Reformation without end

Religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England

Robert G. Ingram

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526126948
• eBook ISBN: 9781526126962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Reformation without end radically reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during 'the Enlightenment'. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways that the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions and the thing which they thought had caused them, the Reformation. Reformation without end draws on a wide array of manuscript sources to show how authors crafted and pitched their works.

Chapter 1

Why then are we still reforming?

WHAT THE GOLDEN KING BEGAN

This account of the past’s hold on post-revolutionary England opens with the stories of two doubting Thomases – Thomas Woolston and Thomas Rundle. One questioned Christ’s miracles, the other, Christ’s divinity. They rehashed heresies from antiquity and both suffered when their doubts became public. The fates of these two doubting Thomases remind us of salient features of eighteenth-century England that most have forgotten. They remind us that the eighteenth-century English obsessed about the past and debated furiously what guidance it should have for the present. They remind us of the places where and the ways in which the eighteenth-century English fought their positions. They remind us of the character of the post-revolutionary politics of religion. They remind us of the role of restraint – official and unofficial, overt and unspoken – in shaping and managing public debate. And they remind us of the central role played in those public debates by clerics. Those eighteenth-century English polemical divines tried to use Renaissance tools to solve Reformation problems that had caused seventeenth-century religious wars. When they failed to solve those problems, the English state did. In the end, Leviathan won.

Both the Woolston and Rundle controversies were fights about the past. The controversy centring on Thomas Woolston (1668–1733) erupted during the late 1720s, almost three centuries after the English Reformation had begun; but the Reformation was the framework within which many located it. Just after Christmas 1728, for instance, Edmund Gibson, bishop of London, received a pseudonymous letter from Christodulus. ‘[B]y the very same Sophistry wherewith you Protestants a Century or two ago unfortunately explained away the points of Holy writ, the authority of the church and the real presence … one of your brotherhood has explained away the whole and the same foul breath that raised your Bubble of a church has blown it into nothing’, Christodulus charged. ‘…[Y]our first step over the brink of heaven naturally landed to hell, the first step you took with your Back to the Catholic Church naturally led you to Deism and Bold Woolston has but ended what the Golden king began, our unhappy Henry the Eight’.¹ Christodulus referred to Thomas Woolston’s recent work on Christ’s miracles. Woolston argued that ‘the literal history of many of the miracles of Jesus as recorded by the Evangelists, does imply Absurdities, Improbabilities and Incredibilities, consequently they, either in whole or in part, were never wrought, as they are commonly believed now-a-days, but are only related as prophetical and parabolical Narratives of what would be mysteriously and wonderfully done by him’. Jesus, Woolston acknowledged, was the Messiah, but prophecy, not miracles, proved it. Woolston promised ‘not [to] confine myself only to Reason, but also the express Authority of the Fathers, those holy, venerable and learned Preachers of the Gospel in the first Ages of the Church, who took our Religion from the Hands of the Apostles and of apostolical Men, who died, some of them and suffered for the Doctrines they taught, who professedly and confessedly were endued with divine and extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit’.² Woolston’s six discourses (1727–29) denied the literal truth of Christ’s miracles, caused a furore and sold nearly twenty thousand copies. The Roman Catholic Christodulus saw in Woolston’s denial of miracles the natural terminus of Protestant logic. Leading figures in the Protestant English church-state judged differently, reckoning Woolston a ‘fool and madman’ whose works caused ‘mischief’.³ Woolston, an idiosyncratic figure with no powerful patron, got punished as a cautionary example. Many of the established Church’s leading figures rebutted him in print and the state brought the royal justice to bear against him.

Woolston’s 1729 trial for blasphemy took place at the Court of King’s Bench.⁴ There the crown’s prosecutors argued that Woolston’s view of Christ’s miracles was illegal. ‘[T]his was the most Blasphemous Book that ever was Published in any Age whatsoever’, claimed Attorney-General Philip Yorke. In it ‘our Saviour is compared to a Conjurer, Magician and Imposter and the Holy Gospel, as wrote by the Blessed Evangelists, turned into Ridicule and Ludicrous Banter, the Literal Scope and Meaning wrested and the Whole represented as idle Romance and Fiction’. Woolston’s writings, Yorke warned, threatened to cause ‘the truth of the Holy Scriptures to be denied and to weaken their authority and thereupon to spread among the king’s subjects irreligious and diabolical opinions’.⁵ Yorke had made an analogous argument in Rex v. Curll (1727). There Yorke had contended that by publishing an obscene book Edmund Curll had committed an ‘offence at common law, as it tends to corrupt the morals of the King’s subjects and is against the peace of the King. Peace includes good order and government and that may be broken in many instances without an actual force. 1. If it be an act against the constitution or civil government; 2. If it be against religion: and, 3. If against morality’.⁶ Theological heterodoxy threatened the state because it could disrupt the peace.

Woolston countered that he had not aimed ‘to bring Our Religion into Contempt, but to put Our Religion upon a better Footing and shew, That the Miracles of our Saviour were to be understood in a Metaphorical Sense and not as they were Literally Written’.⁷ When denying Christ’s transfiguration or healing miracles, Woolston protested that he had followed primitive precedent. ‘I do profess here before God and the World that I am a Christian’, he pleaded, ‘for if I am not a Christian, not even the Fathers themselves are Christians since they believed exactly as I do’. In fact, he continued, ‘the Fathers say Christianity in the Allegorical Sense of the Scriptures’ and no less than St Jerome had argued ‘that the literal sense is contrary to Christianity’.⁸ His discourses aimed only ‘to establish the Christian Religion upon the Foundation of the Fathers and to interpret the Scriptures as they did’.⁹ Woolston’s defence failed to sway the jury, which convicted him of blasphemy. Neither were the judges lenient: they punitively fined him and jailed him in the King’s Bench prison in Southwark, where he remained on and off for the next four years before influenza killed him. Woolston’s supporters claimed he had ‘dyed under Persecution for Religion’.¹⁰ Leaders of the English church-state, by contrast, thought they were protecting truth and ensuring civil peace. Either way, there was no denying that the church-state had sent an unmistakeable message to heterodox polemical divines through Woolston’s exemplary punishment.

The message that heterodoxy harmed clerical careers likewise got sent in the case of Thomas Rundle (1687–1743).¹¹ Nearly a year after Woolston’s death, Lord Chancellor Charles Talbot put forward his domestic chaplain, Rundle, for the vacant see of Gloucester. Queen Caroline also supported Rundle. Yet, from the outset, Edmund Gibson, whom some called Robert Walpole’s ‘pope’, sought to scupper Rundle’s candidacy. The nomination, Gibson reported, had ‘given very great offence to the clergy; and I may truly add, that the uneasiness is general, among the Whig as well as the Tory part of them’.¹² There were longstanding rumours that Rundle was an Arian, something neither Rundle nor his supporters publicly denied and something to which his friendships with heterodox figures lent credibility.¹³ Moreover, Richard Venn, a hyper-orthodox and politically well-connected London priest, recounted to Gibson a long-ago conversation in which Rundle had argued that Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac was ‘an action unjust and unnatural, that it was the remains of his Idolatrous Education and proceeded from a vain affection of exceeding other Nations, that had indeed been guilty of human sacrifice …; that in order to justify and heighten his character in the esteem of his friends, he pretended a Revelation from God, commissioning him to enter upon this bloody affair’. Venn charged that Rundle had ‘falsely accused the Father of the Faith, or else I am sure the whole Christian Religion must be false itself’.¹⁴ Others provided corroborating evidence. Charles Lamotte, a Northamptonshire clergyman, wrote unbidden to Gibson, informing him that years earlier Rundle had been ‘very free with his speech and very loose in his Religion; talking sometimes like an Arian, sometimes like a Socinian’.¹⁵ The prospect of a Christologically heterodox new bishop who had also questioned the Bible’s historical accuracy was too much for Gibson and most clergy. ‘[T]he general sense of the Bishops and Clergy, will not permit me to concur or acquiesce in it’, Gibson informed Walpole, before adding that the episcopate’s obeisance to the state had earned it the right to have its wishes heeded on Church matters: ‘The Bishops, on account of their dutiful behaviour to the Court, might hope for some regard to their inclination and good liking in the choice of every new member of the Bench’.¹⁶

In the end, Walpole withdrew Rundle’s nomination.¹⁷ Contemporaries got the message. ‘[T]he case of Dr Rundel admonishes me, as indeed my own case had done before, of the danger of touching the third & most important article above, Religion. For the Informer against the Dr is not watchful only over the Episcopate, but extends his care to the lowest order of the Clergy’, the talented and ambitious Cambridge cleric Conyers Middleton observed. ‘Thus they guard the gate of Paradise, as it was of old, with a flaming sword; & treat freethinking or any thinking different from their own, as the sin against the Holy Ghost; never to be remitted, either in this life or the next.’¹⁸ Where Middleton read the Rundle affair as a sign of the Church’s power, some orthodox bishops actually feared that it had exposed the Church’s weakness. ‘[W]hat has passed with [Rundle], shews too strongly, how vain an attempt it will be to endeavour to exclude others, against whom there shall be no other objection, but a want of Orthodoxy, in some certain points’, Francis Hare, bishop of Chichester, lamented to Gibson.¹⁹ Hare feared that the Church could not always expect the support and forbearance that its senior partner, the state, had recently shown. He was right.

The government scuttled Thomas Rundle’s episcopal nomination and prosecuted Thomas Woolston for blasphemy not simply because of clerical lobbying but also because polemical divines successfully used print to shape opinions and to mobilize support. In the public debates over both Rundle and Woolston, participants returned regularly to contested patches of the Christian and English past. Woolston’s opponents argued that he and his supporters had perverted ancient Christian truths.²⁰ The ‘Primitive Martyrs and the Reformers … gave us Truth’, Daniel Waterland insisted; those who advocated prosecuting Woolston acted ‘from a true Christian and Apostolical Spirit’.²¹ Richard Smalbroke likewise accused Woolston’s supporters of perverting primitive Christianity. ‘Persons, … under the specious Colour of Liberty are employing all their Artifices to reduce us again to a State of Heathenism and the Religion of Nature’, he fretted. Tellingly, he contended ‘that the Present Licentiousness bears too near a Resemblance to that which was Previous to the Public Confusions in the Age of our Forefathers; Confusions, that ended in the Ruin of the Constitution of both Church and State’.²² Woolston’s supporters also hearkened to the previous century. They countered that Smalbroke’s arguments for ‘persecution’ called to mind Judge George Jeffreys (1645–89) and that ‘[a] proceeding like this would have incurred an Impeachment in former Times and Arch-Bishop Laud was brought to the Scaffold, for Offences much less injurious to his Country’.²³

Thomas Rundle’s proposed promotion to Gloucester similarly got related to England’s past.²⁴ The Weekly Miscellany, a Gibsonite newspaper edited by the acidulous William Webster, savaged Rundle’s candidacy in a way that implicitly connected the present with the past. ‘[T]here is not an Infidel, Deist, or modern Freethinker in the Kingdom, who is not zealous for [Rundle’s] Promotion’, Webster’s newspaper pronounced. Conversely, Rundle’s heterodoxy rankled the orthodox. Indeed, the Miscellany argued, the putatively Arian Rundle was a heretic, since both Elizabethan and Williamite statues had unambiguously hereticated Arianism. Furthermore, Rundle’s opponents were moderates, ones who recognized that there was a ‘Medium between no Toleration and an absolute, unlimited Toleration’: by implication, some things – like Christological heterodoxy – were intolerable.²⁵ The Old Whig: or, the Consistent Protestant, a pro-Rundle newspaper, judged differently but similarly recalled older debates. It not so subtly warned its readers that the fight over Rundle’s candidacy signalled the revival of the previous ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 Why then are we still reforming?
• Part I: Purity of faith and worship against corruptions: Daniel Waterland
• Part II: The history of the Church be fabulous: Conyers Middleton
• Part III: Neither Jacobite, nor republican, Presbyterian, nor papist: Zachary Grey
• Part IV: The abuses of fanaticism: William Warburton
• Conclusion
• INDEX