Providence and Empire

Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 1815-1914

Stewart Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317885344
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The 19th century was, to a large extent, the 'British century'. Great Britain was the great world power and its institutions, beliefs and values had an immense impact on the world far beyond its formal empire.

Providence and Empire argues that knowledge of the religious thought of the time is crucial in understanding the British imperial story. The churches of the United Kingdom were the greatest suppliers of missionaries to the world, and there was a widespread belief that Britain had a divine mission to spread Christianity and civilisation, to eradicate slavery, and to help usher in the millennium; the Empire had a providential purpose in the world.

This is the first connected account of the interactions of religion, politics and society in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales between 1815 and 1914. Providence and Empire is essential reading for any student who wishes to gain an insight into the social, political and cultural life of this period.

Chapter 1

Evangelicalism, Empire and the Protestant State, 1815–1829

In 1815, the United Kingdom emerged victorious following over two decades of nearly uninterrupted warfare with revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It was now the great world power, its mastery of the seas unrivalled, and its main imperial rival, France, bled white and humbled. Developments in British manufactures, with the mechanisation of textile production, the growth of the factory system, the mobilisation of investment capital and the use of aggressive marketing techniques, were transforming the British economy and ensuring unprecedented levels of sustained economic growth. The quarter century before 1815 also witnessed a momentous expansion of British imperial dominion. The loss of the American colonies in 1783, following a prolonged and costly war, had been a blow to Britain’s prestige as a world power. But during the subsequent three decades, the East India Company had greatly expanded and consolidated its control over the South Asian subcontinent, had seized Ceylon and the Cape of South Africa from the Dutch, planted a new colony in Australia and expanded trade with China. Where in 1792 there had been 26 colonies, by 1816 there were 43. The empire now became characterised by dominion over vast expanses of land, in Canada, India, Australia and South Africa, and the governance of immense numbers of non-Europeans and non-Christians, including some 87 million inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. It was difficult for many inhabitants of the island kingdom not to view victory over revolutionary France and the acquisition of such territory and dominion as divinely ordained.¹

Many in 1815 could not help but view the events of the quarter century of struggle in providentialist terms. The United Kingdom had triumphed over revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and established a great empire in the East. Surely the God who ruled the destinies of the world had raised the United Kingdom to such heights for a purpose? A hymn composed at the time of Britain’s triumphs over Napoleonic arms expressed a sense of divine protection:

Amidst our isle, exalted high,

Do Thou our glory stand;

And like a wall of guardian fire

Surround Thy fav’rite land.²

There was a revival of the language of the inhabitants of Christian Britain as the Chosen People with a particular role. Admiral Nelson’s famous victory at the Nile in 1799 had led to the freeing of the Holy Land from Napoleon’s army – evidence of Britain’s providential purpose, and linking Britain’s imperial expansion with the biblical language of the Promised Land. It was in 1804 that William Blake penned his celebrated poem, ‘Jerusalem’, with its conception of England as the new Israel.³ In his influential sermon, The Star of the East, first published in 1809, the Church of England clergyman, Claudius Buchanan, advanced a providentialist interpretation of Britain’s expanding power. ‘It should seem’, he observed, ‘as if God had selected this nation, as formerly his chosen people Israel, to preserve among men a knowledge of true religion’.⁴ For some Christians, Britain’s new power in the East was part of the divine plan for the spread of Christianity. ‘In England’, noted one clergyman in 1798, ‘for some years past, the minds of christians have been unusually enlarged with a desire for the conversion of the heathen; which is a happy token that our blessed Lord is about to accomplish a glorious work in the earth’. ‘Vigorous and persevering efforts’, he added, ‘are now making to send a cloud of missionaries to the East Indies, and to China’.⁵ Some turned to prophecy to explain the events. They poured over Scripture, especially the Books of Daniel and Revelation, for explanations of the meaning of the rise of their island state, and they expressed their findings in such works as William Cunninghame’s Dissertations on the Seals and Trumpets (1813), James Hatley Frere’s Combined View of the Christian Prophecies (1814), and Lewis Way’s Letter to Basilicus (1816). The London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, formed in 1809, emerged as a major force from 1815 under the direction of Lewis Way – and reflected the belief that the conversion of the Jews and the second coming of Christ were fast approaching. For the London-based Scottish evangelical clergyman, Edward Irving, writing in 1826, God had been acting during the ‘ominous years’ of the revolutionary era to bring forth his ‘long-awaited kingdom’, and he ‘hath chosen this nation, as he formerly made choice of Israel, to behold, declare, execute his righteous acts’.⁶

Others within the United Kingdom, however, could not share this confidence. For them, the prospects for their Christian state in 1815 seemed darker. The rapid industrialisation and urbanisation during the war years were bringing profound social dislocations. There was hardship and ruin for many handloom weavers, stocking-makers and other handicraft artisans who were now forced to compete with the new machinery. With the rapid growth of towns and cities came overcrowding, especially in decaying old town centres, and pollution, crime and disease. The end of years of warfare in 1815 also meant a severe downturn of the economy, as government military contracts ceased and tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors were demobilised. There were violent disturbances and widespread unrest and fears of revolution in a society that was becoming increasingly polarised between the rich and poor. These were the years of the Spa Fields riots of 1816, the march of the starving ‘blanketeers’ in 1817, the massacre at the political demonstration at St Peter’s fields, Manchester, in 1819, the Cato Street conspiracy to murder the Cabinet in 1820, the ‘Radical War’ in the West of Scotland in 1820. This seemed far from the ideal of the chosen people, the new Israel, and the providential state.

There was still another difficulty with the notion of the providential state. In the view of many, the true greatness of the British state would be found in its Protestant constitution. It was, as the historian, Linda Colley, has emphasised, a ‘Protestant state’.⁷ In 1688–89, and again in 1745–46, many believed, God had delivered the British people from the danger of Continental despotism and an enforced return to Roman Catholicism. And yet, in 1801, the British state had entered into a parliamentary union with Ireland, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country. Of a total population of about 15,846,000 in the United Kingdom in 1801, some 5,216,000 were Irish, and of these, perhaps three-quarters were Roman Catholic. In short, about a quarter of the population of the Protestant United Kingdom was now Roman Catholic. The Government of William Pitt, moreover, had meant to follow up the Act of Union with a measure of Catholic emancipation that would have given Catholics nearly the same rights and privileges as Protestant subjects. For Pitt, this was the only way to reconcile the Irish Catholics to the Union. Pitt’s plan had been thwarted in 1801 by the opposition of the king. Little more than a decade later, in 1813, Henry Grattan had brought forward another Catholic emancipation bill that had included the provision of state salaries for the Roman Catholic priests in Ireland and that had broad support in Ireland. The bill had been abandoned. But a growing body of liberal opinion was coming to favour Catholic emancipation – and emancipation, for most Protestants, would undermine the Protestant constitution and the Protestant identity of the state.

The established churches in 1815

The United Kingdom in 1815 was a semi-confessional state, in which subjects were expected to conform to the worship, doctrine and discipline of the established church – that is, the church that was officially recognised and supported by the kingdom (England, Ireland or Scotland) in which they resided. The established churches were fundamental to the constitution of the state; they expressed the religious identity of the state, and represented the principle that society was dependent on divine favour. As the Tory politician and diarist, J. W. Croker, famously observed, ‘Westminster Abbey is part of the British constitution’.⁸ The established churches were responsible to the state for providing religious and moral instruction to the people. They were to provide pastoral care to parishioners, including visits to people in their homes. They offered the rites of passage – baptisms, first communions, marriages, burials – that shaped the lives of individuals within communities. There were two established churches in the United Kingdom in 1815 – the United Church of England and Ireland, and the Church of Scotland. The larger of the two, the United Church of England and Ireland, had been created by clause five of the Act of Union of 1800, which had united the established Churches of England and Ireland into ‘one Protestant Episcopal Church’, with a unified ‘doctrine, discipline and government’ which was to ‘remain in full force for ever’. It was the established church of the overwhelming majority of inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The union, however, was still largely theoretical in 1815, and in the eyes of most observers, and for purposes of parliamentary legislation, the Churches of England and of Ireland remained two separate bodies.

The Church of England

The Church of England exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction over both England and Wales. Episcopal in organisation, it included two archbishoprics, Canterbury and York, and 24 bishoprics, including four bishoprics in Wales. The British monarch was the supreme governor of the church, and the bishops, as ‘lords spiritual’, sat in the House of Lords, where they exercised both temporal and spiritual authority. In addition, the bishops were responsible for maintaining ecclesiastical discipline within their dioceses, for examining and ordaining new clergymen, for administering the rite of confirmation, and for conducting regular supervisory visits among the clergy. The official seat of the bishop in each diocese was the cathedral, which with its chapter house and library formed the administrative centre of the diocese. The cathedral buildings were imposing structures, towering over their cities, providing worship on a grand scale and serving as monuments to the nation’s dedication to God, and as collective prayers in mortar and stone. They were served by a dean and chapter, including about a dozen prebendaries, clergymen who were expected to assist with worship and to defend and illuminate the faith through their theological scholarship and lives of conspicuous piety. The reality of early nineteenth-century cathedral life, to be sure, was somewhat less exalted. The journalist, William Cobbett, recalled attending mattins in Winchester cathedral on a Sunday in October 1825, with a total congregation of 15 women and four men in the vast empty space.⁹ Many prebendaries were non-resident, taking the income but treating the office as a sinecure. Others might just as well have been non-resident, as they were quarrelsome, idle or eccentric. In 1815, there were about 780 chapter livings in the Church of England.

The church exercised pastoral supervision of the people of England and Wales through a parochial system. The country was divided into some 11,000 parishes, each with its incumbent clergyman and nearly all with a parish church. The parish clergyman was to provide regular Sunday services, to administer the sacraments, to help enforce ecclesiastical discipline and to provide pastoral care to the people of the parish. He was expected to know the boundaries of his parish, the condition of its inhabitants, the provision for the education of children and the local charities. His main responsibility was the moral and spiritual nurture of the parishioners. The parish clergy were supported from the tithes (a notional tenth of the value of agricultural produce), from rentals of church-owned property and from rents charged for seats in church. There were two main types of incumbents. Rectors were incumbents who possessed the right to all the tithes in a parish. In many parishes, however, the tithes had been granted, or appropriated, to another corporate body – for example, a college, school or cathedral. In these parishes, the clergyman was the rector’s vicar, or substitute, and entitled to only a portion of the tithe. Whether he was a rector or vicar, the incumbent was under legal obligation to provide religious services to the parish population. If unable to perform the pastoral duties, he was required to provide a curate to act in his place.

The clergy were recruited mainly from the middle and lower middle social orders (substantial farmers, the urban middle classes), and large numbers were the sons of clergymen. A study of the social origins of the clergy in the diocese of London during the eighteenth century revealed that some 35 per cent were the sons of clergy, 32 per cent came from professional backgrounds, 13 per cent from the landed gentry, and 20 per cent from the labouring orders.¹⁰ Most attended a ‘public school’ (independent, fee-paying school) where they were trained, often amid harsh discipline, in classical Greek and Roman literature. They then proceeded to Oxford or Cambridge University, where they continued their classical education, picking up some theology along the way. There was very little by way of what we might call professional training in liturgy, preaching or pastoral care. The more ambitious went out of their way to associate with the sons of the gentry and aristocracy and to cultivate connections with potential future patrons. Clerical incomes, meanwhile, rose steadily during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, along with the general rise in agricultural incomes which resulted from more commercial methods of agriculture, including the enclosures of estates, improved drainage of land and better crop rotations. By the early nineteenth century, many parish clergy were able to emulate the manners of the landed gentry, and were keeping carriages, riding to hounds, collecting books, and building spacious and comfortable residence houses. It was the ‘age of the country rectory’ and Augustus Hare’s description of Alderley Rectory in early nineteenth-century Cheshire captures the idyllic comfort of many such homes: it was ‘a low house with a verandah forming a wide balcony for the upper story, where birdcages hung among the roses; its rooms and passages filled with pictures, books, and old carved oak furniture’.¹¹ ‘These were’, recalled the novelist, Anthony Trollope, ‘halcyon days’ for the clergy, when ‘the parson in his parsonage was as good a gentleman as any squire in his mansion or nobleman in his castle’.¹² Parsons were indeed becoming more socially respectable, better able to mix with the upper social orders, than their eighteenth-century predecessors, but they were also growing more distant from the majority of their parishioners.

The doctrine of the Church of England was defined loosely by the Thirty-nine Articles of Faith, a collection of short summaries of belief, open to broad interpretation and intended to represent an inclusive, comprehensive national faith, shaped from Scripture, the traditions of the church and the light of reason. More important than the Articles in defining the faith of the national church, however, was the Book of Common Prayer, rooted in pre-Reformation service books, produced during the sixteenth century and reaching its final form in 1662. Churchgoers in England would have heard its sombre cadences and rich prose repeated Sunday after Sunday throughout their lives, until it was etched into their memories and informed their lives. The church was the largest and most imposing building in most parishes. It was often a time-honoured, medieval structure, whose worn stones had watched over generation after generation of worshippers, while in the churchyard, where parishioners gathered to gossip before and after Sunday services, were buried the ancestors. Most early nineteenth-century church interiors reflected the simple austerity of seventeenth-century Puritanism and eighteenth-century rationalism. They were dominated by the pulpit, often a high, triple-decked structure...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Evangelicalism, Empire and the Protestant State, 1815–1829
• 2. The Waning of the Church–State Connection, 1829–1845
• 3. Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation, 1840–1863
• 4. Revivalism, Ritualism and Authority, 1859–1876
• 5. Overseas Crusades and the New Christian Social Conscience, 1875–1896
• 6. Religious Diversity, Identities and Conflicts, 1896–1914
• Select Bibliography
• Index