Religious Toleration in England 1787–1833 [Reprint ed.] 0415413044, 9780415413046

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STUDIES IN SOCIAL HISTORY

RELIGIOUS TOLERATION IN ENGLAND 1787–1833

RELIGIOUS TOLERATION IN ENGLAND 1787–1833

URSULA HENRIQUES

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1961

This edition published in 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, O X 1 4 4 R N Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Transferred to Digital Printing 2010 © 1961 Ursula Henriques All rights reserved. N o part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. T h e publishers have made every effort to contact authors and copyright holders of the works reprinted in the Studies in Social History series. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals or organisations we have been unable to trace. These reprints are taken from original copies of each book. In many cases the condition of these originals is not perfect. The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of these reprints, but wishes to point out that certain characteristics of the original copies will, of necessity, be apparent in reprints thereof. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Religious Toleration in England 1 7 8 7 – 1 8 3 3 I S B N 1 0 : 0 - 4 1 5 - 4 1 3 0 4 - 4 (volume) I S B N 1 0 : 0 - 4 1 5 - 4 0 2 6 6 - 2 (set) I S B N 1 3 : 9 7 8 - 0 - 4 1 5 - 4 1 3 0 4 - 6 (volume) I S B N 1 3 : 9 7 8 - 0 - 4 1 5 - 4 0 2 6 6 - 8 (set) Routledge Library Editions: Studies in Social History

RELIGIOUS TOLERATION IN ENGLAND 1787–1833

by

Ursula Henriques

Routledge and Kegan Paul LONDON

First published 1961 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, Broadway House, 68–74 Carter Lane London, E.C.4 Printed in Great Britain by W. & J. Mackay & Co. Ltd. Chatham, Kent © Ursula Henriques 1961 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

Preface SOME years ago I set a sixth-form General Essay class to write an essay on ‘Religious Toleration’. On reading the results I said, ‘Never mind, I will write one myself.’ The ultimate outcome of that rash promise was this book. The book is a study of the political struggles over the repeal of laws restricting or penalizing religious minorities in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and of the opinions and ideas expressed in the controversies surrounding these struggles. I have not tried to examine in detail either the actual operation of the statutory restrictions on the religious minorities, or the social and political affiliations of these minorities. Both are interesting questions and both present great practical difficulties. A number of local surveys would probably be needed before any conclusions of value could be drawn about them. I wish to thank Earl Fitzwilliam and the trustees of the Wentworth Woodhouse Estates for permission to quote passages from Edmund Burke's unpublished letters, now in the Central Reference Library at Sheffield. My thanks are also due to Professor T. W. Copeland, to the University of Chicago Press which has copyright in these letters, and to Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Hyde who hold the original Burke letter of 18th February 1790 in the Hyde Collection, Somerville, New Jersey, U.S.A. An early copy is in the Sheffield Central Reference Library. I am obliged to Major Sir Henry d’Avigdor Gold¬ smid for extensive use of the Letter Book of Isaac Lyon Gold¬ smid which is now kept in the Mocatta Library, University College, London, and to the Jewish Board of Deputies for allowing me to look at their early Minute Books. Much work as yet unpublished has been done on matters relevant to this book. Dr. P. T. Underdown has kindly given me permission to cite his thesis, ‘Edmund Burke as Member of

vii

PREFACE

Parliament for Bristol’, 1955, in the library of the Institute of Historical Research, London. The Institute also enabled me to read the thesis, ‘The Religious Ideas of Edmund Burke’, 1947, by the late Dr. L. D. Cowley. I particularly wish to thank Dr. J. F. Lively, Ph.D. (‘Ideas of Parliamentary Representation in England, 1815–32’, Cambridge, 1957) and Mr. Μ. Β. Whittaker, M.Litt. (‘The Revival of Protestant Dissent’, Cambridge, 1959), for allowing me to read and quote from their theses. Mr. Whittaker’s work, when published, will add much to the picture of the struggles for religious toleration of Protestant Dissenters in the early nineteenth century. I am especially indebted to Dr. Geoffrey Best, Ph.D., a good deal of whose work I unwittingly duplicated. His thesis, ‘Church and State in English Polities’, Cambridge, 1955, showed me the importance of the High Church view of the Alliance of Church and State in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. If I disagree with some of his conclusions (not his facts), reading his thesis and published articles helped me to clear my own mind; and nineteenth-century supporters of toleration would point out that truth is the product of the clash of opinions. I am grateful to Manchester University for the Research Studentship which made possible all the basic work, and to Bedford College, London University, for the Tutorial Fellow­ ship which enabled me to turn my thesis into a book. Dr. Robert Greaves of Bedford College has given most valuable help in reading the MS, and pointing out some of the worst errors of terminology and faults of style. Miss Jean Cunningham and Mr. P. A. Brunt have given me much help with the proofs. I should like above all to thank Professor A. Goodwin of Manchester University, whose unfailing kindness and encour­ agement as supervisor enabled me to finish anything at all. U. R. Q. HENRIQUES

University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff. June 1961

viii

Contents page vii

PREFACE I.

1

INTRODUCTION

II. T H E D E V E L O P M E N T RELIGIOUS III.

OF

THE

THEORY

TOLERATION

CHURCH AND S T A T E

VI. J E W I S H

18

54 99

IV. EDMUND BURKE V. ROMAN C A T H O L I C

OF

EMANCIPATION

EMANCIPATION

136 175

VII. E V A N G E L I C A L S A N D I N F I D E L S

206

VIII.

CONCLUSION

260

BIBLIOGRAPHY

278

INDEX

289

ix

I Introduction

I

THE development of religious toleration in England was an ultimate and wholly unintended consequence of the Reformation. Looking back from the vantage point of the twentieth century, it is possible to see that this was so, and also to classify into its main phases the process by which it came about. The first phase, which may be said to have opened with the Elizabethan ecclesiastical settlement of 1559, saw a National Church under a Royal Supremacy established in place of the local branch of the Roman Catholic Church, which had looked to Rome for its spiritual direction. This Church neither preached nor practised religious toleration. Yet in so far as Elizabeth and also James I were politique princes who wished to attract the mass of their subjects into their Church and prevent them joining the irreconcilables in the Roman or Puritan camps, official policy endeavoured to make it fairly comprehensive. It has been remarked that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the attitude of the government towards diversity of religious opinion was more tolerant than that of the main dissidents, the Roman Catholics of the Counter¬ Reformation on one hand, and the Calvinist Puritans on the other.1 Official policy required uniformity of religious practice in obedience to the national authorities in Church and State. 1

P. M . Dawley, John Whitgift and the Reformation, 1955, p. 216. W . K. Jordan, Development of Religious Toleration in England, I, 82–83, 96–97. R.T.–B

1

INTRODUCTION

It did not demand uniformity of religious belief under the direction of a visible Church claiming to be the exclusive channel of salvation, nor conformity to the discipline of a Church claiming to be the guardian of morals on behalf of the honour of God. Either a Roman Catholic or a Presbyterian supremacy would have imposed a narrower and harsher interpretation of religious obedience. At the same time, a liberal measure of religious toleration was impossible. Toleration means the recognition of diversity, both in opinion and in opinion’s outcome, organization. Neither the members of the National Church nor their main enemies thought it either right or necessary to tolerate serious differences of religious faith or organization. They struggled not for liberty but for domination, for control of the National Church. This was true of the Jesuits and seminary priests who sought at the risk of martyrdom to keep the old religion alive in England, but could not steer clear of plots against the sovereign and alliances with her continental enemies. It was equally true of the Puritans who, professing fanatical loyalty to the throne, tried to alter the Church in accordance with the customs of Geneva. Religious toleration in England was probably impossible until events had proved that religious uniformity was impossible. This does not mean that religious toleration was unheard of. Professor W. K. Jordan has shown in his great work on the development of religious toleration in the first half of the seventeenth century,1 that powerful and comprehensive arguments for toleration were raised early in the reign of James I by Baptist writers, while inside the Church itself Socinian and Arminian influence encouraged a current of thought in favour of the widest possible comprehension. But the Baptists were a small and unpopular separatist sect, and the Latitudinarian churchmen were suspected of dangerous Socinian (Unitarian) heresies about the doctrine of the Trinity. Theoretical arguments for toleration came from unpopular minorities, and were in advance of the practical possibilities of the age. The climax of this first phase came in the civil wars of 1642– 1648. It can even be placed in the year 1644, when the attempt of the victorious Presbyterians to impose upon the nation, under 1 W . K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England 1603–25, I, II. The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 1640–60, London, 1936– 40. I, II (cited as Jordan, Religious Toleration, I, II, III, IV).

2

INTRODUCTION

the Solemn League and Covenant, a Church, Calvinist in doctrine and discipline but Erastian in organization, was forestalled by the resistance of the Independents in the Westminster Assembly, with the Army at their back. The proliferation of sects during the Interregnum showed that the dream of a united Church comprising the whole nation was impossible to realize. Yet the generation of the Restoration saw the climax of intolerance in the name of religious uniformity. The persecution of Dissenters by the Laudian Party who dominated the restored Church, a mixture of revenge upon the Presbyterians and precaution against the more fanatical sects, was really an aftermath of the civil wars. 1 It was weakened by the French policy of Charles II, and brought to an end by the Romanizing policy of James II. As early as 1672 the Country Party malcontents in Parliament were trying to get Presbyterian support against the Second Dutch War and the alliance with Roman Catholic France pursued by the king.2 Under James II even High Church bishops found a common cause with Dissenters against a king who used the royal prerogative to Romanize the country, while they also had reason to fear that some Dissenters might be drawn on to the king’s side by the Indulgences offered them. So the logic of the Interregnum was at last recognized in the Toleration Act of 1688. The Toleration Act, whatever its ambiguities, admitted the legal existence of religious congregations outside the Church of England. It recognized in practice the principle that toleration meant the undisturbed conduct of religious worship, within certain doctrinal limits and subject to certain regulations. It did not repeal the penal laws, nor relieve the Dissenters of most of the statutory disabilities which had accumulated against them in the last century. It ushered in the second phase of the development of religious toleration, in which Dissent was recognized, but Dissenters were relegated to the status of second class citizens. While the memory of the Civil War was still fresh, churchmen could claim that excluding Dissenters from offices of power was a necessary precaution for public security. After the accession of William III and still more when the Hanoverians 1

Cf. R. S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement, 1951. A Bill for the Ease of Protestant Dissenters was being discussed in the House of Commons, Journals of the House of Commons, 1672, IX, 259–84. 2

3

INTRODUCTION

came in with Whig and Dissenting support, this argument became less plausible. Under James II, or even Charles II, a check on the religion of office-holders might be necessary to curb the powers of a would-be despotic and Roman Catholic king. Under the thoroughly Protestant Hanoverians, this argument lost force against the Roman Catholics and was nonsense when applied to Protestant Dissenters. As the king became a constitutional monarch, struggling in the grip of a powerful oligarchy, civil disabilities for religious dissent appeared more and more to be a means of preserving the oligarchical families from competition. As public office became increasingly distinct from the private service of the king, and all the more when, in the 1770’s, Parliamentary reform began to be seriously canvassed, disabilities appeared as an arbitrary method of maintaining civil and political inequality. Constitutional rather than religious developments made the limited toleration established at the beginning of the century less endurable at the end of it, although the matter was complicated by the Wesleyan and Evangelical revivals. The climax of this second phase may be placed in the years of the struggle for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, from 1787 to 1790. But the conclusion of the struggle was delayed by the panic reaction of the governing classes to the French Revolution, and the wars which followed. The crisis recurred in 1828–9, when the movements for repeal of the Test Laws and for Roman Catholic Emancipation came to a simultaneous climax, and were immediately followed by the demands of Jewish and other minorities for their civil rights. In the history of the whole development of religious toleration in England, the Civil War and Interregnum may be considered the main turning point,1 yet the fight for religious equality in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was hardly less important. Much has been written, and is still being written, about these later struggles from the point of view of one sect or another, yet few historians have tried to consider them in relation to each other, as parts of a general movement. This book, then, is about religious toleration in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 1 See H. Butterfield, Historical Development of the Principle of Toleration in British Life, Robert Waley Cohen memorial lecture, 1956.

4

INTRODUCTION

The phase which opened in the 1830’s can only be termed miscellaneous. It saw the tardy completion of civil equality for Jews and atheists, but by the middle of the nineteenth century, political equality regardless of religious belief was so nearly achieved that attention had largely wandered from the political rights of Nonconformists or the repeal of archaic penal statutes to such important but miscellaneous questions as the ecclesiastical control of public education, and the disestablishment of the Church of England.1 In disestablishment the principle of equality of payment (since Nonconformists still had to pay church rates, tithes etc.) was involved, but it became increasingly difficult to discover whether these disputes were really about religious toleration. Apart from occasional anti-papist outbursts, intolerance was now mainly effective within subordinate societies such as Oxford and Cambridge Universities, where adherents of the Oxford Movement and Broad-churchmen fought for academic posts and censured each others’‘heretical’or‘papistical’writings, or within the Church itself. The Ecclesiastical Courts rubbed their heads in embarrassment over the effect of the current theories of Evolution upon Biblical exegesis.2 By the end of the century, good Liberals, looking back upon past times and happily unaware how quickly the intolerant prejudices and passions which had once focused themselves upon religion could transfer themselves to politics, nationality, race and colour, could accept the development of religious toleration as a proof of the reality of progress in human civilization. II The accession of Queen Elizabeth made permanent the special attitude of the Tudor Reformation towards religious uniformity. Under Mary the typical occasion of punishment had been heresy, i.e., holding or propagating erroneous doctrine. The typical method was conviction before an ecclesiastical tribunal, followed by excommunication and relegation to the secular arm for execution by burning. In the first twenty years of Elizabeth’s 1 Equality is not quite complete. E.g., the restrictions laid down in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement against the king being or marrying a Roman Catholic have not been repealed. In practice, the test of willingness to take prayers excludes non-Christians from senior posts in all but a very few schools. 2 See A. O. J. Cockshut, Anglican Attitudes, 1959.

5

INTRODUCTION

reign, the chief occasion of punishment was refusal to conform to the forms of worship of the National Church as required by the Act of Uniformity, or to recognize the Royal Supremacy as defined in the Act of Supremacy. Fines were imposed in the lay courts, and were directed to coercing the Roman Catholics into gradual conformity, and to weakening the economic power of the Catholic survivors. Whatever it may have been in 1559, by the following generation Elizabeth’s Church settlement had become a middle way between the revived Roman Catholicism of the Counter¬ Reformation and Calvinist Puritanism inspired from Geneva. Articles of religion, at first needed to define the doctrines and practices of the young Church, had to be wielded by episcopal visitation and the Ecclesiastical Commission as a weapon for maintaining its identity against the attempts of Puritan clergy to alter its practices and government from the inside. Since the missionaries of the Counter-Reformation were the first and most dangerous enemies of both Church and State, the earliest and fiercest penal statutes were directed against them. But by 1592 there was also an act (35 Eliz. cap. l ) against Protestant Separatists and their conventicles. In the course of the seventeenth century, a whole code of penal statutes, directed against those who refused to conform on either extreme, came into being, increasing with every religious and political crisis. In point of fact, the contrast between the methods and aims of the Marian and the later Tudor and Stuart persecutions was far less complete and clear cut than at first appears. The revived statute de Haeretico Comburendo, under which the later Marian burnings had taken place, remained in force. Two persons convicted of Arian beliefs were burned under it in 1611 and 1612, with James I’s personal sanction.1 But popular sympathy was on their side, possibly because heresies on the nature of the Trinity were rare and incomprehensible to the multitude, and the punishment was too reminiscent of Popery and the Spanish inquisition. The statute fell into disuse and was repealed in 1676, although the Church Courts retained their right to convict for heresy. Its place was filled by the blasphemy laws. The severest of this series was the Blasphemy Act of 1648, by which the victorious Presbyterians at the end of the First Civil War sought, 1

Jordan, Religious Toleration, II, 43–51. 6

INTRODUCTION

with Scottish prompting, to force the Church of the Solemn League and Covenant upon England. The Act imposed the death penalty for disseminating errors concerning the nature of God and Christ, for denying the Bible to be the Word of God, and for erroneous opinions about the Resurrection and the Last Judgement. It also laid down imprisonment for a number of lesser and more popular errors held by those sects which dissented from the Presbyterian Church. l Significantly, it provided for recantation. With the victory of Independency under Oliver Cromwell, who really wanted toleration, if only the machinations of Malignants and Presbyterians would have allowed him to have it, a much milder blasphemy decree was substituted. This did not survive the Restoration. Both were ancestors of the Blasphemy Act of 1697 imposing disabilities, and for the second offence, imprisonment for three years on those who impugned the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1721 William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, proposed a new blasphemy bill to check the spread of Socinian and Deist doctrines current at the time, but nothing came of it but a royal proclamation against blasphemous clubs and societies, and royal letters to the bishops to enforce existing laws in defence of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. 2 The special function of the seventeenth-century blasphemy laws, along with the common law doctrine of blasphemous libel, was to replace heresy procedure in dealing with serious differences in religious dogma, especially those tending towards atheism or infidelity. They signified a continuing conception of heresy as distinguished from minor differences or separate organization of worship, which, as schism, were left to the laws against Protestant Dissent. The concurrent existence of laws against blasphemy and against Dissent gave practical force to the distinction, so important in seventeenth–century debates on toleration, between ‘indifferent’ ceremonies and the ‘fundamentals’ of Christian faith. But even in these laws touching fundamental differences of belief, religious error involving danger to souls or dishonour to God was never separated from civil dissidence involving danger to the peace or welfare of society. The preamble to the 1697 Blasphemy Act ran ‘Whereas many Persons have of late Years openly Avowed and 1 2

Ibid., III, 112–15. Norman Sykes, William Wake, Cambridge, 1957, II, 168.

7

INTRODUCTION

Published many Blasphemous and Impious Opinions, contrary to the Doctrines and Principles of the Christian Religion, greatly tending to the Dishonour of Almighty God, and may prove Destructive to the Peace and Welfare of this Kingdom. . . .’ 1 Queen Elizabeth wished to make a break with the religious persecution of the last reign. She would make no windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts.2 Conformity was enough, and the militant recusants would be punished not as heretics, but as traitors. The Act of 1584 against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, and other suchlike Disobedient Persons ran :– Whereas divers persons called or professed Jesuits, Seminary Priests, and other Priests, which have been, and from time to time are made in the part beyond the Seas, by or according to the Order and Rites of the Romish Church, have of late comen and been sent . . . into this Realm of England . . . not only to withdraw her Highness Subjects from their due obedience to her Majesty, but also to stir up and move Sedition, Rebellion, and open Hostility within the same her Highness Realms and Dominions, to the great endangering of the safety of her most Royal Person, and to the utter ruin, desolation and overthrow of the whole Realm, if the same be not the sooner by some good means foreseen and prevented . . . 3 The identification of Popery with sedition was further stimulated by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Much of the repression which followed, including the order to burn Catholic books and the official expulsion of Roman Catholics from the professions, was authorised by a statute (3 Jac. I cap 5) entitled, An Act to prevent and avoid Dangers which may grow by Popish Recusants. The Test Act of 1672 had a similar title (An Act for preventing Dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants.) The same justification was used in the acts against Protestant Separatists. The first Conventicle Act of 1592, against the Brownists, was entitled An Act to retain the Queen’s Majesties Subjects in their due Obedience. Its preamble ran: Tor the preventing and avoiding of such great inconvenience and perils as might happen and grow by the wicked and dangerous practice of 1 2 3

Edmund Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, London, 1713, I, 427. P. M. Dawley, John Whitgift and the Reformation, 1935, p. 6 1 . Gibson, Codex, I, 621–2.

8

INTRODUCTION

seditious Sectaries and disloyal persons: Be it enacted, etc. . . .’1 The great Restoration Conventicle Act of 1664 was directed against ‘seditious Sectaries, and other disloyal persons, who under pretence of tender Consciences, do at their Meetings contrive Insurrections, as late experience hath shewed . . .’ 2 Now, while the Cavalier Parliament certainly had cause to beware of plotting which might go on in conventicles of Fifth Monarchy men, conventicles also included the meetings of Presbyterians, who had been largely instrumental in bringing back the king. The Presbyterians had been driven out of the Church by the Act of Uniformity of 1662, which compelled ministers to declare their unfeigned assent and consent to everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer; and Clarendon had wished to defer the operation of the Act because he feared it would provoke them to rebellion.3 The contention that the laws against religious minorities punished for sedition and not for religious belief or practice was as often a convention or pretence as a reality. Moreover the laws often penalized activities which were in no sense political. The statute of 1580 entitled An Act to retain the Queen’s Majesties Subjects in their due Obedience imposed fines and imprisonment for saying or even hearing Mass. Also, the inquisitions into religious belief which Elizabeth had wished to avoid grew rapidly. In 1583 Whitgift attacked the Puritans within the Church by forcing the clergy to subscribe to eleven articles, so that those who wished to alter its services or government should disclose themselves by their refusal. In 1605 the Roman Catholics who had evaded the heavy fines by conforming to the Act of Uniformity and attending church were made to reveal themselves by being required to take the Sacrament in the Church of England. According to Heywood, the Sacramental test was used as early as 1571 on a Star Chamber decree, by the Gentlemen of the Temple.4 Embodied in the Corporation and Test Acts, it was to become the main engine for excluding Protestant Dissenters from offices of profit or power. The imposition of a declaration against Transubstantiation (imposed in 1605) was found to be a convenient way of excluding Roman 1

Gibson, Codex, I, 588. Ibid., I, 693. 3 R. S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement, 1951, pp. 255–64. 4 S. Heywood, Right of Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted, 2nd edition, 1789, p. l, note. 2

9

INTRODUCTION

Catholics when it was desired to single them out from Protestants. In the seventeenth century the main effect of pretending to punish only for political sedition was to encourage the automatic identification of religious difference with political disloyalty, thereby increasing the temptation of religious minorities to become seditious indeed. The punishment of Dissent as sedition was in accordance with the conception of the union of Church and State under the Royal Supremacy, and with the tendency to sanctify the king which would help to reconcile sincere churchmen to that supremacy. Once the king partook of divinity, rebellion was schism as well as schism rebellion, and the identification became complete. Elizabeth’s attempt to lower the temperature of religious intolerance by making conformity a matter of obedience to the civil power resulted, under the Stuarts, in a system which tended to freeze the further development of toleration. It should be added that the principle was never accepted by the Puritans. The distinction between ‘indifferent’ forms and ceremonies, and fundamental beliefs, with which Hooker tried to convince them that their objections to the customs and government of the National Church were unreasonable, broke against their conviction that their own practices and discipline were Biblical. They thought too many of these ‘indifferent’ ceremonials were relics of Roman corruption. On the High Church side, conformity could never be merely a matter of civil obedience once Episcopal government consecrated by the Apostolic Succession was recognized as the mark of the true Church. The identification of Church with State was shattered by James II, who showed, paradoxically, that the king could join the traitors against the Church. The result of the upheaval of 1688 was a limited toleration for Protestant Dissenters accompanied by an increase, at least on the statute book, of persecution of Roman Catholics. Actually, while the Catholic Penal Code was completed by restrictions on buying and inheriting land, by the double land tax, and by such humiliations as exclusion from the militia and deprivation of horses worth more than five pounds, the active persecution of Catholics in the eighteenth century was mainly confined to Ireland. Immediately after the Revolution, a Tory group led by the Earl of Nottingham attempted to reverse the policy of the Restoration 10

INTRODUCTION

and comprehend the Presbyterians within a wider reformed Church of England, leaving Quakers, Baptists, Independents and other sects to be provided for by a toleration bill outside. The attempt fell through because it aroused fears of ‘Cromwellians’ in power, and offended men of High Church principles.1 It was difficult to comprehend persons of one religious complexion without driving out those of another. Toleration alone was resorted to as second best to comprehension. The Toleration Act recognized an existing situation as much as it created a new one. The more extreme harrying of Dissenters under the Clarendon Code had come to an end with James II’s first Declaration of Indulgence in 1687. The persecution had always been patchy, varying not only with the sway of royal policy and party warfare, but with the locality. The penal laws had been applied with energy in England during the early years of the Cavalier Parliament, and again during the reaction from the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bills. The legislators of Charles II’s reign had tried to make up for the demise of the enforcement machinery of Ecclesiastical Commission and Star Chamber by offering rewards to informers out of the victims’ fines. But the enforcement of Corporation, Conventicle and Five Mile Acts 2 rested on the J.P.s and local magistrates, and the application of the laws varied with the local strength and popularity of Dissent, and the severity or tolerance of local magnates. The Toleration Act, or to give it its proper title, An Act for exempting their Majesties Protestant Subjects, dissenting from the Church of England, from the Penalties of certain Laws, set out to reconcile the affections of Protestant Dissenters to the State by ‘giving some ease to scrupulous consciences’, i.e. lifting the ban on certain kinds of Dissenting worship. The Act gave a list of penal laws directed against the Roman Catholics, including the clause in the 1559 Act of Uniformity enforcing attendance at Church of England services, which were not to apply to Protestant Dissenters. This was probably the more necessary in that 1

George Every, The High Church Party, 1956, pp. 22–42. The Five Mile Act of 1665, 27 Car. II cap. 2, forbade Dissenting ministers to come within five miles of corporate towns or of places where they had preached. It should not be confused with Acts of 1592 and 1605 forbidding Roman Catholic recusants to live in London or travel more thanfivemiles from their homes without special licence. 2

11

INTRODUCTION

there had been complaints of Recusancy fines being levied on Protestant Dissenters.1 It also gave a list of the penal acts directed against Protestant Dissenters of which the penalties were no longer to apply to them, including the Conventicle Acts of Elizabeth and Charles II. It was a grudging toleration which lifted the penalties only, not the laws; a point which was seized on by later defenders of the status quo. Dissenting ministers were recognized, provided they subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, omitting those which related to Church government (in the case of Baptists, also the article on infant baptism). Dissenting places of worship could be opened if certified by a bishop, archdeacon, or J.P., and provided the meetings were not held behind locked doors. Provision was made for tendering and taking the Oaths of Allegiance, Supremacy and Transubstantiation, while special clauses enabled Quakers to make affirmation. ‘Papists’ were specially barred from the benefit of the Act, and so were those who did not accept the doctrine of the Trinity in the Thirty-Nine Articles (who were soon to be subject to the Blasphemy Act of 1697). The main effect of the Act was to legitimize Dissenting ministers and Dissenting worship within the limits of Trinita¬ rianism. The penalties of the Corporation Act were not lifted. The Test Act which had (as its preamble made clear) been originally directed against Roman Catholics, and which was included in the Act under the list of Catholic penal laws, was specifically retained in force against Protestant Dissenters. So was the Act of 30 Car. II cap. 2, excluding Roman Catholics from both Houses of Parliament, although this would seem to have been ineffective, since there was no Sacramental Test in that Act, and it (did not operate to keep Dissenters out of Parliament. Indeed, while Stuart Parliaments had imposed Sacramental Tests upon themselves, this custom had not been perpetuated by statute, and an attempt to exclude Dissenters from the House of Commons at the time of the 1672 Test Act had failed.2 1

Journals of the House of Commons (16th March 1677), IX, 455–6. Journals of the House of Commons, 1672, IX, 266, 270. Heywood says it was the practice of the House of Commons from 1614 to the Restoration to order all its members to take the Sacrament at the beginning of each Parliament, and that this was repeated in 1661 and 1666. S. Heywood, Right of Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted. 2nd edition, 1789, p. 2. 2

12

INTRODUCTION

Protestant Dissenters in the eighteenth century considered the Toleration Act the cornerstone of their liberties. Yet the toleration they enjoyed under it was far from complete. Their special religious ceremonies carried no recognition in civil law. Dissenters still had to be baptized by Anglican clergy in order to be registered; to be buried by them, and after Hardwick’s Marriage Act in 1753, to be married by them. The more bigoted Anglican clergy sometimes questioned the validity of Dissenting baptism, and refused Christian burial. Such humiliations were probably a more serious matter to the humbler Dissenters than the political exclusions which tempted their social superiors to conform to theNational Church. Still, Protestant Dissenters were less at the mercy of local oppressors than their Roman Catholic or Jewish contemporaries. Their position was far less precarious than that of Protestants in France, who, excluded from the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, were literally outlawed, their marriages illegitimized, their children bastardized, their inheritance and even their lives insecure. The political inferiority of Protestant Dissenters was governed by the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Act of 1673. Under the former, those who scrupled to receive Holy Communion according to the rites of the Church of England were debarred from membership of municipal corporations and also commercial and charitable ones. If they had not taken the Communion within a year before being elected the election was said to be void. Under the latter they were disqualified from holding office under the Crown, civil and military, whether in what would nowadays be called political or Civil Service posts. Any person who held such office—or a Crown pension—for more than three months without taking the Sacrament in the Church of England, was liable on conviction to be disabled from suing in any court, from being a guardian, executor or administrator, and from receiving any legacy or deed of gift. He was also liable to a fine of £500. Yet Dissenters (apart from the ministers of accredited congregations) were not relieved of the more onerous and less honourable offices such as constable or churchwarden, although under the Test Act they could provide deputies at their own cost. The Tory and Anglican revival of Queen Anne’s reign was a period of insecurity for Protestant Dissenters. However, there 13

INTRODUCTION

was no frontal attack upon the Toleration Act, a sign, perhaps, that the Dissenters, with their Whig backing, were less vulnerable than the rump of Independents might have been, if the Restoration or the Revolution had included the Presbyterians in the National Church. The first target of Sacheverell and the angry and jealous Tories was the Dissenting Academies. These were founded to compensate for the exclusion of Dissenters from Oxford and Cambridge under university statutes which exacted subscription to all the Thirty-Nine Articles from undergraduates as well as fellows.1 The larger Academies, although precarious and short-lived for lack of endowment, offered a scientific education, were more alive and progressive than the older universities, attracted go-ahead Anglicans as well as the sons of Dissenters, and later tended to become hotbeds of free thought and unorthodoxy. The Schism Act of 1712 was intended to put an end to them, and to deprive Dissenters of higher education except those who could manage to go to Scottish or Continental Protestant Universities. The second target was the practice of Occasional Conformity (a perfectly legitimate practice in the eyes of Presbyterians) by which Dissenters occasionally received Communion in the Church of England, and so defeated the provisions of the Corporation and Test Acts. The Occasional Conformity Act, imposing heavy fines on municipal or Crown office holders who, having taken the Sacrament in the Church of England afterwards attended a Nonconformist service, passed in 1711. High Tories had been trying to get it through the House of Commons since 1702.2 After the Tories had been defeated by the accession of George I and disgraced by their connexion with the 1715 Jacobite rising, the Whigs repealed both Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts. The Dissenters hoped they would abolish the Test Laws as well, but Stanhope’s attempts to do this were prevented by his Whig rival, Walpole, with the backing of the Prince of Wales.3 By 1719, Whig bishops such as William Wake, who had supported the Dissenters against Tory attacks in Anne’s reign, turned out to be remarkably conservative once 1 Subscription was exacted at Oxford on matriculating, at Cambridge, later in the century, on graduating. 2 For details of the Schism Act, see G. M. Trevelyan, England Under Queen Anne, III, 279–84. For the Occasional Conformity Bill see Ibid., I, 277 and passim. 3 J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, 1956, I, 266–70.

14

INTRODUCTION

their own political position was secure. Moreover, the raging controversies inside and outside the Church produced by the spread of Arian, Socinian and Deist doctrines discouraged moderate Churchmen from advocating further relaxation of the laws. The Dissenters had to be content with an Act for Quieting and Establishing Corporations, which amended the Corporation Act by providing that office holders against whom no proceedings for omitting to take the Sacrament had been started within six months after their election should be secure in their posts. Between 1727 and 1739 the Protestant Dissenters made three attempts to secure the repeal of the Test Laws. For this purpose they organized, in 1732, a representative body of laymen, the Committee of Deputies of the Three Denominations (Presbyterians, Baptists and Independents), which, along with the General Body of Dissenting ministers, was to be the principal guardian of Dissenters’ rights and the principal organizer of agitations for extending them until the end of the century.1 But their last effort in 1739 was foiled, partly at least through too strong a common interest of Walpole and the rich banking and trading Occasional Conformists among the Deputies, in letting sleeping dogs lie.2 They did not try again for fifty years. In the middle years of the eighteenth century the toleration of Protestant Dissent seems to have been in a state of equilibrium. The Test and Corporation Acts were unrepealed, but their force was weakened by Occasional Conformity, and by a series of Indemnity Acts suspending the penalties of the Test Laws. These, starting in 1727, became in time almost though not quite, annual.3 How far the Dissenters really suffered from their statutory disabilities would be extremely difficult to estimate at this time, or indeed during any period of the eighteenth century. As in the seventeenth century, enforcement varied from place to place. In some towns where Dissent was strong, notably in Bristol and Norwich, the corporations were said to be controlled by the Dissenters. An abuse practised by the City of London corporation (probably suggested by successful attempts to extract money in similar ways from the Jews), of 1

See B. L. Manning, The Protestant Dissenting Deputies, Cambridge 1952, passim. Norman Hunt, ‘Sir Robert Walpole, Samuel Holden, and the Dissenting Deputies’. Friends of Dr. Williams’s Library Lecture, 1957, p. 29. 3 For frequency of the Indemnity Acts see N. Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker, 1959, p. 102. 2

15

INTRODUCTION

electing Dissenters to high municipal office and then fining them heavily for refusing to take it up, was checked after a long struggle, by Lord Mansfield’s verdict of 1767 in the Sheriff’s Cause.1 Undoubtedly the main mitigation was a general and intentional failure to bring prosecutions and to proffer tests. Even Unitarian congregations, excluded from the protection of the Toleration Act, do not seem to have been pursued by legal actions. Towards the end of the century some notable London Radicals on the Common Council were certainly Dissenters, Occasional Conformists or otherwise. There was a handful of Whig and Radical Dissenting members in the House of Commons. It was, however, generally believed that the social standing of Dissent had declined as the more ambitious individuals conformed to the dominant church. There were few, if any, Dissenters among the gentry who owned boroughs and shared the sweets of government office and patronage. If in some ways the Dissenters’ position continued to im­ prove, in others it became more difficult. The slow hardening of the differences between Dissent and Church, and the aspersions cast upon the morality of Occasional Conformity by the Dis­ senters’ enemies, probably made that practice less respectable and less available to those who took their religion seriously. After 1773 it was, perhaps, not quite so easy for Unitarian congrega­ tions to disguise themselves as Presbyterians. Early in the nineteenth century, the spread of various kinds of Methodism, with their informal prayer meetings, their itinerant and parttime preachers, the reanimation of Orthodox Dissent, and the consequent fears and jealousies of the Anglican clergy, produced an outbreak of prosecutions under the Conventicle Act. It began to appear that the now long-established principle that Trini­ tarian Dissenting worship should not be disturbed, was insecure when the worship was organized in new ways which took it outside the letter of the regulations in the Toleration Act. Increasing numbers of clergymen sitting on the magistrates’ bench could make difficulties over licensing ministers and chapels under the Act itself.2 So the compromise of the Tolera¬ 1

B. L. Manning, op. cit., pp. 119–29. I am indebted for these conclusions to Mr. Μ. Β. Whittaker, whose thesis, ‘The Revival of Dissent, 1800–35’ (Cambridge M.Litt. 1958), contains an excel­ lently documented survey of the numbers of Dissenting congregations, and an account of the reanimation of the law against them. 2

16

INTRODUCTION

tion Act began to break down. In any case, it had never constituted a satisfactory permanent settlement. It depended on the political status quo of 1688 and 1715 rather than on any inherent virtues, and it did not prevent churchmen despising Dissenters, nor Dissenters resenting their religious and civil inferiority. Sooner or later, sleeping dogs would awake.

R.T.–C

17

II The Development of the theory of Religious Toleration

I

T HE theory of religious toleration (a name of convenience for the collection of varied arguments on behalf of toleration), as it appeared in the later eighteenth century, combined Protestant Christian and rationalist elements. Its roots can be traced back into the early seventeenth century. Professor W. K. Jordan has mapped the various paths of thought which led in the direction of toleration, and has concluded that the case for religious toleration had been generally conceded by 1660.1 The later arguments for a fuller measure of toleration might be said to be justifying religious liberty. But it is difficult to define the difference between toleration and religious liberty; liberty being understood, perhaps, as toleration recognized as a right (whatever that may mean) or as a more complete measure of toleration. No clear distinction was made in the eighteenth century controversies. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries contenders both for and against religious toleration continued to repeat what their predecessors had already said. On the one hand there were certain of those stock arguments which seem to recur, in one context or another, whenever persecution raises controversy. One of the commonest was the contention that religious persecu¬ 1

Jordan, Religious Toleration, IV, 467.

18

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

tion only makes hypocrites, a statement which can be found in Roman times as well as in the works of Bentham.1 Such arguments seem to degenerate into mere platitudes or slogans, yet are susceptible of a variety of elucidations which allow them to be adapted to the views of a succession of writers. On the other hand there were arguments which clearly bore the stamp of the religious attitudes or doctrines of those who originated them. As Professor Jordan has pointed out, the Baptists believed that sufficient of the fundamental religious truths for their salvation could be grasped by the simplest of those who sincerely searched the Bible, with the help of the illumination of the Holy Spirit.2 The Socinians of the later sixteenth century and the Dutch Arminians of the seventeenth century bequeathed their ideas to Latitudinarians within the Church of England, as well as to Independents outside it. These believed that religious truth must be sought for and would be progressively discovered by means of intellectual exploration and discussion. Both lines of argument, despite their opposite approach to religious truth, tended to support the conception of a small body of religious fundamentals (although some Baptists used a subjective approach which dissolved even these). Both descended into the later seventeenth century, where they were often held together in inextricable confusion. To such combinations were added further considerations, arising from the experience of scientific discoveries, an increasingly sceptical and materialist outlook, a dominating concern with property, and the necessity to harmonize theories of toleration with the current political ideas of the Social Contract. Traditional arguments were thus preserved, and modified according to the experience of those who inherited them. The theory of religious toleration, however dependent on its seventeenth-century roots, continued to develop. John Milton may be cited as an important exponent of the theory of religious toleration as set forth by mid-seventeenth¬ 1 ‘There is a domain in which no governing authority can have any efficacy; this is the domain of the virtues, and especially of the religious beliefs of individuals. Compulsion of any kind in this domain can only have the effect of causing hypocritical conversions and confessions of faith . . .’ Themistius of Paphlagonia before the Emperor Jovian. Quoted in F. Ruffini, Religious Liberty, tr. J. Parker Hayes, 1912, pp. 29–30. 1 Jordan, op. cit., II, 260–61.

19

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

century Independents. Professor Jordan has explained that Milton was typical rather than original, having been anticipated in most points by writers both inside and outside the Church of England, and surpassed in comprehensiveness and breadth of vision by his contemporary Henry Robinson.1 However, Milton, not Robinson, was remembered, and so transmitted the arguments into the later eighteenth century. Quotations from Areopagitica headed the chapters of those who fought against the subscription to articles of religion or for the repeal of the Test Laws. Milton’s Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes appeared in 1659. In it he wrote: ‘The scripture only can be the final rule in matters of religion, and that only in the conscience of every christian to himself.’2 He recognized ‘no other divine rule or authoritie from without us, warrantable to one another as common ground but the holy scripture; and no other within us but the illumination of the Holy Spirit, so interpreting that scripture as warrantable only to ourselves, and to such whose consciences we can so persuade . . .’3 He called Protestant the name of ‘this doctrine which prefers the scripture before the church,’ and asked, ‘What can there else be named of more authoritie than the church but the conscience; than which God only is greater?’ 4 Later in the same work he maintained that Christ governs his own church, through the inward man and to show the excellence of his spiritual kingdom. The inward man, his understanding and will and actions proceeding from thence and from the work of divine grace on them are matters of religion and cannot be forced. Evangelic religion, faith and charity of belief and practice flow from the understanding and will, once naturally free, now regenerate and wrought on by divine grace. Force applied to such religion frustrates both the religion and the gospel. To compel outward confession is ‘to compel hypocrisie, not to advance religion.’5 In these passages Milton took the ancient argument that force applied to belief only creates hypocrites and deduced it 1

Jordan, op. cit., IV, 140–76, 203. Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, Edition of 1790, p. 4. 3 Ibid., p. 3. 4 Ibid., p. 5. 5 Ibid., p. 22. 2

20

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

from a theory of Christian liberty. The theory is based on the individual’s direct relation with God through grace, together with his right and duty to read the Scriptures as the sole visible channel of divine communication. The consequence of the theory was worked out in an attack on the religious authority not primarily of State but of Church. In 1772, Andrew Kippis, attacking the law which required Dissenting ministers to subscribe articles of religion, described as the principles on which alone Protestantism could be defended: ‘The liberty of private judgement and the sufficiency of Scripture.’1 A little later, George Walker in A Dissenter’s Plea claimed religion as ‘the unalienated property of every individual, for which he is answerable to God alone,’ an intrusion of the Lockeian conception of life in terms of property upon the Puritan vision of man’s relation with the divine.2 This direct relation, along with the acceptance of the authority of Scripture alone, constituted what became recognized as the distinctively Protestant ‘right of private judgment.’ The right, most frequently cited against the claims of the Roman Church to be the channel of religious truth, was equally useful against the pretensions of a State Church to dictate religious allegiance on any grounds whatever. However much religious liberty later became entangled with secular theories of natural rights, it continued also to be justified on the grounds of the direct relation between man and God. When, after the outbreak of the French Revolution, natural rights fell from favour, this older justification could still be used on behalf of Protestant Dissenters and even of Roman Catholics. Thus in 1816 Earl Grey, presenting to the House of Lords a petition of the Roman Catholics of Great Britain for emancipation, maintained: ‘The human conscience was the province of God, and man was guilty of an act of impiety when he interfered with its scruples’.3 At the same time, since the Dissenters continued to envisage the essence of their Protestantism as the repudiation of Church dictatorship of religious belief (the Church of England being here believed to follow the Roman model) the doctrine tended to perpetuate their anti-Roman bias. This important part 1 Andrew Kippis, A Vindication of the Protestant Dissenting Ministers with regard to their late Application to Parliament, 1772, p. 3. 2 George Walker, A Dissenter’s Plea (undated c. 1790), p. 3. 3 Hansard, XXIV (11th June 1816), 1056.

21

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

of the theory of toleration derived from a sectarian, mainly from a Baptist origin. Those Catholics who later adopted it were preaching Protestant doctrine. Those Protestants who applied it on their behalf demonstrated that its universal meaning transcended its partisan origin. The rest of Milton’s Treatise was mainly a plea for the emancipation of religion from the jurisdiction of the secular magistrate. The prevalence of an Established Church in England meant that the threat to religious dissidents usually came from an ecclesiastical party in favour with, or in control of, the existing ruler, not from a fanatical party trying to get into power by supporting a rival government. For a few years under Cromwell the secular ruler became a refuge to whom the sects could look for protection against Presbyterian domination on one hand and the return of Anglican domination on the other. But this position was already threatened when Milton published his Treatise, and did not survive the Restoration. So later English tolerationists were saved from the dangers of Erastian¬ ism. They were not, like Spinoza in Holland, prompted to preach passive obedience to a secular ruler in ecclesiastical matters as a refuge from the claims of Roman supremacy on one hand and from a threatened Calvinist rebellion on the other. Significantly, Hoadly, in the early eighteenth century, was to be an exception. Confronted with the claims of the Non-juring Church and its Jacobite supporters, he reached by a different route the same general conclusions as Spinoza in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and exalted the de facto secular power while dissolving the jurisdiction of the visible Church. His sermon The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ was a source for tolerationist argument in the later eighteenth century; while his pamphlet A Preservative against the Principles and Practices of the Non-jurors both in Church and State provided ammunition for the Erastians of the Establishment who argued that the government had a right to deny religious equality for the purpose of self-preservation. But most English writers for toleration followed the lead of the early lay Baptists, and were preoccupied with separating the Church from the State. Milton shared this preoccupation, although he was less thorough-going in it than his contemporary, the Baptist Roger Williams who had himself suffered from the tyranny of the Massachusetts 22

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

theocracy, or than his successor John Locke who witnessed the Clarendon Code.1 Areopagitica was a tract in favour of unlicensed printing. Much of it was devoted to describing the cramping effect of censorship on the individual and his society. But it also restated the Arminian theory about the means of finding truth which was to lie at the root of almost all subsequent justifications of liberty of religious opinion. The relevant passages from Areopagitica have been too often repeated, but they are so important in this context that they are worth quoting once more. Milton said of truth: ‘If her waters flow not in a perpetual progression they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition’.2 Truth was the virgin which had appeared once with Christ and had been hewed asunder after his death. Her sad friends ‘went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them’.3 Though they could not all be found till the Master’s second coming, licensing was the prohibition to those who continued seeking. Light was given us to ‘discover onward things more remote from our knowledge’ . . . ‘To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it . . . this is the golden rule in Theology as well as in Arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a Church’.4 . . . ‘Where there is much desire to learn there . . . will be . . . many opinions, for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.’5 Again: ‘Let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worst in a full and free encounter ? . . . For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, no stratagems, nor licensing to make her victorious; those are the shifts and defences that error uses against her power.’6 Now by truth Milton meant religious truth; the unity of true belief which fallen man had lost, and which men of good will, discounting those differences on inessential matters to which their free inquiries must bring them, could painfully and 1

For an account of Roger Williams and Massachusetts see W. Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution, New York, 1955, pp. 151–8. 2 Areopagitica, 1644, ed. John Hales, Oxford, 1939 impression, p. 38. 3 Ibid., p. 43. 4 Ibid., p. 44. 5 Ibid., p. 46. 6 Ibid., p. 52. 23

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

partially piece together. In 1787 the Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley wrote in his Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt: ‘The consequence of free discussion would, in time, produce a rational and permanent uniformity. For truth, we need not doubt, will finally prevail in every contest. . . .’1 Priestley thought that subscription to articles of belief, laws penalizing unorthodox opinions, and civil disabilities imposed on religious minorities warped or impeded the discovery of religious truth. The idea that truth was discovered by means of free discussion had become the touchstone of liberal thought. Its corollary was Milton’s assertion that ‘light was given us to discover onward things’. The eighteenth-century advocates of religious liberty were all onward-looking. To them freedom of belief meant room for speculation and innovation. Milton and his fellow Independents were not the only thinkers reaching towards a theory of progress. Dr. Owen Chadwick has described the development of the idea of progress of knowledge of religious truth which Spanish and French Jesuits were creating in the seventeenth century, and which culminated in J. H. Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine.2 The ideas of progress or development, or at least of process, which became so universal in the nineteenth century, had various origins; nor did the lines of thought which composed them remain separate and distinct. Yet the liberal theory retained certain features which distinguished it from that evolved by the Roman Catholic philosophers, and even from the theory of religious progress adopted by eighteenth-century Anglicans.3 It was not concerned with logical extensions of accepted doctrines. It was barely, if at all, concerned with the lessons learned from religious experience in successive historical epochs. It emphasized the search, the intellectual effort of finding out and piecing together from a variety of opinions the particles of truth contained in them. It emphasized the necessity of liberty, not only as a means of encouraging the variety in which those particles were concealed, but also to leave room for the practical application of the truths discovered. The Protestant tradition upon which this rationalist 1

Priestley, Works, ed. J. T. Rutt, 19, 125. Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, Cambridge, 1957. R. S. Crane, ‘Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699–1745,’ Modern Philology, 1936, XXXI, 273–319, 349–381. N. Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker, Cambridge, 1959, p. 174, et. seq. 2

3

24

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

theory of progress was founded would never admit of a visible religious authority acting as arbiter of the truth of the doctrines reached in this way. It was truth itself that seemed to emerge from the search and the clash of opinions, not a body selecting truth; and thus the keynote of the liberal conception of progress was the phrase ‘truth will prevail’. Eventually, unimpeded by the supervision of a religious authority, the theory could be gradually secularized into a doctrine of general social progress. Among the champions of religious toleration called forth by the Anglican ascendancy of the Restoration, the closest to Milton was perhaps John Locke. Locke echoed Milton’s sentiments upon the role of freedom in the progress of truth. His phrase, ‘. . . For truth certainly would do well enough, if she were once made to shift for herself . . .’ was quoted in toleration controversies along with passages from the Areopagitica.1 Locke went much farther than Milton in working out some of the consequences of the search for religious truth. However, the most famous of his works, the Letters Concerning Toleration were mainly a justification of the separation of Church and State. Milton had argued that the magistrate should punish idolatry as an offence to the honour of God. Roger Williams had denied this; for who could judge what opinion was contrary to the honour of God ? Certainly not the lay magistrate, even though he followed the dictates of the dominant church. He must leave such judgement to God when the wheat and the tares were separated, and the tares were set apart until the angels, ‘with their sharp and cutting sickles of eternal vengeance, shall down with them, and bundle them up for everlasting burnings’ on the Last Day.2 Now the wheat and the tares, a favourite parable with tolerationists, was not only an eschatological prediction for believers; it was also a reminder that religious truth could not be infallibly known on earth. So the magistrate had no right to pretend to dictate it. Milton had not gone so far.3 He, and many after him, believed that the fundamentals of Christian truth were clearly set forth in the Scriptures—otherwise how could the poor and simple be saved ? It was further truths that needed searching for. But to Roger Williams, even the funda¬ 1 2 3

Locke, First Letter Concerning Toleration. Works, 10th edition, 1801, VI, 40. The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), London, 1848, p. 84. He used the parable, however, in his Treatise of Civil Power.

25

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

mentals were not unmistakable. ‘Satan’, he wrote, ‘has wrapped Scripture in a thick mist.’ False doctrine might be a sign of damnation, but which was false doctrine, and who were the damned must be left to the divine judgement. The combination of intense religious zeal with such uncertainty of dogma was possible, perhaps, in the mid years of the Puritan revolution, but unlikely to endure. In Locke already, the same argument was pervaded by a gentle scepticism. Locke pointed out that, although there was but one truth, one way to heaven, princes, like their subjects, differed in opinion as to which was truth. If all subjects followed the faith of their princes, one country alone would be in the right, and the rest of the world would follow their rulers on the path to destruction. Men would owe their eternal happiness or misery to the place of their nativity. Locke was tilting at the principle of ‘Cuius regio eius religio’, confirmed by the Peace of Westphalia, still liable to be invoked by European princes, and to which indeed, the Elizabethan Church Settlement had really conformed. But he had already justified toleration by the theory that truth could be progressively discovered, and here he was justifying it by the theory that for the purposes of practical politics it could not be certainly known. Locke offered a variety of justifications for the separation of Church and State. He emphasized the irrelevance of religious belief to civil co-operation; a point made much of by the nineteenth-century Whigs. He dwelt on the inhumanity of the persecutions which followed the intervention of the secular arm in religious controversies. Indeed he would not believe in the sincerity of those who professed to persecute for the salvation of souls. It would be very difficult, he thought, ‘to persuade men of sense, that he, who with dry eyes, and satisfaction of mind, can deliver his brother unto the executioner, to be burnt alive, does sincerely and heartily concern himself to save that brother from the flames of hell in the world to come’.1 He used the negative religious argument that the care of souls had not been committed to the magistrate by God: ‘Because it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another, as to compel anyone to his religion’.2 Moreover, faith is an inward belief, and none can conform his own to the dictates 1 2

A Letter Concerning Toleration, Works, edition of 1823, VI, 23. Op. cit., Works, edition of 1801. VI, 10.

26

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

of another. He who pretends to adds hypocrisy and contempt of God to his sins. Outward compulsion cannot alter belief, and penalties ‘are not proper to convince the mind’.1 The first part of this argument, descended from the early Baptists and Roger Williams, anticipated Hoadly’s contention that spiritual jurisdiction had been given to Christ alone; the second part was a restatement of the old contention that forced conversion makes hypocrites, in the form of an assertion of psychological fact. Belief in his own opinions is part of the nature of the human being. Compulsion violates that nature. In the terminology of the period, his religious belief is the ‘property’ of the human being; its freedom is one of his natural rights. The only way of safeguarding it is to leave it right outside the sphere of the State in which the magistrate can legitimately use his powers of compulsion. Having given his reasons, Locke devoted the greater part of his treatise to delimiting the boundaries of State jurisdiction in ecclesiastical affairs. He had already, restating the Independent ideal, reduced the Church—all churches—to the status of voluntary societies formed for mutual edification and worship to the end of the salvation of their members.2 The only excuse a magistrate could plead for suppressing them or punishing their members was a threat to the security and property of subjects which was the State’s proper concern. But he denied that religious opinion, whether of doctrine or of forms or organization of worship had any bearing on temporal peace or the security of property. Only two religious sects, Fifth Monarchy (the temporal rule of the saints) and Roman Catholicism with its allegiance to a foreign power, threatened the security of civil government. In these cases alone the State must exercise precautions, not against religious opinion but against sedition. Otherwise the machinery of government must confine its operations to the civil sphere. It should not be used to enforce ecclesiastical excommunication by temporal penalties, nor to punish moral sins which did not disrupt the State or invade other men’s rights. The magistrate could have no legitimate end in view but the public good of a secular society. Locke’s first Letter Concerning Toleration was not particularly 1 2

Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 13–16.

27

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

original in the points it made. It was important because it supplemented his Second Treatise on Civil Government.1 It explained what had been left out of the Social Contract, and why. It set out the Whig view of the limited State. Almost all later English advocates of toleration, except the Benthamites, accepted this view; and when the Dissenters supported the constitutional doctrine of legislative sovereignty they never subscribed to the political doctrine of the all-embracing State. English Dissent kept the spiritual side of man outside the sphere of national power. But one of Locke’s exceptions—that against the Roman Catholics—had an equally enduring life among later opponents of the extension of religious liberty. His argument for it was already a traditional one. Elizabeth I, as we have seen, had not burned seminary priests and Jesuits for heresy, but hanged them for treason. The results of Locke’s own practice of freedom in the search for religious truth may be found, not in the Letters on Toleration, but rather in his essays The Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures, and A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, both published in 1695. In these he maintained that a few simple articles of Christian faith were alone essential to salvation; and God would require even these only of men who had been born within reach of the knowledge of Christian doctrine. All articles of belief drawn up by churches and councils were but human interpretations of Scripture truth, and upon them men could disagree endlessly. Eventually all was reducible to the single Gospel message which required no explanation— ‘That Jesus is the Messiah’.2 Now this conclusion had been anticipated almost verbally, by the early seventeenth-century Baptist, Leonard Busher. But in his thought upon religion Locke had inherited the Arminian and Miltonian doctrine of the few fundamentals rather than the enthusiastic scepticism of the Baptists. His thinking was tinged with the rationalism of the Latitudinarian elements in the Anglican Church, to which was now added a new element in the results of scientific dis¬ 1 The Treatise on Civil Government was probably written in 1681, although not published until 1689. The first Letter Concerning Toleration was published in 1689, although presumably written earlier. Locke’s views on Toleration were already established in 1667. Cf. Maurice Cranston, John Locke, London, 1967, pp. 207–8 and 111–13. 2 Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, Works, 1801, VII, 178.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

covery. Searching the scriptures as Milton directed tended to pare down the body of doctrine agreed on by all the searchers into a few widely accepted articles of Christian faith. Scientific discovery and method speeded up the paring-down process by undermining belief in Christian supernatural mysteries, including that of the Trinity. Locke could hardly avoid the charge of Socinianism when he was forced to specify his fundamental beliefs. The warm friend of his old age was Anthony Collins, the Deist.1 Locke could defend the paring-down process in two ways. Like the Puritan Independents he felt that God must have meant religion to be comprehensible to simple people. But he also felt with the scientists that a comprehensible religion must not be in contradiction to the known truth about the material world. Faith must not conflict with reason; and so he confined the province of faith to matters beyond reason, or to matters in which the evidence in conflict with a miraculous occurrence was only probable.2 For Locke and his friends the sum of theological tenets was shrinking, but the body of knowledge was expanding; and owing to the work of Newton, the difference between religious and secular knowledge was becoming blurred. Newtonian science demonstrated God in the material universe. God was seen through His creation; and therefore the knowledge of His works was the knowledge of God. Scientific knowledge was especially important, being the discovery of the laws of Nature, that is the regularities or rules by which God’s creation was governed. If in this way scientific knowledge was religious knowledge, it was on no account permissible to repress it in the interests of the accepted statements of revealed religion. Scientific speculation and revelation must find a modus vivendi, and so eighteenth¬ century thinkers were preoccupied with the delicate task of reconciling the laws of Nature and the miracles of revelation. It is obvious that these difficulties were felt not only by Dissenters, but within the main body of the Anglican Church;3 hence such thoughtful, clever and uninspired attempts at reconciliation between Nature and revelation as Butler’s Analogy. 1 2 3

Maurice Cranston, John Locke, pp. 460–61. Locke, Human Understanding, Works 1801, III, pp. 125–34. N. Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker, Cambridge, 1959, Chapter IV.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

Butler tended to turn religion into a rather pedestrian heavenly sanction for earthly morality (a morality of the cruder sorts of self-control whose necessity reflected the grossness of eighteenth-century manners). Extremists were attacking not only the credibility of miracles but the morality (in terms of charity) of the claims of Christianity to be the exclusive channel of salvation; and this, as has been pointed out, was a principal factor in impelling Anglican apologists to evolve a theory of the development of religious experience.1 Those who could not accept the official or orthodox solutions turned Deist, and substituted a religion of Nature for the religion of Christ, or took refuge in scepticism.2 Those who felt that the progress of knowledge would itself bring about a reconciliation tended, like Locke, to adopt simplified forms of Christianity, and became Arians, or Socinians. They were convinced that scientific discovery could never conflict with divine revelation, since both were God’s truth. They looked about for a philosophy which would harmonize their knowledge of the material world with some at least of the statements and prophesies of revelation. Priestley felt that he had found it in the Hartleyan doctrine of materialism and the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Robert Robinson found it in the worship of Nature redeemed. The contrast between the increasing body of scientific knowledge and the decreasing body of agreed revelation did not go unobserved. Samuel Clarke suggested it might be accounted for because matters of speculation, philosophy and art, things of human invention, experience or disquisition ‘improve generally from small Beginnings to greater and greater Certainty, and arrive at Perfection by degrees: but matters of Revelation and divine Testimony are on the contrary complete at first; and the Christian religion was most perfect at the beginning’.3 However, Richard Law, a leading figure in the evolution of the eighteenth-century Anglican doctrine of development, thought religious knowledge progressive like secular knowledge.4 1 R. S. Crane, ‘Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress,’ Modern Philology, 1936, XXXI, 349–52. 2 R. M. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1954. 3 Samuel Clarke, The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity. Works, 1738, IV, iii. 4 R. S. Crane, op. cit., p. 364. The idea that new lights on the body of doctrine were produced by new experience kept the content of the body steady. In Newman’s doctrine the body itself increased.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

None the less, to Dissenters and Latitudinarians, Christian dogma continued to shrink. They attributed the shrinkage to the necessity of clearing away the accretions which human ignorance, corruption and greed had imposed on pure revelation. Archdeacon Francis Blackburne, author of that unreadable masterpiece The Confessional, found the source of corruption in religious establishments, which he considered a copy of Jewish institutions.1 Robert Robinson thought the Roman Catholic Church had reintroduced pagan conceptions into Christianity.2 Inevitably the idea of the progressive purification of religion was turned into a stick to beat the Roman Catholics. It was contended that increasing knowledge would purge Christianity of Romish superstitions, and purge the Church of England of the remaining superstitions embodied in her Articles of Religion. In their turn the Dissenters might find it difficult to reply to the Deists who counted revelation among the superstitions. In the later eighteenth century the leading contenders for religious toleration were the Rational Dissenters, that is, those Dissenters most affected by the current Arian and Socinian, anti-Trinitarian doctrines. The party within the Church which wanted to abolish subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and to revise the Liturgy held many of the same views. The Rational Dissenters had inherited the lines of thought of Milton, Locke and Newton. They looked to freedom of religious and scientific thought and discussion as a means to the progressive discovery of truth, and rejected any institution, secular or ecclesiastical, which limited this freedom and hindered this discovery. As advocates of religious toleration they still suffered from the partiality and weakness of a sectarian outlook. They tended to confuse liberty of religious thought and practice with simplicity of religious dogma and practice, or rather with that minimum of dogma and ritual which they believed to be truly Protestant. They confused their love of liberty with their own version of Protestantism, for whose protection, after all, the demand for liberty had been formulated. They attacked articles of religion equally because they were imposed on those who did not believe them (or might come not to believe them) and because they disagreed with the substance of them. They disliked bishops 1 2

Blackburne, A Candid Address to the Jews, 1767. Works, 1804, I, 261 et seq. Robert Robinson, The History and Mystery of Good Friday , 1778, passim,

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not only because these upheld religious disabilities, but because they thought bishops unscriptural; and behind the bishops stood the Established Church. They sometimes succeeded in separating in their own minds freedom of belief from simplicity of creed; but since they believed simplicity to be the proper product of freedom, it is not surprising that churchmen sometimes thought their demand for toleration was intended as an attack on the Anglican Church. The Rational Dissenters, in so far as their arguments justified only certain forms of Protestantism, supported an incomplete toleration. On the other hand, because they had assimilated arguments from such various sources, their theory had a broad and varied basis. Their combination of religious considerations (the direct relation between man and God, the progressive nature of the knowledge of religious truth), of philosophical considerations (the psychological impossibility of forced conversion, the necessity of reconciling religious with secular knowledge), and of political considerations (the irrelevance, injustice and inexpediency of confusing religion with politics), gave them a comprehensive body of justifications. In a sense their theory was bigger than they were. They could appeal for liberty on so many grounds; as a condition of religious and secular truth; as a natural right; and as a ‘liberty wherewith Christ had made them free’. II The theory of religious toleration in late eighteenth-century England was developed to its fullest extent by the rational Dissenting ministers Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and Robert Robinson. Priestley was the leading controversialist for religious liberty.1 A man of great mental energy and prolific output, he combined the roles of minister, tutor (at Warrington Academy), scientist, philosopher, and theologian. His polemical writings included:– An attack on Blackstone for his criticisms of the Dissenters in his first edition of the Commentaries on the Laws 1 Anthony Lincoln, Some Social and Political Ideas of English Dissent, 1763– 1800, Cambridge, 1936, pp. 151–81. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background, 1940, pp. 168–204.

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of England;1 arguments for the abolition of compulsory subscription to the Articles of Religion in his Essay on the First Principles of Government;2 a letter to Pitt in remonstrance for Pitt’s desertion of the Repeal cause in 1787;3 a sermon to support the campaign for repeal of the Test Laws, preached on 5th November 1789;4 a long reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France;5 and an angry reply to criticisms of the Dissenters by Dr. Madan of Birmingham.6 In addition to this Priestley dealt with the question of religious liberty at length in his Lectures on History and General Policy for Warrington Academy, published in 1788. He defended Unitarianism against the attacks of Bishop Horsley, and he turned even the preface to his scientific treatise, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, into a paean of prophecy upon the social and political effects of the advance of knowledge, from which the English hierarchy might have reason to ‘tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine’.7 Being such a prolific controversialist, Priestley utilized almost all the arguments common to the Rational Dissenters, but he transcended his predecessors in their application; for he was among the very few Protestant Dissenters who contended for the complete toleration of Roman Catholics.8 His attitude towards the Jews, with whom he engaged in theological argument, was conscientiously placatory, but still proselytizing.9 He justified toleration mainly by his idea of progress in knowledge, which he set out most fully in the introduction to his Essay on the First Principles of Government. Here he described the con¬ 1 Remarks on some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries, relating to the Dissenters, Dublin, 1770. 2 First edition, London, 1768. 3 Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt . . . on the subjects of Toleration and Church Establishments, 1787. 4 The Proper Conduct of Dissenters with Respect to the Test Act, Birmingham, 1789. 5 Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Birmingham, 1791. 6 Familiar Letters Addressed to the Inhabitants of Birmingham, Birmingham, 1790. 7 London, 1774, p. xiv. 8 A Free Address to those who have Petitioned for the Repeal of the late Act of Parliament, in favour of the Roman Catholics, 1780. (Written at the time of the Gordon Riots.) 9 Letters to the Jews, inviting them to an Amicable Discussion of the Evidences of Christianity, 1786.

R.T.–D

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nexion between the progress of knowledge, virtue and happiness. He explained that man’s ideas are collected from a limited space on each side of the present moment, and he called this space man’s present time. The space is greater or less in proportion to a man’s progress in intellect and his advancement above mere animal nature. When it is great as with the ancient and wise, it may enable the man to perceive the temporary nature of evil impressions, and the greater good of which they are productive. No bounds are set to the extension of this space, which is the same as the comprehension of the mind. Nothing but a future existence in advantageous circumstances is required to advance a man above any excellence we can now perceive. The superiority of angelic beings is that their comprehension, that is their present time, is of proportionately greater extent than ours, because of their greater recollection and foresight. And we have a faint idea of a Divine Being to whom all duration is present time. Now not only the individual but the human species itself is capable of similar unbounded improvement. Animals do not progress; but a well educated man in an improved Christian country is ‘a being possessed of much greater power, to be, and to make happy, than a person of the same age, in the same, or any other country, some centuries ago’. And persons some centuries hence will be as much superior to us. 1 The instrument of this great improvement is society, and society implies government. The advantage of a perfected society is that it facilitates the subdivision and specialization of knowledge. In a few years a man can learn all the preceding progress in any one art or science, and spend the rest of his life extending it. Since knowledge is power, human powers will be increased, men will be more easy, comfortable and longer lived, and daily more happy and more disposed to make others happy. Government is to be approved as it favours this progress and to be condemned as it retards it.2 Some resignation of individual liberty is necessary to enable a society with its mutual cooperation to exist; and Priestley goes on to explain how far that resignation takes place. But that government which acts in such a way as to limit the continual progress of knowledge and 1 2

Essay on the First Principles of Government, 1768, pp. 3–5. Ibid., p. 8.

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happiness which it is society’s function to secure, defeats its own end. Priestley’s theory of progress was Utilitarian in that progress was said to be in ‘happiness’, and government was approved according to its contribution to that end. The means of happiness was knowledge, and society with its protector, government, was there to promote knowledge. Its method, by subdivision and specialization, showed an obvious parallel with Adam Smith’s theory of economic progress by the division of labour. Indeed, the Dissenters tended to visualize the advance of knowledge and of commerce on identical lines—free discussion and free trade. 1 The exact nature of happiness was not specified; it was not reduced to the rigid, categorized ‘pleasure’ of Bentham. But Priestley assumed that the power conferred by knowledge would always be used to promote it. Possibly he inherited this part of his theory from mid-eighteenth-century predecessors who, identifying virtue as self-control and the regulation of appetites, argued that the increase of knowledge would make this self-regulation increasingly possible.2 But Priestley also had a religious answer to the problem (which he did not really formulate) why increasing intellectual power should necessarily result in increasing good will. For him, to be wise was to be God-like, and so the will to make happy accompanied the power to do so. Moreover, he also assumed that in a society which collectively possessed much knowledge the individual would be wise. Having adopted the idea that the discovery of truth was progressive, and shown how it was facilitated by social co-operation, he had made it the dynamic of a grand theory of moral and social progress. In other parts of the same treatise, notably in Part III (Of the Progress of Civil Societies to a State of Greater Perfection), Priestley set out to show how society ought to facilitate this same discovery of truth by allowing free inquiry and discussion. Here we are on familiar ground. We are told of the necessity of free inquiry to the establishment of rational conviction, of the faculty of truth of establishing itself by its own evidence and of showing up falsehood; of the dangers of fixed creeds and 1 Cf. W. J. Fox, The Duties of Christians towards Deists, 2nd edition 1819, p. 47. ‘The same principle, as to legislative interference applies to religion as to trade’ . . . for its best advancement, ‘let it alone’. 2 R. S. Crane, op. cit., pp. 373–6.

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organizations whose interest is to impede speculation. The self-evidence of truth was now given the corollary that false doctrines were easy to refute and therefore in no danger of spreading, so that it was safe to allow them to be voiced. There was no need to guard any opinions by means of civil penalties, for in religion and morals, ‘The more important will guard themselves by their own evidence, and the less important do not deserve to be guarded.’1 In other works Priestley returned to the same theme. His Lectures on History and General Policy included a passage on the contribution of the freely speculating individual to the discovery of new truths. ‘. . . Ingenious and speculative individuals will always be the first to make discoveries, and it will require time to communicate them to the rest. Consequently, if the present opinion and practices of the majority of any society were imposed upon all the rest, no improvements could ever take place . . .’ Priestley anticipated, before Godwin and to a greater extent than the Benthamites, some of the arguments in John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty. Priestley’s theory of progressive knowledge included and embroidered Milton’s theory of religious knowledge. A short, if illogical step had been taken, from maintaining that in freedom truth always prevailed, to assuming that freedom would always be utilized for the discovery of truth. But Priestley, faced with Tory opposition to the Dissenters’ claims, and supported by his own belief in providence, would add that truth would prevail in any case.2 Moreover, the theory had been so secularized and extended that knowledge had become the means of earthly happiness or wellbeing as well as the means of ascertaining religious truth. Yet, paradoxically, Priestley’s system was redeemed from complete secularization by his materialism. He 1

Op.cit.,p. 179.

Cf. Anna Barbauld, An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 3rd edition, London, 1790, pp. 15–16. ‘For truth is of a nature strangely encroaching, and ought to be kept out entirely if we are not disposed to admit her with perfect freedom . . . give her the least entrance, and she will never be satisfied until she has gained entire possession . . . Truth is of a very intolerant spirit. She will not make any compromise with Error’ . . . and holds with her only ‘such fellowship as light has with darkness, a perpetual warfare and opposition’. 2 Priestley here went beyond Mill, who was acutely aware that persecution can overcome truth, and therefore really had juster grounds for demanding liberty.

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recognized no division between body and soul, heaven and earth. His eschatology was the resurrection of the body. He ended his sermon On the Proper Conduct to be Observed by the Dissenters with Respect to the Test Act, with a prayer for; ‘Those glorious and happy times . . . when the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of God and of his Christ.’1 The progress of knowledge and of happiness, proceeding, as he thought, by a chain of necessity in which each step conditioned the next, was God’s providence for the human race.2 Only with Godwin, when God’s providence became entirely immersed in the social progress, and the resurrection vanished, was there real secularization. It might be truer to say that then, for the first time in England, the idea of progress gave rise to a modern type of religious politique. Priestley’s demand for toleration followed from his theory of progress. He who retarded the progress or application of knowledge tried to impede God’s providence for man. Laws and institutions which hazarded peaceful co-operation, which limited the free expression and communication of ideas, which tried to blunt intellectual curiosity by imposing articles of belief, which penalized the pioneers of religious and scientific thought or subjected religious minorities to civil disabilities were contrary to God’s purposes. They could not, of course, be successful, for God’s providence was irresistible. They merely dammed up the stream of progress until it burst through the corrupt, man-made barriers, and brought them crashing down. Change, innovation, was necessary and good. Encouraged it was peaceful; obstructed it was violent. This was the real meaning of the ‘train of gunpowder’ that Priestley was accused of laying under the Constitution. It was not a conspiratorial plot, but merely a warning— sometimes in minatory terms—that arguments were dynamite, that new ideas would win, and that the Church was denying the just claims of the Dissenters at its peril.3 The force of this 1 The Conduct to be Observed by the Dissenters in order to Procure the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (Preached at Birmingham, 5th November 1789), Birmingham (undated) p. 16. Also printed under the title The Proper Conduct of Dissenters with Respect to the Test Act, etc. 2 Priestley’s necessitarianism as well as his optimism were Hartleyan. Cf. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background, 1949, p. 136 et seq. 3 E.g., Letters to the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, Birmingham, 1791, pp. 125–30. Priestley says that the Church of England is tottering, and the Dissenters are trying to bring about its separation from the State without calamity.

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argument—the powerful psychological stimulus of the doctrine of the inevitability of change—was to be much more effectively demonstrated later, in the history of Marxism, while Marx made the doctrine more menacing by maintaining that conflict too was inevitable. But Priestley was also being thoroughly illogical, although this probably did not diminish his immediate influence. He was proclaiming that progressive knowledge of truth, including religious truth, was the instrument of social progress. At the same time he was demanding that the civil power should ignore religious opinion because its kingdom ‘was not of this world’. Godwin recognized the contradiction and abandoned part of the argument.1 In view of his theory of progress Priestley was inevitably hostile to the Church ‘as by law established’. The Roman Catholic Church might have absorbed his odium, but he considered the Papacy but ‘an old and dying lion’ which it was cowardly to kick.2 At first he was prepared to concede to the Church of England a limited and temporary utility in helping to spread Christianity and keep order in primitive societies. Existing establishments could be justified in an imperfect world, provided they were reformed, purged of Articles, disconnected from the machinery of civil government, and accompanied by the complete toleration of religious minorities.3 Yet Priestley had already accused the Church of England of making that necessary to Christian community which Christ had left indifferent in matters of belief. He had declared that all establishments ‘in which supreme worship is paid to any other than the one God and father of all’ (that is, all Trinitarian churches) were idolatrous.4 And he nullified his recognition of the Established Church’s utility by contending that all religions, even Paganism, were equally 1 W . Godwin, Political Justice, Toronto, 1946, II, 250. ‘We no longer claim toleration, as was formerly done, from the unimportance of opinion, we claim it, because a contrary system will be found pregnant with the most fatal disasters, because toleration only can give a mild and auspicious character to the changes that are impending.’ 2 Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries Relating to the Dissenters, Dublin, 1770, p. 27. 3 Essay on the First Principles of Government, 1768, Part III. The movement against clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles was then getting under way. 4 Remarks on . . . Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries, p. 17, footnote.

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useful in inculcating the precepts of morality required for the success of civil society.1 After the defeat of the Dissenting ministers’ applications to Parliament for the abolition of compulsory subscription to the Articles in 1772–3, Priestley’s attacks on the Established Church were unqualified. He had already said that its liturgy was Popish enough to encourage conversions to Rome while its intolerance to Roman Catholics blinded them to the light of Protestantism.2 He added that its dependence on the State made hypocrites and sycophants of its clergy.3 It obstructed true religion and caused infidelity.4 In the campaign for repeal of the Test Laws, he joined the chorus of protests against the Sacramental Test which blasphemously debased a sacred ceremony for worldly ends, kept sincere Christians out of the service of their country, and encouraged atheists and cynics to enter it.5 Finally, Establishment, which he identified with the disgraceful Alliance of Church and State, was the prime source of persecution. It encouraged the infliction of civil penalties for religious opinion, which differed only in degree from the stake and the faggot.6 Priestley’s attacks on the Established Church embarrassed the moderates of his own party. It was too easy for Burke to pillory him as an awful warning of the dangers likely to threaten the Church if Dissenters were allowed positions of civil power. Priestley could only answer by pointing out that most Dissenters were content to live alongside the Church of England, and that those who shared his own views were never likely to be dangerous, a reply which, although probably true at that time, was quite ineffective.7 Not all Priestley’s arguments for toleration were derived from his theory of knowledge and progress. He defended the freedom of education from State control on the ground that there 1 Lectures on History and General Policy, 1788, Works, ed. J. T . Rutt, 1826, pp. 24, 350. Familiar Letters to the Inhabitants of Birmingham. Works, pp. 19, 186–7. 2 Essay on First Principles of Government, p. 121. 3 Lectures on History and General Policy. Works, pp. 24, 362. Letters to Burke, pp. 91–95. 4 Familiar Letters to the Inhabitants of Birmingham. Works, pp. 19, 205. 5 Ibid., pp. 19, 163–7. 6 The Proper Conduct of Dissenters, etc., p. 6. 7 Familiar Letters. Works, pp. 19, 181.

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must be scope for the varieties in the characters of men.1 Also, he frequently talked about religious liberty as a ‘natural right’. He did attempt to harmonize his theory of natural rights with his utilitarianism. He explained that the idea of property or right of any kind was founded on regard to the general good of society.2 For instance, it was good for the general happiness that the right of civil liberty should be enjoyed. And to safeguard civil liberty there must be political equality, although in a State large enough to be most favourable to improvements and happiness political equality might have to be modified.3 Similarly, neo-Lockeian theories of social contract tended to crop up in Priestley’s descriptions of the origins of the State. He maintained that men entered into a compact not for the resignation but for the better securing of their natural rights. He also postulated a ‘virtual contract’ between king and people, which the king could be rightfully deposed for breaking.4 This signified that Priestley had not weaned himself from the social contract ideas common to all Whiggish Dissenting pamphleteers. For a supporter of toleration the Whig limited State with its extrusion of religion from the sphere of politics was too useful a formula for safeguarding religious independence and free speculation to be discarded, unless for a Godwinian withering State. At this logical conclusion of his own thinking Priestley never arrived. Richard Price was as remarkable and as versatile as his friend Priestley, although less prolific and less readable. (Priestley has been underrated as a stylist. He wrote too much but on occasion could write admirably, as in his sermon On the Proper Conduct of Dissenters with Respect to the Test Act, a model of clear and vigorous exposition.) He was an economist rather than a scientist, being a pioneer in the theory of insurance. He was consulted by William Pitt about his sinking fund,5 and was invited to act as financial adviser to the federal government of the new United States of America, but declined on the score of old age. His pamphlet, Observations on the Nature of Civil 1

Essay on First Principles of Government, p. 78. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 19 et seq. 4 Letters to Burke, pp. 24–25. 5 Pitt probably accepted Price’s main scheme—with its defects. C. B. Cone, Torchbearer of Freedom, Kentucky, 1952, p. 142 et seq. 2

3

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Liberty‚ advocating self-government for America, was said to be second in influence only to Tom Paine’s Common Sense.1 He wrote an important work on moral philosophy.2 In politics he was more often concerned with constitutional and franchise reform than with religious toleration; but he joined the Committee of Dissenting ministers which applied for abolition of subscription to the Articles in 1772, and his famous sermon A Discourse on the Love of our Country was preached on 4th November 1789 on behalf of the campaign for repeal of the Test Laws. He died just in time to miss the disasters and disillusionments which followed the failure of the campaign. Price was an essentialist and an individualist. He contributed to the theory of religious liberty in two ways; by a theory of knowledge entirely different from Priestley’s and by reinforcing the concept of natural rights. In friendly opposition to Priestley, Price affirmed the reality of substances.3 The substantial realities are known to us independently of the particular material objects which impress our senses. They are known immediately and intuitively to that faculty of the mind which Price calls the understanding. It is possible, therefore, to know not merely the impression left on the senses by external phenomena, but the nature (in this context the same as substance) of realities themselves. Now among the substances so known are good and evil, which can be immediately perceived by the understanding, as the nature of actions. Good and evil are real substances, eternal, unchangeable, and dependent on the will of no one, not even of God. For goodness is part of the nature of God, not an outcome of his will. Good and evil can be perceived by the understanding of any person; but the extent to which they are perceived, and their influence upon the person concerned must be in proportion to his rational faculties, i.e. his reflective powers. 1 Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, 1776. 2 A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals, 1758. Cf. Anthony Lincoln, op. cit., pp. 101–150; D. Daiches Raphael, The Moral Sense, 1947. 3 The following passages are summarized from Price’s A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, 3rd edition, 1787. Cf. also A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity, in a Correspondence Between Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley, first published 1778.

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Our intellectual powers are in their infancy. The lowest degrees of reason are sufficient to discover moral distinctions in general; because these are self evident, and included in the ideas of certain actions and characters. They must, therefore, appear to all who are capable of making actions the objects of their reflexion. But the extent to which they appear, and the accuracy and force with which they are discerned, and consequently their influence, must, so far as they are the objects of pure intelligence, be in proportion to the strength and improvement of the rational faculties of beings and their acquaintance with truth and the natures of things.1 Morality is possible for the humblest human being because it is self-evident and perceptible to the lowest degree of reason. But the individual’s affection to the nature of good, and willing conformity to it, increases with his knowledge. Goodness is part of truth—a real relation of things. Truth is the proper object of mind; and progress in it holds forth the prospect of unbounded scope for improvement. Price, like Priestley, held that truth and virtue and happiness were connected; and in his more sanguine moments, his writings had the same Utopian ring. But being a moral philosopher he gave more attention to elucidating this connexion. There was an element in his philosophy which threatened to disturb his system. For evil as well as good was an essence, malice as well as benevolence, pain as well as pleasure, deformity as well as beauty. Evil was also part of the nature of things, and at first sight there seemed no reason why it also should not be a proper object of mind. Price met this danger by maintaining that the perception of goodness or moral right was accompanied by satisfaction, and of evil by disapprobation or displeasure. He borrowed this from Hume whose theory he was controverting, and who identified primary moral good by its appeal to the moral sense. For Hume what pleased was good. For Price goodness was real, but it pleased by its congruence with the understanding which perceived it. ‘. . . From a necessity in the nature of things, goodness rather than malice must constitute the disposition and end of every mind in proportion to the degree of its knowledge and perfection.’2 Priestley assumed the identity of wisdom and virtue. Price attributed to the mind a 1 2

Price, op. cit., p. 95. Ibid., p. 417. 42

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power of affection through which goodness naturally drew the understanding to itself. But both demanded liberty for the fullest range of the understanding as a means of improving the wisdom and happiness of mankind. In both the demand was based on an optimism about human nature which accounts for the hostility of contemporary Evangelicals, and of all those who felt that intellectual knowledge was impotent to remove them from the dominion of sin. Price’s theory of knowledge produced a further justification for freedom of thought, of which the consequences were more fully worked out by Robert Robinson. Since truth was perceived by a congruence between the substance of things and the faculties of mind considering them, attempts to force or divert the perception of truth must obviously be useless. They could only disturb the congruence by encouraging the intervention of the passions of fear and self love, inimical to the development of the rational faculties. ‘Force,’ said Locke (and bribery, Price could have added), ‘is not proper to convince the mind.’ Price was a philosopher of natural rights. Essentialism, even when justifying natural rights, does not necessarily favour liberty for the individual. Natural rights are rights pertaining to human nature. They are the property, or in modern parlance, the conditions of living required by human nature as such. But what they are depends on the view taken of the nature of the human ‘substance’. Human nature may be conceived as a common nature underlying the varieties of individuals. This would suggest a right of equality, of like treatment. It would not necessarily suggest a right to liberty, although in the privilege-ridden societies of the eighteenth century this was obscured because equality was the obvious road to greater liberty. Again, reality or substance may be seen not only in the individual but in the group or society; and then the group may claim the rights, swallowing up the rights of the individual and incorporating them in its own. This tendency was to grow stronger in the nineteenth century. Its key point was the transfer of the idea of morality, as part of the individual essence, to the group. Again, if the substance of humanity is conceived as rationality; that is, if man is called a ‘rational being’, as he often was in the eighteenth century, and the mark of his humanity is taken to be his capacity for individual understanding, the most important right demanded 43

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

for him is usually liberty; for understanding must have room to work in. If man is seen as an instinctive being, if his nature is considered in terms of needs (which may vary as between men, women and children etc., each of whom have different natures and needs) as with Burke, the demand for liberty may lose priority in the face of other demands. Of course an instinctive need for liberty may give rise to a natural right. Locke’s natural rights were individualistic and libertarian, being based on the instinct of self-defence, but defence of the self’s‘liberty and property’ as well as its existence; although Locke expressed his idea in pseudo-historical or juridical terms. Price added to Locke’s conception a further strong backing of individualism, because he applied his conception of substance to the human soul, in which he included the human mind. In a sermon of 1766 he explained that the soul was distinct from the body, was not something solid, extended and moveable, but was something that thinks, wills and judges. The body was only a machine fitted up for the convenience of the soul.‘Everyone feels that he has a power of self motion, that he can begin action or cease from action as he pleases, and that he has an absolute command over his thoughts and determinations.’1 Our thoughts must therefore be something separate from and higher than matter. The body is destructible but the soul is immortal. It is the highest part of our nature, our proper self, an uncom¬ pounded and simple essence, and an emanation from the supreme intelligence. The sermon continued with an explanation of the necessity of some knowledge to the practice of virtue, and ended, in a rather rapid descent from the sublime, with an appeal for donations to a charity school. Price had fitted his essentialism into a neo-platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul (rescuing the soul from Priestley’s dependence on the resurrection of the body) and in so doing provided a firm argument for individual liberty, the‘reality’ of the individual as a unique, ultimate substance or end in himself. This is why, as Kant would say later, the individual must never be used only as a means, but always also as an end. Price thought it part of the nature of the individual that he was free; an autonomous, self-acting reality, morally responsible for his choice of following the good or evil he could perceive. 1

The Nature and Dignity of the Human Soul, 1766, p. 4.

44

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

It has been suggested that Price was a solitary, unfashionable figure whose philosophy ran against the prevailing materialism of the later eighteenth century. This may be so, but his essen¬ tialism, and particularly his conception of the autonomous individual, had a respectable ancestry going back to Samuel Clarke and his self-motive power,1 and behind him to Ralph Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists.2 It was to reappear in the nineteenth century with a teleological emphasis on the development (as opposed to the mere existence) of the autonomous being, notably in John Stuart Mill’s Liberty. It was, of course, in conflict with the necessitarianism and with the tabula rasa psychology of Priestley. As Price himself claimed, it provided a firmer foundation for the claim for civil and political liberty. If, as Hartley and Priestley thought, man’s actions were necessitated by his conditions guiding the impressions which formed his ideas and moulded his character, what his moral development required was not freedom. That was merely leaving these impressions to chance. He needed the rule of a benevolent despot, the government of superiors who could provide the best conditions and impressions. Priestley, of course, denied that his necessitated man was not free. He was free because‘though the chain of events is necessary, our own determinations and actions are necessary links of that chain’.3 In other words, Priestley’s man felt free, because he did not recognize the compulsions which moved him, and which, to Priestley, were God’s providence. But God’s providence, except at the Resurrection, had to act through human or natural 1

Letters to Dr. Clarke Concerning Liberty and Necessity. Works, 1738, IV, 714–15. ‘For to seek out God there is nothing else but to seek a participation of his image, or the recovery of that nature and life of his which we have been alienated from. And these three things, namely, that all things do not float without a head and governor, but there is an omnipotent understanding Being presiding over all; that this God hath an essential goodness and justice and that the difference of good and evil, moral, honest and dishonest, are not by mere will and law only, but by nature; and consequently that the Deity cannot act, influence and necessitate men to such things as are in their own nature evil; and lastly, that necessity is not intrinsical to the nature of everything, but that men have such a liberty or power over their own actions as may render them accountable for the same, and blameworthy when they do amiss; and consequently that there is a justice distributive of rewards and punishments running through the world.’ Ralph Cudworth, D.D., The True Intellectual System of the Universe, tr. John Harrison, M.A., London, 1845, I, xxxiv–xxxv. Cf. C. B. Cone, Torchbearer of Freedom. 3 The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, 1777, p. 99. 2

45

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

agency. If it were replied that men needed guidance only in their malleable years, and through education, not government, the question arose, at what juncture did education end and government begin? But an autonomous being must be left free. Attempts to destroy his autonomy could only warp, not mould him. Hence freedom, exemption from outside interference, was the consequence of his natural right of self-government in temporal affairs as in religious belief and practice. He could never surrender this right, since it was the condition of his proper existence as an autonomous being. Force was not proper to control the will. Price wanted political institutions arranged to safeguard the self-government of his autonomous individuals, associated in autonomous communities. He thought this could be realized through equal political rights. 1 But although Price’s conception of the autonomous individual led him to concern himself more with political democracy than with religious toleration, in the long run it was perhaps more important for toleration than for democracy that Price rescued the idea of rights from its dependence on the decaying Whig concept of the state of nature and the Social Contract. The contrast between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ applied to political society as implied in Locke’s state of nature could not stand up to the fierce attacks of Burke.2 The idea that the nature of man entitles him to certain considerations, and that the existence of men as autonomous realities, or as free souls, entitles them to freedom, still presents a frail barrier to some of the more modern justifications of intolerance. Robert Robinson was in some ways a very untypical Rational 1 See Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, etc., 1776. Cf. Additional Observations on Civil Liberty, 1777. Price explained his conception of the different kinds of liberty as all amounting to different forms of selfgovernment. He also explained the meaning of natural equality, that no mature person was vassal to another, not as equality of natural talent nor of economic circumstances (p. 21). Modern egalitarianism, economic equality as a political ideal, was not a feature of Dissenting radical thought. Price (and to a lesser extent Priestley) thought political democracy necessary to safeguard individual liberty. The former they generally termed political liberty and the latter civil liberty. It was not until the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution had created a proletariat, that liberals began to suspect that political democracy might merely result in the domination of the masses. Cf. J. S. Mill’s Representative Government. 2 H. V. S. Ogden, ‘The State of Nature and the Decline of Lockeian Political Theory in England, 1760–1800‚’ American Historical Review, 1940–41, X L V I .

46

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

Dissenter.1 The son of a mother of gentle birth who had made a bad marriage and come down in the world, he was educated at a grammar school but was forced by poverty to leave at 14 and become a hairdresser’s apprentice. He never experienced the intellectual stimulus of a Dissenting academy. As a young man he was converted by Whitefield and became first a Methodist preacher, and then a Particular Baptist. He wrote in 1776 a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity against Theophilus Lindsey,2 and he did not become an Arian until towards the end of his life. At one time he added to his income by writing sermons for the local Anglican parsons. Despite the bad behaviour of undergraduate rowdies (whom he powerfully rebuked in his sermon On a Becoming Behaviour in Religious Assemblies), his preaching in the Stoneyard Chapel in Cambridge was famous, and so were his sermons in the surrounding country villages. He had many university friends, among them the Fellows who promoted the application for abolition of compulsory subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1772. He was active in the County Association movement of 1779–80, and a founder of the Cambridge Constitutional Society. Like Priestley and Price he was acquainted with Shelburne.3 He set out his radical ideas with accustomed vigour in his Political Catechism, in the form of a dialogue between George and his father.4 Although a painstaking scholar—he wrote a great history of the Baptist Movement—he possessed a biting tongue, a terse and colourful prose style, and an earthy sense of humour unusual among eighteenthcentury Dissenting ministers.5 He was evidently a‘personality’, and long after his death in 1790 his memory was kept green by many anecdotes of him which appeared from time to time in Aspland’s Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature.6 Robinson’s writing was not always easy to read, because of 1 For a recent biography of Robinson see Graham Hughes, With Freedom Fired, 1955. 2 A Plea for the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. 3 Priestley preached Robinson’s funeral sermon. I have not been able to find out whether Robinson actually knew Price—but it seems probable. 4 London, 1782. 5 He illustrated the necessity for ecclesiastical innovation with reference to a list of pamphlets with unusual names: Sweet Sips of Soulsavingness, A High Heeled Shoe for a Dwarf in Christ, and An Effectual Shove for a Heavy-Arsed Christian. Arcana, Cambridge, 1774, p. 62. 6 Revived from Priestley’s Theological Repository in 1805.

47

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

the essentialist elements in it, and because of some confusion of terms; yet he had a knack of bringing difficult abstract arguments down to earth. He was in many respects a follower and popularizer of Price. He differed from Price, however, in being strongly influenced by the Deist conception of nature. Thus, where in Price the word nature generally seemed to signify the essence or real substance of a creature, Robinson more often used it to denote the created universe, or the sum of God’s creation. He thought it necessary to distinguish between nature created, the perfection and excellence of whatever exists, and nature corrupted, the luxuriance of what exists. 1 Nature created is the standard of morality and of art. ‘Every work of art is so far perfect as it approaches nature, nature is the standard, nature is the critic, nature is the comment after all. To call to the order of nature is innovation.’2 This being so, pure religion could be distinguished by its analogy with nature. ‘The finest idea, that can be formed of the Supreme Being, is that of an infinite intelligence always in harmony with itself; and, accordingly, the best way of proving the truth of revelation is that of showing the analogy of the plan of redemption to that of creation and providence.’3 It was an attitude half way between Bishop Butler and romanticism. Robinson’s conception of nature as the creation was not always distinguished from his conception of nature as essence. When he talked about human nature, he was thinking of the ‘natural constitution of man’, or man as a rational creature. So: ‘The religion of nature (I mean by this expression, here, the objects which display the nature of the Deity, and thereby discover the obligations of mankind), is in perfect harmony with the natural constitution of man’.4 In other passages the inheritance of Price’s individualism was more obvious. ‘The God of Nature has made man in his own image, a self determining being, and, to say nothing of the nature of virtue, he has rendered free consent essential to every man’s felicity and peace.’5 1 The argument about nature corrupted and redeemed is to be found in St. Augustine’s City of God. 2 Arcana, Cambridge, 1774, p. 59. 3 Reflections on Christian Liberty, Civil Establishments of Religion and Toleration, 2nd edition, Harlow, 1805, p. 7. 4 Ibid., p. 12. 5 Ibid., p. 12.

48

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

He called this self-determination‘the dignity of my species, the essence of my natural virtue’, which‘I do not forfeit by becoming a Christian’.1 Robinson’s demand for liberty was based on three of his contentions; his own view of the analogy between religion and nature, the autonomous nature of the individual, where he went beyond Price into a doctrine of natural variety, and the congruence between the faculties of a knower and the object known (again as with Price). The idea that innovation is restoration to the order of nature seems to run parallel with the contemporary conception of the advance of religious knowledge towards scripture fundamentals. Holding it, Robinson was passionately attached to innovation (unless he wanted to call it corruption, as he did Church establishments and fixed creeds); and as bitterly opposed to all those institutions which inhibited it. From his conception of the autonomous individual he derived a political radicalism which was, however, less thorough-going and more Whiggish than that of Price. He looked to extension of the franchise to restore the balance of the constitution, and relied on checks and balances rather than universal representation to secure civil liberty.2 Lastly, from Price’s theory that knowledge depends on a congruity between the knower and the known, together with his conception of variety as part of the nature of things, he drew a reasoned defence of variety in religious belief. Robinson explained that every sensible object related to some sense of the body, and every intellectual object to some operation of the mind. An illiterate countryman can perceive the music of Homer’s language, and the wickedness of his mythology. The arts and sciences, and even theology, as they originate in supreme spirit address themselves to the image of that supreme spirit, man.3 But since there is an infinite variety of objects in nature and in religion, and of differences in the natural capacities of human beings, there must be differences in religious belief.‘ I f God be a rock, and his work perfect, if VARIETY be the characteristic of all his works, an attempt to establish UNIFORMITY is reversing and destroying all the creator’s 1

Ibid., p. 13. Political Catechism, 1782. 3 Arcana, Preface, p. vii. 2

R.T.–E

49

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

glory.’ No Thirty-Nine Articles could be invented by the wit of man which thirty-nine men could exactly agree on.‘ I t is not obstinacy, it is necessity’.1 As Robinson continued, the overtones of Baptist theory could be heard sounding in his philosophy. Since men are all different, the creature’s duty and virtue consists in applying all his ability to understanding as many of the objects, that is, to forming as many ideas of them as are apportioned to his degree.‘So many objects they are capable of seeing, so many objects it is their duty to see. So much of each object they are capable of comprehending, so much of each object it is their duty to comprehend. So many emotions they are capable of exercising, so many emotions it is their duty to exercise. So many acts of devotion they can perform, so many Almighty God will reward them for performing, or punish them for neglecting. This I call the doctrine of religious proportion.’2 He thought the doctrine would unroost every creed in the world, for instead of one creed for a whole nation there would be as many creeds as creatures.‘ W e ought to affirm, the belief of half a proposition is essential to the salvation of Mary; and the belief of a whole one to that of John, the belief of six propositions, or more properly the examination of six propositions, is essential to the salvation of the rev. Edward, and the examination of sixty to the salvation of the right rev. Richard.’3 If rewards and punishments were removed from the study of scripture, that would come to pass in the moral world which has in the scientific world; each capacity would find its own object, and take its own quantum.‘Newtons will find stars without penalties, Miltons will be poets, and Lardners Christians without rewards. Calvins will contemplate the decrees of God, and Baxters will try to assort them with the spontaneous volitions of men; all, like the celestial bodies, will roll on in the quiet majesty of simple proportion, each in his proper sphere shining to the glory of God the Creator. But alas! We have not so learned Christ.’4 With a wonderful, and typical, descent into punning, Robinson added that one consequence of this would be that subscrip¬ 1 2 3 4

Arcana, pp. 27–28. Reflections on Christian Liberty, p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 25.

50

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

tion to human creeds would roll back into the See whence they came. But Robinson hesitated to follow his doctrine of variety to its logical conclusion, that with so many objects and creatures, there could be no ground of belief or perception common to all of them. In many passages we find him contending, after Milton and Locke, that variety of opinion would result in unity on an agreed body of fundamentals, although he would not like to say what those fundamentals were. Robinson’s doctrines of analogy with nature and of variety, stimulated no doubt by Baptist tradition as well as his friendship with the disappointed Cambridge Clerical Petitioners, led him into a mighty animus against the Established Church. Establishments, he thought, were neither scriptural nor analogous to nature. The articles of religion which defined their doctrine were the very negation of the Christian duty of searching the Scriptures, the Christian right of private judgement, and the inherent variety of creation. Moreover, no religion could be established without penal sanctions, and‘ a l l penal sanctions in case of religion are persecutions’. All such attempts to interfere with independent judgement frustrated knowledge and morality and impeded God’s grand design of the harmony of religion and nature. In his Plan of Lectures on the Principles of Nonconformity Robinson held the institution of prelacy entirely responsible for corrupting the morals of the English people. He concluded his third lecture with a satisfying day-dream of the bench of bishops being hurled out of heaven at the Last Judgement :– Finish—by placing prelates—AND people BEFORE the Judge of the whole earth on the last day.REPRESENTthe glorious redeemer exhibiting his faithful servants—WHOM prelacy ruined for claiming their natural—AND religious rights—AND saying to these holytyrants—THESEhad meat—drink—and habitations —BUT ye reduced them to hunger—thirst—and banishment.—I gave them clothing—BUT ye stripped them naked.—They had health—AND liberty from me—SICKNESS—AND imprisonment from you—DEPART!1 Burke probably intended to refer to this Plan of Lectures when he denounced Robinson’s Political Catechism in his speech 1 Plan of Lectures on the Principles of Nonconformity, 8th edition, Harlow, p. 33. Adopted by the Eastern Association of Baptist churches in 1778.

51

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

against the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in March 1790. Whatever the temptations, the prominent Dissenting ministers’ furious attacks on the Established Church did their cause no good.1 Their enemies took advantage of their violent language, ignoring, or not recognizing, the possibility that their bark was worse than their bite. Meantime the confusion of tyrannical with unscriptural helped to keep religious toleration a sectarian issue. Priestley, Price and Robinson between them assembled the most comprehensive (if not the most harmonious) body of justifications for religious toleration achieved by the Protestant Dissenters, or perhaps by any group of people. They were, however, extremists. The moderate Dissenters, laymen and practical politicians, followed them part of the way. They agreed that truth was progressively discovered and that free discussion was a means to it; that differences of opinion must be tolerated if not welcomed, and that innovation was necessary, for without it there would have been no Reformation, nor even Christianity itself. They agreed on the right of private judgement and the right to search the Scripture. They were much more careful not to offend the political and religious susceptibilities of those in power, and tried to avoid infuriating the bishops. At the same time they had to allow for the fact that their political effectiveness rested largely on their being able to cooperate in their campaigns with the Trinitarian Dissenters, to whom searching the Scriptures and the right of private judgement denoted methods of applying a more or less fundamentalist faith in the Bible. They were therefore less given to grand designs, less utopian. On establishments they adopted a Paleyan compromise; on natural and political rights they followed Locke rather than Price. They made little attempt to derive their arguments from universal systems of philosophy, but hammered away at individual debating points useful to their cause. The purpose of their arguments often varied with the occasion and with the position of the arguers. The Clerical Petitioners of 1772, being still inside the Church, tended to desire compre¬ 1 Samuel Palmer’s The Protestant Dissenter’s Catechism, London, 1775, which ran through ten editions up to 1794, and Gilbert Wakefield’s Four Marks of AntiChrist, London, 1788, were equally violent.

52

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY

hension. They also had hankerings after a revised and simplified liturgy. They wanted to widen, not destroy the existing Establishment; to spread the light of private judgement and the results of searching the Scriptures inside it. The Dissenters were more concerned that the Establishment should not act, through the bishops, as a political pressure group against their demands for freedom from State control of their beliefs. Writers at the time of the petitions against the Articles launched their main attack against obstacles to the free development of thought. But they could not help quarrelling with the Calvinist elements in the Church and in Dissent, who felt that the Articles upheld their view of religious truth. 1 Campaigners for repeal of the Test Laws denounced obstacles to the equality of civil and political rights. But there was no hard and fast line between the objects of the campaigners, or the arguments used to obtain them. The principle of toleration was one, whatever the specific points on which its application was desired. Arguments used for one cause were easily adapted to the next. If the moderates did not subscribe to the metaphysics of the extremist philosophers they did develop, on a neo-Lockeian basis, a special view of the relations between Church and State. 1 Andrew Kippis, A Vindication of the Protestant Dissenting Ministers, etc., 1772, p. 6. W . R. Ward, Georgian Oxford, Oxford, 1958, p. 245.

53

III Church and State

I THE controversies over religious toleration in the later eighteenth century did not begin with an attack on the Test Laws, although they led up to it. The opening rounds were on other matters, and were conducted on the Dissenting side by ministers rather than laity. In 1769 the fourth volume of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which had been coming out piece-meal over the last five years, was published. In it Blackstone accused the Dissenters of maintaining their quarrel with the Church of England for frivolous reasons. He also compared them to the Roman Catholics, not to their advantage. Observing that they had‘once within the compass of the last century effected the ruin of our church and state, which the papists have attempted, indeed, but never yet been able to execute’,1 he then suggested that the Toleration Act exempted the Dissenters from the penal consequences, but not the crime of Dissent. This gratuitous attack brought Priestley and other Dissenting pamphleteers angrily into the lists against him. While this controversy was still in progress, a widespread movement to abolish compulsory subscription to the Articles of Religion came to a head in petitions to parliament. The dispute which accompanied it in turn almost merged into the flood of controversy which burst forth when the Dissenters, from 1787 to 1790, at length re¬ 1

Blackstone, Commentaries, 1769, IV, 53.

54

CHURCH AND

STATE

newed their attempts to obtain repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. The movements against the Articles of Religion first came to a head inside the Church of England. A group of Cambridge clergy, influenced by Francis Blackburne’s long pamphlet, The Confessional, decided to petition the House of Commons for the abolition of compulsory subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, both for candidates for ordination and for undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. The petition was rejected on 6th February 1772 by 217 votes to 71, but the debate encouraged the Dissenting ministers of London to prepare a similar petition for the relief of Dissenting ministers and teachers from compulsory subscription to thirty-five of the Thirty-Nine Articles. These movements had a common origin. Like similar movements in the earlier part of the century, they were the fruit of latitudinarianism, which had attacked the Church, and which outside it had turned many English Presbyterians, some General Baptists and even some Independents into Arians or Socinians.1 The summary rejection of the Clerical Petition drove most of the Cambridge men out of the Church of England into Dissent. The Church was thereby purged of much of its liberal element, while Dissent received an accession of strength on its latitudi¬ narian and intellectual side. The ascendancy within Dissent of the Rational Dissenters, or (as they would soon be called) the Unitarians, was temporarily assured; while Dissent was left facing a purged and narrowed Church Party. The next generation of liberal churchmen such as Bishop Richard Watson of Llandaff, and Dr. Parr, was cautious and Whiggish compared with radicals like Theophilus Lindsey, John Jebb, Gilbert Wakefield, and Thomas Fysshe Palmer.2 1

See O. M. Griffiths, Religion and Learning, 1935. Richard Watson, 1737–1816, Bishop of Llandaff, 1782–1816. Desired Liturgical reform. Supported the Dissenters in 1787. Was scared into Toryism by the French Revolution, but continued to advocate Catholic Emancipation. Cf. N. Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1934, pp. 332–78. Samuel Parr, 1747–1825, schoolmaster, friend of Burdett and Fox. Very halfhearted for Dissenters, but a warm friend of Catholic Emancipation. Theophilus Lindsey, 1723–1808, Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge and rector of Catterick. Opened an avowedly Unitarian chapel at Essex Street, Strand, in 1774. John Jebb, 1736–86, lecturer on mathematics and Greek Testament at Cambridge, resigned his preferments (three rectories and a vicarage) in 1775. 2

55

CHURCH AND

STATE

The London Dissenting ministers were more successful than the Clerical Petitioners. Bills for their relief passed the House of Commons in April 1772 by seventy votes to nine, and in March 1773 by sixty-five to fourteen. They were opposed by the ininfluence of George III and hampered by the opposition of Methodists and of Calvinist Dissenters. Their bills were allowed to pass the Commons in order to avoid embroiling members with their Dissenting constituents, and then rejected by a combined operation of court party and bishops in the Lords.1 Of those who troubled to come to the Commons’ debates, it seems likely that some—like Burke—while unwilling to relax the legal safeguards of the doctrine and practice of the Church of England, were not worried by a possible increase in the doctrinal differences between Dissent and the Church, provided the latter was safe. Indeed, in the war crisis of 1779, to counterbalance concessions to the Roman Catholics, the substance of the Dissenting petitioners’ claims was conceded. The Bill of 1779 abolishing compulsory subscription to the Articles by Dissenting ministers and teachers encountered comparatively little opposition, since the now powerful combination of Opposition Whigs supported it, and the government, beset by American and Irish troubles, was not in a state to oppose. However, Lord North, as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, was put up to substitute for subscription a declaration of belief in the Old and New Testaments. It ran;‘ I , A.B. do solemnly declare, in the presence of Almighty God, that I am a Christian and a Protestant; and as such that I believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as commonly received in Studied medicine and became a practising physician and a political Radical working for parliamentary reform with John Cartwright. Gilbert Wakefield, 1756–1801, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, Classical tutor at Warrington Academy 1779–83, and Hackney College 1790–91; classical scholar and ardent supporter of the French Revolution. Imprisoned 1799–1800 in Dorchester gaol for his reply to Bishop Watson’s Address to the People of Great Britain denouncing the French. Thomas Fysshe Palmer, 1747–1802, Fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge. Left the Church in 1783 to become a Unitarian minister in Scotland. Was sentenced to penal servitude for helping to draw up a handbill for the‘Friends of Liberty’ in 1793, and died on his way back from Botany Bay. 1 Richard Pares, King George III and the Politicians, Oxford, 1953, p. 40. W. R. Ward, Georgian Oxford, Oxford, 1958, pp. 253–5, 268. A. Lincoln, English Dissent 1763–1800, Cambridge, 1938, pp. 224–34.

56

CHURCH AND

STATE

Protestant churches, do contain the WHOLE revealed will of God, and that I do believe the same as the rule of my Doctrine and Practice’. The declaration, evidently aimed against advanced Socinians, caused much heart-burning among the Dissenting ministers. Although the word WHOLE was removed in the subsequent House of Commons’ debate, many Rational Dissenters continued to object that the declaration limited freedom of belief.1 Thus the Dissenters’ victory was not untarnished; and the rejection of the earlier petitions and of all attempts to open the universities had brought great disillusionment and stirred up extremists such as Robert Robinson to bitter attacks on the bishops. When, in 1787, the London deputies at length decided to renew their attempts to secure the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, the political situation seemed favourable. Pitt had now stabilized his position as first minister; and there was reason to suppose him a friend to the Dissenters. His father had administered a memorable rebuke to the Archbishop of York when the House of Lords rejected the petition of 1773. To the Archbishop’s charge that the Dissenters were men of ‘close ambition’, Chatham had replied that the Dissenting ministers’ ambition was to keep close to the college of fishermen, not of cardinals, and to the doctrine of inspired apostles, not to the decrees of interested and aspiring bishops.‘They contend for a spiritual creed and a spiritual worship; we have a calvinistic creed, a popish liturgy and an arminian clergy. . . ’2 The political inheritance of Chatham had been preserved for Pitt by Shelburne, the patron of Price and of Priestley, although Pitt had obtained him an earldom and quietly dropped him in 1783. Pitt knew Price, whom he had consulted over his Sinking Fund in 1786. His section of the Whigs, rather than the RockinghamPortland group, had seriously advocated parliamentary reform, and he had made three attempts to mitigate the rotten borough system. Moreover, he was believed to owe his survival as first minister partly to the Dissenters, who had deserted Fox en masse at the general election of 1784, because he united himself with 1 Reasons why it is desirable that the bill now depending in Parliament for the further relief of Protestant Dissenting Ministers, Tutors and Schoolmasters, should pass in its present form, London 20th April 1779. Dr. Williams’s Library. 2 Bogue and Bennett, History of the Dissenters, London, 1812, IV, 162–3.

57

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their arch-enemy, Lord North. In so doing they had chosen to support Pitt’s rather than Fox’s section of Whigs. A liberal mood was running on both sides of the Channel, and the French Edict of Toleration of 1787 and the movement behind it aroused much interest among Englishmen, who as usual thought French reforming measures more liberal than they were. The fight against the Articles had been organized by the General Body of Dissenting ministers in London, and mainly concerned freedom of religious profession for themselves (except in so far as exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge affected the careers and status of the laity). The Repeal campaigns were largely organized by the lay deputies, and concerned the civil prospects of laymen, although Repeal was felt to influence the political and social status of all Dissenters. However, the continuity of the two movements was revealed both in their personnel and in their propaganda. Sir Henry Hoghton, a north-country Dissenter of good family who had been educated at a Dissenting academy, introduced the bills of 1772 and 1773, and seconded all three Repeal bills. Dr. Andrew Kippis, author of A Vindication of the Protestant Dissenting Ministers in Regard to their Late Application to Parliament, in 1772, and chairman of the committee of ministers which negotiated the Act of 1779, was on the subcommittee which prepared the Case of the Protestant Dissenters in Relation to the Corporation and Test Acts, the official Repeal manifesto of 1787.1 Joshua Fownes’ pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Principles of Toleration, published in 1773, was re-circulated by the Application Committee in 1790. The London deputies adopted the Lockeian arguments of Kippis, Fownes and Furneaux, rather than the radical philosophies and views of Priestley, Price, and Robinson. They concentrated on expounding the hardships of the Dissenters and affirming their loyalty to the existing order. They explained that their claim for political rights was in the name of religious liberty, not political republicanism. And they turned their backs on arguments for parliamentary reform. In fact they behaved as negotiators, not agitators. The extremism of the radicals was an embarrassment to them. In 1787 Pitt alluded to Robert 1 Minutes of the Meeting of the Committee appointed to conduct the Application to Parliament for the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 30th January 1787. Guildhall Library.

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Robinson’s attacks on the Establishment, and Sir William Dobden referred to Priestley’s‘train of gunpowder’ as evidence that the Dissenters were not moderate citizens, nor safe to admit freely to office.1 Burke stirred up alarm with Robinson’s pamphlets and with Samuel Palmer’s Protestant Dissenters’ Catechism in 1790. Such works as these, and as Gilbert Wakefield’s Four Marks of Antichrist (all of which marks he found in the Established Church) were used by the opponents of Repeal, as proof of the reality of danger from the Dissenters. The opening of the Repeal campaign, then, found the Dissenters roughly divided. The laymen of the London deputies were on the whole cautious, practical and moderate. Their publicists were mainly lawyers, and they negotiated with the leaders of government as a representative group. The more extreme advocates of Repeal, mostly ministers, were scattered in the provinces. Priestley, once librarian at Bowood and tutor to Shelburne’s son, was now settled near Birmingham, a friend of the Wedgwoods and the middle-class intellectuals of the Lunar Society. Robert Robinson still preached at Cambridge. Dr. John Aikin and his sister Anna Barbauld, children of the tutor of Divinity at Warrington Academy, and given to Utopian views of liberty and progress, lived at Yarmouth and Hampstead respectively. Dr. George Walker, mathematician and minister, and chairman of the Associated Dissenters of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and part of Yorkshire, lived at Nottingham. Walker had been tutor at Warrington in 1772–4; that famous academy was spreading its influence by its staff if not by its students. But even the provincial laymen and lawyers, less inclined to extreme radicalism than the ministers, tended, especially after 1790, to violence of expression. A press in Birmingham printed their pamphlets. The London Committee of Deputies of the Three Denominations appointed a‘Committee to conduct the Application to Parliament for Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts’ under its president, a well known surgeon, Edward Jeffries. The committee met for the first time on 29th December 1786,2 and the Repeal campaign opened early in 1787. As a first move, a 1

Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, XXVI (28th March 1787), 831. Minutes of the Committee to Conduct the Application, etc., 29th December 1786. 2

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deputation was sent to interview the Prime Minister. Pitt received it politely but said that,‘as the application was of so great magnitude he wished to take some time before he gave his opinion and was to give the subject very serious consideration’.1 Pitt then persuaded the Archbishop of Canterbury to call a meeting of the bishops, at which both archbishops and ten bishops voted to maintain the Test Laws, and only Watson of Llandaff and Shipley of St. Asaph favoured their abolition.2 Thereafter Pitt used his influence consistently and decisively, in co-operation with North, against the Dissenters’ cause. Former applications had already shown, as later ones would show, that it was almost impossible for any Bill to relieve religious minorities to become law without government backing. Pitt’s desertion was therefore fatal, though his motives for it are obscure. He may have decided that the Dissenters had little chance against the bishops. He may also have calculated that the Church was now more useful to him than the Dissenters. He may well have been conciliating the king, whose stubborn attitude to the claims of religious minorities was well known. Anyway, this seems to have been a decisive step in his abandonment of liberal policies. Throughout February and March 1787, the Application Committee members were busy circulating copies of their Case to leading politicians, including the cabinet ministers, the Archbishops, Wilberforce, Portland and Sheridan; and interviewing Lansdowne, Fox and Burke,‘the two former of whom received them in a very encouraging manner’. They also circularized some of the leading provincial Dissenters.3 Beaufoy’s repeal motion was debated in the House of Commons on 28th March 1787. It revealed Pitt’s desertion, and ended in defeat by 176 to 98. Probably the full seriousness of Pitt’s desertion was not yet appreciated by the Dissenters. When copies of the Application Committee’s report to the Deputies were circulated, the covering letter declared, that if the causes of the late miscarriage are examined,‘ t h e r e will appear to be nothing discouraging, but on the contrary a fair prospect of success when the subject shall have been more fully 1

Ibid., 19th January 1787. Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, 2nd edition, London, 1818, I, 261–2. Samuel Heywood, High Church Politics, London, 1792, p. 16. Stanhope, Life of Pitt, 3rd edition, London, 1867, I, 336–7. 3 Minutes, 13th February 1787. 2

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considered and the better understood’.1 It was resolved to renew the application next session, or the one after at latest. In the two years which elapsed before the next parliamentary motion, three significant steps were taken by the Application Committee. First, provisions were made to keep the provincial Dissenters much more fully informed of the course of the repeal attempts. The committee was annoyed at accusations from opponents that the Dissenters were ‘neither earnest in their exertions or [sic] unanimous in their wishes for redress’ (an argument later used by opponents both of Catholic and Jewish emancipation, and never considered inconsistent with fears for the safety of Church and State), and wanted the provinces to show their solidarity with the London Deputies.2 It would also appear that, as in 1772, complaints of failure to consult them had been received from the country; for the committee wrote: ‘Nothing but the circumstance of proximity to the seat of power can ever induce those dissenters who constitute what is here called the General Body to act upon any occasion independently of their brethren in other parts of the Kingdom and that only upon sudden emergencies, on which the sentiments of the dissenters at large cannot be collected. But as a common Interest must dictate similar feelings we are confident that in general we express your sentiments whenever we declare our own’.8 Accordingly, it was resolved to add five gentlemen from various parts of the country, including the High Sheriff of Dorset, to the Application Committee.4 This was in line with the practice of the General Body of Ministers, which was sometimes attended by visiting ministers from outside London; but was probably mainly a gesture. More practically, known provincial ministers were asked to send in the names of all the Dissenting ministers in their neighbourhood, so that reports of the committee’s activities and copies of its publications could be supplied to them.5 A shortened version of Heywood’s Right of Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted was prepared for this purpose. Secondly, the committee began to organize political pressure 1 2 3 4 5

Ibid., 4th May 1787. Ibid., 24th April 1788. Ibid., 24th April 1788. Ibid. Ibid.

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upon the members of parliament to favour the Repeal Cause. It was resolved in December 1788, that the members for constituencies in and near London should be asked to support the next application, while country Dissenters were invited to approach their local members in the same way. Plans were already being made to mobilize, at the next general election, the Dissenting Interest in support of‘such candidates as they believe to be well affected to civil and religious liberty but especially to such as being now in Parliament have proved themselves friends to the rights of Protestant Dissenters’.1 A list of the members who had voted for Beaufoy’s motion in 1787 was to be sent to Dissenting ministers and congregations throughout England and Wales. Thirdly, the committee was already taking steps to compensate for the loss of Pitt by a reconciliation with Fox. When Beaufoy and Hoghton were again chosen to propose and second the Repeal motion, it was resolved that the chairman should wait upon Fox, and thank him for his‘able zealous and uniform conduct in Parliament in favour of religious liberty in general and that of the Protestant Dissenters in particular as well as for his late and obliging intimation of his continued good wishes and proposed support in favour of the Protestant Dissenters in their application. . . .’ 2 Fox was to be informed of the new application and given a copy of the revised Case, with an explanation of the real motives for the alteration in the same. No explanation of the real motives appears in the Minutes, unfortunately, for the chief alteration in the Case was the removal of offensive allusions to the Roman Catholics, and this followed a vigorous protest by their spokesman Father Berington. At all events, it is evident that the Dissenters were angling for wider support for their campaign. But the inconveniences of provincial participation were beginning to be felt. The Dissenters of Chelmsford and of Leeds had met, and had sent in letters recommending the committee to‘apply for a repeal of all penal laws relative to religion’ ; to which the committee resolved to reply that:‘Being expressly appointed to obtain the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as far as they affect Protestant Dissenters they 1 2

Minutes, 3rd December 1788. Ibid., 26th March 1789.

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cannot attempt anything further without the directions of their constituents’.1 The loss of Beaufoy’s second motion on 8th May 1789, by only 124 votes to 104, positively encouraged the committee. Jeffries, reporting to a general meeting of the deputies, said; ‘The difference in the majority against us being thus only 20 instead of 78, a flatering [sic] prospect of future success opens itself, and we are justified in concluding, that the Equity and good policy of our claims have increased the number of our friends and relaxed the efforts of our opponents’.2 The application was to be renewed. Meanwhile country Dissenters were advised to set up regional boards of deputies of the congregations within convenient districts, on the lines of the London deputies. Thus the exigencies of the Repeal campaign produced, in the autumn of 1789, a rapid development of local associations of Protestant Dissenters. On 6th November 1789, the London Committee read communications from eleven of them, and in December it read letters from four more.3 There were others not listed in the Minutes, such as Nottingham and Leicester and Manchester; some had probably existed long before the London Committee’s advice. Burke, writing to the chairman of the Bristol Board, alluded to ‘dissenters who seemed to act in corps’ in 1784. During the summer and autumn of 1789 the meetings of these associations passed resolutions in favour of Repeal, which stimulated the clergy of the Established Church to form counterassociations and pass counter-resolutions against Repeal.4 Some time in the late autumn of 1789 the Birmingham Committee of Deputies proposed a union of Dissenters throughout the whole kingdom by means of a pyramid of elected councils of deputies in towns, regions, and finally in London.5 On 4th 1

Minutes, 7th April 1789. Ibid., 26th June 1789. 3 The eleven were, Devizes, Gloucester, Colchester, Taunton, Hertford, Exeter, Brecon, Dorchester, Worcester, Bristol, Birmingham. In December resolutions were read from Norfolk, Monmouth, Cornwall and Wilts. 4 A. Lincoln, op. cit., p. 261. 5 A Meeting of Deputies from . . . the Counties of Nottingham, Derby and a Small adjoining part of Yorkshire, summoned at the request of the Committee of five Associated Congregations of the Town of Nottingham. Extracts from Books and Other Small Pieces. Birmingham, 1790, No. II, 11. This would seem to be a regional meeting. 2

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December a similar suggestion reached the Application Committee in the form of a request for a public meeting in London, signed by forty-four Dissenting laymen and ministers, including Samuel Favell of the London Common Council, Andrew Kippis, Richard Price, and two pillars of the deputies themselves, Joshua Towers and Capel Lofft. On 8th December the Nottingham Deputies sent a letter, drafted by the Rev. George Walker, 1 to a Leicester meeting, explaining the uses of the proposed Union; its convenience, improvement of the human mind by intercourse, its enlargement, correction and promoting of zeal, widening and correction of sentiments,‘and ultimately all the perfection which can possibly be expected’. The letter further pointed out, that failure to exert national attention to great subjects with persistence accounts for the neglect of parliamentary reform, and of‘national attention to the deplorable condition of the negroe slaves’. The writer explained that the Union meditated‘nothing which ought to give alarm’, and merely aimed at collecting and presenting the sense of the whole body of Dissenters in decent and dignified form to the legislature. It was also in perfect conformity with the London Committee, and differed from it only in that it would be established on a larger scale.2 The provinces were now fully aroused. An occasional private expression of doubt was to be heard from a sober-minded business man,3 but most of them were evidently inspired by the divine afflatus of events in France. Their language was far from the cautious and single-purposed statements of the Application Committee and its writers. But the nature of the committee itself was changing. On 16th January its meeting included eleven country delegates, as well as the usual members. On 23rd February a further meeting, attended by country delegates, resolved to convene the deputies to consider appointing a committee to confer with country delegates upon measures to 1

George Walker was author of the well-known pamphlet, A Dissenter’s Plea. Copy of a Letter to a Meeting at Leicester on 9th Dec. transmitted to the chairman to be read by him. Extracts from Books etc., Birmingham, 1790, No. 1. 3 ‘There is too intimate a connection between civil and religious liberty, for us to expect that those who are constantly making encroachments on the one, should show any favour to the other.’ Richard Bright (chairman of the Bristol Dissenters), to Burke, 13th February 1790. Burke Correspondence, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Sheffield Central Reference Library, Bk. 1, 508. 2

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be pursued by the Dissenters at large for the restoration of their civil rights. On 2nd March the third Repeal motion, moved this time, at the request of the Application Committee, by Fox, was lost by 294 votes to 105. Two days later the deputies set up a committee of seven deputies and fifteen country delegates including the Rev. Robert Robinson, which resolved that a Union of the Protestant Dissenters was desirable. A standing committee of delegates would be appointed to pursue measures for obtaining relief from the Legislature on the subject of the Test Laws, and this was to contain twenty-one London and fortytwo country delegates.1 Various subsequent meetings approved the details of its machinery. On 13th May, Jeffries reported to a full meeting of the London Deputies the failure of Fox’s motion. Despite the hostility and prejudice aroused by the enemies of the Dissenters, and the alarm taken at the French Revolution, he recommended perseverance in the claims. He then declared that when the standing committee for the whole body of the Dissenters had been set up the Application Committee would dissolve.2 The swan song of the committee, an Address to the People of England, maintained hurt, but studiously moderate claims of loyalty, and denials of hostility to the Constitution and the Established Church. The continuing opposition to the claim for repeal of the Test Laws, intensified in the beginning by suspicion of the Socinians who led it3 and in the end by fear of the French Revolution, had defeated the cautious methods of the London Deputies. They had chosen Pitt as leader of a reforming Whig faction. When he deserted them they had placed their cause in the hand of Fox. But from 1790 onwards Fox was the leader of the parliamentary remnant which refused to denounce the French Revolution or abandon parliamentary reform. Events were creating a real division of principle in political life, and the Dissenters found themselves identified in parliament with the Opposition just at a time when it was being accused of condoning revolution abroad and possibly favouring it at home. Their attempt to keep the cause of Repeal distinct from that of constitutional reform had 1

Minutes, 3rd and 4th March 1790. Minutes, 13th May 1790. 3 Various comments and alarmed letters appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1787,I,57, II, 247, 341. 2

R.T.–F

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failed. Moreover, the widening of the basis of representation in their own councils had ended in the swamping of the London laymen by delegates from the provinces, unused to the conciliatory attitudes of political negotiation, and far more sensitive to the influence of the extremists. And this the deputies themselves had helped to bring about, as the hopes pinned on ‘candour’ faded and bitterness took their place. As Anthony Lincoln has pointed out, the Repeal movement was independent of the French Revolution, and had begun long before it, although the Revolution stimulated the drive towards extremism on both sides. By 1790 the widespread popular reaction against the Dissenters’ claims had already started. By 1791 churchmen were prepared to condone the violence of the Birmingham mobs who wrecked Priestley’s scientific instruments and burned his house.1 When, about 1800, the Dissenters began to recover from their failure and from the contumely which followed it, circumstances had changed. The Methodists were beginning to be looked on as Dissenters, the Trinitarian revival was under way, with its initial conservatism and its hostility towards Rational Dissent; and the Repeal cause had become hopelessly involved in the claims and emotions of the Roman Catholic Emancipation controversy. That the Repeal movement was England’s French Revolution, as Lincoln has also suggested, is a more doubtful proposition. Edmund Burke set out to show that it was; but the evidence at present available suggests that it ought to be compared with the English movement for constitutional reform rather than with events in France. Whether the foundation of Constitutional Societies in 1789 and rapid growth of Corresponding Societies after 1791 and their culmination in the National Convention in Edinburgh really threatened the political and social order, as an alarmed ruling class thought it did, must remain a matter of opinion. The Dissenters’ attempt to enlarge the London Application Committee into a national delegate committee was certainly less formidable than the National Convention. But the two movements, if parallel, also had connexions. In Manchester the failure of the Repeal compaign and the activities of the Church and King Club formed to oppose the Dissenters led 1 See William Jones, A Small Whole Length of Dr. Priestley. Jones’s Works, ed. William Stevens, London, 1801, XII, 404.

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directly to the foundation of the Manchester Constitutional Society under the same Repeal leaders.1 The champions of Dissenters’ rights—Robert Robinson, John Jebb, Gilbert Wakefield, George Walker, Thomas Walker, the eccentric clergyman Christopher Wyvill, and others—were founding or prominent members of Constitutional societies. They were, as they put it,‘friends to civil and religious liberty’. Besides the formation of Repeal associations, another element in the Repeal campaign calculated to alarm the conservativeminded was the effort to exert pressure in the constituencies. The attempt to exact pledges from parliamentary candidates was reminiscent of the activities of the extremists in the 1779–80 crisis over the American war. The pledge, like frequent elections, was a device associated with radicalism. In fact the attempt misfired dismally. While Churchmen complained bitterly about the activities of the Dissenters in the constituencies, the Application Committee, in turn, briefed Fox to denounce in the House of Commons Bishop Horsley’s orders to the clergy of his diocese to secure the rejection of Mr. Philipps of Carmarthen, who had supported Beaufoy’s motion in 1789.2 But in the 1790 debate, at least two members declared that they were voting against Repeal because their constituencies had instructed them to do so.3 Although Mr. Philipps was returned in the general election of the summer of 1790, the tide was running strongly against the Dissenters. The clerical party liked to reproach the Dissenters for their attempts at political pressure, but when it came to a trial of strength in the constituencies, the superiority of the Church and the weakness of the Dissenting Interest stood revealed. II The campaign to repeal the Corporation and Test Acts found the Dissenters’ opponents on the defensive. By the middle of the eighteenth century the lessons of the religious strife of the 1

T. Walker, Political Events in Manchester, 1794. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, XXVIII (2nd March 1790), 399–400. Minutes, 20th November 1789. The Committee offered Philipps their help and asked for a list of non-resident voters in the constituency. Cf. T. B. Oldfield, History of the Boroughs of Great Britain together with the Cinque Ports, 1792, p. 15. 3 Martin, and Samuel Smith. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, XXVIII, 404, 444. 2

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seventeenth century had been well learned.‘Intolerance’ equally with ‘superstition’ which produced it and‘enthusiasm’ which stirred it up, were terms of opprobrium. Mid-century latitu¬ dinarianism had so done its work, that while the noisiest opponents of Repeal were High Churchmen, the solid body of bishops and ministers who prevented it were those who separated the question of toleration from that of religious truth, paid much lip service to toleration, and insisted that their only concern was for the safety of Church and State. Upon the right of the spectrum of religious parties, the small number of High Churchmen continued to maintain that, since the Church was divinely instituted under the episcopal order through the Apostolic Succession, separation from it was schism, and schism was a sin. Archdeacon Charles Daubeny expressed this view in the Introductory Discourse to his Guide to the Church.‘So long as the Church continues to be what it originally was, a society of Christ’s forming, a wilful separation from it must be at all times equally sinful; it being not less an opposition to a divine institution in one age of the Church than in another.’1 The secular counterparts of these High Churchmen were the High Tory lawyers who, taking advantage of the wording of the Toleration Act and in despite of the Whig Lord Mansfield’s verdict in the Sheriff’s Cause that Dissent was not criminal, continued to maintain that nonconformity to the Established Church was a crime of which the Act merely dispensed with the penal consequences. Blackstone had leanings towards both these views,2 but he also wished to pay lip service to the contemporary sentiment for toleration. So he wrote:‘ . . . For undoubtedly, all persecution and oppression of weak consciences on the score of religious profession are highly unjustifiable upon every principle of natural reason, civil liberty, or sound religion. But care must be taken not to carry this indulgence into such extremes as may endanger the national church: there is always a difference to be made between toleration and establishment’.3 1

London, 1798, p. 2. Cf. Dr. G. F. A. Best’s unpublished thesis,‘Church and State in English Politics 1800–1833’, Cambridge Ph.D., 1955. Dr. Best has drawn attention to Daubeny’s Guide to the Church as an expression of the Hooker doctrine of the Church, and to the corollary that where the visible Church was seen as providential, Dissent appeared as schism. 2 See p. 54. 3 Blackstone, Commentaries, IV, 46.

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Those who inclined to High Toryism therefore tended to look upon toleration as an indulgence, and to take particular exception to the Dissenters’ claim that it was a right. Robert Southey, friend of the‘Hackney Phalanx’, writing in 1828 against Roman Catholic Emancipation, declared that‘ . . . to tolerate is to allow that which is not approved—to suffer that which is not and ought not to be encouraged. . . . And no more dissenters ought to expect or ask, more being inconsistent with the fundamental principles of any constitution whereof religion is part.’ 1 Fortunately, perhaps, for the Dissenters, some of those to whom the Church’s claims to a direct Divine dispensation made Dissent seem the sin of schism (including earlier non-jurors and later members of the Oxford Movement) repudiated the Erastianism which made Dissent seem the crime of sedition. To the High Churchmen of the late eighteenth century who held the view believed to have originated with Hooker, that Church was State in its ecclesiastical aspect, Dissent was both sin and crime. But these were not strong enough for a frontal attack upon the Dissenters (although early in the next century they mounted a limited offensive against the Methodists), 2 and generally blended their voices with the main body of those whose attitude to religious liberty was‘ t h u s far, but no farther’. Since toleration was admitted by all to be necessary and by most to be desirable, the main disagreement was over the definition of toleration. Opponents of Repeal took their stand on the principle of the 1688 settlement, that toleration meant freedom to avow religious opinion and to choose forms of worship without incurring legal penalty. Most Hanoverian churchmen and most politicians of the ruling groups at the end of the century were prepared to concede this, at least to those who claimed to be Trinitarian Christians. Hence the comparative ease with which the Bill of 1779 passed the House of Lords. But they did not consider that toleration included the concession of equal political rights. The Petitioners of 1772–3, being chiefly concerned with freedom of religious opinion, were satisfied with 1

‘The Roman Catholic Question, Ireland.’ Quarterly Review, 38 (July–October 1828), 550. 2 M. B. Whittaker, op. cit., Chap. IV. 69

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this definition. The Repealers were not. Opponents of Repeal argued that Crown and corporate office was a privilege, not a right. Ministers denied that exclusion was a penalty, or carried any stigma. ‘I do not see any reason to consider the seclusion of the Dissenters more as a mark of infamy than any other distinction that upholds political government’, said Pitt in the House of Commons.1 But the Repealers considered that capacity for office (they never claimed a specific share of offices) was a mark of full citizenship, and that exclusion, usually part of the punishment of criminals, imposed a mark of inferiority which depressed the social status of all Dissenters. They denied that the punishment for Dissent, even as mitigated by Indemnity Acts and by omission to enforce the law, was only nominal. They also insisted that it was a punishment for religious belief. Heywood (quoting Furneaux) maintained there was ‘no other definition of persecution than that it is an injury inflicted on a person for his religious principles and profession only’.2 They appropriated a phrase of Paley who had defined a partial toleration as the exercise freely of worship, but exclusion from State offices, while a complete toleration was admission without distinction to all civil privileges;3 and they demanded a ‘complete toleration’. Denying any intention to punish, the government supporters justified the exclusion of Dissenters as a necessary restraint on their political power, on the ground that their admission would endanger both Church and State. They professed to fear a twofold attack—an attack on the State through the Church, and a direct attack upon public order. To the claim for equal participation regardless of religious denomination they opposed the theory of the Alliance of Church and State. Keble was to explain in 1835 that there were two distinct theories of the Alliance. One ‘supposes it one duty of the civil governor to protect and cherish some religion, as one means 1

Parl. Hist., XXVI (28th March 1787), 828. The Right of Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted, 2nd edition, London, 1789, pp. 53–54. 3 Paley, Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). Works, 1838, p. 678. The formula had first appeared in an early essay, Defence of the Considerations on the Propriety of Requiring a Subscription to the Articles of Faith, written in 1773, when Paley was at Cambridge and evidently strongly influenced by the Clerical Petition Movement. 2

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among many for securing peace and order in his dominions: the other, considering that there can be but one Church—the one great system ordained by Our Lord before his Ascension into Heaven, to which all the promises are made—assigns to civil governors in every land their high λειτoυργ α or ministry under that Church, namely to be nursing fathers to her children, training them up to her principles, and by her ordinances bringing them to her, and keeping them with her. . . ’1 Keble, writing from the later, Tractarian viewpoint, per­ haps exaggerated the contrast by exalting the claims of the Church without those of the State. The earlier generation of High Churchmen, while championing the claims of a divinely ordained Church, adapted it to the constitution of the State, after the example of Hooker. Thus the anonymous author of a tract entitled The Danger of Repealing the Test Acts, thought that the outlines of the external Church were laid down in the Gospel, and establishments of it were intended by its founder to be accommodated to the political constitution of every country.2 But the moderate, orthodox supporters of government appealed to the first or Warburtonian theory. For some High Churchmen —as also some of the Erastian Evangelicals—tended to look back towards Divine Right, and to exalt the station not only of Church but of King in a way which Pitt and North, both good constitutionalists and House of Commons’ men, were unwilling to stomach. Indeed, North pointed out that the Test Laws limited the king (who was also controlled in his religious pro­ fession by the Act of Settlement) in his choice of ministers, as well as limiting the Dissenters, and that the laws supported a limited monarchy, not an unrestrained prerogative.3 Their point of view was admirably buttressed by Warburton’s version of the Alliance, described in his Alliance between the Church and the State. Warburton had set out in 1736 to refound the Established 1

Sermon on Church and State, in Sermons Academical and Occasional, 2nd edition, Oxford, 1848, p. 158. 2 London, 1790. 3 Parl. Hist., XXVI (28th March 1787), 820. The Dissenters were wont to point to the Catholic King of France’s Protestant first minister, Necker; and North implied that the King of England, unlike Louis XVI, had no power to dispense with laws imposing religious tests. 71

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Church on the principles of the 1688 Revolution as these appeared to contemporary Whigs. For this purpose he had to justify the existence of a State Church protected by Test Laws on terms which would admit of the toleration of Dissenting worship and belief. He therefore discarded the defence of the Establishment on grounds of providential dispensation or religious truth, and defended it instead on grounds of ‘civil utility’. Adapting Locke to his purpose, he maintained that State and Church were both corporate bodies, set up by contract of their members with each other. The purpose of the State was to cure the evils of the state of nature, and to remedy injustice.1 The visible Church was to promote the social and intellectual ends of religion.2 Next, the two united by ‘free convention and mutual compact’ in a politic league or alliance for mutual support and defence.3 The Church was protected by the civil power, while the work of government was supplemented by the moral teaching of the Church. This moral teaching penetrated into men’s minds where the clumsier influence of secular law and State power could not reach. Warburton pointed out, that a society, through its government, could not provide for the observance of above one-third of the existing moral duties, and that imperfectly, even while the very fact of living in society augmented men’s temptations.4 But a Church protected by that government could bring to bear all its teaching and influence on men’s minds, and so could make society more moral and thus more capable of fulfilling its own ends of peace and justice. 5 The teaching and sanctions of the Church (supported in some places if need be by the secular arm) would keep men loyal and dutiful to each other and to the State. The protection was provided mainly by the Test Laws, which secured the Church from the political attacks of her rivals without destroying freedom of Nonconformist worship and opinion. Now the most efficient way of securing the success and the benefits of the Alliance was for the State to make its contract with the Church of the majority (the same persons being united in one corporation as State and in another as Church). The Church claimed protection by virtue 1 2 3 4 5

William Warburton, The Alliance Between Church and State, 1736, p. 8. Ibid., pp. 34–38. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., pp. 12–13. Ibid., p. 111.

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of its large membership, not of its truth. If it lost its supremacy the Alliance was dissolved and a new one made with the new dominant Church.1 This neat, if narrow polity, cleverly justified the change from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism at the Reformation without opening up, as the Rational Dissenters did, a vista of indefinite further change. Warburton considered the English compact had been made in the reign of Edward VI. Clearly he anticipated no danger to the supremacy of the Anglican Church by any of the many sects obtaining a majority merely through religious argument or peaceful conversion. Without stigmatizing Dissent as schism or crime, his Alliance enabled its supporters to say that anyone who tried to weaken the statutory defence of the Church was attacking the moral basis of the State. Thus it participated in the defensive strength of all Alliance theories. It also made obedience to the magistrates and the prevailing institutions of the State the most significant part of morality, which was characteristic too of the older, Hooker theory. The Hanoverian Whigs of a conservative cast of mind agreed with the High Churchmen in seeing in the Repeal agitation a preliminary to disestablishing the Church and doing away with the chief guarantee of civil morality and obedience to government. The Test and Corporation Acts were the bulwarks of the happy constitution in Church and State. To supplement their arguments from the Alliance, the opponents of Repeal republished Bishop Sherlock’s Arguments Against a Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts.2 This work, originally published in 1718 under the title A Vindication of the Corporation and Test Acts, had maintained that the Dissenters, if true to their own beliefs, must necessarily desire to pull down the National Church and establish in its place their own truer and purer religion. If they succeeded, the Dissenting establishment (which Sherlock, in the light of seventeenth-century history, thought must be Presbyterian) would be a persecuting establishment. If they failed, in any case, Dissenters in office, trying to undermine the Anglican Establishment, would cause religious strife. Any government, then, which fulfilled its primary duty of securing internal peace and order, must exclude Dissenters from 1 2

Warburton, op. cit., p. 111. Published 1787, and again in 1790 and 1827.

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1

political power. Although Sherlock had written before the repeal of the Occasional Conformity Act and the beginning of regular Indemnity Acts had in fact admitted some Dissenters to office, and also in disregard or ignorance of the enormous changes which were overtaking the beliefs and organization of the English Presbyterians during the eighteenth century, he was still cited to show that the Test Laws were the bulwarks of the constitution. Samuel Heywood, in fact, pointed out that the legislature had refuted Sherlock by repealing the Occasional Conformity Act soon after he wrote. 2 But when the Dissenters argued that their members in parliament and in office had shown no inclination to attack the Church, they were told that this was because their numbers in parliament were limited by the operation of the Corporation Act. Meanwhile, the Test Act excluded Dissenters of inferior birth from undermining the Church and constitution in minor executive office.3 The writer of a shrewd pamphlet entitled Political Observations on the Test Act suggested that Dissenters could sap the influence of the Church of England by using the advowson rights of corporations to appoint bad clergymen; and that, once on the Bench, they could refuse to apply the laws which protected the Church.4 ‘A great established church, fortified by a test act, as a legal barrier, confident of its own strength and safety, can extend a legal toleration to all sectaries,’ wrote this author.5 He implied that, once the barriers were down, the churchmen could not afford to be as tolerant as they were. The arguments of Sherlock were also used to justify the form of the Test—perhaps the most vulnerable point in the churchmen’s defences—the official taking of the Sacrament. The regular taking of the Sacrament according to the Church of England was the only proof of a candidate’s affection towards the ecclesiastical constitution, and therefore must be a test of his suitability for office. If a man took the Sacrament hypocritically, 1

Arguments Against a Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 1827, pp. 28–35. High Church Politics, 1792, p. 107. 3 Samuel Horsley, A Review of the Case of the Protestant Dissenters with Reference to the Corporation and Test Acts, 1790, p. 60. 4 Political Observations on the Test Act, 1790, p. 60. The author is identified in the catalogue of Dr. Williams’s Library as John Brand, rector of St. George’s, Southwark. 5 Ibid., p. 6. 2

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or for secular gain, he was answerable to God, and the guilt of his sin could not be charged to the legislature.1 The churchmen would probably have been less apprehensive of danger to the Established Church if they had not feared an attack upon the State. To the conservative-minded, the Dissenters were always the party of sedition. In 1772 the Dissenters were still the killers of Charles I. In 1790, when the French Revolution had revived fears, they were the advance guard of the republicans. The democratic theories of Price and Priestley (both of whom denied any intention of attacking the monarchy) were pointed to, and the disclaimers of the moderates ignored. The writer of The Civil and Ecclesiastical Systems of England Defended and Fortified explained that Roman Catholicism meant tyranny as typified in Bloody Mary, Dissent meant democracy as typified in Cromwell, and the Church of England meant equal laws as seen under George III. ‘Grant an ascendancy, all over the kingdom, to the power of any one of the sects, that have lately endeavoured to strike at the Constitution, through the medium of the Corporation and Test Acts—and—farewell at once to Episcopacy, and Monarchy! ’2 The opponents of Repeal could remember that Price had written a most influential pamphlet for American independence, that Dissenting extremists were threatening to emigrate to America or France, that some had accepted French citizenship, that many Dissenters, especially Dissenting ministers, were vocal advocates of constitutional reform. They were convinced of their seditious intentions. But in this reaction, sedition was extended to cover indiscriminately all advocacy of political reform. It was pointed out that the Church polity of the Dissenters was republican; that their religious education had accustomed them to republican forms, which they would inevitably wish to see transferred to the State. To this end they would always want to add new weight and power to the popular part of government, or diminish that of other parts, and yet were able ‘to deceive themselves into a belief, that they continued friends to liberty and a limited monarchy : though, in a constitution as balanced as our own, any nearer approach to a popular government, must be inimical to both’.3 1 Sherlock, op. cit., edition of 1827, pp. 17–18, 88–89. Cf. A Vindication of the Sacramental Test, 1789. 2 London, 1791, p. 69. 3 Political Observations on the Test Act, p. 46.

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After 1790 it was easy to hurl accusations of republicanism at reformers. But the defenders of the Test Laws were able to justify their suspicions of danger from the most moderate reforms by their interpretation of the existing theory of the balanced constitution.1 It was sometimes said that liberty was secured by the division between judicial, executive and legislative powers (or bodies). More often it was maintained that the virtue of the British constitution lay in its balance of monarchical power embodied in the king, aristocratic power in the House of Lords, and popular power in the House of Commons. It was this version of the theory, as stated by Blackstone, which Bentham analysed so ruthlessly in his Fragment on Government. The opponents of Repeal thought the increase in political participation of the Dissenters, being both middle-class and democrats, would lend too much weight to the popular power, which would overbear the monarchy together with the aristocracy in the House of Lords, and destroy the order and liberty which the constitution secured. Between 1784 and 1789 Burke had held that the popular power and the monarchy were allying to overbear that of the aristocracy.2 It was only after the outbreak of the French Revolution that he appreciated the mutual dependence of aristocracy and monarchy. Reforming Whigs, such as Lansdowne and Pitt (before he deserted the cause of reform) were able to deny danger from moderate constitutional changes because they also subscribed to the theory of balance, as it had been preached by Bolingbroke in the later stages of his career. They considered, that through the corruption of the electoral system, the popular element had been overborne, first by the king, and then (after economical reform) by the aristocracy. Repeal of the Test Laws, and limited reform alike, would help to restore the balance. Moderate Dissenters, too, such as Henry Hoghton and William Smith,3 holding this version of the balance theory, were able 1 For fuller treatment of the ‘balance’ theories, see Richard Pares, King George III and the Politicians, 2nd edition, Oxford, 1964, pp. 31–33. Cf. J. F. Lively, ‘Ideas of Parliamentary Representation in England, 1815–1832’, Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1957. 2 See Chapter IV. 3 Unitarian M.P. for Norwich; member of the Application Committee, Chairman of the London Dissenting Deputies from 1805 to 1832, and campaigner for religious liberty for all sects from 1787 to 1830. He was Florence Nightingale’s grandfather.

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to combine strong advocacy of Repeal with a perfectly sincere attachment to the form of the constitution. Actually, the balance could be made to support a far more radical programme, as it was by Cartwright in Take Your Choice.1 But the supporters of Repeal in parliament and for the most part in the deputies were Whig rather than Radical in their political outlook; and in their attitude to the constitution as to the Church they were compromised by their own left wing. Allied to the more conservative theory of the balanced constitution was a special conception of fundamental law. This in turn was bound up with a certain view of the meaning of the 1688 Revolution. When Warburton was founding his Alliance upon a series of contracts, Bolingbroke was explaining that Whigs and Tories no longer differed on matters of principle, since the latter had abjured Divine Right and the former republicanism, and both equally had accepted the Revolution.2 In 1733 Bolingbroke may have been right, but by 1789 differences had appeared in the way political groups interpreted the events of 1688. To Radicals and to some Whigs, the Revolution had become a symbol signifying that it was possible to alter the succession and throw out a corrupt or tyrannical ruler. To the conservative-minded it was the historical occasion on which the constitution crystallized, so to speak, into its stable and permanent form. Whigs and Hanoverian Tories (if one can give such a name to the more conservative-minded politicians generally identified with the king’s party in the second and third decades of George III’s reign) all subscribed to the belief that society and government had originated in some form of contract or compact, actual or implied.3 The Whigs maintained various forms of neo-Lockeian contract, and like Locke, were much concerned with the establishment and limitation of the legitimate powers of government, i.e. with the making of 1

John Cartwright, Take Your Choice, London, 1775. A pamphlet advocating annual parliaments, equal electoral districts, and universal suffrage. 2 Dissertation on Parties, 11th edition, 1786, pp. 6–12. 3 The words compact or contract were both used. Compact was, perhaps, more appropriate to the first agreement of Locke—the agreement of everybody with each other to be bound by the majority. Contract was used by Bolingbroke in speaking of the agreement between people and king, the setting up, or rather affirming, the principles of the constitution. There were other Whig versions of the contract between people and rulers. Cf. J. W. Gough, The Social Contract, Oxford, 1957, pp. 128–30.

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the contract. The Tories tended to stress the form of government, the contract made. The Revolution, as interpreted in Bolingbroke’s Dissertation on Parties, had produced a limited monarchy stabilized by a balanced constitution. The contract had been made at the Revolution, and the terms of it were laid down in the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, and the Union with Scotland, the important statutes of the Revolution settlement. Only if those laws were broken or repealed, or the constitution they had established so impaired as finally to lose its balance, would the contract be dissolved and a new one necessitated. The Revolution had become, for the Hanoverian Tories, the symbol of the status quo. And this view of it was reinforced by Bolingbroke’s conception of the Revolution as merely the latest of a series of historical crises by which the constitution would arrive at its proper poise; each crisis resulting in a contract such as Magna Carta, or the Bill of Rights. The Tories had no agreed definition of fundamental law, and were apt to dub fundamental any laws they wanted to preserve unchanged. They generally applied the word to those famous statutes they conceived to express the terms of the contract setting up the constitution. These included Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, and sometimes—recognized as fundamental by churchmen when resisting its extension, and by Dissenters when complaining that it was being infringed— the Toleration Act. The Acts of Union with Scotland, and later with Ireland, possessed special sanctity as terms of treaties or contracts of incorporation between two nations. The modern development of the theory, identifying fundamental laws as written instruments laying down methods and machinery of government, and alterable only by special constitutional procedures, was just beginning to filter in from America or France. Thus the author of Political Observations on the Test Act wrote: ‘The laws therefore which prescribe first who shall govern, and secondly in what mode, are constitutional in the highest sense of the term; or fundamental laws of the constitution’.1 The opponents of Repeal maintained that the Test and Corporation Acts were fundamental laws, guaranteeing the safety of the Established Church and the balance of power in the constitu¬ 1

Political Observations, etc., p. 4.

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tion. The Dissenters indignantly denied this, pointing out that the Test Laws had already been repealed in Ireland and had never existed in Scotland, and no harm had resulted.1 The Acts were then said to be guarantees of the more sacred fundamental Act of Union with Scotland. This Act had guaranteed the maintenance of the Church in England (as well as the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland) as by law established. The Tories said that the safeguards of the Church of England could not be removed without jeopardizing the Union. Lord North made this point in 1772, when much of the Commons debate on the Clerical Petition turned on the question whether such an alteration in the Church Establishment as would be entailed in abolishing subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles would violate that Act. He repeated it in 1787 against the Repealers. The clergy assembled at Wakefield on 10th February 1790 resolved that they regarded the Test Act as a fundamental part of the Union, which the king was bound by his coronation oath to maintain.2 The Rev. William Keate thought the Corporation and Test Acts as much fundamental laws as Magna Carta or the Habeas Corpus Act.3 The fundamental laws being those which established and safeguarded the constitution, shared their attribute of fundamental character with the constitution itself. If, on the secular side, this constitution was balanced, on the ecclesiastical side it was characterized by its alliance with the Church. When, later, the Catholics wanted political rights it was a Protestant constitution; when the Jews wanted them it was a Christian constitution. Yet there was a weakness in the Tory theory of fundamental law. It conflicted with a counter theory of the legal sovereignty of the legislature, which had been essential to legitimize the 1688 Revolution, and was already accepted by Hanoverian Tory thinkers. The conflict had already appeared in Bolingbroke, and was patent in Blackstone. Blackstone wrote: ‘Whatever else 1 The Test Act was repealed in Ireland in 1778, to balance concessions to the Catholics. The Scots complained that the English Test Act penalized members of the established Presbyterian Kirk wanting to hold crown office in England. 2 Collection of the Resolutions Passed at the Meetings of the Clergy of the Church of England, etc., 1790, p. 9. 3 Rev. William Keate, A Free Examination of Dr. Price’s and Dr. Priestley’s Sermons, 1790, p. 41.

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may be deemed fundamental and essential conditions (of the Union) the preservation of the two churches of England and Scotland, in the same state that they were in at the time of the Union, and the maintenance of the Acts of Uniformity which established our common prayer, are expressly declared so to be . . . Any alteration in the constitution of either of those churches, or in the liturgy of the Church of England would be an infringement of those fundamental and essential conditions and greatly endanger the Union’.1 Yet in the same volume he had written, that there must in all governments be ‘a supreme, irresistible, absolutely uncontrolled authority . . . in which the rights of sovereignty reside . . . Sovereignty and legislature are indeed convertible terms’.2 Priestley, stung by Blackstone’s contemptuous references to the Dissenters, fell upon the absurdity of supposing that the creators of the Union had intended to prevent either country from making any improvement in its own religious constitution.3 He pointed out that the articles of Union concerning the different religious establishments were only intended to bar all encroachments of one upon the other. He further pointed out that the second edition of Blackstone carried a footnote by the Bishop of Gloucester in which the bishop doubted whether infringements of the Union would dissolve it; since the bare idea of a State without a power somewhere vested to alter every part of its laws was the height of political absurdity. The bishop (who was also dealing with Furneaux’s suggestion that the Union could be altered by the consent of the English and Scots churches which had survived when the parliaments were incorporated)4 declared that the two contracting States had dissolved into a third, corporate body, in which the rights of sovereignty, and particularly of legislation, must reside. But an imprudent use of those rights would alarm individuals, and might endanger, though not destroy, the Union.5 Blackstone himself was forced to admit that: ‘Power of new modelling the 1

Commentaries, Oxford, 1765, I, 97. Ibid., I, 40. 3 J. Priestley, Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Black¬ stone’s Commentaries, Relating to the Dissenters, Dublin, 1770, pp. 12–13. 4 Letters to the Honourable Dr. Justice Blackstone, etc., 1771, p. 150. Furneaux denied the doctrine of any necessary sovereign in a State. 5 J. Priestley, op. cit., pp. 11–12. 2

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Churches, both of England and Scotland (however dangerous its exertion must be), still resides in the Parliament of Great Britain’.1 Here was the crux of the matter. It was perfectly feasible to combine the idea of a balanced constitution of King, Lords, and Commons (though not of independent legislative, executive and judicial powers) with the idea of a sovereign legislature consisting in the King in Parliament. It was not possible to combine a belief in the sovereignty of the legislature with the idea of fundamental law embodied in actual laws. When it came to a clash, the conception of fundamental laws gave way; for there was no special constitutional procedure to distinguish a fundamental or ‘organic’ law from any other, and no court would pronounce a statute invalid on the grounds that it infringed a fundamental law, or punish a subject for acting in accordance with any statute on such grounds. Even the judicial doctrine that Christianity was ‘part of’ the common law, in which common law was talked of as a kind of fundamental law, only survived because no statute was passed overriding it. It is true that the Tories’ attempt to maintain the conception of fundamental law as a series of actual municipal laws affirming the nature and operation of the constitution made them exceedingly reluctant to distinguish between an unjust or politically inexpedient Act of parliament, and an illegal Act of parliament. But as Blackstone’s vacillations had shown, they were sometimes compelled to do so and to admit that the latter did not exist. Lord North called the Act of Union, ‘A pledge between two nations, now happily united, hardly ever to be altered, but yet from the first rules of legislation, liable to alteration.’2 However, the distinction was not popularly recognized among the Tories, and some, like George III, refused to make it. Burke also helped to increase the confusion by retaining the terminology of Tory fundamental law, even in the act of transforming that legalistic conception into a purely political theory. Finally, the Tories claimed that the State, in pursuance of its primary duty of maintaining public security, had the right to defend itself by excluding dangerous categories of subjects from 1

William Blackstone, A Reply to Dr. Priestley’s Remarks, etc., Printed in Priestley, op. cit., p. 48. 2 Parliamentary Debates, London, 1792, VI (3rd February, 1772), 165. R.T.–G

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a share in political power. This sounded so convincing that many Dissenters concurred, merely denying their own dangerous character. But in time they were bound to recollect that the decision to exclude was being made in the name of the State by an unrepresentative government, which could thus perpetuate the power and privileges of those who already enjoyed office. The argument was bound to drive the Dissenters into the arms of the reformers. Moreover, the claim was not always made merely for the purpose of self-defence. Lord North said that it was in the power of every government to prescribe the persons to fill offices of power, and that in England the legislature controlled the executive power.1 The government was visualized as representing a collective body, the State, with powers and rights of its own. As Anthony Lincoln points out, the rights of the State constituted another right, standing over against the right of the individual.2 The arguments against the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts were supported by comprehensive and interlocking theories of the Church’s relation to the State and of the State itself. It is not easy to give a meaningful name to the people, lay and ecclesiastical, who held these theories, or at least thought along these lines. If Burke (and Bolingbroke) were right, the Hanoverian Tories were indistinguishable from the Old Whigs. The Warburton version of the Alliance of Church and State stemmed from the same roots as the theory of the contractual balanced constitution. The French Revolution hardened those elements in this theory of the State which resisted any change towards popular representation. It also brought into the open expressions of the older, High Church, view of the relations between Church and State. III The members of the Deputies’ Committee devoted much of their propaganda to explaining and publicizing their grievances under the Test and Corporation Acts. They clung to the possibility of ‘candour’ in discussion. Even after the decisive failure of 1

Debate in the House of Commons, etc., London, 1789 (8th May 1789), pp. 41–

2

A. Lincoln, English Dissent, pp. 249–51.

42.

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the third Repeal motion, Jeffries explained to a general meeting of the deputies that the minds of members of parliament had been prejudiced by ‘printed papers fabricated to suit the circumstances of the moment’, but that the debate had confirmed many friends, gained over many others, excited no fresh enmity and aroused general attention.1 At least until the Birmingham riots in 1791, the Dissenters maintained, that if the majority of people only knew of their disabilities, they would hasten to procure the repeal of the offending Acts. While the Dissenters strongly objected to the existence of the Test Laws, as of other penal laws still on the statute books, on the grounds that they imposed a stigma, they wanted to show that they also produced practical hardships and insecurity. They were concerned with the inadequate cover provided by the Indemnity Acts, which left intervals of time in which actions could be started, and of which the wording suggested that they were meant to apply to persons who had carelessly omitted to take the Sacramental Test, rather than to conscientious Dissenters. The Application Committee took Counsel’s opinion on whether a new Indemnity Act would end, or merely suspend, an action commenced under the Test Act. Counsel agreed that the action would be merely suspended, but could not find any cases in point.2 In 1789 an action was started under the Corporation Act against a Dissenting mayor of Nottingham, presumably to annoy the Dissenters. 3 It actually helped to prove that the Dissenters were not fully protected by the Indemnity Acts, which may be why no more was heard of it. A large part of Samuel Heywood’s The Right of Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted, as of many other pamphlets, was devoted to expounding the disabilities arising from the Corporation and Test Acts. It explained very little, however, since the actual effects of the laws were never distinguished from the potential ones. The list of legal disabilities made a formidable case, but neither the Dissenters themselves nor their opponents knew how far the laws were enforced. Churchmen liked to point out that they were only meant for application if too many Dissenters got into 1

Minutes, 18th May 1790. Minutes, 16th March 1787. Capel Lofflt, History of the Corporation and Test Acts, Bury St. Edmunds, 1790, p. 21. Observations Suggested by the Perusal of Mr. Loft’s History of the Corporation and Test Acts, Bury St. Edmunds, 1790, p. 19. 2

3

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1

office. The Application Committee proposed a subcommittee to obtain a list of persons who had held offices of profit within the last ten years without qualifying under the Test Act; but unfortunately it does not appear that the list was ever made.2 Since the main argument for preserving the Test Laws was the necessity of protecting the Alliance between Church and State, the Dissenters attacked the theory of the Alliance. Obviously they could not accept the High Church view of the visible National Church as a providential institution, and dissent from it as sin. They therefore proceeded to refute it by the voice of one of its own dissident members. The Application Committee republished and circulated the tracts of Benjamin Hoadly.3 Hoadly’s famous sermon which in 1717 started the Bangorian controversy, The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ, had been preached on the text, ‘My Kingdom is not of this World’. In it Hoadly although a churchman and a bishop had sought to dissolve the Church as a visible body of divine authority, by repeating the Lutheran and Baptist doctrine that, in the Church of Christ, Jesus was sole king, law-giver and judge. Obedience to his laws was the condition of happiness in the next world, and therefore their sanctions were not in this world. The Church of Christ was ‘the Number of persons who are Sincerely and Willingly Subjects to Him as Lawgiver and Judge, in matters truly relating to Conscience or Eternal Salvation’.4 On these lines nothing was left of the visible Church except, possibly, a teaching institution, founded as Paley later claimed in utility and conceived as a ‘scheme of instruction’, whose end was the ‘preservation and communication of religious knowledge’.5 On the question of the Dissenters’ attitude to the Established Church itself the division between extremists and moderates emerged sharply. The extremists, especially the Baptist Robert Robinson, furiously attacked the Church of England for its relics of Popery, its inherent rigidity, and its selfish persecuting 1

Observations Suggested, etc., p. 19. Minutes, 16th February 1790. 3 Minutes, 9th March 1787, 28th January 1790. Hoadly’s Refutation of Sherlock was also circulated. 4 Benjamin Hoadly, The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ, 1717, p. 25. Cf., Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1934, Chapter VII. 5 William Paley, Moral and Political Philosophy. Works, 1838, pp. 670–1. 2

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tendencies. The moderates were prepared to accept the existence of the Established Church on the Paleyan model. They refrained, as far as possible, from attacking its forms of worship or government. They distinguished between the Church itself and its establishment or attachment to the State. This was not always easy to do, since the word ‘establishment’ was sometimes used by different people in different ways. For instance, Blackstone had distinguished between ‘toleration’ and ‘establishment’ in such a way as to equate the latter with the admission of the members of the sect concerned to equal political rights. 1 Elsewhere the payment of the regium donum to Dissenting clergy was cited as a form of establishment, as was later the proposal to pay the Irish Catholic clergy. However, the moderates refrained for the time being from attacking the more obvious privileges of the State Church such as tithes or church rates. 2 Recognizing the nervousness caused by events in France, they denied any wish to confiscate the Church’s endowments. They pointed out that they had no wish to establish their own church in place of the existing one, since they had no form of church discipline to establish.3 None the less, Heywood praised the plan current in parts of North America, where the State government enforced the payment of tithes and then distributed the proceeds among the various sects according to the numbers of their adherents.4 In effect the moderate Dissenters accepted the existence of the Established Church, if without enthusiasm, as an inescapable necessity. Heywood explained that most Dissenters had been taught to look on the Church of England with respect as an ally in the common cause of Protestantism against Popery.5 They contended that the Church of England had preceded, and would survive the Test Laws, which were, in any case, quite ineffective to keep out of office anyone who really wanted to harm her. The laws were unnecessary because the Church of England was safe without them. 1

Blackstone, Commentaries, 1769, IV, 51–52. Church rates did not become a serious question until the Church reorganization and building programmes of the next century. Cf., M . B. Whittaker, op. cit. 3 Heywood, Right of Dissenters, etc., p. 59. High Church Politics, p. 137. 4 Heywood citing Paley, Right of Dissenters, etc., pp. 55–56. Benjamin Franklin had publicized the plan in England in a letter to the press in 1772. This was republished as A Letter Concerning Persecution in Former Ages, etc., in Franklin’s Political Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces, London, 1779, pp. 74–79. 5 High Church Politics, 1792, p. 139. 2

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In denouncing the Alliance, the Dissenters meant primarily to attack the Church’s ability to interfere in politics, to deny them civil and political equality. Heywood wrote that Bishop Horsley’s contention that the Dissenters must submit to some necessary restraints—the only terms on which churchmen and Dissenters could ever walk together as friends—had done more harm to the Establishment than Price, Priestley and Robinson in all their publications. For it implied that the right of private judgement must be limited in the very idea of establishment, and that civil government must exercise jurisdiction over consciences, and that too, to any extent. 1 It was apparent that the attitude of the churchmen towards repeal of the Test Laws was making it increasingly difficult for the moderates to maintain their rather shaky distinction between the Anglican Church and the Alliance. Moreover, it was difficult to attack the latter without denigrating the Church itself. Heywood, writing in the embittered days of 1792, refuted the Warburton Alliance by denying the existence—once the Papal hierarchy had been expelled—of an independent Church for the State to ally with. Henry VIII had made his own church. ‘As well then may the ivy, clinging round the oak, boast of an alliance with its supporter, or rather a puppet with the man who plays the wires’.2 On Warburton’s principles, said Heywood, the Royal Society has as good aclaim to alliance with the State as the Church has. In time, the churchmen’s insistence that establishment entailed political inferiority for nonconformists drove even the more moderate advocates of religious toleration into attacking the Church of England. Even while claiming to respect the Established Church, all the Dissenters justified the separation of Church and State, on various grounds. The moderates did not deny that religion was necessary both to morality and to public order. Priestley, maintaining that even unbelievers could be good citizens, went beyond almost all Rational Dissenters. They did, however, deny the necessity of a specially State-protected, privileged Church to maintain religion. The lessons of religion and morality were most effectively taught by free churches in accordance with their own lights. Moreover, the Dissenters claimed that dependence 1 2

High Church Politics, pp. 127–128. Ibid., p. 123.

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on the State corrupted the Church itself. As Priestley acidly observed, according to the new method of vindicating her, the Church of England ‘hath contracted not only an alliance with, but a striking resemblance of the kingdoms of this world’.1 The strongest evidence of this corruption was the Sacramental Test; and upon this test the Dissenting pamphleteers lavished their finest flowers of invective. Samuel Pearce pointed out that the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was debased into ‘a mere engine of state’. Christ had said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. The Test Act said, ‘Do this to qualify for enjoying office’. Scripture declares, ‘He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, whilst the Test Act holds out a temptation to hundreds thus unworthily to come and receive it.2 The embittered Gilbert Wakefield wrote: ‘. . . that the Lord’s Supper is a most Judicious Test; as Bread and Wine have always been esteemed excellent Food, and are therefore a very proper Introduction to the good Things of a fat Office under Government’.3 The Dissenters pointed out that clergymen who administered the Test were liable to a conflict of law and conscience. The rubric ordered them to refuse the Sacrament to men of notoriously unworthy and evil lives. Yet if a clergyman refused a candidate for public office on such grounds he might incur a legal action for damages, which, even if he won it, would probably ruin him. This question was thought important enough to take up a good part of the 1787 Repeal debate. The Application Committee took Counsel’s opinion on it, only to be told that Serjeants Hill and Madock knew of no case in point, and that the authorities were doubtful.4 The dilemma was obviously academic, but it was an excellent propaganda point. The Dissenters continued to infuriate the clergy by commiserating with them on having at their own risk to desecrate their own Sacrament, and suggesting that they should join with the Dissenters to get themselves relieved of the burden. They also 1

Remarks on Some Paragraphs in Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries, etc., p. 14. Samuel Pearce, The Oppressive, Unjust, and Prophane Nature and Tendency of the Corporation and Test Acts Exposed, etc., Birmingham, 1790, pp. 21–22. (Republished 1827.) 3 Cursory Reflections: occasioned by the Present Meetings in Opposition to the Claims of the Dissenters, and the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, Birmingham, 1790, p. 27. 4 Minutes, 27th March 1787. 2

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continued to remind office holders who had probably never given the matter a thought, that they ought to have a bad conscience. The charge of debasing the Sacrament proved one of the Dissenters’ most effective weapons. In 1828 Lord Goderich admitted embarrassment at taking the Sacrament as a test for office;1 Wellington and the Archbishop of York accepted the argument, and this use of the ceremony was abolished without regret.2 The separation of Church and State was also justified on the grounds of religious and of natural right. Few of the Dissenters followed Price’s elaborate essentialism. They preferred to describe in Lockeian terms the existence of the right of conscience outside the social contract. Religion was a matter between man and God, in which the civil governor had no right to interfere. Also, religious opinions were matters over which those who held them had no control; and therefore they could not be surrendered to the jurisdiction of a magistrate. Jurisdiction over religious opinion was therefore altogether outside the purpose of civil society and secular government. Hence a man’s religious beliefs were irrelevant to his political rights. Lord North retorted that anything could be justified on grounds of natural right—if office for Dissenters, why not votes for those who don’t possess forty shillings freehold ?3 In so far as natural rights were used as a basis for the demand for universal suffrage, he was right. But in so far as they justified the separation of Church and State, Whigs could reply that the maintenance of property was the proper concern of the State, while the direction of religious belief was not. The separation of Church and State, or rather, the belief in a secular, limited State, enabled the next generation of patrician Whigs to be ardent workers for religious toleration, and only very half-hearted workers for political reform. 1

House of Lords, Hansard, 2nd Series, XVIII (17th April 1828), 1607. R. G. Cowherd, Protestant Dissenters in English Politics, 1815–1834,Philadelphia, 1942, p. 42. 2 The decline of the custom of taking the Sacrament at the beginning of each year by the members of the London Common Council can be traced in the Sacrament Certificates and lists in the Guildhall Records Repository. In 1787 there were 228 certificates (the number may not have been complete). In 1810 there were 176 names on the list of those who had taken the Sacrament in a City church; in 1828 there were 113 names on the list. 3 Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, XXVI (28th March 1787), 819. 88

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Finally, the Dissenters, in the light of experience, believed that the separation of Church and State was necessary to prevent the bishops in the Lords, and the Church Party generally, using the laws to prevent the evolution of religious thought. The Alliance was inimical to the whole forward-looking attitude of the Rational Dissenters. The Dissenters scouted the practical difficulties arising from a separation of Church and State. The churchmen need fear no attack upon the Church if the Dissenters got more power, since the legislature would not concern itself with Church matters. The opponents of Repeal said that, on the contrary, a separation was impossible. For a man’s religion was very apt to influence his civil loyalty, and the magistrate responsible for civil order must therefore take religion into account. The Protestant Dissenters, who had justified the laws against Popery on these very grounds, found it difficult to deny the truth of this argument completely. They therefore cast around for a formula which should draw the line at which a ruler was justified in discriminating politically on grounds of religious opinion. Two such formulae were available. One was a typical Paleyan compromise between the High Church and Rational Dissenting positions, and was to become the stock-in-trade of the liberal Tory supporters of Catholic Emancipation. Paley wrote: ‘If the generality of any religious sect entertain dispositions hostile to the constitution, and if government have no other way of knowing its enemies than by the religion they profess, the professors of that religion may justly be excluded from offices of trust and authority.’1 But the door was shut not against the religion but against the political principles its members held. Religious tenets would not be the test if any other could be found. He added (apropos of the connexion between Popery and Jacobit¬ ism) that restrictions ought not to continue one day longer than some visible danger rendered them necessary to the preservation of public tranquility. This was not good enough for the Dissenters, since it allowed their enemies in power to say they were disloyal and exclude them accordingly. They therefore adopted a formula from Furneaux’s Letters to Blackstone. 1 William Paley, Moral and Political Philosophy (first published, 1785). Works, London, 1838, p. 680. Much the same formula had already appeared in his Defence of the Consideration etc., in 1773.

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Furneaux pointed out that if the magistrate were judge of the tendencies of religious principles, religious liberty would be entirely at an end, or at his mercy. ‘But if the line be drawn between mere religious principle and the tendency of it on the one hand; and those overt acts which affect the public peace and order, on the other, . . . the boundaries between civil power and liberty in religious matters, are clearly marked and determined’, . . . and not left to the magistrate’s opinions of the good or bad tendency of the principles.1 Charles James Fox based a great part of his speech on the Repeal motion of 1789 upon this formula. Men were the best judges of the consequences of their own opinions, and how far they were likely to influence their actions; and it was most unnatural and tyrannical to say: ‘Because you think so, you must act so. I will collect the evidence of your future conduct, from what I know to be your opinions’. Men ought to be judged by their actions and not by their thoughts.2 Pitt made the obvious reply, that: ‘The government has a right to guard against the probability of civil inconvenience being produced; nor ought they to wait till, by being carried into action, the inconvenience has actually arisen’.3 That a government should judge acts, not opinions, became one of the planks of the argument for toleration. It was never a decisive argument, since it could always be countered with Pitt’s reply. However, Macaulay was to add to it in the Jewish Emancipation Controversy another reason against deducing acts from opinions—that familiarity and staleness so weakens the influence of tenets on actions that no assumption can properly be made from one to the other.4 The Dissenters had still to meet the charge that they were democrats and republicans, possessed, as Southey was later to express it, ‘of an imperfect allegiance’.5 The publicists of the Application Committee spent much time disproving the cruder charges of disloyalty by giving their own version of English history. They denied responsibility for the death of Charles I— 1

Philip Furneaux, Letters to the Hon. Mr. Justice Blackstone, etc., 1771, pp. 61–

62. 2

Debate in the House of Commons on Mr. Beaufoy’s Motion, etc., 1789, p. 70. Ibid., p. 90. 4 ‘Civil Disabilities of the Jews’, Edinburgh Review, 52, 370. 5 Southey, ‘The Roman Catholic Question, Ireland’, Quarterly Review, 38, 551.

3

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which had been inflicted by a small clique in the teeth of Presbyterian opposition—but suggested that the king had invited his fate. They claimed to have championed Protestant liberty against Charles II and James II. 1 The first edition of the Case of the Protestant Dissenters with Reference to the Corporation and Test Acts claimed that the Protestant Dissenters had voluntarily submitted to the Test Act as a safeguard against Popery, and that their own exemption from it had been attempted by parliament, and had only failed through the evasive action of Charles II. 2 This drew an eloquent protest from the English Catholics’ chief publicist, Father Joseph Berington: ‘You wish to hold us out as the only obnoxious party; as if in the proportion we shall appear guilty, your innocence will be prominent. Could not your cause rest on its merits ?’3 The next edition of the Case appeared without the offending paragraph; and later on the deputies, learning the lesson of their own struggle for toleration, tried to lead their followers away from the easy prejudices of No Popery, even towards the support of Catholic Emancipation. In the meantime they pointed to their valiant services for the Hanoverian kings in 1715 and 1745, when High Churchmen had been Jacobites. On this record they claimed to be loyal citizens and friends to British liberty. The moderate Dissenters repudiated all charges of republicanism and denied that their admission to office spelled danger to the constitution. They refused to accept the distinction, which Pitt made in Parliament for the purpose of denying their claims, between civil liberty as the private rights of the individual, and political liberty as his right to share political power.4 They would not agree that the State, through the legislature, had the right to control admission to public office. They justified their claim to capacity for such office on the basis of neo-Lockeian theories of natural right. 1

Case of the Protestant Dissenters, etc., London 1787. The Dissenters’ version of English history was given at length in Heywood’s Right of Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted. 2 Ibid., 1787, Parl. Hist., XXVI, 780. 3 Joseph Berington, Address to the Protestant Dissenters, Birmingham, 1787, p. 21. 4 Parl. Hist., XXVI (28th March 1787), 825. The distinction was much the same as that between ‘passive’ and ‘active’ citizenship made by Sievès in France. Price and Priestley had also used it, but to show that political liberty was necessary to safeguard civil liberty. 91

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As well as contending that control over religious belief had never been included in the social contract, the Dissenters maintained that other rights held in the state of nature had only been surrendered on entering society in so far as this was necessary for the preservation of its legitimate purposes, i.e. the cooperative maintenance of those personal and property rights which could not be secured in the state of nature. This their opponents denied, maintaining (if they accepted the idea of a state of nature) that natural rights were entirely given up on entering society. The High Church clergyman William Jones declared: ‘That the natural rights of man, are the rights of man in a state of nature only: that is, of man considered as an unsociable independent savage. These are the rights of eating, drinking, sleeping, hunting, fishing, propagating his species, whipping his children, and defending himself against wild men and wild beasts. That as soon as man becomes a member of society, and property is divided by authority, and secured by laws; he is bound as a moral agent . . . All his natural rights are under restraint, and he cannot exercise them at his will, for fear of an executive power ordained to prevent it. They are now no longer natural, but are changed into civil rights.’1 The Dissenters, however, contended that only parts of natural right were given up. How much was surrendered tended to vary with the writer. For instance, the petitioners Fownes and Furneaux maintained that society was to exert the combined defence of the community for the protection of the individual, who lost none of his primary rights, especially not his religious right. 1 Heywood thought there were three degrees of surrendering rights on entering society. Some were given up entirely, some given up but reasserted if society failed to protect them (e.g. the right of selfdefence), and some, like religion, could not be given up at all.3 There was a good deal of cross-purpose in all this, as the Dissenters and their opponents were obviously meaning different things by natural rights. However, beneath the cross¬ 1 William Jones (of Nayland), Resolutions of Common sense about Common Rights (1792). Works, 1801, 12, 458. Jones may have been influenced by Burke; but his view was at least as old as the 1770s. Cf. H. V. S. Ogden, ‘The State of Nature and the Decline of Lockeian Political Theory in England’, American Historical Review, 1940–41, XLVI, 46. 2 Philip Furneaux, An Essay on Toleration, 1773, pp. 20–21. Cf. Joseph Fownes, An Enquiry into the Principles of Toleration, Shrewsbury, 1773, pp. 5–21. 3 Heywood, Right of Dissenters, etc., p. 49.

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purpose lay the fundamental disagreement in that Tory churchmen attributed a much greater part in the development of civilized man to the pressures of society and the discipline of laws than the Dissenters with their vision of natural right as independence or self-dependence were willing to concede. The gist of all the Dissenters’ accounts was that the exercise of the individual’s right was either retained in his own hands or made over for the better protection of the community. The society or State was really a sort of partnership concern, built on an aggregate of surrendered individual rights. Unless, therefore, there was some imperative necessity for exclusion, such as proved criminal acts, the members of the society ought not to be excluded from a share in wielding its powers: and the privileges created by it ought to be justly and equally redistributed to its members. Clear expressions of the Dissenters’ views appeared in pamphlets by Capel Lofft and Heywood. Lofft, commenting on the passage in Burke’s Reflections in which the Tory view of the surrender of rights was set forth, wrote :– A surrender in trust of the whole, even of fictitious property, to preserve a part, is a compact so unequal as rarely to be necessary. But a surrender of primary independent rights, to preserve secondary and adventitious rights, the whole of natural liberty for a precarious portion of civil, is an imaginary compact so . . . incompatible with every idea of reason and justice, that the wildest imagination never created such a chimera . . . I quit it without reluctance, for the plain opinion . . . that man, by uniting himself to civil society, resigns no rights but such as are inconsistent with the ends of such society.1 Heywood explained that distribution of offices was not a conferment of favours depending on the caprice of the magistrate. They were partnership concerns, composed of an aggregate of natural rights, and every man had a natural claim to capacity to hold them. Everyone who had given up his natural right to govern himself must be entitled to the advantage he had stipulated in return.2 1 Capel Lofft, Remarks on the Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, etc., 1790, pp. 36–37. Capel Lofft was a radical Norfolk barrister, and a member of the Application Committee. His pamphlets echo the views of Heywood. 2 Heywood, High Church Politics, p. 161.

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Occasionally there appeared in these discussions another form of contract—the contract made between the people as a whole and their rulers. The writer of Political Observations on the Test Act tried to turn it against the Dissenters, maintaining that the right to office was conventional only, being acquired by compact with the established society, and that, since the people had declared, by the voices of persons properly authorized by them, that they would not enter into such compacts with Dissenters, the latter had no right to office.1 To which they indignantly replied, that this denied ‘the existence of good substantial natural justice prior to all compacts, and merely meant that power was to determine right.2 The Dissenters’ preservation of the Lockeian conception of natural rights as the liberties of the individual which maintained their identity partly outside and partly as a pool inside the society indicated their conception of fundamental law. The rights of nature were guarded by the law of nature, or natural justice. Municipal laws ought to follow the law of nature, but there was no crystallization of that law into a series of important municipal laws or a fixed constitution. It remained a standard to direct political action from outside, not a quality inhering in existing legislation. Laws ought to aim at the protection of rights or the good of the community (which implied the protection of rights), and carried no virtue in themselves apart from their capacity to fulfil these purposes. Rejecting fixed, fundamental laws, the Dissenters found it easy to accept the full legal sovereignty of parliament. If laws were unjust, parliament could, and should, change them. Supposing there had been fundamental laws guaranteeing the safety of the Church Establishment, the Corporation and Test Acts were not among them. But even the Act of Union and the coronation oath only guaranteed the Church ‘as by law established’; and the Church would be whatever the law did establish, or the law need establish no Church. The laws which the Tories claimed as fundamental were those which denied them their just rights, or which were appealed to to check progress towards justice, or to impede ‘improvement’. The 1

Political Observations etc., p. 59. Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke from a Dissenting Country Attorney (Nash), Birmingham, 1791, p. 94. 2

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Dissenters would have entirely agreed with Halifax, that: ‘Fundamental is a Word used by the Laity, as the Word Sacred is by the Clergy, to fix everything to themselves they have a mind to keep, that nobody else may touch it’. 1 They had no reason to subscribe to the theory either of fundamental laws or of the fundamental (Church of England) character of the constitution, or of a balance which kept them out—they had no objection to a balance of forces as a desirable norm which let them in. They held the consistent view that parliament had the legal right to pass or repeal laws on any subject, and yet had a moral obligation, at the dictates of natural justice, to legislate in certain ways, and only upon those matters which ought to come within the purview of a limited, secular State. They did not claim that the Test and Corporation Acts were illegal, only that they were unjust. The moderate Dissenters subscribed to the ideal of the balanced constitution. Its acceptance was the condition of political respectability. Price and Priestley, despite their lip service to the limited monarchy, reverted to an old strain of radicalism inconsistent with the idea of a balance of independent political forces, and with the existence of a king exercising any independent powers. This was the old Whig doctrine that powers of government were held as a trust for the people, and that the ruler was trustee rather than partner to an equal contract, and could be dismissed at will if he abused his trust or displeased his collective master. Price’s claim, which so enraged Burke, that the people could cashier their kings and choose their own form of government,2 was taken from Priestley’s Essay on the First Principles of Government. Thomas Paine, rallying to the defence of Price, claimed that the whole nation had a perfect right to do these things, and bade people look for a model to the country where this theory was in the ascendant—France. It would have been easy for the French doctrine of the Sovereign People and the General Will to graft itself on to this stem. Yet Repeal pamphlets notably lacked reference to the sovereign people or the will of the nation. Rousseau’s version of the social contract 1 Halifax, Political Thoughts and Reflections. Complete Works of George Savile, first Marquis of Halifax, ed. W . Raleigh, Oxford, 1912, p. 214. 2 Price’s famous sermon to the Revolution Society on 4th November 1789, was entitled A Discourse on the Love of Our Country.

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did not appeal to the Dissenters. They knew they were an unpopular minority, and despite their appeal to candour and the force of fair argument, they were chary of hazarding their religious liberty or their civil rights in the hands of a churchbred sovereign people. They wanted a share in the good things of State, and the status that went with them; and they were inclined to champion constitutional reforms which should secure a House of Commons more favourable to themselves and less dependent on interests hostile to them. After that, their interest lay in parliamentary rather than popular sovereignty. It may be surmised that the element of lay Dissenters among English political reformers in the late eighteenth century helped to confine to the opinions of a small minority those aspects of French thought which led through revolution towards totalitarianism. The English liberal ideal remained the limited State. Perhaps the opponents of Repeal underrated the influence of their own attitude in driving the Dissenters towards political reform. But no statistics of political affiliations were necessary to justify the Tory suspicion that Repealers were also Reformers, whether or not this justified calling them traitors. The Dissenter was faced with an alliance of Church and State in which bishops sat in the House of Lords, and helped to defeat his efforts to repeal the Test Laws. He was often faced with an alliance of parson and squire, who rubbed in socially his status as a second-class citizen. The parsons then appeared in increasing numbers on the Bench, to make difficulties over his minister’s licence under the Toleration Act. He was told that the laws which perpetuated this state of affairs were fundamentals of the constitution. He was told that toleration meant liberty of worship and not equality of political rights; and he joined the class of those who felt political inequality as a grievance. Inevitably he looked abroad, and sympathized with those who had defeated similar or more oppressive systems. As a Rational Dissenter he was accustomed to believe that theory and practice in fundamental aspects of life ought to evolve. Hostile churchmen observed that he was used to electing his ministers, and therefore took the elective habit of mind into secular politics.1 Although this was not true of the Presbyterians, and applied 1

Political Observations on the Test Act, p. 46. 96

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mainly to the more orthodox and less politically minded Independent congregations,1 Dissenters by definition had no particular respect for the Episcopal polity. And those who held the ecclesiastical hierarchy unscriptural were the less likely to revere the political hierarchy. Rational Dissenters who were already attuned to searching the Scriptures with the eye of Biblical criticism could search the ‘happy constitution’ as defined by their enemies, with a no less critical and far less reverend gaze. Tories saw liberty as the product of an equilibrium of forces, carefully maintained by a complex of laws. Dissenters found these laws oppressive, and refused to agree that their liberty was maintained. The Tories referred to a unitary State, whose powers were to be used to deny equal citizenship to people who could not subscribe to the Established Church. The Dissenters fell back on a partnership conception of the State in which surrendered rights, or powers, entailed a claim injustice for participation in the State’s powers and privileges. This claim to political equality was also applicable in the sphere of secular political reform. The Dissenters, arguing as a religious minority, used it to support their contention that religious belief ought not to be considered as a bar to political rights or privileges. But Lord North was not far wrong in thinking that, once inequality on grounds of religion had been rejected, interested persons would find it natural to question inequality on grounds of landed property or local custom. So the Dissenters called their supporters ‘Friends to civil and religious liberty’, realizing that the alliance between these was at least as firm as the authoritarian alliance between Church and State; and most of those who had votes cast them accordingly. Tacitly they also realized that religion and politics could not be wholly separated, since attitudes towards the problems raised in these distinct spheres of life were unified in the individual himself. Behind the conflict between Dissenters and churchmen over the Test Laws lay the same conflict of social and economic interest which inspired the struggle over constitutional reform. The Rational Dissenting leaders, whether teachers and 1

M. B. Whittaker, op. cit., p. 37. Mr. Whittaker points out that the Presbyterian ministers were generally appointed by Trustees, who co-opted each other. The elective habit of mind was more typical of the Independents. R.T.–H

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philosophers or lawyers and merchants, were the intellectual élite of a middle class. It was not as yet an industrial middle class; certainly not in so far as it was represented by the doctors and lawyers of the London Deputies. It included rather those elements of professional skill and respectability which made the French Revolution a formidable middle-class movement. In some degree the voice of the churchmen and Tories was the voice of the eighteenth-century landed interest, disguised under an Old Whig, in instinctive revulsion from the clamour of professional and trading classes which would not remain subordinate. Then, in 1790 the French Revolution upset the political sobriety of many of the Dissenters, terrified their opponents, and lent plausibility to the cry of ‘Church and State in danger’. The Dissenting point of view was for a time overwhelmed in a tide of reaction in which the idea of equilibrium became a cover for the aim of order by repression.

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IV Edmund Burke

I EDMUND BRUKE, a politician whose political philosophy was the product of his day-to-day political activities, wrote and spoke always with an eye to particular problems. It was left to the student to build up a coherent philosophy out of a variety of utterances in a way that Burke himself did not. Nowadays builders of Burke’s philosophical system tend to emphasize the unity and consistency of his thought. As regards his fundamental moral basis they are probably right. 1 But since his writings were closely related to changing situations, since his attitude to various controversial questions crossed the usual party lines of his day, and since he was of an excitable nature, large variations and even inconsistencies appear in his statements. Burke was too clever to be caught out frequently contradicting himself. His changes of mind appeared in shifts of emphasis, and his inconsistencies in varying the meaning of words. For instance, while Burke was undoubtedly, throughout his political life, the champion of aristocratic government, his attitude towards the relation between government and ‘people’ changed considerably. In 1780 he told the House of Commons that he had not followed the sense of the people, but had met it on the way while pursuing their interest according to his own 1 E.g., Charles Parkin, in The Moral Basis of Burke’s Political Thought, Cambridge, 1956. In this chapter I have generally followed Dr. Parkin’s interpretation, which seems to me correct and penetrating.

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ideas. ‘They who call upon you to belong wholly to the people are those who wish you to return to your proper home.’1 At this time he desired, without conceding reform of the franchise, to retain the backing of county and of popular borough associations for his assault on the powers of the Crown by way of economical reform. In 1791 he wrote: ‘As to the people at large, when once these miserable sheep have broken the fold, and have got themselves loose, not from the restraint but from the protection, of all the principles of natural authority and legitimate subordination, they become the prey of impostors. . . .’ 2 He was certainly not contradicting himself, yet there was an entirely new authoritarian tone towards the conscious desires and wishes of the mass of ordinary people; and this authoritarianism became more specific as he tended in his later writings to define, and in so doing to narrow the meaning of ‘the people’ in a political sense. Again, when Burke was writing against experimentalism in politics he exalted the role of prejudice as the vehicle of virtue in political life. But he invariably referred to the greatest prejudice of his age, that against the Roman Catholics, as ‘passion’ so that he could denigrate it. It is necessary, therefore, to beware of reading too great a consistency into Burke’s statements. He was justifying his loves and his hates, and these were complicated, variable, and sometimes depended on private as well as public motives. Yet on the whole his underlying outlook on life was consistent. The changing events brought different aspects of it into play; and not the least important of these were the contemporary questions of religious toleration. Burke’s theory of religious toleration had to fit in with his feelings towards the two main religious minorities. His sentiments towards the Roman Catholics never seriously changed. He respected, loved and pitied them, and spent much of his life championing their cause. One of his earlier works, written in the 1760s, was a series of Tracts Relative to the Laws against Popery in Ireland, in which he described and denounced the evil effects of the Irish penal code. It has been said that his coolest period towards the Catholics was in 1774, when he strongly 1 2

Speech on the Plan of Economical Reform. Works, Boston, 1866, II, 361. Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. Works, IV, 10.

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criticized the Quebec Act, although he attacked its political aspect rather than its recognition of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada.1 At this juncture his opposition to the policy of the British government which he thought was driving the American colonists into revolt was uppermost in his mind. But in 1778 he warmly supported Savile’s Act which repealed various laws penalizing Roman Catholic worship in England. He pressed the government to compensate Catholics who lost their property in the Scottish riots of 1779, and administered stinging rebukes to the Presbyterian divines who, he considered, had fomented them.2 After the Gordon riots he dissuaded Lord North’s government from repealing Savile’s Act.3 He angrily and courageously lectured the Bristol electors about intolerance towards Roman Catholics before losing his seat.4 He wrote a series of letters to various dignitaries of the Irish parliament, of which the most influential was the first Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe; and the Irish act of 1793 in which Catholic forty-shilling freeholders obtained votes for the Irish parliament was at least partly due to his warm advocacy.5 The recall of Fitzwilliam from Ireland in 1795 was a personal tragedy to him; particularly as it was largely due to misunderstanding between Fitzwilliam and his friend Portland. His dearly loved son Richard was acting as agent for the Irish Catholics when he died; and his latest letters demonstrate his anxious preoccupation with the deteriorating state of Irish affairs in 1796–7. Burke was prepared to do everything in his power for the Catholics short of turning Roman Catholic himself—which would have blasted his career and done them no good. Burke’s attitude towards the Roman Catholics was probably unique among public men of his generation, especially among those not unfriendly towards Dissenting claims. The Rational Dissenting leaders, following Priestley’s example and the logic 1 P. T. Underdown, ‘Edmund Burke as Member of Parliament for Bristol, etc.’, London Ph.D. thesis, 1955, p. 378. 2 Ed. Fitzwilliam and Bourke, Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, London, 1844, II, 255–61 and 268–74. 3 Ibid., II, 356–75. 4 Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election. Works, 1866, II, 365–424. 5 There is much evidence of Burke’s activity in the Correspondence consisting in letters and memoranda written in 1792 and 1793.

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of their own arguments, brought themselves to tolerate the Catholics in a somewhat patronizing and proselytizing fashion. But their attitude was as different as possible from Burke’s deep and affectionate understanding of the Roman Catholic Church. After 1789 the High Church Party became more tolerant toward the Catholics, realizing that the authoritarian traditions of the Roman Catholic Church might provide some antidote to the levelling and atheistical influences from France. They showed some tendency to place all Dissenters, Protestant and Catholic, on a level; to be tolerated in worship but excluded from political equality with members of the Established Church. In 1813 a tract appeared with the title, The Balance Held Between Catholics and Dissenters.1 This was still a long way from Burke’s warm advocacy of Roman Catholic relief. The Catholics themselves tended to stand upon the superiority of their Church as a divinely appointed vehicle of religious truth, or to appropriate the Whig-Dissenting argument of the separation of Church and State. Burke in his lifetime had no companions to share his peculiar views. After his death some of his practical arguments were taken over by the group known as Liberal Tories, and used to support Catholic Emancipation on grounds of expediency. Evidence and probability both suggest that Burke was moved by a personal affection for the Roman Catholic religion, and that his Irish patriotism was attached to Catholic rather than Protestant Ireland. His mother and sister were Catholics; his wife had been a Catholic until her marriage. After 1789 he kept open house for French Catholic refugees. In 1792 he wrote to his son Richard; ‘There are few things I wish more . . . than that the established churches should be continued on a firm foundation in both kingdoms. When I say few I mean to be exact; for some things, assuredly, I have nearer my heart, namely, the emancipation of that great body of my original countrymen, whom a jackanapes in lawn sleeves calls fools and knaves. I can never persuade myself that anything in our Thirty-nine articles, which differs from their articles, is worth making three millions of people slaves, to secure its teaching at the public expense; and I think he must be a strange man, or strange Christian, and a strange Englishman, who would not rather see Ireland a free, 1

John Rippingham, London, 1813. 102

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flourishing, happy Catholic country, though not one Protestant existed in it, than an enslaved, beggared, insulted, degraded Catholic country, as it is, with some Protestants here and there scattered through it, for the purpose, not of instructing the people, but of making them miserable.’1 Certain features of Roman Catholicism were probably attractive to his temperament. It was a religion of traditional, positive beliefs, but it also included a tradition of slowly developing doctrine. Burke loved the traditional, opposed development to revolution or innovation, and never jibbed at being told what to believe. It gave much scope for those feelings of reverence towards persons which Burke cherished. (It may not be altogether fanciful to suggest that a man of such chivalrous sentiments towards the unfortunate Queen of France would not have been repelled by the cult of the Virgin Mary.) It constituted an ancient, hierarchical, property-owning, corporate Church with authoritarian leadership. As Burke’s political views developed, the form of government of the Catholic Church was likely to exercise upon him the same kind of appeal as independent elective forms of church government exercised upon some Protestant Dissenters. The features Burke praised in the Anglican Establishment were present also in the Roman Catholic Church. But the popular excuses for antipathy bore no weight with him. He was not in the least impressed by any danger of political interference from the Pope, that ‘commodious bugbear’, and he did not believe that Catholic priests had any political influence over their parishioners, who would laugh them to scorn if they departed at Confession from the Seven Deadly Sins.2 Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was a persecuted Church, and aroused Burke’s feelings for the underdog. Writing to Dr. Hussey in 1795, he actually likened it to a primitive Christian Church.3 This demonstration of his warmth towards a Church to which he did not belong suggests that Burke’s undoubted adherence to the Church of England rested upon its existence as the prescriptive Church of the nation in which he made his home and his career rather than its 1 Edmund Burke to Richard Burke, 23rd March 1792. Correspondence, III, 452–3. 2 Edmund to Richard Burke, 7th September 1792. Correspondence, IV, 14. 3 27th February 1945, Correspondence, IV, 284.

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Protestantism (which he considered purely negative) or any other distinctive feature of its doctrine and worship. Burke’s attitude towards the Dissenters, at least in early days, was far more detached. He had personal connexions and associations with them also; but his old schoolmaster had been a Quaker, and the Quakers held themselves aloof from the activities of the Three Denominations. Generally, he supported their cause from the viewpoint of a liberal member of the Established Church. In 1772 and 1773 he spoke in the House of Commons in favour of their application for relief from compulsory subscription to the Articles. His position at this time was a strong belief in the Established Church as a support of religion, combined with the belief that establishment was compatible with toleration. He would ‘have toleration a part of establishment, as a principle favourable to Christianity and as a part of Christianity’. Christianity had risen without establishment, and ‘nothing but the supposed necessity of persecution, . . . can make establishment disgusting’.1 He was no advocate of comprehension, and he would countenance no breach in the Establishment itself. If the Clerical Petitioners wanted to make fundamental changes in the liturgy and articles of religion, they must do so outside the Church. The Church of England was a corporate body and had a right to protect her identity, or change it if the greater part of her members so desired; but there was no sign whatever that they did.2 The Dissenters who wished for freedom to follow their religious principles without demanding participation in the emoluments created by the State for her Established Church ought to be allowed freedom to do so. Only in this way could the benefit of the diverse religions be secured for the support of moral society. All Christians, indeed all believers in positive religions ought to combine against the sceptics and atheists, those ministers of darkness in the world, who endeavour ‘to shake all the works of God established in order and beauty’.3 Burke’s definition of positive religion was wide enough to include the Dissenters who wanted relief from the Articles, although it stopped short of Deists and probably of 1 Speech on the Protestant Dissenters’ Relief Bill, 7th March 1773. Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, London, 1816, I, 153–4. 2 Speech on the Acts of Uniformity, 6th February 1772. Works, Boston, 1866, VII, 5–11. 3 Speech on the Protestant Dissenters’ Relief Bill. Speeches, I, 163.

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avowed Unitarians, since he voted for the Declaration imposed in place of subscription in 1779.1 Burke had evidently accepted the current moderate churchmen’s definition of toleration as freedom of worship and opinion, and in this particular point his position was very close to that of Warburton. But his support of the Roman Catholics led him beyond this position. For he realized that in Ireland the real aim of what appeared to be a religious persecution was to exclude a subject population from civil rights (land ownership, equality before the law, etc.); and he realized also that this was facilitated by their exclusion from political rights. The exclusion from civil rights, of property, of inheritance, and of education, was true punishment. The laws were ‘slow, cruel outrages on our nature, and kept men alive only to insult in their persons every one of the rights and feelings of humanity’.2 In 1792 he was to point out that the Irish Catholics, deprived of votes, had no chance of obtaining civil justice from their rulers, who were entirely independent of their support and consent. Complete disfranchisement, with the consequent break-down of even virtual representation (the implicit identity of interest between rulers and ruled) produced collateral oppressions. Therefore whole classes ought not to be excluded from capacity to share in political power.3 In 1782 he even contended that it was unjust to exclude from their share of State offices the men whose taxes supported the government.4 At that time he was not far from the position of the Repeal campaigners a little later, that complete toleration included an equal capacity for civil and political rights. Indeed, in 1778 Burke was instrumental in securing the repeal of the Irish Test Law. It is clear from his letters at this time that his first interest was in Roman Catholic relief, and that he favoured the Dissenters’ claims mainly in order to ease the way for the Catholics. But in 1779 and 1780 he was prepared to support the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in England.5 1 L. D. Cowley, ‘The Religious Ideas of Edmund Burke’, London Ph.D. thesis, 1947, p. 56. 2 Speech at the Guildhall in Bristol. Works, Boston, 1866, II, 391. 3 First Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, 1792. Works, IV, 253–6. 4 Letter to a Peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws Against Irish Catholics, 1782. Works, IV, 222–3. 5 Letter to the Rt. Hon. Edmund Pery, 1778. Works, VI, 202.

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After 1790 Burke was a bitter foe to the Dissenters. The wellknown cause of this change was the outbreak of the French Revolution; but there were also personal reasons for it, which are less well known, and are therefore worth tracing in some detail. Burke had been Rockingham’s secretary and a member of the Rockingham administration formed by coalition with Shel¬ burne’s Whigs in March 1782. The coalition was a temporary union against the king, made possible and profitable by the failure of the American War. Behind it lay a long history of rivalry and jealousy between Rockingham’s Whigs and Chatham, whose following and tradition had now been inherited by Shelburne.1 Chatham had, at the end of his life, been more of a demagogue than any member of the Rockingham group, including Fox. Shelburne entertained at Bowood all kinds of ‘visionaries’ from Priestley and Price to Bentham, and was evidently identified in Burke’s mind, even at the height of the Economical Reform struggle, with those innovating politicians whose designs were ‘inconsistent with the constitution left us by our forefathers’.2 There were already differences of principle and personal feeling between the two men. On 1st July 1782, Rockingham’s death shattered the already shaky coalition. Burke needed office financially, and according to Wraxall, although he personally detested Lord Shelburne, would gladly have retained his situation under a new first minister of the king’s election, but he could not separate himself from Fox.3 It is evident from letters that he wrote to Fox on 5th and 13th July 1782, that he was deeply involved in schemes to help Fox overthrow Shelburne and take his place.4 After this his dislike of Shelburne was probably reinforced by the unfor¬ getting ill will that accompanies the consciousness of having done someone a bad turn. In February 1783, Fox joined with North to overthrow Shelburne, and Burke returned to office in their wake. But the Fox-North coalition produced one of those explosions of public opinion which occasionally surprised 1

See O. A. Sherrard, Lord Chatham and America, 1958, passim. Burke to Joseph Harford, 27th September 1780. Correspondence, II, 383. N. M. Wraxall, Historical Memoirs of his Own Time, 1856, III, 146. Wraxall may, however, have been referring to the end of 1783 when George III appointed Pitt in place of Fox and North. 4 Fox General Correspondence, Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 47668 ( 2 ) . The letters discussed the question whether Fox ought to hold office under Shelburne, and whether it would be easier to bring him down from inside or outside his ministry. 2

3

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eighteenth-century politicians in their esoteric pastime of ‘ins’ and ‘outs’. Voters were disgusted at the unprincipled alliance of these bitter opponents for the sake of office. In the unrepresentative state of parliament this need not have been fatal to the ministers had not the body of opinion which had hitherto supported Fox and Burke against the king now had the king on its side against Fox and Burke. Then Fox’s East India Bill (drafted by Burke) confirmed the hostility of the powerful East India Company, brought over the City of London and other corporations, and dissolved the remains of Fox’s former popularity.1 The king, the reforming interest, the monied interest, Dissenting self-interest, and the Nonconformist conscience were alike offended. George III’s exercise of prerogative on 18th December 1783, in order to appoint Pitt, instead of evoking protests from the County Associations, produced public meetings and addresses of congratulation to Pitt. 2 Throughout Pitt’s struggle to remain in office against Fox’s fading majority in the House of Commons opinion was turning towards the minister, until the general election of spring 1784 committed such a slaughter of ‘Fox’s Martyrs’ that all Burke’s hopes of office were gone. Upwards of 160 members lost their seats. The Annual Register said that among the interests which joined the Court, that of the Dissenters and the East India Company were the most considerable.3 Burke was left lamenting that a combination of king and people heralded the downfall of the country’s liberties.4 In these circumstances, his opposition to the buying out of rotten boroughs looked like fear that a few Whig aristocrats might lose their monopoly of opportunities of power. 1

N. M. Wraxall, Historical Memoirs of His Own Time, 1856, III, 373–4. Annual Register, 1784, p. 146. The Register said that Addresses poured in without attempt to oppose them or to invalidate them by counter-petitions. Therefore all motion in the country appeared on one side, and perhaps appeared more general than it was. The whole entry is a series of excuses for the landslide of 1784. 3 Ibid., p. 147. 4 Ibid., p. 149. The Annual Register printed a lengthy summary of Burke’s speech on 14th June 1784, after the opening of the new parliament. Burke, commenting on a phrase in the king’s speech, ’the people expected’, declared: ‘When Augustus Caesar modestly consented to become tribune of the people, Rome gave up into the hands of that prince the only remaining shield she had to protect her liberty’. He talked about ‘this double House of Commons’—in Parliament assembled and in Corporation and County Meeting dispersed, and foretold that the minister would play off one against the other—a parallel argument to that of the double cabinet used against the king in his Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, in 1770. 2

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Four years later, in November 1788, the king’s madness offered Fox and his friends an unexpected prospect of return to office. Determined to entrench themselves while the opportunity lasted, they actually cried up the royal prerogative, so that the Prince of Wales, whom they supported against his father, should be able to create peers and dissolve the parliament of 1784. They only confirmed their unpopularity. A further flood of addresses from county and borough meetings poured into Pitt’s office, thanking him for ‘maintaining the just and inalienable rights of the people without diminishing the prerogative of the Crown’.1 Where the Dissenters stood at this moment is difficult to tell. Pitt had deserted them, Fox had supported them; their best hope lay in the Regency. Dissenting interest or advantage and Nonconformist conscience were now on different sides.2 Some of the Dissenters may have agreed with the Ulstermen who were ‘in a considerable degree influenced by the danger apprehended from an unlimited regal power placed under the direction of needy ministers, and of a prince whose private virtues we had not been in the habit of admiring’, but whose scruples had been overcome by a strong interest—in their case, the prospect of Ireland independently nominating a regent. 3 But by the time the second Repeal motion was debated on 3rd May 1789, the king had recovered amid public rejoicing, Pitt was more firmly entrenched than ever, and Fox and Burke, out in the cold, were solacing themselves with veiled plans in case George should go mad again. During the Repeal debates of 1787 and 1789 Burke did not attend the House of Commons. His attitude in 1787 is not clear. He had received a formal request for his support for the Repeal motion from Richard Bright, chairman of a committee of the Three Denominations in his old constituency of Bristol.4 But his 1 Address from Worcester, dated 5th January 1789. Thirty of these addresses are in a box of papers among the Chatham Papers. P.R.O. 30/8/200. 2 The Application Committee approached Fox in March 1789. See Chap. II. 3 Henry Joy to Charlemont, 31st March 1789. MSS and Correspondence of James, First Earl of Charlemont Hist. MSS. Cmssn. 1894, II, 90. The Foxite Whigs’ encouragement of the Irish Parliament to appoint the Prince as Regent may have been one reason for Pitt’s desire for Union in 1800. 4 Bright to Burke, 5th May 1789. Burke Correspondence. Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Sheffield Central Reference Library. Bright begged ‘to renew the application which by their desire I did myself the honour to make to you in March 1787.’

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answer, if he sent one, is lost. In May 1789, a renewed request drew from Burke a long, rambling reply. 1 He pleaded extreme pressure of business connected with the Warren Hastings trial, fatigue and ill-health. In preferring his Indian pursuits he was ‘endeavouring to relieve twenty millions of Dissenters from the Church of England, in Asia, from real grievances which God forbid any of the Dissenters in Europe should have more feeling of, in their Persons, than any of them appear to have in any sympathy with the Sufferers’. If he found himself able to attend he would vote for the Bill in accordance with his well-known principles. But there was a difference between concurrence and activity. He was satisfied that in preferring his Indian pursuits he could not obtain a single vote for himself, family or friends towards a seat in parliament. He then protested his early attachment to the Dissenters, and his belief that they once thought they had some sort of obligation to him. He continued :– In the year 1784, a great Change took place, and all of them who seem’d to act in Corps, have held me out to publick Odium, as one of a gang of Rebels and Regicides, who had conspired at one blow to subvert the Monarchy, to annihilate, without cause, all the Corporate privileges in the Kingdom, and totally to destroy this Constitution. It is not their fault that I am in a situation to be asked by them or by anybody else for my poor Vote; or that I have even one of the old friends of my principles and my heart, to assist me, amidst the Slaughter which they have made of the most Honourable and Virtuous men in the Kingdom. Though they have failed in wholly excluding me, with all the contumely and disgrace which they intended, from the Publick service, and in destroying my feeble reputation without a possibility of reviving it, yet they have succeeded so far, as to oblige me, in my old age, to the defence of my Conduct in my days of greatest Vigour, and to hinder me from doing those services to the cause of humanity, with facility and authority, which I am now struggling to perform lamely, imperfectly and inefficiently. My strength was always in those admirable men (worthy of a better age than they live in) with whom I had been connected. Stripped of them I am nothing; and they can expect but little service from those to whom they have left little ability. He added the following day that he had not attended the House, but had heard that Mr. Fox distinguished himself as he 1

Burke to Bright, 8th May 1789. Ibid.

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did on all occasions. ‘It is not long since that he seemed to be driven from this greater Island, and that he could hardly find a sure seat in Orkney’.1 This letter shows how bitterly Burke had resented the public odium and the loss of office which followed the Fox-North coalition. With money and reputation he had also lost power; and his frustrations over the India bill, his failure to get consistent ministerial backing in his attack on Warren Hastings, were laid at the door of the Dissenters. They had stripped him of his supporters, broken up his party, and, adding insult to injury, blackened his name by mistaking him for a democrat! They had made the wrong choice and must take the consequences. Bright apparently completely missed the drift of this letter. His reply expressed his gratification at receiving it, and said it removed the doubts entertained by himself in common with many others here, ‘of your not being a cordial well wisher to the success of the Protestant Dissenters’ application to Parliament’.2 It was an error, which on numberless accounts, ‘it rejoices me to be corrected in’. He regretted that Burke had been kept by illhealth from the House, and said the Dissenters were consoled for the loss of his public support by the knowledge that ‘they may look at a future time to you for aid’. He hoped they would one day ‘open to their delusion’ and repent in contributing so largely to put it out of the power of those who ever had the inclination effectually to relieve them—‘that their delusion has so long continued, is wonderful’. He ended with praise of Mr. Fox’s speech and with some flowery compliments to Burke. This letter suggests that Burke had not regained the confidence of the majority of the Dissenters, at least in Bristol. Its suave incomprehension of Burke’s snub suggests that Mr. Bright was either imperceptive and insensitive or, more likely, being politic because he still hoped to gain Burke’s support for Repeal as well as Fox’s. Manoeuvring for the 1790 general election was already beginning, and the Dissenting vote was being used as a bait for the Repeal campaign.3 That Burke was still anxious at this time to collect the support of Dissenting 1

A reference to the scrutiny insisted on by Pitt, after the Westminster election. Bright to Burke, 11th May 1789. Burke Correspondence, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments. 3 Chap. III. 2

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leaders individually appears from a letter he wrote to Fox on 9th December 1789. 1 He was suggesting that Fox should help a neighbour who had asked him to apply to the Prince of Wales for leave to dedicate Priestley’s aerial disquisitions to His Royal Highness. It would not be amiss to write to him let the future of Priestley’s application be what it will; tho’ I cannot conceive what objection the prince can have to be considered as an encourager of Science. Besides this consideration Dr. P. is a very considerable leader among a set of men powerful enough in many things, but most of all in elections; and I am quite sure that the good or ill humour of these men will be sensibly felt at the general election. It would be material to you to gain entirely some of these dissenters who are already I fancy inclined to come over to you. This offer to dedicate to the prince is a strong overt act of that Disposition. Even if they cannot be wholly reclaimed, it would be something to neutralise the acid of that sharp and eager description of men. Burke’s decision to quarrel finally with the Dissenting leaders was presumably taken on hearing of Dr. Price’s sermon at the meeting of the Revolution Society on 4th November 1789. His reaction to the events in France had, since the fall of the Bastille, been one of deepening suspicion. On the 9th August he had written to Charlemont of ‘. . . England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud . . . The spirit it is impossible not to admire, but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a startling manner. It is true that this may be no more than a sudden explosion. If so, no indication can be taken from it. But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for liberty, and must have a strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them. . . , ’ 2 By September the French National Assembly had introduced the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and had shorn the king of his legislative power apart from a suspensive veto. On 27th September Burke wrote to his friend Windham, ‘. . . I could not feel perfectly at my ease for the situation of a friend, in a country where the people, 1 Fox General Correspondence, Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 47568. There is a photostat copy at Sheffield. 2 MSS. and Correspondence of James, First Earl of Charlemont. Historical MSS. Cmssn., 1894, II, 106.

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along with their political servitude, have thrown off the yoke of Laws and Morals . . . I have great doubt whether any form of government which they can establish will procure obedience . . . ‘1 In October, Louis XVI, now a constitutional monarch, was fetched back from Paris to Versailles by the rabble of market women. By now, as his long letter to De Pont shows, Burke had come to think of the French Revolution as an evil and dangerous threat to order and liberty.2 And on 4th November, here was Price, exulting in having ‘lived to see Thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice . . . leading their king in triumph’, and in the same sermon demanding the abolition of that gloomy and cruel superstition which had hitherto gone under the name of religion and to the support of which government had been perverted, together with those ‘public iniquities’, the Test Laws.3 Visionary speculations and abstract natural rights, French Revolution, Socinian Dissenters and Shelburne Whigs had now established their identity in Burke’s mind. During December and January he must have been writing the first draft of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which opens with the great attack on Price’s sermon; for on 18th February 1790 he lent it to Philip Francis. Francis criticized him for stooping to a war of pamphlets with Dr. Price,4 but Burke replied :– I intend no controversy with Dr. Price, or Lord Shelburne, or any other of their set. I mean to set in full view the danger from their wicked principles and their black hearts. I intend to state the true principles of our constitution in church and state, upon grounds opposite to theirs. If anyone be the better for the example made of them, and for this exposition, well and good. I mean to do my best to expose them to the hatred, ridicule, and contempt of the whole world; as I shall always expose such calumniators, hypocrites, sowers of sedition and approvers of murder and all its triumphs.5 The Bristol Deputies were happily unaware of what was passing in Burke’s mind when, on 4th February 1790, they wrote once more soliciting his support for the next motion for the 1 2 3 4 5

Burke to Windham, 27th September 1789. Windham Papers, 1913, I, 89. Dated only October 1789. Correspondence, III, 102–121. Discourse On the Love of Our Country. Works, 1816, X, 13–50. Francis to Burke, 19th February 1790. Correspondence, III, 129–130. Burke to Francis, 20th February 1790. Ibid., III, 140–141.

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repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Fox, perhaps taking Burke’s hint that the Dissenters were worth winning, had consented to move the Repeal. Bright forwarded the formal letter on 13th February, commenting that it contained a request ‘that I know it will be a pleasure to you to comply with’. 1 Bright added that he was convinced that almost every individual among the Dissenters would be more gratified by the addition of his name than by that of any other person in Parliament—the Minister alone excepted; and hoped that no circumstance connected with his health would again deprive them of his support, being assured that he would suffer no other cause to do it. Bright said he ardently wished the success of the application, but hadn’t any great hope of it at present, or during the present administration. ‘There is too intimate a connexion between civil and religious Liberty, for us to expect, that those who are constantly making encroachments on the one, should show any favour to the other.—How it is possible that in the mind of any individual, the two can ever be separated, is alone, to me, surprising.’ It was only under the protection of Mr. Fox that they were to hope for relief; and although he was not in that situation ‘in which I myself, and I now begin to trust that the majority of the dissenters wish to see him, and in which situation alone he can give effectual aid—yet the circumstance of his consenting to take the lead in this business carries such weight as to be an omen of success in no very distant period. That his assistance should have been sought by the body of Dissenters does them credit—that Mr. Fox should so readily give it does him honour.’ Dissenting opinion had shifted back to the support of Fox and Burke; but too late. Not even Mr. Bright could have ignored the meaning of Burke’s reply.2 If you will be so good as to cast your Eye over my letter (if you have it by you), you will easily perceive, that whilst my principles and wishes too, lead me not to deprive the state of the service of any of its citizens who will give security that they are not engaged in a faction against any of its legal Establishments, I had many considerations before me which made me less desirous than formerly I 1

Burke Correspondence, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments. Burke to Bright, 18th February 1790. Burke Correspondence, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments. 2

R.T.–I

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had been, of becoming active in the service of the Dissenters. I passed by many things which appeared to me, perhaps not so commendable in the conduct of those who seem’d to lead them, because I considered them as animated with, a serious, humane hatred of Tyranny, oppression and corruption in all persons in Power. I have found by experience that those who are most active and leading, and those who seem to proceed most in Corps, are of a direct contrary Character. He then accused the dissenting leaders of trying ‘to draw us into a connection and concurrence with that Nation (France), upon the principles of its proceedings and to lead us to an imitation of them. I think such designs, as far as they go, highly dangerous to the Constitution and the prosperity of this Country.’ He had very lately put into his hands two extraordinary works, so sanctioned as to leave no doubt upon my mind, that a considerable party is formed, and is proceeding systematically, to the destruction of this Constitution in some of its essential parts. I was much surprised to find Religious Assemblies turned into sort of places of exercise and discipline of Politicks; and for the nourishment of a Party which seems to have Contention and Power, much more than Piety for its object. He ended by expressing his surprise and concern that Fox should take the lead and management of the business: Because it furnishes, in my humble opinion, a very bad example, of a most immoral tendency, to the World; in teaching men, that they may persecute and calumniate their true friend, and endeavour by undermining his Reputation, and battering down his Consequence to put it out of his power to be serviceable to his Country, and yet they may (even while they are continuing these Practices) make use of his Abilities for the service of their Party. This, my dear Sir, is a terrible Example. It can have been no surprise to the Bristol Dissenters when, on 2nd March 1790, Burke rose to oppose the motion for Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts. 1 He began by explaining that he had absented himself from parliament on the last two 1 The speech is reported in Cobbett’s Parl. Hist., XXVIII (2nd March 1790), 430 et seq. Also in Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, 1816, III, 437–483.

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occasions because he had not been able to make up his mind. From information lately received, he was now able to say why he could not vote for the motion. He then proceeded to snub Pitt and justify Fox by a defence of both Chatham and Shelburne’s work in protecting the Dissenters, which he declared they had done without endangering the Church, quoting Chatham’s famous rebuke to the Archbishop of York. Next he avowed his hatred of abstract principles, and especially abstract principles of natural right, which the Dissenters rested on as their stronghold. For such principles superseded society and broke asunder those bonds which had formed the happiness of mankind for ages. The theoretical part of this speech was a summary of those ideas Burke set out at leisure in the Reflections. But more time was given to proving that the Dissenters had become a political faction, hostile and dangerous to Church and Constitution. He produced the two ‘extraordinary works’ which turned out to be the Catechisms of Robert Robinson and Samuel Palmer. He quoted from Price’s sermon, from Priestley’s declaration that he ‘hated all religious establishments, and thought them sinful and idolatrous’, and from his letter to Dr. Burn about the train of gunpowder. He also referred to a report he had received from an Independent minister, Mr. Samuel Fletcher, who had left a Repeal meeting in disgust when its convenors were shown to be plotting against the Established Church. From all these he inferred that the leading preachers among the Dissenters were avowed enemies of the Church of England, which was in greater danger than the Church of France two years ago. Burke ended by saying that ten years ago he would have voted for Repeal, but not now. If the Acts were repealed—and he agreed with the Dissenters’ own contention that the Sacramental Test was a desecration of a sacred rite for worldly ends—then a declaration should be substituted. Let there be a committee to examine the Dissenters’ conduct. He would vote for Repeal only if his facts were not established. It is fair to remark that Burke’s violent tone concealed a moderate substance. The declaration he suggested, although it contained an impractical and entirely unenforceable attempt to tie the hands of electors, and indirectly of parliament (which conflicted with his own ideas of parliamentary sovereignty) 115

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would have allowed into office all Dissenters who were prepared to tolerate Establishment.1 But it was the tone, and the accusations of political faction, that, in the circumstances of the time, influenced others. Nor were the public prepared to make the distinction, still apparently present in Burke’s mind, between the leading preachers and the ordinary Dissenting laymen. Robinson’s Political Catechism, written in 1782, to support the Shelburne administration, was a comparatively moderate and innocuous pamphlet praising the Whig version of the balanced constitution. It seems probable that Burke was confusing it with Robinson’s Plan of Lectures on the Principles of Nonconformity.2 But this had been adopted by the Eastern Association of Baptist ministers as early as 1778. Palmer’s Protestant Dissenters’ Catechism had first been published in 1775. Both these books were over ten years old. Their authors’ opinions had been discussed in parliament—attacked by Pitt and defended in the Lords by Lansdowne.3 Priestley had called Trinitarian established churches idolatrous in his controversy with Blackstone in 1770.4 While it is possible that Burke’s attention was drawn to these books in 1790 by Bishop Horsley, it is incredible that he had not known them, or at least their authors’ opinions earlier.5 If it took the French Revolution to convince him that the Dissenting leaders were so dangerous that they ought to be publicly denounced, at least his method of proving them so was disingenuous. It is apparent from Samuel Fletcher’s letter and report of the seditious remarks heard at the Warrington meet1 ‘I, A.B. do . . . believe that a religious establishment in this state is not contrary to the law of God, or disagreeable to the law of nature or to the true principles of the Christian religion, or that it is noxious to the community.’ The subscriber promised never to attempt to subvert the constitution of the Church of England as now by law established, nor employ power in office to do the same; nor give a vote in an election to any for their attachment to different religious opinions or establishment or with hope they would promote the same to the prejudice of the established church . . . Speeches, 1816, III, p. 482, footnote. 2 See Chap. II. 3 Graham Hughes, With Freedom Fired, 1955. p. 89. For Pitt’s reference to Robinson, see Cobbett’s Parl Hist. XXVI (28th March 1787), 831. 4 See Chap. II. 5 There is no evidence that it was by Horsley that Burke had had the two ‘extraordinary works’ put into his hands, but Horsley had referred most disapprovingly to Robinson’s Plan of Lectures in his Review of the Case of the Protestant Dissenters, (1790, p. 20), and pointed out that the Plan had been accepted by the Eastern Association at Harlow in 1778.

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ing, that the ‘plotting’ consisted in an intention to remove the Liturgy and abolish tithes.1 This programme, and the failure of the Independents and Baptists to get an equal number of representatives with the other Dissenters (presumably Presbyterians) for the proposed general meeting in London, had produced what was probably an inter-sectarian quarrel. Thomas Plumbe, chairman of the Bolton Committee, forwarding Fletcher’s letter to Burke, wrote: ‘The enclosed letter will give you the general opinion of one half or more of the Dissenters in this County—you will best judge the purpose it is meant to serve’. Burke used it to suggest the existence of widespread revolutionary intentions among the Dissenters. It would be unfair to accuse Burke of quarrelling with the Dissenters out of personal pique. For one thing, his breach with them also marked the opening of his quarrel with Fox. And the quarrel with Fox caused him pain. For another thing, his attitudes to religion and politics were already so far from those of the leading Dissenters that a breach would seem to have been bound to occur sooner or later. The French Revolution hardened the attitudes of both sides and drove them towards opposite extremes. None the less, it is evident that Burke was predisposed to quarrel with the Dissenters because he blamed them for his own failures. His letters to them demonstrate the petty side of his nature, and suggest that he was quite unfitted to stand the procedures and reverses of an even very moderately democratic political system. They help to explain why, whatever he may have been as a philosopher, he was such a failure as a politician. Christopher Wyvill, repudiating Burke’s charges against the Dissenting leaders, contended that the Repeal Bill would probably have passed if Burke’s invective had not aroused the fear of innovation and the ‘jealous spirit of state policy’.2 But Pitt’s desertion had been much more damaging. The voting figures suggest that with Pitt’s help the Dissenters might at least have got a Repeal bill through the House of Commons before the Revolution came to widen the gulf between Dissenters and 1

Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Burke, Bk. I, 516. A Defence of Dr. Price and the Reformers of England, 1792, p. 13. Wyvill was a Yorkshire clergyman who had helped to found the County Associations of 1779. He became an ardent Reformer and tolerationist, although he never resigned his benefice. He was a correspondent of William Wilberforce. 2

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churchmen. The figures also suggest that Burke’s speech had little immediate effect on the steady block of about 100 M.P.s who voted on all three occasions for Repeal. The real difference was, that in 1790 a far greater number turned up to vote against it. Other Whigs besides Burke and many other conservativeminded men must have reacted as he did to the news from France, and have sprung to the defence of the status quo. Long before his speech battle had been joined between the Dissenters and the Church Party all over England. The Dissenters’ best hope lay in getting their influential friends in high quarters to push their relief through parliament as quietly as possible. This, partly because of their inadvertent entanglement in Whig group jealousies, they had failed to do. In 1790 they were defeated before ever Burke went down to the House of Commons. But his violent and consistent hostility after that date certainly helped to ensure that their chance should not quickly come again. II Burke’s decision in 1790 that the Dissenters were dangerous enemies of Church and State necessitated some shift of emphasis in his expressions of opinion upon their claims. In 1773 he had said that connivance, that is, the tacit understanding that the penal laws would not be enforced, was ‘a relaxation from slavery, not a definition of liberty’.2 In 1792 he was maintaining that the Test Laws were a dead letter, and denying that, in contrast to the Catholics, the Protestant Dissenters suffered real hardship.3 He could then turn against the Dissenters’ demand for office the aphorism he had used against the Clerical Petitioners in 1772; that ‘Dissent, not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition’.4 In 1792, when he was working for the enfranchisement of the Irish forty-shilling freeholders, he stressed the distinction between the franchise (which the Dissenters already had) and the capacity for office under the Crown (which they wanted), declaring that this difference was recognized in legislature as it was founded in reason.5 1 Votes on the Repeal motions: 1787, 178 to 100; 1789, 124 to 104; 1790, 294 to 105. 2 Speech on the Relief of Protestant Dissenters, 17th March 1773. Works, VII, 24. 3 First Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe. Works, IV, 252–3. 4 Speech on the Acts of Uniformity. Works, VII, 13. 5 First Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe. Works, IV, 252–3. Possibly legislature meant legislation.

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Burke had never accepted the Dissenters’ contention that the magistrate had no jurisdiction over opinion. In 1773, reviving an ancient distinction, he distinguished between the interior and exterior parts of religion, agreeing that while interior religion (presumably private prayer and belief) is within the jurisdiction of God alone, bodily action, that is exterior ceremonies and published advocacy, is in the jurisdiction of the chief magistrate. He cited Hooker in support of this view, but added that under the Toleration Act a part of these powers had been given up. 1 In 1790 he agreed with Fox who was upholding the view that government should consider only men’s actions, not their opinions; but he produced evidence that the Dissenters’ actions and declared intentions made them dangerous. By 1792 he was vehemently maintaining that a government, representing the society, has a general superintending control ‘over all the actions and over all the publicly propagated doctrines of men, without which it never could provide adequately for all the wants of society’. Religion, far from being out of the province of the Christian magistrate, ought to be the principal thing in his care.2 Government had an interest and a duty and therefore a right to attend much to opinions, ‘because, as opinions soon combine with passions, even when they do not produce them, they have much influence on actions’.3 The Unitarians, that is, the Rational Dissenters were a faction; they were becoming a body corporate, disloyal and menacing the public peace. The Catholics were not and would not be unless driven by persecution into the arms of the Jacobins who were their natural foes. By 1792 Burke was stressing the arguments of the opponents of Repeal. Burke had always defended the Anglican Church Establishment, maintaining that those who attacked it, whether Clerical Petitioners or Dissenters, were themselves intolerant. In 1772– 3 he appeared to conceive of the Established Church as the leader in the band of religious associations in their common struggle against the powers of unbelief.4 Again there was a change of 1

Speech on the Relief of Protestant Dissenters. Works, IV, I, 80. The distinction between foro externo and foro interno was still used by William Penn, but rarely appeared in later eighteenth-century arguments. 2 Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians. Works, VII, 43. 3 Ibid. 44. 4 See his Speech on the Relief of Protestant Dissenters. Works, VII, 23 et seq.

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emphasis. In 1792 the Anglican Church was, to Burke, the crystallization of the national religious experience of the English people, as the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland was that of the Irish people. Indeed, Burke called the Alliance between Church and State an ‘idle and fanciful speculation’. An alliance is between two naturally distinct and independent things, such as two Sovereign States, whereas, in a Christian Commonwealth, Church and State are ‘one and the same thing, being different integral parts of the same whole’.1 In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke described this connexion at length. The Church had consecrated the commonwealth, in order to moralize the rulers, ‘that their hope should be full of immortality’, and that the free citizens should exercise their portion of power with awe and humility and responsibility to God.2 Thus the ‘temporary possessors and life renters’, i.e. each generation, would approach the fabric of the State with reverence, and not seek to subvert it under cover of reforming it. ‘He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue willed also the necessary means of its perfection: He willed, therefore, the State: He willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection.’3 Describing the functions of the Established Church, Burke laid special emphasis on the value of its hierarchy. The corporate fealty and homage, i.e. the services in the State Church, should be performed in buildings, in music and decoration, in dignity of persons, ‘with modest splendour, with unassuming state, with mild majesty and sober pomp’. For this was the public consolation in which the poor man, assisting, should be reminded of his equality, his reward in the life to come.4 To this purpose some part of the wealth of the country was usefully employed ‘in fomenting the luxury of individuals’. But hierarchy also enabled the Church’s influence to penetrate all ranks of a class-constituted society. To be respected by the high born, wealthy and dignified, she must ‘exalt her mitred front in courts and parliaments’.5 She must not live upon the alms of grudging congregations, nor must her body of teachers be ‘in no part above the establishment 1

Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians. Works, VII, 43. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Works, III, 353. Ibid., p. 361. 4 Ibid., p. 361–2. 5 Ibid., p. 368.

2

3

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of their domestic servants’ (a poke at the dependence of Dissenting ministers, particularly Baptists and Independents, upon their congregations). 1 The Church, in fact, must have property; and once that was established, it was useless to niggle about ‘the more or the less’. Hierarchy went with land and wealth, and so the Church was economically and politically as well as spiritually bound up with the State. Burke’s conception was a repudiation of the Warburton theory of an Alliance based on a double contract, in favour of the High Church position attributed to Hooker in which each nation was united with a portion of the Universal providential Church, adapted in form to its own constitution. The Church of England was a member of the great partnership, the ‘great contract of eternal society’. In his early days, Burke had expressly, if privately, disowned the principle suggested by the Warburton Alliance, that the end of religion was to be useful to human society. ‘If you attempt (he wrote) to make the end of Religion to be its Utility to human society, to make it only a sort of supplement to the Law, and insist principally upon this Topic, as is very common to do, you then change its principle of Operation, which consists of Views beyond this Life, to a consideration of another kind, and an inferior kind; and thus, by forcing it against its Nature to become a Political Engine, you make it an Engine of no efficacy at all.’2 But he was certainly not insensible to the help which religion offered in keeping the lower orders obedient to government in a society which offered them no prospect of what he considered a civilized life. ‘. . . Moral Duties are included in Religion, and enforced by it.’3 After 1790 Burke’s main theme was that political institutions must agree with the dictates of nature, or of natural morality; and natural subordination was part of these. What Burke feared was not the idea that religion was necessary to social order, but that it was just a nostrum to keep the people quiet. Such a view, generally considered typical of the more sceptical and cynical kind of Tory, could very easily be imputed to churchmen. Burke must have been infinitely 1

Ibid., p. 367. Religion of No Efficacy, Considered as a State Engine. From A Notebook of Edmund Burke, ed. H. V. F. Somerset, Cambridge, 1957, p. 67. The Notebook, found in the Wentworth Woodhouse Collection at Sheffield, was apparently written between 1750 and 1756, but not published. 3 Ibid.‚ p. 70. 2

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offended by Paine’s jibe: ‘The key of St. Peter and the key of the Treasury became quartered on one another, and the wondering cheated multitude worshipped the invention’.1 Such cynicism was foreign to his nature, and would have violated his conception of world order and providence. Probably for this reason he rejected the arguments of Sherlock, and took the Dissenters’ part in their protest against the Sacramental Test. He thought the Sacrament too solemn for such prostitution; men must not be tempted to take it for the sake of gain. By wounding a man’s conscience they ‘annihilated the God within him, . . . and violated him in his sanctuary’.2 So in 1790 he wanted to substitute for the Sacramental Test his declaration containing the oath not to disturb the Church. Burke did not concern himself with the dogmatic or theological aspects of religion, or intervene in the contemporary controversies about the Trinity or the Atonement. But his debt to Bishop Butler in his general conception of religion is very plain. He wrote in his early notebook: ‘The Principle of Religion is that God attends to our Actions to reward and punish them’.3 It is evident from this book that religion appeared to him as a system of rewards and punishments in the next world for our behaviour in this, and from the Reflections, that it also appeared as a system of consolation for the evils and injustices of this world. His interest in it was largely in relation to morals, and what was to him the same thing, to politics. The necessity of establishing to the individual intellect the truth of the tenets of the Christian churches and harmonizing them with the discoveries of science did not agitate him. Religion was a matter of feeling rather than reason. ‘God has been pleased to give mankind an Enthusiasm to supply the want of Reason; and truely, Enthusiasm comes nearer the great and comprehensive Reason in its effects, though not in the manner of Operation, than the Common Reason does; which works on confined, narrow, common, and therefore plausible, Topics. The former is the lot of the very few. The latter is common; and fit enough for common affairs.’4 In his use of the much breathed-on word ‘Enthusiasm’ in the 1 2 3 4

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man. Everyman Edition, pp. 46–47. Speech on the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Speeches, 1816, III, 481. Religion of No Efficacy, etc. Notebook, p. 67. Ibid., p. 68.

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sense of emotional faith, Burke had already entered a romantic world far from that of Bishop Butler. There is no reason to suppose that he ever abandoned this early distinction between the lower reason and the higher feeling (in which he foreshadowed Coleridge’s distinction between the understanding and the reason), and hence he bore the seeds of a fundamental lack of sympathy with the Rational Dissenters in their contention that priority must be given to the search for truth. Before 1790 this was partly concealed by the fact that he had a good deal of respect for the Nonconformist conscience. He thought that an obstinate adherence to religious opinion was a sign of sincerity, and therefore a safeguard against scepticism and atheism. There was a certain admiration in his account of the stiff-necked Protestant libertarians in New England, with whom religion was an unimpaired principle of energy.1 After 1790 he no longer attributed the Dissenting demand for the liberty of private judgement to a tender conscience, but to a determination to become a faction in the State. Thus he was infuriated at attacks on the Church in the name of Protestantism. Protestantism (interpreted by the Rational Dissenters as a revolt from Established Churches and fixed creeds) was pure negativism, nihilism, destructiveness. He was no longer prepared to tolerate the argument that establishment hindered the free discovery of religious truth. In 1773 he had said: ‘My opinion is, that, in establishing the Christian religion wherever you find it, curiosity or research is its best security . . .’ 2 Yet before that date he had laid down the necessity for an authority to interpret religious doctrine, especially for the purpose of bringing some uniformity into the understanding of the Bible, that ‘vast collection of different treatises . . . a most venerable, but most multifarious collection of the records of the divine economy’.3 There was need for an interpreter and unifier, in fact for a traditional Church. Burke never had any confidence that the truth was to be found by each man searching the Scriptures. Nor did he value diversity. ‘Do not promote diversity; when you have it, bear it.’ 4 He shared the churchmen’s view that the arrangement of institutions to promote free discussion was more likely to 1 2 3 4

Speech on Conciliation with America. Works, II, 123–3. Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters. Works, VII, 34. Speech on the Acts of Uniformity. Works, VII, 18–19. Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters. Works, VII, 36.

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produce strife than to produce agreement on a body of fundamental established truth. He said to the Clerical Petitioners of 1772: ‘I will not enter into the question, how much truth is preferable to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues’.1 Burke did not renew his discussion of the Rational Dissenters’ demand for freedom from all fixed creeds and dogmas; but he evidently considered it the fruit of their perverse addiction to ‘abstract’ and ‘metaphysical’ speculation. After 1790 he was ready to class the Rational Dissenters with the Deists and Atheists; to lump Price and Priestley with Paine (it does not appear that he ever crossed swords with Bentham); to use language calculated to persuade alarmed churchmen that the Rational Dissenters were the French Revolution’s infidel ’fifth column’ in Britain. After 1790 Burke thought the Rational Dissenters a danger not only to the Church, but also, directly, to the State and civilized secular society; for they demanded political equality on the basis of the ‘speculative’ doctrine of natural rights. He was mainly concerned to combat the contention of the neo-Lockeians that natural rights were carried over from the state of nature into society, either untouched by the social contract, or surrendered into a common pool for redistribution. But his real objection was less to the conception of natural rights (he used it himself), than to the fact that most of the Dissenters’ natural rights were immunities or liberties, i.e. the rights of conscience or of selfdefence. He objected to the right of self-government or to claims to a share in the state government founded on it. Therefore, in refuting the Lockeians he was equally refuting the more developed individual rights theories of Price. Burke maintained that the abstract principles of natural rights had long been given up ‘for the advantage of having, what was much better, society, which substituted wisdom and justice, in the room of original right. It annihilated all those natural rights, and drew to its mass all the component parts of which those rights were made up’.2 He thought that society was only made 1 2

Speech on the Acts of Uniformity. Works, VII, 14. Speech on the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Speeches, 1816, III, 476.

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possible by the total surrender of the keys of individual independence (the right, or power, of self-defence and of judging in one’s own cause). Their retention in society was a contradiction, for it made social order impossible.1 The Dissenters saw liberty as prior to society, society’s obligation being to preserve it. Burke’s society was prior to liberty, and his liberty, though not unimportant, was at the other end of the process. It was inseparable ‘from order, from virtue, from morals and from religion’, which must be established first.2 After this it was secured by the arrangement of the institutions of order in such a way as to check the over-great concentration or arbitrary use of power. Burke was essentially conservative in that he did not trust human nature to govern itself without a strong framework of institutions. In the Reflections Burke gave a list of what he considered the real rights of men, i.e. those they obtained through civil society. These were the fulfilment of men’s needs, of the natural instinctive demands men make upon life; that is not to say the primary physical and psychological needs for food, shelter, sex, affection, family life; but for the secondary needs arising directly from them; for family inheritance, for the tools and fruits of their industry, for ‘instruction in life and . . . consolation in death’.3 These things only organized society could secure. Neither in isolation nor in the anarchy which was all that so-called society based on ‘metaphysical natural rights’ could afford, would they be safe. The instinctive urge for individual liberty, for selfgovernment, from which the Dissenters derived both their rights of exemption from social control and their claims to share in political power, was not on Burke’s list. It was a destructive instinct, leading to selfish ambition; a passion to be repressed in favour of the constructive social instincts. Man was properly a social animal; and theories based upon his characteristics as an isolated being, or which seemed to regard him in dissociation from his community, were idle, misleading, and harmful. Burke’s attack upon the Lockeians brought him to the position that the rights ‘natural’ to man were those he received 1 See C. Parkin, The Moral Basis of Burke’s Political Thought, Cambridge, 1956, pp. 12–13. 2 Letter to a Noble Lord. Works, V, 183. 3 Reflections, etc. Works, III, 308–9.

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through society. This involved the paradox that man was most natural in society. It has been pointed out that Burke really put an end to the distinction between the state of nature and ‘artificial’ society.1 The state most natural to men was that of a well ordered society in which they could develop all their faculties. He wrote: ‘It is man’s nature to cultivate his reason and art’. And again: ‘We are as much, at least, in a state of Nature in formed manhood as in immature and helpless infancy’.2 It was a teleological, Aristotelian conception. A man’s nature was his potentiality realized, not his primitive beginning. And since he could only realize the potentiality in society, through family, party and State, the State, though created by convention, was ‘natural’. The meaning, or lack of meaning, of Burke’s state of nature was not realized at the time, because he retained the Lockeian phraseology and because he made a real distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘conventional’ for the purpose of reserving to the State (the fruit of convention) the right to distribute offices created by itself. But he had really been answering Price’s conception of the individual as an end in himself by running to the opposite pole of the individualist-collectivist argument, and maintaining that the individual only became valuable in and through society. By himself the individual was nothing—a mere beast, deserter, vagabond; a prey to his own passions or to those of his strongest neighbour; one of a ‘multitude told by the head’.3 He was not a civilized being until he had been reduced by force or fear into membership of a new society. Price’s ‘metaphysical’ natural rights began with the isolated individual and invented a State to suit him. Burke considered that the legitimate political theorist patiently studied the various social and political forms which men had evolved in the course of their experience. The statesman then helped his own form to function by purging it of deformities and adapting it, essentially unharmed, to the circumstances of the time. Burke would not support the Rational Dissenters in their demand for repeal of the Test Laws because they were radical 1 H. V. S. Ogden, ‘The State of Nature and the Decline of Lockeian Political Theory in England, 1760–1800.’ American Historical Review, 1940–1, 46, 21, et seq. 2 Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs. Works, IV, 176. 3 Ibid., 177.

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iconoclasts seeking to return men to their state of nature, or of isolation. Equally as infidels and as democrats they sought power in order to throw down existing institutions and to trample on the ‘prejudices’ which cemented them. Moreover they personally were rootless men, not anchored by land, not attached by prejudice to the Church or the constitution, not tied by the responsibility of a ruling aristocracy. They were the men of talent who had thrown off the fear of God and man,1 lovers of their kind but haters of their kindred. Their real motive was ambition, and under cover of building a Utopia of natural rights they intended to seize power for themselves. For the individual right of self-government Burke substituted the right of the State. Like Warburton he conceived of the State as a corporation, identifiable by its leaders rather than its mass. In so far as it was derived from convention (agreed or acquiesced-in institutions) it was an artificial or ‘moral’ corporation. In so far as it accorded with the order of nature, being based on the natural associations of family groups, buttressed with masses of private property, it was natural. Being natural, it was also unequal, for primitive equality vanished on man’s entry into society. (Burke was quite capable of taking ideas from Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Inequality, as his early semi-satirical Vindication of Natural Society had shown.) Inequality was the inevitable accompaniment of development, and men had equal rights indeed, but not to equal things.2 Burke would not recognize a proper, incorporated state without aristocratic leadership.8 Recognizing the State as a corporation with corporate rights, Burke had to combat the rival corporate view of the State; the idea of the sovereign people acting by a general will. It has already been suggested that there had been some groping towards this in the old radical suggestion that rulers and forms of government could be changed at the will of the nation.4 In its developed form it was a French view, expressed in Rousseau’s 1 Letter to a Noble Lord. Works, V, 216, in which Burke told the young Duke of Bedford who had been criticizing his pension exactly what he thought of a nobleman who deserted the responsibilities of the position in which he was born to become the follower of middle-class adventurers of talent. 2 Reflections. Works, III, 309. 3 At the end of his life Burke laid increasing stress on individual leadership, and seemed about to develop some sort of ‘Führerprinzip’. 4 See Chap. III.

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Social Contract. Burke was not beyond referring to a ‘constructive general will’ rising from convention;1 but he considered the ‘sovereign people’ nothing but a lawless mob, acting under the influence of the men of talent, and carrying out a régime of arbitrary will. It was not according to the natural order, but the product of violent innovation. It consisted of ‘numbers told by the head’ and not in natural subordination. He opposed to it the true corporate State, stabilized by a land-owning aristocracy, consecrated by a Church, regulated by a constitution growing naturally from its social order. His model was to hand in the British constitution. Burke took an Old Whig view of the constitution, similar to that expressed by Bolingbroke in the Dissertation on Parties, but especially emphasizing the constitution’s continuity and (after 1790) its rejection of popular features.2 He proved from the Whig arguments at Dr. Sacheverell’s trial, that the men of 1688 had taken the utmost care to deviate as little as possible from the hereditary line of succession. They had never claimed that the monarchy was elective, nor that the people had the right to change either the king or the constitution. The Revolution had been justified only by a ‘breach of the original contract, implied and expressed in the constitution of this country, as a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed in King, Lords and Commons’.3 Power, although from the people, was not in the people. In the hands of the masses it would be more tyrannically used than in those of a despot. A perfect democracy was ‘the most shameless thing in the world’.4 Power was in the various parts of the constitution, arranged to balance each other. ‘He who thinks that the British Constitution ought to consist of the three members, of three very different natures, of which it does actually consist, and thinks it his duty to preserve each of those members in its proper place and with its proper proportion of power, must (as each shall happen to be attacked) vindicate the three several parts of the several principles peculiarly belonging to them.’ 5 The balance provided a 1

Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs. Works, IV, 171. Burke despised Bolingbroke as a superficial writer—perhaps because of his Deism. 3 Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs. Works, IV, 121. 4 Reflections, etc. Works, III, 355. 5 Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs. Works, IV, 93. 2

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check on power, and was therefore the great preservative of English liberty. Here was a quite conventional statement of the ‘balanced constitution’. This constitution was also seen as the expression of a compact or covenant, by which the people was incorporated into nation or state. The particular nature of the agreement was ‘collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast’.1 This was the crystallized constitution, the result of the compact which could not be violated without disrupting the society. But Burke was faced with a Thomas Paine claiming that Britain had no legitimate constitution because there never had been a contract, merely a conquest by William the Conqueror. So he had to consider more carefully how this compact had been made. Burke’s social contract is not easy to define, because, although he wrote in terms of contract (or compact or agreement), he used the term in unfamiliar ways. The Old Whigs had thought of the settlements following 1688 as a compact binding on all successors. Burke said that, in these settlements, the nation had ‘renewed by a fresh compact the spirit of the original compact of the state’, binding itself in its existing members and in its posterity to adhere to the hereditary succession.2 The original compact would seem, therefore, to go back into an indefinite series of historical events which had shaped the constitution as it stood. Although Burke recognized some laws as ‘fundamental’ in the sense of constitutionally important and therefore specially to be reverenced, such as Magna Carta, and the Habeas Corpus Act, the making of the contract was not the occasion of any one of these laws. Rather it was the combination of all these occasions with the fact of antiquity, or prescription. That laws had stood long meant they were part of the outcome of the contract. The contract was the crystallization process itself; gradual, successive, and flexible enough to allow change for the purpose of conservation. But Burke’s theory of the constitution had not arrived at being teleological. The society and its constitution did not develop towards any self perfection or grand climax. Nor was it ‘organic’. The State, being an ‘artificial’ combination did not grow and die in any inevitable 1 2

Ibid., 169–70. Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs. Works, IV, 135.

R.T.–K

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fashion like a physical being.1 Yet it contained and was affected by the passage of each generation. Burke described the nature (as distinguished from the origin) of the contract as a partnership. It was: ‘A partnership in all science, a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection . . . not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place’.2 Setting aside the mystic or providential element in the ‘great partnership’ it seems that Burke did not mean by the social contract of each state any historical or even figurative event. If anything it was some binding element in a continuing social and political tie. Sometimes he wrote as though it were the element of universal consent. Thus, if an ancient incorporation were dissolved, ‘any number of individuals, who can agree upon it, have an undoubted right to form themselves into a state apart and wholly independent’.3 If then any individual were forced into the fellowship of another, this would be conquest, not compact, and as a free covenant null and void. Evidently in 1791 Burke was still concerned to defend his earlier support of American independence. But he also wrote that the continuance of a society ‘is under a permanent, standing covenant, coexisting with the society; and it attaches upon every individual of that society, without any formal act of his own’.4 Duties to the State, like other duties, are matters of nature but are not voluntary. Elsewhere he admitted that many of the older societies (including the English) had not originated by agreement. So he had now drained the idea of consent both from the origin and from the continuation of the State. If the word contract (or compact) implies a voluntary agreement, or at least an arrangement made with the expressed con1

Letters on a Regicide Peace. Works, V, 234. Reflections, etc. Works, III, 359. 3 Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs. Works, IV, 172. 4 Ibid., p. 165. 2

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sent of the parties, Burke’s social contract was unrecognizable as such. The last sentence of the famous ‘partnership’ passage suggests that he had substituted for consent, conformity to the order of nature, which, since it was every man’s long-term interest, rendered conscious consent unnecessary. It was the same sort of idea as that of virtual representation. ‘. . . The presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things’.1 Yet Burke found the terms ‘compact’, ‘covenant’ and ‘agreement’ very useful, in a variety of ways. He used ‘compact’ to describe a series of laws relating to the machinery, powers and methods of government; to describe an implied agreement between ruler and people which prevented the people from dismissing their rulers at will. Finally he used it to describe the de facto co-operation of the classes and generations in each society, and beyond that the partnership of the nations in the order of nature, that is the universal providence of God. While Burke stood on the shoulders of what he called the Old Whigs who might be said to have become the Hanoverian Tories, he had risen above their heads. He, like they, looked backwards; but his was a political theory on a moral, not a legalistic basis. He was therefore unable to accept the Tory conception of fundamental laws, and wholly supported the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament. He emphasized that the sovereign legislature was the king in parliament, so that legislative power was shared by the King, Lords and Commons, that is, by all the independent balancing elements in the constitution. In 1772 he pointed out that the Act of Union was not irreversible at any point. The power of rectifying the most sacred laws must be vested in the legislature; ‘Because every legislature must be supreme and omnipotent with respect to the law, which is its own creature’.2 The king swore to preserve the religion established by law, which was whatever the law established. Twenty-three years later he said the same thing in much more cautious language, in discussing George III’s stand on his coronation oath against Catholic relief. Magna Carta was a fundamental law. ‘Yet I cannot go so far as to deny the authority 1

Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs. Works, IV, 166. Clerical Petition for Relief from Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, 6th February 1772. Speeches, 1816, I, 95. 2

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of statutes made in defiance of Magna Carta and all its principles.’ He would say, ‘that it is a very venerable law, made by very wise and learned men, and that the legislature, in their attempt to perpetuate it, even against the authority of future Parliaments, have shown their judgement that it is fundamental, on the same grounds and in the same manner that the Act of the fifth of Anne has considered and declared the establishment of the Church of England to be fundamental’.1 Not surprisingly Burke’s language was sometimes misunderstood. He sounded so conservative, and yet he was suggesting that old and important laws were liable to repeal like any others. There was a moral obligation not to tamper with them lightly, since they contained the principles of the constitution as formulated by the wisdom of our ancestors. To cherish these ‘fundamental’ laws was the mark of political responsibility, for ‘people will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors’.2 In the same way, Burke refused to agree that the constitution was unalterable. ‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.’3 Changes in the constitution constitutionally carried out by parliament were necessary and advantageous, so long as their object was the conservation, not the destruction, of the constitution itself. Burke took the Old Whig theory of the State and made it into a comprehensive political system. The groundwork of his system was a providential natural order embodying natural law or justice; the good and evil which are ‘the same everywhere’. Even when he wrote of utility, or ‘prudence’, Burke meant that within the framework of each society men’s advantages should be considered, because such consideration accorded with nature. Real pleasure (or good) lay in subjection to the natural order, and real pain (or evil) resulted from rebellion against it. His was a conservative system, because he saw the natural order in existing institutions, however ‘conventional’, and so took as the guide to political action the experience of history ‘crystallized’ in those institutions, and the laws guarding them. Yet his system fell short of Hegelianism, because his law of nature and 1 2 3

First Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe. Works, IV, 267. Reflections, etc. Works, III, 274. Ibid., III, 259.

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his God did not work entirely within and through existing institutions. They remained outside as a norm to which men should strive to conform, and as a God accessible through prayer, who blessed the Church to consecrate the State. He did not reach the ‘immanence’ of Hegel. Also, because he saw much chance and no regular patterns in history, his system lacked the ’historicist’ element of Hegel’s. His providence did not move into the future, nor did his present exhibit itself as the culmination of a purposeful past.1 Burke like Priestley had a strong belief in a providential system. Like Robert Robinson he referred all to nature, although Robinson’s conception of nature was Deistic and in no way Aristotelian. In his essentialism (although he applied it to institutions) he was not so far from Price. Of course he was as speculative as the Rational Dissenters. All of them were speculating about the norm of political action, about what ought to be done in the field of politics. The Dissenting philosophers referred to their own conceptions of natural rights, while Burke preferred to appeal to his own conception of natural law. Each side started from a different view of human nature, Burke from a pessimistic view (perhaps from a Christian view of original sin) and his opponents from a more optimistic one when events would allow them to do so. The Dissenters wanted change, and Burke, on the whole, wanted things as they were. He could start from the actualities, for he represented the ‘haves’, and they one class of political ‘have nots’. So Burke praised the status quo (except in Ireland) and charged his enemies with being ‘abstract’, ‘speculative’ and ‘metaphysical’. The influence of Burke on the later stages of the toleration controversies was not what he would have desired. The Dissenters’ agitation for repeal of the Test Laws lay fallow for thirty years after his death; and in so far as this was partly his doing, he was successful. But after 1800 controversy centred mainly on Catholic Emancipation. Of all Burke’s writings on behalf of the Catholics, only the First Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe was extensively remembered and quoted. On the other hand, the ‘Protestant’ Tories seized upon his denunciations of innovation, and turned them against all proposals for 1 He was not far from this position. See L. Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago, 1953, p. 319.

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the admission of Catholics to parliament and office. Even the distinction between franchise and office which Burke had used to support the Irish forty-shilling freehold vote of 1793 without accepting Repeal, was used in the nineteenth century to oppose any further concessions. Moreover, the friends of the Catholics were hampered in their arguments by the extreme disfavour into which—not of course only because of Burke—the whole conception of natural rights had fallen. Perhaps Burke would have done even more damage to the Roman Catholic cause if the more fundamental aspects of his arguments had been more readily understood and adopted. He attempted to repopularize a much ‘higher’ view of the relations between Church and State than the Warburton one. The trend of such a view was hostile to the toleration of religious minorities. And unless the English political leaders were prepared to accept the Roman Catholic Church as the appropriate ‘partnership’ church of the Irish nation—which they certainly were not —the Catholics would have suffered (as they did suffer at the hands of churchmen) at least as much as the Protestant Dissenters from a widespread adherence to the view that establishment meant union of secular and ecclesiastical constitutions. Burke was an important link in the development in England of the idea of the corporate State. He stood half way between Bolingbroke’s progressive series of fundamental laws and Coleridge’s developing Idea. He also stood half way between Warburton’s compact-formed corporation and Gladstone’s full view of the State as a moral person. Although Burke, after 1790, paid much attention to securing the monarchy, the corporate view of the State was more important in conservative thinking. It substituted a corporate personality for the royal prerogative as the agent responsible for the State’s ecclesiastical constitution; so that it became possible to believe in the union of Church and State without believing in Divine Right. But the corporate State spelled danger to those who could be said to be foreign, or to owe allegiance to authorities outside it; and this was the prime charge against the Roman Catholics. Burke’s real intellectual heirs were the Lake poets, especially Coleridge. But Coleridge was anti-Papist with a venom which smacked more of popular Methodism than of Bishop Horsley’s old-fashioned moderate High Churchism. By 1800 Catholic and 134

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Dissenting leaders had learned that toleration, like its opposite, was indivisible. He who popularized the Hooker High Church view, and turned the Alliance into an indissoluble Union, could not pick and choose which of the unpopular religious minorities should suffer from the fetters it might impose.

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V Roman Catholic Emancipation

I THE Roman Catholic Emancipation controversy, in the form which dominated English domestic politics from 1800 to 1829, was precipitated by the French Revolution. In 1793 England went to war with France, and the perennial problem of keeping Ireland loyal once more became acute. The Irish Catholic Relief Act of 1793 removed most of the remaining serious restrictions on Catholic profession and worship, together with disabilities in property owning, and enfranchised the Irish Catholic fortyshilling freeholders. The violent reaction of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy families to this Act, and the brief Lord Lieutenancy and sudden recall of the over-zealous Lord Fitzwilliam, produced a crisis. George III took his first stand upon the coronation oath against further concessions, and the disaffected Catholics were temporarily driven (as Burke had feared they would be) into the arms of the rebellious Ulstermen. The rising which followed precipitated the Union of the English and Irish parliaments; and this brought the Catholic question firmly into the centre of the English political stage, and kept it there. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, Roman Catholicism was felt by many Conservatives to be, as Burke represented it, a counterpoise to the irreligious and anarchistic influence of France. But this was a new and feeble sentiment compared with the fierce and time-hallowed prejudices to which both English and Irish Roman Catholics were subject. Of course the situation was quite different in the two islands. English 136

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Catholics were a small minority, increased since 1790 by refugees from the Continent, but generally speaking, a survival of indigenous families from an earlier age. Members of the old Catholic nobility still existed, and the religion had not, like Protestant sectarianism, tended to become identified with lower middle class status or associated with class distinctions. Rather the prejudice was religious and historical, or anti-Irish and nationalist. Legal disabilities had always been much harsher than those suffered by the Protestant Dissenters and 1688 only confirmed these disabilities.1 Until 1791 Catholics continued to be excluded from the protection of the Toleration Act. The Elizabethan and Jacobean penal statutes remained on the book with their denunciations of the Mass, their restrictions on movement, their denial of education and professional opportunity. As late as 1782 Charles Butler recorded the case of two poor Catholic labourers who were summoned by a J.P. and fined a shilling each for not repairing to church. Their furniture had been sold up to pay the fine and expenses.2 The Act of 1791 exempted Catholics who were prepared to take an oath from the operation of the penal statutes, and legalized Roman Catholic worship and the building of chapels subject to certain restrictions. But English Catholics were not only still excluded from office by the Test and Corporation Acts; they were excluded from both Houses of Parliament by the Act of 1678, and from voting at parliamentary elections by an Act of 1689. Exclusion was not primarily by Sacramental Test, but by the Oath of Supremacy and by declarations against Popery and against Transubstantiation specially worded to debar them. Liability to these oaths was not touched by the Acts of Indemnity. The Catholics really were excluded from public life, and from advancement in the professions. But the question exactly how these disabilities operated at any period presents difficulties at least as great as that of the disabilities of Protestant Dissenters.3 Certainly the operation of many of these laws 1 A survey of the disabilities remaining after 1791 is given by Bernard Ward in The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, 1911,I,1–10. 2 Statement of the Present Situation in this Country Drawn up by Mr. Charles Butler (Appendix to A Letter to the Author of the Review of the Case of the Protestant Dissenters, etc., by Sir Henry Englefield, Bart., Dublin, 1790, pp. 56–60). 3 E.g., J. R. Western, ‘Roman Catholics Holding Military Commissions in 1798‚’ English Historical Review, 1955, LXX, 428–32.

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depended on private enforcement and the state of public feeling. In Ireland the Catholics formed four-fifths of the population, and Protestants were everywhere a small minority except in the north. The development of a comparatively prosperous and politically vocal Catholic merchant and professional class since the relief measures of 1778 was counterbalanced by the growth of Orangeism. The corporations were ruled by close Protestant oligarchies, and there were complaints of corruption and religious partiality in all the lower courts of justice. After 1793 the Irish were generally better off in law than the English Catholics, and worse off in practice. The controversial literature produced by the struggle for Catholic Emancipation was of vast bulk but mostly of poor quality. There were various reasons for this. The French Revolution had thrown political theorizing, at least on the Radical side, so greatly out of favour that it was considered dangerous to refer to matters of principle. Only justifications from expediency were acceptable. The widespread prevalence of prejudice against ‘Popery’ produced continual repetition of the same accusations, and continual repetition of the same replies. The Catholic Emancipation controversy was an excellent demonstration of the fact that prejudice cannot be dispelled by reason, if the Radicals had chosen to see it. Finally, the greater part of the controversy was really a discussion on how to deal with Ireland, and concerned matters of urgent policy rather than principle. The Catholic controversy, for all its length and intensity, added less to the theory of religious toleration than the Repeal dispute. It has been pointed out that Catholic Emancipation was really an Irish question.1 The Irish aspect of it was complex. It included the problem of the relations between England and Ireland; how to keep the Irish from rebelling with French assistance during the wars; how to obtain sufficient recruits for the army and to ensure their loyalty; how to stabilize the Union. Anglo-Irish relations were also complicated by the position of the Ulster Presbyterians and by the Protestant Ascendancy families of the south who looked to the British government to ensure the continuation of their privileges. There was moreover the question of what to do about the extreme 1

W . R. Brock, Lord Liverpool and Liberal Toryism, Cambridge, 1941, p. 40. 138

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poverty of the Irish peasants and the endemic unrest arising from it. After 1800 this became for the first time a responsibility which the English parliament and public could not entirely ignore. Yet Catholic Emancipation was also a question of religious toleration. In England hostility to it was embittered by ancient popular prejudice, fed on a historical legend of Smithfield fires, Pius V’s Bull of Excommunication, St. Bartholomew’s Eve, the Spanish Inquisition, the Armada, James II and the Pretenders. There was ecclesiastical jealousy of the Catholic hierarchy, and at least until the end of the eighteenth century, a popular tradition of anti-Catholic mobs, nourished from Scotland. If Ireland had not existed, Englishmen would still have hated the Roman Catholic Church. Antipathy to Ireland stiffened English resistance to Emancipation, but it is unlikely that the tiny minority of English Catholics would easily have forced their way unaided through the wall of prejudice, any more than the Jews did later. Meanwhile, the interaction of Irish politics and English prejudice made the Catholic question extremely complex and difficult to solve. Among the most determined enemies of Catholic Emancipation were the Irish Protestant Ascendancy families, led by Lord Clare, and those who accepted their views. There is little doubt that one motive of Pitt and Dundas in pressing the Union was to withdraw the British government from its humiliating dependence upon this Irish faction. Wilberforce’s sons explained that their father’s great desire in supporting the Union was to widen the basis of political power, and so destroy that predominance of a few great families by which Ireland had long been misgoverned. Lord Clare in the House of Commons replied to a charge of cruelty in searching for arms: ‘Well, suppose it were so; but surely etc. . . .’ ‘. . . I shall never forget Pitt’s look. He turned round to me with that high indignant stare which sometimes marked his countenance, and stalked out of the House’.1 While Ireland had a parliament the minority had an excuse for their intransigence, for they would have good reason to fear the Catholics obtaining political control of the country. If the four or five million Catholics were politically merged into the Protestant millions of the United Kingdom, Irish Protestants 1

R. I. & S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce, 1838, II, 326–7.

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need have no further fear of a Catholic legislature. It would then be safe to conciliate the Catholics by admitting them to political privileges. As Dundas explained :– The protestants would, of course, lay aside their jealousies and distrust; being certain that against any attempt to endanger the protestant establishment in Ireland, the whole strength of the united parliament would be exerted; and, on the other hand, every Catholic, who was a friend to the connection with Great Britain, desirous of obtaining every indulgence, and of being admitted into a participation of every privilege consistent with that connection, would be confident that their causes would be candidly and impartially considered by a united parliament.1 This sentiment was in accord with that of several of the Dublin Castle politicians who had suggested the Union, including Cornwallis and Castlereagh; and in 1798 the leaders of the Irish Catholic aristocracy had favoured union on the basis of the expectations thus held out to them.2 While the government was careful to avoid giving specific pledges to the Catholics, Dundas’ formula was an obvious encouragement to them to expect farreaching measures of relief. Lord Camden interpreted it differently. ‘Even a non-acquiescence in these claims from the imperial parliament would be considered by that body of men (the Catholics) as the effect of their deliberate judgement; on the other hand, a similar conduct in the Irish parliament under the present circumstances would be construed into prejudice and pique.3 The Protestant Ascendancy men wanted the outcome of the Union suggested by Lord Camden. They did not lay aside their jealousies and distrust, but set about communicating them to their colleagues in the United Parliament. Lord Redesdale, who had introduced the English Catholic Relief Act of 1791 was, during his Lord Chancellorship of Ireland, from 1802–6, a bitter partisan of the Ascendancy. His letters to Perceval reflected the fears of the Ascendancy men, that the native Irish thought of the aristocracy as a gang of foreign usurpers, and were only awaiting a favourable opportunity to rise in arms, reclaim their 1

Dundas in the House of Commons, 7th February 1799. New Annual Register, 1799, p. 66. 2 H. M. Hyde, The Rise of Castlereagh, 1933, pp. 282–5. 3 House of Lords, 8th May 1800. New Annual Register, 1800, p. 126. 140

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confiscated lands and church endowments, break the connexion with England, and drive out the Protestants. Lord Clare in 1793 talked about a standing cabinet of cardinals at Rome for the ecclesiastical government of Ireland;1 but it is plain that both he and Redesdale really feared the nationalist influence of the native Irish priests. Lord Redesdale wrote :– The question really is, shall the Roman Catholic religion become the established religion of Ireland, or shall the united church of Ireland remain the established church. In other words, shall a protestant of that church, and perhaps shall any protestant, exist in Ireland; which necessarily involves the further question, shall Ireland remain a part of His Majesty’s dominions, or shall it become a separate independent state, under some new and distinct form of government. The gradations are, from step to step till establishment be gained; then till a portion at least of the church revenues be gained; then till the R.C. become exclusively the established Church, and especially the present established church shall cease to be tolerated, the protestant property seized, the protestant expelled, and Ireland a separate state.2 Apparently, at least, Redesdale did not oppose the concession of seats in parliament to a few of the Catholic gentry. He wrote to Perceval in 1803: ‘Be assured that one more step yielded to the Catholics (unless perhaps a seat in parliament should be allowed to their Temporal lords, and commoners), and Ireland will soon be the scene of a horrid civil war. Nothing will content the papists but the establishment; and to quiet them you must admit the spiritual lords also’.8 In parliament he hammered in the distinction between the few lay Catholic aristocrats of the Fingall type who were politically safe, and the ‘papists’ of the hierarchy with their allies the brash new propertied laymen, who were not.4 The rejection of the 1805 Irish Catholic petition drew from him a sigh of relief. ‘With the Protestant part of the country, the Union has gained 1 Speech of the Rt. Hon. John, Earl of Clare, etc. in the Irish House of Peers on the second reading of the Bill for relief of H.M.’s Roman Catholic Subjects in Ireland, 13th March 1793. Edition published in London, 1813, p. 32. 2 Redesdale to Perceval, 11th March 1804. Perceval Papers, Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 49188. 3 Ibid., 20th October 1803. 4 Substance of the Speech of Lord Redesdale in the House of Lords, on the Motion of Lord Grenville to refer the Petition of the Roman Catholics of Ireland to a Committee, London, May 1805, p. 30.

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considerably by the manner in which the Catholic petition has been rejected. They think they may now have some reliance on the Imperial parliament; and the Catholics are generally said to be more down, or rather less up, as the phrase here commonly is, than at any time since 179S.’1 When it came to the point, political concession was viewed as an encouragement to the Roman Catholic Church, and rejected. With the Ascendancy men, keeping the Catholics out of parliament had for the time being become valued as a means of discouraging the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland. Attacks on the grant to Maynooth Seminary (founded by the British Government as one of its conciliatory measures in 1795), and determined opposition to Pitt’s suggestion that ‘securities’ for the good behaviour of the emancipated Irish should include State payment of Irish priests, followed. Payment of priests, although it had a precedent in grants to Nonconformist ministers, was looked on by some as a partial ‘establishment’ of the Catholic Church. Peel took this view into account, and along with the fact that by 1808 the Irish priests themselves had vehemently turned against the proposal, it helps to explain his eventual rejection of the policy of ‘securities’.2 Redesdale saw in the Protestant gentry and the clergymen of the United Church the scattered forces of civilization maintaining a precarious order amidst the hordes of barbarous savages. It was the Catholics who persecuted the Protestants. The gentry were in the hands of their Catholic servants, who refused to allow Protestants to take service with them, prevented the poorer Protestants from apprenticing their children, and confiscated notices of Protestant meetings.8 Not only the connexion between Ireland and England, but the property, even the lives of the Protestants depended upon the preservation of restrictions on the Catholics. He concluded that it would not be safe to admit them to parliament until they had emancipated themselves from priestly control, and abolished their own hierarchy.4 1

Redesdale to Perceval, 20th October 180S. Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 40188. Quoted in Spencer Walpole, Life of the Rt. Hon. Spencer Perceval, 1874, I, 156. 2 Peel, Memoirs, 1856, I, 196–200, Peel to Gregory, 21st March 1825. C. S. Parker, Sir Robert Peel, 1891, I, 369–70. Cf. Peel’s speech in the House of Commons introducing the bill of 1829. Hansard, New Series XX (5th March 1829), 774. 3 Redesdale to Perceval, 23rd October 1803. Perceval Papers, Add. MS. 49188. 4 Substance of the Speech of Lord Redesdale, etc., May 1805, pp. 50–51. 142

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Redesdale had been frightened by the Emmet rising. But his somewhat hysterical letters reflect the attitude of a ‘settler’ aristocracy dependent for privileges and preservation on the armed support of a mother country. This position was well understood in political circles. In 1807, many who had supported emancipation at the Union had changed their minds, and partly owing to the stand of George III against the Whigs’ attempt to admit Catholics to army commissions in England, the Catholic cause was at a low ebb. Wilberforce wrote ‘. . . that after all you could grant them, so much would still remain behind as to prevent their ever being cordially attached to a Protestant government of which a Protestant church establishment formed a part; that so long as the bulk of the Irish should be Roman Catholics, the Protestants and the friends of Great Britain would be, in truth, a garrison in an enemy’s country. . . ’.1 The influence of Irish Ascendancy counsels on the attitude of the governing Tories should not be underrated. Perceval became bitterly anti-Catholic, although how far this reflected Redesdale’s influence, and how far his own Protestant predispositions must be matter for conjecture. In 1813 William Saurin, the Irish Attorney General was writing to Peel in the same vein.2 An identical fear of the political ambitions of the Irish priests is apparent in the evidence of the Rev. William Phelan before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Ireland in 1825.3 Peel was convinced that it was not from the Pope but from the Irish hierarchy that danger was to be expected. In 1829 he reminded the Cabinet that, ‘The least danger of all is probably that, which in popular opinion is greatest. Namely, danger from the Pope’.4 He added that the Irish Catholic clergy were more powerful than any other Dissenting ministry. Their prelates exercised patronage and the power of removal throughout Ireland; and, unlike the bishops of the Established Church, they were independent of the Crown. The ‘security’ of domestic elections proposed by Bishop Doyle would merely complete their independence. Peel’s attitude is 1

R.I. and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce,III,310. R. B. McDowell, Public Opinion and Government Policy in Ireland, 1801–1846, 1952, pp. 86–87. 3 Report of the Select Committee, Parliamentary Papers, 1825, VIII, 481 et seq. 4 Memo on the relation of the Church of Rome to the State read in Cabinet, 1829. Peel Papers, Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 40430, 52. 2

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more understandable in view of the diplomatic influence the British government could exercise on the papacy since Wellington had restored Pius VII to Rome in 1815.1 From August 1828 both Peel and Wellington were fighting with the king to permit a measure of Catholic relief. When, in February 1829 they at length introduced their Emancipation bill, they probably believed the advent of Catholics to parliament a lesser evil than the continuation of an agitation which as they realized fostered the power and political influence of the priests. Certainly, their choice of policy was dictated by the obvious approach of rebellion, by some doubt as to the loyalty of Irish Catholics in the army, and by the feeling that constant preparedness for rebellion, with the government and parliament divided on the merits of the Catholic question, was a worse evil than its actual occurrence.2 On the other hand, the Protestant Ascendancy men preferred suppressing a rebellion to concession which they felt foreshadowed their extinction. Peel’s and Wellington’s refusal to allow the situation to culminate in a rebellion which they did not really doubt could be quickly put down, represented an eventual refusal to be bound to the interests of the Protestant Ascendancy as much as to the principles of the English Protestant Tories. The most vulnerable part of the Protestant Ascendancy was the Established Church in Ireland, with its 2,436 parishes grouped in 120 benefices, served by only 436 glebe houses, so that three-fifths of the benefices had no resident minister.3 This Church, with its sparse congregations and its vexatious tithe system, was one of the main points at which the Protestant Ascendancy impinged on the lives of the peasants. Bishop Doyle declared that it ‘does not answer the ends for which any Christian Church has ever been erected’.4 Redesdale and those 1 Wellington had suggested a scheme for controlling Irish episcopal elections by a sort of Concordat with the Pope in 1825. See Memo on the Case of the Roman Catholics in Ireland, Wellington’s Dispatches, 1867, II, 592 et seq. 2 Peel’s Memo to Wellington of 12th January 1828. Memoirs, 1856, I, 293. Lord Anglesey to Peel, 20th July, 1828. Ibid., I,158. 3 Figures given by Redesdale to Perceval in a letter of 17th May 1803. Redesdale said the Catholics were building mansion houses for their priests and mass houses to rival the churches, and wanted a big building programme of glebe houses for the Church of Ireland clergy. Perceval Papers, Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 49188. 4 James Doyle, A Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of the Irish Catholics, Dublin, 1823, p. 9.

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of his mind feared that the endowments of the Established Church were the first objects of ambition of the Irish Catholic hierarchy. They therefore sought to rally English opinion to the support of the Irish Church. By Article 5 of the Act of Union ‘The Church of Ireland is made one with that of England, and the United Church is made the established church forever’.1 Although the Union had been carried only five years before, in the teeth of vehement opposition, Redesdale soon discovered that it was a fundamental and unalterable law, like the Bill of Rights and the Union with Scotland. In addition he was able to show that the Catholics had a complete hierarchy, with four metropolitans, twenty-two bishops, and deans, rectors, vicars and curates, all corresponding, or nearly corresponding with the establishment previous to the Reformation, and all (with an additional fifty-nine houses of regulars) pretenders to the rights enjoyed by the clergy of the Established Church.2 His description of the Irish clergy, ‘A great and compact body, a species of corporation, with all the forms and gradations of a distinct and firm government . . . standing in open defiance of the law’, successfully aroused the fears and jealousies of the English bishops.3 Bishop Horsley, who was prepared to plead for toleration of the Catholics (in the limited sense of toleration of Catholic worship), changed his mind about supporting the Irish Catholic petition of 1805 as far as the Lords’ committee. He accepted Redesdale’s view that the Irish hierarchy must be crushed before political concessions could be made to the laymen.4 Irish fears fanned English jealousies; yet, as Halévy has pointed out, the English ecclesiastical hierarchy always hated the Roman Catholic Church as a too powerful rival. Accusations of idolatry, intolerance, and above all, corruption (which meant adding doctrines and practices unknown to Scripture or the early Church to Christian worship), rolled from the pens of High Church polemicists like Dean Phillpotts. The tendency, after 1789, of Tories to favour Roman Catholicism as a counter1

Redesdale to Perceval, 23rd October 1803, Add. MS. 41988. Ibid., 11th March 1804, Add. MS. 41988. Substance of the Speech of Lord Redesdale, etc., p. 14. 4 Protestant Authorities Against Concessions to the Roman Catholics: being speeches of the late Dr. Horsley, Lord Bishop of St. Asaph, and of Lord Ellenborough, London, 1813, pp. 7–11. 2

3

R.T.–L

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poise to Jacobinism could not survive when the English Catholics became Whigs, and the Radical demagogue O’Connell led the Irish patriots. English clergymen detested this corrupt, foreign-ruled hierarchy. Only a few eccentrics such as the Latitudinarians Richard Watson and Samuel Parr, 1 the High Church Alexander Knox,2 and the Liberals Thomas Arnold and Richard Whately8 looked forward to progressive amelioration of the quarrel between the sects, and a gradual assimilation of Roman Catholic tenets and practices to those of the Church of England. Moreover, once the English and Irish Churches had been united by the ‘fundamental’ Article 5 of the Act of Union, it was felt that a successful attack on the Irish Church would involve the disestablishment of the English Church also. Whatever the intention of its engineers, the Union stiffened resistance to Emancipation, by giving the rivalries of Irish politics more opportunities to affect those of England. The attitude of the main body of the English clergy was shared by the political diehards of the ‘Protestant Constitution’, such as Lord Eldon, the Earl of Westmorland, and Sir Robert Inglis.4 They were the secular guardian angels of the Alliance of Church and State, which, after 1800 tended to be expressed less often in terms of Warburtonian utility, more often in the terms of Burke. Finally, the Methodist and Evangelical revival perpetuated the old, anti-papist prejudices of English Protestant Dissent. Professor Hexter has pointed out that, towards the end of the struggle, the Committee of the Three Denominations, controlled on the whole by Liberal Dissenters, with a Unitarian element still influential in it, was unable to control its rank and file.5 The 1

For Richard Watson, see Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1934, Chap. VIII. 2 Alexander Knox, friend of Wesley and of Wilberforce, was in thought a precursor of the Oxford Movement. 3 Arnold and Whately were Oxford ‘Noetics’; Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, and Regius Professor of History at Oxford, Whately a Fellow of Oriel, and later Archbishop of Dublin. 4 Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor, 1801–6 and 1807–27, did his best to stiffen George IV in thefinalcrisis of 1829. Sir Robert Inglis, a link between the Clapham Evangelicals and the High Church Hackney Phalanx, was elected for Oxford University in 1829 in place of Peel. 5 J. H. Hexter, ‘The Protestant Revival and the Catholic Question in England.’ Journal of Modern History, 1936, VIII, 297 et seq. 146

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same was undoubtedly true of the newer Protestant Society,1 representing mainly revived Independent and Calvinist Methodist elements, whose leaders had learned the same lessons about toleration as those of the older body. The more sophisticated leaders of Dissent petitioned for Catholic Emancipation, while their trinitarian troops marched in the opposite direction. Similarly, such politically sophisticated Evangelicals as Wilberforce reluctantly supported concession to the Catholics as part of a conciliatory Irish policy, while their friends were bitterly hostile. The attitude of the Wesleyan movement needs further investigation, but some Wesleyan chapels seem to have been prominent in organizing ‘No Popery’ petitions.2 They had an example in the notorious anti-Catholic letters of John Wesley himself at the time of the Gordon riots; 3 and the political alliance of Conference was with high Toryism.4 Charges of idolatry, mental slavery, disloyalty and intolerance were the common coin of High Church and Evangelical opponents of Catholic Emancipation. But accusations of intolerance from Evangelicals or Methodists had a revivalist tone of their own. ‘Shall we’, asked a correspondent to the Christian Guardian, ‘then try again the effects of that religion, which has walked through our land, reeking with the blood of the saints ?’5 The Evangelicals specialized in running proselytizing societies and in promoting charitable Protestant education for poor Catholic children. Suspicions of their connexion with the government-endowed Kildare Street Society’s schools probably helped to delay the spread of popular education in Ireland. They also badgered the Catholics into printing and circulating their own version of the Bible.6 The Anglican divines specialized in erudite reference to the more intolerant decrees of medieval 1 M. B. Whittaker, ‘The Revival of Dissent 1800–35’, M.Litt. thesis, Cambridge, 1958. 2 Leeds Mercury for 10th January 1829 reports that the Wesleyan minister at Cadishead invited his congregation to sign a petition against concessions to the Catholics, but the congregation walked out. This must have been exceptional; but the Mercury was very pro-Catholic. 3 Letter Concerning the Civil Principles of Roman Catholics, 1780. Defence of the Protestant Association, 1780. For Wesley’s ambivalent attitude towards Roman Catholicism, see J. H. Hexter, op. cit. 4 R. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Working Class Movements of England, 1800– 1860,2nd edition, 1947, pp. 36–49. 5 Christian Guardian, January 1829, pp. 22–54. 6 See Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, II, 189–204.

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and Counter-Reformation church councils. The Oxford churchmen discovered a ‘Protestant’ champion in Joseph Blanco White, a refugee priest with an inside knowledge of Spanish ecclesiastical tyranny, who curdled up Protestant blood in a pamphlet entitled The Poor Man’s Preservation against Popery.1 The flood of anti-Catholic literature which accompanied the crises of the Emancipation struggle stemmed from an ad hoc alliance of these various interests against the Catholic claims. But behind the more or less uniform façade of their repetitive accusations the different interests and attitudes of the member groups could often be distinguished. Nor was the alliance, even ad hoc, always smooth. The Anglo-Irish division was a particularly weak point. All opponents of the Catholic claims denied that the admission to parliament or to office of a few rich men would help the peasants, or even interest them. But the English Tories turned upon the Irish estate owners for their nonresidence and their neglect of their tenants (the blame could then fall on Whig and Catholic landowners as well as Tory Protestants).2 The English and Irish wings of the alliance were always in danger of falling apart. II The opponents of Catholic Emancipation justified their opposition by arguments which constant repetition turned into formulae. The commonest of all these was the accusation of divided allegiance. Although the expression had several meanings it always carried an implication of disloyalty. For instance, Southey wrote that the Protestant Dissenters’ allegiance was imperfect, but not divided, since there was no case imaginable in which their head could call on them to disobey their temporal sovereign or act against him.3 Southey was implying that the Catholics were potential political traitors. The charge of political disloyalty derived its effectiveness from historical memories of Pius V’s Bull Regnans in Excelsis and the Gunpowder Plot. In the eighteenth century it had meant Jacobitism (although the

1 London, 1825. Blanco White was at one time an inmate of Holland House. He died a Unitarian. 2 E.g. Southey, ‘The Catholic Question, Ireland’, Quarterly Review, JanuaryOctober 1828, XXXVIII, 543. ‘The Church of Rome in Ireland’, British Critic, 1829, V, 153 et seq. 3 Southey, ‘The Roman Catholic Question, Ireland’, Quarterly Review, XXXVIII, 551. 148

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Whigs could point out that there were more High Church than Catholic Jacobites). Between 1802 and 1809, when the Pope was in alliance with or in the hands of Napoleon, it reflected fear of Irish rebellion helped by French invasion. After 1815, when Pius VII owed his restoration to Wellington’s armies and Castlereagh’s diplomacy, papal influence ceased to worry the administration, while remaining a popular bogy. Divided allegiance then implied obedience to the Irish Catholic hierarchy and was associated with Irish nationalism, augmented possibly by the feeling that European chancelleries were taking too much interest in the Irish struggle for Catholic Emancipation.1 The charge of divided allegiance in this aspect was mainly concerned with foreign relations. In another political aspect the formula expressed suspicion of the Catholic Church as an institution which limited the influence of the ruler of the State upon a large class of persons. Henry VIII is said to have declared that the clergy who opposed his divorce ‘were but half his subjects since they took an oath to the Pope’.2 Roman Catholicism, as a strong form of Nonconformity, was certain to offend Erastians. Redesdale wrote: ‘Those who resisted the authority of the legislature in establishing the reformation were as guilty of treason, tho’ they acted on opinions which they conceived to be right, as those who adhered to the Stuart family after their expulsion, believing the divine hereditary right to be in that family, indefeasible by any act of man; and the legislature had, in point of conscience, as well as of expedience, as much right to enact laws against the rebel of one description as the rebel of the other’.3 An adherent of fundamental laws could find parliamentary sovereignty very useful, when it suited his book. This aspect of divided allegiance moved European sovereigns to extort national concordats from popes, while the fourteenthcentury statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, originally passed to limit pre-Reformation papal power in England, could still be 1 Goulburn wrote to Peel on 9th January 1827 that he had been told ‘that the Jesuits are making efforts to extend their influence in Ireland. Whether in those endeavours they are assisted by the French Government or not I cannot determine.’ He suggested opening letters from Paris to the Irish politician Lawless, in London where this could be done without discovery. Peel Papers, Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 40332, f.256. 2 G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors, 1956, p. ISO. 3 Redesdale to Perceval, 20th March 1804. Perceval Papers, Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 49188.

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referred to against nineteenth-century English Roman Catholic clergy. The advocates of the Veto and the Exequatur1 likened these ‘securities’ to the terms of national concordats, conveniently forgetting that the English kings and their advisers were neither of the same religion nor of the same nation as the Irish. As the conservative corporate and ‘organic’ theory of the State developed, a sect which looked abroad for its spiritual direction, and which also owned property—or aspired to—was bound to appear a hindrance to State unity. Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each (occasioned by the Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1825 although not published until 1830), was a plea against alienating Church endowments or national income to the payment of Catholic priests. In this treatise the National Church or clerisy appeared as an estate of the nation, responsible for the education, State charity, and public spirit of the whole. A corporate body under foreign influence, exercising social and economic power, which could never be absorbed into the unified, slowly unfolding social and political organism, was hostile to the very Coleridgean ‘Idea’ of the State. To a conservative nationalist like Coleridge, ‘securities’ and concordats were useless medicine for an indigestible body in the stomach of a corporate, semi-total State. Divided allegiance could also mean the distraction of the subject between rival systems of law, enforced by different sanctions. This aspect did not obtrude during the earlier years of the struggle, when urgent questions of loyalty in war claimed attention. It was further obscured by the fact that the Church’s means of discipline, her claim to hear confession, to grant absolution, and to legislate for morals and marriage, were looked on merely as so many ways in which the priesthood secured control over the laity for its own particular ends. It emerged, however, in the later stages of the controversy. The Select Committee of the House of Commons on Ireland in 1825 questioned the Irish bishops minutely on the operation of the canon law of 1 The Veto was the proposed negative of the government on Catholic episcopal appointments. The Exequatur was a censorship of correspondence between the Catholic bishops and Rome. Immediately after the Union some form of Veto might have been carried; but after the failure of Pitt to introduce Emancipation, the younger and more nationalist Irish clergy turned flatly against it. It became a great source of controversy. Grenville quarrelled with the Irish nationalists over it in 1813, and in the end both proposals were abandoned by Peel.

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1

marriage. The bishops attempted to show that the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church, enforced by excommunication, fitted in with the provisions of the English marriage law. Marriage in England and Ireland, although regulated in certain ways by statute, was until 1857 under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts of the Established Church which administered its canon law. The conflict was that of jurisdiction rather than of law or principle. Anglican canons were still very close to those of the Roman Catholic Church, and had not been interfered with as in later, more secular times, by statutes permitting divorce; nor did the Common Law blink at the dissemination of pamphlets advocating birth control. The main point of conflict was over the different degrees of consanguinity barring marriage in the two Churches, and this was adjusted by dispensation.2 Yet the rivalry of jurisdiction concealed real or potential differences of law and custom. Divorce by Act of Parliament was already available to the very rich. At the same time, the Protestant public, prompted perhaps by some hidden psychological antipathy, deeply distrusted both monasticism and a celibate clergy. Lastly, beyond the conflict of laws lay an estrangement of cultural tradition, derived from religious education and differing forms of worship. The Latin liturgy had in the course of centuries become foreign-sounding to English ears. Well-to-do Catholics had for nearly two and a half centuries been forced to go to Belgium, Spain and Italy for their education. Aggressively biblical Protestants, of whatever denomination, were as deeply suspicious of foreign types of cultivation as of non-biblical popular education. Another common formula accused the Roman Catholic Church of absolving its adherents from the necessity of keeping faith with heretics. John Wesley, whose pamphlets were in tone with much anti-Catholic polemic, wrote that no Roman Catholic could give security for his allegiance or peaceable behaviour, because it was a Roman Catholic maxim, established by a public council, and never openly contradicted, that ‘No faith is to be kept with heretics’.3 The charge was at least as old 1

Parliamentary Papers, 1825, VIII, 192, 230. ‘The Church of Rome in Ireland’. British Critic, 1829, V, 183. 3 Letter from the Rev. John Wesley, M.A. (Concerning the Civil Principles of Roman Catholics). In Miscellaneous Tracts by Rev. Arthur O’Leary, Dublin, 1781, p. 192. 2

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as Locke, and it was generally supported by reference to the Fourth Lateran Council, and the burning of Huss in 1415.1 In 1828 Southey tried to justify it by representing the Irish bishops’ change of mind from acceptance to rejection of the Veto, and the Catholic victory at the Clare election, as breaking promises not to weaken the establishment of the Protestant religion or Protestant government of the country.2 This formula had political implications. It was associated with the accusation that Catholics were encouraged to depose and murder Protestant kings, and was tied up with the historical memories and foreign relations aspect of divided allegiance. Denial of it, along with repudiation of the Pope’s jurisdiction in civil affairs, was included in the oath imposed on Catholics by the Relief Act of 1791. It was most frequently used by those who defended the system of oaths and declarations designed to exclude Catholics from parliament and office, even while they declared that papal dispensations made the oaths worthless. The formula was sometimes modified to give it new meanings. A pamphleteer of 1826, attacking Charles Butler,3 Sydney Smith,4 and other champions of Emancipation, wrote that Catholics were taught that the Pope could absolve them from their oaths, and that engagements were null when to the prejudice of the Catholic faith. With reference to ordinary transactions in society, the honour and integrity of Catholics was no more suspected than those of Protestants, as Mr. Sydney Smith well knew.5 Despite this, the formula tended to slide into a general charge of bad faith and bad morals. Hannah More included in her improving novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, the passage: ‘Why, this is retaining all the worst part of Popery. Here is the abstinence without the devotion; the outward observance without the interior humiliation. It is suspending of sin, not only without any design of forsaking it, but with a fixed 1 See H. Phillpotts, Letters to Charles Butler, Esq., 1825. Quoted in G. C. B. Davies, Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, 1964, p. 50. 2 Southey, ‘The Roman Catholic Question, Ireland’, Quarterly Review, 1828, 38, 559–63. 3 Charles Butler, lawyer, historian and pamphleteer, Secretary of the English Catholic Board. 4 Sydney Smith, the famous Whig clergyman, humorist, and friend of Lord Holland. 5 The Catholic Claims Rejected, etc. by an English Protestant, York, 1826, p. 17.

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resolution of returning to it, and of increasing the gust by the forbearance’.1 This evoked two bitter letters from the Catholic apologist Father Joseph Berington. Nothing was ever uttered ‘more groundless, more false, more calumnious’ he wrote, protesting against the ‘thousand malevolent reflections which every day and hour insult our feelings’, and pointing out that the Catholics were excluded by the oaths which were said not to bind them.2 Berington’s letter showed that the English Catholics suffered under the contempt in which their religion was held. But Hannah More’s passage demonstrated the depth of the religious prejudice against them. Irish Protestants asserted that the priests condoned the crime of murder for political purposes. But Hannah More's passage had no political bearing. It was an Evangelical indictment of morality, reflecting the accusations of easy absolution which seventeenth-century Protestant divines hurled against the ‘casuistical’ system of French priests of the court and aristocracy.3 The third formula frequently used by the opponents of Catholic Emancipation was the charge of maintaining exclusive salvation. To the retort of ‘tu quoque’ churchmen replied that the Catholic version was vicious because it confined salvation to those within the Catholic Church, and damned all heretics. Phillpotts admitted there was a doctrine of exclusive salvation, which did no more nor less than ‘exclude all other saviours than our Lord Jesus Christ’.4 It was not exclusive salvation and the damning of heretics which offended the churchmen (as it did the Liberals) but confining salvation to the Roman Catholic Church. Nor did they (nor Wesley) deny the possibility of salvation within the Roman communion. But when, playing on the theme of corruption, they called the Roman Catholic religion ‘false Christianity’ or the Pope ‘Antichrist’,5 their opponents might be excused for believing that they did. Meantime, the 1 Coelebs, Vol. I, Works of Hannah More, 1818, XI, 123. Quoted in Berington’s letter. 2 Rev. Joseph Berington to Hannah More. Brickland, 1809. (Two successive letters.) Wm. Roberts, Memoirs of Hannah More, 1834, III, 274–84. 3 E.g. Jeremy Taylor, The Liberty of Prophesying, 1647. 4 G. C. B. Davies, op. cit., p. 57. 6 Coleridge devoted a section of the Appendix to his Constitution of the Church and State to proving that the Pope was Antichrist.

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C. B. Davies, op. cit., p. 58. Ibid., pp. 50–51. Cf. letter signedVINDEXin the Christian Guardian, January 1829, pp. 22–24. 3 Hansard, XXXVI (9th May 1817), 372. 154

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notice was taken of Whig protests that ‘it was not civil to call people idolaters; particularly when it happened not to be true’. 1 Mr. D. I. Perceval, announcing his grudging conversion to the necessity of Emancipation, said that the Roman Catholic religion was, in his opinion, ‘a foul pollution of the Word of God’. 2 Phillpotts denied that his Fifteen Letters to Charles Butler, published during the crisis of 1825, were specially designed to turn the controversy away from the question of the political rights of a religious minority into a battle of rival sects.3 The Monthly Repository under its ultra-liberal Unitarian editor W. J. Fox, however, saw that this was happening. In 1827 its leader attributed the unpopularity of the Catholic cause mainly to the form which the controversy had taken towards the discussion of the theological and ecclesiastical merits of the Catholic religion rather than the political question regarding the rights of its professors as citizens. It had been for some time the game of the opponents of the Catholics to confound the arguments, and the Catholics had too readily fallen into the trap. 4 As Southey said: ‘Let us not be deceived. Catholic Emancipation may be urged on the grounds of expediency . . . but it comes to a question of religion at last—and “that whale (as Horace Walpole says) must swallow up all gudgeon questions”.’5 In addition to formulating charges against the Catholics, the opponents of Emancipation relied on devices to keep them out. The chief of these was the theory of the ‘Protestant Constitution’. The ‘Protestant Constitution’, or alternatively, ‘Our Happy Constitution in Church and State’, was really a variant of the Alliance of Church and State, seen in terms of existing statutory arrangements, and suitably phrased for use against Catholic claims to political equality. The word‘Protestant’conveniently included not only the Church of England, but the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland, and reflected the provision that the king was not to be nor to marry a papist . . . Moreover, while the ‘Protestant’ 1 Lord Binning in the House of Commons. Hansard, New Series XIII (21st April 1825), 80. 2 Hansard, New Series XIX (8th May 1828), 433. 3 G. C. B. Davies, Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, 1954, pp. 45–44. Phillpotts’ Fifteen Letters to Charles Butler were a reply to Butler’s Book of the Roman Catholic Church. 4 The Monthly Repository, etc., January–December 1827. New Series I, 301. 5 Southey, ‘The Roman Catholic Question, Ireland’, Quarterly Review, 1828, 38, 572.

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Tories were in most cases really concerned to uphold the political supremacy of the Church of England, it was unstrategic for them to stand on a narrow Church of England definition of the constitution, since they could hope for the alliance of many Protestant Dissenters against the Catholics. The conception of fundamental laws was used to uphold the ‘Protestant Constitution’ equally with the Alliance. The Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, and the Union with Ireland were generally cited. When these seemed too weak to stem the Catholic tide, ‘Protestants’ fell back upon the king’s coronation oath to uphold the Church of England as by law established. This removed the bulwark against the dreaded innovation from mere former statutes to the personal discretion of the king, outside parliament (although the personal discretion was in interpreting an oath laid down by statute). The ‘Protestant’ nature of the Constitution, like its alliance with the Church, was part of its nature as ‘crystallized’ and to uphold it was therefore a matter of high principle with Tories, who felt that attempts to ‘break in on the constitution’ in order to settle the Irish problem were a sacrifice of principle to mere expediency.1 The resort to the coronation oath suited Tory thinking. It gave the king a larger measure of personal discretion, especially in religious matters, than the Whigs would countenance, but was precise enough to discourage an indefinite extension of that discretion in a king who took his oath seriously. Some saw the oath as a sort of direct, original contract between king and people, outside and prior to the competence of parliament. In 1795 the Irish prelates asked whether it were not advisable to put an end at once to a claim inconsistent and incompatible with the terms of the original compact between king and people.2 Others thought that, although its terms might be laid down by Act of Parliament, it was, as an oath, a matter between the personal conscience of the king and God.3 Its efficacy as a politi1 For a full account of the theory of the ‘Protestant Constitution’ and the coronation oath controversy, see G. F. A. Best, ‘The Protestant Constitution and its Defenders,’ Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 1958, fifth series, VIII, 105–127. 2 Document sent by George III to Lord Kenyon, referring to the proposed bill of 1795 in the Irish Parliament. Hon. George T. Kenyon, Life of Lloyd, 1st Lord Kenyon, 1873, p. 316. 3 ‘The Oath taken by the King is a purely personal act; it is an act between himself and God.’ Dean Phillpotts, quoted in ‘The Catholic Question’. British Critic, July 1827, II, 2, 195.

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cal weapon depended, of course, entirely upon the determined hostility to liberal measures of the Hanoverian kings. That it could have been used in very different ways, if George IV had not deserted his Whig friends, is suggested by Zachary Macaulay’s account of the discussions of a Radical debating society held in November 1795, in Drury Lane. The question proposed was, ‘Whether the king of England does not violate his coronation oath by giving sanction to a Convention Bill’. First Man—‘I’ll tell you how I think. I think as how if the king passes this bill, he declares war on the people.’ Woman—‘Ay, and he violates the bill of rights.’ Second Man—‘Ay, that he does, and his coronation oath; he does not know his duty; he ought to go to school again, but I hope the people will teach him.’ Macaulay added that a man who looked like a Methodist spoke very confusedly in favour of the bills, and concluded by saying ‘that if these Bills met, as he believed they did, the sentiments of the majority of the householders of this country, the king would violate his coronation oath in not sanctioning them’.1 The Whigs produced various replies to the Tory theory of the coronation oath. The most effective was John Allen’s Letters of Scaevola, which maintained that the king was dependent for the interpretation of his oath on the advice of his ministers, who were in turn answerable to a majority in parliament.2 The Whigs also claimed that the king was not bound by his oath in his legislative, but only in his executive capacity, and that the ‘Church by law established’ was whatever the law did establish. One writer maintained that if the oath was a contract between king and people, it could be dissolved by agreement between the king and the people’s representatives in Parliament.3 The most violent refutation of the theory came from Bentham, who disputed the validity of all oaths as such, ridiculed their religious aspect, and denied that they could add anything to the naked promise. He considered the coronation 1 Z. Macaulay to Wilberforce. Correspondence of William Wilberforce, 1890, I, 110–20. 2 Letters of Scaevola, London, 1807. 3 J. J. Dillon, Essay on the History and Effect of the Coronation Oath, London, 1807.

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oath an engine of irresponsible tyranny, and thought that reliance on it should be looked on as a presumption of the king’s unfitness to rule on grounds of insanity—an insulting reference to George Ill’s madness, and its possible descent to George IV.1 In practice, the resort to the coronation oath was made possible by the gulf existing between public opinion and the ruling groups in parliament. When the House of Commons was really felt to contain the responsible opinion of the nation, it would be more difficult to appeal to the king against his ministers. Once the dependence of the king on the advice of his ministers in all spheres of government had become a firm constitutional convention, the coronation oath could no longer be used in controversial politics. It is possible that, in the long run, the attempts of George III and George IV to exclude the Catholics by relying on it hastened that day. III The supporters of Catholic Emancipation were even more varied in outlook than its opponents. The editor of the liberal Morning Chronicle, in March 1829, hadn’t the smallest doubt that, ‘even in Edinburgh, as well as throughout the rest of Scotland, the lower orders are as generally hostile to concession to the Catholics as in England. . . . Of Newspaper readers of England and Scotland nine tenths at least are favourable to the measure of ministers . . .’ But the great body of the people never read any newspapers, and to this ignorant body the Tories had appealed.2 If the masses opposed Emancipation the majority of the educated public supported it. Peel pointed out that the rising talent in parliament was almost unanimously against resistance to it.3 In consequence, a very wide section of the political spectrum favoured the Catholic claims for one reason or another. In Ireland Catholic opinion, where interested in general politics, of course demanded Emancipation, although with varying degrees of impatience. Irish attitudes exerted pressure on the British parliamentary opposition, as much as on the Tory 1

Swear Not At All, London, 1817, pp. 40–41. Morning Chronicle, 30th March 1829. Place Collection, XLI. 3 Peel’s speech on the Emancipation Bill. Hansard, New Series, XX (5th March 1829), 740. 2

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Administration. Irish Whigs and pro-Catholics, like Grattan and Plunket, tried both to be Catholic champions and to insist on ‘securities’. The English Whigs who, like the Irish, had preferred to treat with Lord Fingall and the moderate Catholic gentry, were forced, after 1812, gradually to abandon ‘securities’ although Lord John Russell was still hopefully suggesting State payment of the clergy in 1849.1 By 1825 they found themselves condoning the activities of O’Connell and the extremists of the Catholic Association. After the fall of the ‘Talents’ ministry in 1807, the most practical hope of relief measures lay in the Tory supporters of Catholic Emancipation. These were mostly the heirs of Pitt and the members of the group later known as ‘Liberal Tories’, although they included Castlereagh and excluded Peel. From 1813 there were sufficient of these ‘Catholic’ Tories in quantity and quality for no Tory administration to be possible without their participation.2 So they were allowed into office, while, at the Regent’s insistence, Emancipation was left an ‘open’ question, which the government as a whole did not handle. This group contained some strange allies. Castlereagh, whose faithful persistence suggests that he felt himself morally obliged to support Emancipation, was in accord with Canning. Wilberforce, who detested the levity of the ex-editor of the AntiJacobin, had agreed with Pitt’s Irish policy, as had Windham. Huskisson followed Canning, and represented his views in the House of Commons after his death in 1827. Castlereagh, and after 1812 Canning, were the core of the group, and consistently advocated the Catholic claims, though not to the extent of jeopardizing their chances of office for them. The ‘Catholic’ Tories were primarily concerned with quietening Ireland, and were convinced that the best way to do this was by concession to the Catholics. They hoped to encourage a native aristocracy by giving the lawyers and merchants, who had prospered since 1778, the privileges that went with possessions. They also hoped to detach the gentry and the ambitious laity from the Catholic hierarchy and bind them to the English connexion. They realized that continued refusal of their claims was 1 For a full account of the troubles over the Veto between 1807 and 1812, see M. Roberts, The Whig Party 1807–12, 1939, pp. 34–79. 2 See Peel’s Memoirs,I,61–62.

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extinguishing the political influence of the moderate gentry, or driving them into the arms of the extremists. ‘Physical force’ said Canning, ‘is more likely to be applied to a door that is shut than against a door that is open’. If we wanted the Catholics’ loyalty we must take their word that we had their temporal allegiance. ‘Let us open to them the sanctuary of the law; let us lift up the veil which shuts them out from the British Constitution, and show them the spirit of freedom which dwells within.’1 The ‘Catholic Tories’ were unimpressed with the ‘Protestant’ fears of the sinister influence which possible Catholic ministers could exert on a Protestant king. They were prepared to tolerate the possible disturbance to political life of a group of Irish Catholics in parliament. They ignored Westmorland’s prescient warnings in the House of Lords: ‘Could anyone say what points a connected body in Parliament of a much smaller number than was contemplated the Catholics might be . . . throwing the balance between the parties, might not attain ?’2 They were not, however, prepared to trust the Irish Catholic hierarchy. They consistently demanded securities, especially the Veto or some form of control over Irish episcopal elections, and the payment of priests. On this matter all the Relief Bills from 1815 to 1825 broke down. The ‘Catholic Tories’ probably gave the impression that they were preaching confidence in the Catholics without practising it. Their most useful real contribution to the cause of Emancipation was to provide a support on to which Peel and Wellington could eventually retire. The Whigs went far beyond the ‘Catholic Tories’ in their support of the Catholic claims. They tended to regard the Penal Code as the cause of all Ireland’s troubles, and Emancipation as the panacea for all her ills. The Edinburgh Review rejoiced over the Bill of 1829. ‘This might be called a bill to remove the exclusion of English capital from Ireland, which will now flow into cheaper labour, and lay the first security for the improvement of the people.’ It predicted that middle class Protestant families would no longer be driven to emigrate by an atmosphere and a pressure they dare not stand, and that the position between landlord and tenant ‘must assume quite another charac1 2

Hansard, New Series, XIII (21st April 1825), 92. Hansard, XL (17th May 1819), 445. 160

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ter’, with feelings of a new alliance, likely to promote residence.1 As for the Protestant Ascendancy gentlemen, the Whigs refused to regard them as the guardians of the Union. Sydney Smith was already asking in 1807 why we were to endanger our own Church and State, ‘not for 500,000 Episcopalians, but for ten or twelve great Orange families, who have been sucking the blood of that country for these hundred years last past’ ? 2 For the popular bogy of papal influence the Whigs had nothing but contempt. Sydney Smith thought that ‘Gog and Magog have produced as much influence on human affairs as the Pope has done this half century past’.3 Nor were they frightened of Catholic machinations in English life. Smith considered that a Catholic chancellor wouldn’t do a ten-thousandth part of the mischief to the English Church that might be done by a Methodistical chancellor of the true Clapham breed. But they agreed with the ‘Catholic Tories’ in mistrusting the nationalist element in the Irish clergy. Grenville was adamant for ‘securities’. Other Whigs abandoned them reluctantly when it became evident that insistence on them would prevent a settlement. Sydney Smith, as well as Russell, continued to hope that the priests would be tamed by the offer of government salaries, for, ‘all men gradually yield to the comforts of a good income’.4 Much as they sympathized with the victims of oppression, few English Whigs understood Irish nationalism. Whig pamphleteers specialized in refuting the charges so repeatedly hurled against the Catholics. If these were true, wrote Smith, how could two-thirds of Europe, ‘Christians, though mistaken Christians’, fulfil the common duties and relations of life ? To accusations of intolerance they replied ‘tu quoque’y supplying historical evidence. Lord Nugent pointed out that most of the instances of Catholic persecution cited were taken from history about two hundred and sixty years old, and that Henry VIII, Calvin, and John Knox had been persecutors too. 5 Thomas Arnold cited persecuting canons from the synods 1 Sadler, ‘The Last of the Catholic Question—Its Principles, History and Effects’. Edinburgh Review, March–June, 1829, 49, 267. 2 Peter Plymley’s Letters, 1807, Letter III, p. 17. Works, 1850, p. 499. 3 Ibid., 1807, Letter X. Works, 1850, p. 531. 4 Sydney Smith, A Letter to the Electors on the Catholic Question, 1826. Works, 1850, p. 577. 5 George Lord Nugent, A Letter to the Electors of Aylesbury on the Catholic Question, Aylesbury, 1820, pp. 11–13.

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of Canterbury and York clergy in 1640, and instanced visitations organized to discover Catholic marriages, burials and baptisms, and to report non-Anglican schoolteachers, or parents who had sent their children to Catholic schools on the continent, so that they could be punished under the penal laws.1 To the charges of breaking faith with heretics, the Whigs replied by referring to the broken Treaty of Limerick of 1691, and the failure to honour the pledges of Emancipation which they alleged had been given to the Catholics at the Union. They also asked why the oaths which Catholics were allowed to break had been so successful in excluding them from parliament ?2 To the contention that Catholicism never changed, Arnold pointed out that, on the contrary, it varied in character from country to country, being tolerant in Saxony, nationalist or antipapal in France and Austria. He agreed that the tenet of Church infallibility did hamper the Catholics in their effort to progress, and deplored the effect of anti-Catholic propaganda in discouraging their efforts and driving them to defend the worse as well as the better features of their religion.3 But the most crushing retort to this formula came from Bentham. Reviewing a pamphlet entitled Cruelties of the Catholics, Bentham interpreted its argument:–Present and future Catholics, whatever cruelties were committed in the past, will remain the same as they were. Therefore whatever harsh treatment was deserved by their ancestors will be due to them. ‘After crushing as many millions of the vermin whom his piety and his charity marked out for sacrifice, the zeal of the abhorrer of Catholic cruelties would have been in the condition of the tiger whom in the plains of Southern Africa a traveller depicted to us as lying breathless with fatigue amidst a flock of antelopes.’ He pointed out that by the same device, the painters of the crimes of kings could have proved the necessity of crushing English Protestantism and executing the present head of it.4 Faced with the influence of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy men on English politics, the Whigs sought to separate that which the Tories had joined. Sydney Smith exposed some 1 Thomas Arnold, The Christian Duty of Conceding the Claims of the Roman Catholics. Oxford, 1829. In Miscellaneous Works, 1846, pp. 44–49. 2 Peter Plymley’s Letters, Letter II. Works, 1850, p. 491. 3 Arnold, op. cit., Misc. Works, pp. 50–52. 4 Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, The Book of Fallacies, 1824, p. 268.

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deliberate confusions in the arguments of the ‘Protestant Tories’. ‘In talking of establishments they always take care to blend the Irish and the English establishments, and never to say which is meant—though the circumstances of both are as different as possible.’ He described the effect of this confusion on the alarmist. ‘I am afraid for the Church of Ireland . . . ‘I do not care so much for the Church of Ireland, if I was sure the Church of England would not be destroyed . . . And is it for the Church of England alone that you fear ? . . . Not quite that, but I am afraid we should all be lost, that everything would be overturned, and that I should lose my rank and my estate.’1 In 1826 Smith allowed that there was danger to the Irish Protestant Church, but, ‘Much more danger I am sure there is in resisting than admitting the claims of the Catholics.’2 The Irish Church was probably safe, provided it consented to perfect toleration,’ . . . a receipt for the quiet and permanence of every establishment which has the real good sense to adopt it.’3 The most likely consequence of toleration would be conversions to Protestantism. As for the English branch of the Establishment, they denied that there was any danger to it at all. Taking a Paleyan rather than a ‘high’ view of establishments, the Whigs did not share the more acute anxieties of the High Church Tories. They were prepared to disestablish a Church which could not justify itself in the eyes of the people it was meant to serve. They considered the case of the Irish Church quite different from that of the Established Church in England (which Whigs like Grey and Russell wished to mend rather than end), but their reverence for both was certainly weakened by the efforts of ecclesiastical leaders to prove that establishment in each country was inseparable from the denial of political equality to those of other communions. The Whigs accepted Catholic assurances that Catholics acknowledged only a spiritual allegiance to the Pope, and none which could interfere with their allegiance to the king. This 1 ‘The Catholic Question’, Edinburgh Review, December 1826–March 1827, XLV, 427. 2 A Letter to the Electors on the Catholic Question, 1826. Works, 1850, p. 576. 3 Ibid., p. 577.

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position was in harmony with the contention of Lockeian Rational Dissenters of the Repeal Movement, that religion and politics ought to be separate. The theory now lacked part of its base, for by 1800 arguments from ‘abstract natural rights’ were so discredited as to be no longer available to practical or parliamentary advocates of religious toleration. The religious right of private judgement, together with the psychological argument that the mind cannot be forced, was still honoured. Grey could argue that ’the human conscience was the province of God, and man was guilty of an act of impiety when he interfered with its scruples’—provided there was no clear necessity in the public interest for restraint.1 But secular natural rights and their survival in the Lockeian social contract were heard of no more. Instead the Whigs tried to combat the theory of the Protestant Constitution in a way more congenial to the Tory point of view, by saying that the common law (which was peculiarly English, of earlier origin than the House of Commons and therefore contained more of the national tradition than statute law) did not recognize political disabilities for religious dissent. Grattan declared that common law, not parliament, gives capacity; parliament limits it. Religion is not a good reason for limiting it; for religion is a moral right. As far as it is a sentiment of the mind, the feeling of the individual, parliament cannot interfere with it—‘It is human legislation, interfering between God and his creatures.’2 Deprived of the social contract, the Whigs fell back upon another Lockeian argument by stressing the irrelevance of religious belief to practical politics. Said Sydney Smith: ‘I am as disgusted with the nonsense of the Roman Catholic religion as you may be . . . but what have I to do with the speculative nonsense of his theology, when the object is to elect the mayor of a county town, or to appoint a colonel of a marching regiment?’ 3 Smith foreshadowed that separation of religious tenet from practical secular morality which Macaulay later emphasized during the Jewish Emancipation struggle. But the 1 Grey presenting a petition from the Roman Catholics of Great Britain in the House of Lords. Hansard, XXXIV (11th June 1816), 1056. 2 Hansard, XXXVI (9th May 1817), 431. 3 Peter Plymley’s Letters, Letter II. Works, 1850, p. 488. The government’s preoccupation in 1807 was with Irish loyalty in the war and with recruitment of soldiers.

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eclipse of natural rights deprived the Whigs for the time of a systematic basis for the separation of religion and politics. However, by 1826, the approach of the Oxford Movement (and possibly the example of Roman Catholic arguments) produced a Whately to postulate a providential, apostolic Church, maintaining its purity in separation from the State.1 The Whigs maintained that Catholic Emancipation was, in the last resort, a matter of principle, for it was a matter of justice. They meant that toleration, up to the limits of public safety, was a Christian duty. Grattan said: ‘We affect the foundation of our faith, and disobey a prime order of natural and revealed religion . . . to love one another’.2 The only enthusiastic supporter of the Catholic claims among the Bishops, Henry Bathurst of Norwich, suggested ‘that a Christian Church should be endangered by an act of justice was a proposition contrary to the great maxim of the religion of Christ, namely, “Whatsoever you would that others do to you, even so do ye unto them”.3 Bathurst valued this principle of Christian toleration more than the preservation of the Establishment, although he maintained that there was no need to choose between them since duty and self-interest coincided. Toleration had been notably lacking in the treatment of Irish Catholics, and English Whigs denounced the record of English government in Ireland as a national crime. ‘The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned,’ wrote Sydney Smith, ‘the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.’4 With the rare Whig nationalist, this consciousness of misrule was reinforced, so that Emancipation became a kind of act of restorative justice. Thomas Arnold called his pamphlet The Christian Duty of Granting the Claims of the Catholics.5 In it he argued that the Irish were a nation; that the nation was large enough for independence; and that the perpetuation of foreign minority government by means of religious disabilities was a reversal of the order of nature, and a national sin. But Arnold’s position was more radical than that of most Whigs, who were 1

Richard Whately, Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian, 1826. Hansard, XL (3rd May 1819), 9. Hansard, XL (17th May 1819), 391. 4 Peter Plymley’s Letters, Letter II. Works, 1850, p. 492. 5 Oxford, 1829. 2

3

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content to believe that Emancipation as an act of justice was the best means of preserving the Union and the essential institutions in Church and State. To the left of the Whigs on the political spectrum, the Benthamite Radicals supported the Catholic claims. They denounced the iniquity of maintaining civil disabilities to preserve a useless and indeed pernicious Church Establishment. All the Radicals hated religious persecution. To them exclusion for dissent was the means by which selfish rulers and ‘sinister interests’ ensured their own supremacy, and at the same time diverted attention and energy from some scheme of ‘improvement’ the Radicals had in mind. They insisted that sectarian differences ought to be ignored in politics because they were simply irrelevant to human behaviour and to the pursuit of human wellbeing. This was the burden of Perronet Thompson’s celebrated article in the Westminster Review of January 1829. Here the fourteen black horses (Protestants) and the six greys (Catholics) were harnessed at each end of the waggon of state; and the fourteen black horses pulled the waggon and the greys backward through the mire, instead of all pulling together. 1 The effect of this sceptical indifference to sectarian divisions among religious believers was that particular struggles, for Repeal, or for Emancipation, tended to appear as part of a general struggle for religious liberty, or, alternatively, to become auxiliary to some secular cause on which they seemed to have some bearing. Perronet Thompson wrote: ‘The struggle for fairness of representation in Ireland, is only the cause of the people of England tried under Irish names; and they are waiting for the decision of this question, before they proceed to their own’.2 The Westminster Reviewers were at least as vexed by the disfranchisement of the Irish forty-shilling freeholders as they were delighted by the Emancipation act. Bentham himself strongly supported Catholic Emancipation. His writings contained many traces of a truly Protestant dislike of the Roman Catholic Church, which was to him the archetype of ecclesiasticism, but he disliked religious oppression so much that he would rather have seen the Orangemen than the Irish Catholics exterminated, if such had been the only alternative. 1 2

‘The Catholic Question’. Westminster Review, January–April 1829, X, 1–36. Ibid., p. 23. 166

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He expressed this sentiment in a note to O’Connell enclosing £ 5 for the Catholic Rent,‘. . . in the humble and cordial hope, that his oppressed brethren of the Catholic persuasion will neither retaliate persecution by persecution, nor attempt redress by insurrection; but unite with the liberal among Protestants for the attainment of security for all, against degradation and oppression in every shape, by the only practicable means— Parliamentary reform, in the radical and solely efficient mode’.1 In the same year, 1828, he drew up a scheme for an assembly of English Catholics and Protestant Dissenters to do away with every statute establishing disadvantageous distinctions on grounds of religious opinion, which was to include Jewish emancipation in its objects.2 O’Connell had no personal intercourse with Bentham until 1828, when he professed himself his disciple, but his tendency to be distracted from the single cause of Emancipation by the claims of radical political reform had, in 1821, imperilled the unity of the Irish movement.3 The Radicals were embarrassing allies to the cause of Catholic Emancipation, since, with the best intentions, they tended to associate it in the eyes of the ‘respectable’ with other and more revolutionary ends. IV The Roman Catholics who campaigned for Emancipation were deeply divided among themselves. Relations between the Irish majority and the English minority were disturbed by national feeling. The English Catholics’ willingness to submit to ‘securities’ made matters worse.4 Only the few Irish gentry who seceded from the Irish Catholic Board in 1815 fell in with the English point of view. From 1814 onwards the Irish nationalist clergy had cause to fear that the Pope might do a deal with Wellington, and secure the diplomatic support of the British government at their expense. When, in 1815 the English vicars apostolic accepted the Quarantotti Rescript 1

Bentham’s Works, ed. Bowring, 1843, X, 544. Ibid., p. 592. 3 See O’Connell’s letter to the Catholics of Ireland advocating a combination of all sects for parliamentary reform, and Sheil’s alarmed reply. Life and Speeches of O’Connell by his son, John O’Connell, Dublin, 1846, II, 302–9. 4 The story of these differences is recounted in detail by Bernard Ward in The Dawn of the Catholic Revival and The Eve of Catholic Emancipation. 2

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sanctioning the acceptance of the Veto, O’Connell launched bitter attacks upon them, calling Dr. Poynter ‘Poynter by name but spaniel by nature’.1 In England itself there was friction between the Catholic clergy, led by the vicars apostolic, and the lay gentlemen. The latter felt that their prospects of professional and political advancement were obstructed by the scrupulous adherence of the clergy to the narrower dictates of their Church. The English Catholic Board, like the Committee of the Three Denominations in the Repeal struggle, was responsible for much of the propaganda defending the claims of the Catholics on the English side. Its chief publicist was the learned lawyer Charles Butler who, like Samuel Heywood of the Dissenting Deputies, specialized in expounding the disabilities and hardships suffered by the Catholics under the laws, and who also stressed the similarities between the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. But the gentlemen represented by the Catholic Board, with the few liberal-minded and doubtfully orthodox priests who shared their attitude, tended to go very far to meet the point of view of their Protestant fellow countrymen. As early as 1788 the Catholic Committee (as the Board’s predecessor was called) drew up a Protestation to Pitt, which set the tone, and much of the phraseology, for similar manifestos throughout the struggle. This Protestation affirmed that Roman Catholics absolutely rejected the power of the Pope to depose heretic sovereigns, to subvert any English rights or laws, to demand obedience to political orders, to sanction breaking faith with a heretic, to absolve a Catholic from any oath or contract, or to forgive any sin without the contrition of the sinner. Some of these affirmations were embodied in the oath in the Relief Act of 1791. The Protestation also rejected the claim of papal infallibility, already current in ultramontane circles.2 The attitude of the English laity was one of extreme ‘Gallicanism’ verging at times on unorthodoxy. It is therefore not surprising to find the Catholic Board, or its provincial branches, defending Catholic claims by arguments for religious toleration taken directly from the Rational Dissenters. When in 1815 reports of antiProtestant riots in the south of France gave rise to a wave of 1 2

Life and Speeches of O’Connell by his son, John O’Connell, II, 210. Bernard Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival, I, 143. 168

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hostility towards the Catholics in England, the Catholic Board at Newcastle resolved: ‘That attached as we are to the faith of the Catholic Church, we do maintain the right of every individual, in every age and every country, to judge of the reasonableness of his belief; and we do moreover maintain that no man can be deprived of this sacred inalienable right without injustice or oppression’.1 But John Milner, an orthodox and battling prelate not unlike Henry Phillpotts in character, condemned the resolutions. He said: ‘It is not the Catholic rule of faith, that every individual should judge of the reasonableness of every article of his faith, but he is to believe them on the authority of the Catholic Church’.2 In England the ‘Gallican’ party was that of the lay gentry, who showed readiness to accept the terms offered by a Protestant government. In Ireland, the ‘Gallican’ party was that of the middle class followers of O’Connell, but especially of the younger, more nationalist clergy. James Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, their leader, avowed his attachment to the Union, but freely admitted the necessity of disestablishing the Anglican Church in Ireland, secularizing some of its endowments, and devoting them to public education or social welfare. These suggestions, put forward in his Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of the Irish Catholics in 1823, were later adopted by the Whigs in the programme which gave rise to their struggle with the House of Lords over the ‘Appropriations Clause’.3 In Ireland the moderate ‘seceders’ were less ‘Gallican’ than the Catholic secular clergy. After Pius VII in 1814–15 had shown signs of coming to terms with Liverpool’s government over the Veto, the Irish bishops discovered an ardent antipapalism. In 1825 Bishop Doyle told the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Ireland, that the authority of the Pope in spiritual matters was limited by the decrees of councils already passed, and by usages. When he directed any decree concerning local discipline to any nation beyond the Patrimony, the assent of the hierarchy of the country was necessary for the decree to 1 Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, II, 237. O’Connell used similar language. 2 Ibid., II, 238. John Milner was Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, 1803– 26, and agent for the Irish Catholic bishops in parliamentary affairs. 3 James Doyle, Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of the Irish Catholics, Dublin, 1823, pp. 35–40.

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1

have effect. As for the temporal power, even Wellington’s old friend and nominee, Archbishop Curtis, told the Committee that it was a survival from the Pope’s medieval position as a feudal prince. ‘Whatever he (the Pope) had, or has of temporal power or authority, he received from men; and, I believe, would have done better not to take it; he has become a great deal less influential man, as a spiritual chief, after receiving it than before.’2 The Irish bishops were determined to remain independent of the British government. They could suggest, plausibly, that any control of appointments which might get into the hands of Dublin Castle, or be influenced by such as Dr. Duigenan, would be used to the detriment of the Catholic religion.3 But the British government were sure they only wanted to add to their own power and authority. In the end the Irish clergy won their point, refusing not only Veto and Exequatur but government salaries as well. Meanwhile, their arguments for the independence of their national church organization vis-à-vis the Pope were used to demonstrate that their allegiance to the British Crown in temporal matters was whole and undivided. All the Catholics based their plea for toleration on a thorough-going theory of the separation of Church and State. The theory at first sight resembled that of the Rational Dissenters or the Whigs; and it enabled the English Catholic laity and Irishmen of Dr. Doyle’s stamp to support the Whig Party without inconsistency. But it was based on the conception of a single, providential, universal, corporate Church, and providential states, and was really a simple form of the Gelasian doctrine of the Two Swords. The Whigs had nothing like it until the revival of the Apostolic conception of the Church of England produced Whately’s Letters of an Episcopalian. The adaptation of this theory to answer the charge of divided allegiance produced some confusing statements from the Irish bishops. Dr. Murray told the Select Committee; ‘The Duties which we owe to the Pope and those which we owe to the King, when properly understood, are like two parallel lines which can 1 Report of the Select Committee on the State of Ireland. Parliamentary Papers, 1825, VIII, 192. 2 Ibid., p. 223. 3 Dr. Duigenan was an avid anti-Catholic pamphleteer. He was made an Irish Privy Councillor in 1808 after the fall of the Talents Ministry.

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never meet. No excommunication, no dread, no inducement, that could be held out by the Pope, should prevail on a Catholic to transgress the allegiance he owes to his sovereign’.1 Bishop Doyle said :– . . . We are bound to obey the Pope in those things that I have already mentioned; but our obedience to the law, and the allegiance which we owe the sovereign, are complete, and full, and perfect and undivided inasmuch as they extend to all political, legal and civil rights of the King, or of his subjects. I think the allegiance due to the King, and that due to the Pope, are as distinct and as divided in their nature, as any two things can possibly be.2 The Catholics really meant that their allegiance was rightly divided according to the things that were God’s and the things that were Caesar’s, but that the division entailed no conflict of loyalty, and no conflict of jurisdiction which could not be harmonized. The Committee’s questions on the Roman Catholic Church’s jurisdiction over marriage and morals were, as we have seen, an investigation of one aspect of this claim. Apart from the theory of the separation of Church and State, the more orthodox Catholics argued in terms of the truth and superiority of their Church, resting on theological contentions in which they were bound to be overwhelmed by Protestant feeling. They contrasted their own unity under the guidance of a traditional authority with the endless divisions brought about by the individual use of the Bible and the right of private judgement.3 Milner’s misnamed End of Religious Controversy was really an uncompromising claim for the sole truth of the Catholic Church as demonstrated by its marks of unity, sanctity, catholicity and apostolicity.4 It might be argued, as the Whigs argued, that the Irish Catholics had a claim in justice as well as 1 Quoted in the Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the State of Ireland, in ‘The Divided Allegiance of the Catholics’, Edinburgh Review, November 1825–February 1826, XLII, 160. 2 Report of the Select Committee, etc., Parl. Papers, 1825, VIII, 190. 3 Joseph Berington to Hannah More, 1809. Wm. Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, 2nd ed. 1834, III, 276. In his earlier Address to the Protestant Dissenters, Birmingham, 1787, Berington had argued from the right of private judgement. Cf., A Letter Non-expressly Addressed to Timothy Hobnail touching the right of the Catholics to hold the Doctrine of Tradition, by Humphrey Hornbook, Norwich, 1824. 4 Written in 1801–2 in reply to the Dean of Winchester’s Reflections on Popery.

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expediency for relief from disabilities which had become the hall-mark of a foreign ascendancy; that the English Catholics were loyal citizens; that there was no danger whatever of Catholic persecution in England or of Catholic conspiracy anywhere. It might later be argued that the Catholic Church could stand guard against the overdeveloped claims of corporate States, that a liberal Catholicism could revive a Christian doctrine of human rights against political and racial intolerance.1 With all this, apart from its doctrine of separation, Catholic orthodoxy did not favour the development of a full theory of religious liberty. The advocates of Catholic Emancipation could not claim that the Act of 1829 represented a victory of persuasion by the forces of religious toleration. The Irish were prepared to fight for Emancipation and Peel and Wellington were not prepared to shed blood to put them down. Peel disfranchised the Irish forty-shilling freeholders who had revolted against the political domination of their landlords, and otherwise fell back upon the securities of Crown patronage and the Protestant feeling of the English electors. Yet the fact remains that, for some reason, despite recurrent crises over the Catholic question, the general election of 1806 was the last in which the electors clearly responded to the cry of No Popery. Despite the indignation aroused in England by the mushroom growth of O’Connell’s Catholic Association, the election of 1826 failed to produce a House of Commons with a firm mandate against Emancipation. Peel, introducing the Emancipation bill in the House of Commons on 5th March 1829, analysed the vote provided by the representatives of the fifteen largest counties and the twenty most populous towns in England, and showed that some fifteen of these had voted against concession to the Catholics and some twenty-five for it, in many cases the two members for the constituency voting on different sides.2 Peel felt himself to be without the electors’ backing for a stand against the Catholics. After O’Connell’s election for Clare in the summer of 1828, no further appeal to the country was possible, since to dissolve parliament would have been an invitation to the Irish to elect a block of Roman Catholic members. The king’s speech on 5th 1 2

See the works of Jacques Maritain. Hansard, New Series, XX (5th March 1829), 727–80. 172

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February 1829 promised a review of the Catholics’ civil disabilities, and at once a nation-wide mass petitioning movement developed, the largest so far in the century, organized locally by parish clergy, squires, and Tory ‘Brunswick Clubs’. Despite the counter-efforts of the Friends of Emancipation, the large majority of petitions opposed the Catholic claims.1 Yet the time of No Popery mobs had also gone, and there were no serious disorders. Rival petitions were signed in many places. At a county meeting of Kentish freeholders held on Penenden Heath in October 1828, to protest against the proceedings of the Catholic Association, about twenty thousand supporters of the ‘Protestant’ party were present, with a phalanx of ‘Catholics’ on one wing, and a cavalcade of farmers in between. Although Sheil, Cobbett and Hunt who turned up to speak for the Catholics were shouted down, and a petition was carried, no violence ensued.2 At a similar meeting in Exeter Castle Yard in January 1829, Whig grandees including Lords Seymour, Ebrington and John Russell supported the Catholics, amid much shouting and some broken heads; but the meeting dispersed quietly.3 There were isolated cases of violence, but no such disturbances as would accompany the passage of the Reform bills.4 Much further investigation is needed before the effect of the persistent propaganda of ‘Catholic Tories’, Whigs, Dissenting leaders and Radicals can be fully estimated. Proceedings in parliament afford no accurate guide, for the uneven and very restricted franchise of 1829 prevented public opinion exercising its full influence upon parliament. Possibly a House of Commons of the post-Reform bill type, chosen by a higher proportion of middle class electors, would have returned an earlier and clearer verdict for the Catholics. Possibly a House elected by universal suffrage would have given Peel his mandate against Emancipation. But whatever effect arguments for toleration had on the final result was unfortunately concealed under a patent victory 1 House of Commons Journals, General Index, 75–92. Ward gives the figures between 5th February and the first reading of the bill on 5th March as 957 petitions against Emancipation and 357 for it. Eve of Catholic Emancipation, III, p. 248. Many of the pro-Catholic petitions were from Ireland, the majority of hostile ones were from English parishes. Accounts of many petitions and meetings are in the Leeds Mercury. 2 Henry Jephson, The Platform, 1892, II, 27. 3 Leeds Mercury, 24th January 1829. 4 Account of Coventry meeting. Ibid., 28th February 1829.

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of the threat of force. The extremist elements in Ireland were encouraged, and ‘Protestant’ elements in England, whether in a Tory House of Lords, or, like Stanley, in Grey’s government, remained strong enough to prevent the Whigs from following up the victory by the necessary radical reforms in Irish administration. In after years, those who had predicted that Emancipation would be a preliminary to attacks upon the Irish Church and the Union could say, ‘We told you so.’ Liberals and tolera¬ tionists, on the other hand, could pronounce an epitaph upon the history of English concessions to Catholic Ireland: ‘Always too little and too late’.

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VI Jewish Emancipation

I ALTHOUGH a small Jewish community had openly existed in Britain since the Restoration, and was gradually increasing in size, no move had been made to secure civil or political rights for the Jews since the fiasco of the Jew Naturalization Bill of 1753. Napoleon’s convocation of a ‘sanhedrin’ in Paris in 1807, and his subsequent attempts to assimilate the Jews into French life and recruit them for his armies, roused considerable interest. The Monthly Repository regularly reported these doings in its intelligence column. The foundation in 1808 and the activities of the London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews, an offshoot of the Evangelical London Missionary Society, excited further comment, not all of it favourable. The Jews themselves ungratefully regarded attempts to convert them to the other religion as an insult to their own. Their Rabbis were apt to denounce or excommunicate members of their faith who accepted charity from conversionist societies. Some Christians also disapproved of the London Society’s aims and methods. Thomas Witherby angrily declaimed against its attempts to interfere with Providence by converting the Jews before their return to Palestine, which would herald ‘the Second Advent of our Lord’. 1 He was also evidently moved by some consideration for Jewish feelings, for he declared it a perversion of the law of 1 Thomas Witherby, A Vindication of the Jews, 1809, p. 254. Quoting from Bishop Horsley.

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the land for the London Society to paste up handbills with abstracts from the Statute of Queen Anne compelling Jewish parents to provide for their Protestant children.1 In 1791 there had appeared an English translation of the Abbé Grégoire’s Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Reformation of the Jews. This important pamphlet had suggested many of the practical steps later taken by Napoleon, although its attitude towards the Jews was on the whole more liberal than Napoleon’s. Written in 1789, the philosophy underlying its suggestions was that of Helvetius; and the influence of the translation helped to ensure that Utilitarianism should form the basis of much argument in favour of Jewish Emancipation. In 1813 there appeared an extraordinary pamphlet entitled The Lamentations of the Children of Israel, respecting the hardships they suffer from the Penal Laws, and praying, that if they are repealed so as to exempt the Catholics and Dissenters from their Influence, the Jews may also enjoy the benefit of this indulgence, in common with the rest of His Majesty’ Subjects. In a letter to a dignified clergyman of the Church of England. By Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, Aaron and Levi, David, Bathsheba, Solomon, 1000 wives and concubines, David Belteshazzar, Manasseh Ben Israel, of the House of David. The pamphlet, which seems to have been written by a Deist, sandwiched attacks on the Sacramental Test and the Athanasian Creed and ‘priestly imposture and cruelty’, with eulogies of the Jewish virtues and demands that the exclusion of Jews from the rights of citizens should be ended. Serious, even eloquent pleas for toleration were jumbled up with ridicule and buffoonery, as in the comment on the Dissenting and Jewish pastors:–‘How happily do they concur in the black cloak and the shortbib!How perfectly does the puritannical phiz of some of them accord with that of a Rabbi in Israel. How exactly alike are the size of their consciences, their zeal for works of faith and piety; and above all, for theREADYPENNY.’2The pamphlet ended with a set piece of the Jews marching in solemn procession through the streets of London, ‘with our rabbies and priests, and our law and commandments, and Aaron’s Bells, at the head of us. If this moving 1 2

Ibid., p. 286. Lamentations, etc., London, 1813, p. 69. 176

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scene shall not have its effect, we must despair of being restored to our natural rights’. 1 Subsequently a satire appeared called An Epistle from a High Priest of the Jews to the Chief Priest of Canterbury, on the Extension of Catholic Emancipation to the Jews. This was a shortened version of the Lamentations with certain sentences displaced or added to, to suggest that all the arguments for Catholic Emancipation and for repeal of the Test Laws applied equally to Jewish Emancipation, and that the relief of Dissenters would inevitably entail the equal relief of the Jews. This time the Jews were to go on their solemn procession in company with the Three Denominations. There were two editions of this curious production in 1821. The anti-Jewish riots in Germany in 1819 excited some sympathy in England, and in 1820 John Cam Hobhouse gave notice in the House of Commons of intention to move a resolution that the condition and disabilities of the Jews be taken into immediate consideration.2 Nothing came of this, for the Jews had lifted no finger on their own behalf. Yet it was apparent that currents of feeling towards them were gradually changing. In 1826 an offshoot of the London Society was founded, called the Philo-Judean Society. Like the London Society it aimed at conversion, but with a more humane and respectful approach. The Christian Register gave its purpose as that of ‘relieving the Jews resident in Great Britain, from the civil disabilities to which they are subjected; and of performing such kind offices towards the members of the Jewish persuasion generally, as may induce them to regard the professors of the Gospel with a more favourable eye, and ultimately lead them within the pale of the Christian Church’.3 Its members appear to have been mainly Evangelical members of the Church of England, although it was open to Nonconformists.4 On the whole it followed Witherby’s line of reasoning, that the Jews would not be converted as a 1

Ibid., p. 71. Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England, London, 1941, p. 248. An outline of the Jewish Emancipation struggle is given in Chapter II of this book. The pamphlets are listed in Jacobs, Wolf and Roth, Magna Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica, 1937. 3 Christian Register for 1829, 48. 4 A vice-president was Viscount Mandeville, and the treasurer was Henry Drummond, a rich and eccentric Irvingite. 2

R.T.–N

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nation until they returned to their own land, when their conversion would herald the Second Coming of Christ. In preparation for this, they were to be restored to self-respect by kind treatment, and raised from their ‘lamentable state of intellectual debasement’ by a more intimate knowledge of their own Scriptures.1 In pursuit of its aims the Society tried to found schools, which were not well attended, and carried on relief work among poor East End Jews. When its Ladies’ Committee aroused the ire of the rabbis by putting copies of the Holy Scriptures into the boxes of child bed linen it distributed, the Society had separate copies of the Old Testament printed. More important, it started a vigorous campaign for the better treatment of Jews both at home and abroad. It reported and deplored foreign persecutions, reprinted Lewis Way’s memorandum to the Emperor of Russia on Jewish rights, and promoted a meeting of Christians and Jews in London to protest about Russian persecuting decrees.2 It also championed the cause of Jewish rights in the City of London. It petitioned the Court of Aldermen on behalf of David Gill Saul, and prepared petitions to both Houses of Parliament in favour of Jewish relief.3 Apsley Pellatt, a London glass and china manufacturer who joined its committee in 1828, campaigned vigorously for the admission of Jews to the Freedom of the City, and wrote a pamphlet entitled A Brief Memoir of the Jews in Relation to their Civil and Municipal Disabilities, from which the proselytizing attitude had completely disappeared.4 The Philo-Judean Society illustrated a development which also occurred among members of the older London Society. Some of those who started out to convert the Jews became their champions, even unconverted. Lewis Way, the moving spirit of the London Society, had campaigned for international safeguards for Jewish rights at the Congress of Aix la Chapelle. When in 1830 the Jews wanted members of parliament to present their petitions and move for their Emancipation under a Tory government, they turned to Evangelicals from the London Society—to Charles and Robert Grant and Lord Bexley. 1

First Report of the Philo-Judean Society (1827), p. 11. Second Annual Report of the Philo-Judean Society, p. 15. 3 Ibid., pp. 13–13. 4 1829. 2

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Up to 1828 nothing effective was done toward Jewish emancipation, for the Jews themselves made no attempt to procure legislative action. Together with their suspicion of attempts at conversion, the tone of the pamphlets just quoted may help to account for their apathy. Despite the recent signs of a more sympathetic public feeling, the Jews were still the most despised and the most depressed of the religious minorities in England. By a happy historical accident, they had not become subject to special codes of law or taxation, nor shut up in ghettos, nor, as in Alsace, had they become a special and isolated class of creditors, at once the oppressors and the butt of a peasant population. Probably too, some of the force of public odium was drawn away from them, since the English already had a national scapegoat in the Roman Catholics. Yet their legal position was precarious. It was comparable with that of the English Catholics before the Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791; but while the Catholics were subject to oppressive statutes and could be restored at least to legal equality with their countrymen by repeal of these, the Jews had no legal status at all.1 Nobody quite knew what their rights were, and attempts to find out resulted in the definition and clarification of their disabilities. There was a dictum of Coke that all infidels were perpetual enemy aliens.2 Coke had argued thus in order to deny them the right to bring legal actions. But although this right had subsequently been vindicated,3 some people still believed that Jews, although born within the country, and of long settled families, were aliens.4 Their right to own land was in doubt, for their legal position in this respect was thought to be regulated by medieval statutes passed before the expulsion of 1290; and a copy of an Ordinance of 55 Henry III, prohibiting them from purchasing freehold land except for a town residence, had been discovered in the Bodleian Library and printed in 1738.5 This, with the Statute De Judaismo of 1275, was believed by many lawyers, including Samuel Romilly, still to apply. A test case on the taking of the oath on 1

The fullest available account of the legal position of the Jews in the early nineteenth century can be extracted from H. S. Q. Henriques, The Jews and the English Law, 1908. 2 Calvin’s Case, 1608. Henriques, op. cit., p. 186. 3 Wells v. Williams, 1697. Ibid., p. 189. 4 Third Annual Report of the Philo-Judean Society, 1829, Appendix B, p. 36. 5 Henriques, op. cit., p. 192. 179

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the Old Testament confirmed their exclusion from the freedom of the City of London,1 which meant that they could not exercise retail trade in the city, although twelve Jewish brokers were allowed to operate on the Exchange on payment of perpetually increasing fees for a broker’s medal. Like the Catholics, the Jews were deprived of facilities for education. They were prevented from teaching and endowing their own schools, and they were excluded from English public schools by compulsory prayers, or by the regulations in the school charters. The legality of their public worship hung on the frail thread of an Order in Council of Charles II. 2 They were excluded from the professions, except those of attorney or doctor (if they could find a medical training outside the universities). They were excluded from parliament, from civil and military crown office, from corporate office, even from voting in parliamentary elections, unless a friendly magistrate (like John Tooke in the City of London) proffered the oath on the Old Testament. The principal engines of exclusion were the phrase ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ and the requirement to take all oaths on the New Testament. The phrase ‘on the faith of a Christian’ (or ‘on the true faith’—either seems to have served) had first appeared in the Oath of Allegiance laid down in the Statute 3 Jac. I, 4 after the Gunpowder Plot. When the original oath was abolished in 1688 it reappeared in other oaths and declarations, including the Oath of Abjuration of the Pretender.3 During the eighteenth century these requirements had been dispensed with for registrations of land, to admit Jewish witnesses in law cases and to admit Jews to jury service and to certain subordinate posts such as constable. The Jews could complain that they were allowed to qualify for the burdens and drudgery of civic life, but not for the rewards. As harassing as the legal disabilities was the pervasive atmosphere of contempt. Even the friends and advocates of Jewish Emancipation could not forbear an attack or a sneer when the opportunity arose. The liberal Unitarian Monthly Repository, reviewing Dr. Solomon Hirschel’s thanksgiving sermon for 1

Ibid., pp. 199–200. Henriques, Return of the Jews to England, 1905, p. 105. The date of the Order in Council was 1674. 3 Henriques, The Jews and the English Law, 1908, p. 76. 2

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Trafalgar, rebuked him for saying that all civilized nations unite in the belief of the true God. ‘Does he seriously believe that there is no difference between the one only God of Moses, and the plural God of Christians ?’ It added that when they (Jews) wish to defend their religious prejudices they call Christians idolaters, and when they have a political purpose to serve they acknowledge them to be fellow believers in the true God.1 In 1821 even Lord Holland (who was not yet a friend of Isaac Lyon Goldsmid) had his poke. Rothschild and his partners were foolish enough to sign an address at Hackney, directed presumably against Richard Carlile and other Deist publishers, complaining of the prevalence of blasphemy and sedition, as tending to subvert the faith of Christ. Lord Holland said at a public meeting, ‘that when the Jews and the Gentiles were all mixed up together, there was some little profit in the rear of all this expression of loyalty and Christian piety’.2 The few very wealthy Jews were financiers, and the atmosphere of money-lending clung like a bad smell. Mackintosh was asking Goldsmid for private loans, and Brougham was borrowing money to buy himself a Yorkshire freehold to qualify as parliamentary candidate, while both were (although this probably had no influence on their opinions) actively advocating the Jewish cause.3 Less religious—or less conscientious—men could relieve themselves of these fetters by deserting the ancestral faith, as did Ricardo and Disraeli. There was no racial prejudice against Jews in the modern sense. Indeed, Disraeli, in his romantic mood, was one of the first exponents of racial claptrap, in his efforts to show the superiority of the Jews.4 None the less Jewish disabilities were sometimes attached to parentage instead of faith. The movement to open the freedom of the City of 1

Monthly Repository,1806, I, 156–7. R. B. Aspland, Memoir of . . . Robert Aspland, 1850, pp. 420–1. 3 Letter Book of Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, Mocatta Library, University College, London, Vol. I. (Letters of 3rd and 5th February 1831 from Mackintosh, and letter headed ‘York, Sat. 5’ from Brougham.) 4 ‘Sidonia was well aware that in the five great varieties into which Physiology has divided the human species; to wit, the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Malayan, the American, the Ethiopian; the Arabian tribes rank in the first and superior class, together, among others, with the Saxon and the Greek . . . But Sidonia and his brethren could claim a distinction which the Saxon and the Greek, and the rest of the Caucasian nations, have forfeited. The Hebrew is an unmixed race.’ Coningsby, 1844. 2

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London began with the struggle of David Gill Saul, baptized son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, to obtain a privilege which the Court of Aldermen and a majority on the Court of Common Council sought to deny him. In London, antiJewish prejudice was the partner of economic exclusiveness and corporate greed. The City had long been in the habit of fining Jews (like Dissenters) for not taking offices from which they were debarred by religious tests; and in the 1820s, while the Saul family was fighting the Common Council for admission to the Freedom, the Council was prosecuting Abraham and Saul Saul, who were still Jewish in religion, for the fine of £5 for not taking it up. 1 It was not surprising that the community’s leaders were cautious about drawing attention to themselves by fighting, in the face of the general prejudice, for improvements in a situation of which the very definition seemed to draw tighter the restrictions surrounding them. The structure of the Jewish community also discouraged communal attempts at full political emancipation. F. H. Goldsmid calculated that in 1830 there were fewer than 27,000 Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, of whom nearly 18,000 were in or near London.2 There were a few very rich families; Rothschilds, international and parvenu, Goldsmids, third generation and assimilated. The London Board of Deputies of British Jews, which in 1778 had begun keeping its minutes in English instead of Portuguese, and since 1805 represented the Ashkenazi (Central European) as well as Sephardi (Portuguese) congregations, included respectable business and professional men. There were also some substantial traders in the provincial towns and ports. The majority of poverty stricken peddlers and old clothes sellers could not possibly be interested in seats for parliament for their wealthy leaders, which were not, as they had become for the Irish poor, symbols of the recognition of a national power. The very orthodox rabbis were unlikely to encourage the laity in their hankerings after Emancipation. There was a well grounded fear that assimilation into the full economic social and political life of the country would be found incompatible with the 1

Minutes of the Proceedings of the Court of Common Council, Guildhall Library, 1827, p. 81. 2 F. H. Goldsmid. Remarks on the Civil Disabilities of the British Jews, 1830, p. 69, Appendix V. 182

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complete observance of Jewish ritual law. There was also an incipient distraction in the embryonic stirrings of Zionism, encouraged by Napoleon’s Egyptian proclamation of 1799 calling on the Jews to return to Palestine,1 and supported by the Evangelicals’ belief in the Second Coming after the restoration of the Jews. But in the early nineteenth century, Zionism was not a serious rival to Emancipation for the minds of educated British Jews,2 nor did they or their Evangelical friends think of them as incompatible.3 In the upshot, the struggle for political rights rested on the exertions of the members of a few wealthy and ambitious families, supported by the settled middle class Jews of London and a few big towns. The struggle for Jewish Emancipation really began with the repeal of the Test Laws. The Tories insisted on substituting for the Sacramental Test a declaration that the candidate for office would not use his power to injure or weaken the Protestant Church by law established, or to disturb it or the bishops and clergy in possession of their privileges. The Protestant Dissenters’ United Committee fought hard against this Declaration, but was forced to give in when Peel made it the price of his support for the bill.4 In the Lords, the Bishop of Llandaff amended the Declaration by inserting the words, ‘upon the faith of a Christian.’ This traditional phrase turned the Declaration into a religious test designed to exclude nonChristians from office. Whether the clause was directed against the Jews is uncertain. Lord Holland thought it was not, and it may well have been primarily directed against the Deists or the infidel Benthamites who were much in the public eye. On the other hand, the urgent protests of Lord Holland and Brougham must have revealed the discontents and ambitions of their wealthy Jewish friends. The Declaration passed, for the Protestant Dissenters were not prepared to risk the bill for it. They contented themselves by passing a resolution deploring it, while 1

Israel Cohen. The Zionist Movement, 1945, p. 44. Moses Montefiore made his first visit to Palestine in 1827 but took a leading part in the struggle for the first Relief bill. 3 Second Annual Report of the Philo-Judean Society, 1828, p. 22. 4 ‘Minutes of the Meetings of the Committee Appointed to Conduct the Application to Parliament for the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 1827– 29.’ Guildhall Library, 18th March 1828, p. 130. Cf. B. L. Manning, The Protestant Dissenting Deputies, Cambridge, 1952, pp. 236–43. 2

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Lord Holland promised Goldsmid that he would undo the damage.1 The repeal of the Test Laws left the Jews technically worse off than before; for the new declaration, unlike the Sacramental Test, had to be taken for corporate (though not for Crown) office within one month of admission, and the holder could not rely on Acts of Indemnity to cover his failure retrospectively.2 Isaac Lyon Goldsmid had tried very hard to persuade Lord Holland to present a petition to the Lords against it; for he thought that the bill would not only add another obstacle to the admission of Jews to corporate office, but would encourage resistance to their voting at parliamentary elections, and, worst of all, would induce the Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn to refuse to modify the Oath of Allegiance to admit his clever son Francis Henry to the Bar.3 The immediate effect of the Declaration was to bring Goldsmid, Nathan Rothschild and Lord Holland into a campaign for the admission of Jews to parliament and office. The repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts and the approach of Catholic Emancipation threatened to leave the Jews the sole considerable religious sect (with the exception of Quakers and Moravians who still suffered through their inability to take oaths) exposed to serious disabilities. This, as Francis Henry Goldsmid pointed out, increased their sense of oppression and isolation,4 while at the same time it aroused liberal sympathies for their plight. The necessity for an attempt to improve their position was obvious. The means was also at hand, and the Board of Deputies, which was by now trying to emulate the role of the Deputies of the Three Denominations in looking after Jewish interests, and had been convened in April to petition against the bill, was brought in to help.5 1 ‘You may depend upon my doing all I can for you without risking the bill and above all reserving to myself the right in consistency as in law, of doing more for you on future occasions. . . .’ Undated letter from Lord Holland to Goldsmid, Letter Book, II, 13. 2 Henriques, op. cit., p. 252. The Acts of Indemnity continued. 3 I. L. Goldsmid to the Duke (presumably of Wellington), 9th May 1828. Copy in Letter Book, II, 47. Published in the appendix to Lionel Abrahams, ‘Sir I. L. Goldsmid and the Admission of the Jews of England to Parliament’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1899–1901, IV, 123–4. 4 Remarks on the Civil Disabilities of British Jews, 1830, p. 37. 5 Board of Deputies of the British Jews (Office of the Board of Deputies, Woburn Square), Minute Book 1, 36.

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After some hesitation it was decided to apply to the Tory administration for support in introducing a Jewish Emancipation bill. Lord Holland, who in 1828 while the Catholic struggle was at its height had urged caution on Goldsmid, in the spring of 1829 thought that the weakness engendered by the split in the Tory ranks over Catholic Emancipation had opened a suitable opportunity for the Jews to pursue their claims. ‘Ministers are manifestly labouring to acquire as much character for liberal measures as they can afford to purchase without sacrificing the interests and influence of their party and friends.’ To grant rights to a weak and politically harmless group like the Jews might revolt their prejudices but could not harm their interests. 1 Accordingly, in April 1829, Rothschild approached Wellington and other members of the government, and on the strength of his interviews advised the Board of Deputies to commission their solicitor, Mr. Pearce, to draw up a petition for presentation to the House of Lords.2 But Wellington made it very clear that the government would not tolerate a further controversial measure before the agitation over Catholic Emancipation had subsided; so, apart from the presentation of the petition, further moves were postponed.3 During the summer recess Rothschild and Goldsmid prepared the ground for next session. The Times was jeering at the Jews for looking with anxiety at the labours of the committee of the London Court of Common Council which was investigating the abuses of the sale of brokers’ medals and the possibility of admitting Jews to the Freedom, but never claiming citizen rights nor glancing at the recently granted though long denied justice to the Roman Catholics.4 It was the usual sneer about being interested only in financial gain, though The Times could not know about the approach to Wellington. An embarrassing advocate, one P. Anichini, had published a flowery eulogy of the Jews, interlarded with execrations on the Catholics, and The 1 Letter Book, II, Lord Holland’s memo, entitled Considerations for the Jews, is undated but evidently belongs to the spring or summer of 1829. 2 Board of Deputies, Minute Book, II (16th April 1829), 8. Printed in T.J.H.S., IV, 141. 3 Ibid., Minute Book, II (11th June 1829), 24–26. 4 The Times, 2nd July 1829. Reprinted in Extracts from the Public Journals, Containing their Opinions on the Disabilities of the Jews, London, 1830, p. 4. (Mocatta Library.)

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Times quoted disapprovingly from some of his flourishes.1 So Francis Henry Goldsmid wrote a moderate and able pamphlet entitled Remarks on the Civil Disabilities of the British Jews, which his father sent to a wide range of notabilities. This, together with the Case prepared by the deputies the following January, served to advertise the Jewish cause. However, on Rothschild’s advice, care was taken to prevent news of the forthcoming application getting into the popular press, where controversy could arouse the latent and overwhelming prejudice which the Jews had so much cause to fear.2 In December the Board of Deputies met at the house of its president, Moses Mocatta, and decided to proceed with the application. A subcommittee of the president and two leading members was appointed to investigate Jewish disabilities. The deputies’ solicitor, Mr. Pearce, then drew up the Case and submitted it to Dr. Lushington, an ecclesiastical lawyer and Whig M.P., and another Counsel, for their joint opinion.3 Evidently this was favourable, for the deputies resolved to take immediate measures to remove the disabilities.4 In January 1830 the expenses of the application were apportioned on four London congregations in accordance with their size. Another petition was prepared, while Rothschild, Goldsmid and Moses Montefiore were officially commissioned ‘to ascertain the sentiment of H. M. Government concerning the application to parliament, and to report the Result to this meeting.’5 At the end of February the petitions were presented in both Houses, and, on 26th April 1830, leave to bring in the first Jewish Relief bill, providing full civil and political rights including capacity for office and membership of parliament, was accorded by 115 votes to 91 in the House of Commons.6 It was now decided to appeal to friendly interests in the country. Mr. Mozley of Liverpool had been collecting the signatures of Liverpool merchants to a petition for Jewish relief. At the request of Robert Grant who had introduced the 1 P. Anichini, A Few Remarks on the Expediency and Justice of Emancipating the Jews, London, 1829. 2 Board of Deputies Minute Book, II (16th April 1829), 8. 3 Ibid. (30th January 1830), p. 33. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 34. 6 Mirror of Parliament, 5th April 1830, p. 1250.

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bill in the Commons, forms of petition in its favour, to be signed by Christians, were sent to several large towns.1 Separate petitions were drawn up for the merchants, bankers and barristers of London, and a subcommittee of the deputies met daily at the King’s Head Tavern in the Poultry to promote signatures. Many of the petitions were presented in parliament, but no counter-petitioning activities seem to have been aroused. Cobbett’s fulminations in the Political Register were for the time being ignored. But further pamphlets were published, replying to points raised by Sir Robert Inglis and others in opposition to the bill.2 On 17th May 1830, the Jewish Relief bill was submitted for its second reading, and was lost by 228 votes to 165. The main reason is well known. The Duke of Gloucester, primed no doubt by the opposition Tories, had been to the king and aroused his alarm.3 The king had let his opposition be known; and although there is little doubt that a determined stand by Peel and Wellington could have overcome the resistance of the decrepit George IV, they can hardly be blamed for not wanting to repeat the distasteful and embarrassing scenes of the last days of the Catholic Emancipation struggle. There is no indication that Wellington or Peel had promised their support to the bill, although Wellington had allowed the hopeful to think, when the first one was deferred in the spring of 1829, that he might not be unfavourable to a later application. In the event, the Tory administration abandoned whatever incipient religious liberalism it may have had, and allowed its followers to rejoin the Old Guard. The death of George IV, and the subsequent general election which brought the Whigs to power, aroused high hopes in the Jewish leaders. A bill was promoted by Goldsmid in 1831, but had to be postponed because of the excitement over the Reform bill.4 In May 1833 a Jews’ Civil Disabilities Bill passed the 1

Minute Book, II (26th April 1830), 44. F. H. Goldsmid, Two Letters in Answer to the Objections urged Against Mr. Grant’s Bill, etc., 1830. Barnard van Oven, An Appeal to the British Nation on Behalf of the Jews, 1830. 3 Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England, p. 240–50. The news was conveyed in a letter from Perronet Thompson to Goldsmid on 28th April 1830. Letter Book, II, 167. Published T.J.H.S., IV, 159. 4 Letter Book, II, 160. 2

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House of Commons by the handsome majority of 159–52. But the opposition to liberal measures had now concentrated in the House of Lords where (with the concurrence of the Duke of Wellington) the bill was rejected. The same thing happened in 1834. A large majority of those sufficiently interested to vote supported the bill in the Commons. All the Whig leaders, with the fatal exception of Grey, favoured Jewish Emancipation. But Grey steadily refused to make it a government measure; and even if it had been, it is doubtful whether it could have been pressed through the Lords. Jewish admission to parliament was one of the early casualties of the clash between Lords and Commons which followed the Reform Act. The resistance of bishops and High Tories in the Upper House was not overcome until 1858. The first round of the struggle for Jewish Emancipation was not altogether a failure. The Jewish leaders, insisting on their claim for full political rights, all along had to struggle against political friends who offered them something less than political equality with other citizens, and against those in their own camp who were prepared to take something less—for instance, a confirmation of the legal right to own land. But the claim for political rights undoubtedly served as a lever to prise open civil ones. The City of London opened its freedom in 1830. A declaratory act finally established the right of Jews to own freehold land in 1833. The same year, young Francis Henry Goldsmid was admitted to the Bar. The professions fell piecemeal. If some ‘Catholics’ of whom hopes were entertained turned out to be anti-Jewish, a number of ‘Protestant Tories’ favoured the Jewish claims. And most of those who opposed admission to parliament and office were prepared to grant relief from other restrictions. Typical of these was General Gascoyne, who spoke strongly against the first bill in the House of Commons. He had written to Mozley of Liverpool, saying that if the bill were confined to abolishing persecuting laws and civil disabilities he would support it, but to support admission to parliament would be inconsistent with his former opposition to the admission of Roman Catholics.1 The failure to storm the political stronghold was not surprising. The Whigs, with honourable exceptions, were some1

3rd May 1830. Letter Book, II, 98, published T.J.H.S., IV, 161. 188

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what half-hearted. The Jews themselves lacked the strength of unity. Some of the merchants let it be known they would be quite satisfied with half measures. Lewis Levy embarrassed parliamentary supporters of the first bill by petitioning the House of Commons through the Solicitor General for a declaratory law on landholding, adding that he did not desire the franchise nor seats in the House, and that all the Jewish brethren with whom he had conversed were equally indifferent about that matter.1 The Board of Deputies acquired some valuable political experience, but its relations with the two great men Rothschild and Goldsmid, who unlike William Smith of the Protestant Deputies were not regular members of the Board, were never smooth. The whole attempt obviously owed too much to the personal influence and private contacts of the leaders. Even in May 1829, Rothschild and Montefiore handed a petition to the Parliamentary representatives without waiting for the Board’s amendments.2 The main function of the Board was to raise funds. And after the failure of the bill of 1830 the congregations refused to give any more to the bottomless pit of parliamentary applications. Their deputies demanded that the money be raised by public subscription,3 and the attempt at official co–operation ended in an explosion of angry letters.4 Goldsmid had to continue without the Deputies, and rely on a Jewish Association formed from persons who were interested in the struggle for removing disabilities.5 The near-success of the early Jewish Relief bills was largely due to the extraordinarily wide range of their supporters. This would seem to reflect not only the personal influence of Rothschild and Goldsmid and one or two others, but also the results, 1

Mirror of Parliament, 1830, II (29th April 1830), 1423. Board of Deputies Minute Book, II, 16. Ibid., II, 84. 4 Goldsmid to the Parnassim and Vestry of the Great Synagogue about the Deputies, 16th September 1838. L. Abrahams, op. cit., T.J.H.S., IV, 172–5. 5 There are no entries in the Board of Deputies’ Minute Book between February 1831 and May 1834. If these were entered in another book it would appear to have been lost. A formal letter to Robert Grant dated 11th April 1833 would seem to represent the London Jewish Association. It expressly denies reports that only two or three individuals among the Jews take a warm interest in the removal of disabilities, and that the community in general regards the subject with indifference. Sixty-eight signatures are attached. There are also signs of an Edinburgh branch. Letter Book, II, 358, printed T.J.H.S., IV, 164–5. 2

3

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among the English middle and upper classes, of the decades of agitation for religious toleration. The Jewish cause was conducted in the House of Lords by Lord Bexley, a Sidmouth Tory and anti-Catholic pamphleteer. As Nicholas Vansittart he had been Lord Liverpool’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1812–14, when Rothschild was financing Wellington’s armies on their way through Europe. He was a member of the Philo-Judean Society. The Relief bills in the House of Commons were introduced by Robert Grant (after his brother Charles had been approached and declined). Grant was a Whig banker and East India administrator. He was also an adherent of the ‘Clapham Sect’ and a member of the Philo-Judean Society. Goldsmid’s Letter Book contains a collection of letters from an astonishing number of notabilities of all sects and parties. Edward Blount and Charles Butler of the English Catholic Board wrote expressing their sympathy with the Jewish cause. O’Connell offered bad advice about pursuing militant methods, but spoke for the first bill in parliament. William Smith undertook to present a Norwich petition. Robert Aspland the Unitarian minister and leader and Robert Owen the Socialist had met Goldsmid through a common interest in the foundation of the new non-sectarian University of London in Gower Street. Bowring corresponded about the resolution of the Unitarian Society regretting the failure of the 1830 bill, and sent a copy of Bentham’s project for a Society of Friends of Religious Liberty. Perronet Thompson published articles in the Westminster Review timed to support the Relief bills, and offered to reprint them as pamphlets for the cost of the paper and ink. Zachary Macaulay, friend of Wilberforce, was as friendly to the cause as his son Thomas Babington. Apsley Pellatt, a friend of Joshua van Oven of the Board of Deputies, sent a copy of his motion to admit Jews to the City of London. The Duke of Sussex, Hebrew scholar and friend of the Goldsmid brothers, pledged his support. Disraeli wrote asking for an interview. In addition to this galaxy of supporters—which is by no means complete1—there are a few formal and chilly notes from Grey, Peel, Huskisson and Sir Robert Inglis. Inevitably much of the burden of advocating the Jewish cause 1 There were also letters from Basil Montagu, Ricardo, Lord Mandeville (president of the Philo-Judean Society) Burdett, Joseph Hume, and others less well known.

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fell upon the parliamentary Whigs. Brougham, Russell and Macaulay were constant supporters in parliament. Yet the history of the first applications for Jewish Emancipation was largely the story of the friendship between Isaac Lyon Goldsmid and Lord Holland. Holland contributed endless time, labour, enthusiasm, and long-winded advice based on his experience of English political life. Goldsmid offered his constituency interest in Surrey in favour of Holland’s son in parliamentary elections. There were visits and breakfast parties, gifts of pineapples and April strawberries from Goldsmid’s greenhouses, and of Passover cakes which Holland enjoyed even when he had the gout. The letters reveal a genuinely shared cause, and a very obvious personal regard, the final pledge of which was Isaac Goldsmid’s baronetcy in 1841, at Holland’s request. Despite the laws and the prejudices, a man of wealth, although a practising Jew, could enter the charmed circle of English upper class social life. The character of that society, together with the peculiar construction of the Jewish community, ensured that throughout the Emancipation struggle, personal persistence and private influence should play a large part. On these (based on wealth but also on personality) combined with the rising tide of middle class liberalism, the Jews eventually won their civil and political rights. II The controversy which accompanied the early campaigns for Jewish Emancipation was carried on with comparative moderation. The voice of anti-Semitic prejudice occasionally emerged, as in the venomous diatribes of Cobbett, who having championed the Catholics in intemperate language, now constituted himself a violent opponent of the Jews. In April 1830 his Political Register carried an entry entitled ‘Blaspheming Jews and Catholic Duke’, commenting bitterly on the Duke of Norfolk’s presentation of a Jewish petition.1 Cobbett also wrote a pamphlet entitled Good Friday; or the Murder of Christ by the Jews.2 In 1833 he was in parliament, where he embarrassed the members by persistently replying to Jewish relief petitions, talking about ‘blaspheming Jews’. 1 2

Political Register, 17th April 1830, LXIX, 502–7. London, 1830.

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These descendants of the murderers of JESUS CHRIST seem to be bestirring themselves upon the Continent, as well as in England; but, they nowhere, except here, have the presumption to be put upon an equality with Christians. The following ordinance, just issued in PRUSSIA, will show what is going to be done to them in the Grand Duchy of POSEN. The reader will see, that the King of PRUSSIA means, that the Jews shallWORKat something or another, like other people; and, if the King ofPRUSSIAaccomplish THAT, the King ofPRUSSIAis really God’s viceregent on earth; for it will be a greater miracle than ever was wrought before: to make these devils work, and to cease to live by cheating, traffic, and usury, can be accomplished by no power but that which could raise men from the dead. It is to attempt to counteract the dispensations of Providence to put these fellows upon a level with Christians in any respect, except that of merely being allowed to live.1 For this kind of outburst, Cobbett was severely castigated in the Westminster Review.2 Some bitter language and some demonstrations of contempt occurred during the debates on the Relief bills; but Cobbett apart, there were no signs of the storms of popular execration which had forced the government to repeal the Jew Naturalization Act of 1753. The arguments against Jewish emancipation fell very roughly into four groups. First there were objections on grounds of religious belief and practice. Here the Jews had to encounter an overwhelming traditional hostility. Archbishop Howley of Canterbury opposed the bill of 1833 on the grounds that Judaism was positive contradiction of Christianity. Nations were under the special guidance of Providence, and ‘crumbled into dust when they flung from them the precepts and practices of Christianity’. 3 Here was the normal voice of Church prejudice, although the Archbishop would give every advantage short of sitting in Parliament. T o Broad-churchmen like Arnold, it was Jewish ritualism the Church had imitated when it turned from the path of simple doctrine and pure morality to external ceremony. 4 T o one kind of Evangelical the Jews were infidels, mockers and blasphemers, schemers and conspirators against 1

Political Register, 20th July 1833, LXXXI, 145. See ‘Religious Disabilities’. Westminster Review, July-October 1830, XIII, 188 et seq. 3 Hansard, Third Series, XX (1st August 1833), 226. 4 Thomas Arnold, Fragment on the Church, 1844, pp. 19, 55–57. 2

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Christianity, condemned and excluded from normal fellowship by the voice of biblical prophecy. This, the fanatic fringe, spoke in the words of I. Perceval. ‘. . . But I know that they fell through unbelief, and that I and my nation can only “stand by Faith”. I therefore desire not to be highminded but to fear . . . What would it have been to the Jews to have admitted into the Sanhedrim or any other public and national body of rulers or Committees—Idolatrous Men? Or to have paid from public treasure the priests of Baal ? Judge you.’1 A second, very important objection to the emancipation of the Jews lay in their foreignness. The inflated tempest over the act of 1753 to naturalize foreign-born Jews had underlined the popular belief that all Jews were aliens; and although there had been a pause in immigration during the Napoleonic wars, there were enough poor Yiddish-speaking Jews to perpetuate it. With foreignness was associated the idea of disloyalty. On one hand this suspicion was increased by the international character of some Jewish banking houses and financial operations. Sir Robert Inglis accused the Jews of London of having furnished Napoleon with a loan to carry on hostilities against Great Britain. The only fact answering to this charge that Jewish supporters could find was the transaction of a Jamaican Jew, Alexander Lindo, who had taken bills of exchange drawn on the French Treasury during the Peace of Amiens, which were afterwards recovered.2 But the full-scale bogy of World Jewish Finance only became widespread at the end of the nineteenth century, long after the Rothschilds and Jewish bankers had lost their pre-eminence in the money market.3 On the other hand the suspicion was confirmed by the doctrine of the Return. The Jews were a nation. Their affections were in Jerusalem whither they expected to return. Therefore they could not be loyal citizens of Britain. ‘The fact was,’ said Sir Robert Inglis, ‘that a Jew could never be made an Englishman, even though he be born here. So long as he looked forward to another kingdom, his sympathies would be given more to a Jew in Paris or Warsaw, than to a person residing in the same, or the next 1 I. Perceval to Goldsmid, 18th February 1831. Letter Book, II, 115. Printed T.J.H.S., IV, 162. Perceval repeated these sentiments in the House of Commons. 2 F. H. Goldsmid, Two Letters, in Answer to the Objections Urged Against Mr. Grant’s Bill for the Relief of the Jews, 1830, p. 5. 3 It was propagated by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

R.T.–0

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1

county to him’. They were, in fact, considered guilty of various forms of divided allegiance (although the actual expression was not used), looking abroad for the fulfilment of their economic, spiritual and national interests. Even Macaulay, while denying their divided allegiance, for they owed no submission to a foreign power, called them not a sect but a nation.2 They, still less than the Catholics, were fitted to become integrated in an organic political and religious Nation State. The accusation of being foreign was combined with what might be called class objections. The Jewish poor, wandering pedlars or old-clothes men or Bethnal Green slum dwellers, were dishonest and dirty. The rich were financiers, and therefore not gentlemen. The class objection shaded into accusations of dishonesty, and so into charges of immorality. The voice of commercial anti-Semitism was not extinct and an anonymous pamphlet of 1809 had accused the Jews of engrossing all money transactions to their own profit, cornering the exchange, of fraud, oppression, cheating, lying, etc.3 The Jews as a whole were believed to be far wealthier than they were. Being interested in nothing but money-making, if admitted to the House of Commons they would traffic in parliamentary seats for profit. They would certainly bribe their way into the House (as though, said the Whigs, nobody else did that!). Sir Robert Inglis, in 1830, uttered the remarkable prophecy, that when the first Jew entered parliament, a parliamentary reform would follow within seven years.4 But at the same time as they were accused of being interested only in money, it was said that their wealth would be used to dominate and unchristianize the country. The old croak of the Church in danger was raised anew. The charge of immorality which had grown out of that of dishonesty was confirmed on a priori religious grounds. Thomas Arnold wrote: ‘Christianity forms so broad a line morally between those who embrace it, and other men, that a man who is not a Christian is most justly excluded from citizenship in a Christian state, not merely on grounds furnished by Revelation, but according to the highest and noblest views of the nature of 1

Hansard, Third Series, XVIII (22nd May 1833), 50. Mirror of Parliament, 1830, II (5th April 1830), 1241. 3 An Essay on the Commercial Habits of the Jews, 1809, Mocatta Library. 4 Mirror of Parliament, 1830, II (5th April 1830), 1240. 2

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1

political society’. The accusation of immorality as the necessary consequence of infidelity had been a familiar feature of the controversies over the trials of Deist publishers.2 It had most probably been strengthened by the emphasis on salvation by faith spread abroad by the Wesleyan and Evangelical revival. Its infiltration into the Broad Church movement via Coleridge and Arnold reinforced the tendency of those who advocated comprehension to mark out the boundaries of the field of religious toleration. With Arnold, the delimitation of these boundaries was again reinforced by an organic theory of the Nation State. Even after the suspicions of disloyalty abated, the a priori conception of morality remained to become one of the great obstacles to the completion of toleration in modern times. In 1857 the House of Lords declared:–‘Without imputing any disloyalty or disaffection to Her Majesty’s subjects of the Jewish persuasion, the Lords consider that the denial and rejection of the Saviour, in whose name each House of Parliament daily offers up its collective prayers for the divine blessing on its councils, constitutes a moral unfitness to take part in the legislation of a professedly Christian community.’3 The final argument was a defensive device similar in nature to those of fundamental laws and the coronation oath. The High Tories fell back upon a dictum of the seventeenth-century Chief Justice Hale, that Christianity was part and parcel of the common law. This maxim, which lack of explicit meaning made adaptable to many situations, had already been used to justify the punishment of Deist publishers.4 It had influenced the verdict by which in 1739 Jews were excluded from the freedom of the City of London.5 It had more recently been utilized by Lord Eldon in the Bedford Charities Case to exclude Jewish children from an endowed free grammar school. For he could argue that as the purpose of a grammar school was to teach religion (since prayers and the New Testament were read at it, and because the masters had formerly taken the pupils to church on Sundays), and as Christianity was part of the law of the land, Jews could 1

Quoted in C. R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, Durham, N.C., 1942, p. 121. 2 See Chap. VII. 3 Quoted in Henriques, The Jews and the English Law, 1909, p. 295. 4 See Chap. VII. 5 Henriques, op. cit., p. 200. 195

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not benefit by the school nor by any other part of the endowment.1 Consistently maintained and extended the doctrine could have been a powerful engine of persecution. It was now brought out again to justify the exclusion of Jews from parliament. Revivified by the teaching of Coleridge, Arnold and Gladstone on the union of the Church and the Nation State, it helped the Tories to cling to the shreds of religious exclusion until 1858.

Tories who, like Lord Bexley, took up the cause of Jewish political rights, maintained that there was no point in withholding from the small and weak minority the privileges already granted to the strong and powerful bodies of Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics. It seemed to them unjust to let in the one and exclude the other. Also some of them probably thought of the Jews as a kind of make-weight to the Catholics. All the supporters of Emancipation, of all parties, especially the Jews themselves, strongly affirmed Jewish loyalty, actual or potential, to the land of their domicile. Reference was made to Jewish assistance, financial and personal, in the ’45 and the French wars.2 To quiet Tory fears, statistics were published to show that in countries where opportunities were open to them Jews took a full share of responsible positions in national life, without attempting to dominate.3 If admittedly some Jews were unsatisfactory citizens, the fault was in the laws which made them so. ‘You have robbed the Jews of country and of character’, said Mackintosh, ‘and then complain that they have no affection for country or regard for character’.4 Francis Henry Goldsmid said that the British Jew’s early associations, all his interests, protected by the law, inspired his love of country. Nothing but the disabling statutes could cause him to feel attachment less strongly than his fellow citizens. He explained that the doctrine of the Return had no more effect on Jewish patriotism than that 1

Ibid., pp. 43–46. E.g. Basil Montagu, A Letter to Henry Warburton, Esq., M.P., 1833, p. 3 1 . Barnard van Oven, Appeal to the British Nation on Behalf of the Jews. Appendices I–III contain lists of eminent Jews in medieval Spain and Portugal, in modern U.S.A. and the Netherlands. F. H. Goldsmid, The Arguments Advanced Against the Enfranchisement of the Jews, etc., 1833, pp. 20–28. Many of the statistics concerning foreign Jews used in these pamphlets were supplied to I. L. Goldsmid by J. D. Mayer, formerly a judge in Amsterdam. 4 Mirror of Parliament, 1830, II (5th April 1830), 1243. 2

3

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of the Second Coming on a Christian’s affection for his own country. The time of both changes was unknown; so they could not destroy the force of the motives which urge men to desire their own and their State’s welfare.1 Macaulay wrote: ‘If there be any proposition universally true in politics, it is this, that foreign attachments are the fruit of domestic misrule’. Patriotism was the result of the association of comforts and pleasures with a community. ‘If the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is because she has treated them like a stepmother’. Using a metaphor which was to become a classic of Jewish defence polemics, he asked, if all red-haired men had first been robbed and tortured, later insulted and derided, where would be their patriotism? 2 The attack upon Jewish commercial morality was countered by drawing attention to virtues in which the Jews were believed to be pre-eminent. One Jewish writer referred to the moral steadiness of Jewish married life, the sobriety, love of education and obedience to the law found in the community.3 Basil Montagu, a friend of I. L. Goldsmid, described their many charities. At business, ‘their books are kept like the books of fate’, but the Jew at home was lavish and elegant, magnificent and liberal.4 For the rest, Macaulay’s explanation of the incomplete patriotism of some Jews also served to answer the charges of physical and moral degradation. It was said that the Jews were what the law made them. Said Robert Grant, ‘For my part, I know no better way of making a people corrupt and wicked, than by framing laws, enacting that they shall be treated as if they were already corrupt and wicked.’5 Francis Henry Goldsmid pointed out that the Jews turned to moneymaking and trade (which was after all not a crime, especially in England), because they were excluded from other means of getting power and bread. ‘You might as well turn six brooks into the channel of one, and then wonder how it happened, that 1 F. H. Goldsmid, The Arguments Advanced Against the Enfranchisement of the Jews, etc., 1833, pp. 11–13. 2 Macaulay, ‘Civil Disabilities of the Jews’, Edinburgh Review, October– January, 1830–31, LII, 368–9. 3 The British Jew to his Fellow Countrymen, 1833, pp. 36–40. 4 Basil Montagu, A Letter to Henry Warburton, Esq., M.P., 1833, pp. 16–17, 28–30. 5 Mirror of Parliament, 1830, II (5th April 1830), 1238.

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the united current exceeded in its depth and in its strength, each separate streamlet.’1 The argument that degraded character was the consequence of oppression, Utilitarian in provenance, harmonized with the consciousness of the more intelligent Evangelicals, that good treatment was a better foundation for conversion than contempt or persecution. And the Whigs agreed that Jews, like Catholics, were more likely to be converted if welcomed and treated with respect. Goldsmid denied the consequence, but agreed that Christians ought to expect it; since, if they believed Christianity was truth, they could not doubt it would be extended by all that contributed to destroy antipathies and diminish ignorance.2 His own later history demonstrated the effect of the treatment for which his Whig friends argued; for he was one of the founders of the ‘Reform’ movement which modernized Jewish liturgy and practice into something closer to the worship and practice of Victorian Rational Dissent than to Jewish orthodoxy, and opened a violent split in the Jewish ranks. There was no ready answer to objections based on religious prejudice. But in reply to the contention that Jewish Emancipation would endanger Christianity, the Jews and their friends maintained that they constituted no danger to the Church nor to Christianity, since they did not proselytize. Nor had they any inclination to persecute Christians as the result of a doctrine of exclusive salvation, since the burden of being the Chosen People which God had placed upon them did not prevent others from finding salvation in their own way.3 As the Monthly Repository had complained, there was a tendency in arguing for Emancipation, to emphasize the kinship of Judaism with Christianity. But if Jewish writers did this, they were but accepting the advantage of the current of friendly feeling towards them produced by the Evangelical and the High Church revival of reverence for the Old Testament both as a source of prophecy and a historical account of God’s dispensation. Indeed, the contrast between infidelity and the belief in a biblical religion had been emphasized by the Deist attacks upon all revealed 1

F. H. Goldsmid, Remarks on the Civil Disabilities of British Jews, 1830, p. 20. Ibid., p. 25. 3 ‘Extracts from the Elements of Faith, for the Use of Jewish Youth of Both Sexes’, in A Letter to I. L. Goldsmid Esq., etc., 1833, p. 12. 2

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religion. F. H. Goldsmid could say that the Christian believes all the Jew believes, only more. 1 John Coles stressed the nature of the Jew as a brother, and founder of the Scriptures. He pointed out that Christ had been a Jew; that Jewish law was the foundation of Christian morality.2 Robert Grant maintained in parliament that, if the laws supported the Scriptures, a large part of the Scriptures was derived from the Jews, and quoted a clergyman who had said, ‘Christianity is adult Judaism’.3 The Whigs joined in, applying their maxim of the Catholic Emancipation controversy. They considered there was nothing in the nature of Judaism to relieve the Christian of his obligation to do unto others as he would be done unto.4 As for Biblical prophecies of judgement upon the unbelievers, even if they were true, those who persecuted the subjects of them were no more free from sin than Judas who fulfilled the prophecy of the betrayal of Christ.5 In the Jewish Emancipation question, the revival of Trinitarian religion with its belief in Revelation and prophecy worked both ways. On the one hand it made the historic role of the Jews as betrayers and unbelievers more important. On the other, it emphasized their role as God’s holy people, whose welcome in dispersion, and kind treatment, heralded the Second Coming. The argument of faith which had prepared the way for the return of the Jews to England in the seventeenth century still echoed in the nineteenth. The ‘enthusiast’ fringe was divided—on each side of the controversy. Friends of Jewish Emancipation were not impressed by the use of the dictum that Christianity was part and parcel of the common law, to exclude religious minorities from political rights. Basil Montagu said that this was the language not of lawyers nor of Christian divines nor of Christianity, but of power. Jews were pressed into the militia, the navy, and juries. When their services were needed without emolument the oaths 1

F. H. Goldsmid, Two Letters, etc., p. 9. John Coles, Observations on the Civil Disabilities of British Jews, 1834, p. 4. 3 Mirror of Parliament, 1830, II (5th April 1830), 1238. 4 Dr. Lushington in House of Commons. Hansard, Third Series, XVIII (22nd May 1833), 57. 5 Macaulay, ‘Civil Disabilities of the Jews’, Edinburgh Review, LII, 373. Richard Whately, Speech in the House of Lords, 1st August, 1833. Reprinted as a pamphlet, London, 1833, p. 17. 2

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EMANCIPATION

were framed according to their religious principles; they were excluded only from power and honours.1 Moreover, Christianity did not teach the exclusion of virtue and intellect from any situation in society. If such doctrines were in the law, the law should be abolished, ‘for it is no part of Christianity’. Macaulay —he probably knew about Goldsmid’s electoral influence in Surrey—pointed out that in reality the laws of exclusion were ineffective. Wealth was power, and the Jews had this wealth and this power. They were denied only the final legitimate consequences of it.2 But the Whigs really answered the doctrine of ‘part and parcel’ by reaffirming that religion and politics ought to be separate. They all argued that the repeal of the Test Laws and Catholic Emancipation had established the principle that religious differences were no occasion for civil discrimination. Lord John Russell added the jibe that if the Commons did not vote for the Jews’ Relief bill, it would prove that concessions to the Roman Catholics had been extorted by fear.3 Said Mr. Buckingham, the arguments of the Jews’ as of the Catholic bill were founded on the one grand principle of toleration; ‘That no peculiarity of opinion on religious matters, no singularity of speculative but conscientious belief, ought to deprive any British subject of an equal participation with all other British subjects of any civil right and privilege of the State.’4 Government existed for the purpose of keeping peace, and to compel us to supply our wants by industry, not rapine. Macaulay said, ‘This is the only operation for which the machinery of government is fit, the only operation which wise governments ever attempt to perform’. Any class not interested in the security of property and order should have no share of the powers which exist to maintain it. ‘But why a man should be less fit to exercise that power because he wears a beard, because he does not eat ham, because he goes to the Synagogue on Saturdays instead of going to Church on Sundays, we cannot conceive’. The points of difference between Christianity and Judaism had nothing to do with his fitness to be a magistrate, legislator or minister of 1

Basil Montagu, A Letter to Henry Warburton, Esq., M.P., 1833, pp. 22–23. Mirror of Parliament, 1830, II (5th April 1830), 1242. 3 Ibid., (17th May 1830), 1783. 4 Hansard, Third Series, XVIII (22nd May 1833), 52. 2

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finance, any more than with his fitness to be a cobbler.’1 Macau¬ lay was contending, as Sydney Smith had contended on behalf of the Catholics, that the State ought to be limited, not because it was founded on a limited social contract, but because religion and politics were simply irrelevant to each other; and it was both inexpedient and unjust to penalize people for characteristics totally irrelevant to the social purpose in hand. Basil Montagu went beyond the argument of mere irrelevance, maintaining that the exclusion of those who differ on religion (they would include Moses, Sir Thomas More or Jeremy Bentham) kept the philosophy of a country from its legislature—to that country’s great loss.2 He was anticipating John Stuart Mill’s later argument that difference was a sign of intellectual strength, which should be utilized, not repressed. The Tories, of course, really denied the irrelevance of religion to politics, affirming that their infidelity demonstrated that the Jews were too immoral to be trusted with power in a Christian State. Macaulay said the State was not Christian. A parliament of Christians and Jews would be legislating for a community of Christians and Jews. For the rest, in judging morality the proof of the pudding was the eating. Macaulay rejected any a priori judgement upon morality from faith. His criterion was that of a ‘nominal Christian’,3 for he thought that the religious dogmas men hold exercise little effect upon their behaviour. ‘It is altogether impossible to reason from the opinions which a man professes, to his feelings and his actions’. Nobody does it except as a pretext for persecuting. A Christian is commanded to do as he would be done by. Yet to how many of the 20 millions of professing Christians in these islands would any man in his senses lend a thousand pounds without security? But when fellow creatures are to be oppressed, ‘we represent those motives which we know to be so feeble for good, as omnipotent for evil’.4 Macaulay’s arguments showed how thoroughly by 1829 the Old Whig demand for the separation of religious from secular considerations had been replanted in Utilitarian soil. But 1 2 3 4

Macaulay, ‘Civil Disabilities of the Jews’, Edinburgh Review, LII, 365. Letter to Warburton, p. 24. See Chap. VII. Macaulay, op. cit., 370–1. 201

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occasionally the conception of right or justice was still used as an alternative to that of utility. Lord Holland recorded his Protest against the rejection of the 1833 Relief Bill in the Lords’ journals. If civil government is originally founded, as the laws passed in the 1688 Revolution seem to acknowledge, on a contract between people and government, ‘it follows that all from whom allegiance and obedience are exacted are prima facie entitled to the privileges secured by the contract as birthrights to the members of the community to which they belong’. If, on the other hand, the reciprocal duties of government and people are founded on the principle of utility, the privileges and rights are useful to ensure the affection of the subjects from whom allegiance is required.1 It was foolish of any government to alienate its subjects without proper cause. Macaulay added that no Christian ‘could deny that every human being has a right to be allowed every gratification which produces no harm to others, and to be spared every mortification which produces no good to others’.2 Thus the alternative arguments, from social contract and from utility, were harmonized by Macaulay’s appeal to the one natural right which remained in the Benthamite scheme—the right of all to be counted equally in the calculation of pleasures and pains. Pamphleteers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and pamphleteers for Protestant toleration in France often argued that persecution drove industrious citizens to emigrate, to the economic detriment of the country; and that toleration was good for trade. Little of this was heard in the Repeal struggle, until Priestley and other Radicals were driven overseas by the Church and King mobs. It was occasionally used about Ireland in the Catholic controversy. The fight against the restrictions on Jewish retail trade and finance in the City of London, and the international connexions of the rich Jewish financiers, made it prominent in the arguments for Jewish relief. Those who thought the Jews financial swindlers or conspirators were by now outweighed by those who believed that their patience and perseverance in finance could be used to England’s advantage. Writers urged that their interest and loyalty should be secured by encouraging them to invest in land. Otherwise 1 2

Hansard, Third Series, XX (2nd August 1833), 252. Macaulay, op. cit., 363. 202

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they would make their money in England and spend it abroad.1 The Jews themselves claimed that governments which had persecuted them had always suffered commercially, while those which protected them benefited. Barnard van Oven cited the example of sixteenth-century Spain.2 The Westminster Review demanded the abolition of the City’s restrictions on Jewish retailers. They were part of a plot against trade. ‘We are to be deprived of the Jews’ industry, that someone else may be the better for it.’ 3 It now seemed that competitive trade coincided with the national advantage. More valuable, the citizens of London had decided that it coincided with their advantage too. It was not by chance that the merchants and shopkeepers of the London Common Council whose predecessors had forced the government to repeal the Naturalization Act of 1753, and who had excluded the Jews from the Freedom of the City in 1739, admitted them in 1830. Already Radical in 1789, the Common Council recovered from the fit of High Toryism into which it was plunged by the French Revolution, about 1808.4 From then on its Radical majority grew; and free trade, together with religious liberalism, became increasingly part of that majority’s policy. All four members for the City voted in support of the first Jewish Relief bill. The admission of Jews to the Freedom the same year marked the maturity of commercial laissez-faire as well as of the desire for toleration in the city. The current of sentiment in their favour marked its course in wider political circles. The early arguments of the Jewish Emancipation controversy showed how far, by 1829, Benthamite Utilitarianism had become the basis not only of Radical but of Whig thinking. It was not an exclusive basis. The Whigs, like other campaigners for Jewish rights, were always eclectic. In 1830 Barnard van Oven like Lord Holland was appealing to man’s ‘undoubted birthright’. His conception of a balance between rights and duties in a State followed the historical Radical tradition of Cartwright 1 J. E. Blunt, A History of the Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England, etc., 1830, p. xiii. 2 B. van Oven, An Appeal to the British Nation on Behalf of the Jews, 1830, p. 50. 3 ‘Disabilities of the Jews’, Westminster Review, January-April 1829, 10, 37. 4 The journals of the Common Council of the City of London in the Guildhall Records Repository, and the printed Minutes of the Proceedings of the Court of Common Council, 1819, in the Guildhall Library, show these movements.

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rather than the natural rights philosophies of Price or even Locke.1 Yet the most popular and successful arguments for Jewish Emancipation were Utilitarian. As we have seen, they began not with Bentham, but with French philosophy expounded by the Abbé Grégoire. Grégoire’s main contention was superficially one of common sense and observation. Bad laws make bad citizens. Oppression degrades the oppressed. The Westminster Review added the refinement that oppression concerns everybody, for an attack on the liberties of a minority endangers the liberties of all.2 Behind this common-sense argument lay the assumptions of tabula rasa psychology. Jews differed from Christians only as red-haired men differed from men of other pigmentation—and Macaulay had no racialist overtones in his use of the metaphor. Treat them as English, and they would become Englishmen. The Tories stigmatized difference of opinion, culture and tradition as wrong and dangerous. This aspect of their thinking has not received much notice, yet some of the implications of the charge of divided allegiance amount to nothing less. Especially when they held a strongly corporate view of State or community, difference (if it didn’t fit into any of the community’s recognized grades) justified ostracism, while ostracism increased difference. But the Whigs also had a contempt for the peculiarities, irrationalities and foreignness of Jewish religious tradition and custom. The Radicals had more than contempt; Rabbinic law exhibited many of the worst features of ‘superstition’ and ecclesiastical obscurantism. Under the combined pressure of their enemies and their friends, the Jews experienced every temptation to adopt the values and standards of their Whig allies. In any case, if they were to take part in English life, their religious practice had inevitably to be modified, whatever the sentiments of rabbis and ultra-orthodox might be. Thus, everything combined to push them along the path of assimilation, turning them as quickly as they could manage it, into Englishmen, with their religion—where they did not abandon it—as a kind of excrescence on their English¬ ness. But the process was not as easy as the Benthamites, or the Whigs, imagined it. In the mass it was retarded by the flow of immigration, in the individual it was complicated by difficul¬ 1 2

B. van Oven, op. cit., pp. 6–7. ‘Religious Disabilities’, Westminster Review, July–October 1830, XIII, 194. 204

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ties of adjustment and sharp conflicts of cultural tradition. The consciousness of ‘difference’ tended to remain, and to breed lack of ease. The process of assimilation was probably inevitable; it certainly happened in other western countries. One consequence of it was that, when in 1918 the Return to Palestine on a large scale became a practical possibility, most of the British Jews from long settled families furiously opposed it, as the spectre of divided allegiance suddenly arisen in their midst. It is idle to speculate whether the Jews might have been more satisfactorily integrated into English society under the Evangelical conception of the Jewish people as a religious group having a special, providential relation with the dominant Christianity. The main trends of national thought and feeling were against it. Moreover it would have required an adaptation of Jewish religious life to modern conditions, which the narrow conservatism of Jewish orthodoxy has always made extremely difficult except by splitting (like Christianity) into mutually hostile sects. Yet some such attitude might have helped the recognition that the strange tradition could contain elements of value or interest whose existence contributed to the richness and variety of British life. It is as true of the Jewish community as Lord Acton found it to be of the Roman Catholic Church, that a minority group, owing spiritual allegiance outside the sphere of the temporal authority, may help to preserve diversity and therefore liberty in a modern Nation State.

205

VII Evangelicals and Infidels

I THE first quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a religious dispute more fundamental than that of Dissenting, Catholic, or even Jewish Emancipation. In the prosecutions for blasphemous libel Christians faced Deists across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. The persecution that resulted—prosecutions, heavy fines, imprisonment, even the pillory, was undoubtedly due to the political aspect of the disagreement.1 Wilberforce wrote to Lord Milton after Peterloo: ‘What your Lordship and I saw amongst the papers of the Secret Committee, gave me but too much reason to fear that the enemies of our political constitution were also enemies to our religion. . . Heretofore they inveighed against the inequality of property, and used every artifice to alienate the people from the constitution of their country. But now they are sapping the foundations of the social edifice more effectually by attacking Christianity. The high and noble may be restrained by honour; but religion only is the law of the multitude’.2 Here the political issue appeared nakedly as a defence of existing institutions against republicans and democrats masquerading as Deists and sceptics. Yet, as with the other, more respectable religious dissidents, the issue was 1 Daniel Eaton was sentenced to the pillory in 1812 for publishing Paine’s Age of Reason, This punishment was abolished in 1816. 2 Memorandum to Lord Milton. See R. I. and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce, 1938, V, 40.

206

EVANGELICALS

AND

INFIDELS

never merely political. The blasphemous libel trials concerned the right to criticize authority by means of an uncontrolled press. They also concerned the right to attack religion and to express opinion freely in fundamental religious matters. An admirable account of the State trials for blasphemous libel has been given in W. H. Wickwar’s The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1810-1832.1 It is proposed, therefore, to confine this chapter to elucidating further some of the arguments used by the parties to the struggle; and after that to considering the principles and attitudes of those whose antagonism was focused by the prosecutions. Wickwar has pointed out that the essence of blasphemous libel had come to consist in its offence against ‘the peace of our Lord the King, his crown and dignity’, rather than in its being to ‘the high displeasure of Almighty God, to the great scandal of the Christian religion, and to the evil example of all others’.2 Although the latter part of the indictment reflected the outraged feelings of churchmen, the emphasis of lawyers on the first part meant that written attacks on religion were interpreted as threats to peace and security. This was done, firstly by construing expressions of infidelity as attacks on the constitution, or, more vaguely, as tending to overturn society; and secondly, by showing that the manner of them was, through ridicule and insult, liable to injure the religious susceptibilities of the public. The first construction was achieved through the maxim that Christianity was ‘part and parcel’ of the common law. This maxim was already in use as a weapon against the civil and political rights of Jews. In the blasphemous libel trials the crown lawyers and judges used it for two purposes; to establish precedents for punishing attacks on Christianity, and to justify refusal to hear evidence in court against the truth of Christianity as part of the defence. Such evidence was said to be a repetition of the libel which the trial was to prove. Various objections were raised to the maxim; that it was meaningless, or being wrongly used as a mere excuse for oppression. Dr. Whately asked what form of Christianity was intended? The Christian religion as established by law was that 1

W . H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1810–32, London, 1928. 2 Ibid., p. 25. 207

EVANGELICALS AND

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of the Church of England; and was a man legally punishable because he impugned any of her doctrines?1 Whately was implying that the maxim would nullify the Toleration Act. Oldfashioned Radicals who tended to justify a liberal and reforming outlook by appeal to the purity of ancient institutions, pointed out that the common law predated Protestantism and even Christianity in England.2 The Unitarian W. J. Fox concluded from this that paganism and Roman Catholicism must once have been part and parcel of the law, and the Church of England was established in defiance of the latter. Fox also argued that Christianity had been elevated to be part of the common law by free inquiry and discussion, disproving the truth and excellence of the former religion. Its success had therefore established the right to attack the religion of the country.2 Most Unitarians, and all other Christians who disapproved of the prosecutions, retorted to those who defended them, that if Christianity was part of the common law, then the common law must be in the spirit of Christianity. To ruin and imprison people because they were not Christians was true persecution, and contrary to Christian charity. ‘We are told Christianity is the law of the land’, wrote Fox. ‘Admitted. This is the only concession we need; for then the law of Christianity, the law of charity, kindness, forbearance . . . is the law of England. And then it follows too, that those prosecutions are illegal because they are Antichristian.’4 Carlile himself and his Benthamite supporters regarded the maxim as one more proof of the rottenness of the common law. John Stuart Mill, writing to the Morning Chronicle, admitted that there were precedents for the protection of Christian doctrine by persecution, and that a judge could say that the law (not Christianity) sanctioned punishment for infidelity. But was this not an absurd justification of the persecuting law? 5 Bentham pointed out that, according to that maxim, any and everything it pleased the piety of this or that bench to call Christianity would be so, and the offender would be liable to punishment as precedent suggested. ‘Know you not, Sir, in a 1

Letters on the Church, by an Episcopalian, 1826, p. 112. Letter to Mrs. Carlile, from ‘a friend to primitive common law’, The Republican, 25th February 1820, II, 197–8. 3 The Duties of Christians Towards Deists, 2nd edition, 1819, p. viii. 4 Ibid., p. xi. 5 1822. Place Collection, Vol. 39, II, 247. 2

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word, that wheresoever common law reigns, . . . security is an empty name?’ 1 As a political weapon the maxim was another device, like fundamental immutable laws and the coronation oath, to prevent reforming attacks on established institutions by appealing to some part of the constitution outside the immediate dominion of parliament. This appeal was cunningly chosen because of the reverence in which the common law was generally held. Advocates of Repeal and of Catholic Emancipation had appealed to it against disabling statutes, as embodying the principle of religious equality. ‘The Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts restored the Protestants to the even-handedness of the Common Law. From that hour the general principles of equality became again recognized, as politic, constitutional and just.’ 2 But to Infidels the common law was not even-handed. It could, of course, be overriden by statute law, but it maintained itself in the chinks of legislation, and with maxims of the ‘part and parcel’ kind it could emerge to defeat the intentions of carelessly, or cunningly, drafted statutes. The Trinity Act of 1813 was intended to extend the protection of the Toleration Act to Unitarian worship and belief. In 1818 Bentham wrote to William Smith who had negotiated the Act with the government, reproaching him for having yielded to the pressure of Lord Chancellor Eldon to withdraw the original draft bill which would have permitted free expression of opinion upon all religious questions whatsoever, and to substitute a narrow bill merely repealing the English Blasphemy Act 9 & 10 Wm. III and two Scottish Blasphemy Acts. Bentham pointed out that in permitting this alteration he had opened the road to the constructions of the common lawyers, and rendered the Act useless.3 Sure enough, in 1817 John Wright was prosecuted for blasphemy in aggressively denying the Trinity and the Atonement, although the prosecution was dropped after Lord Holland had asked questions about it in the House of Lords.4 In 1816 began the Wolverhampton Chapel Case in 1 Letter of Bentham to William Smith, February 1818. Printed in the ‘Introduction’ to Bentham’s Church of Englandism and its Catechism Examined, 1818, p. xli. 2 ‘The Last of the Catholic Question’, Edinburgh Review, March 1829, 49, 235. 3 Correspondence of Bentham and William Smith, printed in ‘Introduction’ to Bentham’s Church of Englandism, etc., 1818. 4 R. Brook Aspland, Memoir . . . of Rev. Robert Aspland, 1850, p. 378.

R.T.–P

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which Lord Eldon denied that the Acts for the Relief of Unitarians had altered the common law. This case, which dragged on until 1836, arose from the attempt of a Trinitarian minister to take ownership of the chapel from a Unitarian congregation.1 The ‘part and parcel’ maxim could thus be used to favour a Trinitarian Party against Unitarians in property disputes within Dissenting congregations. It helped to isolate the Unitarians from the increasing number of the orthodox, and drive them outside the main body of Dissenters into their own association, so that their remarkable leadership of Dissenting policy began to wane.2 But the attempt to defeat the purpose of the 1813 Act by using the common law against Unitarians seems to have died away with the passing of Lord Eldon. It is not improbable that William Smith was quite prepared to accept an Act which (he hoped) would protect respectable Unitarians while leaving the wilder Deists outside. Carlile in 1819 certainly irritated the Unitarians by leaning for his defence upon the Act of 1813, which, he maintained, protected Deists as well as Unitarians, who were but ‘Deists under a cloak’.3 And Bentham would probably have liked to appear in his true, atheistical colours, instead of having to publish his Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion under the pseudonym of Philip Beauchamp. The maxim that Christianity was ‘part and parcel’ of the law was devised to safeguard a kind of primary alliance between religion and State. Sir Matthew Hale, establishing an early precedent for the blasphemous libel sentences, had observed in 1676: ‘That such kind of wicked and blasphemous words were not only an offence to God and religion, but a crime against the laws, State and government, and therefore punishable in this Court (King’s Bench); for to say “Religion is a cheat” is to dissolve all the obligations whereby the civil societies are preserved, and Christianity is parcel of the laws of England, and, therefore, to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of 1 Ibid., pp. 378–82. B. L. Manning, The Protestant Dissenting Deputies, 1952, p. 58, 65. Manning says Eldon awarded the endowments to the Established Church. 2 The Unitarian Association was founded at the time of the Carlile trial. See Monthly Repository, 1819, XIV, 49. 3 Report of the Trial of Richard Carlile, Place Collection, Vol. 39, II, 26.

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law’. Chief Justice Raymond at Woolston’s trial had observed: ‘Whatever strikes at the very root of Christianity tends manifestly to a dissolution of the Civil Government’.2 It was commonly held that belief in a religion which taught at least a doctrine of immortality, with rewards and punishments in the next life for behaviour in this, was essential to safeguard the minimal morality required to hold society together. Even those who repudiated the Alliance of Church and State conceded this. Locke himself had made an exception against the toleration of Atheists on these grounds. Priestley was the first Dissenting minister to step tentatively beyond this doctrine, and not all Unitarians followed him.3 The doctrine, however, became the groundwork of a political construction in favour of all governments, and indeed of the party in power. The Attorney General at Carlile’s trial quoted Blackstone: ‘. . . for if religion were overturned, the government might as well be overturned with it’.4 He added that, so long as the government itself was estimable, it ought to be guarded against such dangerous attacks as the present. ‘If religion were discarded, they might be assured the Constitution would soon fall likewise.’5 In thus using the word ‘government’ in a double sense, the lawyers turned the conception that religion safeguarded the elementary morality of society into a defence of the existing constitution and administration. Probably this was made easier for them by the degree of personal power still left—or recently left—in the hands of the king; so that a government had not yet become recognized as the administration of a political party, which could be changed without damaging the constitution. But the trick was seen through, and infuriated their political opponents. An anonymous, presumably Dissenting writer of Whig views, complained that ‘Church in danger’ and ‘The deluge of blasphemy’ were used by political factions for their own impieties. Such cries had excused the adoption of standing 1 Quoted by Wickwar, op. cit., p. 25. But the maxim was at least as old as Coke. 2 Ibid., pp. 25–26. 3 Talfourd’s speech on ‘part and parcel’ at the Foundation Meeting of the Unitarian Association by implication accepted the doctrine. Monthly Repository, 1819, XIV, 52. 4 Trial of Richard Carlile, Place Collection, Vol. 39, II, 30. 5 Ibid.

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armies, suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and deliberate infractions of the constitution. Such bigotry had produced the Gordon riots and the Birmingham riots, and the expulsion of ‘one of the brightest ornaments of philosophical science’.1 He deplored the fact that many friends of Her Majesty the Queen had refused to attend public meetings to remove the party in power, on the grounds that Lords Liverpool and Harrowby were friends of religion, and religion at this time ‘stands in peculiar need of support from the deluge of blasphemy gone forth upon the public’. Lords Harrowby and Liverpool were respectable in private life, but publicly they were bolsters of faction, ‘the only crutches of an Administration which, for mental imbecility, tottering indecision, and public detestation, is unparalleled in the annals of politics.’2 Since most Christian opponents of the government, including Unitarians, agreed with the basic doctrine that religion was necessary to social order, they directed their main attacks not upon this, but upon the government’s policy of safeguarding religion by civil penalty. They thought the prosecution of Infidels was quite unnecessary. For the past century, every administration had had its Carliles.3 The works of Woolston, Toland, Annet, Morgan, Paine, Houston, Daniel Eaton, Hume, Bolingbroke and Gibbon were published and read, yet Christianity survived. As the poor were educated, they developed an endless appetite for religious tracts; for was it to be credited that ‘Vice keeps pace with the increase of knowledge, and the Devil takes two strides whenever the philanthropist takes one?’ 4 There was an ‘unconquerable propensity to piety’ in the human race.‘. . . Let the People then journey by themselves. Give them the Bible, and do you lead the way on the high road. If they choose not to follow, “who usurps the judgement seat of 1

Presumably Priestley. ‘Christophilus’, Vindiciae Britannicae, 2nd edition, 1821, p. 9. 3 Richard Carlile, 1790–1843, was tried in 1819 on a charge of blasphemous libel for republishing Paine’s Age of Reason and Palmer’s Principles of Nature. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment, a fine of £1,500, and heavy securities for good behaviour which (since they couldn’t be paid) were a method of keeping him in gaol at the government’s pleasure. Subsequently his sister, Mary Anne, was convicted and imprisoned and his wife Jane was prosecuted. His friends continued to publish Deist pamphlets and journals. Cf. Wickwar, op. cit. passim. 4 ‘Christophilus’, Vindiciae Britannicae, p. 17. 2

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Christ?” If knowledge is power, ignorance is the devil. Teach them to read, the rest will follow in due time.’1 Respectable Unitarian spokesmen disliked the Deists they were having perforce to defend. They insisted that the Infidels were negligible, and would have been ignored but for the publicity given them by the trials; that in fact they coveted the notoriety for the profit they obtained on their sales through it. Aspland denounced Carlile in the Monthly Repository as a ‘foolhardy publisher, who, probably, on a calculation of ultimate profit, provokes the vengeance of the civil power, and thus strengthens the hands of the administration for the time being, who take advantage of an example of licentiousness to invade the boundaries of constitutional liberty’.2 He was promptly denounced in his turn for his narrowness and selfishness in a very verbose pamphlet entitled The Monthly Repository Extraordinary.3 A leader in The Statesman said that Mr. Carlile was wrong in his estimation of Christianity and the Bible, but Jesus Christ had abjured all appeal to bodily force and secular compelling of any kind. The punishment given him was not religion but tyranny.4 Thus, after some hesitation the Unitarians resisted the temptation to abandon their own principles, and rounded on the prosecutors as not only foolish, but uncharitable and unchristian. Christian opponents of the government revived the old Rational Dissenters’ argument that Christianity, if it was truth, must conquer. The Morning Chronicle’s leader-writer evoked the authority of ‘almost all eminent Divines and Philosophers’ that when truth and falsehood are fairly presented, truth prevails. Those with a reasonable assurance of the truth of Christianity, ‘could never suppose it would be injured by enquiry’.5 He observed that most of those who called in the law to aid religion were infidels. ‘Christophilus’ wrote to the same effect, and, significantly, prefaced his pamphlet with a long quotation from Milton’s Areopagitica. 1

‘Christophilus’, Vindiciae Britannicae, p. 26. Monthly Repository, 1819, XIV, 64. 3 By Charles Lloyd, LI.D., 1819. 4 Place Collection, Vol. 39, II, 33. 5 Leader on Mr. Hume’s presentation to the House of Commons of a petition from Mary Anne Carlile. Morning Chronicle, 27th March 1823. Place Collection Vol. 39, II, 68. 2

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This argument was enthusiastically adapted to their own uses by Carlile himself and his Deist and Atheist supporters. Carlile wrote that publication of his opinions was a duty which every honest man was bound to perform: ‘That if true they may be adopted, and if false they may be refuted.’ If doctrines were from God, they could not be shaken or overturned by man. The employment of the force of the State proved only that those who resorted to this weapon well knew their opinions to be false, and not upheld by God.1 Carlile had already declared, that if the supporters of bigotry and superstition would accept the challenge he could annihilate belief in the Christian religion as of divine origin in this country within seven years, by the honest sale of pamphlets, not by circulating tracts free.2 With Carlile, and with some Benthamites the argument became a taunt. All opponents of the prosecutions were certain that their own brand of truth would prevail. ‘Rational’ Christians believed that free discussion would confirm the truths of Christianity, Deists that it would cleanse the worship of God from its miraculous accretion, and Atheists that it would demonstrate the falsity of religion. All thought the attack on fundamentals would do no harm, or at least would do more good than harm. For it was essential for the basis of truth to be examined before it was understood. The Morning Chronicle quoted from an eighteenthcentury Archbishop of Tuam:–‘If you refuse or neglect to enquire into the ground and reason of the religion which you have embraced . . . do not think it will excuse you before God on the last day, that your parents or friends brought you up in this religion’. Jew, Turk or Heathen may make the same excuse.3 Although the arguments against the policy of prosecuting infidels were those of the older generation of Rational Dissenters, there was a slight shift of emphasis. Free discussion was now seen, not merely as a means of discovering new truth, but rather as a means of confirming and disseminating truth already established.4 In fact these conceptions of its role appeared alongside each other, and as they were generally not differen¬ 1

The Republican, 1819, I, 271. Ibid., I, 190. 3 Morning Chronicle, 27th March 1828. Place Collection, Vol. 39, II, 68. 4 I am indebted for this observation to Mr. John Lively’s thesis, ‘Ideas of Parliamentary Representation in England, 1815–32’. 2

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tiated by the controversialists, a good deal of confusion resulted. When Radicals said that truth would conquer they did not always mean that it would separate itself from error, but rather that it would overcome established errors and spread to new classes of the population. The widespread prevalence of the dictum that truth must prevail embarrassed the Crown lawyers, who were being forced into the position of tacitly admitting that their religion would be worsted in a free discussion. The Lord Chief Justice, summing up at Carlile’s trial, temporized. It had been argued that religion did not require the aid of civil government. He firmly ‘relied on its divine character. . . . But although it could not be extirpated, it might for a time be superseded’. And he referred to the dreadful anarchy which had followed its supersession in France.1 The government Tories did not want to be convicted of denying freedom of religious opinion or the freedom of discussion which could be considered part of it. They had too often affirmed the liberty of opinion in the debates on the repeal of the Test Laws and on Catholic Emancipation, in order to distinguish between toleration of belief and equality of political rights. They therefore fell back on the distinction between discussion and a calumny or ridicule unnecessary to ascertain truth and injurious to society. ‘God forbid that any restraint (of free discussion) should take place! But they had to distinguish whether the present publication was an instance of that free enquiry and discussion or a work of mere calumny and ridicule. There was no individual and no subject, to whose character or whose merits revilings and calumnies could be lawfully applied.’2 This distinction suited those who wanted to uphold the doctrine of free discussion without associating their respectable persons with the bad taste and demagogic enthusiasm of Carlile and his friends. William Smith had yielded to the argument in his negotiations with the Archbishop of Canterbury over the Trinity Act of 1813. He explained to Bentham that he had agreed to the withdrawal of the original bill, so as ‘not to open the door for the admission of all manner of profaneness and impiety in the mode of treating subjects of so solemn a descrip¬ 1 2

Report of Trial of Richard Carlile. Place Collection, Vol. 39, II, 30. L. C. J. Abbott summing up. Ibid. 215

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tion’. The liberal churchman Whately accepted it, for the Deists’ methods were more than he could stomach;2 and several Parliamentary Whigs had followed suit.3 Bentham would have none of it. His friend James Mill, writing on the liberty of the press, thought opinions greatly unfavourable to government were called indecent; and if judges were allowed to convict on the ground of passionate language, they would enjoy the arbitrary power of convicting for any opinion they happened to dislike. Moreover, the language and feeling in which an opinion was expressed added little force to the opinion. ‘To destroy any excess of favourable feeling, all that is necessary is, to show the precise state of the facts, and the real amount of evil which they import. All excess of feeling arises from imputing to the facts a greater efficacy in the way of evil than belongs to them. Correct this opinion, and the remedy is complete.’ 4 Mill was disingenuous. Ridicule did not add nothing to opinion. It was a weapon of dissemination, or in modern terms, propaganda. Its appeal was not really to impartial reason, nor was it a method of inquiry, although it was being defended by the traditional justification of the necessity of freedom for the advancement of truth. The Radicals held that, after free discussion, errors would be refuted and left to public ridicule. But when they themselves supplied the ridicule they would have been more candid to rely on the well-established French argument that in the face of government armed with force, ridicule is a fair weapon.5 II A curious feature of the prosecutions for blasphemous libel, pointed out by Wickwar, was the co-operation between the ministers of the Crown and the private societies founded by the Evangelicals. The Society for Enforcing the King’s Proclamation (Proclamation Society) was founded by Wilberforce in 1

Wm. Smith to Bentham, 16th February 1818. Printed in Church of Englandism audits Catechism Examined, 1818, Introduction, XX. 2 Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian, p. 53. 3 See Wickwar, op. cit., pp. 144–60. 4 ‘ Essay on the Liberty of the Press’, in Essays, London (1825), p. 33. 5 Voltaire maintains that it is not intolerant to ridicule bad reasoners; when they are insolent and persecutors it is an act of justice. Traité sur la Tolerance. Oeuvres Complètes, Paris 1817, VI, i, 229.

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1787, the Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1802. By 1803 the latter numbered over eight hundred members, and had secured nearly seven hundred convictions.1 The principles of this movement were evidently an important element in the defence against the republicans and Atheists. The greatest name among the Evangelicals was that of William Wilberforce. He had contacts with the Evangelical circles in Yorkshire, Cambridge, and Clapham, and was a friend of Hannah More. He was the friend of Pitt and of Perceval and of William Smith (although he deplored the latter’s religious principles) and the associate of Brougham and of other Whigs and Radicals in various philanthropic causes, especially the fight against slavery. A fascinating and complex personality, he represented on the whole the gentler and broader side of the movement. His friends Joseph and Isaac Milner represented the harsher and narrower aspect. Wilberforce was extremely conservative in political outlook, although his was not the unthinking, automatic Toryism of an Eldon and a Sidmouth. He supported Brand’s motion of 1810 for parliamentary reform, on the grounds that the closing of corrupt boroughs in a period of moderate feeling would diminish the influence of Radical agitators who wanted fundamental changes in the constitution.2 He both admired Lord Kenyon and supported Romilly’s plans for reforming the criminal law. He hated war, and early separated himself from Pitt by opposing the first war with France. He had abandoned the prospects of high office to fight the slave trade. He was naturally humane; and he recounts how he lay awake thinking about two ‘poor women about to be hanged for forgery this day. Alas, how bloody are our laws!’3 In his attitude to the poor there were traces of an old form of Tory paternalism and foreshadowings of a later Tory social tradition. Sharing Burke’s respect for the great landowners as the natural leaders of society and rulers of the country, he added a sense of their responsibility for the well-being of their own countryside.4 Unhampered by Burke’s adherence in economic 1 Wickwar, op. cit., p. 36. Seven hundred is Wickwar’s figure. But can it be a misprint ? 2 R.I. and S. Wilberforce, Ufe of William Wilberforce, 1838, III, 451–2. 3 Ibid., Life etc., IV, 370. 4 See W m . Wilberforce to the Earl of Galloway, 3rd December 1800. Correspondence of Wm. Wilberforce, 1840, I, 219.

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matters to principles of laissez-faire, he deplored the government’s failure to look after the working classes in bad times, and attributed their disaffection to famine and distress.1 He feared the corruptions of London, much as the Lake poets feared those of the industrial towns. Wilberforce’s conception of society, so far as it emerges from his writings, was static and strongly hierarchical. ‘Society’, he wrote, ‘consists of a number of different circles of various magnitudes and uses . . . The principle of patriotism chiefly consists . . . that it should be the desire and aim of every individual to fill well his proper circle (as a part and member of the whole), with a view to the production of general happiness’.2 In smaller minds this doctrine was a magnet to snobbery,3 but there was no emotional pettiness in Wilberforce’s writing. He deplored the decay of simple patriotism, and desired God’s favour on the nation. There is, however, little indication in his work of any strongly corporate or organic conception of the State like that of Burke; ‘A nation’, he wrote, ‘consists of individuals . . . true national prosperity is no other than the multiplication of particular happiness’.4 Like many Tories, he saw society as tending to decay rather than advance, and looked to the traditions and institutions of ‘purer’ times to uphold it. 5 He had a strong belief in the need for social discipline, which was sometimes at war with his humanitarianism. He was unable to support Burdett’s motion for abolishing flogging in the armed forces—‘whilst honouring him for his feelings, durst not abolish it altogether’.6 In the hard times which followed the peace of 1815 his instinctive Toryism and fear of democracy and demagogy triumphed. He voted for the Corn Law, was on the 1

Wm. Wilberforce to W m . Pitt, 17th August 1801. Life, etc., III, 12–13. Wm. Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, etc., 1829, p. 307. 3 ‘I told her that there was indeed a sense in which the clergyman was as good as another, because the profession dignified the lowest of the order, if, like her husband, he was a credit to that order. Yet still there were gradations in the Church as well as in the State. But between the wives and daughters of the higher and lower clergy, there was the same distinction which riches and poverty have established between the higher and lower orders of the laity; and that rank and independence in the one case, confer the same outward superiority as rank and independence in the other.’ Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife. Works, 1, 1818, IX, 209. 4 Wilberforce, Practical View, etc., p. 304. 5 Letter to Pitt, Life, III, 12. 6 Ibid., IV, 18. 2

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secret committee which examined evidence of sedition in 1817, and supported all the repressive measures of government, of which the Carlile trial was one. The political Toryism of the Evangelicals is reflected in the doctrine of Church and State expounded by Joseph Milner. They were unconcerned with the Apostolic Succession, and conceived of God’s communication with man by direct grace and through the Bible rather than through a corporate Church. They thought of the Church of England as a teaching institution. But it was more than a mere Paleyan utilitarian establishment or Warbur ¬ tonian church of the majority, for the Church of England was conservator of a tradition of Gospel religion descended from purer times—‘the highest possible conceivable human authority’. 1 Its liturgy and articles taught pure Gospel doctrine. The modern clergy had departed from them, and in place of the doctrines of original sin, justification by faith, and regeneration in the Holy Spirit, were substituting a system of little more than pagan ethics.2 However, this was no sufficient excuse for committing the sin of schism by abandoning the Church, adding to religious divisions, and so opening the way for unbelief.3 The Evangelicals thought the Church sound at heart, and wished to reform it rather than to leave it. Wilberforce pointed out that it set a standard of morals and education to all the Nonconformist clergy.4 Yet they were perpetually torn between their attachment to the Establishment and their sympathy with the Wesleyans and other reformed Dissenters whose religious experiences they understood, and whose seeking for salvation and holiness they contrasted with the levity of some of the unreformed Anglican clergy. Some Evangelicals were ‘occasional Nonconformists’. They suffered the hearty disapproval of the High Church clergy for this, 5 and of the rank and file for their attempts to reform the Church by using their patronage to appoint clergy of their own stamp. 1 John Venn. Quoted by Michael Hennell, in John Venn and the Clapham Sect, 1958, p. 127. 2 I. Milner, Life of the Author, in J. Milner, Practical Sermons, I, Cambridge,

1801, xxviii. 3

J. Milner, Practical Sermons, I, 131. Hints for a New Book on Religion, in Appendix to Vols. I and II, Life, II, 402. 5 See Dr. Gaskin’s severe letter to Wilberforce rebuking him for uniting with ‘schismatics . . . in public prayer’ and even in Communion: ‘Docketed Church claims —deserves most serious consideration.’ 26th March 1817, Correspondence, II, 366. 4

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Lacking a theory of an apostolic, corporate, visible Church, but possessing a strongly traditional and authoritarian outlook, the Evangelicals fell back on Erastianism. Milner thought the responsibility for providing the form of religion for his subjects lay with the ruler. His course was clear. Since the Gospel was of divine authority and its essentials were apparent and needed no interpretation, the ruler must provide a Biblical religion. To do this was his religious duty; it was also a duty of higher expediency. Since Christianity was beneficial to society, and governments ought to promote whatever is beneficial to society, they must promote that. 1 ‘What shall hinder, then, that the state has the same right to make laws concerning religion, as concerning property, commerce, and agriculture? Is it not a great mistake to separate religious considerations from civil? And while you attempt to do so in theory, will it not be found impossible in practice?’2 Rulers always had taught true religion, and the divine precedent for it was clear in the Jewish history recounted in the Old Testament.8 Having affirmed the clarity of the Gospel doctrines, Milner could turn his back on Locke’s arguments against ‘Cuius regio eius religio’ and on the religious divisions of the last 150 years. Although the Evangelicals were not preaching Divine Right, and king had become blurred with ruler, or State, there was more than a touch of seventeenthcentury paternalism in their attribution of the power of directing religion to the ruler. Their peculiar position made the Evangelicals less intolerant towards the claims of religious minorities than might have been expected from their political Toryism. The Evangelicals, along with the various brands of Methodists, were in reaction against latitudinarians; and they mistrusted Socinianism wherever it appeared. They had in 1787 opposed repeal of the Test Laws largely because they associated the Repeal movement with the movement for abolishing the Articles and changing the Liturgy inside the Church of England. ‘Discredited as it is’, wrote Rev. William Mason to Wilberforce . . . ‘I think it better than no establishment at all, and that I am of opinion it soon would 1 Joseph Milner, Reflections on Ecclesiastical Establishments. Abridged from his History of the Church of Christ. Century IV, 1835, Chap. XVII, p. 6. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 8.

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have been, if this as a previous question had been carried.’1 Once Methodism was on the way to becoming part of Dissent, the relations between Wesleyan Methodists, revived or Calvinist Dissenters, Evangelicals and ordinary churchmen became most complicated. Wilberforce found himself protecting Evangelical clergy against the attempts of their High Church brethren to get their prayer meetings broken up under the Conventicle Act, and drive them out of the Church.2 At the same time the Evangelical clergy suffered from the annoyance of itinerant Methodists preaching in their parishes.3 In 1801 and again in 1811, Wilberforce protected the new Dissenters—many of them splinter Methodist bodies—from the harrying of Lord Sidmouth.4 In the latter year the Wesleyan Conference, the Calvinist Methodists and Congregationalists (represented by the new Protestant Society for the Protection of Religious Liberty), and the Deputies of the Three Denominations, were actually fighting a joint political battle against the forces of Church and Sidmouth Toryism, under Unitarian leadership.5 On the whole, the Evangelicals could not denounce as schismatics those of their own frame of mind who were unable to stay in the Church. Thus Milner distinguished between Dissenters who, owning the religious fundamentals of the Establishment, differed from it in some subordinate sentiments, and Dissenters hostile to all religion, or at least attached to a religion subversive of the great truths of Christianity. Church1 Rev. Wm. Mason to W. Wilberforce, 2nd April 1787. Correspondence of Wm. Wilberforce, I,29. Cf. Life of Wm. Wilberforce,I,258–9. 2 Lord Sidmouth ‘must provide that members of the Church of England might meet together for devotional exercises, without being requested to declare themselves Dissenters. I own I fear, if he does not admit some such provision, numbers will be forced into the ranks of the Methodists.’ Wilberforce to Wm. Hey, 1st May 1811, Life, etc., III, 509. 3 M. Hennell, John Venn and the Clapham Sect, 1958, p. 23. 4 An attempt to limit the conditions under which Dissenting ministers could obtain licences was made by the Bishop of Lincoln and M. A. Taylor, M.P., in 1800. Wilberforce made strong representations to Pitt and the bill was dropped. Life, II, 360–5. In 1811 Wilberforce intervened with Perceval against Lord Sidmouth’s measure. Its defeat was undoubtedly assisted by Evangelical sympathies in government circles. 5 The full story of this struggle and of the founding and composition of the Protestant Society for Religious Liberty is told by Mr. M. B. Whittaker in his M. Litt. thesis, ‘The Revival of Dissent, 1800–1835’, Cambridge, 1958.

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men should exercise forbearance and charity towards the first class, but ‘charity of a very different kind’ towards the second.1 The Evangelicals disliked the Roman Catholics, their hostility taking certain characteristic forms.2 They particularly accused them of denying the Bible to the laity, tried to convert them by circulating Protestant Bibles, and chivvied them into printing and circulating their own. Yet on the issue of Catholic Emancipation they were divided. Wilberforce wavered a good deal. He supported Pitt’s views at the Union. By 1807 he despaired of attaching the Irish Catholics to the English connexion, and, possibly under the influence of Redesdale and Perceval, he and the ‘Saints’ went over to the Portland government. But by 1813 he was voting for Catholic relief, and had adopted (in alliance with his foe Canning) a position approximating to that of Liberal Toryism. Not only did he accept the argument that the consciousness of being persecuted prevented Catholic conversions to Protestantism. He also feared the Irish Catholic hierarchy, and hoped by concession to divide the lay gentry from it. Politically he followed the lead of Pitt, being unwilling that the British Government should be forced to conform to the politics of the Anglo-Irish ruling caste. Religiously his equivocal attitude may have had something in common with that of John Wesley, who was torn between his hatred of the Roman Catholic Church and his belief that, even in that Church, it was possible to have the Christian experience which was, to him, the hall-mark of salvation. With Wesley, and with such Evangelicals as Hannah More, prejudice generally won. It was thus probably due to a certain political sophistication that Wilberforce and some of the ‘Saints’ supported (with ‘securities’) the Catholic claims. Wilberforce hastened to assure two Irish Catholic Archbishops who came to visit him, that his support was not due to a favourable opinion of their religion.3 The hostility of Evangelicals to Infidels was unmitigated either by political expediency or by religious sympathy. They considered religion necessary both to the existence and to the purpose of society. Wilberforce did not insist that this religion must necessarily be Christianity. Many of the good effects of 1

J. Milner, Reflections on Ecclesiastical Establishments, p. 16. See Chap. V. 3 Life, etc., IV, 325–4. 2

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religion in political societies would be produced even by a false religion which prescribed good morals and enforced them by sanctions.1 It did its work by providing and enforcing a minimum moral basis in social intercourse, or moral ‘tone’ for the whole community. He hastened to add that Christianity was superior —more efficient—in doing this, because it taught a higher morality, and because it produced a right temper of mind to support it. It rooted out the selfishness displayed in the upper classes by luxury and frivolity, in the lower by pride and insubordination.2 This service of religion to society embraced even those members of the community who did not believe in the religion. ‘Christians, Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics, persons of ten thousand different sorts of passions and opinions, being members at the same time of the same community, and all conscious that they will be examined by this same standard, will regulate their conduct accordingly, and with no great difference, will all adjust themselves to the required measure.’3 Moreover, it lasted for a while after the living faith which inspired it had decayed. Christianity, where prevalent, had raised the general moral standard to a height before unknown. Its effects had been ‘produced alike in those who deny, and in those who admit, her divine original’, lasting for a time without great apparent alteration, however much her spirit might languish or even her authority decline.4 Wilberforce was evidently thinking of his own contemporary society; but he had originated an argument which, much later, Gladstone could turn into a reason for admitting non-Christian minorities to civil and political rights in a Christian State. For Gladstone held that the morality of Christian belief had so wrought itself into the life and institutions of 1,500 years that it was part of our common inheritance, ‘Common as the sunlight that warms us, and as the air we breathe’.5 Gladstone, in his liberal phase, was using Wilberforce’s observation as a general basis of morality in place of the vanishing conception of ‘natural morality’ or ‘natural law’. But a still later generation could 1

Practical View, etc., pp. 308–9. Ibid., p. 310. 3 Ibid., p. 284. 4 Ibid., p. 285. 5 W . E. Gladstone, A Chapter of Autobiography, 1868, pp. 61–62. 2

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reapply it to Wilberforce’s original purpose of proving the necessity of Christian belief to civilized society, for it seemed to them that the impress of Christian morality was wearing out. 1 While any religion of rewards and punishments might secure the moral bond, Christianity was superior to all others in furthering not only the being but the purpose of a secular society; to make people happy. In rooting out selfishness it created patriotism or public spirit. Greece and Rome had tried to keep patriotism alive by conquest, and Sparta by poverty and hardship, but those countries had not been happy.2 Christianity promoted benevolence, moderation, dutifulness, and resignation to the will of God and the dispensations of His providence. So it softened the insolence of power and rendered the necessary inequalities of the social state less galling to the lower orders by offering them peace of mind here and rewards hereafter.3 Further, Christianity made individuals happy; and influencing personal and group relations, it kept the nation as a whole happy and peaceful. The Evangelicals saw no conflict between religious belief and material well-being. It has been pointed out that many of them were wealthy businessmen, and they thought religion good for economic prosperity.4 Wilberforce was thus able to justify a basic alliance of Christianity and civil society, on both conservative and utilitarian grounds. Unfortunately, the influence of the communal standard of morality could be trusted to prevail only in the upper ranks of society. The secular sanction enforcing it—that is, the only extra-political sanction to which unbelievers were amenable— was the sense of honour. Now the sense of honour, that is, the care for reputation and for the good opinion of one’s contemporaries, was itself the product of money and leisure. It was the standard of a gentleman. Supporting the Catholic Relief bill of 1813 in the House of Commons, Wilberforce asked, ‘Even if the consciences of the Roman Catholics should not be bound by the oath which they will take, where can gentlemen be found, who after swearing not to disturb or endanger the Established Church, would dare to rise and propose any measure to its 1 2 3 4

Cf. A. R. Vidler, The Orb and the Cross, 1945. Wilberforce, Practical View, etc., p. 285. Ibid., pp. 313–14. Cf. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Hennell, op. cit., p. 207. 224

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1

detriment?’ But in the lower orders, ‘that system of honour and responsibility are wanting, which, in superior classes, supply in some poor degree the place of higher principles’.2 The want of honour in the lower classes must therefore be compensated by the direct sanctions of religious belief. If these were removed, ‘the cement of society being no more, the State would soon be dissolved into individuality’.3 Hence the necessity of protecting specifically the lower orders from Deist propaganda, and hence the prosecutions of publishers, or disseminators, rather than authors. Not only the happiness of the deluded victims but the basic morality which held society together was at stake. The Evangelicals built upon their alliance of religious morality and civil society the same political construction as the Crown lawyers. They insisted that obedience to existing rulers and governing aristocracy was part of the morality taught by Christianity to the lower classes. They thereby exposed themselves to the charge of professing religion as a sort of moral police-force to the poor, and of preaching passive obedience in order to preserve their own selfish interests. But while it is true that Wilberforce, and all the upper class theorists who used this argument for the enforcement of religion, blindly arrogated to themselves a monopoly of the sense of honour, the charge was only justified in part. However useful to their own political ends the Evangelicals may have found religion, they never conceived of its experience nor its teaching as applicable only to the lower orders; nor was their emphasis on the morality of obedience directed solely to the poor. They themselves cherished the happiness of religious peace. Wilberforce’s Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians derives its vitality from the unconscious autobiographical element in it; and it is obvious that Wilberforce found in his religion a refuge and comfort, which preserved him from the pettiness and passion of the world. The Christian ’walks in the ways of Religion, not by constraint, but willingly; they are to him not only safe, but comfortable’.4 The service of God should be delightful and pleasant. Sabbath observances were not merely a religious duty; 1

Life, etc., IV, 99. Practical View, etc., p. 203. The view derived from Burke and descended to Coleridge. 3 Ibid., p. 320. 4 Ibid., p. 153. 2

R.T.–Q

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they were a holiday from the worries of business or political life. Nor had the quality of honour, which seemed to exempt the gentry from the political necessity of conformity to religious teaching, any real moral or religious value to them. It was too closely identified with pride. Simple people (including the lower orders) were nearer salvation without it. It had its uses, and Wilberforce thought that reputation should be accepted in so far as it could be used for furthering Christian morality, or happiness. Likewise, contempt should not be courted, and should only be endured where obedience to worldly standards conflicted with Christian morality. But it was part of a system of worldly and unchristian morality which in part conflicted with true morality; which, for instance, encouraged duelling. The obedience required of the lower classes was not contrasted with liberty allowed to the higher, rather with another form of duty. Both the Practical View and Hannah More’s Coelebs (which expounded the precepts of the Practical View in popular form) leave the impression that the Evangelicals had a fundamental fear of the loneliness of liberty, a craving for authority and obedience. Wilberforce wrote that in the Scriptures sin was considered as ‘rebellion against the sovereignty of God’. 1 Nominal Christians allotted a small part of their time and energy to religion, but all outside the allotment was ‘so much addition to that land of liberty, where men may roam at large, free from restraint or molestation’; and this was their great error.2 True Christians yield themselves without reserve to their rightful sovereign, ‘as so many instruments to be consecrated to the honour of God, and employed in his service’.3 Willing service took the place of, and, in a way which closely recalls the experience and doctrine of Martin Luther, became their liberty.4 The Evangelicals preached conversion as release from the dominion of sin. But the release was not secure while the possibility of backsliding existed. Life was a race to be run to a goal, a pressing on, a pilgrimage in service. The emphasis on obedience in politics was echoed in the depths of religious consciousness. At the same time the Evangelicals, like the Wesleyans, 1 2 3 4

Practical View, etc., p. 227. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 119. See Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God, 1953, p. 276. 226

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were intensely conscious of the spiritual value of the individual and of the basic spiritual equality of men, regardless of colour. Thus they abhorred slavery, refusing to agree that negroes were an inferior order, or should ever be treated as things. 1 It has often been observed that the Evangelical mistrust of human nature, and the consequent call for discipline and authority, arose from a strong sense of sin. The Evangelical doctrine of original sin was empirical. To Wilberforce fundamental corruption was, like Newton’s basic theory, ‘the sure result of large and actual experiment’.2 But, apart from scientific analogies, the Evangelicals felt it in their own personal experience, and so preached it as the starting point of Christian life. They realized that the doctrine was hard to grasp. Its very familiarity bred indifference, while love of ease and natural depravity suggested ways of circumventing its consequences. The first step in Christian awakening was not doubt of familiar tenets, but the consciousness of the need of reconciliation with God. For this reason the main shaft of Evangelical preaching was directed at ‘nominal Christians’, at comfortable, careless Whig Christians, of whom Sydney Smith might stand as the exemplar, and to whom the doctrine of salvation by works provided false security. The preacher who aroused this sense of sin, not the pamphleteer who claimed that by attacking fundamental doctrines he forced their holders to re-examine them, did good. Doubts of Christian truth were part of the reawakening process, often painful and long continued. ‘When men begin to have some real faith, they begin also to be sensible of much unbelief; and those who have no real faith are apt to imagine they have sufficient’, wrote Joseph Milner.3 The Evangelicals wanted help in overcoming these doubts, not reinforcement of them. Often they seemed manifestations of their own rebellious spirit, and the arguments of infidels seemed temptations of the Devil. Joseph Milner wrote in his diary: ‘Terrifying temptations. When I am careless, my soul tends to Atheism:– When earnest to desperation:’ and; ‘I have all my life been ensnared by leaning to my own understanding’.4 The unbending Isaac Milner wrote 1

See Wilberforce, A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807. Practical View, etc., p. 32. 3 Joseph Milner, Practical Sermons, I, 50. 4 Ibid., Introduction, I, lxiii, lxxviii. 2

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to Wilberforce of his doubts and difficulties in submitting cordially to God’s way of salvation.1 These men feared the arguments of the Infidels, primarily for their effect upon those less well educated to withstand them than they were, but also at times for their influence upon themselves. ‘I think Mr. Lindsey’s are dangerous books to be in the way of your servants’, wrote the Rev. John Newton to Wilberforce. ‘I thought to read them myself, but it was a foolish curiosity, and I was obliged to stop when I had proceeded a little way in the second volume; for tho’ I was sensible of the sophistry and effrontery of many of his arguments and objections, yet somehow my mind was entangled and hurt; and after I had put the books away, it was two or three days before I was composed again.’2 This poison was not to be trifled with. It was the ’fine words and fair speeches of those who lie in wait to deceive’.3 For these arguments were not truth, nor products of the rational spirit’s attempt to find it, but vain and presumptuous efforts to solve by the intellect matters above its reach. Christianity was susceptible of a variety of proofs; but on such questions as reconciling moral evil with the attributes and perfections of God, we should draw the sceptic off from ‘those dark and slippery regions’ of argument, and lay before him the arguments for the truth of our religion.4 The truths of religion were made known not through the operations of the intellect, but by revelation and by grace acting on the heart. This did not mean that revelation and true reason were in conflict; only that the Gospel fundamentals were so clear, and were of so much consequence to mankind that they could not be rejected without great wickedness of heart.5 The arguments of the infidels were the product of natural depravity. They aroused their own echo in the natural depravity of the heart. In the language of the time, licentious men had ’an interest’ in the falsity of Christian doctrine, although it was not their true interest.6 Since men were 1 2

Correspondence of Wm. Wilberforce, I,190. Rev. John Newton to Wilberforce, 15th November 1786. Correspondence, I,

13. 3

Ibid. Practical View, etc., pp. 43–14. 5 J. Milner, Reflections on Ecclesiastical Establishments, p. 7. 6 ‘There was nothing in their practice which made it their interest to hope that Christianity might not be true.’ (Of Sir John and Lady Belfield.) H. More, Coelebs,I,80. 4

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depraved, this Interest in Infidelity was ‘natural’ to them, although this did not make it excusable, nor avert its consequences. Wilberforce denied that infidelity was the result of sober inquiry and rational preference. It was the ‘slow production of a careless and irreligious life, operating together with prejudices and erroneous conceptions concerning the nature of the leading doctrines, and fundamental tenets of Christianity’; and the reclamation from it was the more rational process.1 Joseph Milner drew the consequence from this kind of reasoning. ‘I do not think it sufficient to say “the truth will take care of itself”. The unlearned and the unwary ought not to be exposed to the mischievous effects of such publications. There is a great difference, for example, between . . . the man who proposes his doubts with modesty, and wishes to have them removed, and the profane sceptic or infidel, who, under the pretence of candour and fair investigation, secretly rejoices in disseminating objections.’2 He agreed that no man should or could be compelled to become a Christian, or forced to profess what he did not believe. By such compulsion the ‘Romish Princes’ persecuted. Every man must have the right of private judgement. But no man ought to be left at liberty to propagate Infidelity and idolatry. ‘The government has a right to restrain men, and oblige them to keep their irreligion to themselves: the same right as to oblige vessels to perform quarantine, when there is reason to suspect the plague.’3 With men ‘naturally propense to wickedness’ Atheism, not truth, might win. In prosecuting Deist publishers the government was not obstructing the progress of truth, but limiting the influence of sin. Nor was any distinction between argument and ridicule really necessary. The latter might add persuasion to the former, but infidelity itself was mockery. The Evangelicals (as has often been observed, both of them and of the Wesleyan movement) turned away from the intellec¬ tualism of the latitudinarian and Rational Dissenting approach to religion. Wilberforce devoted a section of his book to the ‘Admission of the Passions into Religion’, explaining how the 1

Practical View, etc., p. 363. J. Milner, Reflections on Ecclesiastical Establishments, p. 12. 3 Ibid., p. 10. 2

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affections were used in Christian experience.1 Elsewhere, he explained that it was ‘another capital excellence of Christianity, that she values moral attainments at a far higher rate than intellectual acquisitions, and proposes to conduct her followers to the heights of virtue rather than of knowledge’.2 Actually, the Evangelicals attached the utmost importance to the acquisition of the mental skills needed to learn the elements of religion, and to ‘give an account of one’s beliefs before God’. Elementary education provided by religious men was an armour against infidel propaganda, as well as the training for a sober, useful and independent life. Of those with opportunities for a higher education, ‘God expects, in his most highly favoured servants, the diligent exercise of their natural powers’.3 However, Hannah More was rather fearful that learning would foster pride. She would devote a good part of a young clergyman’s life to learning, ‘that he may afterwards discover its comparative vanity’.4 Wilberforce emphasized that religion was no enemy to pursuits of taste, much less of learning. ‘Let them have their due place in the estimation of mankind; but this must not be the highest place. Let them know their just subordination.’5 The intellect had been relegated to second place because the truths it discovered were not the most important ones, for these were truths of the heart. So, when a conflict between the clear message of revelation and the apparent fruits of human reason did appear, the intellect must give way to faith. This subordination of the intellect and its truths probably contributed to the dissolution of the harmony between science and Christian dogma which the Rational Dissenters had tried so hard to establish in their providential schemes. While these would in any case have required reappraisal, the Evangelical attitude rendered the bitter conflicts which followed Darwin’s discoveries inevitable. Rejecting the power of the intellect to discover vital truth, the Evangelicals also denied the connexion between the increase of knowledge and virtue. They denied it empirically, because they did not think the advance of science or the diffusion of 1 2 3 4 5

Practical View, etc., p. 65, et seq. Ibid., p. 276. Hannah More, Coelebs, I, 308. Ibid., I, 303. Practical View, etc., p. 140. 230

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knowledge through the newspaper had made the world a better place. ‘They own that it is too often in vain that you inform the understanding, and convince the judgement. They admit that you do not thereby reform the hearts of men. Though they know their duty, they will not practise it; no, not even when you have forced men to acknowledge that the path of virtue is also that of real interest, and of solid enjoyment.’1 They also denied it theoretically, because it conflicted with their conception of the sinful will, and because the knowledge that counted, the individual knowledge of God, was not cumulative. It was a lifetime’s preoccupation to attain it, and it could not be stored and passed on. Improvement in a society consisted in the increase in the number of regenerate members in it, and Wilberforce was sure, ‘if we believe the Scriptures that God will be disposed to favour the nation to which his servants belong . . .’2 But there was no cumulative progress of the whole society; no ‘march of mind’. Morality sprang, not from an enlightened mind, but from grace acting on the heart and will. Here the Evangelicals went beyond the ‘police’ idea of religion as a sanction of good behaviour by supernatural rewards and penalties. Although the fear of consequences was a perfectly legitimate agent in arousing religious consciousness, it did not of itself make men good. There was a love of holiness for its own sake, a moralizing of the affections and the will.3 Morality was the product, not the means, of salvation. The negative consequence of seeing morality as the fruit of faith was a firm conviction that no infidel could, in a serious sense, be moral. Not that the nominal Christian, or even the infidel, could never do good. Wilberforce was well used to the co-operation of Whigs and even Benthamites in his anti-slavery campaigns and his many other good causes;4 and the possibility cannot be ruled out that his poor opinion of infidel morality owed something to the exasperations of organizing voluntary workers in a long and thankless struggle. The good was in some 1

Practical View, etc., p. 20. Probably a hope of favour in battle with the French. Wilberforce, Advice Suggested by the State of the Times. British Museum. Undated, but preserved among a large collection of handbills dated 1803. 3 Practical View, etc., p. 119. 4 For co-operation of Evangelicals with others in good causes, see M. Hennell, John Venn and the Clapham Sect; also E. M. Howse, Saints in Politics. 2

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way not real, not lasting, and would fail in adversity, be soured by ingratitude, or spoiled through slothfulness and carelessness of principle. Only faith could render moral intention stable and permanent. A section in the Practical View entitled ‘The Generally Prevailing Error of Substituting Amiable Tempers and Useful Lives for Religion’ was devoted to describing the weakness of morally amiable characters without religious faith.1 Hannah More’s sharp eye for the failings of ‘nominal Christians’ did more credit to her powers of observation than her charitable instincts. Both were convinced that morality without religion had no staying power. Christianity was a religion of motives; and morality without religion was ‘a body without a soul’.2 In examining the connexion of religion and morality Wilber¬ force deduced the dependence of a psychological power, namely, the ability to perform duty, on the occurrence of religious experience. He then tried to prove its contraposition from empirical observation which could only be called partial and incomplete. Infidels would be certain to consider his conclusions non-proven. At the same time, where infidelity was not respectably veiled but militant and proselytizing, the conviction that there was no real morality without faith encouraged Evangelicals to call infidels wicked, and treat them accordingly. The spread of Evangelicalism was accompanied in the early years of the nineteenth century by an outburst of educational, philanthropic and missionary activity. It has been pointed out that religious writers and friends of the Evangelicals have fixed their eyes upon the philanthropic side of this activity, while Radicals have only seen the interfering and repression that accompanied it.3 In fact the activities were all inspired by the energy generated by Evangelical fervour, and complemented each other. They were all parts of religious duty, or service to God and man. To John Venn, the drawback of entering heaven was: ‘There will be no sick to visit, no naked to clothe, no afflicted to relieve, no weak to succour, no faint to encourage, 1

Practical View, etc., Chap. IV, Sect. IV. Ibid., p. 204. 3 See E. M. Howse, Saints in Politics, Toronto and London, 1952, p. 116 et seq. Howse, an apologist for the Evangelicals, also attempts to show the other side of the picture. His book contains inaccuracies—e.g., he writes as though William Smith shared the outlook of the Clapham Sect—and should be used with caution. 2

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no corrupt to rebuke or profligate to reclaim’.1 Wilberforce felt that God Almighty had placed before him two great objects; the suppression of the slave trade, and the reformation of manners.2 But in all Evangelical manifestos the reformation of manners meant the suppression of vice. The prospectus of the Society for Enforcing the King’s Proclamation called on all faithful subjects ‘to check the rapid progress of impiety and licentiousness, to promote a spirit of decency and good order, and enforce a stricter execution of the laws against vice and immorality. . . .’3 This may have been the natural reaction of Puritanism in a gross and cruel age; but it made repression the chief instrument and associate of reform. The main energies of the Evangelicals—apart from the antislavery campaign—were concentrated on the saving of souls by spreading the Gospel, that is, in organizing missionary and Bible societies. The question then arises why men who believed that morality could result only from real religious conviction should have found it worth while to repress the mere manifestations of sinful nature in those who had failed to grasp the religious offer held out to them. Could they not have left it to the judgement of God, as Roger Williams had left heresy to the judgement of God ? One explanation would seem to lie in their conception of the Christian duty of securing a moral standard in the community. Another was, that Evangelicals believed in the efficacy of force in moral training, up to a point. Forced obedience was far inferior to the spontaneous obedience of the religious heart, but it created a habit of right action which prepared the ground for the seed of grace.4 Hence in the moral as in the political sphere the Evangelicals had little fear of the effects of coercion, provided it was used by the right side. They did not suggest that the saved and the good could infallibly be identified. They did not demand a rule of Saints—their own ‘Saints’ in parliament formed a kind of ‘ginger group’ of Tory Independents which did not aspire to govern. But they did invoke the aid of State machinery, inspired by themselves, to enforce upon society at least an outward 1

Quoted by M. Hennell, op. cit., p. 204. Wilberforce’s Diary—Sunday, 1787. Facsimile of Wilberforce’s handwriting, Life, IV, at end. Quoted by E. M. Howse, op. cit., p. 119. 3 Life of Wilberforce,I,393. 4 See John Venn on Education. Hennell, op. cit., p. 137. 2

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show of what they held to be the moral standards yielded by revelation. Hence they failed to distinguish any area of moral action in which the individual ought to be free from the intervention of the secular law. The main explanation was undoubtedly the Evangelical revival of the old Calvinist doctrine of the honour of God, as part of the conception of the sovereignty of God. As Wilber¬ force put it, Christians ‘are become the sworn enemies of sin . . . the war which they have denounced against it is cordial, universal, irreconcilable’.1 Part of this service of God was to repress, not only in themselves but in others, those manifestations of the sinful heart which offended him. Hence, for instance, their abhorrence of profane oaths, of which even the very mildest (as a correspondent to the Christian Observer pointed out) showed the intention of disrespect and rebellion towards God.2 Vice and crime were equally such manifestations, one directed immediately against God, the other against men. Wilberforce complained that the guilt of actions was estimated, not as according to the Scriptures they offended God, but as they were injurious to society. Murder, theft, fraud, some kinds of lying, injured social happiness, and ‘how different, accordingly, in the moral scale, is the place they hold from that which is assigned to idolatry, to general irreligion, to swearing, drinking, fornication, lasciviousness, sensuality, excessive dissipation—and in particular circumstances, to pride, wrath, malice, and revenge!’ 3 Wilberforce found no excuse for the vices of gentlemen, and witheringly denounced Burke’s observation on the sins in the higher ranks of society ‘losing half their evil by losing all their grossness’.4 Now sin was the response of the unregenerate heart to temptation. Therefore temptation must be kept away. The response of the heart is instinctive and emotional. Pride, rebelliousness and infidelity are corrupt emotions of the heart. So is the urge to obscenity. The Evangelicals made no qualitative distinction between sin arising from uncontrolled physical instinct, and sin arising from the uncontrolled instinct of insubordination. The 1

Practical View, etc., p. 118. Letter entitled ‘On Profane Swearing and Interjections’, Christian Observer, 1819, XVIII, 15. 3 Practical View, etc., pp. 223–4. 4 Ibid. 2

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Society for the Suppression of Vice listed among its objects, the suppression of obscene books and prints, of prostitution, of cruelty to animals, of unnecessary sabbath-breaking, and of breaches of the peace, which included profane swearing and blasphemous libels. Thus, obscenity, cruelty, blasphemy and sedition were all jumbled together, for all were the sinful fruits of depravity. In their anxiety to repress obscenity the Evangelicals turned their backs on Milton’s protest against those who should set themselves up to judge what writings were encouragement to sensual instinct and ‘prurient imaginings’: ‘Banish all objects of lust . . . ye cannot make them chaste that came not thither so’. 1 In their Erastianism, as in their identification of sin and crime, they turned their backs on Locke. In their demand for obedience and their political Toryism they allied themselves both with the High Church and with the majority faction in the Wesleyan movement. The mantle of confidence in their own righteousness which had descended upon those who had conquered their own doubts, and their harshness towards people who differed from them, marked an intolerant frame of mind. The Whigs complained that such theorists as Milner leaned as far towards persecution as the age would allow. But the Evangelicals were in some respects broader than the High Churchmen (whom in many respects they so closely resembled) with their doctrine of near-exclusive salvation in a narrow, national or an apostolic, episcopal Church. They inherited from seventeenth-century Puritanism a Protestant respect for the individual, and in cherishing the right of private judgement they agreed also that forced conversion (though not enforced silence) breeds hypocrisy. Evangelical proselytizing was (except sometimes in Ireland) characterized by a real desire to convert, rather than to use religious differences to keep down social and political enemies. Therefore the more thoughtful Evangelicals came to demand not only the fair treatment of negroes, but civil rights for religious minorities. Their comparative indifference towards a corporate visible Church made them somewhat half-hearted defenders of the Establishment; but their strong emphasis upon the connexion of faith and morality made them the most determined of all the enemies of the Infidels. 1

Areopagitica, ed. Hales, 1928, p. 26. 235

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III Deists and Atheists, unlike Protestant Dissenters, Roman Catholics and Jews, emphasized their points of conflict rather than their points of agreement with the religion of the majority. They were proselytizers, defiantly certain of their own Tightness, and prepared to argue for their own toleration chiefly on the grounds of the superiority of their tenets. They defended the truth and value of Deism or Atheism, and affirmed the falsity and worthlessness not of Christ but of the religion propagated in his name. On the whole, questions of value predominated over questions of fact. Most Deist and Atheist pamphlets included some refutation of the supernatural aspects of Christianity, derived, nearly or remotely, from Hume’s observations on miracles.1 But there was on both sides of the ChristianInfidel controversy a striking concentration on the moral consequences of belief. Practical Evangelicals stressed morality through faith. Benthamite Atheists, while they denied the existence of God on grounds of Hartleyan materialism, objected to religion not only because it was untrue but because it was false. They meant that religion was a deception, and therefore carried evil consequences. They returned the Evangelical charge against the ‘fine words and fair speeches of those who lie in wait to deceive’, with interest. The Infidel assault upon the morality of religion was directed against two cardinal points—the ‘police’ aspect of religion as a system of supernatural rewards and penalties, and the derivation of morality from faith. The Infidels thought supernatural religion merely an instrument of police. It was invented by rulers to keep their subjects in order, and the invention bred its own class of parasites in the process. According to Bentham, religion created a ‘particular class of persons incurably opposed to the interests of Humanity’. It bred a ‘sacerdotal class’ of ‘performers of prodigies’ whose interests had a ‘peculiar affinity’ with those of a governing aristocracy. The two ‘sinister interests’ united to divide the spoil at the cost of the happiness and self-dependence of the 1

E.g. Shelley’s Eusebes and Theosophus, which also includes a refutation of the argument from design. 236

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1

people. Bentham directed much of his denunciation against the Established Church, because he wanted to break its control of education, and because he thought its sacramental system, articles, catechism, and order of priesthood were efficient instruments in its stranglehold on popular opinion.2 But his attacks upon the teaching of passive obedience and of the use of religion as a tool to maintain the ascendancy of corrupt rulers applied equally to Evangelical teaching. The Deists and Atheists, to a greater extent than the former generation of Rational Dissenters, had become infected with the extreme anti-clericalism of Helvetius and Holbach. They considered that religion had not only been appropriated by the rulers for their own purposes, it had been invented by, or for, them. Bentham thought that the claims of Christianity—all of it which went beyond the plain moral precepts of Christ—had been invented by St. Paul.3 In such invention, the human intellect had impiously invaded the realm beyond that of deductions from sense-experience in which truth could be ascertained, in order to fabricate a God in the image of an earthly despot, and cause others to bow down before it.4 But the Infidels allowed a confusion to creep in. Sometimes they wrote as though religion were purposely invented by liars to deceive dupes, at others as though all were dupes, practising a form of unconscious selfdeception, persisted in because the predicament of human beings caused them to long for the security it promised. Although he usually used the former, Bentham never disentangled these two conceptions of the falsity of religion. Most Infidel writings were obscured by the same confusion. Even if religion had been invented and used for the general good, not for the selfish interests of rulers, the whole idea of sanctions to ensure moral action would have been repudiated by the Godwinian group of Infidels, of whom, from 1812, the young Shelley became the representative. Godwin found in coercion the great enemy of moral development. For this reason he also 1 Philip Beauchamp (Bentham, ed. Grote), Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind, 1822. Mischief VI, p. 116 et seq. 2 Cf. the various editions of the Church of Englandism and its Catechism Examined. (First published, 1818.) 3 Not Paul but Jesus, 1823. 4 Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion. This is summarized in Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, 1949, pp. 91–94.

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rejected political government as a permanent factor in human life, and looked forward to the time when the State and its coercive machinery would wither away. He agreed with Tom Paine that ‘Society is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness’.1 In society rewards and punishments for conduct—though not for opinion—might be necessary so long as human beings needed to be restrained from injuring each other. But the threat of punishment extinguished all magnanimity of spirit; and a continued threat reduced men to parrots.2 The Godwinians thought the idea of heavenly reward and penalty damaged morality at its root, because it corrupted the purity of motive. ‘A person who should labour for the happiness of mankind lest he should be tormented eternally in Hell, would with reference to that motive possess as little claim to the epithet of virtuous, as he who should torture, imprison, and burn them alive, a more usual and natural consequence of such principles, for the sake of the enjoyments of Heaven.’3 The teleological development of human nature described in Shelley’s Plan of a Treatise on Morals shows the individual equally with mankind, progressing from an infancy of savagery, solitariness and selfishness to the condition where he is ‘capable of desiring and pursuing good for its own sake’.4 Richard Carlile, at that time a follower of Paine, wrote in The Republican: ‘I have avowed myself a Deist, or a believer in one eternal and omnipotent God, and in the social principles [sic] that virtue is its own reward’.5 The Godwinians also repudiated the idea that virtue could lie in obedience, even willing obedience, to a will. Godwin explained that the nature of happiness and misery, pleasure and pain, is independent of all positive institution: that is, it is immutably true that whatever tends to procure a balance of the former is to be desired, and whatever tends to procure a balance of the latter is to be rejected. In like manner the promulgation of virtue, truth and 1 Quoted from Paine’s Common Sense, in Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Second edition corrected, 1796, I, 125. 2 Ibid., p. 179. 3 Shelley, Plan of a Treatise on Morals, Prose Works, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 1906, II, 203–4. 4 Ibid., p. 201. 5 The Republican, December 1819, I, 272.

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political justice must always be right. There is perhaps no action of a rational being that has not some tendency to promote these objects, and consequently that has not a moral character founded in the abstract nature of things.1 Shelley wrote: ‘A King, or an assembly of men, may publish a proclamation affixing any penalty to any particular action, but that is not immoral because such penalty is affixed’.2 Here was the ‘Greatest Happiness’ principle appearing as an immutable moral law. The application of that law at any one time would depend on the circumstances of the moment. The balance of pleasure or pain produced would depend upon the relationship of human beings to each other at the time of the action. In another work Shelley illustrated this point by explaining that, for instance, famine would be ‘good’ to the corn merchant, and ‘evil’ to the poor.3 But in no case would the will of a lawgiver be the criterion of what was right or wrong. Clearly, ‘the utmost exertion of Omnipotence could not cause that to be virtuous which actually is vicious’.4 Virtue lay in the nature of things, that is, in the nature of men and in their relations with each other. Godwin conceived the source of individual virtue as an inherent sentiment of benevolence, tempered by justice (equal distribution to equal desert) and rendered continually more effective by the increase of knowledge and intelligence. In face of this splendid, if somewhat woolly ‘march of mind’, religion, in its adherence to institutions and rules, its articles of belief and irrational prejudices, could only be a drag and a hindrance. Indeed it was a danger, for whatever repressed the forces of progress would cause a revolutionary explosion whose accompanying violence would retard the progress of human nature towards perfection by many years. The advance of virtue and the retreat of compulsion were complementary aspects of progress, inevitable, but quicker if violence were avoided. As Shelley drew away from the immediate influence of Political Justice, he began to discard its chilliness and intellec¬ tualism. Benevolence became sympathy. The function of society 1

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793, I, 121. Shelley, Plan of a Treatise on Morals. Prose Works, II, 204. 3 Eusebes and Theosophus. Prose Works, I, 324. 4 Letter to Lord Ellenborough. Written in 1812. Prose Works, II, 379. 2

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was to assist aesthetic experience, which experience continually stimulated and widened the sympathy of the individual. ’The inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutely sympathize with the sufferings and enjoyments of others, than the inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civilization.’1 Towards the end of his life, Shelley rejected the value of the mere accumulation of knowledge and the development of intellect. He saw that the scientific knowledge (both the things known and the knowing of them) accumulated by the mechanists and political economists, and applied without imagination, had merely increased the extremes of luxury and want, and added to the misery of the mass of people. The real progress of humanity, therefore, must be in the increase of sympathy, or of love, which Shelley defined as a ‘going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own’.2 Shelley identified the good with the true and beautiful. ‘To be a poet is to appreciate the true and beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression.’3 Shelley’s elaborate theory seems in the end to amount to the questionable assertion that the beautiful is the harmonious, imaginatively grasped by an extension of our understanding; that contact with all kinds of beauty therefore trains us to comprehend the moral beauty of good actions, and also extends our sympathy with the pains and pleasures of others by exercising our imaginative grasp of their situation as our own; all this as one aspect of a growing ability to create harmony from our impressions and so to perceive or comprehend real values. Dr. R. J. White has suggested that Shelley was approaching the position of Coleridge, and had he lived, would have returned to religion by way of imagination and symbolism.4 Certainly he was already writing what seemed very like Coleridgean essentialism; he was already distinguishing two kinds of pleasure, the durable and universal and the transitory and particular, playing much the same two roles as Coleridge’s 1

Plan of a Treatise on Morals. Prose Works, II, 199. Defence of Poetry (1821). In R. J. White, Political Tracts of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, 1956, p. 204. 3 Ibid., p. 200. 4 R. J. White, op. cit. Introduction, p. xxxvi, et seq. 2

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1

reason and understanding. He was already demanding that the sceptic should ‘spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men’.2 But he had some way to go, for he would have had to concur in Coleridge’s affirmation of the role of choice, or free will as the means of discovering truth. The development of his theory was cut off at a place where it implied a demand, in the name of moral progress, for that untrammelled liberty of aesthetic experience and artistic expression which Evangelicals were most loath to concede. Equally with the use of religion as moral police, the Infidels repudiated the idea of morality through faith. Morality through faith was the consequence of salvation by faith, which they thought an immoral doctrine. The Infidels referred back to the old argument, that force is unsuited to convince the mind, since belief is independent of the will. ‘The will can have no influence on belief’ wrote Samuel Bailey; ‘Or, in other words, belief, doubt and disbelief are involuntary states of the intellect’.3 If opinion was independent of the will, it could not be just to punish a man for what he could not control. Belief, therefore, could never justly be the subject of a judgement of merit or demerit.4 The doctrine of salvation by faith took the judgement of belief as meritorious into the very heart of religion; and was felt to point to an unjust God. For this reason the Unitarians had denied that salvation by faith was part of true Christianity and had turned to a doctrine of sincerity in whatever belief was held, with works. The Deists had rejected the Gospels for containing it, and repudiated Christianity for a God of harmonious Nature. The Infidels felt that, from a doctrine such as salvation by faith, no sound ethic could flow. Morality stood upon its own legs, was even contaminated by religion. ‘Moral virtue is sufficient for man to practise through life, both for his own happiness and that of his fellow—religion has ever made him wretched.’5 Shelley thought Christianity had borrowed from 1 2 3

Defence of Poetry. Political Tracts, etc., p. 203. Ibid., p. 204. Samuel Bailey, Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions, 1821, pp.

13–14. 4 Cf. Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, English edition, 1928, p. 199, for Godwin’s application of this argument to the coercion of behaviour. 5 Letter to the Republican, 3rd December 1819, I, 229.

R.T.–R

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the philosophers of Greece and India some rules of conduct worthy of regard, but all were nugatory as long as credence was given to the dogma that belief is a criterion of merit or demerit.1 The inevitable consequence of this dogma was persecution. James Mill pointed out that from confusing the odium rightly attached to mistreating evidence with the odium wrongly attached to opinion properly formed, ‘the spirit of persecution derives its principal means of accomplishing its nefarious ends’.2 The more certain people were that their beliefs were right, the more justified they would feel in punishing those who disagreed with them. Bentham explained at length how the feeling of certainty in a man’s own breast as to the truth or Tightness of any fact is transferred into an attribute of the fact itself; this being a contrivance to force other men to entertain the same persuasion, or to appear to.3 Where salvation and morality depended on faith, expression of disbelief was regarded as sin, and a cover given to fostering antipathies and harrying those who aroused them. Bentham explained: ‘The genealogy is in this wise: from imaginary grace, imaginary mystery, imaginary sacrament, come imaginary blasphemy, imaginary sin; from imaginary sin comes real antipathy; and from men in ruling and otherwise influential situation, real oppression and real persecution on that one part, real suffering on the other:—for, by the imaginary sin, is produced, in the ruling breast, along with the antipathy, a pretence for gratifying it’. 4 The Infidels would not allow that Carlile’s attacks on Christianity were ‘ridicule’ or ‘blasphemy’ and insisted that he was being persecuted for the expression of genuine, uncontrollable opinion. The Infidels’ a priori objection to identifying morality with faith was confirmed by their observation of the nature and effects of the ethical teaching associated with religion. Indeed, their protests were really part of a wide and spontaneous revolt against what was conceived to be the whole spirit of orthodox Christian ethics.5 The spirit of this revolt can be observed in 1

Eusebes and Theosophus. Prose Works, I, 307. James Mill, The Principles of Toleration, 1837, p. 6. Reprinted from the Westminster Review, 1826. 3 See ‘Of Improbability and Impossibility’. Quoted by C. K. Ogden, Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, 1932, pp. 53–58, from Bentham’s Works, VII, 76–79. 4 Bentham, Church of Englandism and its Catechism Examined, 1824, p. 93. 5 For a later phase of this revolt, see Murphy, ‘The Ethical Revolt Against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England’. Am. Hist. Rev., 1955, LX, 800–17. 2

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Thomas Paine’s extraordinary account of his conversion from religious belief as a result of a sermon on the Redemption heard when he was a little boy of eight. . . . I well remember, when about seven or eight years of age, hearing a sermon read by a relation of mine, who was a great devotee of the Church, upon the subject of what is called Redemption by the death of the Son of God. After the sermon was ended I went into the garden, and as I was going down the steps (for I perfectly recollect the spot) I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son when he could not revenge himself any other way; and as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what purpose they preached such sermons. This was not one of those kinds of thoughts that had anything in it of childish levity; it was to me a serious reflection arising from the idea I had that God was too good to do such an action, and also too almighty to be under the necessity of doing it. I believe in the same manner to this moment; and I moreover believe that any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system.1 Paine had stumbled on the problem of the God who was said to be both good and omnipotent, and yet committed evil. He had therefore discarded the Christian God for a God of Nature which, unlike the God of Revelation, did not seem to him red in tooth and claw. Shelley stated the same problem in more sophisticated terms. ‘Will he (the Theist) place his God between the horns of a logical dilemma which shall restrict the fullness either of his power or his bounty ?’2 Few of the Infidels attributed these distorted moral teachings to Christ himself. Carlile referred to him as ‘that teacher of Deism’. Bentham denied that there was any quarrel between Christianity and philosophy (i.e. Utilitarianism). ‘Who wishes to see the pure morality of the Gospel impeached or undervalued? What is wanted is to carry out that good will to men which it breathes into practical effect universally . . .’3 Bentham’s objection was to the Christian conception of sin, and the appendage of supernatural beliefs in whose name men 1 2 3

Paine, Age of Reason, Thinkers’ Library, 1953, p. 4 1 . Eusebes and Theosophus. Prose Works, I, 312. Utilitarian Catechism, 1830, p. 63. 243

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punished actions for reasons other than their injury to the community, added to the sum of pain without increasing that of pleasure, and baffled the search for a common moral principle. The religion called Christianity, by attaching merit and demerit to belief, subjected its adherents to a persistent training in habits of mental dishonesty. It called on the terrors of immortality to persuade men of the dangers of infidelity.1 Only the Infidel could afford to be honest with himself, since for him death had lost its sting.2 Religion gave rise to articles of belief and to oaths, which compelled men—especially undergraduates and clergymen—to be dishonest with others about their real beliefs and doubts.3 The moral consequences of religious belief were intolerance, self-deception and hypocrisy. Shelley, however, found a false ethic in the Gospels themselves. ‘A patient acquiescence in injuries and violence; a passive submission to the will of sovereigns; a disregard of those ties by which the feelings of humanity have ever been bound to this unimportant world; humility and faith, are doctrines neither similar nor comparable to those of any other system.’ He added that friendship, patriotism, and magnanimity, sensibility, genius, learning, courage, qualities which have engaged the admiration of mankind, we ‘are taught by Christianity to consider as splendid and delusive vices’.4 Later he explained that :–‘The doctrine of acquiescing in the most insolent despotism; of praying for and loving our enemies; of faith and humility, appears to fix the perfection of the human character in that abjectness and credulity which priests and tyrants of all ages have found sufficiently convenient for their purposes’.5 The less sophisticated Infidels, including Paine, disconcerted the churchmen by taking seriously the claim that the whole Bible was verbally inspired, and then picking holes both in its 1 Bentham accused the Roman Catholic monastic system, in particular, of impressing undefined terrors after death. Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion, etc., pp. 73–74. Cf. Shelley,Proposals for An Association, etc. Prose Works, I, 276. 2 Bentham, op. cit., p. 8. Shelley, Eusebes and Theosophus. Prose Works, I, 313. 3 See Bentham, Swear Not at All. Written against University Oaths in 1813, and republished against prosecutions for blasphemy in 1817. Cf. Church of Eng¬ landism and its Catechism Examined, 1818, directed mainly against the inculcation of the Church of England catechism in public elementary schools. 4 Eusebes and Theosophus. Prose Works, I, 295. 5 Ibid., p. 306.

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factual consistency and its morality—especially that of the Old Testament. The Republican was full of shocked letters about the behaviour of ancient Jewish kings.1 The Infidels substituted for the ethics of Christianity their own ideals of moral behaviour. Shelley transformed the somewhat calculating benevolence of Political Justice into a heroic ideal of self-mastery, splendid, if non-violent resistance, and moral revolt. On the one hand, the Irish people were exhorted to fit themselves for freedom by learning temperance and selfcontrol.2 On the other hand, Milton’s Satan was praised for his defiance of God the tyrant;3 and Prometheus the hero type (in Shelley an obvious Christ-substitute), suffered and defied tyranny to benefit mankind. In Shelley the accent was on selfsacrifice, together with moral integrity. The Benthamites did not share the Godwinian horror of coercion in the cause of moral action, their own social system being based on it. They therefore stressed rather intellectual integrity. James Mill’s plan of education aimed at instilling the virtues of intelligence, temperance, benevolence, and intellectual honesty. The Benthamites’ insistence on honesty has sometimes been overlooked, because it did not feature prominently in Mill’s essay on Education, being instead discussed in detail in his Principles of Toleration. Yet the exaltation of honesty pervades Bentham’s writings, often in the negative form of attacks on dishonest thinking, but 1

‘Sir, On referring to the Chapters of the Old and New Testament, stated in your Republican of last Friday, I was astounded at the abominable and filthy stories contained in them. Although I have frequently read the Bible and Testament, I was not acquainted with half the indecent tales they contain; as a father, I shall consider it my duty to prevent my children reading a book so full of disgusting and immoral biography. . . .’ Letter of W m . Ainger to the Editor of the Republican, 25th October 1819. Republican, 5th November 1819, I, 174. ‘A servant girl who is happy she escaped the pressing times of King David, as described in the four first verses of the first chapter of the first Book of Kings, those of Solomon, who pressed every female that was fair, and came in his way, and those of Hosea, when the Lord commanded him to choose a wife from amongst the prostitutes of the city, Hosea, Chaps. I, II, and I I I ; prays God save Carlile, and subscribes a Shilling.’ The Editor adds, ‘The singularity of the above has induced us to give insertion to it in this distinct manner; it was received and valued as that teacher of Deism (Jesus) valued the widow’s mite.’ Ibid., I, 180. 2 Shelley, Address to the Irish People, Dublin, 1812. 3 Prometheus Unbound, Preface, Shelley’s Poetical Works, ed. H. B. Forman, 1882, I, 341.

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sometimes in positive precepts. Bentham thought this ethic consonant with the simplest Christian teaching, while Shelley thought he had abandoned the Christian moral example for one derived more closely from classical Greece. Yet in the moral teaching of both groups appears very plainly the ideal of independence, self-control, candour and intellectual honesty inherited from the Rational Dissenters. In such an atmosphere it was not surprising that Richard Carlile saw himself as a hero defying established tyranny in order to disseminate truth for the benefit of mankind. Nor, on his record, is there any reason to doubt his assertion that he was ready to persevere in promulgating his opinions, even were this made punishable with faggot and stake. 1 Infidelity had found its martyr, and the government and its allies an opponent who combined the thirst for publicity and the Puritan determination of an‘honest’John Lilburne. Having repudiated religious morality and indicated their own ethical ideals, the Infidels had still to justify their demands for freedom of thought and discussion as the basis of human order and progress. Godwin’s Utopian scheme implied a demand for individual freedom of action as well as thought. Increasing freedom was not only the condition of each individual’s development, but the reward of it. Yet in the progress of society as a whole there was a special role for freedom of discussion. Shelley wrote :–‘The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or about to be restored’.2 Communication of thought here seems to form the link between opinions and institutions; its effect being to keep the advance of civilization and the retreat of coercive institutions in balance with each other. Free expression would allow this process to proceed smoothly; repression (since discussion could not now be prevented, only driven underground), might end in violence. 1

Letter to Dr. Rudge, Republican, 1819, I, 183. Prometheus Unbound, Preface, Shelley’s Poetical Works, ed. H. B. Forman, 1882, I, 343. 2

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The Benthamites did not share the facile Godwinian assurance of the innate perfectibility of human nature. They therefore required a permanent framework of coercive education, law and political institutions, to provide the motives to keep human desires turned on the right path for increasing happiness. But they distinguished between action and opinion, and found within this framework an essential role for freedom of thought and discussion on all subjects. Firstly, free discussion of political institutions was necessary for good government, that is, government for the benefit of the governed. In the Fragment on Government, long before his conversion to full democracy by James Mill, Bentham wrote that the motto of a good citizen under a government of laws was —‘to obey punctually; to censure freely’. For censure, even when ill founded, exploded the credit of every institution founded on mere prejudice, and brought every institution to the test of real utility.1 James Mill believed that free discussion would also have a part to play in a democracy. If the House of Commons were properly representative, a full and free discussion of policies and personalities would give the people the information necessary to choose the best governors and to check their actions.2 Most important, the constant play of free discussion revealed the ‘sinister interests’ who usurped power for their own advantage, and so allowed them to be pulled down, or their formation prevented. The concept of‘sinisterinterests’, those individuals or groups of individuals who combined to pursue a selfish advantage opposed to that of the community as a whole, was an important part of Benthamite political theory. Their presence vitiated the whole operation of the social machine, for it affected the individual’s sense of honour or of reputation. In a properly constituted community, the desire for reputation, or public approbation, induced the individual to act with public spirit and seek the good of the whole. But once ‘sinister interests’ formed they encouraged him to act for the good of the group instead of the whole. ‘A corporation, a party, a sect, a profession, may have interests common to all its members, but hostile to the body of the nation; and every association of this nature, contains a 1 2

Bentham, Fragment on Government, 1776, pp. xiv–xv. James Mill, On the Liberty of the Press, 1825, p. 19. 247

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corresponding portion of the popular sanction. There will, therefore, be accredited or tolerated falsehoods, for the purpose of protecting the small society against the great one.’1 Thus, as Dr. Lively has observed in his full discussion of the Benthamite theory of representation, Bentham’s fear of ‘sinister interests’ induced him to revive something very like Rousseau’s theory of the General Will as contrasted with the Will of All, or the will distorted by the play of sectional demands.2 Now to Bentham and James Mill, the greatest ‘sinister interests’ were the King, the Aristocracy, the Law and the Church. Bentham’s language on the misdoings of rulers is at times almost reminiscent of a theory of original sin (in the corrupting effects of irresponsible power), and at others, of an embryonic theory of caste war. But of all the ‘sinister interests’, the associates who deceived others with the false promises and threats of religion in order to enslave them were the most dangerous, especially where, as in most countries, religion had been put on the footing of an institution, i.e. established in alliance with the rulers. There must be free discussion of religious matters, for ‘religious opinions can be made to embrace everything on which the unlimited power of the rulers, and the utmost degradation of the people depends’.3 It was possible for a liberal Dissenter to agree with the Benthamites on the necessity of freedom of discussion to good government without supposing, as they did, that its result would be to unmask religion as a fraud and so dissolve the Church. The Baptist minister Robert Hall defended the republication of his Apology for the Freedom of the Press, and for General Liberty, by arguing that, since governors partake of the same corruption as the people, aggravated too often by the possession of power, ‘to allege the depravity of human nature as a reason for submission to arbitrary power, involves the absurdity of supposing that the cure of one degree of wickedness is to be obtained by affording unlimited licence to a greater’. 4 Secondly, complete freedom of thought and of expression was 1 A Treatise on Judicial Evidence, extracted from the MSS. of Jeremy Bentham, Esq., by M . Dumont, 1825, p. S3. 2 J. Lively, ‘Ideas of Parliamentary Representation in England, l815–32.’ Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1957. 3 James Mill, On the Liberty of the Press, 1825, p. 34. 4 Letter to the Christian Guardian, 25th February 1822. Place Collection, Vol. 39, II, 183. The Apology was first published in 1793.

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essential for the maintenance and extension of truth, both in social relationships and in the progress of knowledge. The Benthamites’ exaltation of honesty as a moral virtue was closely connected with their notion of the importance of truth in society. They saw in common truthfulness the necessary condition of a happy society, in the continued discovery and diffusion of truth the necessary condition of social progress. Bentham explained: ‘Our happiness depends at every moment, so to speak, and much more than we believe, on the state of our knowledge. Our actions take a particular direction, according to what we know of things or persons’. Our own knowledge is very insufficient, so we have to take the testimony of others, and that testimony is useful only in so far as it is true. Therefore veracity ‘rests on the general interest, for truth is the bond of the social alliance’.1 Upon the progress of true knowledge rested the whole construction of happiness which men had built and would build. Pain, Bentham thought, was natural, pleasure the fruit of experience. All useful knowledge consists in believing facts conformable to experience, ‘in believing the modes of producing pleasure and avoiding pain to be, in each particular case, such as actual trial indicates. . . . To maintain and extend the alliance between belief and experience, will thus appear to be incalculably the most important object of human endeavour’.2 A passage from the Utilitarian Catechism is worth quoting because it shows how closely the Benthamites connected truth with morality :– The only probable and efficacious remedy for every evil, moral or physical, by which man is oppressed, is a diligent and intrepid search after TRUTH. Not merely a frigid or indifferent inquiry, but a continued and anxious search, putting the question upon every subject and every asserted fact, physical or metaphysical, moral or political, pious or profane—is it true ? After this inquisition is made, will be framed the still more practical question—what is RIGHT? We cannot have the least chance for answering the latter justly, without having procured a carefully deduced answer to the former. The enquiry what is right, is identical with what is likely to 1

Treatise on Judicial Evidence, 1825, p. 3 1 . Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion, pp. 93,94. For the Benthamite psychology of knowledge, see Halévy, op. cit., p. 434 et seq. 2

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produce the greatest amount of happiness ? To answer this latter all-important question, we must, as we have already stated, ascertain what is true? The more we know of truth, the better chance have we of performing what is right.1 Later it is indicated that the inducement to ask what is right is the identity of the private with the public happiness.2 The Benthamites found two conditions necessary to the alliance between belief and experience. The first was psychological integrity or the disposition to honesty. The second was the elucidation of all the facts. The first could only exist through freedom of thought, that is, through absence of fear of the consequences of holding unpopular opinions. The second could only exist through free publication and discussion of all opinions. The Benthamites maintained that any attempt to influence opinion by imposing a reward or penalty upset the mental mechanism by which facts conformable to experience were ascertained. They paid much lip-service to the argument that force was unsuited to convince the mind. But what they really feared was that force would destroy truthfulness, and so persuade the mind of untruths. Bentham quoted Pascal: ‘The will, says Pascal, is one of the principal organs of belief. Bring fear and hope into operation, give men a real or imaginary interest in believing or disbelieving, and there is no proposition, however irrational, which may not be supported, supported not only by external testimony, but with as sincere a belief as it is possible to have in what we do not understand’.3 James Mill explained that only evidence could convince the mind. But an ‘interest’, that is, a desire to believe caused by fear or hope of the consequences, destroyed the will to handle evidence fairly. A man could remain in voluntary ignorance of the whole or part of the evidence, or let the evidence on one side carry an undue impression through wishing that truth should be found on that side.4 Samuel Bailey, who was less wholeheartedly addicted to tabula rasa psychology, perceived that reward and penalty worked in a more subtle way. He maintained with greater con1

Utilitarian Catechism, pp. 49–50. ’All inquiry is dependent on the question what will promote the greatest amount of happiness—of national happiness . . . or if you please to put it so, My happiness. All these may be shortened by asking what is right ?’ Ibid., p. 51. 3 Treatise on Judicial Evidence, p. 966. 4 Principles of Toleration, 1837, pp. 11–15. 2

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sistency than the others that opinion was not, or was only partly, controllable by the will. A man might acquaint himself with all the arguments on that side of the question to which his inclinations were directed, and shun all the rest, and yet the conviction he was trying to avoid would force itself upon him.1 The action of the emotions upon the will was uncertain. ‘We believe not what we wish but what we hope. In fear we believe the reverse of what we wish.’ A strong emotion dominated the attention and concentrated thought on particular features of a situation to the exclusion of all the rest. Only those arguments illuminated by the passion were retained, and determined the judgement.2 Thus the distortion of judgement by the ‘interest’ still took place, though it was largely involuntary, and its results uncertain and unpredictable. In addition to the operation of immediate ‘interests’ the Benthamites were very conscious that the formation of opinion was affected by habit. Where false associations of ideas were habitual, it was very difficult to break them and rearrange the ideas in accordance with the real order of events. Where there was a habit of allowing the emotions to interfere with the judgement of evidence, it was even more difficult to obtain unbiassed judgement on any set of facts where interest could enter in. James Mill accused the Church of England, through its control of education, of instilling both these habits.3 There was a remedy for the tendency to false judgement. A man must try to be acquainted with the state of his own mind, and therefore make allowances for improper prepossessions. This would loosen the power of preconceived notions, and he would then be able to examine the subject with diligence and impartiality. But improvement would be gradual.4 Mill thought we should get rid of our affections before judging, or if that were impossible, make allowance for them by attaching greater 1 Samuel Bailey, Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions, and Other Subjects, 1821, p. 37. Bailey was evidently known to James Mill, who quoted passages from his Essays on the Pursuit of Truth in a laudatory notice in the Westminster Review for October 1829, XXXI, and placed his Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinion next after the Wealth of Nations. 2 Ibid., pp. 50–54. 3 Mill said that faithfulness in regard to evidence, like virtue, was the result of habit. Principles of Toleration, 1837, p. 17. 4 Samuel Bailey, Essays on the Pursuit of Truth, etc., 1829, pp. 56–59.

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weight to evidence opposite to the affection. To help this effort he brought in a legitimate ‘interest’—which was also on Bentham’s list of simple pleasures—the love of truth for its own sake. ‘If a man loves truth and fairness more than he loves either side, he will inquire and judge virtuously’—and vice versa.1 Praise and blame should be attached, not to opinions but to the method of handling the evidence by which they were reached.2 In this way, children could be educated in the habit of fair judgement, and accustomed to pursuing truth regardless of selfish interest. And by implication, the ‘sinister interests’ which promoted the application of reward and penalty to opinion for their own ends must go. Here lay the root of the Benthamite demand for secular education. Once opinions had been properly understood, and were grounded on the unbiassed treatment of evidence, it was felt that interest and emotion could have little influence upon them. ‘With regard to the opinions of which we have a distinct and thorough conviction, the state of our feelings could make no difference’, wrote Bailey.3 The recognition that the process of overcoming prejudice must be slow lent some sobriety to his theory of progress. The contribution of free discussion or publication to the advancement of knowledge was distinct from that of freedom of opinion. Bailey recognized this by separating his essay on the publication from that on the formation of opinions, giving as his reason the old distinction that opinion was involuntary, but publication was an act of will. He then justified publication by elaborating the old idea of collaboration in the discovery of truth through difference of opinion. Godwin had written: ‘Indeed, if there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind’.4 Bailey’s exposition was more elaborate. He thought that in view of the diversity of innate talent, intellectual power, and emotional outlook, the differences of sect, nation, party and locality, differences of opinion were inevitable.5 There was no absolute test of truth, ‘yet we have faculties to discern it (truth), 1 2 3 4 5

James Mill, Principles of Toleration, p. 17. Ibid., p. 22. Samuel Bailey, Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions, p. 60. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793, I, 2 1 . Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions, 1821, pp. 44–48.

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and it is only by the unrestrained exercise of those faculties that we can hope to attain correct opinions’. Success in every subject depended on completeness of examination. As no individual mind could possibly see all the arguments on both sides in full force, co-operation of minds was indispensably requisite.1 Some will come to the enquiry under circumstances peculiarly favourable to success, some with faculties capable of penetrating where less acute ones fail, and some disengaged from passions and prejudices with which others are encumbered. While one directs his scrutiny to a particular view of the subject, another will regard it in a different aspect, a third will see it from a position inaccessible to his predecessors; and, by the comparison and collision of opinions, truth will be separated from error and emerge from obscurity. If attainable by human faculties, it must by such a process be ultimately evolved.2 It followed that all that could be said upon a subject must be permitted to be said; to impose the least restraint would diminish the probability of attaining truth. In the process of actual discovery we were midway in the stream of ignorance and error, and must allow free discussion for the sake of future illumination.3 The question then arose, how could one be sure when the truth had been reached ? If truth was to be revealed through free discussion, what was the test of truth ? But on this point, Bailey, Mill and Bentham had different answers. Bailey had no absolute test of truth but he clearly expected his process to establish an ever increasing body of truths which further discussion would not overturn—hence his final outburst of Utopian optimism. At some stage in the process, then, the initial differences of opinion would have to give way to agreement. The implication was, that in the absence of self-regarding aims stimulated by emotion fostered by social or political ‘sinister interests’ such agreement was possible. James Mill thought that ‘ . . . when all opinions true and false, are equally declared, the assent of the greater number, when their interests are not opposed to them, may always be expected to 1 2 3

Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 130. 253

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be given to the true’. Mill’s test, therefore, fell short of unanimous agreement. Bentham, on the other hand, expected all truths, theological, metaphysical and political equally with those of the physical sciences, to be sought by disinterested free inquiry, but thought that majority opinion was not a test of the results. Truth was perceived by unanimous agreement. Such agreement was already achieved by scientists, who desired only to know the laws of nature, that is, to class facts according to their similarities and differences. ‘Our perceptions concerning them (laws of nature) perfectly agree with those of our fellow men.’2 The Benthamites’ failure to agree upon a test for the truth of disputed opinions was partly due to their own position. They were an unpopular minority, and the last thing they wanted was that their own views should be tried at the bar of contemporary public opinion. Therefore they continually contrasted enlightened opinion with corrupt opinion, or opinion as it actually was, and pushed the testing time into the future. Truth could only prevail in so far as it managed to emerge in the face of ‘interest’ and pull it down. Ultimately, they had to rely upon an optimistic interpretation of universal history, to demonstrate that truth and happiness did increase—which is why their view was eventually so vulnerable to the pessimism caused by historical catastrophe. Moreover, Bentham’s own test of unanimous agreement did not seem to fit the method of discovering truth by collating different opinions. The Benthamite method of discovering truth, as set out by James Mill and later by John Stuart Mill in the Logic, was by establishing a high degree of probability of a fact through repeated experiment leading to identical result, by multiplication of experiment producing unanimity of opinion, and by subsequent classification of the facts so established. The discussion of differences was a very useful preliminary or first stage in this method. It forced people to state the grounds of their opinions, thereby revealing many facts which might have gone unnoticed, and bringing to light reasons of which the general validity could be considered. But unfortunately, those very matters in which controversy is most usual, as in politics, morals or religion, are also those in 1 2

Liberty of the Press, p. 23. Treatise on Judicial Evidence, p. 268.

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which it is most difficult to experiment, or in which there is no ready means of testing hypotheses based on inductions from the facts and reasons revealed. It was not satisfactory to identify conclusions drawn from data supplied by free argument over politics or morals with conclusions based on the data of physical science; it was even less satisfactory in an age when the findings of science were believed to be permanent and unalterable to a much greater extent than they are today. In religion, for example, lack of a universally accepted experimental test of true conclusions meant that truth was not, could not be, finally agreed; and differences of opinion based on variety of education, experience and temperament tended to perpetuate themselves, whether there was a ‘group’ or ‘sinister’ interest or not. The question also remained whether procedure by collating differences could be made to work in the field of practical politics and daily life. Honest opinion can, perhaps, be distinguished from self-interested opinion, but for practical purposes the borderline is exceedingly difficult to discover. How can opinion held as a result of experience, education, class, temperament, be separated from one held through desire for some particular advantage ? If the religious temperament exists, can dogma be attributed merely to a selfish desire for salvation? The Benthamites begged this question by their belief that religion was an intentional invention to deceive others. If the landowner believes that a rural way of life is best for the nation, at what juncture do his efforts to perpetuate it suggest that his view is founded on narrow self-interest? Certainly, where practical agreement is desired, a course of action can be decided upon by the compromise of freely expressed opinions. That this is the best basis for political action is the gospel of modern Liberal Democracy. But this is a method of conducting practical politics rather than discovering truth; and it remains more dependent both upon a reasonable balance of powers within the community, and upon a universal will to conduct life peacefully, than the early Benthamites were, perhaps, willing to concede. The theory of the increase of truth through free discussion was, some thirty years later, taken up by John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty. Mill started by abandoning Bentham’s contention that morals and politics were a science of which the appropriate test of truth was unanimity of opinion. He distinguished 255

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between mathematics, in which all argument is on one side, natural philosophy where there may be disagreements, and morals, religion, politics, social relations and the business of life, where multiple opinions are likely, and in which, therefore, some less complete estimate of correctness must prevail.1 Heretical opinions . . . are generally some of those suppressed and neglected truths, bursting the bonds which kept them down, and seeking reconciliation with the truth contained in the common opinion, or fronting it as enemies, and setting themselves up, with similar exclusiveness, as the whole truth. The latter case is hitherto the most frequent, as, in the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of a truth usually sets while another rises. . . . 2 The possible differences of opinion due to ‘interest’, to experience, and to the inherent constitution of the mind and emotions were now expressed under the term ‘one-sidedness’. The power of frustration of truth by ‘sinister interests’ was diminished; for Mill conceived that the truth could be ascertained, not by general or majority agreement, but through examination and synthesis by a single disinterested observer. Through the work of the superior individual, collating and drawing conclusions from the evidence supplied by the free discussion of differences, increasing insights into reality could be obtained. The same idea was accepted by Newman, who saw in it one process for the development of religious truth, with the Roman Catholic Church as the continuing, authoritative arbiter of fragments of truth extracted from successive fallible opinions and half-truths.3 Chapter II of Mill’s essay On Liberty itself exhibited some of the achievements and limitations of the process of finding truth through difference. The materials from which it was constructed were plainly the previous generation’s arguments in the Evangelical-Infidel controversy. But the chapter was not a synthesis of opposing ideas nor a compilation of fragments of truth. It was a restatement of the Benthamite argument, modified to meet certain of the objections brought against it. 1 2 3

J. S. Mill, On Liberty, Everyman, p. 96. Ibid., p. 105. Essay on the Development of Doctrine, 1845. 256

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It was a forceful and persuasive restatement of the liberal justification for freedom of opinion and discussion, convincing to liberal readers because it appealed to their ‘interest’, that is, their point of view, while at the same time taking into consideration the realities of their—perhaps of our—predicament. The Deists and the Atheists, influenced as they were by French thinkers, also represented the logical conclusion of English Rational Dissent. They had completed the process of simplifying the tenets of Christianity by simplifying them right away. Truth then had to be discovered by the operations of the human intellect, and their real method of doing this was by exploring and classifying phenomena. The older, Protestant conception of the agreed body of simple fundamental truths drawn from the Bible now belonged to the Methodists and the Evangelicals, and was spreading from them into the Broad Church movement. Again, the Infidel arguments exhibited the logical conclusion of the Unitarian contention that intolerance was the product of fixed beliefs and institutions. They maintained that persecution was the fruit not of religion abused, but of religion itself. The Infidels were at the opposite pole to believing Christians, both High Church and Evangelical. While the orthodox considered faith the cement of society, the Infidels considered free thought the basis of progress in civilization. While the Evangelicals thought faith the mainspring of morality, the Infidels thought faith the main obstacle to morality. Christian writers perceived that faith was induced by the emotions of fear and longing, and sealed by emotional satisfaction. Benthamites thought that this kind of self-interested emotion stood in the way of the perception of the truth and the increase of happiness. The Infidels maintained—not always consistently—that opinion was involuntary. Coleridge, in many ways the philosopher of the Trinitarian revival, reasserted the role of free will in the assent to religious truth. Evangelicals and Infidels bore some of the resemblance of opposite extremes. For instance, the Evangelicals made no practical distinction between sin and crime, both being what displeased God. The Benthamites failed to distinguish any sin apart from crime, which was what injured the community (although not all of it was suitable for prevention by public R.T.–S

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law). The Evangelicals derived morality a priori from faith, and the Benthamites tended to derive it a priori from scepticism. Both tied it to truth, although to differently discovered, different kinds of truth. It was perhaps fortunate for the practice of toleration in England, that the centre parties of Whigs and moderate Radicals, who disliked over-much logic, insisted that morality could be discerned only by observing action, and that a man’s religious tenets had little to do with his practice. In all the contemporary controversies, the Infidels fought on the side of toleration. They demanded the repeal of religious tests, especially in education. They advocated the civil and religious equality of Roman Catholics and Jews, and the modification of blasphemy and libel laws to secure free publication. How far were they really tolerant? On sectarian issues the Infidels were neutral, because they thought them entirely unimportant. About the difficulty of the two natures of Christ, Bentham wrote, ‘. . . to human conduct, take it any of these ways, what difference does it make ?’1But on questions of basic religious belief they were not neutral, because they thought Christianity produced political oppression, persecution, and untruthfulness. They wanted to disestablish the Church of England, but would they have stopped at that ? Their theory of ‘sinister interests’ required the dissolution of all bodies which stood between the State and the individual, and so frustrated the reconciliation between the individual and the general interest. Could they have tolerated the existence in the State of a great, property-owning corporation, attracting the spiritual loyalty and the temporal interest of great sections of the population? Could they have tolerated the lesser interests arising from the social and communal activities of the Nonconformist sects ? The Benthamites’ theory that religion was the product of ‘sinister interests’ deprived them of sympathy for others who might feel a need for the assurance of salvation, or a love of holiness which they did not share. How far could they have tolerated the dissemination of propaganda designed to stimulate passions which distracted men from the impartial examination of evidence, and the pursuit of moral and political truth ? Would their conception of the necessity of freedom of thought and 1

Church of Englandism and its Catechism Examined, 1824, p. 29.

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communication to the increase of truth and happiness have counteracted their temptation to restrain the harm done to truth and happiness by religion ? No answer can be given; for if there were some strains in Benthamite thinking which seemed to point to intolerance, the Benthamites never had sufficient prospect of power for their strength to be tested. In this, perhaps, their lot was a happy one. The intolerant aspects of their thought bore no fruit. But their defence of fairness in judgement and their justification of freedom of discussion, became the core of modern liberalism in politics and religion alike.

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VIII Conclusion

I THE events of 1828–9 were a triumph for the political supporters of toleration de facto, not a victory of principle. Catholic Emancipation was carried because the Irish were prepared to fight for it, and the English government was not prepared to put down a rebellion. Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts really slipped through under cover of the government’s embarrassment in the final stages of the Catholic struggle. 1 This imposition of toleration, so to speak, from the outside, obscured the extent to which Whig and Radical attitudes had contributed to its victory. Any attempt to answer the question how far arguments in favour of religious toleration were effective in bringing about Repeal and Catholic Emancipation must necessarily be conjectural. Why did the electors fail to respond to the demand for a ‘Protestant’ parliament in 1826 as they had responded in 1806, and this despite the alarm caused by the Catholic Rent ? Why had the No Popery mobs vanished ? Answers from circumstance can be given, which amount to How, and not Why. It has, however, been pointed out that the tone of English politics had 1 Manning has pointed out that it took years of agitation by the Deputies to achieve Repeal in 1828. B. L. Manning, The Protestant Dissenting Deputies, Cambridge, 1952, pp. 220 et seq. But the Repeal debates occupied comparatively little parliamentary time; and discussion in them turned largely on the possible effect of Repeal on Catholic Emancipation.

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become more tolerant; and it is no accident that this was observed by Dr. Cecil Roth in his History of the Jews in England, because it was in the extraordinary range of middle class talent supporting Jewish Emancipation that this conversion was most apparent.1 The passing of Catholic Emancipation by a Tory government undoubtedly helped to break up the Tories and let in the Whigs. But if Emancipation had been carried by a Whig government, as it would have been, the connexion between the ‘complete’ toleration at least of avowedly religious beliefs and communities, the renewed power of the Whigs in politics, and the force of industrial wealth behind them would have been more obvious. There were other reasons besides the Catholic crisis for the comparative facility with which the repeal of the Test Laws was ultimately carried. Although the Methodists were still unpopular, even the most prejudiced churchman of this later generation could hardly mistake the main Wesleyan body for republicans. The Methodists had opposed the 1772–3 Petition movement, and had ignored the 1787–90 Repeal campaigns. But since Lord Sidmouth’s ill-advised attack on the Dissenting ministers and Methodist itinerant preachers in 1811, even Conference had learned to co-operate with the Three Denominations in matters of common defence. The Calvinist Methodists, now fully recognized as Dissenters, had their own representation on the Protestant Society for Religious Liberty.2 The Repeal cause still had Unitarian leaders (the veteran William Smith in parliament, and Robert Aspland, minister and editor of the Monthly Repository), but Dissent had ceased to be a dwindling body, and the renewal of its numbers was due to Methodism and to revived Trinitarian Dissent. There was a potential force behind the Repeal movement which had not existed in 1790. The successes of 1828–9 were also partly due to the lack of unity on the Tory side. The Evangelicals, active persecutors of Deists and Infidels, did not oppose Repeal, and were divided on Catholic Emancipation and Jewish Emancipation. The High Church Tories, leading defenders of the ‘Happy Constitution in Church and State’ could not withstand the combined pressure of 1

Oxford, 1941, pp. 248, 251. Cf. Mark Whittaker, ‘The Revival of Protestant Dissent’, M.Litt., Cambridge, 1959. 2

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Whigs and liberal Tories. But of course their defeat was not complete. Entrenched in the House of Lords, they rejected, in 1834, a bill to admit Dissenters to Oxford and Cambridge, and managed to stave off the comparatively weak pressure of the Jewish minority for political rights for another thirty years. They also helped to prevent the following up of Catholic relief by effective reforms in Ireland. Other battles had still to be fought. The blasphemous libel laws remained unchanged, although government prosecutions were dropped. Avowed Atheists and Infidels had to wait for their admission to political rights until Bradlaugh. Oxford and Cambridge were still closed to Dissenters. The disputes over Dissenters’ marriages, church rates and, especially, church control of public education became, if anything, more bitter after 1829. Popery continued its traditional role of red-rag to John Bull. Even so, thirty years after Catholic Emancipation, John Stuart Mill could say that in England only the ‘rags and remnants’ of religious persecution were left.1 Yet the Evangelical piety which failed to stop, which even promoted, the political toleration of religious minorities, did not promote a tolerant social climate. John Stuart Mill was sensible as his father had not been of a pressure to conformity in opinion and behaviour, not from laws and government, but in society itself. Although by 1833 the number and political weight of those who, in the main, supported toleration had greatly increased, and of those who opposed it had decreased, yet the theory of toleration was on the whole showing less vitality and those of its opponents showing more than in the 1780s. This is less surprising if the function of argument in politics be considered. The Rational Dissenters hoped that reasoned argument would convert their opponents. In fact, argument merely stimulated their opponents to systematize their own case. When the Dissenters’ arguments began to acquire political weight and to threaten the status quo, a notable hardening of the opposing position occurred. And the events of 1828–9 produced, both a spate of schemes for reconstituting the Alliance or Union of Church and State, and, in the Oxford Movement, a definite reaction towards intolerant sentiment. The hardening effects of controversy did not, however, 1

On Liberty, Everyman, 1948, p. 91. First published 1859. 262

CONCLUSION

prevent the arguments for toleration from exercising any influence on the course of events. These stated a case which the uncommitted could examine, and those whose position, experience or temperament inclined them towards toleration could adopt. They acted as advertisement, banner and party platform for their cause. They did, as arguments do, convince people who were willing to be convinced; and circumstances ensured that these were an increasing number. Also, the constant repetition of the arguments acted as propaganda. The gradual spread of distaste for the political use of the Sacramental Test is an example of this. They did play a part in the political struggle for toleration, only not quite the part their authors thought they played. Their appeal, not acting on pure, unbiassed reason, was not really dependent on the completeness or coherence of the case made out. Repetition of telling points rather than coherence of system made the political weapon—which may help to account for the fragmentary and repetitive nature of some arguments for toleration in most ages, noticed in Chapter II. Once the case had been established to the satisfaction of its supporters, continued development of the theory was not essential to the political success of the cause, although of course modifications, to meet opponents’ replies as well as changing circumstances, had to be made. Again, this does not mean that the nature of the arguments used in the political struggles for Repeal or Emancipation were unimportant. They defined as well as advertised the cause. Here the circumstance of the subdivision of sects (which churchmen deplored and Unitarians welcomed) influenced the definition. The subdivision, while preventing any one sect being faced with a unanimous combination of all the rest against it, also encouraged each sect to demand toleration for itself on terms which applied to all or most of the others. The subdivision was therefore the condition of the development of a theory of toleration, instead of a claim for the supremacy of one prevailing sect or belief. A theory persistently advocated is not without influence on those who hold it. The Rational Dissenters began by claiming toleration largely on grounds of their own superiority to the Roman Catholics. But the élite which led them ended by demanding civil and political rights for Roman Catholics and Jews on the grounds of the value of religious toleration. 263

CONCLUSION

Various reasons can be given for the weakness of the theory of religious toleration towards the end of our period. The body of arguments which we have called the theory of toleration had been taken over from the seventeenth century and developed during the eighteenth century by the Rational Dissenters. It has been suggested that by 1787 these were already roughly divided into the philosophical extremists and the Lockeian moderates. In the generation after 1800 the two wings of the theory, as of the main bodies of its supporters, moved further apart. The Lockeian arguments, especially the demand for the limited, secular State, were taken over by the Whigs. Priestley’s conception of progress through the cumulative development of knowledge fell into the hands of the Benthamites, who freed it from its Christian element, and from anti-clerical made it fiercely anti-religious. Bentham and James Mill were at least as far removed from, say, Lord Holland and Macaulay as the latter from Eldon and Sir Robert Inglis. Moreover, the theory of toleration had lost part of its roots with the decline of the doctrine of natural rights. Burke had helped to destroy the remnants of the idea of rights derived from a pre-social State, lasting into society. The old Protestant belief that the relations between God and man were outside the sphere of human jurisdiction never died out. The Dissenters continued to use the plea of natural rights in their petitions when parliamentary Whigs and Radicals had abandoned it; and the popularity of Tom Paine in radical clubs showed that the idea was still alive in working-class thought. But those nearer the centre of politics early in the nineteenth century turned to Utilitarianism rather than to natural rights for the assumptions underlying their theory of the limited State. Thus the Whigs tended to stress the irrelevance of religious belief to political action rather than the sacredness of opinion from human interference; and this gave their contentions an air of expediency. Moreover, Burke and the French Revolution between them had also banished Price’s essentialist basis for individual rights from political currency. Systematic radical thought was now Benthamite; and Bentham lacked an adequate theory of personality. The philosophy of Bentham was individualistic and egalitarian in so far as ‘one counted for one and no more than one’ in the pleasure-pain calculus, but it possessed little respect for 264

CONCLUSION

the inner being of individual personality, because its tabula rasa psychology made man the creature of his circumstances. Robert Owen drew legitimate consequences from this psychology when he argued that, since men were largely the product of their circumstances, the latter should be benevolently but completely planned. Although Benthamite psychology was useful in the plea for Jewish Emancipation, it weakened the theory of toleration as this had been built up in the later eighteenth century. That theory had been based on a combination of disparate philosophies ; the plea for liberty in the form of self-government, from the essentialism of Price, and the plea for liberty or lack of restriction, from the theory of cumulative knowledge based on Hartleyan materialism adapted by Priestley. These incompa¬ tibles, combined and balanced, constituted a mainstream of nineteenth-century liberal thought. The combination was later restored by John Stuart Mill, who held a conception of individuality derived from Humboldt, along with views of progress derived mainly from the earlier Utilitarians. Not only was Price’s theory of personality lacking after 1800; his essentialism had been taken over on to the other side by Coleridge and turned against the supporters of toleration. In Coleridge’s essay On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each, the concept of the Idea was applied to individual communities instead of to individual human beings. The group swallowed up the individual, who found fulfilment in his society, being a member of a class which was an integral part of the corporate persona or State. Admittedly, Coleridge had no conception of an independent corporate Church to combine with his State. The National Church, or clerisy, was a functional part of his corporate nation. Like the religion that Wilberforce saw as holding society together, it was not necessarily Christian, its Christianity in England being ‘a blessed accident, a providential boon’. The universal Church appeared as the aggregate of the ‘public communities’ or congregations of professed Christians everywhere whose head was Christ alone.1 Coleridge failed to harmonize his conception of a universal visible Christian Church organized after the manner of Protestant Independency with that of an Erastian national 1 See the section entitled ‘Idea of the Christian Church’, at the end of Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State, etc.

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CONCLUSION

Church being part of a corporate State. But this difficulty at least prevented the oppressive combination of religious and secular authority which the High Church Gladstone demanded in his State in its Relation with the Church.1 Essentialism in Coleridge’s hands attacked another branch of the theory of toleration. Coleridge held that the knowledge acquired and handed down by the intellect reflecting on data supplied by the senses was an inferior or merely preliminary brand of knowledge, as the intellect or Understanding was preliminary to the Reason which combined thought with feeling, or deep interior conviction. The Understanding had its place, but was evil when it lost its subordination to Reason. In turn, Reason, and the truths it perceived were preliminary to the knowledge of God through love.2 Coleridge’s teleological theory of individual knowledge, clothed as it was in the language of German Idealism, was not incompatible with the Evangelical position. It led away from the idea of the cumulative progress of knowledge; and it was altogether hostile to the idea of the advancement of truth by means of the unbiassed intellect. This, the first specific reply to Benthamite rationalism, was a return to a theory of emotional intuitive knowledge. In the next generation, W. G. Ward, maintaining a theory of cumulative religious knowledge in the Church, in conscious rivalry with the Rationalists, would deny that vital knowledge, which was of the heart and the emotions, was compatible with impartial judgement about the object known.3 Even the affirmation of autonomy, of freedom itself, was used against the arguments for toleration. Price followed Samuel Clarke, who had maintained the existence of a psychological break between forming opinion and taking action; the first being involuntary and passive, the second voluntary, and subject to the control of the will.4 Thus he could maintain the traditional argument that belief is involuntary, and penalty for it is useless and unjust. Coleridge abandoned this break, reaffirming the role of the will in faith, as part of Christian free will. The doctrine of free will has not been used as a direct 1

Published 1838. This is the main theme of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, 1825. 3 W . G. Ward, Ideal of a Christian Church, second edition, 1844, p. 490. 4 Letters to Dr. Clarke Concerning Liberty and Necessity, Samuel Clarke, Works, 1738, IV, 714. 2

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CONCLUSION

justification for the human punishment of religious opinion. Indeed, it has been suggested that the fully tolerated existence of different beliefs is necessary to maintain the individual’s freedom of religious choice, or in other words, is an essential condition for the exercise of Christian free will.1 But it linked up with another argument on the anti-toleration side—that morality was the product of religion—so that the irreligious man, responsible for his lack of faith, was deliberately immoral. The tone of Coleridge’s comments on Infidels points the question how far can a tolerant attitude be maintained in the face of the implication that those outside the Church have deliberately chosen wrong ? To compensate for the weakness left by the discrediting of natural rights, the Whigs did make their own contribution to the theory of toleration, in the form of a revival of the old Lockeian argument that toleration is part of Christian duty. This was strongly contended by Bishop Bathurst championing Catholic Emancipation in the House of Lords, as well as by the Unitarian minister W. J. Fox attacking the prosecutors of Richard Carlile. Burke had supported the Dissenting petitioners with it in 1773.2 In a harsher age the Quaker William Perm, himself a sufferer under the penal laws, had pointed out that persecution contradicts the great ‘synteresis’, ‘to do as one would be done by’.3 In the nineteenth century it was less often used by minorities demanding toleration than by sympathizers from majority groups; for it is less embarrassing and more persuasive to point out a Christian duty owed to others than to yourself. The supporting text, ‘Whatsoever ye would that others should do unto you, even so do ye unto them,’ bore a double interpretation. Used by Hobbes as the basis of natural law in the Leviathan, it was a counsel of expediency or enlightened selfinterest, signifying that the most effective way to get fair treatment is to give it. Coupled with the command to ‘love your 1

See A. R. Vidler, The Orb and the Cross, 1945, p. 123. ‘I would have toleration a part of establishment, as a principle favourable to Christianity, and as a part of Christianity.’ Speech on the Relief of Protestant Dissenters. Works, VII, 25. 3 The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience Once More Briefly Defended, etc., 1670, p. 23. The ‘synteresis’ was a spark of conscience or function of practical reason, seen as a portion of the divine left within man’s soul. See Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God, 1953, pp. 150–1. 2

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neighbour as yourself it was an injunction of altruism, a command to cultivate sympathy by putting yourself in the other man’s place. The Whigs generally failed to distinguish between these implications.1 Bathurst declared: ‘That a Christian church should be endangered by an act of justice was a proposition contrary to the great maxim of the religion of Christ, namely, “Whatsoever you would that others do to you, even so do ye unto them”;’2—an attitude infuriating to the realists of the Protestant Ascendancy, who were convinced that if you gave the Irish an inch they would take an ell. Despite some confusion of meaning the Whig argument from Christian duty, supported by what have been referred to as ‘Peace and meekness texts’ was not without importance.3 It was a real attempt to combine the justification of toleration with the defence of religion, by making toleration part of the ethical teaching and one of the marks of true religion. At times this argument alone stood as buffer between the Tories’ ‘Happy Constitution in Church and State’ and the Infidels’ contention that religion was invented by rulers to safeguard their selfish privileges by means of exclusion or persecution. II Looking back upon the whole body of arguments for religious toleration from the French Revolution to the Reform bill, it seems possible to classify them into two main groups. There were arguments justifying the toleration of religious differences (taking toleration in its ‘complete’ form as entailing no political discrimination), and there were arguments suggesting social and political arrangements to preserve it. The first or justifying arguments could in turn be subdivided into those claiming or enjoining justice, and those defending liberty. The arguments from justice generally sought to claim or stimulate sympathy, as the motive for according justice. This classification is convenient but inexact; for some arguments, seen from different angles, fall under several headings. 1 Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies was a fantasy on this text, used as a maxim of natural justice, with the implications undifferentiated. 2 Hansard, XL (17th May 1819), 391. 3 G. F. A. Best, ‘The Whigs and the Church Establishment in the Age of Grey and Holland.’ History, June 1960, XLV, No. 154, p. 106.

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The arguments justifying toleration by an appeal to justice or sympathy included the pleas for Christian duty already cited. They also included the contention that bad character is the product of ill-treatment, with its implication that responsibility for0 the good character of all the subjects lies with those in authority. They further included the pleas for comprehension on the grounds of broad agreement or common tradition put forward by the Clerical Petitioners, and later by Thomas Arnold. Those who advocated comprehension sought to broaden the confines of the Church, i.e. of the accepted or privileged society. They were by the later eighteenth century usually people of unorthodox views within the Church. Akin to such pleas were those theories of Christian fellowship which urged extension of the hand of friendship to men of other creeds and communities on the basis of a few shared fundamental beliefs, or a common religious experience. In the period under survey, the latter were expressed mainly in the tolerant aspects of the Wesleyan and Evangelical movements. They were typical of new religious minorities or those in sympathy with them, seeking to create a fellowship transcending the boundaries of existing religious divisions. They showed that toleration was not, after all, a Whig or Radical preserve. But they had marked limits. The fellowship they enjoined ended at the confines of those who would join the wider Church, or who shared the belief, or acknowledged the experience. One reason for this limitation was perhaps that support of comprehension, equally with the idea of the wider common fellowship, often sprang from a desire for unity, re-established on a broader basis, to include existing divisions and differences of opinion or organization. And this desire for unity was strengthened by the tendency among believers to feel that unity testified to the truth of their beliefs; whereas full toleration is based on the acceptance of diversity, at least in the matter to be tolerated. The earlier eighteenth-century Dissenters claimed a fellowship of Protestants against Catholics. Arnold claimed a fellowship of Christians against Jews. Burke, before 1790, claimed a fellowship of believers against Atheists. But the concept of human rights also falls within this group in so far as it is an attempt to widen sympathy with certain classes of persons to humanity, or to all ‘rational beings’. Perhaps the Broad Churchmen and the 269

CONCLUSION

Wesleyans and Evangelicals demonstrated better than others the complexities of thought and feeling over religious toleration. Their attitudes showed how closely tolerant and intolerant trends of thought may be interwoven, and how often the same tenets may lead to tolerant or intolerant conclusions on the part of different people or on the part of one person at different times. Practical sympathy is a wasting asset. It is more cultivable, it can cover a wider field than the more intense emotion of love. But it is not easy to extend a justice based on sympathy to those who hold fundamentally different opinions, and impossible when these seem to threaten valued institutions or a valued order of life. Outside the range of sympathy the sphere of toleration was extended by arguments justifying liberty. Arguments for liberty are also arguments for toleration, since toleration is to liberty as one man’s duty to another man’s right —if a man is to have liberty, you must tolerate his actions. These arguments were really defences of the role of liberty, justifications for letting even enemies do as they pleased, on the grounds that to prevent this was harmful, or that to permit it promoted happiness, or virtue, or whatever value was seen to constitute the good life. They included the demand for individual freedom of belief on the ground that no man is infallible, that God alone can judge opinion, that God has given no ruler the right to interfere between man and himself. These were seventeenth-century Independents’ arguments, but in the late eighteenth century Deists, and indeed Whigs, still found them useful. Paine, attacking toleration as a substitute for religious liberty (he meant toleration as indulgence not right) claimed that toleration placed itself not between man and man, nor Church and Church, but man and God.1 The arguments for liberty also included all the main justifications of the developed eighteenth-century theory of toleration; the need for self-government as the condition of development of the individual, the inevitability of difference of opinion, or alternatively, the need for free expression of all opinions as the condition of the progress of knowledge and happiness. All the justifications of liberty were, of course, liable to contradiction. The contention that men should not judge between God and man turned very easily (especially in Whig hands) 1

Rights of Man, 1791, Everyman, I, 65.

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into the contention that no one could know what was religious truth; and this negation of faith was unsatisfying to religious enthusiasm. ‘Toleration,’ wrote Coleridge, ‘is a herb of spontaneous growth in the soil of indifference; but the weed has none of the virtues of the medicinal plant, reared by Humility in the garden of Zeal.’ 1 Coleridge refused to render the fashionable lip service of the late eighteenth century, holding that toleration was incompatible with conviction, and was the fruit of mere indifference. The plea for self-government was attacked by believers in original sin, like Burke, who thought that human nature, left to its own devices, brought forth evil fruit, and therefore wanted it controlled by traditional institutions, authority, and conservative ‘prejudice’. The argument of inevitable variety gained wider acceptance than most, but was rejected both by those who believed in a divinely appointed visible Church, and by those who thought the Bible message was clear. The demand for unfettered expression of opinion was rejected by those who observed that the more men knew of scientific laws the less they used them for the happiness of mankind. The most vulnerable point here was the too facile connexion between knowledge and virtue, understanding and goodwill, which Priestley sought to bind together in a system of religious faith, and Bentham sought to harmonize in the Deontology. Free expression might have been more easily defended if it had not been associated with theories of moral and social progress which personal experience of wars or disasters could at any time discredit. The justifications of toleration tended to find their own outcome in suggestions for social and political arrangements to preserve what was justified. A comprehensive Church was the logical expression of a broad Christian fellowship; religious and political equality within limits the safeguard of a fellowship transcending traditional sectarian borders. Extremists naturally justified complete liberty; for they had little prospect of sympathy from the majority of their fellow countrymen. Consequently, their arguments tended to carry revolutionary suggestions for arrangements to facilitate liberty. The Clerical and Dissenting Petitioners had attacked fixed creeds and articles of religion because these prevented the progressive discovery 1

Aids to Reflection, 1904, p. 67.

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CONCLUSION

and diffusion of religious truth. The Dissenting Philosophers, especially Godwin and Priestley, attacked fundamental laws, fixed constitutions, and establishments, because these dammed up the social changes consequent on the progress of knowledge and virtue. These attacks in the name of ‘innovation’ or ‘improvement’ were bound to frighten the conservative-minded, especially in the hectic light of the French Revolution. The reaction, whatever contrast Burke might seek to establish between ‘innovation’ and ‘development’ tended to justify repression on the grounds that any change would precipitate an avalanche. The nineteenth-century Church of England Whigs believed in the duty and virtue of toleration within the boundaries of religious respectability, but were not deeply involved in the theory of indefinite progress. They therefore valued flexibility, but not above stability. They had no desire to dissolve all existing institutions, but they did tend to decrease the number of untouchable arcana, the institutions or beliefs which must be defended at all costs. In this way they found it possible to tolerate differences over a wide area without feeling that fundamentals were threatened. The Whigs disliked fundamental laws, immutable constitutions and providential church establishments, hedged about with defensive discriminations. They also believed, with an almost doctrinaire intensity, that the surest defence was concession. Thus they argued that keeping Protestant and Catholic Dissenters in a position of political and civil inferiority induced them to attack the Anglican Church. Therefore the safety of the Establishment lay in Repeal and Catholic Emancipation. But since they (except Whately whose views were unusual) held no ‘high’ view of the Church, they considered that if Establishment proved inseparable from the political ‘Alliance’, then the Church should be disconnected from the State to preserve Christianity. The Whig method of facilitating practical toleration was to separate religion—on which differences of opinion were irreconcilable—from secular life, in which co-operation was still possible. This method might be termed the way of dissociation. Its most prominent feature was the demand for the separation of Church and State; so that lack of religious sympathy need not destroy social co-operation. Actually, disestablishment became a 272

CONCLUSION

Nonconformist cry. Most of the Reform bill generation of Church Whigs clung to the Paleyan view of the Church as a teaching establishment, and wanted to reform rather than jettison it, so long as it did not conflict with the primary— secular—ends of the State.1 The way of dissociation also included the demand that no account should be taken of opinion, separating opinion from action so that, again, the effects of difference should be minimized and the breakdown of practical co-operation prevented as far as possible. This method tended to divide life, in order, so to speak, to preserve the possibility of co-operation in separate compartments of it. The extent to which these demands for dissociation were directed to the deliberate arrangement of institutions and policies to facilitate toleration was obscured by the habit of talking about these arrangements not as though they ought to be, but as though they were. The Whigs indiscriminately affirmed that the spheres of Church and State ought to be separate and that they were separate. Thus, Locke had declared that men could not submit their beliefs to the dictate of a magistrate. His contemporary William Penn agreed with him, but looking backward to the schoolmen, justified his agreement by referring to the division in the natural Order of Creation between men’s bodies which belonged to the temporal governor and their souls which belonged to God.2 Sydney Smith pointed out that a man’s credulity in the nonsense of Catholic doctrine had nothing to do with his capacity as captain of a marching regiment. Macaulay (who as the son of Wilberforce’s great friend ought to have known better, but was probably reacting against his Clapham Sect upbringing), maintained that belief exercised no influence on behaviour, partly at least because the Gospel precepts bore little relation to modern life. In fact, those who argued from separation observed just those facts of life and experience which justified and facilitated the arrangements they wanted to bring about. Behind the older writers there still lurked the conception of the natural as the norm; the idea that Church and State were by nature separate institutions (just as Churchmen of the ‘Hackney 1 T. B. Macaulay, ‘Gladstone on Church and State’ (18S9). In Critical and Historical Essays, 1885, III, 63 et seq. Russell wished to appropriate surplus endowments for State purposes. 2 The Reasonableness of Toleration and Unreasonableness of Penal Laws and Tests, 1687, p. 31.

R.T.–T

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CONCLUSION

Phalanx’ thought they were by nature or providence allied or united institutions, and the Benthamites thought the Church not in accordance with the facts of experience, but false and useless). For all, their arrangement according to what ought to be was in a sense a restoration to what is. The Tories thought the extremists’ aims dangerous, and the Whig aims (when they did not confuse Whigs with Radicals) negative. Dissociation was the negation of unity and of wholeness. The Churchmen tried to maintain the body of arcana as a related scheme of religious and political beliefs which stood, or fell, together. The preservation of this scheme ranked as a priority far above the completion of the toleration of minorities. To Warburtonian Old Whigs Church and State were related in such a way as to secure the moral influence of the dominant Church for the cohesion of the State. To High Churchmen Church and State were providentially arranged so that the national branch of the true Church consecrated the State. In this way the society was unified within a framework of institution and belief and permeated by religious and moral teaching. The fly in the ointment was, that those outside the Church could never believe in the reality of the ideals represented by the system. When they saw that morality appeared to mean in practice obedience to the prevailing administration, they thought this consecration was simply an excuse to perpetuate a monopoly of power in the hands of a ruling clique. The doctrine of the Alliance of Church and State was unfavourable to complete toleration, and in more ways than the defensive discrimination its advocates demanded to preserve it. For instance, it quartered two communities upon each other. Those within a community tend to secure their own solidarity by distrusting or despising those outside it. Where the adherence to a church was made the condition of equal citizenship, those voluntarily outside the Church were simultaneously thrust outside the inner or full membership of the secular community, thus suffering the effects of a double exclusion. Hence the stigma which all the minorities complained of as attached to their exclusion from political equality. Moreover, the justifications put forward for so treating them were bound to imply their untrustworthiness, inferiority or at least their strangeness to the community. They were deficient in loyalty; or they had put 274

CONCLUSION

themselves outside by dividing their allegiance. In addition to this, the Alliance in practice gave civil consequences to any inherently intolerant doctrine still alive, that is, still capable of inspiring passion, within the Church. Such a doctrine in the early nineteenth century was that of exclusive morality. If morality (for whatever excellent dogmatic reason) was a priori the fruit exclusively of religious faith, then the unbeliever was immoral. Or, if, as with the Benthamite Atheists, immorality was the fruit of faith, then the believer was immoral. The doctrine of exclusive morality was emotive. It discouraged sympathy by encouraging the conviction that those who differed were bad. As Bentham had observed, it fostered feelings of antipathy. The Alliance of Church and State gave the doctrine of exclusive morality teeth and claws. By the nineteenth century these were sharper where the broader alliance of religion and morality came into conflict with non-Christian opinion than at the division between Church and Dissent. A situation could be conceived in which the Alliance might act as a bulwark against the advocates of intolerant political or racial doctrines trying to grasp power. It might not be a very effective bulwark, since the Alliance was a defensive doctrine containing in itself no stimulus to enthusiasm, and unlikely to hold against revolution backed by enthusiasm. But in the nineteenth century there was no such situation, and the Alliance in Ireland too obviously reinforced the secular domination of a political and national minority. So the Whigs, apart from an equivocal attitude towards the Infidels who were too extreme for them, opposed it. Listening to the grievances of Dissenters and Catholics and Jews, they were unimpressed by the results of the consecration of the State by the Church. Not addicted to a belief in a priori morality, they were unwilling to encourage good that evil might come. Toleration for the Whigs had priority, both as an end in itself and as a means to preserve other values. They were not entirely indifferent to religion. Indeed, complete indifference was recognized as a very unstable basis for toleration, in so far as it discouraged reverence for the human, as well as the divine, personality. The Deist and cynic Bolingbroke was remembered as a great persecutor of Dissent. They preferred moderation, or comparative indifference, to religious enthusiasm; and they thought a common religious tradition on a broad base rather 275

CONCLUSION

than uniform opinion or rigid institutions sufficient to cement the State. They found toleration incompatible with the sort of enthusiasm which would unify life by subordinating all other aspects of it to religion; they were very suspicious of proselytizing and missionizing. Their principles and practice were unspectacular, for they were unheroic, ‘nominal’ Christians. The Whigs could be charged, in their defence of toleration, with preferring fragmentation to wholeness, indifference to enthusiasm, uncertainty to faith. It has been suggested that the purpose of the Lockeian idea of the limited State was really to emancipate an increasingly commercial people from the obligations of religious conscience and humanity towards the poor. 1 Perhaps this is as true as the suggestion that the Evangelicals turned to religion in order to keep the poor in their place. Certainly the Whigs failed to realize the economic suffering and social injustice fostered by various aspects of the doctrine of laissez-faire to which they adhered (in common with Burke and Peel); and they have incurred odium for it.2 They have had too little credit for the consistent and disinterested labour which men like Charles James Fox, Lord Holland, Lord John Russell and Sydney Smith undertook on behalf of the despised religious minorities. If their philosophy of life was in some respects negative, their view of it comfortable, eclectic, incomplete, this did not worry them. Their attitude may suggest, that although toleration as a cause may excite enthusiasm, the most consistent friends of toleration are often those who take the middle of the road. Toleration cannot be complete unless it is also universal. The Protestant Tories reiterated that one cannot tolerate the intolerant (although they were actually using this Lockeian argument as a cloak to conceal their refusal to consider whether Catholic Emancipation really endangered the Church of England or not). In some circumstances the cause of toleration may be better served by maintaining a steady toleration within gradually widening limits than by flinging down all barriers, and bringing about a sudden reaction. For after all, toleration is 1

R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Pelican edition, 1942, p. 151. This suffering was increased after 1834 by the new Poor Law, which was not a product of Whig laissez-faire, but an attempt to apply the Benthamite pleasure-pain calculus to the problem of unemployment. It was administered by Benthamite civil servants with very half-hearted support from Whig administrations. Cf. S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, 1952. 2

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guarded by the attitude of tolerance rather than by any theory, although attitudes and theories have their obvious connexions. It is a truism that to obtain the virtues of moderation it may be necessary to sacrifice some of the virtues and advantages of zeal, and a further truism that practical moderation may entail a sacrifice of logic. For toleration tends to attract to its banner those who feel they can go through life without some of the certainties that others find indispensable and therefore call good. The basis of consistent toleration is often that kind of humility which enables a thoughtful man to teach his tongue to say ‘I do not know’.

277

Bibliography No attempt has been made at an exhaustive survey of this very large field. I have included a fair proportion of the works mentioned in the text, with some which, although not mentioned, have been of particular use. Some MS. materials and many printed works have been used in more than one chapter. I have grouped the MS. materials and some printed sources together, and have added separate sections for Protestant Dissenters’ pamphlets, and for secondary and contemporary printed works relating to Edmund Burke, Roman Catholic Emancipation, and Jewish Emancipation. PRINCIPAL MS.

MATERIALS

British Museum Fox General Correspondence. Add. MS. 47568. Peel Papers. Add. MS. 40332, 40430. Perceval Papers. Letters from Lord Redesdale to Perceval, 1802–5. Add. MS. 49188. The Place Collection, Vols. 39, I and II, 41. City of London Library, Guildhall Minutes of the Meetings of the Committee Appointed to Conduct the Application to Parliament for the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 1787–90. (An extra volume in the series of Minutes of the Protestant Dissenting Deputies.) Minutes of the Meetings of the Committee Appointed to Conduct the Application to Parliament for the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 1827–9 (the United Committee). Minutes of the Proceedings of the Court of Common Council, 1819– Guildhall Records Repository Journals of the Common Council of the City of London. Mocatta Library, University College, London The Letter Book of I. L. Goldsmid, two vols. 278

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Office of the Board of Deputies of the British Jews, Woburn Square, London, W.C.1 Minutes of the Meetings of the Board of Deputies of the British Jews, Vols. I and II. Public Record Office Chatham Papers. P.R.O. 30/8/200. Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Sheffield Central Reference Library Burke Correspondence. PUBLISHED SOURCES PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, DEBATES, REPORTS, STATUTES, ETC EDMUNDGIBSON,Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, two vols., 1713. Journals of the House of Commons, Vol. IX, 1803. Parliamentary Debates. Lords and Commons, 1771–3, Vol. VI, 1792. Parliamentary Register, 1779, Vol. XII. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, 1786–90, Vols. XXVI–XXVIII. The Debate in the House of Commons on Mr. Beaufoy’s Motion for Repeal of such Part of the Test and Corporation Acts as Affect the Protestant Dissenters, 8th May 1789. HANSARD. Parliamentary Debates, 1815–33. Mirror of Parliament, 1830. Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the State of Ireland. Parliamentary Papers, 1825, Vol. VIII. CONTEMPORARY JOURNALS AND PERIODICALS

Reference to contemporary politico-religious disputes can be found in all the journals and periodicals of the time with any interest in political issues. Only a few religious periodicals such as the Arminian Magazine, early organ of the Wesleyan Methodists, carefully ignored them. For this book I have used :– The Annual Register, 1784–5, Vol. XXVII. The New Annual Register, 1799, 1800. The British Critic and Theological Review, 1827, Vols. I and II. The Christian Guardian and Church ofEngland Magazine, 1829, Vol. XXI. The Christian Observer, 1819, Vol. XVIII. The Christian Register, 1829. Cobbett’s Political Register, 1810–33. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1787, Vol. LVII, Pts. I and II. The Leeds Mercury, 1828–9. The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, 1805–30. 279

BIBLIOGRAPHY The Republican, 1819, 1820, Vols. I and II. The Test Act Reporter, 1827–8 (a compilation of propaganda for Repeal of the Test Laws put out by the United Committee). The Edinburgh, Quarterly, and Westminster Reviews. See under Contemporary Works, Pamphlets, etc. G E N E R A L , AND P R O T E S T A N T DISSENTERS SECONDARY AUTHORITIES

BOGUE,D.,andBENNETT,J.,History of the Dissenters,

four vols., 1808–12. BOSHER,R.S.,The Making of the Restoration Settlement, 1951. BURY, J. B., A History of Freedom of Thought, Home University Library, Oxford, 1952. — The Idea of Progress, 4th ed., 1928. CHADWICK, O., From Bossuet to Newman, Cambridge, 1957. CLARK,G.KITSON,The English Inheritance, 1950. CONE, C. B., Torchbearer of Freedom, Kentucky, 1952. COWHERD, R. G., Protestant Dissenters in English Politics, 1815–34, Philadelphia, 1942. DAWLEY,P.M.,John Whitgift and the Reformation, 1955. EVERY,G.,The High Church Party, 1956. GOUGH,J.W.,Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History, Oxford, 1955. — The Social Contract: A Critical Study of its Development, Oxford, 1936. GRIFFITHS,O.M.,Religion and Learning, 1935. HALÉVY, E., The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, Tr. M. Morris, London ed., 1949. — A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. I and II, 1924. HALLER, W., Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution, New York, 1955. HARLOW,V.,The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1952. HENNELL,M.,John Venn and the Clapham Sect, 1958. HOWSE,E.M.,Saints in Politics. The Clapham Sect and the Growth of Freedom, 1952. HUGHES,G.,With Freedom Fired, 1955. JORDAN,W.K.,The Development of Religious Toleration in England, four vols., 1936–40. LASKI,H.,Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, 1917. LINCOLN,A.,Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, Cambridge, 1938. MACCOBY,S.,English Radicalism, 1786–1832, 1955. MANNING,B.L.,The Protestant Dissenting Deputies, Cambridge, 1952. PARES,R.,King George III and the Politicians, Oxford, 1953. 280

BIBLIOGRAPHY RAPHAELDAICHES,D.,The Moral Sense, 1947. RUFFINI,A.,Religious Liberty, Tr. A. Parker Hayes, 1912. SANDERS, C. R., Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement,

Durham, N.C., 1942. SEATON,A.A.,The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts, Cambridge, 1910. STANHOPE,FIFTHEARL,Life of the Rt. Hon. William Pitt, four vols., 1861. STROMBERG,R.M.,Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1954. SYKES, N., Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1954. — From Sheldon to Secker, 1959. — William Wake, two vols., Oxford, 1957. WARD,W.R.,Georgian Oxford, Oxford, 1958. WHITE, R. J., Political Tracts of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, Cambridge, 1953. WICKWAR,W.H.,The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–32, 1928. WILLEY,B.,The Seventeenth Century Background, 1949. — The Eighteenth Century Background, 1949. — Nineteenth Century Studies, 1950. ARTICLES BENNETT,T.,‘Hallamand the

Indemnity Acts’. Law Quarterly Review, 1910, Vol. XXVI. BEST,G.F.A.,‘TheWhigs and the Church Establishment in the Age of Grey and Holland’. History, June 1960, Vol. XLV. BUTTERFIELD,H.,Historical Development of the Principle of Toleration in British Life, Robert Waley Cohen Memorial Lecture, 1956. CRANE,R.S.,‘AnglicanApologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699– 1745.’ Modern Philology, 1936, Vol. XXXI. HUNT,N.,Sir Robert Walpole, Samuel Holden, and the Dissenting Deputies. Dr. Williams’s Library Lecture, 1957.

OGDEN,H.V.S.,‘TheState of Nature and the Decline of Lockeian Political Theory in England, 1760–1800’. American Historical Review, 1940–41, Vol. XLVI. CONTEMPORARY

PRINTED

WORKS

GENERAL

ARNOLD,THOMAS,Miscellaneous Works, 1845. ASPLAND, R. B., Memoir of the Life, Works and

Rev. Robert Aspland, 1850. 281

Correspondence of the

BIBLIOGRAPHY Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions and Other Subjects, 1821. — Essays on the Pursuit of Truth, 1829. BENTHAM, JEREMY, Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind, 1822. — Book of Fallacies, ed. Bowring, 1824. — Church of Englandism and its Catechism Examined, 1818. — Fragment on Government, 1776. — Swear Not At All, 1817. — Treatise on Judicial Evidence, 1825. — Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, ed. C. K. Ogden (Extracts), 1932. BLACKSTONE,W.,Commentaries on the Laws of England, four vols., 1765–9. Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. George Canning, 1828. CLARKE,S.,The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity. Works, Vol. IV, 1738. COLERIDGE,S.T.,Aids to Reflection, 1825. 1904 ed. — On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each, 1830. GODWIN, W., Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2nd ed., two vols., 1796. HOLLAND,LORD,Memoirs of the Whig Party, two vols., 1854. BAILEY, SAMUEL,

LOCKE,JOHN,Works, 10th ed., 1801.

MILL, JAMES, Essay on Education, in Essays, 1825. — Essay on the Liberty of the Press, in Essays, 1825. — The Principles of Toleration (Westminster Review, 1826), 1837. MILL,JOHNSTUART,Autobiography, World’s Classics, Oxford, 1952. — On Liberty, 1859, Everyman, 1948. MILNER, JOSEPH, Practical Sermons, Cambridge, 1801. — Reflections on Ecclesiastical Establishments (Reprinted from History of the Church of Christ), 1835. MORE, HANNAH, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, two vols. Works, XI and XII, 1818. ROBERTS, W., Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, four vols., 2nd ed., 1884. PAINE,THOMAS,The Age of Reason, 1795. Thinkers’ Library, 1953. — The Rights of Man, 1791 and 1792. Everyman. PALEY, W., Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. Works, ed. E. Paley,Vol. III, 1838. — Defence of the Consideration on the Propriety of Requiring a Subscription to Articles of Faith, 1773. PRICE, RICHARD, Additional Observations on Civil Liberty, 1777. — Discourse on the Love of Our Country, 1789. — The Nature and Dignity of the Human Soul, 1766. 282

BIBLIOGRAPHY — Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, etc, 1776. — A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, 3rd ed., 1787. PRIESTLEY,JOSEPH,Works, ed. J. T. Rutt, 1826. ROBINSON, ROBERT, Arcana, 1774. — The History and Mystery of Good Friday, 1777. — On a becoming Behaviour in Religious Assemblies, 1776. — Plan of Lectures on the Principles of Non-conformity, Harlow, 1778. — Political Catechism, 1782. — Reflections on Christian Liberty, Civil Establishments of Religion and Toleration, 2nd ed., Harlow, 1805. ST.JOHN,HENRY,VISCOUNTBOLINGBROKE,Dissertation on Parties, 1734, 11th ed., 1786. SHELLEY,P.B.,Prose Works, ed. R. H. Shepherd, two vols., 1906. — Defence of Poetry (in Political Tracts, etc., ed. R. J. White), 1956. WARBURTON,W.,The Alliance Between Church and State, 1736. WHATELEY,RICHARD,Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian, 1826. WILBERFORCE,W.,A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, 1829 ed. WILBERFORCE,R.I.,ANDS.,Life of William Wilberforce, three vols., 1838. — Correspondence of William Wilberforce, two vols., 1840. WILLIAMS,ROGER,The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 1644, 1848. WRAXALL,SIRN.M.Historical Memoirs of his Own Time, four vols., 1836. PROTESTANT

DISSENTERS

The pamphlet literature on Repeal of the Test Laws is very large, and any list must necessarily be selective. An excellent bibliography of pamphlets and other relevant works is at the end of A. Lincoln’s Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, Cambridge, 1938. The following are some of the more important pamphlets mentioned in this book: BLACKBURNE,FRANCIS,The Confessional (1766). Works, V, BRAND, JOHN, Political Observations on the Test Act,

1804. 1790, Dr.

Williams’s Library. The Case of the Protestant Dissenters with Reference to the Corporation and Test Acts. 1787, 1789 eds. A Collection of the Resolutions Passed by the Meetings of the Clergy, etc., 1790. Copy of a Letter to a Meeting at Leicester on 9th December etc., in Extracts from Books and Other Small Pieces, No. 1. Birmingham, 1790. FOWNES,JOSEPH,Enquiry into the Principles of Toleration, 1772. FOX,W.J.,The Duties of Christians Towards Deists, 2nd ed., 1819. 283

BIBLIOGRAPHY FRANKLIN,BENJ.,A

Letter Concerning Persecution in Former Ages. In Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces, 1779. FURNEAUX,PHILIP,Letters to the Honourable Mr. Justice Blackstone, 2nd ed., 1771. ‘CHRISTOPHILUS’,VindiciaeBritannicae. Christianity Interested in the Dismissal of Ministers. A Vindication of the People from the charge of Blasphemy, and a Defence of the Freedom of the Press, 2nd ed., 1821, Bodleian Library. HEYWOOD,SAMUEL,The Right of Dissenters to a Compleat Toleration Asserted, 2nd ed., 1789. — High Church Politics, 1792. HOADLY,BENJAMIN,The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ, 1717. — Bishop Hoadly’s Refutation of Bishop Sherlock’s Arguments against a Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Ed. of 1787. HORSLEY,SAMUEL,A Review of the Case of the Protestant Dissenters with Reference to the Corporation and Test Acts, 1790. KIPPIS,ANDREW,A Vindication of the Protestant Dissenting Ministers with Regard to their Late Application to Parliament, 1772. LOFFT,CAPEL,Remarks on the Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, etc., 1790. A Meeting of Deputies from . . . the Counties of Nottingham, Derby and a small adjoining part of Yorkshire, summoned at the request of the Committee of Five Associated Congregations of the Town of Nottingham. In Extracts from Books and Other Small Pieces, No. II, Birmingham, 1790. PALMER,SAMUEL,The Protestant Dissenters’ Catechism, 1775. PEARCE,SAMUEL,The Oppressive, Unjust and Prophane Nature and Tendency of the Corporation and Test Acts Exposed, etc., Birmingham, 1790, London, 1827. Bishop Sherlock’s Arguments Against a Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, ed. of London, 1827 (first republished in 1787 from Thomas Sherlock’s A Vindication of the Corporation and Test Acts, 1718). WALKER,GEORGE,A Dissenter’s Plea, 1790. WATSON,RICHARD,Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, Bishop of

Llandaf,

2nd ed., 1818.

WYVILL, CHRISTOPHER,

A Defence of Dr. Price and the Reformers of

England, 1792. EDMUND BURKE

(See also PRINCIPAL MS. MATERIALS) SECONDARY AUTHORITIES

COBBAN, A., Edmund

Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century, 1929 (1960 edition now published). 284

BIBLIOGRAPHY COPELAND, T. W., Edmund

Burke, Six Essays, 1950. MAGNUS, P., Edmund Burke: A Life, 1939. PARKIN, C., The Moral Basis of Burke’s Political Thought, Cambridge, 1956. STRAUSS,L.,Natural Right and History, Chicago, 1953. P R I N T E D SOURCES

Works, eight vols., ed. Fitzwilliam, 3rd Earl, and Bourke, Sir R., Boston ed., 1866. COPELAND,T.W.,and SMITH, M. S., Checklist of the Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 1956. Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, four vols., 1844. SOMERSET,H.V.F.(Ed.), A Notebook of Edmund Burke, Cambridge, 1957. The Speeches of Edmund Burke, three vols., 1816. BURKE, EDMUND,

ROMAN C A T H O L I C E M A N C I P A T I O N SECONDARY AUTHORITIES

BROCK, W. R., Lord Liverpool and Liberal Toryism, Cambridge, 1941. DAVIES, G. C. B., Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, 1954. FEILING, K., The Second Tory Party, 1938. HYDE, H. M., The Rise of Castlereagh, 1933. LECKY, W., The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, 2nd ed., 1871. MCDOWELL, R. B., Public Opinion and Government Policy in Ireland,

1801–1846, Dublin, 1952. PARKER,C.S.,Sir Robert Peel, two vols., 1891. REYNOLDS,J.A.,The Catholic Emancipation Crisis in Ireland, 1823– 1829, Yale, 1954. ROBERTS, M., The Whig Party, 1807–1812, 1939. TWISS,HORACE,Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon, 1844. WALPOLE,SPENCER,Life of the Rt. Hon. Spencer Perceval, 1874. WARD,B.,The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, two vols., 1909. The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, three vols., 1911. ARTICLES

BEST, G. F. A., ‘The Protestant Constitution and its Supporters’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1958. Fifth Series, Vol. VIII. DAVIS,W.CARLESS,‘CatholicEmancipation’. Cambridge Modern History, 1907, Vol. X.

HEXTER,J.H.,‘TheProtestant Revival and the Catholic Question in England’. Journal of Modern History, 1936, Vol. VIII. 285

BIBLIOGRAPHY WESTERN, J. R., ‘Roman Catholics Holding Military Commissions in

1798’. English Historical Review, 1940–41, Vol. XLVI. MS. and Printed Sources: See Principal MS. Materials, Parliamentary Papers, Contemporary Journals and Periodicals. CONTEMPORARY PRINTED WORKS, PAMPHLETS AND MEMOIRS

The Catholic Emancipation Controversy produced a vast pamphlet literature, much of it unoriginal and repetitive. The following list includes some of the more prominent works, and a small selection from the mass. ALLEN,JOHN,Letters of Scaevola, 1807. ARNOLD, THOMAS, The Christian Duty of Conceding the Claims of the

Roman Catholics, Oxford, 1829. BERINGTON,JOSEPH,Address to the Protestant Dissenters, Birmingham, 1787. BLANCOWHITE,J.,The Poor Man’s Preservative Against Popery, 1825. BUTLER,CHARLES,Address to the Protestants of Great Britain and Ireland, 1813. — Speech of the Rt. Hon. John Earl of Clare, etc., in the Irish House of Peers on the Second Reading of the Bill for Relief of H.M.’s Roman Catholic Subjects in Ireland, 13th March 1793. 1813 ed. COBBETT, W., History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 1824. DILLON, J. T., Essay on the History and Effects of the Coronation Oath, 1807. DOYLE, JAMES, A Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of the

Irish Catholics, Dublin, 1823. Edinburgh Review (unidentified), ‘Divided Allegiance of the Catholics’. November 1825–February 1826, Vol. XLIII. ENGLEFIELD,SIRHENRY,BART.,A

Letter to the Author of the Review of

the Case of the Protestant Dissenters; with a short address to the right rev. the Lord Bishop of St. David’s. With Charles Butler’s Case of the English Catholic Dissenters as Appendix, 1790. KENYON, HON. GEORGE T., The Life of Lloyd, First Lord Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice of England, 1873. MILNER, JOHN, The End of Religious Controversy, 1802. 1878 ed. — Dr. Milner’s Appeal to the Catholics of Ireland, Dublin, 1809. NUGENT,LORDGEORGE,A Letter to the Electors of Aylesbury on the Catholic Question, Aylesbury, 1820. O’CONNELL, J., The Life and Speeches of O’Connell by his son, John O’Connell, Dublin, 1846. 286

BIBLIOGRAPHY PEEL,SIRR.,Memoirs, Vol. I, 1856.

Letter from the Rt. Hon. Lord Petre to the Rt. Rev. Dr. Horsley, Bishop of St. Davids, 1790. Protestant Authorities Against Concessions to the Roman Catholics: being Speeches of the late Dr. Horsley, Lord Bishop of St. Asaph, and of Lord Ellenborough, 1813. Substance of the Speech of Lord Redesdale in the House of Lords, on the Motion of Lord Grenville to refer the Petition of the Roman Catholics of Ireland to a Committee, 1805. SADLER,M.T.,‘TheLast of the Catholic Question—Its Principles, History and Effects’. Edinburgh Review, March–June, 1829, Vol. XLIX. SMITH, SYDNEY, ‘The Catholic Question’. Edinburgh Review, 1827, Vol. XLV. — A Letter to the Electors on the Catholic Question (1826). Works, 1850. — Peter Plymley’s Letters (1807). Works, 1850. SOUTHEY, ROBERT, ‘The Roman Catholic Question, Ireland’. Quarterly Review, 1828, Vol. XXXVIII. THOMPSON,J.PERRONET,‘TheCatholic Question’. Westminster Review, January–April 1829, Vol. X. Despatches, Correspondence and Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur, Duke of Wellington, K.G., eight vols., 1867–80. WESLEY,REV.JOHN,M.A.,The Civil Principles of the Roman Catholics. In Miscellaneous Tracts, by Rev. Arthur O’Leary, Dublin, 1781. PETRE, LORD,

JEWISH EMANCIPATION

(See also principal MS. sources, parliamentary papers, etc., contemporary journals.) SECONDARY AUTHORITIES

COHEN, ISRAEL, The

Zionist Movement, 1945. HENRIQUES,H.S.Q.,The Jews and the English Law, 1908. — The Return of the Jews to England, 1905. MARKS, D. W., andLOWY,A.,Memoir of Sir Francis Henry Goldsmid, Bart, 2nd ed., 1882. ROTH,C.,History of the Jews in England, 1941. —, with J. JACOBS and L. WOLF, Magna Bibliotheca Anglo–Judaica, 1937. ARTICLE

‘Sir I. L. Goldsmid and the Admission of the Jews of England to Parliament’. Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1899–1901, Vol. IV.

ABRAHAMS, L.,

287

BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTEMPORARY P A M P H L E T S , REPORTS AND MEMOIRS

Most of the pamphlets are listed in Roth, Jacobs, and Wolf’s Magna Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica, and are to be found in the Mocatta Library, University College, London. A Few Remarks on the Expediency and Justice of Emancipating the Jews, 1829. BLUNT, J. E., A History of the Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England, etc., 1830. The British Jew to his Fellow Countrymen, 1833. COLES,JOHN,Observations on the Civil Disabilities of British Jews, 1834. An Epistle from a High Priest of the Jews to the Chief Priest of Canterbury, on the Extension of Catholic Emancipation to the Jews, 1821. An Essay on the Commercial Habits of the Jews, 1809. Extracts from the Public Journals Containing Their Opinions on the Disabilities of the Jews, 1830. GOLDSMID, F. H., The Arguments Advanced Against the Enfranchisement of the Jews, 1833. — Remarks on the Civil Disabilities of the British Jews, 1830. — Two Letters in Answer to the Objections Urged Against Mr. Grant’s Bill, 1830. GRÉGOIRE,ABBÉ,Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Reformation of the Jews, English Translation, 1791. The Lamentations of the Children of Israel, respecting the hardships they suffer from the Penal Laws, etc., 1813. A Letter to I. L. Goldsmid Esq., 1833. MACAULAY,T.B.,‘CivilDisabilities of the Jews’. Edinburgh Review, October 1830–January 1831, Vol. LII. MONTAGU,BASIL,A Letter to Henry Warburton, Esq., M.P., upon the Emancipation of the Jews, 1833. OVEN,B.VAN,An Appeal to the British Nation on Behalf of the Jews, ANICHINI, P.,

1830.

PELLATTT,APSLEY,Brief Memoir of the Jews, in Relation to their Civil and Municipal Disabilities, 1829. First and Second Reports of the Philo-Judean Society, 1827, 1828. Quarterly Review, ‘Hurwitz’s Hebrew Tales’. January–March 1827, Vol. XXXV. Westminster Review, ‘Disabilities of the Jews’, January–April 1829, Vol. X. — ‘Religious Disabilities’. July–October, 1830, Vol. XIII. WHATELY,RICHARD,Speech in the House of Lords, 1st August 1833. Reprinted as pamphlet, 1833. WITHERBY,THOMAS,A Vindication of the Jews, 1809. 288

Index Abbott, Charles (later Baron Tenter¬ den), Lord Chief Justice, 215 Abjuration of Pretender, Oath of, 180 Academies, Dissenting, 14, 47 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord, 205 Aikin, John, 59 Aix la Chapelle, Congress of, 178 Allegiance, divided, 148–51, 170–1, 194, 204–5 Allegiance, Oath of ( 3 Jac. I, c. 4 ) , 180 Allen, John, 157 Alliance of Church and State, 70–71, 73, 82, 84, 89, 120–1, 146, 155, 248, 262, 274–5 Alsace, 179 Anichini, P., 185 Anne, Queen, 13, 176 Annet, Peter, 212 Application Committee, 59, 60–61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 84, 90 Arians, 6, 55 Arminians, 19 Arnold, Thomas, 146, 161, 162, 165, 192, 194–5, 196, 269 Articles of Religion, 6, 9, 12, 14, 33, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54ff, 79, 104, 244, 271 Aspland, Robert, 47, 190, 213, 261 Assimilation, Jewish, 182, 204–5 Atheists, 214, 236ff, 275 Bailey, Samuel, 241, 250ff Balance, of constitution, 49, 76–79, 81, 95, 128–9 Bangorian controversy, 84 Baptists, 2, 7, 11–12, 15, 47, 5 5 ; view of toleration, 19, 22, 50 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 59 Bathurst, Henry, Bishop of Norwich, 165, 267, 268 Beaufoy, Henry, 60, 62, 63 Bedford Charities Case, 195 Bentham, Jeremy, 19, 76, 106, 124, 157, 162, 166–7, 190, 208ff, 216, 236–7, 242, 243, 246, 247, 249ff, 258–9, 264, 271, 275 Berington, Father Joseph, 62, 9 1 , 153 Best, G. F. A., vi, 68n

Bexley, Nicholas Vansittart, Lord, 178, 190, 196 Birmingham, 33, 59, 66, 83 Birmingham Committee of Deputies, 63 Blackburne, Francis, 3 1 , 55 Blackstone, Sir William, 32, 54, 68, 76, 79–81, 85, 116, 211 Blasphemy Act (1648), 6–7 Blasphemy Act (1697), 7–8, 12, 209 Blount, Edward, 190 Board of Deputies of British Jews, 182, 184, 185, 186, 189 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Lord, 76ff, 128, 134, 212, 275 Bowring, Sir John, 190 Bradlaugh, Charles, 262 Brand, Thomas, M.P., 217 Bright, Richard, 64, 108, 110, 113 Bristol, 15, 101, 108, 112 Brougham, Henry, P., Lord, 181, 183, 191, 217 Brunswick Clubs, 173 Buckingham, James Silk, M.P., 200 Burdett, Sir Francis, 218 Burke, Edmund, 39, 46, 5 1 , 56, 59, 63, 66, 16, 81, 99ff, 217, 234, 264, 267, 269, 271, 272; attitude to Dissenters, 104–6; attitude to Roman Catholics, 100–4; proposed declaration in place of Sacramental Test, 116n, 122 Burke, Richard, 101 Burn, Dr Edward, 115 Busher, Leonard, 28 Butler, Charles, 137, 152, 168, 190 Butler, Joseph, Bishop of Durham, 29– 30, 48, 122, 123 Calvin, Jean, 161 Cambridge, see Petitioners, Cambridge Clerical Cambridge Platonists, 45 Camden, John Jeffreys Pratt, Lord, 140 Canning, George, 159, 160, 222 Carlile, Richard, 181, 208, 210, 212n, 213, 214, 238, 242, 243, 246 Cartwright, John, 77, 203 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Lord, 140, 149, 159

289 R.T.–u

INDEX Catholic Association, O’Connell’s, 159, 172 Catholic Board, English, 168, 169, Irish 167 Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), 172 Catholic Relief Act, English (1791), 137, 140, 152, 168; Irish (1793), 136 Catholics, excluded from parliament, 137, 162 Chadwick, Owen, 24 Charles I, 90–91 Charles II, 91 Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of, 57, 106, 115 Christian Guardian, 147 Christian Observer, 234 Christian Register, 177 Christianity, and common law, 195–6, 199–200, 207ff Christophilus’, 213 Church and King Club, Manchester, 66 Clare, John Fitzgibbon, Lord, 139, 141 Clare, election, 152, 172 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 9 Clarke, Samuel, 30, 45, 266 Class objection, to Jewish emancipation, 194 Cobbett, William, 173, 187, 191–2 Coke, Sir Edward, 179 Coleridge, S. T., 123, 134, 150, 195, 196, 240, 257, 265–6, 271 Coles, John, 199 Collins, Anthony, 29 Committee of Deputies of the Three Denominations, 15, 59, 146, 221 Common law, 164, see Christianity and Common law Compact, social, 77, 93, Burke and, 131 Conformity, Occasional, 14, 16, 74; Act, 14 Constitution, ‘happy’, 73, 155, 261, 268 Constitution, Protestant, 79, 146, 155– 6, 164 Constitutional Societies, 66, 67 Contract, social, 28, 40, 46, 77–78, 94–95, 128, 156, 164, 201 Conventicle Acts, 8, 9, 12, 16, 221 Copleston, Edward, Bishop of Llandaff, 183 Cornwallis, Charles, Lord, 140 Coronation oath, 94, 131, 136, 156–8 Corporation Act, 4, 12, 13, 15, 57, 74, 79, 82, 83, 95, 105, 113, 114, 184 Corporations, Act for quieting and establishing, 15 Corresponding Societies, 66 Cromwell, Oliver, 7, 22 Crown, religion of, 5n Cudworth, Ralph, 45

Curtis, Patrick, Archbishop of Armagh, 170 Darwin, Charles, 230 Daubeny, Charles, 68 Declaration of belief in the Old and New Testaments, 56–57 Declaration of Indulgence, 11 Declaration against Popery, 137, against Transubstantiation, 9, 137 Declaration not to injure the Established Church, 183 De Haeretico Comburendo, 6 Deists, 29, 30–31, 195, 206, 210ff, 236ff, 265, ‘under a cloak’ 210 De Judaismo, Statute (1275), 179 Denominations, Three, see Committee Disestablishment, 5, 85, 163, 272–3, of Anglican Church of Ireland, 163, 169 Disraeli, Benjamin, 181, 190 Dissenters: Rational, 31–32, 33ff, 55, 73, 89, 96–97, 101–2, 123–4, 126–7, 164, 213–4, 237, 246, 262, 263, 264; toleration of, 11–12, 14ff; Calvinist, 56 Divine Right, 71 Dobden, Sir William, 59 Doyle, Bishop James, 143, 144, 169, 171 Duigenan, Dr Patrick, 170 Dundas, Henry (later Lord Melville), 139, 140 East India Bill, 107 Eaton, Daniel, 212 Ebrington, Lord, 173 Edinburgh, National Convention, 66 Edinburgh Review, 160 Eldon, John Scott, Lord, 146, 195, 209, 210, 264 Elizabeth I, Queen, 5–6, 8, 28 Emmet rising, 143 Erastians, 22, 149, 220, 265 Evangelicals, 146, 147, 175, 192, 198, 206, 217, 219ff, 229ff, 237, 257–8, 261–2, 269–70 Exequatur, 150, 170 Exeter, 173 Favell, Samuel, 64 Fifth Monarchy, 27 Fingall, Lord, 141, 159 Fitzwilliam, William Wentworth, Lord, 101, 136 Five Mile Act (1665), 11n Fletcher, Samuel, 115, 116 Foreignness, allegation of, against Jews, 193–4 Fownes, Joshua, 58, 92

290

INDEX Fox, Charles James, 57, 62, 65, 67, 90, 106ff, 113, 114, 115, 117, 276 Fox, W . J., 155, 208, 267 France; Edict of Toleration, 58; Protestants in, 13; see also French Revolution Francis, Philip, 112 Franklin, Benjamin, 85n French Revolution, 21, 65, 66, 82, 98, 111–12, 117, 136, 138, 264 Furneaux, Philip, 58, 80, 89–90, 92 Gascoyne, General Isaac, 188 General Body of Dissenting Ministers, 58, 61 George III, 56, 60, 81, 106ff, 131, 136, 143, 158 George IV, 157, 158, 187 Gibbon, Edward, 212 Gladstone, W . E., 134, 196, 223, 266 Gloucester, William Frederick, Duke of, 187 Goderich, Frederick John, Lord Gode¬ rich (afterwards Earl of Ripon), 88 Godwin, William, 36ff, 237ff, 246–7, 252, 272 Goldsmid, Francis Henry, 182, 184, 186, 188, 196ff Goldsmid, Sir Isaac Lyon, 181, 184, 185, 189, 191 Goulburn, Henry, 149n Grant, Charles, 178, 190 Grant, Robert, 178, 186, 190, 197, 199 Grattan, Henry, 159, 164, 165 Grégoire, Abbé, 176, 204 Grenville, William (later Lord), 161 Grey, Charles, Earl, 21, 163, 164, 188, 190 Gunpowder Plot, 8, 148 ‘Hackney Phalanx’, 69, 273–4 Hale, Sir Matthew, 195, 210 Halévy, Elie, 145, 241n, 249n Hall, Robert, 248 Halifax, George Savile, Marquess of, 95 Harrowby, Lord, 212 Hartley, David, 4 5 ; Hartleyan materialism, 30, 236, 265 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 133 Helvetius, 176, 237 Henry VIII, 149, 161 Heresy, punishment for, 5, 6, 7 Heretics, keeping faith with, 151–2, 154, 162 Hexter, J. H., 146 Heywood, Samuel, 9, 12n, 6 1 , 70, 74, 83, 86, 92, 93, 168 Hill, Serjeant, 87 Hirschel, Solomon, 180

Hoadley, Benjamin, 22, 27, 84 Hobbes, Thomas, 267 Hobhouse, John Cam, 177 Hoghton, Sir Henry, 58, 62, 76 Holbach, Paul Heinrich Deitrich, Baron d’, 237 Holland, Henry Fox, 3rd Lord, 181, 183, 184, 185, 191, 202, 209, 264, 276 Honour, Wilberforce and, 224–6, Bentham and, 247 Hooker, Richard, 10, 69, 7 1 , 73, 119, 135 Horsley, Samuel, Bishop of St Asaph, 33, 67, 86, 116, 134, 145 Howley, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 192 Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm, 265 Hume, David, 42, 212, 236 Hunt, Henry, 173 Huss, John, 152 Huskisson, William, 159, 190 Indemnity Acts, 15, 83, 137, 184 Independents, 11, 14, 15, 55 Immorality, allegation of, against Catholics, 152–3, against Infidels, 195, 228–9, 232; against Jews, 194–5, 197, against prelacy, 5 1 , against religion 236ff, 257, 275 ‘Indifferent’ and ‘fundamental’, 7, 10, 51 Inglis, Sir Robert, 146, 187, 190, 193, 194, 264 Interests, sinister, 247–8, 252, 253–6, 258 Ireland, 136ff, 158ff; Burke and, 101, 102–3, 105 Ireland, Established Church in, 144–5, 163 James II, 3, 10, 11 Jebb, John, 55, 67 Jeffries, Edward, 59, 63, 83 Jesuits, Act against (1584), 8 Jew Naturalization Act (1753), 175, 192, 193 Jewish Association, Goldsmid’s, 189 Jewish Relief Bill (1830), 186–7 Jews; emancipation of, arguments against, 192ff; numbers of (1830), 182; pre–emancipation status, 179ff Jews’ Civil Disabilities Bill (1833), 187–8, 202 Jones, William, of Nayland, 92 Jordan, W . K., Professor, 2, 18 Kant, Immanuel, 44 Keate, William, 79 Keble, John, 70–71 Kenyon, Lloyd, Lord, 156n, 217

291

INDEX Kildare Street Society, 147 Kippis, Andrew, 2 1 , 58, 64 Knox, Alexander, Bishop, 146 Knox, John, 161 ‘Lamentations of the Children of Israel’, 176–7 Land ownership, Jews and, 179, 188 Lansdowne, William Petty, Lord, 76, 116 Lateran Council, Fourth, 152, 154 Law, Richard, 30 Law, fundamental, 77–81, 94–95, 131– 2, 145, 156 Legislature, sovereignty, of, 79–81 94–96, 131 Levy, Lewis, 189 libel, blasphemous, 7, 206ff, 262 liberty; civil and political, 9 1 ; civil and religious, 64n, 9 7 ; religious and toleration, 18, 269–70; and natural rights, 43–44 Lilburne, John, 246 Limerick, Treaty of, 162 Lincoln, Anthony, 66, 82, 283 Lincoln’s Inn, 184 Lindo, Alexander, 193 Lindsey, Theophilus, 47, 56 Lively, J., vi, 248 Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord, 212 Llandaff, Bishop of, see Copleston, Watson Locke, John, 23, 25ff, 43–44, 46, 52, 72, 77, 88, 94, 126, 152, 164, 204, 211, 235, 273, 276 London: City Corporation, 15–16, 88n; Freedom of, Jews and, 178, 180ff, 185, 188, 195, 203; University of, 190 London Missionary Society, 175 London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, 175, 176, 177, 178 Lushington, Dr Stephen, 186 Macaulay, T . B., 90, 164, 190, 191, 194, 197, 200–1, 204, 264, 273 Macaulay, Zachary, 157, 190 Mackintosh, Sir James, 181, 196 Madock, Serjeant, 87 Manchester Constitutional Society, 67 Mansfield, James, Lord, 16, 68 Marriage Act (1753), 13 marriage law, Catholic, 150–1 Marx, Karl, 38 Mary I, Queen, 5 Mason, William, Rev., 220 Mass, Act against the (1580), 9 Maynooth grant, 142

Methodism, 16, 66, 69, 146–7, 221, 261, 269–70, Calvinist, 147, 221, 261 Mill, James, 216, 242, 245, 247, 248, 250, 251, 253–4, 264 Mill, John Stuart, 36, 45, 201, 208, 254ff, 262, 265 Milner, Isaac, 217, 227 Milner, John, 169, 171 Milner, Joseph, 217, 219–21, 227, 229, 235 Milton, Lord, 206 Milton, John, 19ff, 235 Mocatta, Moses, 186 Montagu, Basil, 197, 199, 201 Montenore, Moses, 186, 189 Monthly Repository, The, 47, 175, 180– 1, 198, 213 morality, exclusive, 231–2, 275 Moravians, 184 More, Hannah, 152, 153, 217, 222, 226, 230, 232 Morgan, Thomas, 212 Morning Chronicle, 158, 213 Mozley, Mr. of Liverpool, 186, 188 Murray, Dr Daniel, Archbishop of Dublin, 170 Napoleon I, 149, 175, 176, 183, 193 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal), 24, 256 Newton, Isaac, 29 Newton, John, 228 ‘Nonconformists, occasional’, 219 Non-jurors, 22 Norfolk, Bernard Edward Howard, Duke of, 191 North, Frederick, Lord (later Earl of Guilford), 56, 58, 7 1 , 79, 8 1 , 82, 88, 97, 106 Norwich, 15 Nottingham, Mayor of, dissenting, 83 Nottingham, Daniel Finch, Earl of, 10 Nugent, George Nugent Grenville, Lord, 161 Oath on faith of a Christian, 180, 183, on New Testament, 180 Oaths, Bentham on, 244 O’Connell, Daniel, 146, 159, 167, 168, 172, 190 Owen, Robert, 190, 265 Oxford Movement, 165, 262 Paine, Thomas, 4 1 , 95, 122, 129, 212, 238, 243, 244, 264, 270 Paley, William, 70, 84–85, 89, 163, 273 Palmer, Samuel, 59, 115, 116 Palmer, Thomas Fysshe, 55

292

INDEX Parliament: Dissenters in, 16; tests for membership, 12, 137, 180; sovereignty of, see legislature Parr, Dr Samuel, 55, 146 Pascal, Blaise, 250 Paul, St, 237 Pearce, Samuel, 87, Peel, Sir Robert, 143, 144, 158ff, 172–3, 183 187 Pellatt, Apsley, 178, 190 Penenden Heath, 173 Penn, William, 267, 273 Perceval, D. I., 155, 193 Perceval, Spencer, 143, 217, 222 Petitioners, Cambridge Clerical, 51, 52, 55, 79, 269, 271 Phelan, William, 143 Philipps, Mr, of Carmarthen, M.P., 67 Phillpotts, Henry, Dean of Chester, later Bishop of Exeter, 145, 153, 154, 155, 169 Philo-Judean Society, 177–8 Pitt, William, 40, 57, 58, 60, 65, 70, 71, 76, 90, 91, 107, 115ff, 139, 142, 217, 222 Pius, V Pope, 148 Pius VII, Pope, 144, 149, 169 Plumbe, Thomas, 117 Plunket, William C. (Later Lord Plunket), 159 Political Register, The, see Cobbett Poynter, Dr William, 168 Price, Richard, 32, 40ff, 48, 49, 64, 75, 86, 95, 106, 111, 112, 115, 126, 264ff Priestley, Joseph, 24, 30, 32ff, 45, 54, 59, 66, 75, 80, 86–87, 95, 106, 111, 115, 116, 202, 211, 264, 265, 271, 272 priests, Catholic, State payment of, 142, 159–161 Proclamation Society, 216, 233 Protestant Ascendancy, Irish; 136, 138ff, 143, 144, 162 Protestant Dissenters’ United Committee, 183 Protestant Society for Religious Liberty, 147, 221, 261 Protestation,RomanCatholic(1788),168 Presbyterians, 2–3, 7, 11, 14, 15, 55, 73 Quakers, 104, 184 Quarantotti Rescript, 167 Quebec Act, 101 Radicals, 77, 166–7, 203, 204, 208, 216–7, 258 Raymond, Sir Robert (later Lord), 211 Recusants, Act against (1605), 8

Redesdale, John Freeman-Mitford, Lord, 140ff, 149, 222 reform, parliamentary, 4, 57, 58, 76, 167; political 88, 167 Reform Judaism, 198 regium donum, 85 Republican, The, 238, 245 Revolution (of 1688), 10, 77ff, 128 Ricardo, David, 181 rights, human and natural, 27, 88, 91ff, 202–4, 264, 269, Burke and, 124ff, 134; Price and, 43ff, 264, Priestley and, 40 Robinson, Henry, 20 Robinson, Robert, 30ff, 43, 46ff, 57, 59, 65, 67, 84, 115, 116, 133 Rockingham, Charles Watson-Went¬ worth, Marquess of, 106 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 179, 217 Roth, Cecil, 261 Rothschild, Nathan, 181, 184ff, 189 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 95, 127, 248 Russell, Lord John, 159, 161, 163, 173, 191, 200, 276 ‘Saints’ in parliament, 233 salvation, exclusive, 153–4, 198 Saul, Abraham, 182 Saul, David Gill, 178, 182 Saul, Saul, 182 Saurin, William, 143 Savile’s Act, 101 Schism, 7, 68, 69 Schism Act (1712), 14 Scotland, Union with, 78–79; see also Union, Act of sects, subdivision of, 263 sedition, 8–10, 27, 69, 75, 112 Settlement, Act of, 71 Seymour, Lord, 173 Sheil, Richard Lalor, 173 Shelburne, William Petty, Lord (later Marquess of Lansdowne), 47, 57, 106, 115 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 237, 239ff, 243ff Sherlock, Thomas, 73–74, 122 Shipley, Jonathan, Bishop of St Asaph, 60 Sidmouth, Henry Addington, Lord, 221, 261 Smith, Adam, 35 Smith, Sydney, 152, 161ff, 201, 227, 273, 276 Smith, William, 76, 189, 190, 209, 210, 215, 217, 261 Society of Friends of Religious Liberty, Bentham’s project for, 167, 190 Socinians, 2, 19, 55, 65, 220 Southey, Robert, 69, 90, 148, 152, 155

293

INDEX Sovereignty, see legislature Spinoza, Baruch, 22 Stanhope, James, Earl, 14 Stanley, Edward (Earl of Derby), 174 Suppression of Vice, Society for the, 217, 235 Supremacy, Act of, 6; Oath of, 137 Supremacy, Royal, 10 Sussex, Augustus Frederick, Duke of, 190 Test, Sacramental, 9, 12, 13–14, 74, 87–88, 115, 122, 137, 176, 183, 263 Test Act, 4, 8, 12, 13, 33, 4 1 , 57, 74, 78–79, 82, 83–84, 9 1 , 94–96, 97, 105, 114, 118, 137, 183–4 Thirty-Nine Articles, see Articles of Religion Thompson, J. Perronet, 116, 190 Times, The, 185–6 Toland, John, 212 toleration: in 17th century, 1ff; meaning of, 69–70; partial and complete, 70; and liberty, 270 Toleration Act (1688), 3, 11–13, 16– 17, 78, 137, 139, 208, 209 Tooke, John, 180 Tories: ‘Catholic’, 159–61, 173; Liberal, 102, 159; ‘Protestant’, 144, 156–7, 174 Towers, Joshua, 64 Trinity Act (1813), 209, 215 Uniformity, Act of (1559), 6, 9 Uniformity, Act of (1661), 9 Union (with Ireland), Act of, 139, 145, 146, 162 Union (with Scotland), Act of, 78–81, 94, 131, 145 Union of Protestant Dissenters, 63, 64, 66 Unitarians, 2, 16, 56, 119, 146, 209–13, 241, 263 Universities, 5, 190, 262; exclusion of Dissenters from, 14, 57, 58, 262; of Jews from, 180 Utilitarianism, 35, 203–4, 264

van Oven, Barnard, 203 van Oven, Joshua, 190 Venn, John, 232 Veto, 150, 152, 160, 168, 169, 170 Wake, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 7, 14 Wakefield, 79 Wakefield, Gilbert, 55, 59, 67, 87 Walker, George, 2 1 , 59, 64, 67 Walker, Thomas, 67 Walpole, Horace, 155 Walpole, Sir Robert, 14, 15 Warburton, William, 71–73, 77, 82, 121, 127, 134 Ward, W . G., 266 Watson, Richard, Bishop of Llandaff, 55, 60, 146 Way, Lewis, 178 Webber, Daniel, M.P., 154 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 88, 144, 160, 185, 187, 188 Wesley, John, 147, 151, 153, 222 Wesleyans, see Methodists Wesleyan Conference, 221, 261 Westminster Review, 166, 203, 204 Westmorland, John Fane, Earl of, 146, 160 Whately, Bishop Richard, 146, 165, 170, 207–8, 216, 272 White, Joseph Blanco, 148 White, Dr R. J., 240 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 9 Whittaker, M. B., vi, 16n Wickwar, W . H., 207, 216 Wilberforce, William, 139, 143, 147, 159, 206, 217ff, 221ff, 234, 265 Williams, Roger, 22, 25, 233 Windham, William, 111, 159 Witherby, Thomas, 175, 177 Wolverhampton Chapel case, 209–10 Woolston, Thomas, 211, 212 Wright, John, 209 Wyvill, Christopher, 67, 117 Zionism, 183

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