown in 1204. Like the Isle of Man they have retained their own judicial and administrative arrangements and never sent representatives to the Westminster parliament.

The ecclesiastical divisions of the British Isles were, between 1714 and 1815, similar, but not identical, to the political ones. In the whole of Britain apart from Scotland, the established churches were Anglican and had an episcopal and diocesan structure. The two provinces of Canterbury and York covered the whole of England, Wales, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, the last of which formed part of the diocese of Winchester. All the two provinces’ archbishops and bishops, with the exception of the Bishop of Sodor and Man who sat in Tynwald, had the right to a seat and vote in the House of Lords at Westminster. Ireland had four ecclesiastical provinces and its four archbishops and 18 bishops sat in the Irish House of Lords. After the Act of Union the Irish church was represented, on a rota basis, by one of its archbishops and three of its bishops in the House of Lords at Westminster. The Reformation had taken rather a different form in Scotland from that in the other parts of the British Isles and a presbyterian rather than an episcopal Protestant church had been established. With the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603 successive Stuart monarchs had endeavoured, so far as they were able, to reintroduce episcopacy into Scotland and to bring the Scottish church more into line with the English one. It was the policy of religious integration which had been a major factor in bringing about the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the temporary abolition of the monarchy in Britain. The attempt at religious integration was eventually abandoned in 1689, when episcopacy in the Church of Scotland was finally abolished and the institution became wholly presbyterian in character. The Scottish church was largely self-governing, its ultimate authority being its General Assembly at which the crown was represented by a royal commissioner, and there was no representation for it in the parliament at Westminster.

The structure of religion in England and Wales

The established church in England and Wales, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands comprised two provinces and 27 dioceses. The provinces were by no means even in size; that of York comprised only the five northern dioceses of Carlisle, Chester, Durham, Sodor and Man, and York; all the remaining dioceses, including the four Welsh ones, were in the province of Canterbury. They varied considerably in size from Sodor and Man, with only 17 parishes, and Rochester, which comprised only that part of Kent west of the River Medway, to the enormous diocese of Lincoln which covered the whole of five counties and parts of several others. The dioceses of Canterbury and York also contained peculiars, comprising groups of parishes in other dioceses for which the respective archbishop, and not the diocesan bishop, was responsible. The diocese of Bangor also had two detached groups of parishes entirely surrounded by the diocese of St Asaph but for which the bishop of Bangor was responsible. The diocese of Bristol was in two separate sections comprising a few parishes in and around Bristol and the county of Dorset. Two English dioceses, Chester and Hereford, had some parishes in Wales, and two Welsh dioceses, St Asaph and St Davids, had some parishes in England. Each diocese had a cathedral, over which the bishop had very limited jurisdiction, and which was administered by a chapter headed, in most cases, by a dean. Two cathedrals, those of Llandaff and Sodor and Man, were in ruins by the eighteenth century, though at Llandaff a temporary structure was built in the nave so that services could continue to take place within its walls. Each diocese also had between one and six archdeaconries, administered by an archdeacon who was effectively the bishop’s deputy and carried out regular visitations of the churches and clergy within his archdeaconry. There were some exceptions to this arrangement: the royal peculiars of Westminster Abbey, St George’s at Windsor and the Chapels Royal; the peculiars which formed part of the dioceses of Canterbury and York; archdeaconries in the dioceses of Bangor and St Asaph which had been combined with the bishopric in order to increase the bishop’s income; and the Channel Islands, which formed two deaneries in the diocese of Winchester in which the deans exercised most of the authority of the bishop. Some dioceses, especially in Wales where the archdeacons did not exercise the authority of their counterparts in England, had rural deans who exercised a supervisory role over all the parishes in the deanery, a unit smaller than an archdeaconry, though the duties delegated to them varied from diocese to diocese. The basic unit of ecclesiastical administration was the parish, which varied greatly in size and which might comprise a single settlement with a church, or several settlements with a parish church and, in some cases, one or more chapels-of-ease in which some services took place.

In theory all parishioners were members of the established church, but in practice some were not. There were, throughout England and Wales, small groups of Roman Catholics, Baptists, Independents, Presbyterians and some smaller sects who worshipped in their own chapels, though they were all obliged to pay tithes for the upkeep of the clergy of the established church, rates for the upkeep of its churches, and if they wanted to contract a legal marriage they had to do so by being married in an Anglican church by one of its clergy. Protestant dissenters could license their chapels for worship by applying for permission to do so to the diocesan authorities and licensed chapels had protection in law. However, Roman Catholics did not acquire this right until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, so they, and any group of Protestants who had not licensed their chapels, though they were normally able to worship without molestation, did not enjoy the protection of the law.

The structure of religion in Ireland

In principle the structure of the established church in Ireland was more or less identical to that of the established church in England and Wales. In practice it was rather different. Whereas in England and Wales there were comparatively few Roman Catholics or Protestant dissenters, this was not the case in Ireland. For reasons that are outside the scope of this book,¹ Roman Catholicism had retained the allegiance of the majority of the population of Ireland and the attempts by James VI and I in the early seventeenth century to establish Protestant plantations had succeeded in creating almost as many presbyterian Protestant congregations in Ireland as episcopal ones. The situation of the established Church of Ireland was unique in eighteenth-century Europe, in that a religious body that enjoyed all the privileges of establishment could not command the loyalty of more than a tiny proportion of the population. Throughout the period between 1714 and 1815, and with only the slightest fluctuations, Roman Catholics constituted about four-fifths of the population of Ireland. The remaining fifth, though Protestant, was divided roughly into 60% members of the Church of Ireland (i.e. 12% of the total population of Ireland) and 40% Presbyterians (i.e. 8% of the total population of Ireland). There were many parishes in Ireland in which there were no, or very few, members of the Church of Ireland, and churches fell into ruin through complete disuse. Maintaining the clergy required the creation of, sometimes very large, parochial areas, and the small size of some of the Irish dioceses meant that it was practical to unite them under one bishop. By the eighteenth century the 35 pre-Reformation dioceses were being administered by a total of 22 archbishops and bishops, though even so most were smaller in size than the average diocese in England and Wales. Some dioceses had several cathedrals, others had none because they were in ruins, but most were no more than glorified parish churches, their dignities and prebends filled by local clergy using the modest endowments to boost inadequate parochial incomes. There were archdeacons, though they exercised no powers, and the only diocese to have retained rural deans was Cloyne. Irish bishops did not have the administrative support available to their counterparts in England and Wales though most dioceses appear to have been efficiently administered. Roman Catholics and Presbyterians laboured under the same restrictions as their co-religionists in England and Wales, with the penal laws restricting the freedom of Roman Catholics being enforced rather more stringently, at least during the first half of the eighteenth century.

The structure of religion in Scotland

In Scotland the religious structure was very different from that in the other parts of the British Isles. With the final abolition of episcopacy, and the approval of both the monarch and the Scottish parliament in 1690, a fully presbyterian system of church government was established in Scotland. Under its General Assembly the country was divided into areas covered by provincial synods, each comprising a number of presbyteries, which in turn each comprised a number of kirk sessions, each kirk session comprising the ministers and elders of that parish. At each layer of church government both clergy and laity were represented. These arrangements were not altered by the union treaty of 1707, and the abolition of the separate Scottish parliament, except in one respect. In 1712 the parliament at Westminster, despite the objections of the General Assembly, re-introduced private patronage into the Church of Scotland, restoring to the heritors (landowners) the right to present ministers to vacant charges. Although the presbyterian party in the Church of Scotland had triumphed in 1689–90 no immediate attempt was made to deprive ministers with episcopalian sympathies. What was finally to remove them from the established church was not their doctrinal standpoint but their political one and their continued support for the Jacobite cause. Even then episcopalian clergy were still to be found in parts of the highlands. Episcopal ministers remained in charge of parishes at Contin, Fodderty and Urray until 1721, at Barvas on Lewis until 1722, at Daviot and Dunlichity until 1726, at Glenorchy until 1728 and at Boleskine until 1729.² However after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–6 the small number of surviving episcopalians in Scotland, now fully outside the established church and maintaining their bishops and clergy, found themselves heavily persecuted and labouring under even more restrictions than the small number of Roman Catholics. There were also divisions within the majority Presbyterian community in Scotland, with various groups seceding from the Church of Scotland over issues mostly relating to patronage or the interpretation of the Westminster Confession as the standard of doctrine.³ None of these groups were very large but they created the same tensions with the established church as Protestant dissenters in England and Wales.

Jacobites and non-jurors

In 1688–9 King James VII and II had been forced into exile. The Act of Settlement of 1701 laid down that, in the event of neither William III nor his sister-in-law Anne having any successors, the throne should pass to the Electress Sophia of Hanover and her heirs. The Act also laid down that every future monarch must be, or become, a member of the Church of England. The succession of William III had caused some problems for Anglican churchmen. Much as they disapproved of James II’s Roman Catholicism and his attempts to remove some of the restrictions on his co-religionists, he was still the anointed king and there was some doubt as to whether it was possible to recognise another monarch while he lived. The Archbishop of Canterbury, four English bishops and one Irish one refused to take the oath to William III and were deprived in 1690–1. Although episcopacy had been abolished in Scotland by the General Assembly in 1689, the unanimity with which the Scottish bishops expressed their reluctance to take any but the most circumscribed oath to the new king was a factor in his acquiescence in the Assembly’s decision. The lead given by some of these bishops was followed by some of the clergy and a number of non-juring Anglican congregati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Three Kingdoms, Two Establishments
• 2 Dissent from the Religious Establishments
• 3 The Maintenance of Doctrinal Orthodoxy
• 4 A Theology of Good Works
• 5 The Condition of the Established Churches
• 6 The Beginnings of Ecclesiastical Reform
• 7 The Threat of Revolution
• Conclusion
• Appendices:
• Bibliography
• Index