Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain: from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century : Essays in Honour of Keith Robbins 9781317067245, 9781409451488

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain: From the Restoration to the Twentieth Century

Professor Keith Gilbert Robbins, from the portrait by Paul Brason. Copyright of the Artist and Trinity Saint David College, University of Wales.

Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain: From the Restoration to the Twentieth Century Essays in Honour of Keith Robbins

Edited by Stewart J. Brown University of Edinburgh, UK Frances Knight University of Nottingham, UK John Morgan-Guy University of Wales, Trinity St David, UK

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Stewart J. Brown, Frances Knight and John Morgan-Guy 2013 Stewart J. Brown, Frances Knight and John Morgan-Guy have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identi-fication and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Religion, identity and conflict in Britain : from the Restoration to the twentieth century : essays in honour of Keith Robbins. 1. Religion and sociology–Great Britain–History. 2. Religion and culture–Great Britain–History. 3. Church and state–Great Britain–History. 4. Christianity and politics–Great Britain–History. 5. Great Britain–History. 6. Great Britain–Religion. I. Robbins, Keith. II. Brown, Stewart J. (Stewart Jay), 1951- III. Knight, Frances. IV. Morgan-Guy, John. 941-dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Religion, identity and conflict in Britain : from the Restoration to the twentieth century: essays in honour of Keith Robbins / edited by Stewart J. Brown, Frances Knight, and John Morgan-Guy. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-5148-8 (hbk) 1. Great Britain–Church history. 2. Christianity and politics–Great Britain–History. 3. Church and state–Great Britain–History. I. Brown, Stewart J. (Stewart Jay), 1951 - editor of compilation. II. Robbins, Keith, honouree. BR755.R44 2013 274.1’07–dc23  2012045459 ISBN 978-1-4094-5148-8 (hbk)

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors  

vii ix

Introduction  

1

PART I

Religion and Identity

1

Defining Britain and Britishness: An Historian’s Quest. An Appreciation of Keith Robbins   Bruce Collins

2

The Manner of English Blasphemy, 1676–2008 John Spurr

3

The Topography of Power: Elites and the Political Landscape of the English Town 1660–1760   Peter Borsay

4 5 6

  

‘Sleep not while the trumpet is blown in Zion’: Public Somnolence, Civic Values and Modern Audience in Eighteenth-century Britain   Joris van Eijnatten A Tale of Two Mirrors: Forming an Identity for the Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales   Eryn M. White



Sunday Schools and Welsh National Identity: An Historiographical Study   Paula Yates

7

Evangelicalism and British Culture   D.W. Bebbington

11

27

47

63

81

93 105

vi

Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain

8

Anglican Attitudes to Roman Catholicism in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries   Nigel Yates

PART II

Conflict and Identity

9

Trials and Shadows: Bishop Charles John Ellicott (1819–1905) and    ‘angry controversies’ in the Church of England John Morgan-Guy

137

Recreation or Renunciation? Episcopal Interventions in the Drink Question in the 1890s   Frances Knight

157

10 11 12 13 14

Reactions to the Didache in Early Twentieth-century Britain: A Dispute over the Relationship of History and Doctrine?   Thomas O’Loughlin

121

175

Religion, Politics and Sport in Western Europe, c.1870–1939   Hugh McLeod

195

W.T. Stead, the ‘New Journalism’ and the ‘New Church’ in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain   Stewart J. Brown

213

‘An Ambitious Venture’: Oxford University Press and The Oxford History of England   Brian Harrison

233

Select Bibliography of the Publications of Keith Robbins   261 Index273

List of Figures Frontispiece

Professor Keith Gilbert Robbins, from the portrait by Paul Brason. Copyright of the Artist and Trinity Saint David College, University of Wales  

ii

3.1

Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, ‘The South East Prospect of Warwick’ 1731  

48

4.1

William Hogarth, ‘The Sleeping Congregation’ (1736)  

64

10.1

Bishop Francis Jayne  

163

11.1

Philotheos Bryennios  

177

13.1

W.T. Stead  

214

14.1

G.N. Clark as Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, in the front quad with Princess Elizabeth on 25 May 1948, the day when she received the honorary degree of DCL, with their departure prevented by the College tortoise  

237

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Notes on Contributors David W. Bebbington is Professor of History at the University of Stirling. His publications include Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: a History from the 1730s to the 1980s (1989), The Dominance of Evangelicalism: the Age of Spurgeon and Moody (2005) and Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (2012). Peter Borsay is Professor in the Department of History and Welsh History at Aberystwyth University. His publications include The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (1989), The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700–2000: Towns, Heritage and History (2000), A History of Leisure: the British Experience since 1500 (2006) and Resorts and Ports: European Seaside Towns since 1700, edited with J.K. Walton (2011). Stewart J. Brown is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1801–1846 (2001), The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 7: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660–1815, edited with T. Tackett (2006) and Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 1815–1914 (2008). Bruce Collins is Professor of Modern History at Sheffield Hallam University. His most recent publications are War and Empire: the Expansion of Britain 1790–1830 (2010) and Transnational Soldiers: Foreign Military Enlistment in the Modern Era, edited with Nir Arielli (2013). Joris van Eijnatten is Professor and Chair of Cultural History at Utrecht University. His publications include Liberty and Concord in the United Provinces. Religious Toleration and the Public in the Eighteenth-Century Netherlands (2003), Preacher, Sermon and Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century (2009), edited, and Religionsgeschichte der Niederlande (2011), co-authored with Fred A. van Lieburg. Sir Brian Harrison is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at Oxford University. His first book was Drink and the Victorians. The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 (1971, 2nd edn. 1994). His latest publications are the two concluding volumes in The New Oxford History of England: Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951–1970 (2009) and Finding a Role? The United Kingdom 1970–1990 (2010), both published with revisions in paperback in 2011.

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Brian Ll. James was formerly Sub-Librarian, University College, Cardiff, and sometime joint editor of the Glamorgan History Society and general editor of the South Wales Record Society. His publications include G.T. Clark: Scholar Ironmaster in the Victorian Age (1998). Frances Knight is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of The Nineteenth Century Church and English Society (1995); The Welsh Church from Reformation to Disestablishment, with the late Glanmor Williams, the late Nigel Yates and William Jacob (2007); and The Church in the Nineteenth Century (2008). Hugh McLeod is Emeritus Professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham. His books include Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870–1914 (1996), Secularisation in Western Europe 1848–1914 (2000) and The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007). John Morgan-Guy was Lecturer in Theology and Church History at University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter, until his retirement in 2011. He contributed to, and co-edited, Biblical Art from Wales (Sheffield, 2010) and The Oxford Handbook to the British Sermon 1689–1901 (Oxford, 2012). With Professor William Gibson he is currently preparing and co-editing a new history of the diocese of St David’s since the Reformation. Thomas O’Loughlin is Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham. His publications include Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish Writings (2000), Discovering Saint Patrick (2005), Adomnán and the Holy Places: the Perceptions of an Insular Monk on the Location of the Biblical Drama (2007) and The Didache: a Window on the Earliest Christians (2010). John Spurr is Professor of History and Head of the College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University. His publications include The Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (1991), English Puritanism 1603–1689 (1998), England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (2000), The Post-Reformation: Religion, Society, Politics and Britain, 1603–1714 (2006) and (edited) Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury (2011). Eryn M. White is Senior Lecturer in Welsh History at Aberystwyth University. Her publications include Calendar of Trevecka Letters, with Boyd S. Schlenther (2003), The Welsh Bible (2007) and the co-authored The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales 1735–1811 (2012). Nigel Yates (1944–2009) was Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Wales, Lampeter, and Provincial Archivist to the Church in Wales. His recent books include The Religious Condition of Ireland 1770–1850 (2006); Eighteenth

Notes on Contributors

xi

Century Britain: Religion and Politics 1714–1815 (2007); Liturgical Space: Christian Worship and Church Buildings in Western Europe 1500–2000 (2008); and Preaching, Word and Sacrament: Scottish Church Interiors 1560–1860 (2009). Paula Yates is Dean of Non-Residential Studies at St Michael’s College, Cardiff. Her publications include The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Church, State and Society in Northern Europe, 1780–1929. Vol 2: The Churches, edited with Prof. Joris van Eijnatten (2010), ‘Drawing Up the Battle Lines: Elementary Schooling in the Diocese of Bangor in the Second Decade of the Nineteenth Century’, in Nigel Yates (ed.) Bishop Burgess and His World: Culture Religion and Society in Britain, Europe and North America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2007) and ‘Anglican Clergy in the diocese of Bangor 1811–1817’, in The Welsh Journal of Religious History, vol. 6 (2011).

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Introduction Stewart J. Brown, Frances Knight and John Morgan-Guy

This is a book about British identity between the mid-seventeenth century and the early twentieth century, the period in which the modern United Kingdom took shape amid the challenges and opportunities of industrialisation, urbanisation and the growth of democracy. Our authors explore a number of themes relating to Britain’s modernising society, including expressions of civic consciousness in the expanding towns and cities, the growth of Welsh national identity, movements for popular education and temperance reform and the influence of organised sport, popular journalism and historical writing in defining national life. Most importantly, we consider religious movements and the role of religion in defining social institutions, social movements and national identity. The British state during our period was essentially a Christian state, and more specifically a Protestant state, which maintained established Churches for the pastoral care and religious instruction of the populace, legislated against blasphemy and unbelief, endeavoured (for most of our period) to suppress Roman Catholicism through penal laws, maintained (for most of our period) religious tests for public officials and gave religious belief a central place in civic ceremonies, processions and rituals. A large proportion of the population attended public worship Sunday after Sunday, absorbing the solemn language of the King James Bible, singing the Psalms or hymns and listening to lengthy sermons. Christianity permeated society, defining the rites of passage – baptism, first communion, marriage and burial – that shaped individual lives, providing a sense of continuity between past, present and future generations and informing social institutions and voluntary associations. For many in Britain, their multi-national state was under the special care and protection of providence; they were a chosen people, and their commercial and military success, their imperial expansion and the stability of their institutions and social structures were all expressions of divine favour. A religious conception of the British state and society remained a powerful force throughout our period. And yet this religious conception of state and society was also the source of conflict. There was no consensus about the nature of Britain’s religious identity. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 had brought the restoration of the established Protestant Churches within Britain and Ireland, but it also brought limited toleration for some who were unable for reasons of conscience to worship in the established Church. Toleration allowed the emergence of congregations of Protestant Dissenters – Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and English and Irish Presbyterians – for whom the established Churches represented grievous error. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under the influence of a predominant evangelicalism, Dissenting Churches diversified

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain

and steadily grew in numbers and in influence, until they achieved parity with the established Churches. Increasingly, Dissenters, or Nonconformists as they became known, came to demand not only toleration but full equality for all religious denominations within the state. By the 1830s, some also called for the disestablishment and disendowment of the established Churches, and the result was bitter conflict between Church and Dissent. Embracing a strict religious conscience, most Nonconformists did not recognise the established Churches as the main expressions of the religious identity and moral purpose of the expanding imperial state, and Britain’s religious identity became contested ground. From the later eighteenth century, Roman Catholics also demanded, and gradually achieved, emancipation from the penal laws. Experiencing a revival in numbers and influence during the later nineteenth century, Roman Catholics challenged both the claims of the Protestant established Churches and the Protestant Nonconformists. There were, meanwhile, also conflicts within all the Churches, as groups perceived the ancient faith in different ways and responded in different ways to the challenges to the faith raised by biblical and historical scholarship, science, moral questioning, and social dislocations and unrest. By the early twentieth century, most Churches were more uncertain in the teachings, their influence and authority began to wane, and new movements emerged to give expression to collective longings for higher spiritual and moral values – including organised sport, journalism and historical writing. Our authors explore these and other themes relating to religion, identity and conflict in modern Britain. The chapters in our book have, in various ways, been influenced by the distinctive approaches and contributions of the eminent historian and public intellectual, Professor Keith Robbins, whose many publications have greatly enriched our understanding of early modern and modern Britain. The volume has been produced in his honour, and in creating a themed volume offering fresh interpretations of religion, identity and conflict in modern British history, we have also endeavoured to reflect the themes that have informed Robbins’ body of work. Robbins’ scholarly corpus includes seminal studies of British identity, including the rich variety of social institutions, movements and networks that form British society, the importance of Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English regional identities in understanding the modern British state, the place of literature, education and sport in defining culture, and the vital role of religious faith and religious institutions. As well as a prolific author, he has also been an academic leader – Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, Professor of Modern History and Head of the Department of History at the University of Glasgow, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales, Lampeter (1992–2003) and Senior Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales (1995–2001) In these positions he has inspired and encouraged students and colleagues alike with the highest standards of excellence.

2

Introduction

3

Our volume begins with a critical review and appreciation of the historical contributions of Professor Robbins by Professor Bruce Collins. In a wide-ranging chapter on ‘Defining Britain and Britishness: an Historian’s Quest’, Professor Collins explores Keith Robbins’ understanding of the diversity of modern British society and culture, of the multiple identities held by individuals and groups under the larger umbrella of Britishness and of the ever-changing contingencies in which historical actors must function. ‘Robbins’, he observes, ‘was one of the first historians to place the heterogeneity of the United Kingdom at the centre of his analyses’. Collins gives particular attention to Robbins’ treatment of religion. Quoting Robbins’ observation that in the later nineteenth century, ‘no other country in Europe was as ecclesiastically complex as the United Kingdom’, Collins considers Robbins’ nuanced analyses of denominational diversity and conflict, of the changing connections between religion and national identity, of the pervasive sense of the British as a ‘chosen people’, of the continued strength of the Church-state connection, and of the remarkable resurgence of Roman Catholicism in twentieth-century Britain. In the following chapter, Professor John Spurr provides a study of changing conceptions of the legal offence of blasphemy in England and Wales from the later seventeenth century to the present – giving particular attention to the offence of scoffing at, or ridiculing religious belief. As he demonstrates, scoffing at organised religion, and especially of the clergy, became increasingly prevalent from the Restoration of 1660, amid the larger cultural reaction to decades of oppressive Puritan discipline. Orthodox Christians responded to such scoffing with a sense of outrage and an insistence that the civil laws against blasphemy be strengthened and strictly enforced. However, the offence could be difficult to define in the civil courts. Much scoffing took the form of casual profanity, ribald humour and drunken mockery; to what extent did such offences warrant civil punishment? Moreover, many orthodox Christians viewed the new scientific interpretations of the natural world and enlightened critiques of religion and Scripture as forms of irreverent scoffing. Over time, blasphemy became increasingly problematic in law, as the boundaries became blurred between scoffing and a serious questioning of Christian dogmas. By the later nineteenth century, Spurr observes, judges were struggling to distinguish between expressions of honest doubt and the intention to cause offence, while there was also a growing attempt to assess the specific hurt that was caused to believers. Although the blasphemy law was repealed in 2008, the growing influence of non-Christian faiths and the increased commitment to equal treatment of different faith communities suggests that the offence of blasphemy will remain a pressing issue. In Chapter 3, Professor Peter Borsay explores ‘Elites and the Political Landscape of the English Town 1660–1760’, with particular emphasis on what he terms the ‘topography of power’. He considers how the architectural landscape of the early modern English town reflected the four major nodes of power – the Church, the resident aristocracy or gentry, the shire and the civic body – and their respective, and ever-evolving, hierarchies of status. ‘Reading’ the historical

4

Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain

records of these landscapes reveals much about the nature of a town, its social hierarchy and its surrounding hinterland. In the following chapter, on ‘Public Somnolence, Civic Values and Modern Audience in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Professor Joris Eijnatten contributes to the growing interest in the history of the sermon through an investigation of the popular reception of sermons by eighteenthcentury congregations. In particular, he presents, with empathy and humour, a number of contemporary accounts of individuals sleeping through sermons, and he explores why this somnolence was viewed by the governing elite with deep misgiving and anxious concern as the century progressed. Concern over sermoninduced slumber, he suggests, may have reflected changing eighteenth-century views of the expectations of public life. ‘The ideal audience’, he suggests, ‘as a unified, emotive, disciplined and rational public seems to have come increasingly to the fore during the period’. The next two chapters discuss themes of religion and identity within the Welsh context. In Chapter 5, Dr Eryn White discusses the background to and the birth of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism (which emerged in 1811) and she highlights the connections of Calvinistic Methodism and the growing sense of Welsh national identity. In their effort to define the new denomination as a branch of the ancient apostolic Church, apologists of the movement also contributed to an enhanced appreciation of the religious history and language of the Welsh people. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, she concludes, ‘it became clear … that the Calvinistic Methodist Church was emphatically a Welsh institution. It reinforced this with an increasing number of publications to guide and inform its members.’ In Chapter 6, Dr Paula Yates explores ‘Sunday Schools and Welsh National Identity’. As she demonstrates, Sunday schools in Wales had developed out of the circulating schools of the eighteenth-century Welsh evangelical revival, and they imparted primary education as well as spiritual instruction, free of charge, to both children and adults. These Sunday schools were overwhelmingly Nonconformist in religion, conducted in the Welsh language and strongly rooted in popular culture. As such, they became a powerful force in shaping a modern Welsh national identity, as well as vibrant expressions of Welsh democracy. They were key promoters of a Welsh democratic intellect, providing the ‘vital underpinning to the democratic uprising of a predominantly working-class, Welsh-speaking, nonconformist underclass’. The theme of religion and cultural identity is explored at the British level by Professor David Bebbington. In Chapter 7, ‘Evangelicalism and British Culture’, Bebbington provides a wide-ranging survey of the cultural engagement of Protestant Evangelicalism from the early eighteenth century, giving attention to popular culture, but even more to the high cultural movements of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Modernism. As he shows, British Evangelicals did not see themselves as necessarily separate from or opposed to the movements of this world. On the contrary, British Evangelicalism was profoundly influenced by its cultural context. Moreover, it was the movements of high culture, rather than popular culture, that most provided the ‘intellectual framework’ within which

Introduction

5

British Evangelicalism developed. This sophisticated intellectual framework, Bebbington argues, contributed in no small way to the success of the Evangelical movement. The theme of religion and identity is further discussed in one of the last works of the late Professor Nigel Yates, one of the key initiators of this volume before his untimely death. In Chapter 8, ‘Anglican Attitudes to Roman Catholicism in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Professor Yates considers the changing attitudes toward Roman Catholicism among leading high churchmen of the established Church of England, at a time when most inhabitants of Britain viewed anti-Catholicism as fundamental to the identity of the British state. As he demonstrates, sympathy for the suffering of the Roman Catholic Church during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars contributed to a new openness to ecumenical discussion among a number of Anglican leaders. There were even calls for union of the Roman Catholic and Anglican communions, including the call of the London vicar, Samuel Wix, in 1818, or the extraordinary appeal in 1824 by James Doyle, Irish Roman Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin. However, there was also considerable opposition to any such proposals, as the conflicts roused from the 1830s by the Oxford Movement would soon reveal. In Part II, our authors shift from a primary emphasis on themes of religion and identity to an emphasis on the themes of religion and conflict. Dr John MorganGuy opens this second section with a chapter on ‘Bishop Charles John Ellicott (1819–1905) and “angry controversies” in the Church of England’, in which he explores the career of a leading figure in the early Lambeth Conferences of world Anglicanism; indeed, Ellicott may well have been the first to use the term ‘our Anglican communion’. As Bishop Ellicott’s career reveals, the later nineteenthcentury Church of England and the emerging world Anglican communion were far from united or confident. Behind the power and influence of Victorian Britain, and widespread belief in the civilising and Christian mission of her Empire, there were growing anxieties among the Anglican bishops over popular infidelity, biblical criticism, evolutionary biology, ritualism and disestablishment. Morgan-Guy concludes that ‘Ellicott’s correspondence and his published works show clearly that by the 1860s and 1870s the cracks in the fabric [of the Anglican communion] were already appearing’. In Chapter 10, Dr Frances Knight continues the exploration of religion and conflict with a study of ‘Episcopal Interventions in the Drink Question in the 1890s’. As she maintains, British Christian opinion was deeply divided over the temperance question, with many Christians enjoying a drink and pointing to the prevalence of wine in the Bible, while zealous Christian temperance crusaders embraced their cause almost as an alternative religion and showed little charity to their opponents. At the same time, the human costs of Britain’s massive consumption of alcohol were immense, in terms of poverty, domestic abuse, longterm health problems, violent crime and ruined lives, and this was a real concern for the parish clergy. The efforts in the 1890s of the bishops of the established Church of England to respond to both the Christian divisions over temperance and the social costs of alcohol abuse proved feeble and futile, and highlighted the

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weakening social influence and authority of the Church. In Chapter 11, Professor Thomas O’Loughlin analyses an important controversy among late nineteenthand twentieth-century Church historians over liturgical practices in the early Church, and in particular over the dating and impact of an early Christian text, the Didache, or ‘The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’. O’Loughlin shows how this controversy went to the heart not only of the nature of the primitive Church, but to the understanding of Christianity, and he explores how it was conducted with considerable passion by a ‘British school’ of patristic scholars, whose contributions, he argues, warrant more attention. In Chapter 12, ‘Religion, Politics and Sport in Western Europe, c.1870–939’, Professor Hugh McLeod moves beyond the British focus of our volume to provide an account of the rise of modern sport in its Western European social and culture context. In a wide-ranging chapter, he considers the growth of amateur and professional sport – including gymnastics, cricket, cycling and especially football – and he explores the close connections of sport to religious and political organisations. Many scholars, he observes, have viewed organised sport as a major contributor to secularisation, or even as ‘a new religion, that was squeezing out the old’. But as he demonstrates, sport was very often an expression of traditional religious identities, as well as a source of new identities and commitments. The connections of late nineteenth-century religion and journalism in Britain are explored by Professor Stewart J. Brown, in his study of the religious views of the pioneering investigative journalist, W.T. Stead. Beginning his career as an uncompromising voice of the Nonconformist Conscience, Christian social reform and liberal imperialism, Stead would in later life become a leading advocate of spiritualism, automatic writing, spirit photography, telepathy and ghost stories. Religion, Brown argues, is vital to an understanding of the diverse, sometimes contradictory strands of Stead’s career. Stead, he maintains, was essentially a seventeenth-century Puritan transposed into the nineteenth century and committed to achieving the godly commonwealth in a democratic and industrial Britain. Stead came to view the newspaper as the modern-day pulpit and the editor as a type of priest, and Stead’s later attraction to spiritualism and the occult reflected his vision of a world saturated in divinity. ‘He sought’, in Brown’s words, ‘to make religion live as a social force in the world’. Finally, in Chapter 14, Professor Sir Brian Harrison provides a thoroughly researched account of the gestation, writing and publication of arguably the most important historical work of twentieth-century England, the 15-volume Oxford History of England, published between 1934 and 1965 under the general editorship of G.N. Clark. This was a project that brought together many of the foremost historians of the century, including R.G. Collingworth, F.M. Stenton, A.L. Poole, R.C.K. Ensor and A.J.P. Taylor; they could be perceived as representing what the Romantic poet and essayist, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, once described as a ‘clerisy’, or a body of learned people concerned with giving expression to the shared memories and enduring values that shaped national identity. Drawing upon his own experience as general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National

Introduction

7

Biography, Professor Harrison writes with sensitivity of the often strained personal relations between Clark and his team of gifted but temperamental historians, while he provides valuable assessments of the individual volumes and of the series as a whole. The Oxford History of England would define for the tempestuous twentieth century an abiding sense of continuity with the past, of enduring values and of national purpose. It is a fitting note on which to close our volume, reminding us of the continuing aspiration to define a national identity and sense of national purpose within these islands.

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Part I Religion and Identity

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Chapter 1

Defining Britain and Britishness: An Historian’s Quest. An Appreciation of Keith Robbins Bruce Collins

I In a disquisition on British intellectual life in the twentieth century, Stefan Collini regretted the decline in the role of public intellectuals and noted in particular the absence of historians from such luminaries’ ranks. Although he stressed the readiness of historians to address wider audiences than academic specialists, he devoted extended attention only to A.J.P. Taylor, whose infatuation with generalizing and popularizing, and concern to entertain and to shock, demonstrated the dangers ensnaring eager habitués of the world of the tabloids and the sound media.1 Collini’s work raises the question of whether historians pay sufficient attention to the impact of each others’ work. While there has been long-standing interest in the legacy of the most polemical and best-selling historians and while recent attention has been accorded some historians’ work as public intellectuals, such interest is relatively narrowly focused.2 This is because the role of public intellectual has been defined beyond the reach of virtually all practising historians. Collini offers a definition which requires high academic standing in a chosen discipline, access to and influence over a wide public, a capacity to say important and interesting things to that audience and a lack of prescriptive attachments to other causes or organizations.3 An obvious response is that Collini’s model, by setting too specific a threshold, has excluded many practitioners who seek to influence significant but not sizable audiences, not least the sixth-formers and university students who form the overwhelming majority of those spending large amounts of time reading the subject, as well as those who teach them. Without ever reaching mass readerships, historians constantly produce books of synthesis and reinterpretation, as well as more accessible works of research, which are intended to shape opinion. In a world in which we learn to influence as much by nudge as by exhortation, by networks as by rallies and by nuance as by grand theory, sustained engagement with small but educated audiences represents a far from negligible role for the historian. If allowed thus to consider the role of public intellectual more expansively and more generously, I would offer an appreciation of the work of Keith Robbins as an example of the wider and unremitting efforts

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain

of professional historians to engage in public persuasion and opinion-leadership. By moving beyond the world of the media don, it is possible to suggest that the work of professional historians relevant to ‘public’ discourse is more pervasive and even more impressive than Collini asserts. Keith Robbins has dedicated himself to disseminating a public understanding of history. Apart from serving as editor of History for ten years and then as president of the Historical Association, he has edited numerous historical series, including Profiles in Power and the Longman History of Religion in Britain.4 But the core of his achievement has been a dozen books, stretching from a substantial study of the Munich crisis published in 1968 to a major examination of the Christian Churches in the British Isles during the twentieth century, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, and a substantial political history of the world since 1945, published in late 2012. From the very beginning, he has consistently tackled major controversies and wide-ranging themes. Yet despite the sheer breadth of his interests and range of his analyses, this corpus contains at least four recurrent concerns: defining Britain and Britishness; understanding Britain’s international role, especially with regard to Empire and to Europe; locating processes of historical change in a framework of institutional decision-making; and explaining the nature of religious activity and faith in a British context. By exploring these themes, it is possible to make a case for the educative role of the professional historian as an interpreter of how contemporary societies emerged from and interacted with their pasts. II Robbins was one of the first historians to place the heterogeneity of the United Kingdom at the centre of his analyses.5 Robbins reflected most fully on Britishness and the disparate and elusive ingredients from which the United Kingdom was ‘blended’ in his Ford Lectures, published in 1988 as Nineteenth-Century Britain: Integration and Diversity, and in Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (1998). The latter book’s first chapter sketched the mediaeval interactions of the four countries, and their complex internal politics and governance. He then showed how such contrasting and unstable entities were pulled together by political ambition, military initiative and dynastic accident and aggrandisement. For much of his Ford Lectures, he discussed and documented a wide variety of nineteenth-century interaction and integration, involving culture, religion, business, politics, education, sport and patriotism. While fully recognizing diversity, he argued for the creation of networks across all these aspects of British life. In many respects, integration, sometimes seen as a byproduct of the imperial adventure imposed by the landed establishment through its control of the state, became the work of the professional and commercial middle classes. The universities and the formation of professional elites through higher education received particular emphasis, and indirectly provided an alternative

Defining Britain and Britishness

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to the overwhelming weight given by Ernest Gellner to mass literacy in the formation of national consciousness. Nor did integration flow simply from AngloSaxon expansionism. From the injection of new men into England’s intellectual and political life to the introduction from Scotland of such innovations as golf, chartered accountancy and Lipton’s tea, the direction of influence was neither one way nor easy to categorize.6 Although the creation of a more closely integrated cultural, economic and political entity progressed strongly in the nineteenth century, integration was neither complete nor consistent. An earlier attempt at general synthesis – The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain 1870–1975 – admittedly began each of its four chronological sections by assessing the state of the United Kingdom as a whole and by sketching its external relations, particularly with the Empire and later Commonwealth and with Europe. But one distinctive feature at the time of its publication, in 1983, was the separate attention given to conditions in the United Kingdom’s four component countries. The Eclipse of a Great Power begins with the four countries’ diversity in the 1870s and Nineteenth-Century Britain emphasizes how diversity remained vigorous even in areas where closer collaboration or interaction flourished; for example, missionary activity remained the responsibility of the separate Churches, and football of both types was organized by separate English, Scottish and Welsh boards.7 Powerful particularisms meant that the loosening of ties and the reassertion of Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities from the 1970s can readily be accommodated within Robbins’ framework. He begins The Eclipse of a Great Power with a discussion of difference and he ends Great Britain with reflections on ‘regions and nations’ which conclude that ‘The matter of Britain … after 2,000 years, was still under debate’.8 This emphasis on the importance and yet elusiveness of national identities has larger implications. When, at the end of the Cold War, Samuel Huntington’s notions about an impending clash between Islam and Christian-Judaic ‘civilizations’ were being developed, Robbins injected a cautionary scepticism. He stressed that 160 of the world’s 190 countries in 1998 experienced ethnic problems and that contemporary trends were part of the perennial clash and convergence of civilizations. If the quest for larger ideological underpinnings to global interactions had taken new directions, there remained no basis for worth-while predictions in a global society riddled by ethnic and regional conflicts.9 Robbins’ approach to explaining Britishness is far less schematic than most modelling of the nationalist imperative would require. He acknowledges the force of legacies and myths from the past without prioritizing them. He documents the role of language and education without accepting Ernest Gellner’s insistence upon their formative influence. He allows for the role of the state and ruling elites in propagating ideas and images of national identity without giving their agency the manipulative and causative power ascribed to them by Eric Hobsbawm.10 He insists that Britishness has been a phenomenon of sporadic rather than continuous intensity, and declines to characterize it as demotic or delusional or diversionary. His approach describes the many ways in which divergent groups have developed

14

Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain

and expanded a sense of Britishness according to widely varying opportunities and circumstances. Middle-class professionals, through career progression and personal ambition as much as through pressure group activity, have been as effective in generating a sense of Britishness and a complex of ‘national’ networks and organizations as have any ruling elites intent on heading off popular political protest or discontent by fostering a false consciousness of national identities and aspirations. Indeed, the landed political elite remained ambivalent about the development of Britishness. If Lord Rosebery in 1882 warned Scots that ‘the swift amalgamating power of railways … the centralisation of Anglicizing empire … the compassionate sneer of higher civilization’ had eroded Scottish identity, Lord Salisbury, during his premierships in the period 1885–1902, simply sought, without any triumphalism, to steer the country in the Conservative interest through turbulent times.11 No programme to define or redefine Britain emerged in those years as an upper-class strategy to diminish the attractions, real or putative, offered by radicals, trade unionists or socialists to promote internationalism or ‘regionalism’. Much theorizing about nationalism has played down the impact of international competition upon the process of defining nations. Robbins’ concern to explore international relations and the ways in which international developments shaped Britain enables him to provide a more complex and ever-shifting depiction of how Britishness should be seen as part of a continuing and often volatile process of self-definition and redefinition. A persistent theme has been the relationship with France and continental Europe more generally. Both a long-term and a shortterm view of British history supports the conclusion that decisions involving international alignments or alliances typically hinged on political calculations which flowed from transient influences and objectives. Robbins shows how inconsistent and indeed malleable official attitudes were. Even mediaeval monarchs waxed and waned in the importance they attached to ruling specific tracts or expansive territories in France. It was natural immediately after the Second World War for the British to entertain a low regard for European political aptitudes and institutions, as well as for the Europeans’ capacity to organize themselves into effective defensive alliances. Equally naturally, the British government saw Britain as the only reliable ally through whose good offices the United States might be able to exert influence over Western Europe. Some analysts in the 1940s even entertained the notion that Britain could offer an ideal synthesis of both the capitalist and socialist ingredients that were applicable not just to post-war Europe but also to the United States, which had been lifted only by war-related spending out of the depression of the 1930s. By 1961–63, however, membership of the Common Market had become a vital means by which Macmillan’s Conservative government hoped to modernize Britain itself. Twenty years later, the European Community had a quite different ideological role as an open field upon which a newly invigorated and entrepreneurial Britain was to flex its commercial and manufacturing muscle. But in the 1990s the European project degenerated, in the eyes of sceptics, into a politically centralizing bureaucratic juggernaut. As recently

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as 1983, the Labour party pledged to withdraw from the European Community, whereas ten years later it was the Conservative government which was virtually torn apart by the ratification of the Maastricht treaty.12 Robbins demonstrates that these varying initiatives reflected shifting selfdescriptions of Britain. Those descriptions depended upon whether the British saw themselves as global or regional in their cultural, political and economic reach; as economically efficient or in need of new regulatory structures in which to create new markets; as self-reliant upholders of liberty or dependent upon new pan-European political institutions and social guarantees; and as autonomous international actors or future members of an increasingly unified European superstate. Britishness thus shifted in its nature as the debate over what Europe was or represented unfolded. Other factors involving issues of self-definition entered the equation. Engagement with Europe involved the confidence or otherwise which British governments had in their relationship with the United States. Overtures to Europe followed disillusionment with Washington, notably after Suez and under Edward Heath, who, in the early 1970s, had little time for Richard Nixon’s policies and administration. Distancing from Europe can be said to have coincided with periods of greater closeness to and confidence in Washington. Labour in the 1990s saw pro-Europeanism as a way of disconnecting Britain from an imperial past and from an American hegemonic present. Economic considerations entailed radically different ideals of what constituted a British way of life. Macmillan’s interest in the Common Market at least in part fitted into his personal quest for a middle way towards planned capitalism, whereas Thatcher’s principal interest in European economic policy was to promote a freer market for the unimpeded flow of investment, currency, labour and goods. Those two views mirrored those prime ministers’ differing concepts of Britain, with one seeking the conciliation of interests within a politically generated consensus, and the other detecting true Britishness in the exercise of enterprizing energies wherever those talents could be deployed. Both views derived at least part of their clarity from what was believed to be the legacy of a vibrant past.13 This consistent stress on the malleability of British policies towards Europe has been coupled to indications of the fragility of any European ideal. For example, it is difficult, in recent times, to describe a ‘Christian Europe’ when Christian Democrats were powerful essentially only in Germany and Italy, boosted in popular support by the threat of Communism, and when the regime in Spain until 1975, though backed by the Roman Catholic Church, repudiated democracy. Moreover, Europe found it impossible to project itself outwards when confronted with foreign policy challenges of importance to Britain. Instead, Britain was thrown upon American support over the Falklands; no common front was generated by the Gulf crisis of 1990–91; the European Union failed to respond coherently to the break-up of Yugoslavia.14 In discussing the various ways in which Britain has engaged with continental Europe, Robbins persistently emphasizes the caution with which those conducting

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British foreign policy approached continental commitments. One of the principal characteristics of Sir Edward Grey’s foreign policy was its tendency to evade explicit positions. The Munich crisis of 1938 amply demonstrated the limitations of British power, the uncertainty of the French connection, British frustration at the failure in the 1920s to secure enduring Franco-German co-operation, exasperation that the Abyssinian crisis had shunted Italy towards Germany and bemusement that the Spanish Civil War had so extensively and persistently distracted large segments of British public attention away from more pressing and threatening developments in central Europe. Appeasement fits well with key episodes in post-1945 British foreign policy-making; it reflects the difficulties of meeting the obligations of a Great Power while lacking the specific tools needed to undertake initiatives in central Europe and the necessary diplomatic and financial leverage to induce continental allies to align themselves with British objectives. The dilemmas of defining national purpose, as well as conducting foreign policy, were effectively laid bare in Robbins’ first book, on the Munich crisis. At the core of the debate over the Munich agreement was the problem of locating Britain as a diplomatic actor in Europe. At the highest strategic level, the British conducted foreign policy in traditional Great Power mode, despite the tensions which such a mode naturally created for advocates of collective action. But decisions made by the principal powers could not be translated into action unless they commanded public assent. Behind the diplomatic drama of the Munich crisis lay the disquieting truism that the issues at stake did not galvanize or unite British opinion in favour of war in the way in which national feeling was, soberly, aroused by September 1939. There was the additional constraint that Neville Chamberlain sought to act in unison with the Empire, whereas dominion leaders expressed great reluctance to go to war over the Sudetenland.15 Closer to home, there was considerable concern about what the British could contribute to a continental war. Military strategy focused on defence, and on supporting the French army as the only available instrument of attack. But co-ordination with the French proved difficult throughout the crisis. Robbins encapsulated the dilemma in describing the meeting at Munich: ‘The suspicious chill of the entente cordiale remained until the end. Daladier and Chamberlain, two strangers, walked into the room of the Fuhrerhaus masquerading as brothers’.16 Collaboration on detail and on strategy remained problematic. Given ministers’ fears for the defence of the United Kingdom from aerial bombardment, the lack of a close rapport with France, so vital to any recourse to offensive war, severely inhibited British policy-making. Churchill himself, by arguing that German military rearmament was substantial and threatening, created an atmosphere of foreboding which undermined his advocacy of war sooner rather than later, for a logical response to his warnings was to delay any forceful response until Britain had intensified its own armaments programme.17 But hesitations about British capacity to wage a continental war, other than blockade of Germany, merely formed one element in a larger process of soulsearching. According to Robbins: ‘Beneath the confident utterances of leading

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politicians on all sides can be found the lingering uncertainty about the future of Britain and her status in the world’.18 The limitations of British power were the more striking because they surfaced when the Empire stood at its largest extent, when the leading continental power, Germany, was still struggling to recover from the crushing defeat of 1918, when the Soviet Union was sapped by bloody internal turmoil and when the United States was wracked by economic depression. One of the most pervasive ‘lessons’ to be gleaned from Robbins’ corpus is the perennial presence, amidst expansion and plenitude as well as amidst contraction and dearth, of doubts about the efficacy and reach of influence and power. It is almost as if, even in the exercise of diplomatic power, the discussion of national purpose and character amounted to a recurrent assessment of what Britishness stood for and to what purposes it might be dedicated. Evaluating national consciousness and national ‘will’ thus became a means by which politicians, journalists, intellectuals and other opinion-formers expressed an effervescent mix of personal and collective doubt as well as confidence about the purposes and resilience of Britishness. The occasions when such doubt receded most markedly were during the great wars of the twentieth century. The First World War demonstrated the strength of the integration of the different ‘nations’ of Britain. Indeed, conceding that ‘The balance between integration and diversity has to be struck afresh in each generation’, Robbins concluded that British identity, ‘forged as it was by a government and people firmly conscious of an imperial destiny, reached its apogee around the First World War’. Robbins endorses interpretations of the coming of war which stress popular relief and indeed enthusiasm for the fray.19 War in 1939 won virtually universal support because it was seen to come at the end of a long drawn-out process of conciliating and negotiating with Hitler; there was no alternative if stability were to be sought in Europe. But, at another level, war was seen as a defining moment in affirming British national identity: It was a war, in a broad sense, for ‘Christian civilization’ but particularly for the form that civilization took in Britain itself. No society is ever spontaneously and completely ‘at one’ and beneath the public face there was discord and some tension … Nevertheless, past and present did seem for a time to be fused to an extraordinary degree. In itself that fusion could not take the country to ‘victory’, but without it, defeat, in the dark years, might have been more likely.20 This formulation indicates that Britishness asserted itself most forcefully under international challenges, and that globalization and the reduced significance given to national boundaries from the late twentieth century would inexorably erode the ties which nineteenth-century integration had created or strengthened.21

While Robbins stresses the integrating influences of the two world wars, he also emphasizes the peculiar international complexities from which they arose. As his second substantive examination of British foreign policy, Robbins published a biography of Sir Edward Grey; in this work, imperial Britain’s dependence

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on alliances and distaste for large-scale war stand out. Good relations with the United States had to be maintained, so that Grey accepted whatever gloss the Americans wished to put on the Monroe Doctrine. An accord with Japan was essential for stability in the Pacific, just as the entente with France underpinned British policy towards Europe. With those essentials in place, Grey was fatalistic about relations with Germany, whose ambitions he felt to be irreconcilable with British interests. Grey, like Neville Chamberlain, hated the prospect of war; ‘no one could be less ‘’militarist’’ in disposition’. Just as Grey had underestimated the gravity of the crisis in 1914 and gone reluctantly to war, so he provided little dynamic leadership during the conflict. It was perhaps remarkable that someone who had played a leading role in foreign policy-making within the Liberal party from 1892 to 1916 should have so limited an interest in both ‘abroad’ and in the cohesiveness of imperial interests. But this evidence fits well with Robbins’ recurrent theme that a sense of power and the state’s authority was highly elusive, even to those who allegedly commanded access to both. At the height of Britain’s imperial greatness, the country’s foreign policy was under the tutelage of a politician who displayed limited intellectual inquisitiveness, who regretted the progress of urbanization, and who had limited acquaintance with, and less liking for, the world beyond these shores. Equally important, Grey’s reluctant endorsement of war in 1914 depended upon very precise circumstances and exact conditions. Five days after war began in 1914, Grey confided that ‘But for Belgium, we should have kept out of it …’22 The dual importance of contingency and a ministerial sense of the limitations of power shaped inter-war as well as pre-1914 policy-making. One of the most striking of Robbins’ formulations is his account of the 1920s and 1930s, when ‘History and geography combined to make the management of British foreign policy the most complex in the world as it then existed’.23 Although in 1918 Britain had 3.5 million men under arms, its diffuse Empire, pluralistic imperial politics and lack of militarism meant that foreign policy was conducted in the 1920s and 1930s from self-consciousness of relative weakness rather than strength. The will to use force to resolve disputes was lacking and by 1938 the threats from Germany, Japan and Italy together pointed to British defeat in war. Military preparedness for a European war was lower than it had been in 1914. There was no alliance with America, despite the United States’ economic and potential military importance. There was no linkage with France, irrespective of the growing magnitude of German ambitions. Moreover, given the multiplicity of problems facing Britain at home and across its Empire, there was no consensus that Europe should take priority or that rearmament was acceptable. According to Robbins, appeasement in 1938 was a necessity rather than an option.24 Not everyone accepted that conclusion at the time. The leading dissident was, of course, Winston Churchill. Yet Churchill encapsulated the tensions created by Britain’s unique world role more fully than any other British leader did, not least because of his consuming sense of and absorption in history. It is symptomatic of Robbins’ interests that he chose Churchill as the figure about whom to write in

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the series which he edited on Profiles in Power. Amidst all the doubts about the sincerity and depth of Churchill’s political convictions, there was no doubt about his belief in the British Empire and its place in the world. Frustration at Britain’s apparent powerlessness in the 1930s fuelled his political actions, while much of his thinking on foreign policy after 1945 stemmed from an attempt to maintain Britain as a great power, despite deep American scepticism on that score. The problem, of course, was that Britain never generated the capacity to fight a major continental European land war without an ally’s army. Churchill himself, early in his career, focused on the Empire and the navy, dismissing the army’s contribution to British global power. His insistence on continuing with the war in 1940 depended upon a combination of bluff, expectant opportunism and the cultivation of an American alliance. Churchill never resolved the dilemma created by the French defeat in 1940; American support (and, later, far more than that) was essential to Britain’s status as a world-power, but the United States had little interest in preserving an Empire which was central to Churchill’s vision of Britishness.25 Robbins’ thinking about national purpose and identity and the ways in which it has been shaped by external forces has been informed by the study not just of men in power but also of those critical of the ‘official mind’. Unusually for an historian whose first two books concerned the conduct of British foreign policy – albeit with a firm eye on the domestic political context in which foreign policy was so conducted – Robbins started his research with a dissertation on the peace movement during the First World War and later turned that into a book. This interest was supplemented by a biography of John Bright, among whose notable contributions was opposition to the Crimean War and resignation from the cabinet over the Gladstone administration’s Egyptian intervention in 1882. One might detect here the lingering impact of A.J.P. Taylor’s brilliant short book on dissent in British foreign policy, The Troublemakers, to which Robbins has briefly paid tribute.26 More importantly, however, Robbins approaches the advocates of an alternative foreign policy with the scepticism necessary in a professional historian. He emphasized, among other things, three principal dilemmas. The peace movement was wrong footed in 1914, both because its various groupings and participants failed to grasp the gravity of the international situation and the impending threat of war and because its arguments cut little ice with the Liberal government. Later, a second shortcoming emerged when many members of the peace movement urged that international order would be maintained through popular participation in post-war international organizations and not solely through the domination of such organizations by governments. This attempt to democratize international relations failed abysmally.27 A final dilemma takes us both to the core of Robbins’ methodology and to an important handicap facing the professional historian in acquiring a role as a public intellectual. In laying out the taxonomy of the wartime peace movement, Robbins reveals the full range of its opinions and groupings as well as its activities. The imperative to dissent and to organize became in itself a major handicap:

20

Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain The peace societies preached the possibility of permanent unity and concord on a universal scale, yet on their own small scale exhibited few signs of co-operation between themselves. New societies were formed supposedly to develop slight shades of conviction on a particular problem … Pacifists constantly condemned ‘power politics’, yet, within the Peace Movement the struggle for mastery constantly showed itself both between individuals and groups. They ostracized their opponents as they were themselves ostracized.28

Such an approach is easy to criticize as subordinating ideas and passions, and the advancement of particular modes of understanding, to mere organization and minor bureaucracy. Yet the historian has a responsibility to explain the nature of the public sphere as it is and not as it might ideally be. The constraints imposed upon the attainment of policy objectives by the processes of political engagement appeared similar for both the practitioners of and dissenters from foreign policymaking in the 1910s. With John Bright, Robbins explored similar tensions involved in failing, or refusing, to reconcile the tug of collective party responsibility with the push of individual belief. Bright ended up on the losing side of the late Victorian imperial zeitgeist. His consistent revulsion against the Ottoman Turks and his advocacy of good relations with Russia led him into lonely and debilitating opposition to British intervention in the Crimean War, and to renewed political activism in the late 1870s in opposition to Disraeli’s confrontation with Russia.29 Not only did he attack the Conservatives’ expansionism in the late 1870s, he also resigned from the Liberal cabinet over the intervention in Egypt in 1882. The continued British presence in Egypt troubled him to the point where he confided in January 1884 that ‘The Egyptian blunder has blunted the edge of my regard for much further public labor [sic] & service’. He deplored both the decision to send Gordon to Khartoum and the subsequent hero-worship of the slain martyr. The general was in fact ‘a strong fanatic, bordering on the insane, drawing his justification from the horrible stories of the Old Testament wars rather than from the New Testament & Gospel narratives’.30 Yet, while Bright opposed intervention in Egypt, he also objected to the introduction of Home Rule in Ireland; he pressed for land reform, at the expense of absentee aristocratic landowners, but not for larger political concessions. Bright’s shortcomings went beyond major matters of policy; he found it difficult to operate within a political team, did not reach out to the working classes, or even the professional middle classes, and resisted state regulation of the factories upon which his family’s wealth rested.31 Bright’s career illustrated the complexity – of recurrent interest to Robbins – of reconciling the imperatives of government, legitimated by parliamentary consent and by its habitually gradualist and cautious approach to decision-making, with the periodic mobilization of public political opinion. It also demonstrated the influence exerted by external developments – in this case the Crimean War, Russophobia and imperial adventures – in defining national priorities in ways opposed by the leading radical orator of the age. Together, these aspects of Bright’s career

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reinforce the model of a blended national sense of identity which was resistant to rigorously defined conservative or liberal value systems or ideologies. Against Bright’s free trading and theoretically internationalist inclinations the power of the external environment to shape Britishness remained impressive. III If Britain’s world role proved exceptionally complicated, so too did her experience of organized religion: ‘No other country in Europe was as ecclesiastically complex as the United Kingdom’.32 This partly resulted from the establishment of different denominations in England and Scotland, the position of the Anglican Church established in Ireland, until 1870, and the rival claims in different parts of the United Kingdom of the five main denominational groupings of Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists/Congregationalists and Methodists. Some developments, notably the Welsh alignment with Nonconformity, emerged essentially in the nineteenth century. All groupings organized themselves in ways which recognized the diverse national character of the United Kingdom. None of them set up organizational structures which mirrored the United Kingdom itself, although Robbins makes effective play with the movement of individuals and particular groups between the countries; for example, the two primates of the Church of England in 1914 were Scots. Looking beyond the British Isles, most groupings had more to do with America and the Empire than with continental European churches; in theological terms, continental influences seemed to Robbins to be slight. Yet even the late Victorian imperial mission failed to provide the churches in Britain with a point of unity of organization and effort in their overseas roles.33 One aspect of national identity was the seventeenth-century connection asserted between Englishness (later extended to Britishness) and Protestantism. The nature of that linkage in the twentieth century forms an important theme of Robbins’ major study of twentieth-century religion. Another theme concerned closer co-operation with other Protestant denominations. Despite disestablishment in Ireland and then in Wales, despite protracted negotiations about Anglican union with Presbyterians in England from the 1950s (as part of a larger migration to intercommunion with the Church of Scotland and later with the Methodists) and despite efforts to unify the principal Protestant Churches in Wales, ecumenical efforts have failed to remove or erode denominational divisions. Still another theme has been the unique constitutional position of the Church of England, as manifested in the coronation service, in the need for parliamentary approval for key changes in the Church’s governance, and in the composition of the House of Lords. Ecclesiastical politics have been further complicated by Irish circumstances. Until recent decades, the Roman Catholic Church commanded a major power base within independent Ireland, dictating policy on certain issues to the state, recruiting clergy from Ireland and using the Irish diaspora to man the

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hierarchy of the vast Catholic Church in the United States. Anglicans found it far easier to open a dialogue with Catholics in England than in Ireland. Moreover, the involvement of the Churches in Ireland’s politics was complicated by the organization of both the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches on an all-Ireland basis; any discussions conducted by the British government about Northern Irish Catholics’ role had to go through the papal nuncio in Dublin rather than through the papal emissary in London. Doctrinal, as well as organizational, positions have taken varying shape according to the differing social and cultural character of the British Isles; thus Anglicans in Ireland have tended to be Low Church, while Episcopalians in Scotland have tended to be high, in reaction to the contrasting ethos of the predominant denomination in each country. Further challenges for the English national Church have included its peculiar position within the worldwide Anglican communion and the legitimacy of its claims to represent the country as a whole. In an age of declining church attendances, the Roman Catholic Church is now the leading single English denomination in terms of regular worshippers – as it is in the United States even though two-thirds of regular worshippers are Protestant. The impact of changing denominational ties is difficult to assess. For example, both world wars saw the leading Churches rallying to the national cause, despite much denominational activity in opposition to war before both conflicts. But neither war yielded any post-war surge in general religiosity or inter-denominational collaboration.34 Moreover, the competitive consequences of Catholicism’s growth have been mitigated by continuing secularization, a trend following continental European rather than American experiences.35 It might be argued that Robbins’ approach to religious issues and the role of religion in Britain focuses too heavily on matters of organization, structure and affiliation. Such a preoccupation would come naturally to an academic who, over a period of 26 years, spent hardly any time as other than a dean, head of department or principal/vice-chancellor. The ripost would be that grand claims and aspirations in every aspect of human endeavour or experience – sport, culture, religion, politics, business – become entangled in the crushing need for organization, dispute resolution and ‘management’. In examining religious life, as in dealing with other aspects of Britain’s history, Robbins advances a particular position, which is consistent, persistent and persuasive. He refuses to accept that any single theme or issue defined the nation’s past or that there have been developments or reforms of transcendent importance in the making or unmaking of Britain. Instead, he insists upon ambiguity and complexity in the constant tension of competing factors which are in kaleidoscopic and fast-moving interplay with each other. Shifts of emphasis and of opinion rather than dramatic decisions modify rather than transform human understanding and the human condition. This position may not be heavily accentuated in Robbins’ writing but it permeates the analyses and judgements in everything he writes. Furthermore, he concludes his exploration of Church history by emphasizing, in typically understated tones, how the claims that we now live in ‘a secular age’ do not fit with the widespread belief in the existence of a deity and the widespread exploration of spirituality. He ends, as usual, on a

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cautionary note about the false witness of those who claim a single, simple path to an all-encompassing, in this case secularist, truth.36 Such cautionary admonitions are at one with Robbins’ stress upon the improbability that history can offer guidance to the future. In his first book, he declared, ‘the only great lesson of Munich, the most difficult to learn, is that there are no great lessons. Historians, useless in predicting the future, achieve something if they prevent others doing so’.37 Thirty years later, he concluded that, if ‘The future of Britain still remains obscure and its structure may yet be subjected to fresh stresses and strains’, the historian could offer little guidance other than an insistence that Britain’s history would continue to exert a powerful influence over its inhabitants.38 But he equally insisted that historical literacy and understanding were essential: ‘Historical analogy drawn from the British past rarely appears in contemporary rhetoric … British history has largely ceased to be a school for modern British statesmen – but it may be as perilous to be ignorant of the past as it is to be obsessed by it’.39 Such an approach might be criticized as excessively cautious or indeed conservative. His very first book was welcomed for its ‘cool approach and lengthened perspective’ but one reviewer found occasionally that it took its ‘Olympian detachment’ too far.40 Yet Robbins offers a coherent justification for wariness of the melodramatic when taking a long view in history. After all, British intellectuals have been working within traditions of inquiry about political affairs and international relationships which go back to the ancient Greeks. To place British preoccupations within a context which implicitly assumes that we have been grappling with issues concerning the public sphere for over two millennia provides a salutary historical warning against over-emphasis upon the significance of short-term change and monocausal interpretations: ‘Historians and politicians face substantially the same problems. They have to synthesize information from many different sources and reach an overall judgement. The facts may be difficult to substantiate or tantalizingly incomplete. Inevitably, there will be disagreement about the weight to be placed upon various factors’.41 This scepticism applies to model-building in general. In considering the decisive changes of 1989–94 (perhaps, he suggests, a short period which will prove as critical a watershed as the Second World War), Robbins insisted that ‘when change did come, both its scope and timing were rarely predicted – a fact that makes one cautious about academic claims to understand both the international ‘system’ and the dynamics of domestic change’.42 An emphasis on the uncertainty of decision-making and the contingencies in which decisions are made, together with an argument for the protean nature of the national context in which and for which decisions are formulated and identities expressed, form the clear intellectual position that Robbins has articulated for 40 years. To suggest that historians in Britain fail to contribute to a deep and rich public intellectual life can only be sustained by too narrowly limiting the terms by which public intellectuals are defined. By loosening the definition and narrowing the range of the required impact, historians may be seen to contribute to a far wider realm of public debate than Collini somewhat austerely recognizes.

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Endnotes 1 Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), pp. 374–92, 467–68. 2 Richard J. Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and Continental Europe (Cambridge, 2009); Brian Holden Reid, ‘Michael Howard and the Evolution of Modern War Studies’, Journal of Military History, 73 (2009), pp. 869–904. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, for example, offered an impressive series on great historians of the past – Historians on Historians – in the 1980s and 1990s. 3 Collini, Absent Minds, pp. 52, 56, 62–3. 4 He has been a prolific and expeditious reviewer and willing contributor to collections of essays. He worked over many years on the Bibliography of British History  1914–1989 (Oxford, 1996) which includes 27,000 entries. For at least some of the time when this work was in preparation, Robbins anticipated providing critical evaluations of the works listed, which would have made the task attempted even more impressively daunting. 5 Review by T.C. Smout, English Historical Review, 107 (1992), pp. 1043–4. For an introduction to a burgeoning historiography, see David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 427–45. 6 K. Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain: Integration and Diversity (Oxford, 1988), pp. 127, 129, 167; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 35–8. 7 K. Robbins, The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain 1870–1975 (London, 1983); Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain, pp. 95, 165. 8 Robbins, Eclipse of a Great Power, pp. 8–17; K. Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness (London, 1998), pp. 337–43, quote at p. 343. 9 K. Robbins, The World Since 1945: A Concise History (Oxford, 1998), pp. 251, 255. 10 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism; Theory, Ideology, and History (Cambridge, 2001, pp. 108–14, 117–9, 144–6; E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge, 1992 edn), pp. 80–95. 11 Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain, p. 28; Robbins, Great Britain, pp. 187–9. 12 Robbins, Great Britain, pp. 12–15, 33–6, 307–9, 313–9, 329. 13 Ibid., pp. 317–9, 332–4, 339. 14 Robbins, World Since 1945, pp. 119–20, 170, 222–3, 232. 15 K. Robbins, Munich 1938 (London, 1968), pp. 307, 329, 355–8. 16 Ibid., p. 316. 17 Ibid., pp. 130–131, 194, 290, 337. 18 Ibid., p. 340. 19 Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain, pp. 184–5; K. Robbins, The First World War (Oxford, 1984), pp. 16–18, 24. 20 Robbins, Great Britain, p. 235. 21 Ibid., p. 320. 22 K. Robbins, Sir Edward Grey. A Biography of Lord Grey of Fallodon (London, 1971), pp. 33, 76–9, 106–7, 126, 130, 133–7, 227, 231, 290–297, 321, 325–7. 23 K. Robbins, Appeasement (Oxford, 1988), p. 17. 24 Ibid., pp. 6, 14–17, 38, 40, 42–45, 81. These emphases tie in with his scepticism over the impact of the World War I. Robbins, The First World War, pp. 162–4.

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25 K. Robbins, Churchill (London, 1992), pp. 16, 28–9, 31, 83, 93, 103, 109, 132–4, 138, 162–3, 167, 171. 26 Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain, preface. The Bright biography is dedicated to Taylor, who also acted as a referee for Robbins in the 1970s. 27 K. Robbins, The Abolition of War: The British Peace Movement, 1914–1918 (Cardiff, 1976), pp. 25–7, 174, 189–91. 28 Ibid., p. 217. 29 K. Robbins, John Bright (London, 1979), pp. 15, 104–17, 235–7. 30 Ibid., pp. 247–9. 31 Ibid., pp. 49–50, 83–4, 207–9, 260–261. 32 Robbins, Eclipse of a Great Power, pp. 73–4. 33 Ibid., pp. 75, 333–4; Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain, pp. 63–4, 81–2, 91–6; Robbins, Great Britain, pp. 243, 245–50; K. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church 1900–2000 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 351, 466. 34 Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 35, 38–39, 43–6, 103–5, 114, 156–7, 179, 187–9, 203–5, 210, 234–5, 239, 279, 283, 314–5, 330–331, 348, 365, 369, 403, 420, 426–7, 438, 440–441, 463, 469, 470–472. 35 Robbins, Great Britain, pp. 334–5. 36 Robbins England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 472–5. 37 Robbins, Munich 1938, pp. 4–5. 38 Robbins, Great Britain, p. 343. 39 Ibid., p. 321. 40 C.L.Mowat in English Historical Review, 85 (1970), pp. 386–8. 41 Robbins, Appeasement, p. 78. 42 Robbins, World Since 1945, p. 201.

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Chapter 2

The Manner of English Blasphemy, 1676–20081 John Spurr

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008 abolished the common law offence of blasphemy in England and Wales. The offence had first been prosecuted at common law in the seventeenth century and its tortuous history between inception and abolition illuminates much of England’s religious and social history over the intervening centuries. For some of those debating the abolition of the offence in 2008, the ‘blasphemy law’ was one of ‘the historical and cultural threads that make the country what it is’, while in the opinion of the government minister it was ‘moribund and discriminatory’, a blot on Britain’s record in maintaining human rights.2 What MPs were discussing was a specific, but vaguely defined, crime called blasphemy. They did not concern themselves with the underlying notion of blasphemy – and that for a very good reason. Blasphemy is a notoriously slippery concept. The term seems to have its origin in the Greek word used to translate the Hebrew verbs which mean ‘to curse’ and ‘to speak aloud’ in Leviticus 24, where Moses and the children of Israel stone the man who ‘blasphemed’ the name of the Lord.3 Formulating a general category of blasphemy is a challenge. Intending or doing harm is evidently close to the heart of the matter: ‘speaking evil of sacred matters’ is one authority’s definition; another’s is ‘the attacking, wounding and damaging of religious belief’. Many other commentators prefer to regard blasphemy as a cultural phenomenon that arises when one party takes offence at another’s description of something that they hold sacred.4 It is widely held by scholars that accounts of blasphemy must be rooted in specific circumstances; that it is simply more meaningful to discuss a blasphemy than it is to grope after the universal category of blasphemy. They gibe at generalisations such as ‘blasphemy is the speaking of the unspeakable’ on the grounds that ‘there is little to learn from a naked and reductive formula, shorn of historical context’.5 The law and lawyers, however, must, if they can, transcend historical contingencies and proceed from definitions. In the 1979 appeal arising from the last prosecution for blasphemy to be heard before the English courts, the socalled Gay News case or Whitehouse v. Lemon (1976), Lord Scarman concluded his judgment by claiming that the modern law was properly formulated in the following textbook definition:

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain Every publication is said to be blasphemous which contains any contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous matter relating to God, Jesus Christ, or the Bible, or the formularies of the Church of England as by law established. It is not blasphemous to speak or publish opinions hostile to the Christian religion, or to deny the existence of God, if the publication is couched in decent and temperate language. The test to be applied is as to the manner in which the doctrines are advocated and not as to the substance of the doctrines themselves.6

This comprehensive definition covers speech and writing, the Church of England, the Bible, God, Christ and atheism and a test of decency, in other words, a distinction between the manner and the substance of the alleged blasphemy. However, even this was not enough to satisfy the House of Lords Select Committee on Religious Offences in 2003 when it struggled in vain to reconcile the offence of blasphemy with the European Convention on Human Rights. Although the courts in the 1976 case and the 1979 appeal had decided that this was an offence of strict liability, the Select Committee found the position with regard to the act (actus reus) and the intention (mens rea) wholly unsatisfactory.7 Moreover it was clear that the existence of the offence jarred with the European Convention and with the prevalent concern to protect the feelings of every faith community in Britain. As Trevor Phillips, chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, crisply commented when calling for the abolition of the offence in 2005, ‘the law should protect the believer not the belief itself. Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Sikhism are robust enough to fight for themselves’.8 This chimed with the government’s case in 2008: Maria Eagle argued that the blasphemy law was ‘plainly discriminatory’, did ‘more harm than good’, had fallen into disuse and had, anyway, been supplanted by the new offence of incitement to religious hatred.9 This chapter is principally concerned with one aspect of the evolving definitions of the common law crime of blasphemy between the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries: the test of decency. The distinction between the manner and the matter of blasphemy is crucial and obvious. No doubt it is as old as the notion of blasphemy itself. It was far from novel in the seventeenth century when our story begins; but in the second half of that century, as part of wider cultural trends, the distinction was drawn more often and more forcefully than it had been before. This was because the very manner in which some denizens of Restoration and Augustan England treated the sacred matters of religion looked dangerously blasphemous. Poking fun at religion was brought to a new height in these decades, and acquired a distinct tone and register: a sceptical, witty, ironic, tone, known as drollery, mockery, banter or scoffing. This scoffing manner was bequeathed to later generations who adapted it to their rather different purposes. Meanwhile the outrage that this mode of expression provoked among orthodox Christians led to a series of legal cases and judgements in which the very manner of blasphemy became the predominant issue.

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I Early modern blasphemy took many forms. Blasphemy was ‘speaking any evil Thing of God, making War with Heaven itself, and flying as it were in the Face of the Almighty; or scoffing at Religion, and speaking reproachfully of God’s Ordinances’.10 In an age of competitive religious zeal, blasphemy was often to be found in the eye of the beholder. Thus a significant number of individuals – prophets and sectaries, Quakers, Ranters or Socinians – who presumably saw themselves as respectful towards God, were perceived as far from respectful by their orthodox neighbours. Some paid a heavy price. The Quaker James Nayler’s entry into Bristol in 1656, in apparent emulation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, along with palm fronds and female followers crying hosannah, was condemned as blasphemous by the Protectorate Parliament. The MPs ordered that Nayler be branded and his tongue bored. Blasphemy was widely and understandably associated with the denial of God, but avowed atheists remained scarce or perhaps just reticent. Some bold individuals revealed their doubts or indifference: one London witness stated in court that ‘if any here can prove there is a God, I will believe him’.11 In 1732 Henry Williams of Llafwrog, Anglesey, was fined three shillings and four pence for stating in Welsh that God meant no more to him than a blade of grass.12 Alcohol and anger alike fuelled casual blasphemies. We frequently hear of drunken labourers prosecuted for questioning the possibility of the virgin birth or the immortality of the soul. Not that drunken excess was restricted to the labouring classes. During a ‘frolic’ at the Cock Tavern in Bow Street on 16 June 1663, an inebriated and possibly naked Sir Charles Sedley, courtier and playwright, ‘abused’ Scripture and preached ‘a mountebanke sermon’ – ‘with eloquence preaching blasphemy to the people’.13 Predictably there were also more idiosyncratic, not to say crazy, utterances. A Middlesex man was accused in 1666 of ‘speaking blasphemous words, vizt, that he the said [Samuel] Seares was really Christ’.14 An unnamed ‘maid’ arraigned for preaching blasphemy at the Old Bailey in 1678 was no sooner released on a promise of good behaviour than she ‘fell to it afresh’ claiming that she was the third person of the Trinity ‘for which Impious Expression, she is likely to be Whipt into better Manners of Religion’.15 Of all these different facets of blasphemy, it is ‘scoffing at religion’ that is most germane to the concerns of this essay. Purposeful scoffing was the ill Practice of such as set their Mouths against Heaven, by prophanely making Holy Writ the subject of their Mirth, and Drollery, ridiculing Vertue and Religion, and (in as much as in them lies) laughing all Piety out of Countenance, without which Cicero tells us, No Faith could be secured, no Society amongst Men could be preserved, nor that most excellent Vertue of Justice it self subsist; And therefore, to speak loosely, and wantonly about holy Things, or Persons; to make any thing nearly relating to God and Religion, the Matter of Sport and Mockery; or to turn the Sentences and Phrases of the Holy Scripture into Jest, and Ridicule, is (notwithstanding the commonness thereof) a very great Sin.16

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The ‘commonness’ of scoffing was indeed remarkable in late seventeenth-century England. Its hallmarks were laughter, ridicule and mockery, but these were spread along a spectrum ranging from the vituperative at one end to the gentlest of irony at the other. Much scoffing was verbal and ephemeral. As is the way of such things, we usually learn more about scoffing from its critics than we do from its practitioners. It is its opponents who proffer the forthright descriptions of ‘Buffoonery and Banter, Ridicule and Sarcastick Irony’, while the scoffers take refuge in dissimulation.17 When a scoffer did justify his stance and style, he naturally did so in a suitably mocking and offensive manner. In 1729 Anthony Collins defended the use of irony in a world-weary, cynical tone calculated to cause offence while apparently stating a truism: ‘the Opinions and Practices of Men in all Matters, and especially in Matters of Religion, are generally so absurd and ridiculous that it is impossible for them not to be the Subjects of Ridicule … Laughing therefore, and Ridicule in serious Matters, go around the World with no inconsiderable Applause, and seem highly proper for this World of Nonsense and Folly’.18 Ridicule of serious matters was a characteristic of that period between the Restoration and the mid-eighteenth century, roughly from Hobbes to Hume, which is now often called the early English Enlightenment. This was an era of radical philosophical speculation and scientific discovery, a period of new political organisations – political parties, newspapers and coffee houses – and of new energies mobilised by these institutions. It was also a period that had its own distinctive mode of expression, urbane, ironic, witty, indirect and yet full of verve and invention. A scoffing satirical quality seemed to animate cultural and public life. The stage was full of raillery and repartee: the fop, the would-be wit, was the butt of the withering commentary and banter of the true wit. Playwrights and poets laid about each other in verse, excoriating the sons of dullness and all the Grub Street race. The rage of political party was expressed and fuelled by the caustic satires of L’Estrange and Marvell, Defoe and Swift. Yet it was perhaps organised religion that bore the brunt of the levity. There were generations reacting against religious enthusiasm, suspicious of cant and hypocrisy, sceptical of the clerical profession and the Church, especially of the Church’s privileged political and social position. Those who cast themselves as freethinkers claimed to follow reason without constraint from authority or convention, and to find little reason in revealed religion. This lineage may well begin with Thomas Hobbes in the 1650s. In recent years Hobbes has been re-read. Quentin Skinner has revealed his rhetorical strategies and shown us that Hobbes was a very artful author indeed, and Roger Lund has drawn attention to Hobbes’ ‘dissimulation, irreverent skepticism, ironic indirection and epigrammatic wit’.19 Lund has argued that Leviathan was seen by many as an exercise in ‘philosophic drollery’, an unsettling mixture of reason and raillery aimed at clerical and religious targets. Hobbes spawned a long line of witty debunkers of orthodox and organised Christianity, men like Charles Blount, an early populariser of Spinoza, the republican John Toland, author of Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), the deist third Earl of Shaftesbury and the freethinkers Anthony Collins,

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Thomas Woolston and Matthew Tindal. These authors were perceived to have a common style.20 Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706), for example, was accused of displaying ‘the most scurrilous Contempt and scornful Disdain that Profane Wit and Malice could invent’; his writings, like those of Blount and Toland, were full of ‘Scandalous Reflections and Profane, Scornful, Impious, Blasphemous Revilings of the Blessed Son of God Christ Jesus and his Religion’.21 Scoffing, however, was a broader phenomenon than freethinking. In the minds of the orthodox, scoffing was a tidal wave of blasphemy, while the fashion for ‘atheistic drollery’ was a social and generational innovation. ‘There was never any other Age, in which sacred and serious things have been so rudely and impudently assaulted by the prophane abuses of Jesters and Buffoons’, protested Joseph Glanvill, rector of Bath Abbey: we see the folly and ignorance of our fore-fathers; and laugh at the Tales with which crafty Priests abused their easiness, and credulity. Spiritual substance! Immortal souls! Authority of Scripture! Fictions, Ideas, Phantomes, Jargon: Here is demonstration against the spiritual Trade and spiritual men. The rest of the work is for Songs and Plays; for the wit and humour of agreeable conversation. Thus far we are come, and the infection spreads; so that there is scarce a little vain Thing that hath a mind to be modish, but sets up for a derider of God, and of Religion; and makes a scoff of the most serious thoughts, and profession of the wisest men of all Ages. Heaven and Hell are become words of sport, and Devils and Angels, Fairyes and Chimeras: ‘tis Foppish to speak of Religion, but in Railery; or to mention such a thing as Scripture; except it be to burlesque and deride it.22

Religion was ridiculed in speech, on the stage and in print. Pamphleteers poured scorn on anyone who cannot speak for fifteen minutes, ‘but he must either scoff at religion or sacred offices, or repeat profane, debauched or scurrilous language, or make reflections upon other men’s infirmities and misfortunes’.23 ‘On what unhappy times are we fallen’, wailed Jeremy Collier, scourge of Restoration playwrights, ‘That the Poets should suffer’d to play upon the Bible, and Christianity be Hooted off the Stage!’24 ‘Is it such an Entertainment to see Religion worryed by Atheism, and Things the most Solemn and Significant tumbled and tost by Buffoons?’25 ‘Abhor all such books as turn religion into jest and mirth’, urged Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London in 1728. ‘When you meet with any Book upon the Subject of Religion, that is written in a ludicrous or unserious manner; take it for granted that it proceeds from a deprav’d mind, and is written with an irreligious design. Such Books are calculated not to inform the Understanding, but to corrupt the Heart’.26 And the result of all this? By the 1730s it certainly seemed to Bishop Butler that it was as if everyone now agreed religion to be fictitious ‘and nothing remained, but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world’.27

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II What did scoffing amount to? It can be characterised by its rhetorical style and its targets. The style relies on a host of tactics: irony, irreverence, sarcasm, indirection, understatement, innuendo, false questions, feigned surprise or bewilderment, disingenuous disclaimers, parallels and parodies, versions of the reductio ad absurdam and the ability to insinuate something without ever quite stating it. The aim was to puncture certainties and raise unsettling thoughts, often in a witty turn. Thomas Hobbes, for example, remarked that ‘miracles are marvellous works, but that which is marvellous to one, may not be so to another’; or – even more startlingly epigrammatic and destructive of the underpinnings of revealed Christianity – for a man to say that God ‘hath spoken to him in a dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him’.28 What price miracles and personal revelations after those barbed comments? More elaborate exercises such as Blount’s Life of Appollonius or Toland’s Gospel of Barnabus were designed to debunk Christian history or theology under the guise of pseudolearned treatises. Such views and works were circulating in an intellectual context where expressions of outright atheism tended to be clandestine: although the shocking allegation that Moses, Mahomet and Christ were all three rogues, cheats and imposters was in circulation, as were the very different arguments of Spinoza, these were not quite in the style of our scoffers. Scoffers tended to be more circumspect or less serious. ‘It may be necessary … for wise men to speak in parables and with a double meaning, that the enemy may be amused and they only “who have ears to hear may hear” [Matthew 11: 15]’.29 A great deal of ink has been spilt in discussing whether their meanings were encoded: were they esoteric and intended for those in-the-know, or were these authors forced into levity and self-censorship by the threat of prosecution? Members of the clerical profession were a prime target for the scoffers, who took aim at the bubble of clerical pretension and pomposity, as well as at the intellectual constraints imposed by religion and at the obscurantism of divines. Taken together, and spiced with wit, these resentments and grievances emboldened Englishmen first to detect and then to denounce clerical tyranny or ‘priestcraft’. They were drawing upon the age-old suspicion that a self-interested and domineering clergy had made religion into a mystery, a trade or a craft. Francis Osborne warned that the curious questions of school divinity simply dulled the edge of faith and formed the weapons of contention: they had been ‘devised to puzzle the laity, and render the clergy no less necessary than honourable’.30 Priestcraft was a political design to keep the clergy in the saddle and the laity in tutelage; it involved a spell that could be cast over princes to enslave them to the nefarious ambitions of the clergy. The Roman Catholic clergy were obvious practitioners of the art, but some Restoration Englishmen saw evidence of its practice in the English Church, and especially on the part of the bishops. It became a witty commonplace that the world contains mainly ‘fools and knaves’, and that the clerical knaves had usurped power ‘over the folly and ignorance of

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the others’.31 In 1682 Dryden’s Religio Laici was greeted as a resounding blow for freedom from ‘the holy cheat’ and the tyranny of the priest. After 1688, there was an even more pronounced and explicit tradition of anticlericalism. Matthew Tindal remarked that ‘nothing sooner [gives] a Man the Character of an Atheist than being an Enemy to Priestcraft’.32 Scoffing did not confine itself to institutional targets such as the clergy and the Church. It was also directed at the Word of God. Bishop Gibson complained that it was ‘usual in loose Company among unthinking People’ to make Scripture ‘the subject of Wit and Jesting, and of raising Mirth from unserious Allusions to the Language or Matter of it’.33 Such abuse might range from silly jokes to drawing attention to the inconsistencies and internal contradictions of Scripture. The more effective sallies were often pretences at explaining the text or translating terms. According to one critic, Hobbes ‘presumes to give such unnatural explanations, descriptions, and definitions to several words and terms, which in themselves have no difficulty, as disturbs the whole Analogy of Scripture, and exposes those expressions, which are dictated by the Spirit of God, in his light and comical interpretations, to the mirth of those who are too much inclin’d to be merry with the Scripture, and to the scandal of all men who are piously affected’.34 The pose of an objective, dispassionate reader of Scripture was transparently bogus. Anthony Collins insinuated that God was speaking ironically or sarcastically in Genesis 3: 22, where Adam and Eve ate the apple – ‘behold the man is become like one of us, to know good and evil’. ‘I think this Passage shews, that the whole affair of the Fall, of which we have so very brief an Account, was a very entertaining scene’.35 This was calculated to be gratuitously insulting language. Thomas Woolston’s Six Discourses of the Miracles of our Saviour (1729) poked fun at Christ’s miracles, deliberately and provocatively opening them up to ridicule by asking, for example, why had Christ not been sued for damages by the owners of the Gadarene swine? Scoffers were natural sceptics and therefore unlikely to form neat parties. Yet in the eyes of the orthodox – and the orthodox, if not the pious, were the vast majority of the population – scoffers did form a threatening whole, an undifferentiated body of jeering, dangerous and immoral men, whose manner betrayed the rottenness of their lives and principles. They threatened an inundation of what Atterbury called ‘levity, lewdness and irreligion’.36 Individual scoffers stood for the whole and confirmed the worst fears of the orthodox, whether they forsook their evil ways, as did Rochester and Burridge, or remained defiantly unrepentant. George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, one of the ‘Court wits’ of Charles II’s reign, exemplified all that the orthodox most feared: he was debauched – guilty of open adultery with the Countess of Shrewsbury, whose husband he had allegedly killed in a duel; he was a religious sceptic – a noted lampooner of the bishops and advocate of freedom of religious belief; and, to top it all, he was a scoffer. In the House of Commons, he was charged with, among much else, an addiction to levity. King and nation were in danger, thundered one MP, ‘from a knot of persons that meet at the duke’s, who love

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neither morality nor Christianity, who turn our saviour and parliaments into ridicule, and contrive prorogations’. Another member lamented that Buckingham ‘laughs always at all religion and true wisdom’.37 ‘I am represented as a constant companion of drolls and lampoons and as one that abuses all serious things’, complained Buckingham. His defence was all too witty. The only ‘grave things’ he had deliberately ridiculed were ‘grave follies’ since ‘some follies are more foolish for being grave’. He wished that his enemies had turned only his own weapons of ‘mirth’ and ‘innocent laughter’ against him.38 Buckingham survived these politically motivated attacks, but other scoffers were not so lucky. In 1729 Thomas Woolston’s irony at the expense of Christ’s miracles was greeted with outrage and then prosecution on a charge of blasphemous libel. Convicted, fined and imprisoned for a year, Woolston was also required ‘to continue in prison for life’ unless he and other sureties would be bound in the huge sum of £4,000 for his good behaviour during his lifetime. Woolston remained in gaol, defiantly still publishing, until his death in 1733.39 Individual scoffers at religion were fair game. And what they said was far less important than how they said it. Bishop Gibson’s comment on Woolston’s case is illuminating: As to the Blasphemous Manner in which a late Writer has taken the liberty to treat our Saviour’s Miracles and the Author of them; though I am far from contending, that the Ground of the Christian Religion, and the Doctrines of it, may not be discuss’d at all times, in a calm, decent, and serious way (on the contrary, I am very sure, that the more fully they are discuss’d, the more firmly they will stand,) yet I cannot but think it the Duty of the Civil Magistrate at all times, to take care that Religion be not treated either in a ludicrous, or a reproachful manner, and effectually to discourage such Books and Writings, as strike equally at the Foundation of all Religion, and of Truth. Virtue, Seriousness, and good Manners; and by consequence at the Foundation of Civil Society.40

So we can see that when ridicule offended, when mockery hit home, the offended wanted to hit back. Clerical authors claimed to welcome ‘sober reasoning’, but they would not tolerate mockery and scoffing. In their eyes, scoffing was an attempt to corrupt the heart, not to inform the understanding. It was an appeal to the passions, vices and emotions, not to reason. The freethinkers, who claimed that they sought ‘combat by wit and argument’, responded with the accusation that they were not allowed the liberty to examine the truth of things, but were forced into irony and ridicule by the intolerance of their opponents. Neither side surrendered the arguments of substance, but both sides paid increasing attention to the manner of the debate. Meanwhile the orthodox invoked the aid of the civil magistrate in suppressing this manner of irreligion, and to achieve that end, scoffing had to be converted into the offence of blasphemy.

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III Blasphemy is a sin. It is a spiritual offence, often allied with heresy and apostasy, and so traditionally the concern of the Church courts. Blasphemous statements and beliefs were pursued sporadically by the bishops in medieval and early modern England – often as part of campaigns against Lollards or Anabaptists – and by the mid-sixteenth century the offence was also occasionally brought before the Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber. Blasphemy became a statutory offence under short-lived legislation of 1648 and 1650 and under the 1698 Blasphemy Act, which, although never used, was only repealed in 1967. These statutes were all designed against sectaries and heretics who denied the central dogmas or doctrines of Christianity – the 1698 Act was aimed against those who denied the Trinity – and so any prosecution under these laws would require a clear doctrinal statement to be at issue. Far more common than doctrinal blasphemy was, of course, the casual profane swearing and blasphemy, the ‘by God’ which punctuated early modern conversations and which was the subject of specific legislation between the reigns of James I and George III. A statute of 1624 created a summary offence dealt with by a Justice of the Peace and imposed a fine of 12d for each oath, the fine to be used for poor relief, while for those too poor to pay, the tariff was three hours in the stocks for every offence. In 1695 new legislation made convictions easier by reducing the number of required witnesses from two to one, and pegged the fine at 12d for servants, day labourers, common soldiers and sailors, and at 2 shillings for all other social ranks. Thus we find Isaac Loader, a Kentish JP, reporting that in the summer of 1709, he had fined John Tyldesley, gentleman of East Greenwich, £1 for 10 oaths, Thomas Pheanes, a Deptford mason, 1 shilling for one oath and Margaret Finch, wife of a Deptford baker, 10 shillings for ten oaths.41 In 1745 the tariff was revised into three bands by adding a 5 shilling per oath charge for gentlemen and above. These acts required an information upon oath from a witness who had heard the oath or for the oath to have been uttered in the hearing of a JP. Such records suggest that in most cases the blasphemy was ‘by God’. But other profanities were open to prosecution; for example the reform societies of the 1690s encouraged informants to report when ‘God, Lord, Jesus, or Christ are used plainly and lightly and in the sense of an affirmation or negation’.42 While these two categories of seventeenth-century blasphemy – belief and profanity – were criminalised by statutes, the definition of scoffing as blasphemy is a tale from a different part of the English law, the common law. The path by which the common law took cognisance of the crime of blasphemy is fairly clear. An early step occurred in 1663 when Sir Charles Sedley’s frolic at the Cock Tavern led to his appearance before King’s Bench on a charge of blasphemy: he was fined and very briefly imprisoned; and the Chief Justice Foster told him that it was the court’s duty to punish ‘profane’ actions against Christianity. The principle was firmly established by the Taylor case of 1676. John Taylor, yeoman of Guildford, was indicted for saying

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain Christ is a whore-master, and religion is a cheat, and profession [of Christianity] is a cloak, and they are both cheats, and all the earth is mine, and I am a King’s son, my father sent me hither, and made me a fisherman to take vipers, and I neither fear God, devil, nor man, and I am a younger brother to Christ, an angel of God, and no man fears God but an hypocrite. Christ is a bastard, God damn and confound all your gods, Christ is the whore’s master.43

Taylor was convicted, and sentenced to the pillory and to wear a sign reading ‘for blasphemous words, tending to the subversion of all government’. The judge, Sir Matthew Hale, laid down that ‘to say religion is a cheat, is to dissolve all those obligations whereby the civil societies are preserved, and that Christianity is parcel of the laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law’. He also defined the offence of blasphemy as ‘contumelious reproaches of God, or the religion establisht’. Hale’s 1676 judgement was a landmark statement in the law of blasphemy because it established a) that this spiritual matter was a common law offence, and b) that Christianity could not be insulted because that would subvert government. Some commentators may have interpreted Hale’s judgement too readily as an assertion of religion over law and state: Elliott Visconsi has recently argued that we should see this ruling was part of Hale’s claim for secular jurisdiction over blasphemy and for moderation in the face of the severity demanded by religious zealots.44 Hale’s judgement marked a discernible shift of legal emphasis. Not, I suspect, because it marked a new attitude towards blasphemy on the part of the authorities; after all, the civil and ecclesiastical powers had always seen blasphemy as socially dangerous (as well as harmful to the sinner), and always been alert to the manner in which blasphemy was uttered, the mode and scale of its dissemination, as well as to what was actually said. The judgement was a watershed because it created a usefully capacious legal category. Legal developments are often about the possibility of prosecution, the creation of categories that allow the identification and penalisation of crimes. In this case the state had thrown in its lot with the Church of England and with Christianity: criticise one and you criticise the other, or, as many commentators have claimed, henceforth blasphemy was little more than a form of sedition. Blasphemy was certainly the utterance or publication of a reproachful statement, and was therefore classified by eighteenth-century lawyers and their successors under the general heading of libel. According to Blackstone, in the eighteenth century libel had four heads – sedition, defamation, obscenity and blasphemy. The fourth species of offences therefore, more immediately against God and religion, is that of blasphemy against the Almighty, by denying his being or providence; or by contumelious reproaches of our Saviour Christ. Whither also may be referred all profane scoffing at the Holy Scripture, or exposing it to contempt and ridicule. These are offences punishable at common law by fine and imprisonment, or other infamous corporal punishment: for Christianity is part of the laws of England.45

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The charge of blasphemous libel shaped the way that the British state dealt with scoffers over the next centuries. A number of prosecutions were mounted for blasphemous libel across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Naturally each of these was rooted in a specific set of circumstances, but a broad trend is discernible. Initially the defendants were sceptics, deists and atheists, men like Woolston; but later, as political radicalism developed, working-class agitation emerged, and the spectre of revolution loomed, those prosecuted tended to be republicans, freethinkers and secularists. Blasphemy cases, like other libel charges, came by the 1790s to centre on political freedoms, especially the freedom of expression and publication. The Tory governments of the era were keen to use charges of this kind to repress radicals. Bow Street runners were despatched to apprehend seditious books and their blasphemous publishers. Booksellers who specialised in selling cheap print to the common man found themselves in court for publishing wicked, scandalous and blasphemous libels: Thomas Williams was prosecuted in 1797 for selling Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, as was Richard Carlile who received a threeyear sentence in 1819; Daniel Eaton was prosecuted on the same charge in 1813 for distributing The Rights of Man; and Henry Hetherington was prosecuted in 1840 for selling Haslam’s Letters. Accusations were generously framed: a book was often charged in a blanket phrase as ‘scandalous, impious, blasphemous and profane’.46 Yet these cases were rarely as effective as the government had hoped. The charges allowed too much latitude to jurors and handed a public platform to defendants who were adept at turning it to their advantage.47 Joss Marsh’s close attention to nineteenth-century blasphemy trials has revealed that they were about so much more than the repression of heterodox opinion. They were contests over free speech, secularisation, political causes such as working class political participation and republicanism, and the elevation of high culture and especially literature as marks of moral seriousness to be contrasted with the vulgar language of artisans and radicals. A distinct class bias was in operation. The wealthy and educated were permitted a level of heterodoxy denied to the common man: in 1841 Edward Moxon, the publisher of Shelley’s Queen Mab, was acquitted on charges of publishing a blasphemy; the next year the workingclass atheist Jacob Holyoake got six months for blasphemy. Marsh argues that blasphemy was also increasingly confused with indecency and in due course obscenity: what she has identified as a high Victorian crisis of language led to a series of restrictions on words and speech – some of it through legislation such as the Obscene Publications Act of 1852 and some of it through the emergence of powerful cultural norms such as ‘bowdlerisation’ and the vogue for euphemism. However, it is not class, radicalism or obscenity that is my concern, but scoffing. Scoffing was at the forefront of many blasphemy trials. In 1817 the small-time bookseller William Hone was tried and acquitted three times for his political pamphlets that parodied the catechism, creed and liturgy. His acquittal was due in no small part to the hilarity that had ensued when he read out his humorous pamphlets in court. Chief Justice Ellenborough raged that he had produced ‘an impious and profane libel … on one of the most beautiful compositions that ever

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came from the hands of men … to bring this into ridicule, to endeavour to write down the Litany, was impious and profane’.48 After Richard Carlile was imprisoned for the blasphemy of selling Paine’s Age of Reason, his Fleet Street bookshop was staffed by ‘volunteers’, who continued to distribute radical works, and who were repeatedly brought before the courts. In 1824 one such volunteer ‘made a defence which lasted nearly five hours, in which he ridiculed most of the prophecies and miracles contained in the holy scriptures, and made the most indecent and shocking reflections upon the characters of the prophets and apostles’.49 In the 1880s humour was a favoured weapon of the atheist periodical The Freethinker which hoped that ‘the absurdities of faith’ would be ‘slain with laughter’. This irreligious version of Punch ran a comic strip ‘Comic Bible’, which included amusing cartoons – ‘Let there be light’ accompanied a drawing of the Almighty as an old gent in a fez lighting his pipe – and skits. According to these humorists, Joshua was remarkable for circumcising a million and a half Jews in a day and this ‘surprising old Jew was as great in oratory as in surgery … He addressed an audience of three millions, and everyone heard him … No wonder the walls of Jericho fell down when Joshua joined in the shout’. ‘Here was Christianity as it might have been played in a music hall’, comments Marsh.50 The apparent climacteric arrived in 1883. On the complaint of Henry Varley, an evangelical Notting Hill butcher, several of those associated with The Freethinker, including its editor G.W. Foote and the great radical campaigner Charles Bradlaugh, were prosecuted for blasphemy. The details of the trials need not detain us, although they did lead to Foote’s detention for a year with hard labour in Holloway. What marks out Foote’s case as of historical significance is the judgement pronounced by Chief Justice Coleridge. Coleridge attempted to clarify matters: ‘I now lay it down as law, that, if the decencies of controversy are observed, even the fundamentals of religion may be attacked without a person being guilty of blasphemous libel’.51 In other words, an acceptable inquiry into religion can be distinguished from an unacceptable assault. The matter of a statement was distinct from the manner of a blasphemy. IV The distinction between the manner and the matter of an attack on religious belief goes to the heart of notions of blasphemy; but as so often, perspective is all. One view is that the prosecution of blasphemy was intended to protect the law of the land, taken to include Christianity, and that the scurrilous nature of blasphemous utterances was a separate issue, possibly a side issue. The judges both drew this distinction and confounded it. In 1819 Richard Carlile was told by C.J. Abbot that he was prosecuted for ‘a work of calumny and scoffing’, which ‘reviles and calumniates’ the Christian religion, rather than ‘a calm, serious, dispassionate, inquiry into the truth, or the evidence of the truth, of our religion’ – yet he was also told that the law did not allow any man to deny the truth of the Christian

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religion.52 Those commentators eager to trace the emergence of the principle that it is permissible to question religion prefer to latch on to Coleridge’s 1883 dictum that there is no offence of blasphemy if the inquiry is decently expressed. This is to separate reasoned argument from mockery and abuse and to place reasoned argument beyond the reach of the law. A clear triumph for reason! Yet the position may be less straightforward than it appears. Blasphemy, according to Coleridge, lies in the manner of the attack, in its indecency, mockery or ridicule. This, in turn, raises two questions: one about historical practice and the other about judgement. Historically, the prosecution of blasphemy was already in fact limited to insulting and indecent attacks on religion. ‘The course hitherto adopted in England’, commented the 1841 Royal Commission, ‘has been to withhold the application of the penal law, unless in cases where insulting or contumelious language is used, and where it may fairly be presumed that the intention of the offender is not grave discussion, but a mischievous design to wound the feelings of others … It is only where irreligion has assumed the form of blasphemy, in its true and primitive meaning, and constituted both an insult to God and man, that the interference of the criminal law has taken place’.53 Roger Lund sees the 1729 trial of Thomas Woolston for blasphemous libel as a key moment. The court invoked the 1676 precedent: ‘Christianity is a parcel of the common law of England … whatever strikes at the very root of Christianity, tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government’. It then proceeded to convict Woolston on the grounds of the style of his writing: his defence that he was mounting a serious argument that Christ’s miracles were to be understood as metaphors could not outweigh the evidence of his mocking prose.54 He was convicted for the manner as much as the matter of his book; indeed, it is possible that he could have made the same argument in a plain and respectful prose and not have been prosecuted at all. More than a century later, in 1840, Hetherington was convicted for this apparently ‘insulting and contumelious’ expostulation: What wretched stuff this Bible is to be sure! What a random idiot its author must have been! I would advise the human race to burn every Bible they have got. Such a book is actually a disgrace to ourang outangs, much less to men. I would advise them to burn it, in order that posterity may never know we believed in such abominable trash.55

In the 1970s Lord Scarman believed that ‘the watershed between the old and the modern law’ of blasphemy was located in the judgements on Hetherington in 1840 and Ramsay and Foote in 1883. Scarman – like many of his predecessors – quoted Lord Denman’s summing up in the Hetherington case of 1840: Now, gentlemen, upon the question whether it is blasphemous or not I have this general observation to make, which I have often heard from Lord Tenterden in cases of this description, namely, that the question is not altogether a matter of opinion, but that it must be, in a great degree, a question as to the tone, and

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain style, and spirit, in which such inquiries are conducted. Because, a difference of opinion may subsist, not only as between different sects of Christians, but also with regard to the great doctrines of Christianity itself; and I have heard that great judge declare, that even discussions upon that subject may be by no means a matter of criminal prosecution, but, if they be carried on in a sober and temperate and decent style, even those discussions may be tolerated, and may take place without criminality attaching to them; but that, if the tone and spirit is that of offence, and insult, and ridicule, which leaves the judgment really not free to act, and, therefore, cannot be truly called an appeal to the judgment, but an appeal to the wild and improper feelings of the human mind, more particularly in the younger part of the community, in that case the jury will hardly feel it possible to say that such opinions, so expressed, do not deserve the character which is affixed to them in this indictment.56

So in 1883 Coleridge was doing no more than enunciating a distinction between manner and matter that was already well established in practice and in some quarters of public life. Moreover many commentators would argue it has continued in practice – albeit very rarely – up to the Gay News trial of 1976. There was also a matter of judgement here, but perhaps of literary judgement. Coleridge’s dictum meant that the manner of the blasphemy was now what had to be judged. Hetherington’s splenetic claims had to be judged as insulting. In Bradlaugh’s case of 1883, the court was asked to judge whether the following was insulting in manner: The God whom Christians love and adore is depicted in the Bible with a character more bloodthirsty than a Bengal tiger or a Bashi-Bazouk. He is credited with all the vices and scarcely any of the virtues of a painted savage. Wanton cruelty and heartless barbarity are his essential characteristics. If any despot of the present time tried to emulate, at the expense of his subjects, the misdeeds of Jehovah, the great majority of Christian men would denounce his conduct in terms of indignation.57

And on whose behalf, by whose standards, are the judges and the juries to make these judgements? In 1883, when Foote was imprisoned, liberal public opinion was outraged at the stylistic judgement behind the conviction. ‘The only essential difference between Mr Matthew Arnold’s sarcasms and the caricatures of Mr Foote is one of refinement’, argued an Anglican clergyman. ‘The one is polished, keen, suggestive, the other rough, outspoken, and course [sic]. One wields the rapier, the other brandishes the bludgeon’.58 As Peter Jones observes, what was novel in Coleridge’s decision was his willingness to take account of the manner of the attack ‘in such a way that the object of the legal protection became Christian believers rather than Christian belief’. In the nineteenth century Christian believers were the dominant majority and the ‘manner’ issue was judged in terms of class, propriety and culture: ‘uncultured men speaking at street corners’ – socialists, birth-control pioneers and other radicals –

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were subject to prosecution.59 In the late twentieth century the boot was on the other foot; Christians were an embattled minority and used the ‘manner’ of the alleged blasphemy to claim a special hurt, as Mary Whitehouse did in 1976. As late as 2007 the same arguments were heard and the same definitions cited when ‘Christian Voice’ attempted to prosecute ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’. Even as it ruled that the Theatre and Broadcasting Acts prevented a prosecution for blasphemy, the High Court was clear about the definition of blasphemy as ‘contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous, and/or ludicrous material relating to God, Christ, the Bible, or the formularies of the Church of England’.60 By passing the question of ‘manner’ to the courts, to juries, to pressure groups and even to the tabloid press, blasphemy has clearly become the special hurt suffered or claimed by any group.61 V The manner of English blasphemy resolves into questions of offence given and offence taken. There is no doubt that scoffers set out to wound. Their gibes may be couched in the elegant eighteenth-century mock apologia of Anthony Collins: this manner of writing is seldom complain’d of, as unfit to be allow’d, by any but those who feel themselves hurt by it. For the solemn and grave can bear a solemn and grave Attack: That gives them a sort of Credit in the World, and makes them appear considerable to themselves, as worthy of a serious Regard. But Contempt is what they, who commonly are the most contemptible and worthless of Men, cannot bear or withstand, as setting them in their true Light.62

Or the gibes may take a crass twenty-first century form: that barometer of contemporary Western taste YouTube currently hosts the ‘Blasphemy Challenge’, the ‘Rational Response Squad’s’ invitation to individuals to video their own repudiation of the Holy Spirit – the unforgivable blasphemy according to Mark 3: 29. Whatever the stylistic differences, these are deliberate attempts to offend the devout by mockery. Meanwhile, some of the devout persist in their failure to distinguish their own hurt from any affront offered to their God. In the 2008 last-ditch parliamentary attempt to preserve the legal offence of blasphemy, Anne Widdecombe MP argued that should a colleague assert to her that Christ was not God, this would be an opinion not a blasphemy: However if he were to do something completely different – to mock, to ridicule and to use, in the most horrible fashion, the person of Jesus Christ – that would be a direct assault on me as a Christian. What a lot of people fail to understand about blasphemy is that it hurts deeply and is deeply offensive. The reason the Muslim community got so worked up about those cartoons was that they did not mock Muslims – they mocked the Prophet. None of us would get worried about Christians being mocked, but when Christ is mocked, that is different.63

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The gulf can only widen as atheism increasingly comes into conflict with all forms of belief. Jousting with each other on BBC Radio 4, Lord Robert Winston, the Jewish fertility expert, and Richard Dawkins, the apostle of atheism, had a telling exchange. Winston averred that he had no problem with atheism, ‘it’s the tone I object to’. Immediately Dawkins countered that there is ‘something about religion that feels entitled to take offence’, and then turned the knife with the observation that ‘offence is something that people take when they’ve run out of arguments’.64 These are sentiments and distinctions that have been with us since at least the seventeenth century. Translated into the wider arena of equality of respect and treatment for all beliefs and faith groups, it is difficult not to see the manner of criticism becoming just as troublesome in the future as it has been in the past. Despite the abolition of the offence of blasphemy, the offence given by the tone of attacks on belief is unlikely to diminish. Endnotes 1 I am grateful to audiences in Bath, Cardiff and Cambridge who have heard earlier versions of some of these arguments, to Elliott Visconsi, to the work of Roger Lund and to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University, for the award of a fellowship during which I did some of the preliminary reading for this essay. 2 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Debate in the House of Commons on the Lords’ Amendment 116 to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, 6 May 2008, column 640 (Richard Bacon and Maria Eagle). 3 David Lawton, Blasphemy (Hemel Hempstead, 1993), p. 14. There is a huge literature on the subject including Alain Cabantous, Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century ( New York, 2002); Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth-century England (Chicago, 1998); David Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the Present (Aldershot, 1999); David Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (Oxford, 2007); Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Blasphemy and Heresy: The Modernist Challenge. A Review Article’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (1995), pp. 399–412; Peter Jones, ‘Blasphemy, Offensiveness and the Law’, British Journal of Political Science, 10 (1980); Leonard W. Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offence against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (New York, 1993); David Nash, ‘“To Prostitute Morality, Libel Religion, and Undermine Government”: Blasphemy and the Strange Persistence of Providence in Britain since the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Religious History, 32 (2008), pp. 439–56. 4 Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World, p. 1; Levy, Blasphemy, p. 3; Lawton, Blasphemy, pp. 1–16. 5 Marsh, Word Crimes, p. 7; J Villa-Flores, Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson, AZ, 2006), pp. 7, 19. This is a slightly different point from David Nash’s interesting suggestion of ‘passive blasphemy’ in Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World, pp. 24, 49, 185. 6 The textbook cited was Stephen’s Digest of the Criminal Law, 9th edn (1950), in Whitehouse v. Lemon; Whitehouse v. Gay News Ltd On Appeal From Regina v. Lemon, House of Lords, 21 February 1979, reported at 2 WLR 287 (1979) consulted online at lawindexpro.

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7 ‘Strict liability’ means that the defendant’s intention is regarded as irrelevant; what is at issue is whether or not the defendant did publish the material that is the subject of the prosecution. House of Lords Select Committee on Religious Offences (2003), First Report, appendix 3 (available online at http://www.parliament.the-stationeryoffice.co.uk/pa/ld200203). 8 ‘Modernise Blasphemy Laws, Says Race Relations Chief’, The Times (13 January 2005), p. 31. 9 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (6 May 2008), cols 638, 639–40, 666 (Maria Eagle). 10 Henry Hooton, A Bridle for the Tongue (London, 1709), p. 9. 11 Michael Hunter, ‘The Problem of ‘Atheism’ in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 35 (1985), p. 137; also see Gerald Aylmer, ‘Unbelief in Seventeenth-Century England’, in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978); Michael Hunter, ‘“Aikenhead the Atheist”: The Context and Consequences of Articulate Irreligion in the late Seventeenth Century’, in M. Hunter and D. Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992); Roger D. Lund, ‘Guilt by Association: The Atheist Cabal and the Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England’, Albion 34 (2002); and David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell (1988). 12 National Library of Wales, Great Sessions, file number 4/250/4, document 16, available on Crime and Punishment website (http:///www.llgc.org.uk/php_ffeiliau). 13 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds R.C. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1971), vol. 4, p. 209. 14 G.D. Nokes, A History of the Crime of Blasphemy (London, 1928), p. 40. 15 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, ref. t16780828-14 (Maid, religious offences, 28 August 1678); also see ref. T16780703-1 (Maid, religious offences, 3 July 1678). 16 Hooton, Bridle, p. 13. 17 Anthony Collins, A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (London, 1729), p. 4. 18 Collins, Discourse, pp. 19, 20. 19 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996); Roger D. Lund, ‘The Bite of Leviathan: Hobbes and Philosophic Drollery’, English Literary History, 65 (1998), 825–55. 20 See Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: II, Shaftesbury to Hume (Cambridge, 2000); Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge, 1992); Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003). 21 John Turner quoted by Roger D. Lund, ‘Irony as subversion: Thomas Woolston and the crime of wit’, in Roger D. Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 175. 22 Joseph Glanvill, Seasonable Reflections (London, 1676), ‘The Sin and Danger of Scoffing at Religion’, pp. 6–7. 23 Hooton, Bridle, p. 18. 24 Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (London, 1698), pp. 80–81. 25 Collier, Short View, p. 138. 26 Edmund Gibson, The Bishop of London’s Three Pastoral Letters (London, 1732), p. 10. 27 Butler, Analogy of Religion, quoted in Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, II, p. 17. 28 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck, revised edn. (Cambridge, 1996). 29 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), p. 31.

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30 Francis Osborne, Advice to a Son (Oxford, 1658), Part II, pp. 153–4. 31 The Genuine Works of His Grace George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (Edinburgh, 1754), p. 407. 32 Tindal quoted in B.W. Young, ‘Matthew Tindal’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004), vol. 54, p. 816. 33 Gibson, Three Pastoral Letters, p. 45. 34 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr Hobbes’s Book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), p. 199. 35 Collins, Discourse, p. 23. 36 [Francis Atterbury], The Axe laid to the Root of Christianity (London, 1706), p. 8. 37 Anchitell Grey (ed.), Debates of the House of Commons, from the year 1667 to the year 1694, 10 vols (London, 1763), vol. 2, p. 257. 38 See John Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000), pp. 53–4, 108, and sources cited there. 39 Lund, ‘Irony as subversion’, pp. 187, 189. 40 Gibson, Three Pastoral Letters, p. 37. 41 E. Melling (ed.), Kentish Sources VI: Crime and Punishment (Maidstone, 1969), p. 151. 42 A.G. Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners 1688–1715’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 96–7. 43 Taylor’s Case was differently reported at 3 Keble 608 and 1 Vent 293 (for discussion see Elliott Visconsi, ‘The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v. Taylor 1676’, Representations 103 (2008), 30–520). Sedley’s case was reported 1 Sid. 168; 17 St T 155. 44 Visconsi, ‘Invention of Criminal Blasphemy’. 45 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols (1765–9: facsimile edition, Chicago, 1979), vol. 4, p. 59. 46 Nokes, History of Blasphemy, p. 82. 47 Philip Harling, ‘The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790–1832’, Historical Journal 44 (2001), 107–34. 48 Nokes, History of the Crime of Blasphemy, p. 85. 49 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, ref. t18240603-252 (James Clark, 3 June 1824). 50 Marsh, Word Crimes, p. 138. On these sources, also see D. Nash, ‘Laughing at the Almighty: Freethinking, Lampoon, Satire, and Parody in Victorian England’, in J. Wagner-Lawlor (ed.), The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives (Aldershot, 2000). 51 Marsh, Word Crimes, p. 3. 52 Nokes, History of the Crime of Blasphemy, p. 88; Jones, ‘Blasphemy, Offensiveness and the Law’, 134, n 21. 53 British Parliamentary Papers, III. 85, cited by Marsh, Word Crimes, pp. 91–2. 54 Lund, ‘Irony as subversion’, 181–9. 55 Regina v. Bradlaugh (1883), 15 Cox C.C. 217 at 219, quoted by Jones, ‘Blasphemy, Offensiveness and the Law’, 142. 56 2 WLR 287 (1979) consulted online at lawindexpro. 57 Regina v. Hetherington (1840), 4 St Tr N.S. 563 at 565-6, quoted by Jones, ‘Blasphemy, Offensiveness and the Law’, 143. 58 Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World, p. 171. 59 Marsh, Word Crimes, p. 162, quoting Hypatia Bonner, Bradlaugh’s daughter. 60 High Court Judgement, 5 December 2007. 61 This understanding not only underpins protests by Christian groups against artistic and other performances (as in the cases of ‘Pope-Town’ or Chris Ofili, but also by other faith groups (as in the cases of The Satanic Verses, Behzti, and the Jyllands-

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Posten cartoons). Outraged sensibilities are frequently linked in practice and judicial thinking with the threat of a breach of the peace or worse civil disorder: see Nokes, History of the Crime of Blasphemy, p. 99. 62 Collins, Discourse, p. 7. 63 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (6 May 2008), col. 648. 64 Item on the Hay Literary Festival, Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 (28 May 2007).

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Chapter 3

The Topography of Power: Elites and the Political Landscape of the English Town 1660–1760 Peter Borsay

In 1731 the Buck brothers, Samuel and Nathaniel, drew and engraved their ‘South East Prospect of Warwick’. It was one of a series of long prospects taken of over 70 English and Welsh ‘Cities, Sea-ports and Capital Towns’, which together constituted the first systematic and detailed visual record of the two countries’ leading towns.1 The images subtly blended town and country, old and new, stability and prosperity, in a serenely ordered vision of urban life. Less obviously they were also images of power. Through the depiction of the most prominent buildings and areas, emphasized by the use of numerals keyed to a text at the base of the drawing, places of power – and the elite formations that they accommodated – were carefully highlighted and graded. In the case of Warwick the most prominent feature was the castle, its south flank rising sheer above the Avon, its two great medieval towers, Caesar’s Tower and Guy’s Tower, breaking the town’s skyline. The eye was led naturally on to the church of St Mary’s. Located on the top of the hill on which Warwick sits, and almost at the centre of the Bucks’ prospect, its huge gothic-style tower soared above the town, crowning and fusing together, like a keystone in an arch, the entire urban landscape. Castle and church were the dominant elements in the view. But also highlighted were four other influential buildings: the Market House, with its hipped roof and pretty cupola, built in 1670; the County Hall, erected between 1676 and 1686; the ‘Sessions House’ or as it is now known Court House, effectively the town hall, recently completed in 1730; and the Priory on the northern edge of the town, a private house built in about 1566 on the site of St Sepulchre’s Priory, and updated probably in 1620.2 To those who purchased and perused the Bucks’ prospect of Warwick, these buildings would have contributed to the handsome and satisfying profile of the town. But viewers would also have been conscious that the structures constituted a complex but integrated palimpsest of power. Four sources of authority – four facets or fractions of the ruling order – were readily identifiable; the church (represented by St Mary’s), the resident aristocracy and gentry (represented by the Castle and the Priory, both of which possessed large estates on the edge of the town), the shire (represented by the County Hall) and the civic body (represented by the Market Hall and Court House). It was out of the interaction of these four

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3.1  Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, ‘The South East Prospect of Warwick’ 1731. Reproduced by kind permission of Warwickshire County Record Office (collections PV.WAR. Gen.3)

nodes of power, and of the physical forms which embodied and energized them, that the town’s official political culture emerged. In this Warwick was hardly untypical. Most eighteenth-century towns possessed at least two of these nodes (with their attendant buildings), and some – primarily those which were county centres – possessed all four. One absentee from Warwick’s townscape was the crown. By the eighteenth century only in London did the monarchy possess any extensive physical presence. This was a long call from the medieval period when kings and princes had been a key influence in the founding of towns, and deemed it necessary to construct impressive buildings, notably castles, to assert their authority (Warwick Castle was itself under royal administration between 1478 and 1547).3 During the early modern period only in York (which accommodated the Council in the North), Ludlow (the Council in the Marches, the administrative capital for Wales), Windsor, Newmarket, and for a brief period in Winchester, did the crown establish a serious urban foothold outside the metropolis. Significantly all except Windsor and

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Newmarket, the latter the capital of horse racing, proved temporary phenomena. The Council in the North was abolished in 1641, the Council in the Marches in 1689 and Charles II’s audacious experiment at establishing a new royal capital at the ancient seat of Saxon authority at Winchester lasted only a few years in the 1680s.4 However, the crown achieved a symbolic material presence through the widespread deployment of representations of royalty – statues, paintings and coats of arms – reflecting the fact that civic authority, formalized through the issue of a royal charter, ultimately flowed from the monarch. Of the four provincial nodes of power, the Church was seemingly the weakest. In the medieval town it achieved a widespread and impressive physical impact in the form of cathedrals, minsters, parochial churches, chapels, chantries, religious guilds, monastic houses and hospitals.5 Alongside their spiritual role, many of these institutions exercised considerable secular authority because they might be major landowners and were sometimes located in liberties outside the control of the civic government, a source of ongoing political tension. The

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Reformation, and the dissolution of the religious houses, guilds and chantries led to the redistribution and reconfiguration of space and power in the town. Much of the urban property of the Church was transferred into secular hands, and the religious fabric desecrated, remodelled or simply left to decay.6 But the Church continued to exert a physical and spiritual presence, and to constitute a source of power. Cathedrals and parochial churches survived, and in diocesan capitals the clergy continued to operate as a separate fraction of the urban elite. In many towns guildhalls became town halls, accommodating the newly constituted corporations of the period, as at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick and Lichfield;7 and monastic places of worship were turned into civic churches, as at Bath, Pershore, Malmesbury, Sherborne and Tewkesbury.8 The spiritual authority associated with the Catholic medieval religious fabric was not entirely dissipated by the Protestant revolution; it remained a latent source of power to be harnessed by the burgeoning secular authorities. Churches were, after all, invariably the biggest, most prominent and – despite the efforts of the iconoclasts – architecturally the most impressive structures in the majority of towns; and they were the houses of God. When the eighteenth-century corporation wanted to celebrate a military victory, it was to church that they processed, in their civic uniforms, to give thanksgiving to God. Council members were expected to turn up regularly at church in their gowns, and sit together in the council pew. In 1682 it was ordered at Preston that the ‘mayor, bailiffs, Aldermen & common council do upon every Lords Day in the aforenoon wear their gowns & go together to the church’ and there sit together in the council pew, ‘the mayor to the highest seat the Aldermen to the next large seat and the rest of the common council to the two lower most seats’.9 The parish church at Blandford Forum, handsomely rebuilt after the fire that hit the town in 1731, contains a prominent civic pew of 1748, with two parallel benches upholstered in red velvet facing each other either side of the mayor’s seat, a richly carved chair exuding municipal pomposity.10 In the 1720s Defoe noted how though Queenborough in Kent, ‘ [is] a miserable, dirty, decay’d, poor, pitiful fishing town; yet [it is] vested with corporation priviledges, has a mayor, aldermen, &c. and his worship the mayor has his mace carry’d before him to church, and attended in as much state and ceremony as a town twenty times as good’.11 Churches mattered because they conferred authority on those who commanded their spaces. This was perhaps most evident in the elaborate ceremonies mounted to inaugurate a new mayor. During a day of events the principal players processed from one site of power to another, often including in their itinerary, as at Banbury, Colchester and Norwich, a visit to cathedral or church, where a special sermon would be delivered.12 One factor which threatened the influence of the established Church, and its importance as a site of power, was the growth of religious pluralism, particularly once separate places of worship began to appear. Under James II the council at Newcastle upon Tyne included Protestant and Roman Catholic Nonconformists, so that ‘the cap [of maintenance], the mace, and the sword were one day carried to the church, another day to the mass-house, and on the third to the dissenting meeting-house’.13

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Such practices not only reflected the fragmentation of the Church’s authority, but also fissiparous tendencies within the civic elite. The years after the restoration of Charles II saw the first serious new wave of investment in urban church building since the Reformation.14 This was in part a reflection of the growth in urban populations; but it was also a statement of the continuing, and indeed renewed importance attached to the religious fabric. Significantly the most impressive buildings in the city of London, rebuilt after the fire of 1666, were not the secular ones, but the reconstructed churches, and in particular the spectacular mass of the rebuilt St Paul’s, the sight of which – its dome floating over the Thames – came to symbolize the commercial metropolis. When Canaletto came to paint the city in the mid-eighteenth century, it was church spires and a cathedral dome that dominated the scene, not docks and business premises.15 Churches were fashionable and progressive. This was reinforced by the fact that most of the new urban churches were constructed in the classical style, enhancing their image as centres of enlightened culture. When the Bucks drew their two prospects of the burgeoning industrial city of Birmingham in 1731, though industrial plant and some smoke were clearly to be seen, the most prominent feature on the skyline was the baroque tower and cupola of St Phillip’s, built on the highest point in the town in the early eighteenth century.16 Churches gave towns status. Many of the new classical squares that were being constructed in London and provincial towns from the later Stuart period to provide high status residential accommodation were accompanied by elegantly designed chapels and churches, which added ‘tone’ to the area, and helped create ensembles of high kudos construction.17 Moreover, by the eighteenth century more positive attitudes to the legacy of medieval gothic religious architecture, than those which held sway in the post-Reformation era, began to emerge. Though early in the century many still perceived this legacy as the debris of a superstitious papist culture, growing antiquarian sentiment among the elite was slowly raising interest in the gothic inheritance, locating it within a national tradition, cherishing – and seeking to protect – the links with the past.18 The fabric of Beverley Minster was facing serious threat in the early eighteenth century. Wishing to avoid the sort of calamity which had hit the abbey at nearby Selby, after the collapse of its central tower in 1690, a major restoration project was launched based on a survey and designs by the leading baroque architect Hawksmoor. The appeal for funds was highly productive, and 400 craftsmen were employed – mostly between 1717 and 1731 – in securing and embellishing the fabric.19 Behind the success of the Beverley appeal and project was the emergence of the town – and urban centres like it, many with rich gothic architectural heritages – as a place of fashionable resort and residence for the gentry and professions.20 This was part of a much wider process, which since the late seventeenth century had seen the positive re-engagement of the aristocracy and gentry with the towns.21 To characterize it in these terms is perhaps too simplistic. But there is a good deal of truth in the notion that whereas seigneurial lords had been at the heart of the process of founding towns in the post-Conquest period, often established outside

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a castle which constituted their residence and political base, by the early modern period the nation’s leaders were essentially a rural elite, with few maintaining their principal home in a town. A substantial country house and estate continued to be the calling card of the elite, and to represent the bulk of its capital and investment. But the seventeenth century and particularly the post-Restoration period saw a growing interest in the town, that was to blossom in the eighteenth century. There were strong economic and political reasons for this. Towns were growing sources of wealth and power. Britain was the most dynamic centre of urbanization in eighteenth-century Europe, and perhaps in the world. As urban populations and trade grew, so it became highly profitable to own and exploit urban property. This could lead to the sort of new town project at the coal and tobacco port of Whitehaven, over which Sir John and then Sir James Lowther exercised seigneurial control, and in which the high degree of planning was a reflection and instrument of their authority.22 In designing Whitehaven the Lowthers looked towards London as their model, and in particular the flowering West End of elegant squares and terraces, much of it built on the estates of aristocratic entrepreneurs. Accommodation of this type became necessary to house the rural elite for whom an annual period of residence in London became de rigeur if they were to sustain their position in society.23 One particular reason for visiting the metropolis was to attend the royal court and Parliament, and to lobby the government. This reflected the fact that the power of the British national state had during the early modern period become increasingly centralized in London. Paradoxically, in the long run such a process did not benefit the crown, since Britain developed into a pluralist rather than absolutist state, in which, particularly after 1688, the powers of the monarch were substantially constrained. The limitations on the crown manifested themselves physically in the relatively modest accommodation occupied by the crown, and the many ambitious projects to build a new palace in the metropolis that failed to get off the ground. Instead power was spread across the fine aristocratic town houses that filled the squares of the West End.24 It is significant that when in 1762 the crown did eventually acquire new quarters, these were located in the eighteenthcentury town house (1703–05) of the Dukes of Buckingham; and when eventually in the 1820s a new building – Buckingham Palace – was constructed in and around the carcase of the earlier house, it was to a flawed design which according to John Summerson ensured that ‘the palace became a laughing-stock’.25 If the pursuit of political power attracted the ruling elite to London, the capital’s social and cultural kudos were also a major pulling point. Cities were fashionable. This was a reflection of Renaissance and then Enlightenment thinking, which stressed the notions of civility, sociability and politeness, and the association of these concepts with urban life.26 If a gentleman or aristocrat was to cut a credible sociable profile, and avoid the stigma of being branded a barbarian backwoodsman, then a trip to town became essential. To service the demand generated, a whole range of up-market recreational services were developed – theatre, concerts, opera, assemblies, walks, pleasure gardens and

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such like – primarily in the vicinity of the West End. Because such facilities were deployed as arenas in which to compete for and acquire status, then they were places of power as well as of pleasure. The same went for provincial towns as they acquired similar facilities. Francis Drake noted of the balls held during August race week at the impressive new assembly rooms at York, opened in 1732 and designed by the leading Augustan patron of the arts, Lord Burlington: ‘here it is that York shines indeed, when, by the light of several elegant lustres, a concourse of four or five hundred of both sexes, out of the best families in the kingdom, are met together. In short the politeness of the gentlemen, the richness of the dress, and remarkable beauty of the ladies, and, of late, the magnificence of the room they meet in, cannot be equalled, throughout, in any part of Europe’.27 The reference to the ‘beauty of the ladies’ suggests that one of the principal functions of the assemblies was their role as a marriage market. Here it was that power lay indeed, for it was through marital alliances that the nation’s elite constantly reinvigorated, remodelled, reproduced and reconstituted itself. Assembly rooms, from the grandest in Bath or York, to the smaller but no less elegant rooms in tiny places like Eye and Bungay in Suffolk, were important points of power in the urban landscape.28 The rooms at York were primarily paid for and run by the county gentry of Yorkshire. Burlington’s involvement in the project stemmed not just from his skill in architecture and his position as an aristocratic Maecenas, but also from the fact that his principal seat was at nearby Londesborough Hall.29 For the early modern gentry the notion of the county or shire had a special meaning, providing them with a collective sense of identity and influence. The county ‘community’, as Alan Everitt has referred to it, found its geographical focus in the county town, where it constituted one of the operating nodes of power.30 At York this found its topographical articulation not only in the assembly rooms, but also – and more importantly – in the Castle site, which was an independent liberty within the city, and contained a handsome suite of court and prison buildings from which the county was administered by its gentry. The Grand Jury House was erected in 1673, the Debtors’ prison in 1701–05, while in the 1770s and 1780s John Carr designed a female prison, and elegant new assize courts.31 Castles, modified and updated, were common locations for county buildings. Often situated on elevated sites, like at Lancaster and Lincoln, and with their daunting architecture and historic significance as places of power, they commanded – as in medieval times – the surrounding territory.32 Many of the castles, as at York, had been royal ones, and the highlight of the legal, and in many places social, year was the assizes, when the royal judges arrived to dispense the crown’s justice in the most serious legal cases. On these special occasions it was common for the justices to process into the town followed by the county’s gentry who would act as jurymen. The gentry also met on a more regular basis in the shire buildings, in their capacity as justices of the peace, appointed by the crown, to implement the laws of the land and administer county business. This was all a reminder that authority ultimately flowed from crown; that there was a delicate balance between the monarchy and

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rural elite, and between the national and local state; and that the crown did have a presence in the town, albeit through local elites acting formally on its behalf. The city of York, like a number of the leading provincial towns in England, was also a county in its own right, and possessed its own justices of the peace. At Newcastle upon Tyne there was, as Celia Fiennes described the situation in 1698, ‘a large building of bricke within brick walls which is the hall for the assizes and session for the shire of Northumberland’, and quite separately the Exchange or Town Court, built in 1658, which contained ‘a very large Hall for the judges to keep the assizes for the town’.33 County status freed cities from control by the shire’s rural gentry, and gave them a substantial measure of independence. The principal sites of civic power in York were the chamber over the medieval Ouse Bridge (repaired in the sixteenth century), where the corporation of mayor, aldermen and common councillors met on a regular basis, and the fifteenth-century Guildhall, where the Commons convened to play their role in the election of the mayor.34 York had acquired corporate and county status during the medieval period. For many other towns it was the Reformation that triggered the process of incorporation, and with this went a burst of town hall construction.35 What characterized the wave of new building and remodelling of town halls that occurred from the later seventeenth century was not so much an acceleration in the volume of halls erected, but the widening range of broadly civic buildings constructed – market halls and crosses, cloth halls, almshouses and hospitals, customs’ houses, charity schools and such like – and the architectural style and form adopted. The Tudor town and market halls had been often modest in size, built in a vernacular style, and were frequently of timber-framed construction. The new, post-Restoration-style halls used brick and ashlar stone, and adopted the classical style that was now the hallmark of fashion. This was a self-conscious gesture, aimed particularly at the rural elite, that the town and its rulers – who were themselves increasingly building classical-style houses – were a civilized and polite polity. The new-style civic buildings were thus a gesture of, and justification for, political independence. 36 The existence of multiple nodes of power in the urban landscape had the potential for conflict. Who owned the towns? Was it the citizens whose habitus it was? Or was it the landed elite who controlled the countryside and machinery of the national and local state, who visited and used the towns as social, political and administrative centres, and who might possess secondary – and occasionally, as at Warwick, primary – residences there? In a city like Bath, which attracted swarms of seasonal visitors from amongst the ranks of the gentry and aristocracy, together with a growing body of fashionable ‘resigentry’, the tensions would sometimes bubble to the surface. In the early eighteenth century the corporation was extremely sensitive about extramural building projects, aimed at servicing the needs of the polite visitors, which threatened to damage traditional symbols of civic identity, like the city walls, or subvert the spatial parameters of the city’s authority. The spa’s assembly rooms, crowded with the nation’s governing elite, were sites of gentry and aristocratic power, from which, according to a guide of 1811, ‘the trading part of the inhabitants of Bath, however respectable … [is] excluded’.37 The ‘riposte’ of the city’s business leaders, who packed the corporation, was to construct a spectacularly elegant town

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hall (1775–78), with a spacious and elaborately decorated upper room which was used to accommodate citizens’ assemblies.38 In York the corporation did not invest in a new town hall. Instead it was decided in the 1720s to build a mayoral residence that the city’s first magistrate would occupy during his term of office. The resulting Mansion House, built to a Palladian design with a tetrastyle frontispiece of ionic pilasters with pediment (inserted into which were the city arms), and including a semi-basement with kitchens and offices, a ground floor containing a dining room, robing room and butler’s pantry, a first floor with elaborately decorated state or banqueting room and a second floor with bedrooms, was in effect a country house, erected in the centre of the city.39 As such it represented a coded challenge to the county’s landed elite – our leading citizen occupies a house as elegant, large and well appointed as one of your houses, and he, and his fellow councillors, should therefore be treated as gentlemen and fellow members of the governing class. Not for nothing was the city’s leader styled Lord Mayor. The Mansion House was a gesture of independence, but it would be a mistake to see it exclusively, or even primarily in terms of competition and conflict. One of the functions of the building was to wine and dine the local gentry. In 1702, as part of a thanksgiving day celebration for military successes, the corporation agreed that ‘a general jubilation be made to the gentry & clergy’ at the medieval Merchants’ Hall.40 The new Mansion House allowed such social gatherings to be accommodated in more modish and elegant surroundings. Of the mansion house built in the 1690s at Newcastle upon Tyne, at a cost of £6000, John Brand tells us, ‘the judges of assize, with their chief officers and servants, are usually entertained here, during the assize week. The mayor gives entertainments in it to very large companies of the gentlemen of Newcastle and its vicinity, and it is furnished for that purpose, with a valuable and elegant service of plate’.41 On such occasions cities were not only showing off, but were also engaged in a political choreography aimed at cultivating and negotiating a relationship of mutual advantage with a variety of elite fractions, primarily based outside the town. Ingratiating the royal justices – at Newcastle they were normally conveyed ceremonially across the Tyne in the mayor’s barge42 – was one way of acknowledging the power of state and monarch, and towns generally went to considerable lengths to do this. From the crown’s perspective – and from the medieval period this had generally underpinned royal policy to the towns – it did not need a formal presence in the town, and could avoid the costs this would require, as long as urban leaders maintained public order and implemented the government’s laws and directives. In return the urban elite was allowed considerable freedom of manoeuvre within their own domains, as well as a range of economic privileges vital to their commercial well-being. Only during the reign of James II did the crown attempt to intervene in a sustained, systematic and widespread fashion in urban politics.43 As to entertaining the gentry, this was a tacit recognition of the dependency of urban and rural-based elites upon each other. On the one hand, the gentry and aristocracy wanted access to the considerable political capital that many towns

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possessed, through virtue of the parliamentary seats vested in them, as well as to the expanding social and cultural facilities to be found there. On the other hand, the leading townsmen wanted the access to the machinery of the state that the landed class could provide, so as to secure and promote the town’s interests. Traders also desired the immensely lucrative business generated by the visiting gentry, and the opportunity to raise their own social status by hob-nobbing with their rural superiors. The outcome was that town and country big-wigs were constantly grooming each other, through the exchange of gifts and services. Members of Parliament, for example, would often make donations to improve the civic fabric, as a mark of gratitude for being chosen by the urban electorate.44 For much of the later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century urban politics was destabilized by Tory and Whig party divisions, the long fall-out from the explosive events of the Civil Wars.45 However, over the longer term, and acting as a damper on these party politicized tensions, the potential friction that existed between urban and rural elites in the town was mitigated by the pursuit of mutually compatible agendas. In York the city council purchased shares in the new assembly rooms in 1731, and in 1753 in the grandstand that adorned the racecourse, secure in the knowledge that though this might create alternative sites of influence within the city, a small loss of independence would be more than compensated for by the business generated in attracting the county’s gentry into the town.46 I would like to conclude by returning to the Bucks’ prospect of Warwick. The illustration highlighted certain key buildings – the Castle, Market House, Court House, St Mary’s church, the County Hall and the Priory – from which it is possible to identify four nodes of power in the town; the Church, the resident aristocracy/ gentry, the shire and the civic body. What the illustration almost wholly fails to show, shrouded as the townscape is in tiers of foliage, are the ordinary houses and streets. In some respects this is more worthy of depiction than the buildings highlighted, since in 1694 the core of Warwick had been devastated by fire, and rebuilt to a novel and highly fashionable classical design.47 The organization and character of the reconstruction reveals a great deal about the way in which the various urban nodes of power, and their elite fractions, interacted, and demonstrates how the political landscape of towns varied according to their particular circumstances. The rebuilding of Warwick was rigorously supervised by a court of fire commissioners, whose membership was almost wholly drawn from the ranks of the county gentry. The town corporation’s only formal input appears to have been the presence of the mayor. This all reflected the fact that as a small shire town, Warwick was highly dependent upon its county clientele, who were to play a leading role in the reconstruction. But the shire hall, where the rural gentry gathered in their capacity as administrators and justices, was not the principal point of power in the town. The key figures on the Fire Court – reflected in their heavy attendance records – were William Bolton, the lord of the manor, William Colmore, one of the town’s two MPs, and the two major landowners on the town’s periphery, Sir Henry Puckering at the Priory and Lord Brooke at the Castle. It was the last of these who was undoubtedly the king pin behind the whole rebuilding exercise. He was one of the wealthiest landowners in Britain,

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with estates scattered across the nation. Warwick was his principal seat, and his close scrutiny of the rebuilding, and the imposition of a sophisticated and modish plan, suggests that he wanted to improve the appearance of the town so that it would act as an attractive ante-chamber to his residence. In particular the remodelling created a handsome avenue of streets and buildings running from the site of the North Gate to the foot of the Castle, situated on the southern edge of the town. Prominent along this axis was the rebuilt church of St Mary’s, and in particular its spectacular gothicstyle tower – about the design of which Hawsksmoor, as at Beverley, was consulted – which was aligned with the great fifteenth-century Guy’s Tower at the Castle. It is tempting to think that this association was more than accidental on Brooke’s part. The church housed, in the chancel and Beauchamp Chapel, which escaped the fire, the impressive tombs of the late medieval and early modern earls of Warwick, as well as Brooke’s own ancestors, the Greville family. By rebuilding the church, and in particular the tower, to a gothic design – despite the classicism of the rest of the town – was Brooke deliberately tying together castle and church, in an act of conscious historicism that allowed him to draw upon the rich legacy and resonance of the two buildings to reinforce his own position and lineage? (He was in fact descended from a fourteenth-century wool merchant in Chipping Campden.)48 Where does all this leave the civic elite in the town? Warwick was atypical among English towns in having such a powerful aristocrat living within its borders. Taken in conjunction with the presence, as residents or visitors, of the county gentry, there was an inevitable price to pay in terms of political independence. But there were considerable economic benefits, with the huge business generated by the castle and visiting gentry. Moreover, the right to elect two MPs gave the town some political leverage, so that Brooke was careful to handle the civic body with due respect and care to ensure the return of candidates of whom he approved. A certain rapprochement between castle and council was recognized in the layout of the rebuilt St Mary’s, so that though Brooke purchased a bank of the most expensive pews at the rear of the church, the corporation acquired a specially constructed civic pew to house its members.49 At the time of the fire the corporation met in a converted inn, lying on the church-castle axis. The former inn was only slightly damaged and was not rebuilt. Surrounded by new and modish classical architecture, the town house must have stood out like a sore thumb. During the 1720s the building was demolished, and a handsome baroque court house constructed, complete with first floor assembly room. The project was a bid for recognition motivated by a desire to raise the status of the corporation. In practice the expense involved, and the way the money was raised, left the council highly vulnerable to legal attack from dissatisfied townsmen and gentry interests in the town, and – after legal action was initiated – this appears to have led to a serious decline in the corporation’s autonomy for several decades.50 In building the Court House Warwick’s civic body of shopkeepers and craftsmen had overreached itself, and demonstrated its weakness rather than its strength. The configuration of power in the town was such in the early eighteenth century that it was difficult for any independent bourgeois node of power to escape from the shadow of castle and county gentry.

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The relatively weak position of Warwick’s civic polity under the early Hanoverians was not necessarily typical of English towns. Many urban authorities were able to exercise a great deal more freedom over their destiny, and the town hall, with its allied municipal buildings, was a pole of power from which radiated considerable influence. The growing flows of wealth being generated through commerce, manufacture, consumption and services – only a portion of which derived from demand among the landed elite – ensured that there existed an increasingly wealthy and independent urban bourgeoisie, especially in places heavily engaged in trade or industry.51 The civic buildings erected reflected this sense of confidence and difference. When the port of Bristol built a magnificent new merchant exchange in 1743, it was designed in the fashionable Palladian style associated with the landed elite’s country houses, and deployed the services of John Wood, architect of Queen Square at Bath, built (1728–36) to accommodate the gentry who visited the spa. But the corporation committee controlling the building project rejected Wood’s attempt to implant an ‘Egyptian Hall’ – that archetypal aristocratic motif that had been introduced at the York assembly rooms by Burlington – favouring instead an open atrium or peristyle in the manner of the Royal Exchange, one of the iconic buildings of commercial London.52 Moreover, the address delivered at the opening ceremony made clear that the spirit behind the building was a commercial and not a landed one: What can more redound to … the Honour of the City itself, than the Raising of a Structure, which, by its Magnificence, will give Foreigners and Strangers an Idea of your Generosity and Worth; and by its Commodiousness will enable the MERCHANTS to Assemble together, and mutually communicate their Thoughts, and exert their Endeavours, not only for the Preservation, but for the Enlargement of our Foreign Trade, which is the Grandeur of the Crown, the Glory of the Kingdom, the Source of our Riches, and the Strength and Support of the Commonwealth? … THAT the TRADE of this City may FLOURISH and INCREASE, and the PROSPERITY and REPUTATION of it be daily ADVANCED, are the ardent Wishes of the CORPORATION, this NOBLE PILE, raised by their Liberal Hand, more eminently TESTIFIES than WORDS can EXPRESS.53

The Bristol Exchange was a powerful expression of both a civic and commercial interest. Its influence derived from the fact that Bristol was a port city, and not, for example, a county town or spa. The Bristol case reminds us that all towns contained multiple nodes of power and associated elite fractions, but the relative importance of these in a particular community varied according to its economic and social characteristics. In this paper four nodes were explicitly identified; the Church, the resident gentry/ aristocracy, the shire and the civic body. In some towns the military might be added to this list, and a further, in most places largely latent presence, was the crown. Each of these nodes possessed physical manifestations, in which the form of building reflected and shaped the power of those it accommodated.

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Each node was also associated with different fractions within the urban elite, which jostled and competed with each other for power. The potential for conflict was exacerbated by the tendency for these fractions to themselves divide, for example along party or religious lines. Nonetheless, we should not overestimate the fissiparous tendencies among the urban ruling order. Alongside the pressures towards fragmentation were also ranged ones towards integration. It was not in the long-term interests of those who ruled towns to parade their divisions, so that the various fractions were usually engaged in a process of negotiation by which they established a modus operandi which identified their mutual interests and secured a credible façade of unity. Finally, it is important to recognize that power in the town was not confined to those who possessed the means to construct impressive buildings and fabricate the landscape. The official places of power were capable of being commandeered and subverted by forces drawn from the broad mass of inhabitants in urban society. Market places, squares and important streets were frequently the site of popular recreations, demonstrations and riots. Even the fine buildings that lined these spaces were not immune from invasion. During the food-related disturbances at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1740 the rioters broke into the Town Court and sacked it, damaging the portraits of Charles II and James II – a reminder that in 1688 a fine equine statue of James had been unceremoniously dumped into the Tyne by the mob.54 Such action, unusual as it might be, was an assault on the real and symbolic fabric of the central and local state, and a reminder that the political landscape of towns was more volatile and less serene than the Bucks’ prospects might suggest. Endnotes 1 S. and N. Buck, Buck’s Antiquities or Venerable Remains of Above Four Hundred Monasteries, Palaces … in England and Wales. With Near One Hundred Views of Cities and Chief Towns, 3 vols (London, 1774), vol. 3. 2 The Victoria History of the County of Warwick, Volume VIII, ed. W.B. Stephens (London, 1969), pp. 428, 431, 438–40, 450. 3 Ibid., p. 453. 4 J. Hutchinson and D.M. Palliser, York (Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 52, 55, 60: D. Lloyd, the Concise History of Ludlow (Ludlow, 1999), pp. 63–8, 103–4; VCH Berkshire, Volume III, ed. P.H. Ditchfield and W. Page (London, 1923), pp. 404–23; P. May, The Changing Face of Newmarket: a History from 1660 to 1760 (Newmarket, 1984); P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 89, 186–8. 5 C. Platt, The English Medieval Town (London, 1976), pp. 148–74; J. Schofield and A. Vince, Medieval Towns, 2nd edn (London, 2003), pp. 175–211; J. Finch, ‘The Churches’ and C. Harper-Bill and C. Rawcliffe, ‘The Religious Houses’, in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson (eds), Medieval Norwich (London, 2004), pp. 49–119. 6 R. Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c.1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998); D. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, 1979), pp. 226–59; W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540–1640, 2nd edn (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 170–202.

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7 A. Dyer, ‘Crisis and Resolution: Government and Society in Stratford, 1540–1640’, in R. Bearman (ed.), The History of an English Borough: Stratford-Upon-Avon (Stroud, 1997), pp. 80–83; VCH Warwickshire, vol. VIII, pp. 423–4; VCH Staffordshire, Volume XIV, ed. M.W. Greenslade (Oxford, 1990), pp. 13–15, 82–3. 8 P. Borsay, ‘Early Modern Urban Landscapes, 1540–1800’, in P. Waller (ed.), The English Urban Landscape (Oxford, 2000), p. 117. 9 Preston Corporation MSS, Guild Roll 1682, fols 226–7. 10 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments England, County of Dorset, Volume 3, Central Dorset, Part I (London, 1970), p. 21. 11 D. Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. G.D.H. Cole and D.C. Browning, 2 vols (London, 1962), vol. 1, p. 110. 12 W. Potts, A History of Banbury (Banbury, 1958), pp. 111–2; P. Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, 2 vols (London, 1768), vol. 1, p. 100; ‘Account of the Company of St. George in Norwich from Mackerell’s History of Norwich’, Norfolk Archaeology, 3 (1852), p. 360. 13 J. Brand, History and Antiquities of the Town and County of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2 vols (London, 1789), vol. 1, p. 328. 14 M. Whiffen, Stuart and Georgian Churches: the Architecture of the Church of England outside London, 1603–1837 (London, 1947–48); B.F.L. Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church (London, 1963); C. Chalklin, ‘The Financing of Church Building in the Provincial Towns of Eighteenth-Century England’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns (London, 1984), pp. 284–310. 15 J. Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, 5th edn (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 203–38; B. Allen, ‘Topography or Art: Canaletto and London in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’ in M. Warner (ed.), The Image of London: Views by Travellers and Emigrés (London, 1987), pp. 29–33. 16 Buck, Buck’s Antiquities, vol. 3; W. Hutton, An History of Birmingham to the End of the Year 1780 (Birmingham, 1781), pp. 246–9. 17 Borsay, Urban Renaissance, pp. 78–9. 18 R. Sweet, Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2004), pp. 231–307; C. Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London, 2001), pp. 21–104. 19 I. and E. Hall, Historic Beverley (York, 1973), pp. 23–6. 20 VCH York East Riding, Volume VI, The Borough and Liberties of Beverley, ed. K.J. Allison (Oxford, 1989), pp. 131–5. 21 P. Borsay, ‘The Landed Elite and Provincial Towns in Britain 1660–1800’, The Georgian Group Journal, 13 (2003), pp. 281–94. 22 J.V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: the Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 179–261; S. Collier and S. Pearson, Whitehaven 1660–1800 (London, 1991). 23 J. Summerson, Georgian London (Harmondsworth, 1962), pp. 27–112; J. M. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society 1650–1750 (London, 1998), pp. 215–52; S.E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 2002). 24 M.H. Port, ‘West End Palaces: The Aristocratic Town House in London 1730–1830’, London Journal, 20 (1995), pp. 17–46. 25 Summerson, Architecture in Britain, pp. 264, 484, 487; J.J. Norwich, The Architecture of Southern England (London, 1985), p. 352.

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26 A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), pp. 60–63, 128–40; R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000), pp. 34–40. 27 F. Drake, Eboracum: or the History and Antiquities of the City of York (London, 1736), p. 241. 28 Borsay, Urban Renaissance, pp. 150–162, 243–8, 336–49. 29 York Civic Archives, M. 23/1, Assembly Rooms: Directors’ Minute Book 1730–58; M.23/3, ‘Proposals for building, by subscription, assembly rooms, in the city of York’; R. Wittkower, The History of York Assembly Rooms (York, 1951). 30 A. Everitt, ‘Country, County and Town: Patterns of Regional Evolution in England’, in P. Borsay (ed.), The Eighteenth-Century Town: a Reader in English Urban History 1688–1820 (London, 1990), pp. 93–104. 31 Drake, Eboracum, pp. 286–7; Hutchinson and Palliser, York, pp. 197–9; H. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840, 3rd edn (New Haven, 1995), p. 219. 32 M. Girouard, The English Town (New Haven, 1990), pp. 45–56. 33 The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. C. Morris (London, 1947), p. 210; H. Bourne, The History of Newcastle upon Tyne: or the Ancient and Present State of That Town (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1736), p. 125. 34 Drake, Eboracum, pp. 184–5, 280–281, 328–9; Royal Commission on Historical Monuments England, City of York, Volume V, the Central Area (London, 1981), pp. 76–82; York City Archives, House Book of the Corporation, 15 January 1700/1, 3 February 1700/1. 35 R. Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c.1500–1640 (Oxford, 1991). 36 Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 101–12, 253–5, 325–8. 37 The Original Bath Guide, Considerably Enlarged and Improved (Bath, 1811), p. 107. 38 P. Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700–2000: Towns, Heritage and History (Oxford, 2000), pp. 298–304; T. Fawcett and S. Bird, Bath: History and Guide (Stroud, 1994), pp. 61–2. 39 Drake, Eboracum, pp. 330–331; VCH Yorkshire: the City of York, ed. P.M. Tillott (London, 1961), pp. 544–5; RCHME, City of York, Volume V, pp. 96–9. 40 York City Archives, House Book of the Corporation, 2 December 1702. 41 Brand, Newcastle, vol. 1, p. 56. 42 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 545. 43 J. Miller, Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660–1722 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 218–42. 44 Borsay, ‘Landed Elite and Provincial Towns’, pp. 285–6. 45 P. Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1996); P.D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in English Towns  1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998); Miller, Cities Divided. 46 York City Archives, House Book of the Corporation, 9 March 1731 and 7 December 1753. 47 For the rebuilding of Warwick and the arguments below see P. Borsay, ‘A County Town in Transition: the Great Fire of Warwick, 1694’, in P. Borsay and L. Proudfoot (eds), Provincial Towns in Early Modern England and Ireland: Change, Convergence and Divergence (Oxford, 2002), pp. 151–70. 48 A. Warmington (ed.), Campden: a New History (Chipping Campden, 2005), pp. 40–42.

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49 M. Farr (ed.), The Great Fire of Warwick 1694: the Records of the Commissioners Appointed under the Act of Parliament for the Rebuilding the Town of Warwick, Publications of the Dugdale Society, 36 (1992), pp. 480, 495; T. Kemp, History of Warwick and its People (Leamington, 1905), p. 109. 50 P. Styles, ‘The Corporation of Warwick 1660–1835’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 59 (1935), pp. 48–90; VCH Warwickshire, vol. VIII, pp. 497–504; C. Hodgetts and M. Booth, ‘Warwick Court House’, Warwickshire History, 15 (2011/12), pp. 43–63. 51 R. Sweet, The English Town 1680–1840 (Harlow, 1999), pp. 179–91, 194–8; N. Rogers, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Politics’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture Society and Politics, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 159–80. 52 A. Gomme, M. Jenner and B. Little, Bristol: an Architectural History (London, 1979), pp. 143–8; J. Wood, A Description of the Exchange of Bristol (Bath, 1745), pp. 11–12. 53 Wood, Description of the Exchange, pp. 33–4. 54 J. Ellis, ‘Urban Conflict and Popular Violence: The Guildhall Riots of 1740 in Newcastle upon Tyne’, International Review of Social History, 25 (1980), pp. 332–49; Brand, Newcastle, vol. 1, pp. 30–31.

Chapter 4

‘Sleep not while the trumpet is blown in Zion’: Public Somnolence, Civic Values and Modern Audience in Eighteenth-century Britain Joris van Eijnatten You are asleep: consumptive sleep!1

William Hogarth’s ‘The Sleeping Congregation’ (1736) is a milestone in the cultural history of the sermon. The scene is quite straightforward.2 A myopic clergyman with a blank expression struggles through a sermon, which is written out in full, as was commonly done in those days. The sermon’s text is Matthew 11: 28, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’. The congregation, it seems, has quite literally taken the message. Practically everyone is fast asleep, despite the complaint written on the door of the pulpit: ‘I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain’ (Galatians 4: 11). The clerk beneath the pulpit is one of the very few churchgoers not utterly dead to the world. However, his attention is drawn not to the homily but to the impressive bosom of a young woman. She, too, is sound asleep, holding in her limp hands a fan and a book of prayer, tellingly opened at the chapter on marriage. The scene conveys a sense of extreme lethargy and boredom on the part of the audience, and complete lack of inspiration on that of the preacher. Hogarth’s eighteenth-century print contains meanings we no longer register, let alone understand. One of the few attempts at decoding ‘The Sleeping Congregation’ is an article by Bernd Krysmanski.3 He notes that the hats worn by two old women in the congregation identify them as Quakers. At the time, Quaker women were sometimes compared to harlots, and Krysmanski suggests that Hogarth may have been referring to the past carnal activities of two ex-prostitutes turned pious. This fits in well with the print’s obvious sexual connotations, evident especially from the ugly clerk’s sneaky gaze at the more pronounced physical attributes of the young lady, but also from the sizeable genitals of the heraldic lion depicted on the church wall. Like sleep and indolence, marriage and especially lust have often been associated with churchgoing and sermons. Indeed, various elements in Hogarth’s engraving point towards wholesale depravity. Fixed to the pillar on the right is a hatchment bearing three owls – in the Christian tradition symbols of disbelief, sin, fleshly desire and lassitude. In terms of faith and piety the signs are not much better: the triangle symbolizing the Trinity has been turned upside down.

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4.1  William Hogarth, ‘The Sleeping Congregation’ (1736)

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The print thus refers to various pictorial traditions. One concerns acedia, with sleeping individuals indicating listlessness and neglect of duty. Another tradition criticizes indifference and apathy by portraying pulpiteers and congregations ironically. A third symbolizes iniquity through ugliness; in this case, audience members with particularly repulsive physiognomies. Krysmanski interprets all this as a critique of what in Hogarth’s ‘post-Puritan’ view would have been the chief vices of Hanoverian England. As an artist from the industrious middle class, Hogarth felt called upon to denounce the excess of lust and sloth, sexual desire and inertia, as symptoms of the general ‘moral decadence’ of his age.4 This seems a cogent enough interpretation, but perhaps more could be said on the subject. As Krysmanski points out, Hogarth was not the only creative artist to comment on sleepers in church, whether lustful and dissolute or not. How prominently did sleeping audiences (and wakeful ones for that matter) figure in eighteenth-century texts and images? Did writers and artists besides Hogarth find it worthwhile to single out and represent apathetic (or, alternatively, awakened) audiences? If so, why did groups of sleeping individuals attract attention? Based on such source material as anecdotes, jokes, essays, diaries and even sermons, this chapter traces a particular eighteenth-century interest in sleeping and/or wakeful audiences. This will help identify the broader cultural context of Hogarth’s ‘sleeping congregation’ and hopefully contribute to explaining why, from that century onwards, audiences have been expected to be wakeful. I There is another classic British representation, apart from Hogarth’s famous print, of an audience hitting the sack in church. Like ‘The Sleeping Congregation’, Jonathan Swift’s sermon ‘Upon Sleeping in Church’ suggests that the topic did, indeed, weigh heavily on eighteenth-century minds. Those most in need of the sermon, argued Swift, are often absent from it because they are supposedly indisposed, have business to do, idle their time away or simply detest all religion; or because they fail to pay attention, gossiping among each other in whispers, allowing their thoughts to wander on subjects quite unsuitable to the sacredness of divine service and making jokes at the expense of the preacher. But, continues Swift: But of all misbehaviour, none is comparable to that of those who come here to sleep. Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon. Perpetual custom hath so brought it about that the words of whatever preacher become only a sort of uniform sound at a distance, than which nothing is more effectual to lull the senses. For that it is the very sound of the sermon which bindeth up their faculties is manifest from hence, because they all awake so very regularly as soon as it ceaseth, and with much devotion receive the blessing, dozed and besotted with indecencies I am ashamed to repeat.5

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Sleep does not figure largely in the remainder of the sermon, which is mainly about the causes and effects of the clergy’s lamentable neglect of proper preaching. Comparing the church to the playhouse, Swift notes a discrepancy in audience behaviour. Whereas people are perfectly capable of staying awake during a theatrical production lasting four hours, they fall fast asleep as soon as the preacher embarks on his 30-minute sermon. Swift’s solution is ‘common civility’. Succumbing to slumber is bad manners. And perhaps, suggests the bishop most practically, people should eat less before going to church.6 Swift’s ‘Upon Sleeping in Church’ is based on Acts 20: 9, where ‘a certain young man named Eutychus’, sitting in a window during one of Paul’s sermons, falls asleep and plunges to his death. Fortunately, Paul was able miraculously to restore the culprit to life (in the post-Apostolic period sleepers would not have been so fortunate, Swift observed).7 In the eighteenth century, the example of the unheeding youth Eutychus seems to have been generally regarded as a warning to sleepers in church, ‘those especially who indulge drowziness in a short service’,8 who are ‘vigilant and attentive’ in the theatre but ‘cannot sit out, at God’s Word, one poor Hour or half, without a Nod, or Slumber’.9 Edifying booklets using the question-and-answer method common to catechisms provided instructions based on the case of the somnolent Greek (Q: ‘Will you sleep in Church?’ A: ‘No, for Eutychus being asleep when St Paul was preaching, fell down’.).10 Let us do our very best to keep awake, ‘that if we should be suddenly taken off, we may at least be found doing our duty’.11 ‘Slumbering sleeping worshippers, are a disgrace to their profession’12 – ‘A sight, I believe, never to be seen in a Mahometan Mosque, and seldom in a Pagan Temple’.13 Some ascribed sleeping in church to the work of the devil.14 Others included it among the many ostensibly minor sins for which proper Christians should especially beware, given that bad usually ends in worse. Apart from sleeping in church, minor depravities included lying officiously, mincing oaths, telling unchaste things, behaving churlishly, intoning wanton songs and talking extravagantly over wine.15 Such ‘Sleep as seizes a Man at Church Against his Will and notwithstanding his Endeavour to the contrary’ is what the Church of England clergyman Edward Wells regarded as a typical ‘sin of infirmity’.16 Jonathan Swift, then, was not the only clergyman to present arguments against sleeping in church. The effort seems to have been as interdenominational as the vice itself was universal. James Penn, the vicar of Clavering cum Langley in Essex, published an admonitory letter addressed to sleepy churchgoers, identifying pudding and porter as victuals they had better avoid.17 The Presbyterian ministers, William Harris of London and Samuel Perrot of Cork, wrote sermons on slumber in the pews.18 ‘Sleep not while the trumpet is blown in zion’, passionately cried out one clergyman.19 The wellknown Methodist leader Daniel Rowland of Llangeitho summed it all up: ‘wrth wrando, mae un fath fel Eutychus yn cysgu tra y pregethir y gair’. [‘Nay, while we are under the preaching of the word, some of us, as Eutychus, fall asleep’.]20 Who could possibly disagree with such an insightful observation? In eighteenth-century Britain, complaints about latter day Eutychii were, it seems, all but ubiquitous.21

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Given the situation, it is hardly surprising that the art of speaking well was a discipline to which many eighteenth-century clerical instructors, as well as wouldbe teachers of the clergy, devoted their attention. Vicesimus Knox identified different kinds of preachers, including the ‘Humdrum’, the kind of speaker most liable to bringing about a stupor among his listeners. He is the one portrayed in Hogarth’s print. The Humdrum recites in full the homiletic compositions of others, murdering every sentence as he reads.22 Knox may have been studying the commentary on Hogarth by John Trusler, who had previously condemned the ‘humdrum, drawling manner of the indolent preacher’. Having no inclination to produce eloquence both ‘tender and manly’, a Hogarthian minister will necessarily fail ‘to animate the cold, rouse the stupid, melt the obdurate, and, bend the stubborn’.23 The Fashionable Preacher distinguishes between the whiner, bawler, gesticulator and ‘cold, indifferent’ preacher; it is the latter who preaches ‘half of his audience asleep’.24 Style, of course, is a consequence of habit, and habit the result of training. Rural preachers lacked schooling and did nothing to remedy the defect. ‘They Preach the People asleep one part of the Day, and drink some of ’em asleep the other’.25 Henry Fielding suggested in Amelia that undisciplined time management was the root cause of lethargy: ‘if a sermon be prolonged a little beyond the usual hour, doth it not set half the audience asleep?’26 Vicesimus Knox observed elsewhere that the preachers’ custom of making ‘formal divisions and subdivisions’ had a ‘powerful effect in realizing the sleeping congregation of Hogarth’.27 Learning the ‘Art and Knack’ of elocution was obviously the best way to prevent the ‘injudicious, lifeless, careless, precipitate, slubber’d, perfunctory, superficial Manner of Reading our Compositions’, and avoid having ‘a Person publickly sing, and whine, cant, and drone out his Words, (as if his Design was to lull the Audience asleep)’.28 In brief, reading ‘a Heap of heavy dull stuff, without Sense of Connection’ made for suspiciously restful congregations.29 In northern climes (and elsewhere too, one suspects) elocutionary reforms did not, alas, achieve the desired effect. The Church of Scotland minister William Thom admitted as much. In the 1760s, he attended the sermon of one of the ‘very lifeless, clumsy, and heavy-handed preachers’ of Glasgow: who, if he could not be said to be the inventor of sleep, was at least a powerful promotor of it. He gave copious and successful doses of the true soporific. I soon found myself becoming drowsy: I kept mine eyes open as long as I could; I supported my head on my palm, with my elbow on my desk before me; sleep, however, overpowered me: but I was soon set awake by a painful stroke which my chin received, in falling, by the law of gravitation, on the front of the gallery; with difficulty I catched hold of my wig, which had half falled down from my head.

Confused by his sudden and somewhat indecorous return to reality, Thom looked around him. To his surprise, he ‘heard all the masters on my right and left snoring loud, and saw most of our students, and many of the congregation, fast asleep’.30 One expects clergymen to be particularly concerned about the reign in ecclesiis

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of Hypnos and his henchmen. But they were not the only ones to complain or at least express anxiety. There were those who wrote poems on sleeping in church. ‘Awake, awake, my drowsy pow’rs,/Attend the preacher’s tongue;/How dare I sleep away those hours/On which salvation’s hung’.31 The poet Mary Leapor (1722–46), developing a contrast between conversion by force (‘the shining Spear’) and persuasion by argument (‘slow-pac’d Reason’), posed the rhetorical question: if violence was so much more effective, ‘who would to a sleepy Audience preach’?32 According to the muse, the standard subject matter of sermons was not conducive to wakefulness: ‘Let grave morality her maxims keep,/and lull her gaping audience fast asleep’.33 Ecclesiastical sandmen figured notoriously in various kinds of literature, including such plays as The Informers Outwitted (1738). The characters in this drama discuss the quality of London parsons: ‘We have one now at our Town, who lays all the Congregation fast asleep in a Quarter of an Hour’.34 Temporary suspensions of consciousness in the vicinity of the pulpit were obviously a welcome source of merriment to the wits of the age. Hogarth-like tableaux figured popularly in joke books, which pitilessly criticized sleepers and preachers alike.35 One jester produced the following wisecrack, called ‘Sleeping at Church. An anecdote’: A certain decent statesman, of mature age, was going the way of all the earth, and his disorder was so violent that it prevented him from taking any rest in sleep. Whereupon his family intreated him to send for a physician, in hopes that something might be administered to procure sleep; but the old man not being very free to part with his money, soon recollected, that as it was customary for him, when in health, to sleep in the church, he thought it would naturally come upon him, if in that place, even in sickness, and at the same time save the doctor’s fees. Carry me to the church, says he, and I shall be sure to sleep there. But as the house of God was at some distance, and he not in a situation to be removed, was deferred carrying, till he was fallen into a deep sleep, not to be awaked.36

Another yarn, dated around 1800, is included under the heading ‘Sleepy Congregation’: ‘How shameful it is that you should fall asleep’, said a dull preacher to his drowsy audience, ‘when that poor creature’, pointing to an idiot, who was leaning on a staff and staring at him, ‘is both awake and attentive’. ‘Perhaps, sir’, replied the fool, ‘I should have been asleep too if I had not been an idiot’.37

Some anecdotes were made at the expense of the listeners rather than the preacher: Mr. Ogilvy, a Scottish clergyman, at Lunan in Forfarshire, had a great deal of eccentricity in his character and manner. One Sunday, when he was in the middle of his sermon, an old woman who kept an ale-house in the parish, fell

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asleep: her neighbour jogged her, in order to waken her. The parson seeing this, said – ‘I’ll waken her fast enough. – Phew. – (whistling) – Janet! a bottle of ale and a dram!’ – ‘Coming, Sir’.38

Witty or calculating pastors like Ogilvy, who generally did their best but were fed up with incorrigible sleepers in church, frequently appear in tall stories. On occasion, the painful predicament of pulpiteering pastors led to disproportionate reflexes (or so this story of 1780 goes). ‘Alas! his rhetoric’s all in vain,/To rouse the stupid drowsy brain;/For, whilst he reads his lecture o’er,/Some think of dinner, and some snore’. This particular parson began hitting the members of his audience, for some incongruous reason, with a horse’s ‘knuckle-bone’.39 Others were more inventive and stuck to verbal rejoinders. The Puritan Hugh Peter (c.1598–1660) is reputed to have cried, ‘fire, fire!’, a signal of clerical distress that resulted in ‘the Sleepers in a great Hurry awaking, and crying out, Where? Where? He answer’d, In Hell to burn Sleepers’.40 This story crops up elsewhere, too, although in the later versions the Puritan has become a Methodist. The journalist Anne Newport Royall (1769–1854), recounting her experiences with sleeping congregations in Hartford, Connecticut, tells us: A Methodist preacher (I forget his name) perceiving his audience asleep, cried out with a loud voice, ‘fire! fire!’ The audience awaking, cried ‘where? where?’ ‘In hell’, said the preacher, ‘for those who sleep under the gospel!’ This was different from the shrewd old parson, on a similar occasion, who was fond of a nap himself. Discovering his audience asleep one day, he stopped suddenly, and addressing some children who were at play in the gallery, in a whispering tone, desired them to be still, or they would wake the old folks below!41

It seems that an indelible image had fixed itself on eighteenth-century minds: ‘As a Parson I am preaching every Sunday to an audience fast asleep’.42 Let me offer a few more examples, just to illustrate the enormously diverse nature of this ubiquitous discourse on dozing. Quakers were often scolded for making a habit out of doing nothing. It seemed to casual observers that they looked upon somnolence as a virtue (one inadvertently thinks of the Quaker women in Hogarth’s print). ‘I have seen one of your noted Speakers rouse out of a deep Sleep’, observed one critic in 1745, ‘and stand up and vend his devout Dreams, no doubt to the great Edification of his naping Hearers’.43 Joseph Addison offers another approach. In The Guardian of 1713 he mentioned, in a list of the causes of death in the countryside: ‘Took cold sleeping at church’. Claiming 11 victims, rustic repose underneath the church rafters was surpassed as agent of eternal ruin only by bewitchment (13 deaths), the month of October (25 deaths) and old age (100 deaths).44 Comparing Roman Catholics to Protestants, some commentators sought rhetorical effect through contrast. Papists, said one in 1782, ‘have the advantage of us in wakeful congregations’. Their joyful music keeps the people alert, a fact even truer of Jews congregating in synagogues. Not surprisingly perhaps, this author’s solution was to model sermons after a merry

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song – a most apposite remedy against sleep if delivered ‘in a requisite manner’.45 Alexander Pope agreed. A Catholic, he expected one trill of music to ‘Wake the dull church’.46 Possibly the most creative suggestion to prevent hibernation during homilies was the introduction of the ‘automaton’, an ingenious appliance that takes the place of the preacher. In nine out of ten churches, noted the inventor, ‘we find the parson nodding, and the audience asleep’. It was evident to him that the problem arose from ‘the lulling melody of opiate sounds’. However, it was quite easy to avoid the production of auricular narcotics. All one needed to do was programme the voice-box of a mechanical android in such a way that the audience stayed awake. The device would unfailingly pronounce ‘the word death in a hollow dismal tone’, followed at specific intervals by such terms as ‘judgment’ (vocalized acutely), ‘eternity’ (with a rather higher pitch), ‘hell’ (in a flowing tenor) and damnation (in a deep bass).47 Unfortunately, such methods and contraptions aimed at inducing insomnia during church services at best counteracted symptoms. They did not root out the cause. Thus the problem remained. II If Hogarth was unique in his artistry, he was hardly alone in his criticism. In eighteenth-century Britain, as we have seen, sleeping in church was an object of disapproval, ridicule, satire, derision, revulsion and, in some cases, objective commentary. It was the cause of much anxiety, irritation, anger and interested observation. Three questions arise. Was the critique expressed by these various analysts limited to church audiences? Was their unease typical for the eighteenth century? And if we answer both questions affirmatively, how do we explain this? One avenue to explore is the fact that sleep was as much an issue for advocates of the theatre as it was for those of the church. Stage audiences were expected to be quite as wakeful as pulpit ones. The comparison is not superficial, at least not to eighteenth-century observers. The pulpit was often compared to the stage, the preacher to the actor and the church to the theatre. The contrast was obviously meant to define two separate spheres of life, the one frivolous, immoral and secular, the other serious, moral and sacred. In connection with our theme, the juxtaposition of pulpit and stage is telling: it shows that commentators at the time assumed that similar problems required similar solutions. The same techniques were used to keep the speaker in control and the audience awake. Homiletic is, of course, classical rhetoric in Christian guise, as most eighteenth-century observers knew very well (although some were loath to admit it). However that may be, ministers suffered from an inferiority complex when confronted with their more exuberant theatrical counterparts. It seemed that the things they did circa sacra were never enough. Not even the superlative performance of a gifted clerical anchorman could overcome an audience’s prejudice against the content of what they were required to listen to. As one notorious early eighteenth-century

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opponent of the playhouse observed: ‘A fine sight ’tis indeed, to see a Company of Ladies cracking their Sides at a dull Play, and sleeping all Church-time at an excellent moral Sermon’.48 One of the ‘flights of humour’ in The Festival of Wit is a proposal for a system of taxation that was bound rapidly to fill the government treasury. This included: ‘A tax on every person that went to an Italian Opera, that did not understand the language: on every person who attended a Concert, without a knowledge of music, and on all persons sleeping at Church’.49 A sure way indeed of replenishing empty coffers! But at least the consumers of a spectacular if incomprehensible Italian musical stayed awake during the performance. As for the playwrights and actors themselves, they recognized that they had to wrestle with exactly the same problems as parsons and preachers. Hugh Kelly’s tragedy Clementina (1771) allegedly was very dull. Note the following response by a patron of the theatre, asked why he had not hissed during the performance: ‘“How the devil could I?” said he, “It was impossible! A man cannot hiss and yawn at the same time!”’50 The writer Samuel Derrick even opined that the English were ethnically burdened with an ‘inactive sluggish disposition’. Hence French plays, which ‘politely jog on at an easy pace that lulls you to sleep’, were unsuitable to Britons.51 It is telling, perhaps, that the actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, after quoting Horace’s si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi, did not provide the translation (‘If you wish me to weep, you yourself must first feel grief’) but adapted the verse: ‘He that feels not himself the Passion he would raise, will talk to a sleeping Audience’.52 This eighteenth-century adaptation of an ancient adage was repeated verbatim elsewhere.53 Incidentally, it was thought that musical audiences, too, were best kept attentive. Music that did not address the mind but consisted only of ornamentation, observed Abbé Pluche, was bound to ‘tire or lull’ an audience asleep. To prevent this, musicians (Pluche was thinking of composers like Rameau) strove to ‘keep the Ear for ever awake by Dint of musical Jerks and Flutterings’.54 Jean-Jacques Rousseau had similar reservations about contemporary Italian opera, which included ‘drawling and tiresome lamentations, which would not fail to set the whole audience asleep, if they were sung without screaming’.55 Sleeping audiences, then, made their presence felt outside the church as well as in it. Another question is whether sleeping congregations were regarded as a particularly grave problem prior to the eighteenth century. This issue will need to be fully examined elsewhere. But it is evident that clergymen had begun to wrestle with the problem of sleepers in church long before the Age of Enlightenment had begun. Erasmus had already made the point in his Praise of Folly: if what is delivered from the Pulpit be a grave, solid, rational Discourse, all the Congregation grow weary, and fall asleep, till their Patience be released; whereas if the Preacher (pardon the Impropriety of the Word, the Prater I would have said) be zealous in his Thumps of the Cushion and Antick Gestures, and spend his Glass, in the telling of pleasant Stories, his Beloved shall then stand up, tuck their Hair behind their Ears, and be very devoutly attentive.56

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It would be interesting to know whether Swift had other predecessors besides Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, as a Dutchman, may simply have been unusually prescient and perceptive. Diaries are another source; they provide, in often curious pericopes, delightful early modern instances of churchly siestas.57 A case in point is the compulsive womanizer and regular churchgoer Samuel Pepys. On 28 April 1667, he went (unwisely, perhaps, directly after dinner) to church in Putney, where I saw the girls of the schools, few of which pretty; and there I come into a pew . Here was a good sermon and much company, but I sleepy, and a little out of order, for my hat falling down through a hole underneath the pulpit, which, however, after sermon, by a stick, and the helpe of the clerke, I got up again.58

John Evelyn, too, suffered from sporadic attacks of pew-bound lifelessness. In the summer of 1680, for example, a ‘stranger’ preaching on Mark 9: 43–4 discussed the disagreeable conditions of the pit, ‘where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched’: He spake of the Death they put Malefactors to in Egypt, the cutting them asunder, and [setting] the upper halfe of the body on a hot plate: the suffering mans paine expressed in weeping teares, and gnashing of teeth, which he applied to the paine of Hell-fire … The excessive heate made me extreame sleepy ….’59

It is not clear in this case whether the weather, inferno or the sermon put Evelyn to sleep; usually he was attentive in the extreme. The point is that early modern references to comatose congregations seem incidental, and that it is chiefly individuals who tended to nod off.60 In general the evidence, or rather the lack of it, suggests that communal sleeping in church was not a subject of as great importance in the period before Addison, Swift and Hogarth introduced it as a topic of public debate. In the seventeenthcentury original of Jean Claude’s Traité de la composition d’un sermon there is no reference to corporate slumber. In the 1779 English translation, the editor Robert Robinson praises Claude’s homiletic effort: ‘Sleep, and whispering, and compliments, and all the disgraces of christian worship were banished [from] these assemblies’.61 It is in Robinson’s footnotes, rather than the original text, that one will find diatribes such as this: ‘Constant sleepers are public nuisances, and deserve to be whipped out of a religious assembly, to which they are a constant disgrace’.62 It appears that in the eighteenth century the congregation as a whole, rather than only individuals, were taken to task for not staying alert. Preachers continued to be required to produce inspired sermons; individuals were still obliged to remain attentive; but now the audience as a whole was expected to behave in a conscientious fashion. The focus of concern had shifted from individuals to the audience as a whole.

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Here we should, perhaps, point out that eighteenth-century clergymen were not always encumbered by sleeping audiences. Some performed their duties in much happier circumstances. Quite often the public was wide awake – or purposely awakened. The awakening of believers less assiduous than Evelyn is, like sleepiness itself, a topos as old as Christianity. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet showed its relevance in a sermon on Romans 13: 11 (‘now it is high time to awake out of sleep’) delivered on Advent Sunday before no one less than the Sun King himself – demonstrating in the process that spiritual snoozing was confined neither to a particular class nor to the Atlantic archipelago. Bossuet begins as follows: Should I obtain belief, were I to say that the whole human race is plunged in a profound sleep; that, even amidst the agitation of this splendid court, the greater number are oppressed with an inward lethargy? It is however an immutable truth, that he only is awake who is mindful of that great concern, his salvation. How many of this audience are unfortunately diseased with this somnolent affection!63

This, of course, had been the ministerial mantra ever since Paul rescued Eutychus from oblivion. What is striking in the eighteenth century, however, is the emphasis on collective awakenings. Again, this is not the place to discuss awakenings in detail. But take, by way of example, John Wesley. Molesting Morpheus metaphorically was practically his core business. What he did in Aughrim, Ireland, is a thing he did everywhere: ‘to awaken a serious but sleepy Congregation’.64 His rhetoric is laden with expressions denoting sleep and wakefulness (or, alternatively, death and life, as well as sight and blindness).65 In August 1771, according to his journal, he preached at Haverfordwest, where he ‘found the people in general to be in a cold, dead languid state’. This did not surprise him, ‘since there had been for several months a total neglect of discipline’. Wesley wrote, ‘I did all I could to awaken them once more’.66 He expected an audience to respond, and to do so vigorously and collectively. And whatever might be said for (or against) enthusiastic Welsh revivalists, one cannot deny that as an audience they were often very wide awake. A few days after preaching in Haverfordwest, Wesley stood before an audience of ‘Jumpers’ – awakened believers who out of pure spiritual joy tended to hop around in sacred space. Observed Wesley: Some of them leaped up many times, men and women, several feet from the ground: they clapped their hands with the utmost violence; they shook their heads; they distorted all their features: they threw their arms and legs to and fro, in all variety of postures. They sung, roared, shouted, screamed with all their might; to the no small terror of those that were near them.67

Revival congregations were criticized in their day for their extravagant behaviour, ranging from pulpit thumping to enthusiastic convulsions; but not for being awake.

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III Both ‘evangelical’ and mainstream clergy were united in their conviction that church members ought to be wakeful, and to be wakeful in unison, as an audience. Could we take this argument one step further by suggesting that this prominent, seemingly unanimous eighteenth-century diatribe against sleeping in church played a key role in the formation of the ‘modern’ audience? Allow me to make some tentative suggestions. Social categories such as ‘audience’ and ‘public’ are culturally constructed; as representations of what presumably was real, they convey at the same time certain assumptions about what is good and what is bad. In other words, values are inherent to the way we look at audiences. The significance of such values becomes apparent when they are contrasted with their opposites. In the case at hand, a sleepy audience, which is bad because it pays no attention, compares negatively with a wakeful audience, which is good because it listens. In cultural discourse, then, audiences are constructed through attributes (‘sleepiness’, ‘wakefulness’) which are given a valence (‘good’ or ‘bad’) by being contrasted with their opposites. Having ascertained that representations of audiences can be understood in terms of dichotomies, and that such dichotomies reveal specific values, the question arises why clergymen and critics, producers and performers were so worried about the audience’s mental state. The important word in this context, I believe, is ‘public’. Audiences, including church audiences or congregations, are public phenomena. They exist in the public sphere. This makes them important. In the way they act, audiences (also known as ‘publics’, but I shall refrain from using the word to avoid confusion with ‘public’) reflect, or ought to reflect, those best practices we believe should be present in the public sphere. Sleeping when one should really be awake is obviously not a best practice. It is not hard to imagine why large-scale dormancy was seen as a vexing social problem. If audiences sleep in church, to the particular chagrin of preachers, they may also sleep at school or in law courts or, God forbid, at state ceremonial occasions. Universal vegetation was more than just a spiritual headache; it threatened to impose itself on public space. In a broad and loose sense, therefore, representations of audiences contain signs and messages concerning values that we might label ‘civic’. Civic values are collective values inhering in the paradigmatic audiences that ideally should constitute the public sphere. Given the rise of that public sphere in the eighteenth century (at this juncture, it is necessary to keep Habermas in mind),68 it is logical to assume that the religious audience, too, was furnished with the attributes necessary for a healthy civic life. Nowadays we might say, perhaps, that good audience behaviour reveals a good understanding of citizenship. Let me resume my argument. Audiences may be positively or negatively associated with civic values because audiences exist in, or in relation to, the public sphere.69 Images of audiences suggest value judgements about the willingness and capability of audience members to act publicly in certain ways (or, indeed, not to act at all). We can see now why attitudes towards revivalist congregations were so ambivalent. If anything, Bible-thumping preachers and groaning congregations demonstrate full, unqualified, public commitment to the message broadcast

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(in this case from the pulpit). What revivalist audiences lacked, of course, was discipline. In The Spectator, Joseph Addison had already pointed out the need for more self-restraint during sermons: Nothing is more frequent than to see women weep and tremble at the sight of a moving preacher, though he is placed quite out of their hearing; as in England we very frequently see people lulled asleep with solid and elaborate discourses of piety, who would be warmed and transported out of themselves by the bellowings and distortions of Enthusiasm.70

In conjunction with the stress on wakefulness, there arose in eighteenth-century religious discourse an emphasis on disciplined behaviour and proper conduct. This emphasis was new and it was connected with, or perhaps even preceded, similar developments in the sphere of leisure and entertainment.71 Two themes appear to inform this new religious discourse. The first is rationality. An attentive audience was understood to be a rational one, even if it reacted emotionally. The Presbyterian minister Joshua Parry castigated the ‘absolute stupidity’ of those who welcomed pedantic admonitions concerning worldly things, but wilfully, and unreasonably, spurned words of spiritual advice. ‘Persons of this turn, if they are not actually asleep in public worship, might almost as well be asleep; for they are no more attentive to the instructions there delivered, than to words that are spoken at a thousand miles distance’.72 For Parry, paying attention to religious advice was a reasonable thing to do, if only because gaining eternity seemed of rather greater consequence than feeling rested for the remainder of the Sabbath. The second theme that appears to inform eighteenth-century religious discourse is the idea that speaker and listeners together form, or ought to form, a unified and impassioned collective. A combined emotional response signalled a state of wakefulness. No less a personage than Lucifer himself had allegedly pointed out in 1751 that audience response depended on clerical input. A sermon and preacher lacking in ‘Life and Spirit’ would soon put ‘one half of your Congregation asleep’. But a minister who acted as ‘Mouth of the Congregation’ was likely to strike his audience with ‘Awe and Reverence’. For ‘so great is the Effect of his pious and unaffected Behaviour on the Minds of the People, that they all join him as it were with one Heart and with one Voice’.73 Romans 15: 6 acquired a weight beyond the religious assembly stricto sensu: it became a demand all modern audiences were required to satisfy. Hence the interest, extending far into the nineteenth century, in forms of rhetoric that ‘reached the heart’, by applying techniques spiritual (and other) leaders were required to master in theory and practice.74 Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation may not just have been a run-of-the-mill post-Puritan response to the lackadaisical British work ethic. Eighteenth-century representations of audiences, including church audiences, seem to offer an important vista on how media interact with society. It is, after all, the audience through which a medium (in this case, the preacher) connects with the world. And as that world turned into something more ‘modern’, audiences were expected to change with it.

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The ideal audience as a unified, emotive, disciplined and rational public seems to have come increasingly to the fore during the period. The interesting thing about the religious audiences or congregations we have considered in this chapter is the unprecedented emphasis on collective alertness. Even before the rise of media technology, Hogarth’s print signalled a fundamental shift towards a more modern culture of communication. It is a topic that deserves further research, over a much larger time-span, in Britain but also elsewhere in Europe. After all, given the many parallel developments, shared images and mutual perceptions in British and continental history,75 the question inevitably arises: was sleeping in church an insular problem, or did Europe as a whole share the nasty habit of zonking out in Zion? Endnotes 1 A Letter from a Chancellor (London, [1795]), p. 168. 2 For example in Sean Shesgreen (ed.), Engravings: 101 Prints (New York, 1973), print 36. 3 The following is based on Bernd Krysmanski, ‘Lust in Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation – or, how to waste time in post-Puritan England’, Art history, 21 (1998), pp. 393–408. 4 Ibid., p. 408. 5 Jonathan Swift, ‘Upon Sleeping in Church’, The Works (…). Arranged, Revised, and Corrected, with Notes, by Thomas Sheridan, 17 vols (London, 1784), vol. 10, pp. 138–50, at pp. 141–2. 6 Ibid., pp. 149–150. 7 It was widely debated, especially during the nineteenth century, whether Eutychus may not simply have lost consciousness; in the eighteenth century the raising of Eutychus was usually seen as a proof of the truth of Christianity. 8 Stephen Addington, The Life of Paul the Apostle. With Critical and Practical Remarks on his Discourses and Writings (London, 1784), p. 401. 9 John Carpender, A Comparison betwixt Prayer and Preaching (London, 1708), p. 37. This author suggests that Eutychus’ drowsiness was excusable, since Paul preached late at night. Cf. Hannah Neale, Sacred History in Familiar Dialogues, for the Instruction of Children and Youth, 4 vols (London, 1796), vol. 3, p. 191, where ‘the length of Paul’s discourse forms an apology’. 10 [Thomas Rimbron], The Christian Instructor, and Monitor: or, a Guide to Parents and Children, to Masters and Servants, in Religion and the Way to Salvation (Bristol, 1744), p. 52. An alternative in A Looking-glass for Youth and Age; or, a Sure Guide to Life and Glory (s.l., s.a. [1798?]), p. 4: ‘wilt thou go to church as many others do for fashion sake, or chat and sleep when there’? ‘No Sir …’. 11 [Sarah Trimmer], Sacred History, Selected from the Scriptures; with Annotations and Reflections, 6 vols (Gloucester, 1788), vol. 6, p. 373. See also John Willison, A Treatise Concerning the Santification of the Lord’s Day (Edinburgh, 1745), pp. 260–261, on ‘sleeping or drousiness, in time of divine service’. 12 William Dalrymple, The Acts of the Apostles Made Easy to the Young and Unlearned, by a Short Paraphrase, Notes and Reflections (Ayr, 1792), p. 213. 13 P. Doddridge, The Family Expositor: or, a Paraphrase and Version of the New Testament, 6 vols (London, 1739–56), vol. 3, p. 324.

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14 George Muir, The Parable of the Sower Illustrated and Applied (London, 1769), p. 47. 15 Anthony Horneck, The Happy Ascetick: or, the Best Exercise, Together with Prayers Suitable to each Exercise (London, 1711), pp. 110–111. 16 Edward Wells, The Common Christian Rightly and Plainly Instructed in the Grounds of Christianity (Oxford, 1712), pp. 71–2. 17 James Penn, By Way of Prevention, a Sleepy Sermon, Calculated for the Dog Days ([London], 1767). 18 [William Harris], in: Practical Discourses concerning Hearing the Word. Preach’d at the Friday Evening-lecture in Eastcheap (London, 1713), pp. 216–86, espec. pp. 220–225 (‘Be not sleepy Hearers’); Samuel Perrott, ‘On Sleep’, in Sermons on Practical Subjects (Cork, 1798), pp. 244–58 (on Psalm 3: 5). 19 James Turner, The Duty of Keeping, and the Sin of Profaning, the Sabbath-day, Briefly Explained (Coventry, 1773), p. 23. 20 Daniel Rowland, Pum pregeth ar y testunau canlynol (Caerfyrddin, 1772), p. 187. 21 There are also sermons on related texts, such as George Whitefield’s ‘Directions How to Hear Sermons’, in his The Christian’s Companion: or, Sermons on Several Subjects (London, 1739), pp. 5–20, on Luke 8: 18 (‘Take heed therefore how you hear’). 22 Vicesimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, 2 vols (London, 1779), vol. 1, pp. 31–2. 23 [John Trusler], The Works of Mr. Hogarth Moralized (London, 1768), p. 110. 24 The Fashionable Preacher; or, Modern Pulpit Eloquence (London, 1792), p. 5. 25 Country Roger, The Dissenting Laity Pleading their own Cause against the Clamours and Calumnies of the Highflying Clergy (London, 1708), p. 3. 26 Henry Fielding, Amelia (London, 1780), p. 72. 27 Vicesimus Knox, Winter Evenings: or, Lucubrations on Life and Letters, 2 vols (London, 1790), vol. 2, p. 513. 28 Cuthbert Ellison, What Will this Babler Say? In Two Sermons (London, 1748), pp. 27–8. 29 Lucifer, Hell-gates Open to All Men: or, an Invitation to Persons of every Age, Sex and Quality, to a Residence in the Infernal Regions (London, 1751), p. 107. Isaac Gilling, The Qualifications and Duties of Ministers. A Sermon Preach’d at Taunton, May the 27th, 1708, before an Assembly of the United ministers of Somerset and Devon (Exeter, 1708), p. 31: ‘If you Preach coldly, you will rock your People asleep’. 30 [William Thom], The Motives which have Determined the University of Glasgow to Desert the Blackfriar Church (Glasgow, 1764), pp. 34–5. 31 Thomas Greene, ‘Chiding my Drowziness beneath the Sound of the Gospel’, in: Poems on Various Subjects, Chiefly Sacred (London, 1780), pp. 220–222, at p. 222. 32 ‘Some Acts of a Second Play, Written at the Request of a Friend, in about a Fortnight’, in [Mary] Leapor, Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1751), p. 247. 33 G.P. Tousey, Flights to Helicon: or, Petites Piece, in Verse (London, 1768), p. 12. 34 [Solomon Bung-Your-Eye], The Informers Outwitted. A Tragi-comical farce (London, 1738), p. 24. 35 On the raw, unkind nature of eighteenth-century jokes, see Simon Dickie, ‘Hilarity and Pitilessness in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: English Jestbook Humor’, in: Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2003), pp. 1–22. 36 John Fallowfield, The Moral Instructor; Consisting of Miscellaneous Essays, Poems, Anecdotes, Maxims, &c. (Penrith, 1795), p. 289. 37 [Christopher Grin], The New Loyal and Patriotic Jester, or Complete Library of Fun (London, 1800?), p. 47. The same joke in Ann Sophia Radcliffe, The Ladies Elegant Jester, or Fun for the Female Sex (London, [1800?]), p. 47.

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38 Joke upon Joke. Or the Last Packet from the Land of Festivity and Mirth (London, 1800), p. 271. 39 [J. A–––N], ‘The Sleepy Congregation. A tale’, in: The London Magazine. Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 50 (1780), pp. 231–2. 40 The Second Part of Whipping-Tom: or, a Rod for a Proud Lady (London, 1722), p. 17. 41 [Anne Newport Royall], Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States. By a Traveller (New Haven, 1826), p. 303. 42 Adam Fitz-Adam, The World, 4 vols (London, 1794), vol. 2, p. 156. The World was edited by playwright Edward Moore and first appeared as a periodical in 1753–56. 43 John Graham, Simon Pure Unmask’d: or, the Errors of Quakerism Display’d. A Dialogue betwixt a Quaker Speaker and a Lay Protestant (Newcastle, 1745), p. 47. 44 Joseph Addison, The Papers of Joseph Addison, Esq. in the Tatler, Spectator, Guardian, and Freeholder, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1790), vol. 4, pp. 275–6 (Guardian 17 August 1713). 45 William O’Brien, O’Brien’s Lusorium: being a Collection of Convivial Songs, Lectures &c. entirely Original, in Various Styles (London, 1782), pp. 88–9. 46 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book 4, verse 58. 47 Moral and Political Magazine of the London Corresponding Society 1 (1796), pp. 218–19. 48 Arthur Bedford, A Serious Remonstrance in behalf of the Christian Religion, against the Horrid Blasphemies and Impieties which Are Still Used in the English Play-houses (London, 1730), p. 362. Bedford is quoting a play by Richard Estcourt, The Fair Example: or the Modish Citizens (London, 1706), p. 21. 49 The Festival of Wit: or, the Small Talker (London, 1782), 184. The same joke appears in The New London City Jester; or a Banquet of Wit, Mirth, and Fancy (London, 1794),  p. 49; and The Yoyal Jester, or Prince’s Cabinet of Wit (London, 1792), p. 73. 50 Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the Stage, 5 vols (London, 1800), vol. 5, pp. 278–9. 51 Samuel Derrick, A General View of the Stage. By Mr. Wilkes (London, 1759), p. 55. 52 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, and Late Patentee of the Theatre-Royal (London, 1740), p. 62. 53 With reference to Thomas Betterton in [Anon.], The History of the Stage. In which is Included, the Theatrical Characters of the Most Celebrated Actors (London, 1742), p. 11; [Anon.], An Account of the Life of that Celebrated Tragedian Mr. Thomas Betterton (London, 1749), p. 30; A New and General Biographical Dictionary,11 vols (London, 1761–62), vol. 2, p. 158. 54 Noël Antoine Pluche, Spectacle de la Nature: or, Nature display’d. Being Discourses on such Particulars of Natural History as were Thought most Proper to Excite the Curiosity, 4th edn., 7 vols (London, 1763), vol. 7, p. 69. See also George J. Buelow, A History of Baroque Music (Bloomington, 2004), pp. 1–2. 55 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Miscellaneous works of Mr. J.J. Rousseau, 5 vols (London, 1767), vol. 2, p. 100. 56 Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. by W. Kennet, 6th edn. (London, 1740), p. 85. It is interesting to compare this eighteenth-century rendering of the Latin text with a sixteenth-century translation. Cf. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folie. Moriae encomium a Booke made in Latine by that Great Clerke Erasmus Roterodame. Englisshed by Sir Thomas Chaloner Knight (London, 1549), unpaginated: ‘wherin if ought be sayd grauelye, and to the mattier, he shal see strayght all the audience other slepe, or gaspe, or be vrksome. But and yf the skreker (the preacher I would haue sayde) falleth out of his purpose, as commonly their vsage is, into some tale of Gesta Romanorum, or suche lyke, than by and by they lift up their heads, they stande up, and geue good care’.

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57 For an extensive treatment, see Joris van Eijnatten, ‘Getting the Message. Towards a Cultural History of the Sermon’, in Joris van Eijnatten (ed.), Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Long Eighteenth Century (A New History of the Sermon IV) (Leiden etc, 2009), pp. 343–88. 58 The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 1667, 8 vols (Berkeley, 2000), vol. 8, p. 188 (Sunday 28 April 1667). 59 Guy de la Bédoyère ed., The Diary of John Evelyn (Woodbridge, 1995), p. 234 (11 July 1680). 60 There are, of course, many other ways to examine the issue. In early-modern Dutch orphanages, for example, lying, cheating, swearing, disobeying, fighting, quarrelling and sleeping in church were trespasses of equal magnitude (it was worse to steal, masturbate or get drunk); Nelleke Bakker, Jan Noordman and Marjoke Rietveld-van Wingerden, Vijf eeuwen opvoeden in Nederland. Idee en praktijk: 1500–2000 (Assen, 2006), p. 346. 61 Robert Robinson, ‘The life of monsieur Claude’, in: Jean Claude, An Essay on the Composition of a Sermon (Cambridge, 1779) vol. 1, p. xlvi. The ‘Traité de la composition d’un sermon’ was first published in the Oeuvres posthumes (Amsterdam, 1688). 62 Claude, Essay on the Composition of a Sermon, vol. 2, p. 383 (note 5). 63 Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Select Sermons (London, 1800), p. 1. 64 Wesley, An Extract from the Reverend Mr. John Wesley’s Journal, from November 25, 1746, to July 20, 1749 (London, 1754), p. 128. 65 John Rutty, A Spiritual Diary and Soliloquies (London, 1776), p. 207: ‘Above half the people are asleep’, followed by ‘Every wordling is blind’. 66 Wesley, An Extract of the Rev. John Wesley’s Journal, from September 13, 1773, to January 2, 1776 (London 1797), p. 31. 67 Wesley, An Extract of the Rev. John Wesley’s Journal, from September 13, 1773, to January 2, 1776, p. 31. 68 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (London, 1989). 69 Paul Lichterman and Charles Brady Potts (eds), The Civic Life of American Religion (Stanford CA, 2009). 70 Joseph Addison, The Works of the Late Right Honourable Joseph Addison, 4 vols (London, 1732) vol. 3, p. 482 (Spectator 407). The passage was popular: it was included in Thomas Weales, The Christian Orator Delineated ([London], 1778), p. 161; William Scott, Lessons in Elocution; or, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse (Edinburgh, 1779), p. 62. 71 Compare the disciplining of theatre audiences in Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences. From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge, 2000). See also Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca NY, 1999); Helen M. Burke, Riotous Performances. The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712–784 (Notre Dame IN, 2003). 72 Joshua Parry, Seventeen Sermons, on Practical Subjects (Bath, 1783), p. 325. 73 Lucifer, Hell-gates, 107. 74 See Joris van Eijnatten, ‘Reaching Audiences. Sermons and Oratory in Europe, 1660-1800’, in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett eds, The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. VII: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Reawakening (1660–1815) (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 128–46. 75 Keith Robbins, Britain and Europe 1789–2005 (London, 2005). .

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Chapter 5

A Tale of Two Mirrors: Forming an Identity for the Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales Eryn M. White

The early years of the nineteenth century were crucial in establishing the perception of Nonconformity as intrinsically Welsh and Wales as inherently Nonconformist. The secession of the Calvinistic Methodists from the Anglican Church in 1811 helped ensure the numerical triumph of the Nonconformists over the Church by the mid-nineteenth century, so that Nonconformists felt justified in claiming Wales as their own. As Densil Morgan has suggested, evangelical Nonconformity ‘had succeeded to a remarkable degree in recreating Wales in its own form and image’.1 The need to confirm the identity of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism at a key turning point in its history was an essential part of this process. The Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales was ushered into the world in 1811, after a lengthy gestation period of over three quarters of a century.2 After so long a wait, its arrival was something of an anti-climax, with very little fanfare as the movement proceeded to ordain its first ministers. The new Calvinistic Methodist Church was still rather unsure of its identity, having clung so long to its position as a church within a church. For much of the eighteenth century, the Methodists had been careful to avoid assuming too ostentatiously any of the characteristics of a separate denomination, even though the potential for separation had been apparent from the 1740s when the movement had begun to build society houses or chapels. Methodism in separating from the Church lacked any formal distinctive declaration of belief, since it had no real quarrel with the 39 articles of the Anglican Church. Thomas Jones of Denbigh was one of the strongest voices arguing that the adoption of any other confession of faith was wholly unnecessary.3 It was only after his death in 1820 that the Connexion moved ahead with the acceptance and publication of its confession of faith, Cyffes Ffydd y Corph, in 1823. The denomination was subsequently registered in the Court of Chancery in 1826. It might be expected that the name adopted by the new religious body would give the clearest indication of how it chose to define itself, but the element of the name which became most readily identified with the movement was not of its own choosing. ‘Methodist’ was a dismissive nickname devised by the opponents of the early movement in England. In both England and Wales those influenced by the evangelical revival frequently referred to themselves as ‘the people called

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Methodists’, indicating that they regarded the use of the name as part of the persecution they faced. Despite attempts to advocate terms such as ‘the society people’ as alternatives, the Welsh evangelicals surrendered quite quickly to the inevitability of this popular naming and were using the word ‘Methodist’ as a matter of course by the early 1740s. Even so, for the rest of his life, Howell Harris would note in his diary his opposition to the name as one which more properly belonged to the English Wesleyan movement. As late as 1771, he preached in the Countess of Huntingdon’s College at Trefeca and was, according to his diary entry, ‘cutting about the word Methodist, that ’tis of the Devil’s putting’.4 He invariably insisted on the term ‘Christian’ as being the only acceptable description, one which would also embrace all the various branches of the evangelical movement.5 Harris was of course right to argue that ‘Methodist’ was a term that originated in England and in the early years of the revival it was used in Wales to refer specifically to Whitefield, the Wesleys and their followers. Yet it was soon being used as a label to describe the Welsh revivalists, who appeared so similar to the English movements as to merit the same nickname from their opponents. ‘Methodist’ was adopted as part of the Welsh language and with a plural suffix attached to it, the ‘Methodistiaid’ were born. Even so, there was some effort, at the height of Welsh Nonconformity in the nineteenth century, to replace this borrowed English word with a more intrinsically Welsh name, resulting in the term ‘Trefnyddion’, which, translated into English, would be something akin to ‘Organizers’. While in many ways an apt description, it failed to dislodge the already deeply engrained usage of the word ‘Methodist’. By 1811, the term ‘Methodist’ needed to be further qualified by the adjective ‘Calvinistic’, reflecting the gulf that now separated the Calvinistic Methodists from the Wesleyan Methodists. John Wesley had received a lukewarm reception in Wales once the divide between Arminian and Calvinist Methodism was confirmed in the early 1740s and the Wesleyan Church made little headway throughout the eighteenth century, partly because of an inability to communicate in the Welsh language. Thus the preaching circuits were largely confined to the more anglicised areas of south Wales. However, Thomas Coke, who was born in Brecon, persuaded the Wesleyan Conference in 1800 to send Welsh-speaking missionaries to north Wales, leading to the formation of a northern circuit which comprised 60 chapels by 1810.6 John Elias complained in his autobiography that the name ‘Methodist’ in Wales had at one time presented no confusion as the only Methodists were Calvinists. There had been, he claimed, general doctrinal agreement between Methodists and Dissenters, since they all espoused Calvinism.7 With the concerted efforts of the Wesleyan Methodists to establish themselves in Wales from the start of the nineteenth century, that situation changed. Debates between the two rival Methodist groups led to a clarification of the doctrinal positions of the Calvinistic Methodist and the emergence of the new denomination. At the forefront of the controversy was Thomas Jones, who emerged as the chief spokesperson in print for the Calvinist cause. The emergence of the Arminian challenge seemed to drive some Calvinistic Methodists into a more emphatic high Calvinist attitude on questions of predestination and election. Thomas Jones tried to steer the Connexion between the Arminianism of the Wesleyans and the higher

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Calvinism of the group led by John Elias by espousing a more moderate Calvinism which he viewed as the legacy of the Protestant Reformation.8 It has traditionally been considered that higher Calvinism gained the upper hand after Jones’ death, although Densil Morgan argues that Elias was not as uncompromising on matters of election as he has sometimes been depicted.9 To some extent, the ‘Calvinistic Methodist’ name had been forced upon the new denomination. There was an inevitability as well about the fact that it was specifically the Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales. This reflected the way in which Calvinistic Methodism in England had fallen into disarray by the early nineteenth century. In the early days of the evangelical revival, there had been considerable communication between the English and Welsh Calvinist branches, with George Whitefield appointed as the official Moderator of the Welsh movement, even though his frequent absences in America meant that this role was something of a sinecure. After his death, the Welsh Methodists had maintained strong links with the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, with many Welsh Methodist clergy travelling regularly to England to fill the pulpits of her chapels.10 She relied increasingly upon the support of Thomas Charles of Bala and David Jones of Llangan to assist her in this way. After her death in 1791, those bonds were significantly loosened. The college which she had established near Howel Harris’ home at Trefeca was moved to Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. A number of her chapels allied themselves with English Dissent in order to ensure their continuation. By 1811, there were only two Huntingdonian chapels left in London, compared to 46 Wesleyan.11 It was increasingly apparent that Calvinistic Methodism was largely a Welsh phenomenon and it is no surprise that the name of the new denomination reflected that reality. In addition to these practical considerations, the new denomination displayed a greater tendency to define itself as peculiarly Welsh than the eighteenth-century Methodist movement in the country had done. It embraced the tradition of associating Protestantism, the Welsh people and the Welsh language in a way that had perhaps not been as necessary for its eighteenth-century predecessors. That is not to say that the early Methodist leaders had been indifferent to Welsh language and culture; indeed, Howel Harris had frequently made statements urging a pride in the nation’s language and heritage.12 However, Methodism, which was born, bred and nurtured within Welsh-speaking Wales, had no need to emphasise its Welsh credentials in the way that sixteenth-century Protestantism had felt obliged to do. The Elizabethan Anglican Church had needed to make a considerable effort to counter the initial perception that it represented an ‘English faith’, usurping the place of the traditional Welsh Catholicism.13 Both early Anglicanism and Puritanism had struggled to explain their basic beliefs through the medium of the only language most of the population could understand, and had struggled to combat the reluctance to accept what seemed an alien imposition. Eighteenth-century Methodism was indigenous to Wales and therefore had no trouble in communicating with people through the medium of both of the languages commonly used in the country. It produced a body of literature for a population increasingly equipped to read such writing, thanks to the success of the circulating

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schools started by Griffith Jones and later the Sunday schools pioneered by Thomas Charles. It was the very strength of its Welsh character which enabled the early Methodist movement to take its Welshness for granted. The tendency instead was to justify its somewhat unorthodox status as a church within a church by recourse to biblical precedent, particularly the early church of the New Testament. William Williams was the first to write of the movement in a historical context and his emphasis was on the broad sweep of global Christian history, identifying what he interpreted as the ebb and flow of revival and decline from the early church through the Protestant Reformation and beyond. In his elegy to Griffith Jones, Williams painted an engaging image of Jones spending his time in heaven in the company of Rees Prichard, the seventeenth-century cleric whose religious verses caught the popular imagination.14 Yet, otherwise, the heroes Williams hailed in his works were Wycliff, Hus, Luther and Calvin, rather than William Salesbury, John Penry and Morgan Llwyd. By the time the Methodist denomination was founded, however, there were signs that those who were engaged in fashioning its identity were more concerned with establishing its roots in the Welsh past. History, biography and autobiography became increasingly important literary forms for the Methodists at the turn of the century. Ironically, one of the newest of the major Welsh Nonconformist denominations came to be known as ‘yr Hen Gorff’ or ‘the Old Connexion’. Derec Llwyd Morgan suggests that the period between the Methodist Revival in the mid-eighteenth century and the death of Thomas Charles in 1814 witnessed the cementing of the relationship between religion and literature in Wales.15 This period also roughly corresponds to the time between the publication of two highly influential works on the history of religion amongst the Welsh people: the expanded second edition of Drych y Prif Oesoedd [The Mirror of the First Ages] by Theophilus Evans in 1740 and Drych yr Amseroedd [The Mirror of the Times] by Robert Jones in 1820. The differences in emphases of the two writers gives a clear indication of the changes wrought by the evangelical revival and of the way a distinctive Nonconformist view of history was emerging. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was already a long-standing tradition of perceiving the history of the Welsh people within a biblical context. For good Protestants, it was perhaps natural to wish to identify the history of their nation with the trials of God’s chosen people in the Scriptures. This was by no means unique to Wales; Mark Noll’s work on the influence of the Bible in America reveals very similar tendencies.16 There was a particular resonance amongst the Welsh, however, because of the belief that the Scriptures had been available in Welsh or in an older Brythonic language in the past, but had been lost as a result of the influence of Rome and conquest by the English.17 Sixteenth-century Protestantism had made good use of the old British myth that Joseph of Arimathea had imported the Christian faith to the British Isles around the year 60 AD.18 Protestantism was hailed as a return to that older, purer version of Christianity, which predated what was seen as the corrupting influence of Rome. This gave the new faith an ancient history and a sense of connection with the nation which made it far more acceptable

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and to a large extent helped counteract the Welsh preconception of Protestantism as ‘the English faith’. Scholars in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century searched for traces of the lost British version of the Scriptures. The great Celtic scholar Edward Lhuyd apparently doubted its existence, but kept an eye out for it anyway. It was generally accepted that the ancestors of the Welsh were the first converts to Christianity in the British Isles and that as a result there was a special connection between the faith and the Welsh language. There is no doubt that these considerations played an important part in the writing of Welsh history in this period. Richard Davies’ preface to the New Testament in 1567 had set out the case for Protestantism as a return to the old Celtic Church as established through Joseph of Arimathea’s preaching. That preface remained in print throughout the early modern period. It also appeared as a separate publication in 1774 and in 1778 under the title Llythyr y gwir Barchedig Dad yn Nuw, Rysiart Dafies.at y Cymry [The Letter of the right Reverend Father in God Richard Davies.to the Welsh], edited by Peter Williams, who had also been responsible for editing the first edition of the Bible to be printed in Wales, in Carmathen in 1770. Joseph of Arimathea thus provided a link to the New Testament, but there was another important myth which provided a link to the Old, because it was also believed that the founder of the British or Welsh people was Gomer, who was purported to be the eldest son of Japheth, who appears in Genesis as one of the sons of Noah who went on to populate the earth once more after the Great Flood.19 These myths coalesced in Theophilus Evans’ Drych y Prif Oesoedd or ‘A Mirror of the First Ages’, which first appeared in 1716 and was revised, with an additional 10,000 words, in 1740. This work proved to be one of the most popular accounts of the history of Wales for many years and ran to 21 editions by the end of the nineteenth century.20 An English translation by George Roberts was published in Pennsylvania in 1834 with a view to keeping alive a sense of their origins among Welsh Americans.21 Evans was ordained in the Anglican Church and was just 23 when the first edition of his magnum opus appeared in 1716. He revised the work substantially in the second edition in 1740, adding an estimated 10,000 words to the total. The work was divided into two parts, the first dealing with the origins and early history of the Welsh people, up to the conquest by Edward I, and the second with the history of the gospel in Wales. The biblical context of the work was clearly set out, with Evans stating in the first sentence of the second edition: It is a great and unprofitable task to relate the history of the Welsh people – to their recount the misfortunes which attended them in every age and country in which they have resided, since the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel. It is painful and lamentable to relate how ungrateful they were to God, how desirous of rebelling against him, and how ready to rebel against Him and to fall into the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil. This was the cause of all the calamities which befel them.22

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Evans made it clear that any misfortunes the Welsh nation had suffered throughout its history were a punishment for straying from a proper worship of God, echoing the trials and tribulations of the people of Israel in the Scriptures. As Evans explained: ‘as long as the Britons feared God and kept from evil, that long the enemy stayed home. But when the Britons forgot God and his worship, then their enemies began to prepare to visit them’. This may not sound like the most optimistic account of Welsh history, but there was a certain exuberance when discussing blood and battles, as well as a more positive side. Following on from that initial statement, Evans went on to explain how other great nations had come to grief, how the Jews and the Greeks had been conquered and how the Romans had fallen from their former glory with their language confined to within the covers of books. He then added, But we, a remnant of the Ancient Britons, still occupy a portion of this great island, of which we were once the sole possessors; and retain our original language, if not perfectly, yet in greater purity than any other nation in the world.23

A glimmer of hope and pride remained, therefore, despite the sinfulness and tribulations which plagued the Welsh, possibly with reference to Old Testament prophecies regarding the preservation of a faithful remnant of the chosen nation. Evans mixed British mythology with biblical references and seemed to revel in both. Derec Llwyd Morgan suggests that there is a general correspondence between the history of Israel and the history of Wales in this work, and that there are occasional more specific correlations, such as the account of the early Welsh saint, Dyfrig, demanding that the Saxon Hengist be cut to pieces, just as Samuel had slaughtered King Agag in the Old Testament.24 Evans is often mentioned in the same breath as Charles Edwards, the author of Y Ffydd Ddiffuant (the Unfeigned Faith, 1667), who also wrote an account of history with similar influences, but Derec Llwyd Morgan suggests that there is a considerable gulf between the two authors.25 Yet Evans is still a long way from the perspective of a modern historian. For one thing, he was highly indignant when some commentators dared to suggest that Brutus, who gave his name to the island of Britain, did not in fact exist; thus he was prepared to peddle some of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s flights of fancy even though these had been largely discredited long before the eighteenth century.26 None the less, it is easy to understand why he became something of a bestseller. He provided stirring tales of Boudicca and Arthur at a time when the Welsh were desperately short of heroes. There was an undoubted appeal in the notion that the Welsh were the inheritors of a long-standing Christian tradition which gave them a primacy over the other inhabitants of the British Isles and, if Evans had his way, most of the rest of the world. The title of Theophilus Evans’ work is echoed in the first published history of the Methodist movement in Wales, Robert Jones’ Drych yr Amseroedd in 1820, and it would appear that this was a deliberate choice. Drych yr Amseroedd did not

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cover the same ground as Drych y Prif Oesoedd. Instead it concentrated mainly on the previous 100 years, ‘the late years of revival’, although with reference to the background from the Protestant Reformation onwards. It was the first work by a Welsh Methodist to focus on placing the revival in the Welsh context rather than within the wider scheme of Christian history. Robert Jones outlined his motives in an introduction addressed to his ‘kind compatriots’, in which he sought to prove that knowledge of the past was useful in the present. He was driven, he claimed, by the fact that few nations on earth had been more careless regarding the past than the Welsh. He urged people who believed that there was little to be learnt from history to bear in mind that a substantial proportion of the Bible was comprised of books of history. The history of the Christian Church through the ages was also worthy of note. Who would now know of the many martyrs for the faith, or of the contribution of Wycliff, Luther and Calvin, if some of the faithful had not bothered to record their stories? A chan fod hanesiaeth yn ddiamheuol ymhob oes ac ymhob gwlad mor fuddiol ac adeiladol, a raid gan hynny i’r Cymry uniaith gael eu cau mewn tywyllwch ac anwybodaeth am y pethau rhyfedd a wnaeth yr Arglwydd yn eu plith?27 [And since history is without question so useful and constructive in every age and in every country, must the monoglot Welsh therefore be enclosed in darkness and ignorance of the wondrous things the Lord has done amongst them?]

Robert Jones has been accused of producing a grotesquely distorted image in his mirror. He has been regarded as one of the main architects of the Methodist view of history, an approach to the past which generally castigated the period prior to the evangelical revival as one of utter darkness, superstition and stagnation and conversely proclaimed the advent of revival as a bright dawn which miraculously enlightened the prevailing gloom.28 Jones painted a bleak picture of a country devoid of religious guidance and wedded to fearful superstition, so that, he claimed, ‘scarcely a bird flew, or a innocent little lamb appeared, or a snail crawled, without some fancy forming of what would happen in the following year’.29 The reason for this distortion was that Jones did not write solely or even primarily as a historian, but rather, as he declared at the outset, with the aim of illuminating ‘the wondrous works of God’ in relation to Wales: Myfyrio yr oeddwn ar y gwaith rhyfedd a wnaeth yr Arglwydd, o’i fawr drugaredd, yn yr oesoedd diwethaf drwy’r Efengyl yng Nghymru; a bod llaw’r Arglwydd, yn amlwg ac yn wyrthiol, yn dwyn y gwaith gogoneddus ymlaen: ond er mor rhyfedd yr ymddiffynnodd Duw Ei achos, ac y cosbodd yr erlidwyr; er hynny, meddaf, hyd y gwn i, ni bu wiw gan neb gadw coffadwriaeth, na dodi y pethau hynny mewn ysgrifen, i ddangos i’r oes bresennol ac i’r oesoedd a ddêl, ryfedd weithredoedd Duw.30

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain [I was meditating on the wondrous work the Lord, of his great mercy, has done in recent times through the Gospel in Wales; and that the Lord’s hand, evidently and miraculously, carried out this glorious work: but however wondrously God defended His cause, and punished persecutors; despite this, I say, as far as I know, no-one has seen fit to keep a remembrance, or to put these things in writing, to show to the present age and the ages to come, the wondrous works of God.]

As a spokesperson for the new Methodist denomination, he was swayed by a not wholly unnatural desire to present the early movement and its founders in an heroic light. His account of the pre-revival period aroused some resentment among the old Dissenters, but was adhered to by subsequent Methodist historians, including John Hughes in his three-volume Methodistiaeth Cymru in the 1850s; this was regarded for many years as one of the most authoritative works on the movement. The writing of Williams Pantycelyn, particularly his elegy to Howel Harris, is often seen as representing the vanguard of the Methodist attack on pre-revival religion.31 In that elegy Pantycelyn specifically stated that not one presbyter, nor priest nor bishop was awake before 1735; thus pointing to a resounding failure on the part of the ministers of the Established Church. It is also the case that Robert Jones’ depiction of the faults of pre-revival Wales may actually be interpreted chiefly as an indictment of the weaknesses of the Anglican Church rather than of old Dissent. After the age of the Bible translators in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, few Anglicans were singled out for praise by Jones, except for Rees Prichard, Moses Williams and Griffith Jones. Instead it was the Dissenters who received the lion’s share of approval, with William Wroth, Walter Cradock, William Erbury, Vavasor Powell, Morgan Llwyd, Henry Maurice and Stephen Hughes commended for their attempts to improve the spiritual condition of the Welsh people. Jones owned that there were a number of ministers among the Dissenters prior to the revival and subsequently ‘whose remembrance will smell sweetly until the end of time’.32 In some respects, Jones’ greatest departure from the truth lay not in a tendency to overstate the spiritual failings of the country prior to revival, but in an exaggeration of the effects of that revival. If it was wrong to depict the country languishing in ignorance and superstition, it was equally wrong to claim that the darkness was dispelled as swiftly and utterly as suggested in Drych yr Amseroedd. Jones was scathing about a number of superstitions because of their alleged roots in the Roman Catholic teachings on purgatory and the intercession of the saints. Yet, while he was distressed that the contemporary situation did not show greater improvement over the previous period, he did not acknowledge sufficiently that many superstitions persisted, despite Nonconformist disapproval. A substantial proportion of the population remained untouched by the evangelical revival and may even have been hardened against evangelical influence by resentment of the evangelicals’ criticism of popular customs and recreations.33 The reflections of Wales before and after the revival were both manipulated in different ways, therefore, but with the same purpose of magnifying the impact

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of the revival in order to emphasise God’s benevolence towards the nation. It became clear, therefore, that the Calvinistic Methodist Church was emphatically a Welsh institution. It reinforced this with an increasing number of publications to guide and inform its members. One of the most significant was the Drysorfa Ysbrydol [The Spiritual Treasury] which first appeared in 1799, edited by Thomas Charles and Thomas Jones. This was an attempt to emulate the success of the Evangelical Magazine by offering similar information regarding congregations, along with theological discussion and snippets of Methodist history. It set a standard and formed a blueprint for subsequent denominational periodicals, including the Calvinistic Methodist Y Drysorfa, Yr Eurgrawn Wesleyaidd [The Wesleyan Magazine] and the Independents’ Y Dysgedydd [The Instructor].34 These titles would do much to enhance the sense of a separate identity among each of the denominations, whilst at the same time serving to bolster the Welsh language. Groups often seek to define themselves in contrast with others. In the case of the new Calvinistic Methodist denomination, it might have been expected that it would seek to distance itself from the Anglican Church from which it had just separated. However, the early Methodists actually seemed content to assimilate the traditions of the Anglican Church to a large extent and to accept its doctrines. The generation of leaders who had taken the Methodists out of the Church were followed by ministers who had been ordained into the Methodist Church rather than the Established and whose allegiance was therefore less divided. Even so, it was only with the furore over the Education Commission of 1847, or the ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’ as it became known, that the Calvinistic Methodists came to view the Church with some hostility.35 In 1811, whether consciously or unconsciously, it seems to have been the Wesleyan Methodists against whom they measured themselves. The emergence of the Wesleyan movement in Wales in the nineteenth century represented a new challenge to the Calvinistic Methodists, especially in the north-east of the country. The Calvinist side laid claim to the strongest Welsh heritage, and thus to being the ‘old connexion’, by way of contrast with the Wesleyan newcomers. By doing so, they laid the foundations for the strong sense of identification between Nonconformity and the Welsh language. They would proceed to build on those foundations throughout the nineteenth century by concerted efforts to educate and publish through the medium of Welsh. Their view of history would continue to be based on Robert Jones’ vision of a nation ‘exalted unto heaven in privileges above all of the inhabitants of the earth’.36 Endnotes 1 D. Densil Morgan, Wales and the Word: Historical Perspectives on Religion and Welsh Identity (Cardiff, 2008), p. 17. 2 David Ceri Jones, Boyd S. Schlenther and Eryn Mant White, The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735–1811 (Cardiff, 2012), pp. 213–38. 3 Frank Price Jones, Thomas Jones o Ddinbych 1756–1820 (Denbigh, 1956), p. 32.

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4 National Library of Wales, Calvinistic Methodist Archive, Diaries of Howel Harris, 25 August 1771. 5 Eryn M. White, ‘The Eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival and Welsh Identity’, in Mark Smith (ed.), British Evangelical Identities Past and Present, Volume 1: Aspects of the History and Sociology of Evangelicalism in Britain and Ireland (Milton Keynes, 2008), pp. 86–7. 6 Glyn Tegai Hughes, ‘Welsh-speaking Methodism’ in Lionel Madden (ed.), Methodism in Wales: A Short History of the Wesley Tradition (Llandudno, 2003), pp. 23–8. 7 Goronwy P. Owen (ed.), Hunangofiant John Elias (Swansea, 1974), pp. 75–6. 8 Jonathan Jones, Cofiant y Parch. Thomas Jones (Denbigh, 1897), pp. 158–80; Frank Price Jones, Thomas Jones o Ddinbych, pp. 30–39. 9 D. Densil Morgan, ‘Credo ac Athrawiaeth’, in J. Gwynfor Jones (ed.), Hanes Methodistiaeth Galfinaidd Cymru: Cyfrol III Y Twf a’r Cadarnhau (c.1814–1914) (Caernarfon, 2011), pp. 125–41. 10 Jones, Schlenther and White, Elect Methodists, pp. 182–6. See also Alan Harding, The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion (Oxford, 2003). 11 Boyd S. Schlenther, Queen of the Methodists: the Countess of Huntingdon and the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Faith and Society (Durham, 1997), p. 184. 12 For instance, Diaries of Howel Harris, 21 November 1769, 23 May 1770, 2 July 1770. 13 Glanmor Williams, The Welsh and their Religion (Cardiff, 1991), pp. 138–72. 14 N. Cynhafal Jones (ed.), Gweithiau Williams Pantycelyn Cyfrol I (Holywell, 1887), p. 442. 15 Derec Llwyd Morgan, ‘Llenyddiaeth y Methodistiaid, 1763–1814’ in Gomer M. Roberts (ed.), Hanes Methodistiaeth Galfinaidd Cymru: Cyfrol 2 Cynnydd y Corff (Caernarfon, 1978), p. 456. 16 Mark A. Noll, ‘The United States as a Biblical Nation 1776–1865’, in Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (eds), The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (Oxford, 1982), pp. 43–5. 17 R. Geraint Gruffydd, ‘Anglican Prose’, in R. Geraint Gruffydd (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c.1530–1700 (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 176–8. 18 Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff, 1967), pp. 209–19; Glanmor Williams, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 244–6; Eryn M. White, The Welsh Bible (Stroud, 2007), pp. 27–9. 19 Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’, in Branwen Jarvis (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c.1700–1800 (Cardiff, 2000), p. 28. 20 Geraint H. Jenkins, Theophilus Evans (1693–1767): Y Dyn, ei Deulu a’i Oes (Aberystwyth, 1993); Prys Morgan, ‘Y Ddau Theophilus: Sylwadau ar Hanesyddiaeth’, Taliesin, 19 (1969), pp. 36–45; Glanmor Williams, ‘Romantic and Realist: Theophilus Evans and Theophilus Jones’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 140 (1991), pp. 17–27; Gwyn Thomas, ‘Two Prose Writers: Ellis Wynne and Theophilus Evans’ in Jarvis (ed.), Guide to Welsh Literature c.1700–1800, pp. 54–63. 21 Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘I Will Tell You a Word or Two about Cardiganshire’, in R.N. Swanson (ed.), The Church and the Book, Studies in Church History, 38 (2004), p. 309. 22 English translation from Theophilus Evans, A View of the Primitive Ages, translated George Roberts (reprinted Llanidloes, 1840?), p. 17. 23 Ibid., p. 18. 24 Derec Llwyd Morgan, Y Beibl a Llenyddiaeth Gymraeg (Llandysul, 1998), pp. 116–7.

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25 Ibid., p. 119. 26 Branwen Jarvis, ‘Welsh Humanist Learning’, in Gruffydd (ed.), Guide to Welsh Literature, pp. 150–1; Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain 1533–1707 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 23–33. 27 Robert Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, ed. G.M. Ashton (Cardiff, 1958), p. xxxiii. 28 Geraint H. Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society in Wales (Cardiff, 1978), pp. 306–7; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘“Peth Erchyll Iawn” oedd Methodistiaeth’, Llên Cymru, 17 (1993), 196–7. 29 ‘… braidd yr ehedai aderyn, ac y câi y oen bach diniwed ymddangos, na’r falwoden ymlusgo, heb ffurfio rhyw ddychymyg am yr hyn a ddigwyddai iddynt y flwyddyn ganlynol’. Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, p. 25. 30 Ibid., p. 1. 31 Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’, in Jarvis (ed.), Guide to Welsh Literature, pp. 39–40. 32 Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, p. 28. 33 See, for instance, Russell Davies, Hope and Heartbreak: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1776–1871 (Cardiff, 2005). 34 Huw Walters, ‘The Periodical Press to 1914’, in Philip Henry Jones and Eiluned Rees (eds), A Nation and its Books (Aberystwyth, 1998), pp. 197–207; Huw Walters, ‘The Welsh Language and the Periodical Press’, in Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801–1911 (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 349–78; Aled G. Jones, ‘The Welsh Newspaper Press’, in Hywel Teifi Edwards (ed.), A Guide to Welsh Literature c.1800–1900 (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 1–23. 35 Prys Morgan, ‘From Long Knives to Blue Books’, in R.R. Davies, et al. (eds), Welsh Society and Nationhood: Historical Essays Presented to Glanmor Williams (Cardiff, 1984), pp. 199–215; Gwyneth T. Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: the Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff, 1998), pp. 209–22; Glanmor Williams, William Jacob, Nigel Yates and Frances Knight, The Welsh Church from Reformation to Disestablishment, 1603–1920 (Cardiff, 2007), pp. 316–7. 36 ‘… wedi eu dyrchafu hyd y nefoedd mewn breintiau, tu hwnt i bawb o drigolion y ddaear’, Jones, Drych yr Amseroedd, p. 106.

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Chapter 6

Sunday Schools and Welsh National Identity: An Historiographical Study Paula Yates

The notion of national identity is a complex one and it is never easy to define what constitutes national identity without recourse to stereotypes. In the case of Wales, the endeavour is complicated by the fact that it is only in the last 200 years or less that it has begun to be seen as a nation, with a distinctive national identity. Before the second quarter of the nineteenth century, at the earliest, Wales was seen by most people as part of England, with its own cultural peculiarities to be sure, including its own language, then widely spoken, but no more a nation than Cornwall or Yorkshire. Its relationship to England was felt to be rather like that of the Highlands to the rest of Scotland and Wales had been seen, from the outside at least, in a similar way: remote, sparsely populated, picturesque and rather uncivilised. It was the perception of the Welsh as in need of civilisation and salvation, two conceptions then inextricably bound up together, which led to the sustained financial support coming from England for Griffith Jones’ circulating schools. There was similar support for ambulatory schools in the Scottish Highlands from the Edinburgh-based Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of Welsh nationhood was likely to conjure up a romanticised version of history, folklore and the ‘Celtic twilight’.1 The title ‘Prince of Wales’, though ancient, had survived into the nineteenth century as a matter of political expediency. Wales had only for the briefest of periods, if even then, been united under a single leader, in the struggle against the English. Different parts of Wales had developed differently and if the idea of a modern Welsh national identity were to develop it was not obvious what the nature of such an identity would be. As Keith Robbins has observed: The historical experience of ‘North’ Wales had not been the same as ‘South’ Wales and more than geographical factors made it difficult to assert and maintain a single Welsh identity. … Was the ‘true’ Wales the pub in Port Dinorwic (Gwynedd) where men talked avidly of sea serpents, or Merthyr Tydfil, which George Borrow also visited, where sea serpents were less in evidence?2

Nevertheless, since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, attempts have been made to draw the Welsh together into one cultural, historic and national

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body, with shared characteristics, habits of thought and ways of life. In this search for what makes Wales Welsh, and perhaps equally importantly, for what makes the Welsh different from the English, there are a number of recurring themes. In the absence of the institutional trappings of a nation, the Welsh have tended to look for Welshness in the revival, or creation, of a shared culture, religion and language. The question of Welsh national identity has now become a matter of public policy. Since devolution, the Welsh Assembly has taken on the task of uniting Wales behind a shared identity and it is interesting to consider which elements of national life it considers important for this task. Buildings are certainly part of it: the developments at Cardiff Bay; the Assembly Building itself; the Millennium Centre; and, perhaps even more importantly, the Millennium Stadium. The Welsh Assembly has not ignored the traditional image of the Welsh as a predominantly rural people but it is placing more emphasis on Wales as an enterprising, successful nation, which is spreading its influence through Britain and the world. BBC Wales has produced a succession of programmes on Welsh heroes and heroines, travellers, technocrats and entrepreneurs. The identity being projected is a modern, forward-looking one, rooted in a proud history and an ancient language, updated for the modern world. The Welsh language is central to this modern Welsh identity and much public funding is invested in its preservation and promotion. How successful this endeavour of creating a Welsh national identity for the twenty-first century will be remains to be seen; however, what is certain is that the Welsh Assembly is emphasising different elements of Welshness from those that would have been central a generation ago. Some of the things that would then have been considered a vital expression of Welsh identity have now been relegated to the dustbin of history. The coal industry is an example. Fifty years ago the Welsh coal miner was as much identified with Wales as was the daffodil or the leek. Now Wales’ mining past supports, but is no longer central to the notion of Welshness. This chapter will examine a part of Welsh life which, like mining, no longer contributes directly to Welsh national identity. Indeed, unlike mining, its former contribution to that identity has been virtually forgotten. From about the 1840s until the second half of the twentieth century, education was at the heart of the struggle for Welsh nationhood. In particular, Welsh Sunday schools were seen as different from English ones. Not only that but the differences were perceived, and promoted, as stemming from and reflecting Welsh national characteristics. To understand how this came about it is necessary to look first at another key element in Welsh identity – religion. Twenty-first-century Wales is characterised by secularism and sometimes a militant atheism. All Christian denominations have suffered a sharp decline in membership over the last generation and the numbers of closed and converted chapel buildings across the country testify to this decline. In public discourse, religion does not hold the central place it once had in the idea of Welsh identity. None the less, until recently, and probably still in the popular perception, Wales is a nation dominated by Protestant Nonconformity and its chapel culture. Writing

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in the 1970s, in the run-up to the unsuccessful devolution referendum of 1979, Daniel Jenkins traced the roots of Wales’ growing disengagement from the English connection to this chapel culture. It was through their religion that the Welsh people recovered their own souls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was supremely through the life of their own dissenting chapels, built by their own hands, that they found a road to personal maturity and independence which owed little or nothing to the English establishment and which often aroused its hostility. The chapels were their own and once they were inside them no outside power could interfere with them. They were the shrines of their communal identity in the most intimately personal sense.3 More recently the Welsh church historian Densil Morgan has written as follows of the role of Nonconformity in the development of Welsh national identity: Nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity was of the people, by the people and for the people, an exceedingly popular religious option unencumbered by a socially superior, hierarchical church government which represented the interests of an alien class … and with the widening of the franchise a deep divide opened up between a populist, progressive, Welsh medium Nonconformity on the one hand, and a beleaguered though still socially privileged, Tory, Anglophone established church on the other.4

It was in the heart of this ‘deep divide’ of religion, language and social class that education came to be the focus for expressions of Welsh national identity. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the seeds were sown for the battles over education between Anglicanism and Nonconformity that were to parallel and feed into the disestablishment campaigns of that century.5 There is also evidence that these divisions did not only concern religion but were also exacerbated by class differences. Competition over educational provision between Church and chapel became especially marked at an early date in the wealthy diocese of Bangor, with its largely graduate clergy – more so than in the much poorer diocese of St David’s, where the clergy were much more likely to be farmers’ sons and educated at a local grammar school.6 Even in the early years of the nineteenth century, the roots can be found of the later characterisation of Welsh national identity as democratic and anti-establishment. It was, however, in the 1840s and 1850s that Welsh and English, Nonconformists and Anglicans, found themselves glaring at each other in open hostility across the battlefield of education. In 1846, in the aftermath of the Rebecca riots, the United Kingdom government set up a royal commission to enquire into social unrest and popular education in Wales. This commission reported the following year and the report, known in Wales simply as the Blue Books, was highly critical of the state of Welsh schooling and, even more importantly, was seen in Wales as condescending and insulting to the Welsh people and their language. Though initially protests against the report came from Anglicans as well as Nonconformists,7 the Blue Books soon came to be seen as emblematic of Welsh sufferings at the hands of

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the English. In 1853/4 Robert Jones (‘Derfel’) published a play, Brad y Llyfrau Gleision (the Treason of the Blue Books), which likened the publication of the report to the popular legend of the Treason of the Long Knives. According to this legend, the Saxon Hengist, aided by his daughter Rowena, had invited the British nobles under Vortigern to a banquet, and at a prearranged signal each Saxon stabbed his British neighbour to death.8 In Derfel’s play, Welsh Anglicans were presented as joining with the villainous royal commission inspectors while the Welsh Dissenters led the people out of potential humiliation and into active protest and demands for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales and the promotion of Welsh national institutions. Derfel’s play reflects how, within a few years of the publication of the report, the Blue Books had come to be seen as a betrayal from within, with the Anglicised, Anglican inhabitants of Wales portrayed as the treasonous enemy. The Blue Books had a huge influence on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of Welsh identity in opposition to the English. Prys Morgan has described the Treason of the Blue Books as ‘a myth of origin at the birth of Liberal nonconformist Wales’. However, he perceived its primary importance as lying in its uniting of Welsh Nonconformity. The effect of the Blue Books was to throw the weight of Methodism behind the older dissenting denominations such as the Baptists and Independents, thus creating a united Welsh Nonconformist front that was also convinced that it must take some form of political action. Up to 1847 many of the chief Welsh patriots, such as Carnhuanawc, had been Anglican parsons. Nonconformists had shown only moderate interest in things Welsh, preferring to concentrate on theology or the internal affairs of each sect. After 1847, by contrast, the Nonconformists took it for granted that Anglicans were the enemy of Welshness, and more and more tended to identify themselves with Wales, making Nonconformity stand for Welshness itself, and blotting out the memory of the old clerical patriots.9 What is missing from Morgan’s analysis is the importance of education itself as a focus for protest and an expression of Welsh national identity. It is no coincidence that the crucial factor in dividing the Welsh from the English on religious grounds was a disagreement over education. The roots of that division had been developing in the seedbed of education from the early decades of the century. Although by the mid-1840s there were some differences in style and method between dissenting and Anglican Sunday schools, the dissenting Sunday schools did not take on their role as symbols of Welshness until after the publication of the Blue Books. Welsh Nonconformists seem to have taken comfort from the interest taken in Sunday schools by the commissioners and from the evidence the commissioners’ report provided that far more children, and adults, were taught in Sunday schools than in day schools. This picture of the commissioners’ positive view of dissenting Sunday schools, however, may have been exaggerated. According to Prys Morgan, for example, one of the commissioners, J.C. Symons, when he reported on Brecon, Radnor, Cardigan and the ‘Welsh’ parts of Monmouthshire, ‘was critical of Anglican Sunday schools for their dullness, praising by contrast

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the Sunday schools of the nonconformists’. But in fact Symons praised both the best Anglican Sunday schools and the best Nonconformist ones. He said that in the worst Anglican ones, all sink into the deep ruts of the rote system and the mechanical exercise of reading. The child ceases to regard the instruction in any other light than as an appendage to the drudgery of the weekday routine and all the sanctity of character and spiritual effect of the Sabbath school is utterly lost.10

Symons certainly seemed to prefer the system used in the dissenting Sunday schools, where instruction was largely by means of theological debate, in classes which in some areas, notably Cardiganshire, were much more likely to contain adult learners than were Anglican ones. However, he was dubious about how much of these debates was really useful. The Welsh are very prone to mystical and metaphysical research, and especially in Cardiganshire. The great doctrines and moral precepts of the Gospel are, I think, too little taught in Sunday schools. They are more prone to dive into abstract and fruitless questions upon minute incidents, as well as debatable doctrines – as, for example, who the angel was that appeared to Balaam – than to illustrate and enforce moral duties or to explain the parables.11

Although both Anglicans and Nonconformists made use of Sunday schools, by the middle of the nineteenth century Sunday schools had come to be most strongly associated with Nonconformity, while day schools were seen as the province of Anglicanism. Sunday schools were also more likely to be taught in the Welsh language, whereas day schools, partly under the influence of the National Society, were more likely to be taught in English. For all these reasons, as Nonconformists united against Anglicanism, they began to promote the differences of Welsh Sunday schools and to see these differences as particularly expressive of Welsh identity. This chapter will trace the developing claims for the uniqueness of Welsh Sunday schools and their expression of Welsh national characteristics against the development of the Welsh sense of a distinctive national identity through the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, plotting it particularly against the ‘wars of religion’ over the established Church and education. In their early days, Sunday schools in Wales were not markedly different from those in England. Thomas Charles, the great hero of Nonconformity in late eighteenth-century Wales (though he consented to the ordination of Calvinistic Methodist clergy in 1811 only with the greatest reluctance and seems to have identified with Anglicanism for some years after that)12 is widely seen as the father of Welsh Sunday schools. In fact his original preference was for circulating day schools, as being capable of providing a better schooling than Sunday schools, and it was only after the Sunday School Society extended its activities, and funding, into Wales after 1798 that he began to found Sunday schools on any scale. He acted

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as agent for the Sunday School Society in North Wales and the Sunday schools set up under his aegis were run on the model provided by the Sunday School Society, open to ‘poor persons of either sex and any age, who are taught to read only and instructed in the knowledge of their duty to God’.13 They were thus very similar to the Sunday schools being set up in England, and by Anglicans in Wales. All were open to adults and by the 1840s Nonconformist Sunday schools were, in some rural parts of Wales, more likely to have adults in them and to be taught in a more discursive way than Anglican ones.14 In any event it is clear that in the early 1830s Welsh Sunday schools were seen as belonging firmly within the Sunday school movement that had been founded, or rather widely promoted, by Robert Raikes in Gloucester from 1781. In 1831 the South Wales Calvinistic Methodist Association met at Llangeitho and among its activities was the planning of celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sunday school movement. That those at this meeting identified closely with the movement in England is shown by their reference to ‘the first jubilee of the Sabbath School, to be observed in order to recall its first origin, in the year 1781, through the instrumentality of the immortal R. Raikes Esq. of Gloucester’. Later proponents of the distinctive origins of Welsh Sunday schools may have been encouraged in their belief by the fact that in Wales the jubilee was celebrated on the birthday of Thomas Charles (14 October) and not that of Robert Raikes (14 September). However, the minutes make clear that the October date was chosen not for ideological reasons but rather because ‘many of our teachers and scholars may be deprived of the privilege of being present … [because] our harvest will not be gathered in sufficiently universal’.15 Later interpretations of Welsh Sunday schools seem to have been influenced by the 1847 commissioners’ descriptions of adult education taking place in some dissenting Sunday schools and of their use of a different method of instruction (though the commissioners’ criticisms of this method seem to have been less widely remembered). Many have assumed that the differences between dissenting and Anglican Sunday schools had existed from their earliest days. Such an interpretation is to be found in a letter of 1863, quoted in a publication of the 1890s and therefore possibly suspect, but not inconsistent with other evidence. In this letter, the Rev. David Charles, the grandson of Thomas Charles of Bala, wrote that Sunday schools had existed before Thomas Charles ‘but on another and more inefficient principle’. The distinguishing principle of Thomas Charles’ Sunday schools was ‘that the object of the Sabbath school was the instruction not only of children but of adults also, and that it was intended not merely to teach spelling and reading, but to bring all classes together to examine the Word of God and to exchange thoughts upon its all-important truths’.16 If this is an accurate description, then the idea of the democratic nature of Welsh Sunday schools, reflecting the idea of Welsh nationalism as a working-class movement directed against an alien elite, was already being developed by the 1860s. The controversy over the Blue Books of 1847 may have been the event that opened up the ‘deep divide’ and showed Sunday schools to be an expression of Welsh difference. However, the situation moved on and developments in the 1860s must be seen against the background of growing calls for the disestablishment of

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the Church of England and Ireland. In the 1860s the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control (the Liberation Society) was turning its attention to campaigning within constituencies to get candidates sympathetic to the cause of disestablishment elected to Parliament. In 1862 the society decided to pay particular attention to Wales in the wake of the 1851 religious census, which had revealed that those worshipping in Nonconformist chapels accounted for about 80 per cent of total attendances.17 Unlike Wales, whose capacity for being treated differently in legislative terms from England was not established until the 1880s, Ireland was seen by the Liberation Society and others as the best place to breach the walls of the established Church. Against a background of Fenian disturbances and calls for Irish home rule, Gladstone publicly espoused the cause of Irish disestablishment. This formed a crucial issue in the general election of 1868, which the Liberals won with a decisive majority. Legislation to bring about the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland followed in 1869. It is to the general election of 1868, with an electorate expanded by the recent Second Reform Act, that significant changes in the political order in Wales are often traced.18 Wales emerged from the general election with 23 Liberal MPs against only ten Conservatives. There had been some talk, in Wales at least, of Welsh disestablishment in the election. The Welsh language paper Baner ac Amserau Cymru described the Anglican Church in Wales as ‘like a Rip Van Winkle rousing itself from sleep in amazement at the passing of the Irish act and finally becoming aware of the challenge of Nonconformity on its own doorstep’.19 From about that time there were calls for the Welsh church to be disestablished regardless of what happened in England, with parliamentary speeches promoting the cause by Watkin Williams and others.20 These calls fell on stony ground. Even after Irish disestablishment there was still no proper organisation amongst Welsh MPs or disposition within the leadership of the disestablishment campaign as a whole to view Wales as a separate entity from England. Relations between Nonconformity and the Liberal government, meanwhile, were soon damaged by the conflict across England and Wales over Forster’s Education Act of 1870. Nonconformists were outraged by the Act, which provided state funding to Church schools and appeared to leave education in rural areas in particular in the hands of the established Church. Nonconformists met in Manchester in 1872 and resolved to support only those Liberal candidates who were committed to amending the Act. This falling out between the Liberal party and its Nonconformist power base contributed to Gladstone’s defeat in the election of 1874.21 The period between 1860 and 1880 then was one in which the identification between Nonconformity and an emerging sense of Welsh nationalism was enhanced by conflict over religion and education. This alignment found a political voice in the Liberal success in Welsh constituencies after 1868. During that period the place of Welsh Sunday schools as symbols of Welsh identity had also developed further. By the 1880s the idea that Welsh Sunday schools had experienced separate origins and a different development from English ones was universally accepted in Wales. In

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contrast to the Jubilee celebrations of 1831, the Welsh did not join with the English Sunday school centenary celebrations in 1881, choosing instead to commemorate the centenary in 1885, 100 years after Thomas Charles’ first Welsh Sunday school was founded. The volume produced by David Evans a couple of years previously, in 1883, to celebrate the centenary, demonstrated clearly the importance that schools, and Sunday schools in particular, had for Welsh national identity. Evans’ volume shaped the story of Welsh Sunday schools into anti-English and anti-Anglican polemic.22 It dismissed the contribution of Anglican charity schools to the education of the poor, asserting that the endowments of such schools were often used to increase the clergyman’s salary with only a small fraction going to pay youthful and under-qualified teachers. Evans gave credit, in the period before Sunday schools, only to the Puritan Thomas Gouge and the evangelical proto-Methodist Griffith Jones for having actually reached the poor and he concluded that ‘the whole period may not inaptly be described in the words of the prophet, especially with reference to the bright contrast of the Sunday School period: “and there was a day – neither night nor day – but there will be light in the evening.”’23 Evans described the central role of Thomas Charles of Bala in the instigation and promotion of Sunday schools but he traced the earliest Sunday schools in Wales back to one founded at Crawlom near Llanidloes in about 1770 as a development from a circulating school. Thus it was important to his argument that, though Charles’ contributions had come later than those of the English Raikes, Sunday schools in Wales had predated those in England and Charles’ Sunday schools were conducted on the Welsh rather than English model. For Evans the differences between English and Welsh Sunday schools were manifold but the three main ones were that Welsh Sunday schools had grown out of circulating schools, that adults were taught as well as children and that the teachers gave their services free of charge.24 His history of Sunday schools laid emphasis not only on the differences between Welsh and English Sunday schools but also on the ‘fact’ that the Welsh Sunday schools were older, more spiritual and untainted by English influence. In this distancing of Welsh Sunday schools from English ones, the claim that Charles’ Sunday schools had been conducted on the Welsh model was significant. Throughout the 1890s, the campaign for Welsh disestablishment was hampered by the weakness and lack of success of the British Liberal party, though Liberal strength grew in Wales itself. Conflict between Church and chapel was revived by the Education Act of 1902, which was opposed by Nonconformists across England but which, in Wales, united Nonconformity with growing nationalist fervour to produce a heady political atmosphere. Individual members of the Free Churches were imprisoned for non-payment of rates in England and Wales. In Wales, however, some local authorities expressed their Welsh identity by refusing to levy the rates necessary to implement the Act.25 It is no coincidence that two people chose to write lives of Thomas Charles of Bala and accounts of his schools in the first decade of the twentieth century, while the fury over the 1902 Act was still raging and the long campaign for Welsh disestablishment was finally approaching a successful outcome.

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The first of these biographies, published in 1909, was by the Rev. William Hughes, an Anglican cleric.26 His scholarship was careful but his motivation was clear. He was anxious to portray the Welshness of the Anglican Church in Wales and he chose to do so by stressing the establishment credentials of the early leaders of Welsh Methodism and by presenting Griffith Jones as an Anglican and Thomas Charles as an Anglican under the skin, quoting him as saying that he could ‘live independent of the Church; but I am a Churchman on principle, and therefore shall on no account leave it, unless I am forced to do so’.27 Hughes stressed Charles’ connection with the English SPCK, from whom he bought books for his schools, and points out that many of the Bibles Charles distributed were bound together with the Book of Common Prayer, to help ensure they would promote an Anglican orthodoxy.28 That Hughes’ book was designed to be a defence of the Church of England against the supporters of disestablishment was revealed clearly in a footnote: The cry of ‘alien Church’ was unknown in Charles’ time, and unheard of until recent years; and has no historical foundation in fact; but was invented by the enemies of the Church as a catchword, for political purposes, in the Disestablishment campaign.29

The fact that Hughes chose to use, as his vehicle for Church defence, a biography of the man most closely connected with Sunday schools, together with an extensive section on the life of Griffith Jones, founder of Welsh circulating schools, is telling evidence for the significance of education for the development of Welsh national identity. In the following year D.E. Jenkins published his monumental and meticulously detailed Life of the Revd Thomas Charles, based on Charles’ very extensive correspondence. In this work, Jenkins portrayed the established Church as the oppressor of the Methodists, and as having failed to provide the poor with the education for which they so ardently wished. He criticised and attempted to refute some of the views put forward by Hughes.30 Nevertheless, he also argued persuasively against the portrayal of Welsh Sunday schools as having a separate origin from the English Sunday school movement and through his work the notion of a separate origin lost a good deal of ground, though the distinctive ethos and nature of the schools continued to be maintained. By the 1920s, after the success of the disestablishment campaign, the triumphant connection between education, Nonconformity and Welsh national identity was established beyond argument in the minds of Welsh educationalists. Once again the evidence is clear to see in the commemoration of the foundation of Sunday schools in Wales. During the 150th anniversary celebrations in 1935, the difference between Welsh and English Sunday schools was said to be ‘obvious to the least observant’ and the book produced by D.M. Griffith to celebrate this anniversary was unambiguously entitled Nationality in the Sunday School Movement. It was devoted to analysing the differences between the movement in England and that in Wales and to demonstrating that these differences, at least in part, reflected the national characteristics of the Welsh.

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The Welsh, with their chapel-going tendencies, were seen as an essentially religious nation; the indifference and ineffectiveness of the established Church was again described, but now mainly in terms of secular and imperialist preoccupations. The main theme was that English Sunday schools were founded for secular reasons by the ruling classes, whereas Welsh ones were founded for religious reasons and arose from a providential coming together of those inspired to teach and those inspired to learn. The movement in England owes its origin to a desire of the well-to-do classes to keep the poor in order and in subjection. When the movement was introduced into Wales, there was added a very lively sense of responsibility for the eternal well-being of the people as individuals; the results expected from the movement in England, then, were briefly these: the people would acquire the elements of knowledge, together with an unquestioning respect for the existing social order; and more particularly in Wales, the schools, by teaching people to read, would make accessible to them those truths which govern their spiritual welfare.31

One further feature of Welsh Sunday schools which Griffith asserted was that they were almost entirely Nonconformist. Indeed, he quoted a figure of 99 per cent, taken apparently from the 1834 report of the Select Committee on Education.32 Griffith’s book represents arguably the most developed and triumphalist account of the distinctiveness of Welsh Sunday schools. After 1935, interest in Sunday schools began to wane. By then, Welsh disestablishment had been achieved and the education question had been settled for better or worse. In the face of the increasing popular abandonment of the churches, Nonconformists and Anglicans began to feel that there were advantages to working together. Wales was absorbed with two World Wars and the world depression in the first half of the twentieth century. It was not until the 1970s that the idea of Sunday schools as defenders of Welsh nationhood surfaced briefly once again. In 1967, the report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (Wales), known as the Gittins Report, devoted most of its attention to the need to preserve the Welsh language through the education system. According to the census of 1971, only 20 per cent of the population of Wales spoke Welsh, representing a drop of 8 per cent from the percentage in 1951. Against this background the historiography of Sunday schools began to lay a new emphasis on their use of the Welsh language, in contrast to the English language day schools. In 1978 the first volume of a proposed history of education in Wales was published which took its account up to the mid-nineteenth century.33 Fired up by the Gittins Report and in the midst of the expansion of Welsh medium education which followed it, it is not surprising that several of the contributors to this volume, who included R. Tudur Jones and Mary Clement, referred with approbation or regret to the language through which schools were taught in their respective periods. T.M. Bassett, writing on Sunday schools, lauded the use of Welsh in Sunday schools but condemned later Welsh educationalists for believing that Sunday schools were enough to keep the Welsh language alive. ‘It is’ he observed, ‘a serious charge against those who used

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the Sunday school as an excuse for policies which were both misguided and servile and in the final outcome almost catastrophic for the national language in Wales’.34 The use of the word ‘servile’ is interesting. It encapsulates the democratic and radical nature of Welsh nationalism which had certainly been present in the nineteenth century but which came into its own in the 1970s. There was a widespread interest at that period in education as an influence on working-class aspirations and on Sunday schools as an icon of working-class culture. In Wales the nationalist movement still reflected the religious divisions that had been so important in its development and education was portrayed as a vital underpinning to the democratic uprising of a predominantly working-class, Welsh-speaking, Nonconformist underclass against the English-speaking, Anglican ruling elite. Since then the emphasis in matters of Welsh identity has moved firmly to the Welsh language – while education is viewed as important, in nation-building terms, as a medium for spreading Welsh culture, especially through its language. Ecumenism has largely replaced interdenominational religious conflict and all churches are facing serious problems of maintaining allegiance and funding. That Welsh Sunday schools were different continues to be remembered but their central part in expressing Welsh national identity has largely passed into history.35 Endnotes 1  K.O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980 (Oxford: University Press 1982), p. 1. 2  Keith Robbins, Nineteenth Century Britain: England, Scotland and Wales – the Making of a Nation (Oxford: University Press, 1988), p. 7. 3  Daniel Jenkins, The British: Their Identity and Their Religion (London 1975), p. 46. 4  D. Densil Morgan, Wales and the Word: Historical Perspectives on Welsh Identity and Religion (Cardiff, 2008), pp. 115–6. 5  Paula Yates, ‘Drawing up the Battle-Lines: Elementary Schooling in the Diocese of Bangor in the Second Decade of the Nineteenth Century’, in Nigel Yates (ed.), Bishop Burgess and his World: Culture Religion and Society in Britain, Europe and North America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cardiff, 2007), pp. 135–44. 6  Paula Yates, ‘The Established Church and Rural Elementary Schooling: the Welsh Dioceses 1780–1830’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wales, Lampeter 2007), especially pp. 275–85. 7  Prys Morgan, ‘From Long Knives to Blue Books’ in R.R. Davies, Ralph A Griffiths, Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Kenneth O. Morgan (eds), Welsh Society and Nationhood: Historical Essays Presented to Glanmor Williams (Cardiff, 1984), pp. 199–215; as an example of Anglican protests, the Dean of Bangor’s weighty response to the inspectors’ criticisms was reprinted in William Hughes, The Life and Speeches of the Very Revd J.H. Cotton, BCL, Dean of Bangor and Rector of Llanllechyd (Bangor 1874), pp. 64–83. 8  Morgan, ‘Long Knives’, pp. 200–204. 9 Morgan, ‘Long Knives’, p. 210. 10 Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales Part 2: Brecknock, Cardigan, Radnor and Monmouth (London 1847), pp. 50–51.

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11 Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry, 2, p. 51. 12 Yates, Established Church and Rural Schooling, p. 154. 13 The rules of the Sunday School Society are reproduced as an appendix to D.M. Griffith, Nationality in the Sunday School Movement (Bangor, 1935); quotation on p. 161. 14 For a discussion of the teaching of adults in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Sunday schools in England and Wales, see Yates, ‘Established Church and Rural Education’, pp. 180–187. 15 The minutes are quoted in D.E. Jenkins, The Life of the Revd Thomas Charles, BA, of Bala, 3 vols. (Denbigh, 1910), vol. ii, pp. 2–4. 16 Letter of 24 December 1863, quoted in J. Henry Harris (ed.), Robert Raikes: A Man and His Work (London, 1899), p. 330. 17 See particularly K.D.M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 23–53. 18 Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, pp. 11–12. 19 Paul O’Leary, ‘Religion, Nationality and Politics: Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales, 1868–1914’ in J.R. Guy and W.G. Neely (ed.), Contrasts and Comparisons: Studies in Irish and Welsh History (Welshpool, 1999), p. 92. 20 Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, p. 12. 21 David M. Thompson (ed.) Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1972), p. 178. 22 David Evans, The Sunday Schools of Wales, Their Origin, Progress, Peculiarities and Prospects; a Centenary Tribute (London, 1883). 23 Evans, Sunday Schools, p. 105. 24 Ibid., pp. 158–64. 25 For the complexities of the struggle between local authorities and government see Gareth Elwyn Jones, The Education of a Nation (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 84–105. 26 William Hughes, Life of the Revd Thomas Charles BA of Bala (Bala, 1909). 27 Hughes, Thomas Charles, p. 43, quoting a letter of Thomas Charles dated 29 September 1785. 28 Ibid., p. 60. 29 Ibid., p. 65. 30 Jenkins, Thomas Charles, for example vol. iii, p. 595. 31 D.M. Griffith, Nationality in the Sunday School Movement (Bangor, 1935), pp. 1–2. 32 Ibid., p. 45. 33 J.L. Williams and Gwilym Rees Hughes, The History of Education in Wales, I (Swansea, 1978). 34 T.M. Bassett, ‘The Sunday School’ in Ibid., pp. 78–9. 35 See, for example, Gareth Elwyn Jones and Gordon Wynne Roderick, A History of Education in Wales (Cardiff, 2003), p. 43.

Chapter 7

Evangelicalism and British Culture D.W. Bebbington

‘To say’, declared W.H. Groser, secretary of the Sunday School Union, in 1900, ‘that the Church has remained unaffected by influences permeating our national life would be to assert that we are independent of our social environment’.1 That supposition, he assumed, was absurd. People were moulded by their circumstances and consequently the Christian community was swayed by its setting. This process took place in many ways. Political factors could impinge on churches, absorbing their time and energy in exercising power, or else in avoiding its exercise. Perhaps the impact of the state is greatest when it is hostile, but since the eighteenth century, with a few notable exceptions, the public authorities in Britain were generally benign, or at worst neutral, towards religion. Likewise economic conditions could shape church life, with abundant or restricted resources drastically affecting the conduct of congregational affairs. Wealth or poverty certainly had altered church methods in Britain, but usually the chief effect has been on the scale of operations rather than their substance. The concern of this chapter is with a more fundamental aspect of the condition of human beings, their cultural formation. It will explore the basic assumptions that have coloured the way Evangelical Christians have looked at the world and ordered their affairs – what we might call the spectacles behind their eyes. How have cultural attitudes shaped the expression of the Christian gospel in Britain? One aspect of culture that undoubtedly affected Evangelicals was its popular dimension. There were deep-seated patterns of inherited custom among the common people that necessarily interacted with the gospel. This was the plebeian culture celebrated by E.P. Thompson, with its respect for fairness, its strain of neighbourliness and its variety of rough but vibrant ways.2 It was remoulded by the process of industrialisation and the growth of literacy but it nevertheless retained much of its resilience into the twentieth century before it was transformed once more by the mass media. It included a great deal of superstition, with traditional events such as bonfires and well-dressings marking the cycle of the seasons, and consultations with wise women as in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Popular beliefs of this kind were by no means confined to the countryside but still flourished in London in the early twentieth century. Charms, amulets and a powerful sense of ‘luck’ remained deeply rooted among cockneys.3 This dimension of popular culture, open to the supernatural, seems to have formed an initial advantage to evangelists on entering an area. Thus in west Cornwall, belief in a shadowy local spirit called ‘Bucca’, who had to be propitiated if fisherman were to expect success, helped to prepare the way for the huge impact of Methodism on the region.4 Although there

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were tensions between superstition and orthodoxy, the locals at least had a lively awareness of a spiritual dimension to life. As Evangelical faith put down roots in an area, furthermore, its sacred worldview often meshed into folk religion. At Staithes on the North Yorkshire coast, for example, a Methodist harvest festival of the late twentieth century was plausibly explained by a visiting sociologist as having as much to do with the potency of nature as with distinctively Christian faith.5 There seems to have been, for good or ill, a great deal of common ground between Evangelicalism and popular culture. Nevertheless the relationship between the two was more often one of antagonism. Many of the earliest Methodist preachers of the eighteenth century were greeted with fierce opposition, often encouraged by local clergy or gentry but generated chiefly by a sense that the community was under attack by outsiders. Thus in Pendle Forest in Lancashire in 1748, John Bennet’s singing band of Methodists was resisted by a rabble with drums, music and guns.6 For much of the nineteenth century, respectable Evangelicals were sharply marked off from the rough element in the parish, those who never darkened the doors of a place of worship. Their entertainments, which seemed an alternative to true religion and a source of perennial temptation, came under severe Evangelical censure. At Derby, for instance, the annual races, which had long been a haunt of betting touts and their cronies, were eventually suppressed by the magistrates in 1835 as a result of Evangelical pressure.7 The sharpest encounters often took place over drink. The centre of male sociability among the poor was the alehouse and the number of drink outlets was immense. In Lambeth in 1905 there were 172 churches, chapels and mission halls but as many as 430 public houses and beerhouses.8 Drunkenness was always a target of church censure, but down to the middle years of the nineteenth century total abstinence was rare except in Primitive Methodism. Increasingly, however, drink was perceived as the supreme obstacle to conversion. From the 1870s Nonconformity and much of Scottish Presbyterianism turned decisively against alcohol. Even the Church of England launched a strong temperance society, supported chiefly by Evangelical clergy. There were annual temperance sermons; Bands of Hope encouraged the young to take the pledge; and the temperance campaign became a political movement. Plebeian culture, on the other hand, remained wedded to the public house. A gulf was created between the poor who liked a drink and the churchgoers who on principle shunned alcohol. Consequently, gospel and popular culture were in conflict for much of the twentieth century. Other features of culture, however, became indigenised within the Evangelical movement and the bulk of this chapter will take them as its theme. High culture is usually contrasted with the popular variety, but in reality tendencies that began in the elevated circles of cultural innovators gradually spread to a much wider public over time. The rank and file of Evangelicals was therefore affected by the steady dissemination of the main currents in Western civilisation over the last three centuries. The first major wave of influence that percolated down to them was that of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the power of reason to discover truth and improve the human lot. John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton,

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the chief progenitors of Enlightenment in the English-speaking world, both contended that received knowledge was not to be taken on trust. This stance is often supposed to have made the Enlightenment intrinsically anti-religious, with human reason pitted against the authority of Scripture. It is true that Voltaire, one of its greatest luminaries, set the tone of the French Enlightenment with his cry of écrasez l’infâme, a rallying call against the institutional embodiment of revealed religion. It is also true that many of the British religious thinkers of the eighteenth century who were most affected by the spirit of the age, whether latitudinarians in the Church of England, moderates in the Church of Scotland or Socinians in Dissent, became in varying degree detached from traditional Christian convictions. Recent scholarship, however, has shown that the Enlightenment was immensely varied in its expressions, so that, in north Germany for example, it was closely bound up with pietism.9 Similarly in England and Scotland, although there were critics of Christian teaching such as Matthew Tindal, Anthony Collins and David Hume, there was a great deal of overlap between Enlightenment thinking and orthodox theology. There was no automatic antagonism between the intellectual temper of the age and the rising Evangelical movement. On the contrary, Evangelicalism was permeated with Enlightenment notions from the inception of the movement into the nineteenth century. Both movements, in the first place, were dedicated to empirical method. Locke and Newton equally favoured investigation as the method for discovering truth. Both men were deeply respected by Evangelicals, although Evangelicals were most devoted to the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, as a foundation for their thinking. Although Reid and the Scottish school held that first principles had to be assumed, their methods were essentially empirical, not deductive. Their texts were standard in the curriculum of nineteenthcentury theological colleges. Respect for empirical method led to sympathy for science. Natural theology, the prevailing British tradition of apologetic thought, formed a bridge between science and religion. Evangelicals heartily approved when, in 1802, William Paley published his Natural Theology. They frequently followed Paley in appealing to the evidences of a designing purpose in the world that confirmed the existence of a Designer. One of the most popular works by Thomas Chalmers, who later became the leader of the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland, was his series of Astronomical Discourses (1817) on what science had revealed concerning the wonders of the heavens and the glories of their Maker. Natural theology remained the framework within which Evangelical theologians came to terms with Darwin after 1859. Purpose, they argued, could still be discerned in an evolutionary world so long as it was not assumed to be absent. An Enlightenment framework continued to ensure that there was little or no gulf between science and religion in Evangelical thought for most of the nineteenth century.10 A second bond between Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment was optimism. A leading characteristic of the later Enlightenment of the second half of the eighteenth century was the idea of progress, the notion that humanity was

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advancing morally towards a better future. A similar optimistic temper marked Evangelicals. ‘More will in the end be saved than will perish’, declared Thomas Scott, the leading Anglican Evangelical commentator on the Bible. ‘Diseases, wars, passions’, he went on, ‘will all be subdued’.11 Scott’s confidence in the elimination of the scourges of humanity was a result of postmillennial teaching, the belief that the second coming of Jesus would not take place until after a millennium of peace and prosperity. According to this reading of biblical prophecy, the millennium would dawn as a result of the gradual extension of the gospel and the consequent spread of Christian values throughout the world. In this vein the General Baptist Magazine carried an article in 1854 on the millennium envisaging not only the disappearance of moral evils but also such secular benefits as the end of ‘the oppressive weight of taxes that grind nations to the dust’. ‘Governments will still probably exist’, the writer remarked, ‘but theirs will then be an easy office; for all will be a law unto themselves’. This happy state of affairs might take some time, but could be expected to arrive around the year 2016.12 The postmillennial view was not unanimous among eighteenth-century Evangelicals, but, in the wake of the upheavals of the French Revolution, it became their general opinion. The launching of the missionary movement at the same juncture seemed to vindicate the expectation of the universal triumph of the gospel. The vigour of Evangelical postmillennialism goes a long way towards explaining the strength of the Victorian idea of progress. They were mutually reinforcing and, as the century wore on, virtually indistinguishable. Perhaps the most characteristic feature of Enlightenment was its pragmatism. Traditional institutions, it was insisted, must be reformed so as to make them efficient. This had been the stance of the philosophic radical Jeremy Bentham and the current of utilitarian thought with which he was associated. Equally, however, it was to be found amongst Evangelicals. They were far less committed than earlier generations of Protestants, whether Churchmen or Dissenters, to precise forms of church order. Instead they were willing to experiment. Because their grand goal was the rapid propagation of the gospel, they were impatient with any obstacles to this propagation resulting from the traditional ways in the churches. Lay agency was one of the most significant expressions of their pragmatic temper. Christian initiatives were not left to the professional clergy but were taken up by laypeople, female as well as male. Thus Methodism was run by society stewards and the great majority of its sermons were delivered by lay preachers. Likewise in the Church of Scotland, Chalmers revived the office of parish deacon in 1819 in his urban ministry in Glasgow so that businessmen could deploy their talents in the service of the Church.13 There were many other instances of a new flexibility in the area of ecclesiology. Early Anglican Evangelical clergy, eager to preach wherever there were needy sinners, often entirely ignored the parochial system of their Church. Likewise during the early nineteenth century the Baptists, despite their existence as a denomination being predicated on their practice of believer’s baptism, largely abandoned their insistence on the rite as a condition of participation in communion.14 Matters of lesser importance than the proclamation of the gospel could be adapted for the sake of greater effectiveness.

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Societies rather than churchly agencies were likely to be better managed, and so the British and Foreign Bible Society and similar organisations became typical expressions of the Evangelical temper. If secular Enlightenment thinkers aimed to promote utility, Evangelical biographers frequently praised the usefulness of their subjects. The assimilation of the spirit of the age by Evangelicals meant that there was a close affinity between the two approaches. Another high cultural force, however, impinged on religion in the early nineteenth century. The new mood, Romanticism, developed in pioneering literary circles, especially in Germany, from the last years of the eighteenth century. In Britain its most celebrated exponents were the Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge, and the historical novelist Sir Walter Scott. The term ‘Romantic’, however, is used here not in a sense restricted to that generation of authors, but rather it encompasses the whole cultural wave that spread out from them, enveloping first some of the highly educated and then a slowly increasing proportion of the population as the nineteenth century wore on. The preferences of the era of Enlightenment were gradually – but by no means entirely – supplanted over the decades. Instead of the Enlightenment exaltation of reason there was an emphasis on will, emotion and intuition. Simplicity was replaced by mystery, the artificial by the natural and the novel by the traditional. Romanticism exerted a powerful influence over the direction of Christian thought in the Victorian age. The new taste underlay the appeal to history of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England and the ornate display of Ultramontane ritual in the Roman Catholic Church. Coleridge was a major inspiration for other Anglicans such as Thomas Arnold who shaped subsequent Broad Church theology. Evangelicalism was far from immune from the influence of Romanticism. Edward Irving, a minister of a Church of Scotland congregation in London, acknowledged Coleridge as his mentor. It was Irving who, more than any other, transposed Evangelical doctrine into a Romantic key. In a memorable sermon lasting over six hours delivered before the London Missionary Society in 1824, he denounced unsparingly the methods of his host organisation. The Society, he claimed, had capitulated to modern business methods in a spirit of expediency. Missionaries should instead go out without resources other than a total reliance on the Almighty for their support. The rational calculation of the Enlightenment must be abandoned in favour of radical faith. Irving was ready with Romantic eyes to perceive dramatic events as bearing the authentic hallmarks of the supernatural. In 1831, when speaking in tongues broke out in his congregation, he readily accepted its miraculous credentials. The legitimacy of speaking in tongues was to be an article of faith in the Catholic Apostolic Church that from 1833 institutionalised Irving’s convictions. Most significantly of all, Irving came to believe that Jesus would return soon and in person. In 1827 he published The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty, a translation from Spanish of a work by a Chilean Jesuit, contending for Jesus’ ‘own personal appearance in flaming fire’.15 In the book Irving dropped the postmillennial expectation of the gradual advance of the gospel in order to embrace the premillennial hope that the second coming would

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precede the millennium. That was to abandon the characteristic eschatology of the Enlightenment for that typical of Romanticism. Irving was the person who did most to inject Romantic presuppositions into the Evangelical bloodstream. A leading figure who seconded Irving’s efforts was J.N. Darby, whose outlook was also coloured by Romantic taste. Poetry, for Darby, was an attempt ‘to create, by imagination, a sphere beyond materialism, which faith gives in realities’.16 There were the hallmarks of the new sensibility: imagination, the supersession of the material and faith itself. At first, as an Irish clergyman, he held views of apostolic succession comparable to those of the Oxford Movement. Then, in the 1820s and 1830s, as he moved into the emerging Brethren circles, he developed as strong an insistence on the supremacy of faith over reason as did Irving. His species of pre-millennial teaching, which became known as dispensationalism, bore the mark of a characteristic feature of Romantic thought, cultural relativism. There were no permanent standards by which to evaluate every part of human history, but rather the dispensations were separate stages in time when God’s dealings with humanity were distinct – a principle that enabled him to repudiate Irving’s acceptance of the revival of the gift of tongues, by arguing that speaking in tongues was a phenomenon alien to the present age. Other men who left a substantial legacy to the new Brethren movement also drank deeply from the Romantic well. A.N. Groves was the epitome of the wandering missionary depending wholly on the Almighty that Irving had envisaged and George Müller was an immensely influential exemplar of living by faith rather than by rational planning. The Brethren as a whole embraced an ecclesiology that bore the Romantic impress. Christian assemblies were formed not by human acts but by ‘gathering to the Lord’. Such assemblies had no defined membership, but consisted of those who were ‘in fellowship’, vital elements in an organic community. Their leadership was not constituted by formal procedures but by the emergence of men with appropriate gifts. All was both natural and spiritual. The Brethren movement can be seen as adopting a Romantic version of Evangelical faith.17 The main effect of the Romantic mood in the Evangelical movement as a whole, however, was to push many of its adherents in a more theologically liberal direction. The central shift was in the doctrine of God. The theologians who had written under the sway of Enlightenment had understood the Almighty primarily as the creator and just governor of the universe. A younger generation falling under Romantic influences, by contrast, saw him primarily as Father. The pacesetters of the new view were the Scots, Thomas Erskine and John McLeod Campbell, who complained that earlier writers had depicted God using legal imagery rather than in terms of the family.18 For Erskine, McLeod Campbell, and their followers, the Almighty was seen essentially as the father of all, so that no distinction was drawn between those who were adopted into his family and those who were not. The effect of this doctrine of the fatherhood of God was therefore to blur the line between the converted and the unconverted. There were other Romantic innovations. They included a shift in emphasis away from the atonement, or Christ’s sacrifice to atone for the sins of humankind, to the incarnation, or Christ

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taking on human flesh to show humankind how to live righteously; the incarnation became the premier doctrine in the estimate of High Churchmen and Broad Churchmen alike. Theologians influenced by the Anglican clergyman and professor, F.D. Maurice – such as the Wesleyan John Scott Lidgett – commonly took this path to an incarnation-based theology. The problem here was that the centrality of the cross was being eclipsed. Again, the biblical higher criticism that impinged on Evangelical scholarship in the later Victorian years was largely founded on German Romantic premises. The development of doctrine in ancient Israel, it was believed, must have conformed to an evolutionary pattern, in which religious truth was gradually unfolded. After much debate, William Robertson Smith was dismissed from the Free Church College at Aberdeen in 1881 for embracing this point of view. By now, Romantic currents of thought were beginning to erode the accepted understandings of conversion, the cross and the Bible, which had long formed three of the Evangelical fundamentals of belief. Yet aspects of the Romantic vision could also lead in a theologically conservative direction. The emphasis on ‘faith’ rather than extensive bureaucratic and institutional structures became in the later years of the nineteenth century the animating idea behind a wave of new missionary bodies beginning in 1865 with Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. Premillennialism stiffened the backbone of Evangelicals in the Church of England, although the teachings did not spread to many people outside its ranks, apart from the Brethren. And the Keswick movement, beginning in 1875, taught a Romantic prescription for holy living. The Lake District, where its annual convention gathered, had once been the home of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Those associated with Keswick, such as Frances Ridley Havergal, often possessed poetic taste or talent. The substance of the teaching – that holiness was attainable by faith rather than by effort – bore witness to the twin Romantic emphases on moments of crisis and on personal trust. The mode in which sin was dealt with, according to Keswick teachers, was not by removing it (‘eradication’) but by repressing it (‘victory’), an enduring process that was typical of Romantic categories. The whole enterprise can be recognised as a recasting of spirituality in a Romantic style. By 1900, despite dogged resistance by J.C. Ryle, it had come to dominate Anglican Evangelicalism.19 Before the end of the nineteenth century aspects of the Romantic inheritance had served to strengthen theological conservatism within the Evangelical movement. It was in the twentieth century, however, that a Romantic way of looking at the world became most widespread among the British public. In the Garden City movement at the start of the century, for example, the advocacy of rural features in new cities such as front gardens and open spaces can be seen as an expression of the wistful quest for preserving the purer influences of the countryside that was near the heart of Romantic sensibility. Again, when the Labour MPs of 1906 were asked who had moulded them most intellectually, the reply was not Karl Marx but John Ruskin, the prophet of fostering the beautiful in the world of work and one of the greatest Romantic prose writers. The Roman Catholic Church exercised a fascination over sensitive minds in the early twentieth century because of its insistence on the value

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of tradition inherited from the past and on the capacity of faith to respond to symbols. The continuing Ultramontane ethos of the mass had what Ronald Knox, the son of an Anglican Evangelical bishop but himself a Catholic convert, called a ‘dramatic and appealing character’.20 The first half of the twentieth century was an era when the cultural legacy of Romanticism reached its apogee. The effects were felt in all the strands of Evangelical life. From the first decade of the twentieth century, ‘liberal Evangelicals’ started to emerge in the Church of England. At first the phrase was used to describe Evangelicals who leant not in a Broad Church direction, towards a more liberal theology, but rather in a High Church direction, towards a more Catholic form of churchmanship. Typically it described those clergy who wished to adopt liturgical practices once thought alien to Evangelicalism, such as vestments, a choir and flowers on the communion table. In 1904 one self-professed ‘Liberal Evangelical’ explained that his standpoint meant that he was able to introduce flowers into his church without what he viewed as the ‘noxious teaching’ of the High Church movement.21 The reason often given was that young people, because of their improved aesthetic preferences, could be retained only by a higher churchmanship. From 1906, Liberal Evangelicals organised themselves in a body which after 1923 took the title the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement. By the 1920s it had become more committed to a broader theology, especially in wholeheartedly welcoming biblical criticism. Its ethos was most fully expressed in the Cromer Convention, an annual devotional gathering conducted on the lines of Keswick. It was exclusively Anglican, highly clerical and tolerant of addresses that verged on pantheism. Edward Woods, later Bishop of Lichfield, would go out walking along the cliffs carrying a copy of Wordsworth in his pocket.22 The Cromer Convention was a bearer of the Romantic spirit. The Methodists possessed a parallel body in the Fellowship of the Kingdom, which emerged at the end of the First World War. It recast traditional Methodist teaching in terms of three watchwords: Quest, Crusade and Fellowship. The Quest sought spiritual experience; the Crusade meant outreach; and the Fellowship was for members meeting in fortnightly groups. The very terminology was redolent of knightly enterprise at the court of King Arthur, and its publications reflected the same Romantic ethos. J. Arundel Chapman, for instance, described biblical inspiration in these terms: A poem such as Wordsworth’s Michael, the picture of the Austrian Tyrol in June, a piece of music such as Bach’s Mass in B Minor, the view of the Langdale Pikes, differ markedly, but they are all alike in this – that they get us.23

Inevitably many Methodists gravitated in a High Church direction, and a Methodist Sacramental Fellowship was launched in 1935. According to K. Harley Boyns, a minister who wrote a pamphlet called Our Catholic Heritage, ‘The past, with its conquests, its fragrance, its saints, its immortal splendour, is ours’.24 The echoes of the Oxford Movement’s discovery of an idealised Christian tradition nearly a century before are unmistakable.

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A similar pattern is evident among churches possessing a Reformed inheritance. Many congregations of the Church of Scotland, which was largely reunited from 1929, introduced more frequent communion, service books with fixed liturgies and the observance of the Christian year. So close did the Church of Scotland move to the Church of England that by the 1950s there was nearly a merger of the two established Churches. Although a campaign by the Scottish Daily Express ensured the scheme’s rejection because it entailed the acceptance of bishops, many of the Presbyterian leaders themselves had been willing to embrace episcopacy.25 In Wales the trend was less marked, but greater dignity of worship did appear among the Calvinistic Methodists, from 1930 called the Presbyterian Church of Wales. A book about the home missionary work of the Welsh Presbyterians published in the late 1940s captured in its title the same spirit as the Methodist Fellowship of the Kingdom: The Romance of the Forward Movement.26 Among the English Congregationalists there were two tendencies shaped by Romantic influences, pointing in different directions. On the one hand there was an advance of theological liberalism, which proceeded far beyond the bounds of Evangelicalism. Thus T. Rhondda Williams, one of the leading exponents of theological liberalism and chairman of the Congregational Union in 1929, regretted that Wesley and Whitefield had been burdened by ‘the incubus of a traditional theology’.27 On the other hand there was the so-called Genevan movement that gathered around Nathaniel Micklem of Mansfield College, Oxford, from the 1930s. Micklem stressed the place of Calvinists within any fully developed understanding of Catholic tradition. His friend B.L. Manning of Jesus College, Cambridge, shared his vision, extending it to the other Free Churches. For him the early Methodists of Lincolnshire singing the hymns of Charles Wesley about the cross were the modern equivalents of mediaeval penitents wending their way across the same wolds chanting of the five wounds of Christ.28 The evocation of the past once more provided a sanction for the exaltation of the Church and the sacraments. The supreme instance was W.E. Orchard, the minister who conducted high mass at the Congregational King’s Weigh House Chapel in London before seceding to Rome.29 The High Church remodelling of the Reformed tradition could hardly go further. Baptists had a rather different blend of currents flowing amongst them. Many of the denominational leaders, such as the Cambridge classicist T.R. Glover, fitted into much the same liberal Evangelical mould as the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement. Among the rank and file, however, there were sympathies for the more conservative expressions of the Romantic legacy. Queensberry Street Baptist Church, Old Basford, Nottingham, is an instructive case study. In 1929 an energetic member still in his 20s, a children’s dress manufacturer named Douglas Stocken, stayed in the Aberystwyth holiday home run by the Young Life Campaign, a dynamic evangelistic organisation. There Stocken was quickened by its version of Keswick spirituality centring on ‘full surrender’. Returning to Nottingham, he threw himself into Young Life Campaign activities and became church secretary three years later. The Nottingham church was renewed by

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the Keswick message, becoming the most vigorous Baptist cause in the area. There was a range of striking changes. The church began to concentrate on ‘soul winning’. Bazaars were abandoned as worldly entertainments. The church now raised money only by voluntary giving. Premillennial teaching became standard. Queensberry Street drew away from other Baptist churches, while moving closer to Anglican Evangelicals and Brethren who also supported the Young Life Campaign and Keswick. There was, in short, a transformation of cultural atmosphere. The Romantic style had filtered down to a Nottingham suburb.30 Baptists included in their ranks a good number professing similar higher life and adventist beliefs. That helps explain the alignment of more Baptists than of other Nonconformists with the conservative Evangelical coalition in the post-war era. The pattern of Evangelical life in the early twentieth century was therefore moulded by the cultural inheritance from the previous century. The Romantic legacy made it common to present the Christian faith in rather ethereal form, blurring the sharp lines of doctrine and concentrating on the fatherly love of God. That generated the liberal tendency. At the same time certain doctrinal themes, especially those surrounding the church, sacraments and ministry, chimed in with Romantic preoccupations. The same trends that made the Roman Catholic Church especially attractive gave rise to a higher churchmanship among many Evangelicals. Yet Romantic influence had also generated beliefs with conservative implications. Keswick teaching and the advent hope, popular among Anglicans, Brethren and others – such as the Baptists of Queensberry Street, Nottingham – stiffened resistance to liberalism. The cultural mood that had animated the avantgarde of the early nineteenth century had spread so as to become a diffuse but potent element in twentieth-century church life. The first major challenge to these ecclesiastical styles arose in the 1930s. It came from the Oxford Group led by Frank Buchman, a Pennsylvania Lutheran minister. Teams of life-changers, often Oxford undergraduates, visited an area to urge personal surrender to God. Individuals were drawn into groups where they talked frankly about their efforts to achieve the four ethical absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness, love. Adherents were encouraged to spend daily quiet times jotting down thoughts in notebooks as a way of discovering the guidance of God. The Oxford Group aroused suspicion in many Evangelical quarters because its meetings often dispensed with prayers, hymns or Scripture readings. ‘Such a movement’, darkly observed the Brethren magazine the Witness, ‘… can only have one end (Rev. 3.16 [‘Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth’])’.31 The later history of the Oxford Group, which in 1938 was transformed into Moral Rearmament, might seem to have borne out this judgement, for the movement became less distinctively Christian. For a while, however, at the depth of the great depression, the movement attracted attention to the Christian message, won converts and in the eyes of some observers seemed to presage revival. For all its idiosyncrasies, it brought a fresh burst of evangelistic vitality into the land.

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The impact of the Oxford Group can be traced to its cultural role. Buchman wanted to remove every obstacle to the transmission of the gospel and so deliberately adopted the latest fashions. His movement therefore reflected the new cultural mood that had been created by the literary and artistic avantgarde in the years before and after 1900. This was the phenomenon variously called ‘Modernism’ or ‘Expressivism’. It bore little relation to the contemporary movement of theological modernism, which was an advanced form of liberalism, but took its name because it embraced the modern as an alternative to Romantic nostalgia for the past. It could equally be called ‘Expressivist’ because of a characteristic commitment to free self-expression. Cultural Modernism was as original a phase in the history of Western civilisation as the Enlightenment or Romanticism, and can best be understood as a cultural wave succeeding them. Its origins can be traced particularly to Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1870s and Sigmund Freud in the 1890s. From Nietzsche came the belief that there is no intrinsic order in the universe. Hence, it came to be held, there is no correspondence between words and things so that language cannot represent reality. From Freud, Jung and their circle came the perceptions of depth psychology. There was exploration of the recesses of the subconscious, leading to the view that thought cannot be distinguished from feeling. The novelists such as James Joyce who explored the stream-of-consciousness technique and the artists such as the Surrealists who turned the world of dreams into their subject-matter were typical exponents of this fresh cultural manner. The Oxford Group was the leading embodiment of cultural Modernism in religion, and the Buchmanites displayed many typical characteristics of the period’s cultural pioneers. They believed in self-expression, telling each other in their groups how they really felt. Accepting the basics of depth psychology, they pursued mutual counselling. Personal relations had to be authentic, and so the Groupers went in for first names. They would even, according to a critical representation, have called Saint Peter ‘Pete’.32 Like Modernist artists, they rejected any notion of boundaries, not distinguishing the sacred from the secular and so, to the scandal of most Evangelicals of their day, going for rambles on a Sunday. Their doctrine was unspecific, for, like the cultural mood they represented, they refused to pin down words to a single meaning. In the spirit of the Bohemian creators of Modernist art, they disliked institutions and so normally sat loose to the churches. Yet, because they were so anti-institutional, they relied on personal authority to hold them together and gave a degree of control to Buchman that some contemporaries likened to that of Hitler. For a while during the 1930s, these techniques had an enormous appeal for the young, the prosperous and the educated, the sector of the population most swayed by recent cultural innovations. As the Second World War supervened and Moral Rearmament turned in fresh directions, the permeation of the churches and of society largely came to a halt. The lasting penetration of Evangelicalism by the new cultural mode in this period was therefore very limited.33

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The major impact of Modernism/Expressivism was deferred until the 1960s, the decade of the expressive revolution in society at large. By then the cultural movement had evolved as it spread to a wider public, but it had not been superseded. The phenomenon that has come to be called ‘Postmodernism’, which many would date from the 1960s, did not replace Modernism. Postmodernism is so called because it rejects Modernity, the legacy of the Enlightenment, not Modernism. In reality the two formed one stream of cultural influence. Thus in the field of architecture the Bauhaus school of the 1920s constituted the cutting edge of the ‘Modern Movement’. Its central principle was giving precedence to the functional over forms of traditional design. A major Postmodernist monument, Richard Rodgers’ Pompidou Centre in Paris, by placing its service ducts on the outside, bears witness to the same priority. For all the differences of appearance, there is an underlying continuity between the two. The essence of both is authenticity, the hallmark of Expressivism. Late twentieth-century Postmodernism was an increasingly diffused version of the cultural forces that sprang into being around the opening of the twentieth century. The chief way in which this cultural phenomenon impinged on Evangelicals was through charismatic renewal. Charismatics baptised the rising cultural mood into a Christian guise, and their characteristics mirrored those of the Oxford Group in the 1930s. There were, to be sure, exceptions: the Oxford Group, for example, had none of the exuberant worship that was so salient in the charismatic renewal movement, and in the earlier period there had been no question of altering the existing style of church services. Nevertheless the similarities were marked. The worship style of the charismatic movement was itself about selfexpression, showing by gestures such as hand-raising how people felt inside. The prayer-counselling therapy that became a feature of charismatic renewal drew extensively on depth psychology. An insistence on authentic personal relations led to a rejection of individualistic churchgoing and sometimes to the creation of Christian communities. The sacred and the secular were not held apart so that, for example, there was an unprecedented surge of creativity in such matters as the making of banners and the inclusion of dance in worship. There was a tendency to downgrade fixed theological formulas and even, in some charismatic house churches, to insist that theology must be expected to change over time. There was a dislike of the institutionalism of existing denominations and this in turn provided much of the spur to form new house churches. And at certain points, especially in the 1970s, there were authoritarian tendencies within the movement. The so-called ‘heavy shepherding’ of that juncture, sometimes extending to the choosing of life partners for adherents, was subsequently largely repudiated, but the attributes of leadership became a much more common theme at conferences. The charismatic movement represented the rising temper of the age. The growth of charismatic renewal is one of the most striking features of late twentieth-century Christian history. It revitalised many existing congregations and gave rise to substantial networks of new churches. Even where it did not come to dominate, it affected the style of church life, especially in worship. Seconded

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by technological improvements, a multiplicity of instruments was introduced and the visual came to rival the verbal. One symbolic change was the legitimation of applause. Noise in church had been frowned on in the period when Romantic norms prevailed since it was conceived to be a profane intrusion on the sacred. The expressive revolution in worship, however, encouraged clapping both to keep time with the rhythm of the music and to show appreciation of particular contributions to services.34 All this was especially welcome to the young, the educated and the successful. The young appreciated worship that approximated to pop music; the educated were aware of the latest cultural trends; and the successful could pay for their taste to be gratified. Holy Trinity, Brompton, the leading bellwether congregation among Evangelicals by the end of the twentieth century, was full of the young, the educated and the successful. The appeal of Holy Trinity was partly a consequence of the clear exposition of the gospel that the church set out in its Alpha evangelistic programme, but it was also partly the result of its close adaptation to the cultural currents of the time. Just as the gospel in its Enlightenment form had exerted a strong appeal in the early decades of the Evangelical movement and in its Romantic style in the century or so from the 1830s, so its embodiment in a Modernist/Expressivist idiom proved to be powerful in the years around 2000. A number of conclusions flow from this analysis. In the first place, it is evident that Evangelicals have been deeply embedded in their cultural settings. W.H. Groser was right to claim that churches are moulded by their environments. It is impossible to understand the patterns of theological and ecclesiastical change without attention to the cultural context. Secondly, popular culture did not shape the trends in the expression of the gospel as much as developments in high culture. It is true that local customs impinged on how Evangelicals spread and lived the faith, but the deferred impact of intellectual innovations was far greater because they soon became enmeshed with major theological concerns. Popular culture in the sense of secular ways of life probably exerted its greatest influence by repulsion, creating a gulf between the churches and the mass of the people. Thirdly, the high cultural movement of the Enlightenment provided the intellectual framework within which early Evangelicals operated. Empiricism, optimism and pragmatism all constituted common ground between Evangelicals and their progressive contemporaries, so giving them a powerful apologetic advantage. The growth of the movement owes a great deal to this extensive intellectual affinity. Fourthly, the succeeding cultural wave of Romanticism immersed many Evangelicals. Its consequences were manifold, fostering liberal developments in theology and more elaborate liturgical practice, but also giving rise to distinctly conservative doctrinal trends, especially through the faith principle, premillennial teaching and the Keswick Convention. And finally, the emergence of a novel Modernist/Expressivist mood exercised a comparable effect on the Evangelical movement in the twentieth century. After a stunted initial impact in the 1930s, it exerted a transforming influence over Evangelical life in the decades after the 1960s. Overall it is clear not only that the host culture has helped shape the articulation of the gospel but also that it has contributed in no small measure to its degree of success.

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Endnotes 1 Sunday School Chronicle (1900), p. 729, quoted in P.B. Cliff, The Rise and Development of the Sunday School Movement in England, 1780–1980 (Redhill, Surrey, 1986), p. 197. 2 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1968), especially chapter 3. 3 S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999). 4 William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, 2nd series (Penzance, 1873), p. 246. 5 David Clark, Between Pew and Pulpit: Folk Religion in a North Yorkshire Fishing Village (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 104–5. 6 David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven CT, 2005), p. 90. 7 Anthony Delves, ‘Popular Recreation and Social Conflict in Derby, 1800–1850’, in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914 (Brighton, 1981), p. 107. 8 Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York, 1982), p. 24. 9 Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1982). 10 D.W. Bebbington, ‘Science and Evangelical Theology in Britain from Wesley to Orr’, in D.H. Livingstone et al. (eds), Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York, 1999), pp. 120–141. 11 J.H. Pratt, The Thought of the Evangelical Leaders: Notes of the Discussions of the Eclectic Society, London, during the Years 1798–1814 [1856] (London, 1978), p. 257 (7 June 1802). 12 General Baptist Magazine (July 1854), pp. 308, 309. 13 S.J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford, 1982), pp. 132–3. 14 M.J. Walker, Baptists at the Table: The Theology of the Lord’s Supper amongst English Baptists in the Nineteenth Century (Didcot, Oxon, 1992), chapter 2. 15 J.J. Ben-Ezra, The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty, trans. Edward Irving (London, 1827), p. vi. 16 Heyman Wreford, Memories of the Life and Last Days of William Kelly (London: F.E. Race, n.d.), p. 81, quoted in M.S. Weremchuk, John Nelson Darby (Neptune, NJ, 1992), p. 167. 17 This point is developed in D.W. Bebbington, ‘The Place of the Brethren Movement in International Evangelicalism’, in N.T.R. Dickson and Tim Grass (eds), The Growth of the Brethren Movement (Milton Keynes, 2006), pp. 247–50. 18 D.W. Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (Leicester, 2005), pp. 156–7. 19 D.W. Bebbington, Holiness in Nineteenth-Century England (Carlisle, 2000), chapter 4. 20 Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, 5 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1961–75), vol. 5, p. 261. 21 Record (23 September 1904), p. 954 (A.H. Hope-Smith). 22 I.M. Randall, Evangelical Experiences: A Study in the Spirituality of English Evangelicalism, 1918–1939 (Carlisle, 1999), p. 56. 23 J. Arundel Chapman, The Bible and its Inspiration (n.p., n.d.), p. 5.

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24 K. Harley Boyns, Our Catholic Heritage (n.p., n.d.), p. 8. 25 Tom Gallagher, ‘The Press and Popular Protestant Culture: A Case-Study of the Scottish Daily Express’, in Graham Walker and Tom Gallagher (eds), Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 193–212. 26 Howell Williams, The Romance of the Forward Movement ([Denbigh, 1949?]). 27 T. Rhondda Williams, The Working Faith of a Liberal Theologian (London, 1914), p. 40, quoted by A.P.F. Sell, Nonconformist Theology in the Twentieth Century (Milton Keynes, 2006), p. 15. 28 B.L. Manning, The Making of Modern English Religion (London, 1929), pp. 141–2. 29 Elaine Kaye, The History of the King’s Weigh House Church (London, 1968), chapter 8. 30 D.W. Bebbington, A History of Queensberry Street Baptist Church, Old Basford, Nottingham (Nottingham, 1977), pp. 38–9. 31 Witness, January 1937, p. 17. 32 John Moore, Brensham Village [1946] (London, 1966), p. 171. 33 D.W. Bebbington, ‘The Oxford Group between the Wars’, in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Voluntary Religion (Oxford, 1986), pp. 495–07; D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), pp. 235–40. 34 D.W. Bebbington, ‘Evangelicals and Public Worship, 1965–2005’, Evangelical Quarterly, 79 (2007), pp. 3–22, especialy p. 20.

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Chapter 8

Anglican Attitudes to Roman Catholicism in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Nigel Yates

In 1778 Parliament passed the first of a series of measures aimed at alleviating some of the disabilities imposed by law on Roman Catholics in England and Wales. Similar measures were introduced, in two stages, by the Irish Parliament in 1774 and 1778. They were not introduced in Scotland where the Roman Catholic community was still suspected of holding Jacobite sympathies. The legislation was extremely limited in its impact. In return for taking an oath of allegiance to the Crown, Roman Catholics were permitted to purchase land legally and the threat of arrest and imprisonment was lifted from Roman Catholic priests and schoolmasters.1 Even so there was an immediate Protestant backlash. In 1779 there were anti-Catholic riots in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and a petition signed by a very large number of people – 26,000 in Glasgow and 120,000 in London alone – was presented to Parliament. The Protestant Association, founded by Lord George Gordon, established branches in several English cities and towns – Bath, Bridlington, Bristol, Canterbury, Carlisle, Norwich, Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Rochester. In 1780 there was a week’s rioting in London in which there were attacks on Roman Catholic chapels, the houses of known Roman Catholics, and many other buildings. Altogether 210 people were killed in the riots and a further 75 subsequently died of their wounds.2 From this date until the final passing of Roman Catholic Emancipation in 1829 the issue of Roman Catholic belief and practice was tied up with intricate political issues of loyalty to the Crown and potential papal intervention in British affairs which are not the concern of this chapter. However, behind these political debates there was another, more theological, debate going on within the Anglican established Churches in England, Ireland and Wales about their relations with the Roman Catholic Church and whether there was any possibility of achieving a greater degree of understanding and possibly even reunion. It is this issue that will be dealt with in this chapter. One of the earliest contributions to this more ecumenical attitude towards the Roman Catholics came from a somewhat surprising source. Frederick Augustus Hervey, bishop of Derry from 1768 and third Earl of Bristol from 1779, had an unenviable reputation for good living, house building, foreign travel and womanising, but he also described Roman Catholicism as ‘a mild and harmless

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superstition’, attended the washing of feet by the Pope on Maundy Thursday in the Sistine Chapel, lobbied on behalf of candidates for Roman Catholic episcopal vacancies in Ireland, and contributed to the building of not only Church of Ireland, but also Presbyterian and Roman Catholic churches in his diocese, including the gift of four marble pillars supporting the baldacchino of St Columba’s, Derry, in 1784.3 Anglican attitudes to Roman Catholics were more greatly affected by the presence in England of large numbers of émigré clergy and members of religious orders, who arrived from France following the anti-Christian purges of the 1790s. Some Anglicans who had traditionally viewed the Pope as Antichrist were forced into a dramatic volte-face when it became more apparent that it was the French Revolutionary Government, rather than the Roman Catholic Church, that deserved this opprobrious epithet. One of those carried along by this reappraisal of Roman Catholicism was Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806), who collaborated with John Milner, parish priest of Winchester (where large numbers of émigré clergy had gathered) and a future vicar-apostolic, to protect émigré Roman Catholic clergy – despite opposition from Bishop Brownlow North, and his chancellor, John Sturges. When a bill was introduced to tighten restrictions on Roman Catholic convents and schools, Horsley opposed it on the grounds that the existing penal legislation was adequate protection against any proselytising by Roman Catholic institutions. However, Horsley remained an opponent of Roman Catholic emancipation. Further, when sounded out on whether the English bishops would be opposed to the transformation of the Roman Catholic vicariates into proper dioceses, he was as hostile to this proposal as were his fellow bishops. Whilst F.C. Mather describes him as ‘ever a true friend of Roman Catholics’, there were clearly limits to his toleration.4 John Sturges, who had been on the opposite side from Horsley in the debate over the émigrés, continued to promote a relatively hard-line position on Roman Catholicism. In his Reflections on the Principles and Institutions of Popery, Sturges expressed the view that Roman Catholics should be grateful for the toleration they had been granted and not attempt to be polemical. His book was partly a response to John Milner’s History of Winchester which he felt had been deliberately provocative in its account of the cathedral and its clergy since the Reformation: The useful and proper effect of Toleration thus granted should be reconciliation and concord. Each party should abstain (the weaker party especially) from what is irritating and offensive.5

A similar conflict between a desire for toleration and a defence of the English Reformation can be found in the work of Charles Daubeny (1745–1827), prebendary and (from 1804) archdeacon of Salisbury. Daubeny defended the pre-Tractarian branch theory of the Catholic Church, which included not just the Anglican, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches – The Tractarian branch theory – but also the Lutheran Churches of Denmark and Sweden. Yet Daubeny had no difficulty in placing crosses over the pulpit and altar table of his church in Bath and he strongly deprecated the fact that this image of Christianity should have fallen ‘a sacrifice

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to the intemperate paroxysms of reforming frenzy, and Puritanical fanaticism’, an action and defence which by the 1840s would have attracted ringing cries of ‘No Popery’.6 Daubeny, though he defended the English Reformation, was careful to explain its true nature against the potential charges of schism, which he himself laid against Protestant Dissenters in England and Wales. For Daubeny, the separation of the Church of England from the Church of Rome was grounded, not upon the notion that England had a right to form a church for herself upon any new plan of her choosing; but rather upon the idea that it was not compatible with the spiritual welfare of the English people to hold communion with a corrupt church. It was neither the government nor the doctrine of the Church of Christ that was protested against on this occasion, but the corruption that had taken place in both; these included the usurped supremacy of the bishop of Rome; and certain dangerous tenets, which were incompatible with the essential articles of the Christian Faith.7 Peter Nockles makes a distinction between Horsley and Daubeny in their attitude to Roman Catholicism. Whereas Horsley had, through his attitude to the French Revolution, rejected ‘the eschatological basis of anti-Roman Catholicism’, Daubeny, and some of those who supported his line, such as Bishop PretymanTomline of Lincoln and William Jones of Nayland, had ‘interpreted the events of Revolutionary France and especially the Irish Rebellion of 1798 so as to bolster rather than soften anti-Roman polemic’.8 In practice some pretty fine hair-splitting was involved here, but by the first decade of the nineteenth century the nature of this division among high churchmen was becoming clearer. The popular London preacher, Sydney Smith, observed that, As I love to worship God according to my own conceptions of real religion, I love that every man should do the same … Some feelings of generosity we might display towards other sects, for the recollection that we are the strongest, that we are endowed, that we are protected; that we have the favour of the great mass of the people, and the countenance and support of the law. It would be charitable to remember, that these things must be galling to those who have as firm a conviction in the truth and superiority of their creed, as we can possibly have of ours.9

Bishop Shute Barrington of Durham devoted his 1810 visitation charge to the ‘Ground of Union between the Churches of England and of Rome Considered’. Although he acknowledged the errors of Roman Catholicism, he felt that charity and gentle argument should be the tools to counteract them, rather than the tightening of the existing penal legislation. It is worth quoting his views at some length: I think we may discover a favourable omen in the abhorrence, which Papists express, in general terms indeed, against those charges of idolatry, blasphemy, sacrilege and impiety, which we impute to some of the doctrines and usages of their Church. To reject with abhorrence the imputation of idolatry, blasphemy and impiety is surely to be prepared to renounce any doctrine or usage, which

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain can be fairly proved to deserve such charges. If then we could convince them (which I trust, we may do; for truth will finally prevail), that it is idolatry to deify and worship the consecrated elements; that it is sacrilege to suppress half the Eucharist, in direct contradiction to our Saviour’s Institution, to the example of the Apostles, and to the first ten centuries; that it is blasphemy to ascribe to Angels and to saints, by praying to them, the divine attribute of universal presence; that it is impiety to deny the sufficiency of our Saviour’s sacrifice once offered; and that it is a crime against the laws and constitution of this free Empire to admit a foreign supremacy and jurisdiction in any appointments, civil or ecclesiastical, of this country; if, I say, by persevering in a spirit of truth and charity we could bring the Roman Catholics to see these most important subjects in the same light that the Catholics of the Church of England do, a very auspicious opening would be made for that long desired measure of CATHOLIC UNION, which formerly engaged the talents and anxious wishes of some of the best and ablest members of both Communions. And what public duty of greater magnitude can present itself to us, than the restoration of peace and union to the Church by the reconciliation of two so large portions of it, as the Churches of England and Rome?10

The fact that Shute Barrington was at least open to the proposition that reunion between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church was not just possible, but worth aspiring to, certainly separated him from high church colleagues who found such a prospect both impossible and undesirable. More favourable views of Roman Catholicism were also the result of more travel abroad and could come from surprising sources. Edward Copleston, who as bishop of Llandaff would later be a strong critic of Tractarianism, wrote letters home to his father and brother about his European tours in 1814 and 1816 in which he expressed his favourable impression of Roman Catholicism: The churches … which are in ‘Catholic’ Countries open all day long, were never without people kneeling in profound devotion. One custom they have, which might well be imitated by protestants, that of repairing to church to say their private prayers … In Flanders … The churches are open in summer from five in the morning till noon, during which time a succession of priests are officiating, the people coming and going, seldom less than thirty in the church at any one time, with great appearance of devotion … In all the places of worship I have attended … I must say that there was greater appearance of devotion than the English Church ordinarily presents … They come before the Service begins. Many sit there an hour with their books, and seem to be engaged in private prayer. I confess I cannot understand the ground upon which the English boast themselves to be a peculiarly religious people.11

Copleston’s appreciation of Roman Catholic devotion, however, could not match the effusiveness by which the advanced Tractarian, and later convert to Roman Catholicism, F.W. Faber, would describe Roman Catholic services at Bruges in 1839. Faber observed,

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a very beautiful procession … as the octave of the Assumption, when St Mary’s image was carried through the streets, preceded by the Host, to visit St Mary Magdalene in her church. From the general chastity of arrangement, and strikingly graceful gestures of the little children, who generally form a portion of it, a procession is far the most imposing of Roman ecclesiastical pageants.12

Whereas Faber seems to have been bowled over by the whole experience, as he was later by the Maundy Thursday liturgy, including the washing of feet, at St Mark’s, Venice,13 Copleston made a distinction between the theological doctrines of Roman Catholicism and the genuine devotion of Roman Catholic worship. Nevertheless, a more personal contact with Roman Catholicism as a result of foreign travel did impress upon Anglicans that some anti-Roman Catholic propaganda was based largely on fear and ignorance. It was this general softening of attitudes towards Roman Catholicism, and a desire to distinguish between doctrinal error and unfair caricature, that was to lead to a real division among Anglicans, and especially among Anglican high churchmen, during the course of the nineteenth century. The publication of Newman’s Tract XC in 1841 was one such divisive episode, the row provoked by the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850 was another, as were the debates over auricular confession in Anglican churches and the publication of The Priest in Absolution in 1873. The popular belief that Roman Catholics needed to be rescued from their Church and saved from superstition in order to become proper Christians was a constant theme in the newspapers, Punch cartoons and much popular literature.14 The beginnings of the nineteenth-century high church debate over how the Church of England should respond to Roman Catholicism are reflected in the exchange of publications between Samuel Wix and Thomas Burgess. Wix stood in a similar tradition to Bishops Horsley and Barrington or Archdeacon Daubeny. He was scarcely an apologist for everything Roman, as F.W. Faber and some of the more extreme Tractarians were later to become, but he did feel that Roman Catholicism had been unfairly treated and deserved a better hearing of its doctrinal positions, much of which had been misinterpreted by the crude polemical publications of the past. Burgess, on the other hand, although a protégé of Bishop Barrington, did not share his patron’s more charitable disposition to Roman Catholicism. Partly this was because Burgess had developed his own theory of early Christianity in Britain in which the Celtic Church had been a proto-Protestant one, which had been forced into subservience to Rome as a result of the English conquests of Ireland and Wales. It has to be emphasised that Burgess’ interpretation was not a new one. It had been expressed nearly 200 years earlier by Archbishop James Ussher in his Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates of 1639, although, as Alan Ford has recently pointed out, Ussher expressed himself more cautiously than some of those who later quarried his work to justify their own theological positions. Nevertheless, Ussher’s work certainly ‘fits into a tradition of protestant scholarship which tried to demonstrate the purity of the national churches before they were overwhelmed by papal darkness’.15

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Thomas Burgess, consecrated bishop of St David’s in 1803, published his Tracts on the Origin and Independence of the Ancient British Church in 1815. In this work, he argued that the doctrine of papal supremacy was based on a misinterpretation of Scripture and in particular of the text ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock, I will build my Church’. Burgess argued that the ‘rock’ was Christ himself not Peter and his successors. He then proceeded to argue that the gospel was preached directly in Britain by some of the apostles (quoting Eusebius as evidence for this) and states that the probable missionary was St Paul. For Burgess the Celtic Church in the British Isles was wholly independent of Rome and ‘the Church of Britain was a Protestant Church nine centuries before the days of Luther’. He also maintained that the ‘Church of Britain’ had remained independent for the first two centuries, from the errors and corruptions of the Church of Rome … The Religion of protestants in this united Kingdom is not a new Religion, but is as old as the days of St Paul, who preached in and established it in Britain. The Church of Britain was fully established before the Church of Rome.16

He then proceeded to outline the principal differences between this early British Church and what he described as the ‘errors’ and ‘corruptions’ of the Roman Catholic Church as outlined in Table 8.1. The vehemence of Burgess’s attacks on Roman Catholicism were part of a particularly strange brand of Anglican high church theology which has recently been analysed in some depth by Mark Smith.17 For the purposes of this chapter it explains his attitude to Samuel Wix’s attempt to build on the arguments of Bishop Barrington’s 1810 Charge. Table 8.1

Comparison of Bishop Thomas Burgess’s alleged differences between the early church of Britain and the Roman Catholic Church

Ancient British Church

Roman Catholic Church

Christ the head of the Church

Papal supremacy and infallibility

Observed second commandment

Idolatry to host and images

Prayer only to God in Christ

Prayer to departed saints

‘Scriptural’ doctrine of the eucharist Bread and wine both given to laity ‘Christ offered himself once for all

Belief in transubstantiation Refusal of chalice to laity ‘Papists believe that Christ is daily offered up by

on the Cross’

the Priest at the Mass’

Salvation achieved by Christ’s death

Belief in purgatory

Few and simple ceremonies

Complex ceremonial

‘conducive only to the decency and order of public worship’. Source: Thomas Burgess, Tracts on the Origin and Independence of the Ancient British Church, London 1815, pp. 202–5.

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Samuel Wix was the vicar of St Bartholomew-the-Less in the city of London. There he published his eirenicon which began: It is thought that the Church of England, she being the great reformed Church in Apostolic succession, should propose to the Church of Rome, a meeting, to consider, with all possible affection and forbearance, whether some plan might not be devised to accommodate their religious differences. The Church of Rome might, perhaps, relax in what the Church of England considers her fundamental errors, and the Church of England might incline a little more than she does to some of the favourite opinions or practices of the Romish Church, which are not unscriptural.18

Wix argued that the popular opposition to Roman Catholicism, which at times verged on the hysterical, was based largely on a misunderstanding of its doctrines and practices: Among the common errors which are commonly objected against the Church of Rome are Transubstantiation and the invocation of Angels and departed Saints. But here, surely, if a proper Christian temper on both sides were cultivated, mutual advantages to conciliation might be made. The words of our Saviour … are mysterious, and are differently understood by some of the most pious, and most learned members of the Church of England. While some consider the sacrament, thus instituted by our blessed Lord, simply as a memorial, others understand the words in a sense which induces them to believe, that, when they receive the consecrated elements, they do more than barely commemorate the death and passion of Christ; and some conceive that, in the administration of the eucharist, a solemn sacrifice is offered … Another practice of the Church of Rome, considered as fundamentally erroneous by the Church of England, is, her addressing prayers to angels and departed saints. But these prayers should be understood to be addressed, as they are by the Romish Church, not to the angels or saints, as possessing in themselves any godlike authority or power, but as intercessors for good on our behalf to God and our Saviour. Prayers to angels and departed persons, thus considered, are unchargeable with being idolatrous as offered to beings inferior to God for divine help … . There are other practices of the Church of Rome, which, however erroneous they are supposed to be, have been greatly misrepresented, and referred to principles which the Roman Catholic himself does not acknowledge. Thus the praying before a crucifix has been uncandidly represented as praying to a crucifix. The frequent signing of the cross, the use of consecrated water, the bowing at the altar, all have been denominated superstitions and sometimes worse; whereas, they are, in reality, ceremonies harmless in themselves, which may be either beneficial, or otherwise, as they are used properly, or as they are abused.19

Wix’s defence of Roman Catholicism certainly went further in respect of conciliation than Bishop Barrington’s 1810 Charge; nonetheless, it was not without precedent.

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In 1704 there had appeared an anonymous Proposal for Catholic Communion by a Minister of the Church of England, which had covered much the same ground as Wix’s own publication, and from a very similar perspective. This was republished, with some minor alterations, in 1781, 1801 and 1812.20 Indeed, it may well have been the edition of this work in 1812 that inspired Wix to take up his pen. However, whilst the anonymous author of this earlier work had restricted himself to raising the principal allegations against Roman Catholicism, and then answering them, Wix made a practical proposal: No solid objection prevails against the Church of England attempting a union with the Church of Rome; Since the Church of Rome is acknowledged by the Church of England to be a true apostolical Church. She denies no article of faith which the Church of England maintains to be requisite to salvation; though she entertains, in addition opinions which the Church of England considers unnecessary or erroneous; many of which the Roman Church, on kind consultation might be disposed to renounce or to modify, or to some of which the Church of England might manifest a charitable forbearance: and so an union, than which nothing could be more desirable to the Christian world, nor more agreeable to the peaceful spirit of the Gospel, might be happily effected … With respect to the Church Service being in a language not understood by the common people, which custom has sometimes been stated to be grounded on a wish to preserve the people in ignorance, a more kind explanation might have been found in the affection of the Roman Catholics for the Latin language, as being, in a certain degree, a Catholic language. It should, moreover, be known that there are, for the accommodation of the humbler classes in society, in addition to the mass service and vespers in Latin, prayers in the Roman Chapels in England, in the vulgar language of the country, and it should be considered that the whole is a matter, not of faith, but of discipline, which might be adapted to public feeling and edification. In the Council which it is proposed to be called, this custom of the Church Service being in a language not understood by the common people, might be considered, and be completely abandoned … Other customs in the Roman Church, might also be dispassionately reviewed, particularly the offering up of prayers for the dead; the consecrating of oil for anointing the sick; the burning of incense at the altar, and the mixing of Sacramental wine with water. If it shall appear, on impartial inquiry into primitive usage among the first Christians, that these customs did not originally prevail in the Christian Church, and if the Roman Catholic could not conscientiously surrender them, there might not appear to the liberal Protestant, who is desirous of peace, any solid objection to them. For, though they should not be ordered in the Holy Scriptures, they are not forbidden: and, if they were customs which were adhered to by the earliest Christians, and which have thence deserved a sanctity in the eye of the Roman Catholic, they might be retained in charity, and in perfect freedom from Superstition.21

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Wix then goes on, as later Anglican ritualists were to do, to give examples of Anglican writers of the seventeenth century, justifying some Roman Catholic practices as entirely legitimate. All this was far too much for Bishop Thomas Burgess. In a vehement condemnation of the Reflections, Burgess argued that the Church of Rome must renounce many impeding errors, before the great Council could meet. The Church of England could meet the Church of Rome only on equal terms. The Pope therefore must abandon his assumed supremacy over the Christian Church. But will he ever renounce a Sovereignty which he affirms God himself has given him?22

Burgess accused Wix of being disingenuous in comparing his plan for union with the earlier aspirations of Archbishop Wake: The difference between your principle of union, and that of Archbishop Wake [is that] the Archbishop’s proposal was for union with the Gallican Church, yours is for union with the Church of Rome. The Archbishop said there could not be union with the Gallican Church, until she separated herself from the Church of Rome; yours is union with that Church. The Archbishop’s principle of union with the Gallican Church was, that ‘they should purge out of their offices what is contrary to ours’. Your principle of Union with the Church of Rome, is that of mutual concession.23

Burgess did not accept that the differences between the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches were about relatively unimportant issues, but thought that they were fundamental in both doctrine and practice. He criticised many of Wix’s justifications of the Roman Catholic position as being inaccurate and pointed to the outright condemnation of Roman Catholic doctrines and practices in both the Articles of Religion and the Book of Homilies: My objections to your plea for union … do not arise from want of charity to the Roman Catholics, or to excessive prejudice against the Church of Rome, but from the authority and judgement of our own Church.24

Wix, however, was undeterred. The bishop, he averred, appears to have lost that regard for the Church of Rome, as a true, or as a real (if he prefers that word) though corrupted, branch of the Church of Christ, which the soundest of Protestants have not scrupled to allow her … You write as though all invocation of the saints was not only wrong and absurd, and dangerous, as it certainly is, but absolutely idolatrous … Others, however, of the Church of England, valuable for their erudition and piety and inferior to none in their attachment to scriptural truth, have disdained to call it idolatrous … Two Churches may agree

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Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain in the essential doctrines of Christianity, while one of the Churches may have unscriptural additions, which the other has not. Both Churches may, therefore, be said to profess the same faith in all the essential doctrines of Christianity: but it could not be asserted that the faith of two Churches was essentially the same. That is very different, and was not asserted by me: yet does your Lordship draws your conclusion as though I had asserted it.25

In addition Wix could not resist the temptation to question Burgess’s own doctrinal orthodoxy, citing the bishop’s support for the British and Foreign Bible Society, which ‘in its latitudinarian constitution, and sectarian associations, is considered by the author, and by many others, to be the grand modern engine of schism and religious insubordination in this kingdom’.26 Wix concluded that Burgess was fighting old battles irrelevant to the current ecclesiastical situation, while Wix insisted that ‘the Roman Catholics are disposed to make much greater concessions than is generally imagined, and there is a very prevalent disposition among them to abandon error’.27 Was Samuel Wix living in some imaginary world of his own? Surely the last 200 years of Anglican-Roman relations would support the view that the Roman Catholic Church would make few, if any, concessions to Protestant opinion and would expect reunion to be largely on its own terms. In fact, Wix did have some evidence to support his claim that the time was ripe for some sort of conference. Following the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the support of the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy for the Act of Union, clear indications were given to the British government that the bishops would, in return for greater measures of Roman Catholic relief leading up to full political emancipation, be prepared to accept a role for the government in the appointment of the bishops and for the salaries of the clergy to be paid by the state. One Irish bishop, James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin, went much further than this. In an open letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, published in the Dublin Evening Post on 22 May 1824, Doyle argued in very similar language to that used by Wix: I would presume to state that, if Protestant and Catholic divines of learning and a conciliatory character were summoned by the Crown to ascertain the points of agreement and difference between the Churches … the result might be more favourable than at present would be anticipated. The chief points to be discussed are the Care of the Sacred Scriptures, Faith, Justification, the Mass, the Sacraments, the Authority of Tradition, of Councils, of the Pope, the Celibacy of the Clergy, Language of the Liturgy, Invocation of Saints, Respect for Images, Prayers for the Dead. On most of these it appears to me that there is no essential difference between Catholics and Protestants; the existing diversity of opinion exists, in most cases, from certain forms of words which admit of satisfactory explication, or from the ignorance and misconceptions which ancient prejudice and ill-will produce and strengthen, but which could be removed; they are pride and points of honour which keep us divided on many subjects, not a love of Christian humility, charity and truth.28

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Was Doyle being disingenuous? His nineteenth-century biographer certainly did not think so, though he admitted that Doyle received little support from fellow Roman Catholics in Ireland.29 Their general view was that Doyle’s opinion was ‘idle and visionary’, though his biographer suggested that Doyle probably had, from his wide reading, a much more accurate understanding of Anglican doctrine and practice than his critics. Two years later, Doyle published a scholarly work in which he analysed what he regarded as the points of difference between the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. He denied the claim that Roman Catholics believed the Pope had the power to intervene in the affairs of national governments. He pointed out that Anglican condemnation of the Roman Catholic practice of private confession to a priest was disingenuous since it had been specifically sanctioned in the Book of Common Prayer; indeed, the absolution formulae of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches were almost identical. Doyle also reprinted a statement of the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy which asserted that Roman Catholics were permitted to read the Bible in approved translations, that they ‘revered’ but did not ‘worship’ the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Saints, that they accepted the same Ten Commandments as Protestants (differing only in their numbering), that they held sins were never forgiven without true repentance and that they ‘detest as unchristian and impious’ the belief that it was acceptable to murder heretics.30 Doyle’s arguments, however, were simply dismissed as special pleading, even by such high church Anglicans as the future Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter, who described his arguments as utterly fallacious and depicted Roman Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary as ‘this disgusting, this polluting trash’.31 There can be little doubt about which Anglican version of the nature of Roman Catholicism proved more attractive over the years. When Thomas Burgess was translated from the diocese of St David’s to that of Salisbury in 1825, the person chosen to preach the sermon at Burgess’ primary visitation of his new diocese was someone who could be relied upon to make clear the real and deep differences between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. The preacher argued that whereas the Church of England regarded Scripture as ‘the sole fountain of faith’, the Roman Catholic Church did not; instead, it gave equal weight to tradition. There were he continued, substantial differences between the two Churches on the doctrines of original sin, free will and justification. The Roman Catholic took the view that ‘an ordinance instituted in one age of his Church is binding on another’ in respect of ceremonial and usage. The Church of England had abolished certain Roman Catholic rites, not ‘merely because such rites had been used by the Church of Rome’ but because they were viewed as originating from ‘superstitions’. Anglicans and Roman Catholics differed on ‘the nature and extent of authority’ with the latter taking the view that no salvation existed outside the Roman Catholic Church.32 Up to the end of his life Bishop Burgess was to pursue the same line. In a published letter to Viscount Melbourne, dated 18 November 1835 and entitled ‘on the Idolatry and Apostasy of the Church of Rome; in Proof that the Doctrines of the Church of Rome are not fundamentally the same as those of the Church of England’, Burgess wrote:

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This favourable aspect towards the Church of Rome is a great and fatal delusion … the doctrines of the Roman Church are so far from being fundamentally the same with those of our Church, that they are fundamentally and essentially opposed to them, and subversive of them … The Church of Rome is falsely called Catholic, and most inconsistently denominated Roman Catholic. It never was the Catholic or universal Church of Christ, either in authority or doctrine.33

Burgess was not alone among high churchmen in his denunciation of Roman Catholicism. In explaining his support for the Jerusalem bishopric scheme in 1842, W.F. Hook, the prominent high church vicar of Leeds, took a not dissimilar position and he strongly attacked those among his fellow high churchmen who took a different view: There are, certainly, many such persons among our younger brethren at the present time, who are inclined to look upon our own Church in the following light: they regard the Church of England as a branch of the Catholic Church from which, without peril to their souls, they may not secede: but they look upon it as injured rather than improved by the Reformation; they think that if some abuses were corrected, serious errors were introduced; they agree with the Romanists in maintaining that the Reformation was unnecessary, at all events, to the extent to which it was carried; and that this was conducted in a manner not to be defended upon catholic principles. The conclusion which must be inevitably deduced from these premises is this, that the Church of England, as at present constituted, is not the model according to which other Churches must be reformed; that she is full of imperfections; and that we have as much to learn from Rome as Rome has to learn from us …34

It would, of course, be foolish to see Samuel Wix as some sort of ‘Romaniser’, a precursor of R.H. Froude or F.W. Faber or W.R. Ward, those more extreme young Tractarians, but there is no doubt that the divisions among Anglican high churchmen that we have noted in this chapter, in their attitudes to Roman Catholicism, were to create a deep fissure within Anglican high churchmanship throughout much of the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries. Those Anglo-Catholics who labelled the Roman Catholic Church ‘The Italian Mission’ were, in essence, disciples of Bishop Burgess, though they would, no doubt, have been horrified at such an identification. Endnotes 1 N. Abercrombie, ‘The First Relief Act’, Challoner and His Church, ed. E. Duffy (London, 1981), pp. 176–93. 2 G. Rude, ‘The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters and Their Victims’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 6 (1956), pp. 93–114; C. Haydon, AntiCatholicism in Eighteenth Century England, c.1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993), pp. 204–18.

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3 Nigel Yates, The Religious Condition of Ireland 1770–1850 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 32–3, 72, 235–6; see also J.R. Walsh, Frederick Augustus Hervey 1730–1803, Fourth Earl of Bristol, Bishop of Derry (Maynooth, 1972), and P. Rankin, Irish Building Ventures of the Earl Bishop of Derry (Belfast, 1972). 4 F.C. Mather, High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) and the Caroline Tradition in the Late Georgian Church (Oxford, 1992), pp. 102–15. 5 John Sturges, Reflections on the Principles and Institutions of Popery (Winchester, 1799), p. 111. 6 P.B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 153, 210. 7 Charles Daubeny, Guide to the Church, 3rd edn. (London, 1830), pp. 120–121. 8 Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, p. 169. 9 Sydney Smith, A Sermon upon the Conduct to be Observed by the Established Church towards Catholics and other Dissenters (London, 1807), pp. 11, 22–3. 10 Shute Barrington, Sermons, Charges and Tracts (London, 1811), pp. 442–3, 445. 11 W.D. Copleston, Memoirs of Edward Copleston, DD, Bishop of Llandaff (London, 1851), pp. 58–9, 77–9. 12 F.W. Faber, Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches and among Foreign Peoples (London, 1842), p. 146. 13 Ibid., pp. 301–6. 14 On this last topic see Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge, 2006). 15 Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), pp. 208–20. 16 Thomas Burgess, Tracts on the Origin and Independence of the Ancient British Church (London, 1815), pp. 143–4, 193. 17 Mark Smith, ‘Thomas Burgess, Churchman and Reformer’, Bishop Burgess and His World: Culture, Religion and Society in Britain, Europe and North America in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Nigel Yates (Cardiff, 2007), pp. 5–40. 18 Samuel Wix, Reflections Concerning the Expediency of a Council of the Church of England and the Church of Rome being Holden with a View to Accommodate Religious Differences (London, 1818), pp. 12–13. 19 Ibid., pp. 14–15, 26–7. 20 An Eirenicon of the Eighteenth Century: Proposal for Catholic Communion by a Minister of the Church of England, new edition with introduction, notes and appendices, ed. H.N. Oxenham (London, 1879). 21 Wix, Reflections, pp. 28–9, 32–9. 22 Thomas Burgess, Popery Incapable of Union with a Protestant Church, 2nd edn. (Carmarthen, 1820), pp. 25–6. 23 Ibid., pp. 37–8. 24 Ibid., p. 146. 25 Ibid., pp. viii–ix, 43, 65–6. 26 Ibid., pp. x–xi. 27 Ibid., p. 95. 28 Oxenham (ed.) Eirenicon, pp. 324–5. 29 W.D. Fitzpatrick, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Right Rev. Dr Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, 2nd edn. (Dublin, 1880), p. 333. 30 J.W. Doyle, An Essay on the Catholic Claims (Dublin, 1826), pp. 266–7, 295–304.

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31 Henry Phillpotts, A Supplemental Letter to Charles Butler, Esq., on Some Parts of the Evidence given by the Irish Roman Catholic Bishops, particularly Dr Doyle, before the Committees of the Two Houses of Parliament in the Session of 1825; and also in Certain Passages in Dr Doyle’s ‘Essay on the Catholic Claims’ (London, 1826), pp. 6, 17. 32 C.M. Mount, The Church of England and the Church of Rome briefly contrasted: A Sermon preached in St Peter’s Church, Marlborough, at the Primary Visitation of the Right Rev. Father in God, Thomas, Lord Bishop of Salisbury (Bath, 1826). 33 J.S. Harford, Life of Thomas Burgess, DD (London, 1840), pp. 536–45. 34 W.F. Hook, Reasons for Contributing towards the Support of an English Bishopric at Jerusalem (London, 1842), pp. 4–5.

Part II Conflict and Identity

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Chapter 9

Trials and Shadows: Bishop Charles John Ellicott (1819–1905) and ‘angry controversies’ in the Church of England1 John Morgan-Guy

Writing to Benjamin Disraeli on 27 December 1869, Charles John Ellicott, then six years into his long episcopate at Gloucester, bemoaned ‘I know, as a man of business myself, how scant is the time for letters’.2 We can, despite this disclaimer, be grateful that Ellicott proved to be a tireless and inveterate correspondent, and the letters that he wrote, especially those to Disraeli and Gladstone, often passionate and frank to the point of being indiscreet, combined with a veritable stream of published works, throw a great deal of light on the leadership of the Established Church of England, its thinking and its policies in the middle years of Victoria’s reign.3 Ellicott was a son of the parsonage, as was his father before him.4 He was born at Whitwell in Rutland on 25 April 1819 of an English father and Welsh mother. Whitwell was, and remains, a very small community, some four miles from Oakham,5 so the formative influences upon him were those of a deeply rural and traditional society. Initially he seemed destined to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, for after a brief spell as a Platt Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge,6 he married and settled as the incumbent of Pilton, only a few miles south of Whitwell and his family home.7 Pilton was even more sparsely populated than Whitwell; there were only 45 inhabitants of the parish8 and Ellicott was thus able to devote the greater part of his time to scholarship, and to biblical exegesis in particular.9 He was not, however, a neglectful pastor, and his ten years’ experience at Pilton are reflected in two thoughtful later works, The Church and the Rural Poor and The Spiritual Needs in Country Parishes.10 His Rutland years also nourished his interest in the natural order; he was to remain a keen naturalist throughout his life.11 The focus of this chapter is not on Ellicott’s contribution to biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century, immense though that was. It was, nonetheless, that scholarship, cautious and conservative, which brought him after 1858 a series of rapid promotions, and, ultimately, at the age of only 44, to the united sees of Gloucester and Bristol.12 The decades of the 1850s and 1860s were unsettled ones in the world of biblical scholarship13 and Ellicott was profoundly disturbed by and hostile towards trends which he felt undermined the authority of Scripture.14 He

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was never to deviate from what he believed to be ‘the supremacy of the blessed Word of God, and the utter irrelevancy of all teaching as bearing upon eternal salvation, except that which may be concluded and proved by the Scripture’, and he judged many biblical scholars as ‘dealing deceitfully even with the Word of God itself’.15 As late as 1891 he was to publish Christus Comprobator: The Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament,16 in which he was highly critical of what he called ‘the English exponents of the Analytical view of the Old Testament’,17 and warned that ‘If the supernatural is to be minimised in the Old Testament, will it be long before the same demand will be made in reference to the New?’ ‘For the same spirit’, he continued, ‘that has found irreconcilable difficulties in the supernatural element of the Old Testament will ultimately challenge the evidence on which the Incarnation rests’.18 In this, at least, he was prescient. He was content to remain loyal to Jesus’ own endorsement of the authorship of the books of the Hebrew bible; that was, as Scotland put it,19 ‘sufficient guarantee of their veracity’. To depart from that position would lead to the temptation ‘to believe in a possible ignorance on the part of our Lord … and [thus] the way is paved for a belief in the possibility, not only of His ignorance, but even of His fallibility – and so, by dreadful inference, in the possibility of our hope in Him, here and hereafter, being found vain and illusory’. He agreed – as was not often the case – with Canon H.P. Liddon who had challenged ‘With whom have we to do, here and hereafter, a fallible or the infallible Christ?’20 Any scholarly support, for Ellicott, for arguments which undermined faith in ‘the infallible Christ’ would lead inexorably to agnosticism and atheism.21 Against this the Christian Church, and the Established Church of England in particular, which was his primary concern, had to take an unequivocal stand. Ellicott honestly believed – and he was far from alone in so doing – that the Established Church was in danger of being undermined by such arguments against the infallibility of Christ. There was, he perceived, infidelity to its core teachings, discipline and doctrine, and growing scepticism towards them from within and without. The result, if those attacks succeeded, would have what was for him a disastrous consequence; the severing of the Church from the state, leading to the triumph of atheism – or at the very least indifference – over the former, and the growth of materialism in the latter. The two were in fact intimately linked. Materialism, as he told the Lambeth Fathers in 1878, he believed to be ‘distinctly atheistic’. Both agnosticism and materialism were manifestations of a ‘wretched know-nothing creed’ which was eating away the very life of the soul – that is, the soul of the nation, as well as that of any individual who embraced it.22 In this he was at one with James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester from 1870–84, who told the same session of the Lambeth Conference that the real danger was not so much the ‘scientific unbelief’ which could be ascribed to ‘Darwinism’, but the ‘unscientific unbelief, that is, of those little educated. Unbelief has penetrated very deeply indeed into the stratum of our working men, in our mines, in our manufactories, in our dockyards, and elsewhere. Unbelief almost reigns in those places’. He warned that ‘it is impossible to meet the difficulties of these men simply by argument; their belief is often shaken more by feelings of indifference than by anything like scientific argument’.23

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For Ellicott, the answer to infidelity of this kind was fidelity; fidelity to ‘plain, dogmatic truth, as resting on scripture’24 and to the English Reformation and the doctrines espoused by the sixteenth-century reformers.25 ‘Never let us shrink from speaking of our Church as protestant’, he told a congregation in Bristol Cathedral in 1866; ‘Catholic it is in its faith and principles – Protestant in its attitude to false teaching and doctrinal error’.26 What was needed was the strong, steady, dedicated witness of loyal Church-people. So in the same sermon he deplored the fact that so many churches were closed from Sunday to Sunday, with the consequent neglect of daily service ‘bidden, plainly bidden, yet deliberately omitted when no fair or reasonable man could say there was a reasonable cause for their omission’. He especially deplored the ‘joyless’ observance of saints’ days. He regretted the fact that in many churches the Holy Communion was celebrated infrequently, even when it ‘is plainly otherwise ordered’, and castigated those – among whom he numbered many of his hearers – who were themselves infrequent communicants. There were too many ‘poor and sparse companies of communicants (a few minutes hence will, I fear, bear witness to these last words)’.27 With such lacklustre and lukewarm a witness on the part of Church-people, it was not surprising that agnosticism, indifference and materialism should be making inroads to society at large. The national Church needed to know what it was and what it believed, and the best safeguards of its fidelity were the Establishment and the Royal Supremacy. As Scotland has pointed out, ‘Ellicott was happy with the supremacy of the Crown over the National Church because he saw it as “the foundation of our national independence and true Christian liberty”’.28 Ellicott devoted a whole chapter of his Some Present Dangers of the Church of England, based upon an address to his clergy and churchwardens given during his Visitation in Bristol Cathedral in 1877, to a robust defence of the royal supremacy,29 in which he emphasised ‘not only the duty, but the blessedness, of rightly co-ordinating the two great and inseparably united principles of a loyal Christian life – the rendering unto Caesar of the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God of the things that are God’s’.30 To attack or undermine the royal supremacy over the English church was to indulge in what he called ‘lawlessness’. In the opening chapter of Some Present Dangers of the Church of England, Ellicott identified ‘the three great evils in the Church at the present time’ as ‘lawlessness, caballing and sacerdotalism’.31 All of these, he said, emerged ‘from the vanity and self-assertion’ of individuals, and, if they were no more than that, would be mere irritants in the life of the Church. The Church, and the ordained ministry in particular, has always had its mavericks. However, he perceived that ‘there may be in the Church as a whole dangerously confederated action, and sinister combinations seriously imperilling the very existence of the present relations of the Church and the State …’32 It was this fear, which arguably never left him, that fired his hostility towards ritualism. For this, perhaps, he remains best known.33 It was not primarily a matter of disputes over ceremonial or the ordering of church buildings, furniture and fittings. It was more fundamental than that. If the ‘science’ of contemporary biblical criticism was a threat to the credibility of the Christian

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faith and to the core doctrines proclaimed by the Church, then the ‘science’ of lawlessness exemplified especially by ritualist clergy within the Church equally threatened to undermine it. What is little known is what might be called Ellicott’s ‘behind-the-scenes political manoeuvring’ to maintain the relationship between the Church and the state in which he engaged in particular during the first decades of his long episcopate. The stability and the good name of the Church of England, and, through the Establishment, the ability of its leaders to walk the corridors of power, were matters of prime concern to him. That is why his actions, for example, in regard to ritualism, to the appointment of Frederick Temple to the see of Exeter in 1869, and to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland on 1 January 1871, as well as his contributions to the second Lambeth Conference in 1878 are of particular interest. The Temple affair, Irish disestablishment and the 1878 conference will be dealt with in their turn. There is some evidence, albeit slight, that Ellicott himself had a liking for ‘a good, if not a high, ritual’ in the performance of Divine Service.34 Scotland has pointed out that in 1873 he showed some sympathy and understanding of the ritualist position as: a reaction to the growing uncertainty over key Christian doctrines. He took the view that in a climate in which all things were ‘shifting and opinionable’ many were finding it necessary for the sake of their congregations to ‘make the truth more objective, and revert to practices and ritual that may seem to form the best standing protest to the doubts and scepticism of the times’.35

However, his views hardened, and under no circumstances would he have been prepared to indulge his personal predilections in this respect. His father had graduated in law, and Ellicott had grown up with a deep respect for legality and an equally deep distrust of anything which flouted it, or could be construed as untrammelled individualism.36 The lawlessness, caballing and sacerdotalism with which Some Present Dangers was principally concerned in 1878 were those associated with ritualism. Caballing he defined as ‘the spirit of party’, and sacerdotalism as ‘that undue exaltation of an office and its privileges’.37 Lawlessness was ‘the increasing tendency of individuals, in the matter of rites and ceremonies, to become a law to themselves, and to adopt, on their own responsibility, whatever they might themselves judge to be primitive and catholic’.38 What in this respect was increasingly disturbing was that ‘lawlessness … has almost acquired the dignity of a science’. It was claiming to be one of two things, ‘either the legitimate setting forth of the traditional observances of the Church of England which have never been expressly forbidden’ or had, over the centuries, fallen into disuse; Ellicott, clearly, could live with that, albeit not entirely comfortably. ‘Or, on the other hand, still more boldly, it claims to be a manifestation of rightful protest against the decisions of an unlawful court and judge-made law’.39 That he would neither accept nor tolerate.

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To refuse obedience to the laws of this Church and realm, to set aside rightful authority except where it may be accordant with our own predilections, to deny that the Churchman is morally or spiritually bound by the decisions of equitable and lawfully constituted Courts, and to yield allegiance only to that which … we ourselves hold to be sacred – this verily is to join the cause of Disestablishment, and to aid powerfully and effectually, the designs of those to whom the very name of a Church is an offence and a stumbling-block. If obedience be not rendered to our Courts, but only to that which we ourselves or the clique to which we may belong may assert to be binding and obligatory – then verily the end will have come. The holy bonds which unite the Church and the State, now sorely strained, will at length be broken, and ecclesiastical lawlessness will have wrought out that which sectarian opposition and political dissent never could have effected if left unaided, and for which the open foe would have laboured hopelessly and in vain.40

The ritualists, not so much by their ritualism as by their combination into societies and sodalities, by what might be called ‘corporate lawlessness’, were helping to push open the doors to disestablishment and to atheism.41 The ‘corporate lawlessness’ of the ritualists would also push open the doors to Rome. It is, perhaps, difficult in the twenty-first century to appreciate how strongly many felt that ritualism in its widest sense – which included, for example, the revival of the Religious Life for women in the Established Church – was perceived as a betrayal of the Church’s essentially Protestant character. Writing in 1850 to the ritualist vicar of St Thomas, Oxford, Thomas Chamberlain, about the proposed Rule of Life for a female community that Chamberlain was establishing in his parish, Ellicott’s later friend and correspondent, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, warned against the use of ‘Romanist’ language. Such language, Wilberforce explained, ran the risk of betraying the postulants ‘into infidelity to their mother Church, and to perversion to the Papal (in this land) schismatical and corrupt communion’.42 In the eyes of such staunch defenders of the national Church as Wilberforce and Ellicott, the Church of England was not in schism from Rome, it was the other way about. If ritualism led to Romanism, then it was indeed infidelity to the mother Church.43 Groups towards which Ellicott was particularly hostile were the English Church Union and the Society of the Holy Cross, both of which he suspected of Romanising.44 In a letter to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1870 Ellicott referred to the former as ‘an arrogant and offensive church society’ and exclaimed, ‘Come what may, I shall oppose that crew at all costs’.45 The Society of the Holy Cross, a confraternity of priests established in 1855, circulated for the use of selected members of the clergy a manual entitled The Priest in Absolution. A Manual for Such as are Called into the Higher Ministries of the English Church.46 Ellicott, who opposed auricular confession except in extremis,47 called for action against anyone associated with what he described as ‘this abominable volume’.48 In a letter to Archbishop Tait in May 1879 he requested the Primate to ‘take some very decided step and direct us your suffragans to pause before admitting to officiate in our dioceses any of those’

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and added that ‘The matter cannot be let to drop’.49 The matter had, in fact, been rumbling on for some time. Both Ellicott and Tait had spoken in the House of Lords in June 1877 when the Earl of Redesdale had drawn attention to the manual, and roundly condemned it. Ellicott informed the House that he had refused institution to a priest until he had withdrawn from the Society and repudiated the book.50 He was still urging such action upon the Primate two years later. He would have been well aware of the meeting which had been held by the Society of the Holy Cross in July of 1877, and which had censured the bench of bishops for allowing the subject of confession to be brought before the Lords ‘without previous consultation with their clergy’, and when a Mr J.A. Heaton had argued that the first remedy was to take from the Bishops the privilege of sitting in the House of Lords, because that would teach them they were not first of all peers, and then ministers of God, but that their political power as ministers of God came from their being such and their proper exercise of it. It would remove from them the great temptation to throw themselves into the life of those around them, and thus become political representatives of the Established Church of England in the House of Lords.51

This was just the kind of argument, from one of the ‘cabals’, that concerned Ellicott; Heaton’s call had come perilously close to being one for disestablishment.52 This was something Ellicott could not accept. It was one reason why he was deeply suspicious of Gladstone, who he felt was too sympathetic towards the ritualists. Writing to Disraeli in September 1873 he said, ‘This unfortunate man in power is deprotestantizing us, and so, in the surest way, disestablishing. The balance must be greatly redressed if we are to go on. And it is the popular side to take. The Protestantism of the ordinary Englishman is inexpugnable’.53 For this reason, if for no other, he was prepared to make some concessions towards Dissenters. Three years earlier, writing to Archbishop Tait, he had advocated a modest opening of the pulpits of the Church of England to those not episcopally ordained, and the removal of what he called the ‘present penalty’ attached to a cleric of the Established Church who preached in a dissenting chapel. ‘We should go far to conciliate, and, I humbly think, break no principles. Our Sacraments and our Orders would be fully guarded’.54 He added that, ‘This coming year we shall be wise to “Nationalize” our Church. This will postpone, indefinitely, all disestablishment schemes, but it will involve concessions on the part of some of us old fashioned High Churchmen’.55 Such a move would not just help to safeguard the Protestant Establishment; it would also act as a bulwark against the ritualists. He felt ‘very certain that one would be better off with Venn and Stanley in an establishment, than with Pusey and Liddon in a sect’. It was now time, he continued, for ‘reasonable concessions [to] be made to Low, Broad and especially in those parts where Low and Broad are agreed’.56 When the chips were down, for the ‘old fashioned High Churchman’, it was better to have a Protestant Established Church of England that leant towards evangelicals, even liberals (of the stamp of

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Dean Stanley of Westminster) and Dissenters, than the triumph of the ritualists which would leave that Church little more than a disestablished sect, vulnerable in the face of a re-invigorated Roman Catholic Church in England. In 1868 the Liberal W.E. Gladstone became prime minister, and the following year, in an endeavour, Chadwick suggests,57 to bring more theological balance to the episcopal bench, he nominated Frederick Temple to the see of Exeter. Temple had been, in 1860, a contributor to the volume Essays and Reviews, a work which had proved immediately controversial – as Scotland put it, ‘Reaction to the Essays was widespread and for the most part unequivocally critical and condemnatory’.58 It was, nonetheless, a ‘best-seller’, reaching a seventh edition within a year of publication. Working independently, according to the editor, H.B. Wilson, and ‘responsible for their respective articles only’, the seven contributors, all members of the Established Church and in all but one case (C.W. Goodwin) ordained clergymen, set themselves ‘to illustrate the advantage derivable to the cause of religious and moral truth, from a free handling, in a becoming spirit, of subjects peculiarly liable to suffer by the repetition of conventional language, and from traditional methods of treatment’.59 Such a declaration invited confrontation with exponents of ‘traditional methods of treatment’ in respect of biblical scholarship such as Ellicott. It was too closely in tune with the German biblical criticism to which he was so resolutely opposed. It is often overlooked that the contributors to Essays were not young, academic hot-heads anxious to make a reputation for themselves, but rather were without exception mature scholars at the very heart of the establishment. One (Benjamin Jowett) held a Regius Chair at Oxford, and another (Mark Pattison) was a Head of House. A third, Frederick Temple, was not only Headmaster of a respected public school, Rugby, but also a chaplain-in-ordinary to the sovereign, and a fourth (Rowland Williams, who was to become the most notorious) was Vice-Principal of St David’s College, Lampeter. In essence, as Chadwick has pointed out,60 ‘The doctrinal authority of the church was in question. Was it not the Catholic faith, held everywhere and always and by every Christian, that the Scripture was inspired in all its parts?’ Yet in their several ways, the authors of Essays were calling this into question. Temple, for example, seemed to challenge the received orthodoxy. ‘If geology proves to us that we must not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally’, he wrote, ‘if historical investigations shall show us that inspiration … was not empowered to protect the narrative of the inspired writers from occasional inaccuracy; if careful criticism shall prove that there have been occasionally interpolations and forgeries in that Book, as in many others; the results should still be welcome’.61 At a stroke, Temple assailed the accepted biblical chronology and claims to textual inerrancy. Indeed, his concluding sentence seemed to imply that to think in any other way than that now being opened up was childish. ‘For we are now men, governed by principles, if governed at all, and cannot rely any longer on impulses of youth or the discipline of childhood’.62 This peroration is nothing less than a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13: 11.63 Temple was calling on his (anticipated) opponents and critics to grow up. Cumulatively, the contributions to

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Essays struck a body-blow at the received orthodoxy. And now, only nine years after the Essays had seen the light of day, one of the contributors, whose paper had been placed first in the volume, was to be elevated to the episcopal bench. Ellicott’s had been one of the first, and one of the most weighty, of the responses to Essays. In 1861 he had contributed what is generally recognised as one of the more able and convincing responses, a 100-page essay, ‘Scripture and its Interpretation’, in the volume Aids to Faith, edited by his predecessor at Gloucester, William Thomson.64 Ellicott was horrified by Temple’s nomination. On 17 December 1869 he wrote to Gladstone, notifying him that he did not consent to Temple’s consecration, and that he ‘fully shared’ the opinion of the bishop of St David’s (Connop Thirlwall) that Temple’s contribution to Essays and Reviews was ‘really quite as dangerous as any of the others’. He had told the bishop of London (Jackson) that he would not consent to the consecration unless Temple ‘publicly and expressly disowned the teaching of Essays and Reviews wherever it was at variance with the doctrine of the Church of England’. Interestingly, his fundamental objection as expressed in this letter was not to Temple’s assault on received biblical orthodoxy, but to his ‘significant silence’ on, for example, ‘fully accepting the Nicaean doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son’. Ellicott was close to accusing Temple of heresy.65 To Disraeli, ten days later, he confided, ‘This Temple business has done Gladstone a world of harm’, but he counselled caution in the way in which opposition to the appointment was handled. ‘Dexterity is required to keep up the rally on the one hand, but on the other cautiously to avoid making Dr Temple a martyr’. He told Disraeli that the opposition voiced in the Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation (the bishops) ‘will assume a sober and general form, for example, that where three bishops of the province should in writing object, consecration should not proceed till the case had been considered by the bishops of the province’. He added, revealingly, ‘Of course this would be carefully wrapped up in language respectful to the State …’66 This is an important insight into the way Ellicott and, no doubt, other bishops were thinking. They were disturbed by Temple’s nomination, and willing to make their opposition to it known. They would be pleased if pressure was brought to bear on Temple to dissociate himself from the views expressed in Essays and Reviews; Convocation had (not entirely wholeheartedly) condemned them in 1864, and 10,000 clergymen (somewhat under half) of the Church of England and Ireland had signed a declaration upholding the inspiration and divine authority of the bible. That condemnation and declaration still stood. However – and this is the implication of Ellicott’s letter to Disraeli – the opposition in 1869 to Temple’s elevation had its limits. It was not, as Chadwick suggests,67 that ‘churchmen trusted the prime minister’; many, like Ellicott, certainly did not. But Gladstone as prime minister of the sovereign represented the power of the state, and to carry through opposition to the nomination to its logical conclusion would set the Established Church on a collision course with the state. Ultimately, the Church and the bishops would submit. Arguably heterodox bishops like Benjamin Hoadly and Richard Watson had been

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nominated and consecrated in the eighteenth century.68 Ellicott could not answer for Convocation’s Lower House, the clergy (‘I never can answer for that wild Lower House’ he told Disraeli),69 but after due – and deferential – protest, Temple would be consecrated, despite not abjuring his published views. In the event, Temple remained silent until after his consecration, which took place in Westminster Abbey, perhaps appropriately, on the feast of the doubting apostle Thomas on 21 December 1869. Four bishops – one was Ellicott – entered a protest. He lived to see Temple translated to London (1885) and, finally, in 1896 to the primatial see of Canterbury. To have carried opposition to its logical conclusion might have risked schism within the Church, but it ran the greater risk of precipitating disestablishment. The Church of England might find itself no longer an integral part of the English constitution, something Ellicott regarded as essential. That very year, 1869, Gladstone was carrying through the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland to which his government was pledged. There were those who would have happily turned the spotlight onto the Church of England as well. Temple was not to be the ‘martyr’ who brought that about. After Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the position of the Established Church of Ireland, ministering as it did to a minority of the population, became increasingly insecure. By the mid-1860s, the prospect of disestablishment was becoming more and more likely. Writing to his friend Samuel Wilberforce in April 1865, in the last months of the Palmerston ministry which had nominated him for the see of Gloucester, Ellicott pointed the finger at Gladstone: What a pity Gladstone will kick over the traces. All the moderate Church party in the country are much disturbed. Of course you and I and shrewd people know well enough that the Irish Church is in a very unsatisfactory position – but Gladstone should not say so. These things weaken the growing confidence moderate churchmen are evidently feeling in him. If we have the amount of life actuaries would assign we shall have – I feel certain – to deal with this unhappy church, but not yet. Still, the cup is plainly filling, and there is not, as far as I can see, a single head on their Bench that is in any degree equal to the emergency. It is by far the hardest problem of our times.70

At that time, Gladstone was serving for a second term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and was not to take office as Prime Minister for another three years. Although Gladstone was the only Liberal minister other than Shaftesbury obviously interested in ecclesiastical matters, Ellicott was already wary of him. Superficially, their personal relations were cordial,71 but it is clear from this letter that Ellicott foresaw what was coming, and his inclination was to oppose any such initiative. During the ensuing three years, he had second thoughts, as a revealing letter to Disraeli in April 1869 makes clear. With Gladstone’s massive majority after the 1868 election, Ellicott recognised that there was little chance of influencing the vote in the House of Commons. (He referred to the ‘tyranny of the majority’ there.) His instinct was to oppose the second reading of the Irish disestablishment

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bill in the Lords, but he made clear the real reason for the opposition of the Bench of Bishops: ‘The thing that stirs us ecclesiastics of blue blood,72 – is – not so much the disestablishment of this doubtfully efficient Church as the diversion of religious money from religious purposes’.73 In other words, disendowment and the possible if not probable secularisation of much of the wealth of the Church of Ireland was the real sticking point. He sought Disraeli’s advice and guidance in a private meeting, and also undertook to discuss the outcome with members of the Bench. ‘I have some influence with my brethren or else I would not trouble you’. A further letter, dated 6 May, reveals the outcome. The tactic proposed was very similar to that which was to be followed six months later in the Temple affair; the bishops would adopt an attitude of ‘maximum hostility’ as defined by ‘experienced leaders and tacticians’ – among whom he no doubt numbered himself – in the hope of amending the bill, but in the end they would not oppose a second reading. His fear was, however, that ‘the high Conservative peers’ might force a division, and thus oblige the bishops to do something some at least wished to avoid doing, namely, vote.74 However, by 2 June, when the bishops ‘on the active list’ met again, attitudes had hardened. Ellicott told Disraeli that three would not vote; two ‘good speakers will vote against but speak in favour of not dividing the House’; the remainder (18 or 19) would both speak and vote against. He warned, rather curiously, ‘I may vote for’.75 In fact, when the vote was taken on the 19th June, four – the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the bishops of Oxford and Chester – abstained, and the unpredictable bishop of St David’s, Connop Thirlwall, voted in favour.76 It is necessary to turn to Ellicott’s correspondence with Gladstone to obtain a more detailed picture of his thinking. In a letter of 29 January – nearly six months before his letters to Disraeli – he had told the Prime Minister: ‘I agree with you that the verdict is “disestablishment”’ but I do not wish the English Bishops (now in a very critical position) to commit themselves to any ‘collegiate’ opposition to disestablishment (a) because it would be fruitless (b) because it would provoke great bitterness against us, hurry on that which is in the distance – removal of the Bishops from the House of Lords as ‘obstructives’ – and precipitate by the aroused passions of both sides that which I dread and should oppose to the last – our (English Church) disestablishment (it is, as yet, far off) (c) because I am honestly of opinion that not only is the position of the Church of England different from that of the Church of Ireland but – check; we are (I see it in a hundred things) through strife and trial, going ahead; they are going (except in a few localities) – a tail.77

Two months later, he returned to the question. Gladstone had sent him an ‘advance copy’ of his proposed bill, which Ellicott described as ‘your momentous measure’. In his response, he wrote, ‘Now that the measure is before us my humble mind then, is, as follows: 1. That in all its leading features it will become law this session. There is a thoroughness and finality about it that scarcely leaves doubt that it will

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receive a second reading in both Houses this year.78 I hope so – for this plain reason, – that as the unfortunate Church is to be wound up, yours are, after all, the hands that will most kindly do it’. He believed that ‘several Bishops of reputation will probably not offer opposition to a second reading. And this attitude will be of great importance to you for it is very clear to me that if the wiser Bishops thus accept a national verdict their moderation will have a vast effect on the House of Lords. I was the first English Bishop to announce publicly something like a willingness to accept the judgement of the nation, and I have not only not suffered by my words, but have even influenced others. It would seem probable that this feeling of moderation will increase, now that the measure is known’. He did, however, warn that the proposals relating to disendowment were unacceptable in their present form, and that opposition to the bill would focus on these.79 Somewhat unusually, a copy of Gladstone’s reply, dated 18 May, is incorporated into the correspondence file. It was something of a sharp rejoinder. He confessed himself puzzled by the grounds on which Ellicott and others opposed the disendowment proposals, and warned that the consequence of a rejection of the bill at second reading ‘must be very injurious and it may be that the injury will not be confined to the Irish Church’.80 Ellicott replied immediately. Gladstone’s words seem to contain a thinly veiled threat; opposition by the bishops to his proposals ran the risk of precipitating what they feared, a measure to disestablish and disendow the English Church. However, Ellicott was not a man to be bullied. He pointed out to Gladstone that, ‘I have honestly laboured in all our Councils to prevent, so far as sober words could do it, any design on the part of any of the Irish Prelates to divide the House, and any Collegiate vote’. This was fully in accord with what he had told Gladstone in January, and the tactic that he had outlined to Disraeli earlier in May. He went on to tell Gladstone: ‘More, I have done all I could to induce all with whom I have any influence to avoid a division, unless it were positively forced on us by some leader in the Opposition of high character – in which case each man must, in that great pinch, follow his own calm conscience’. His labour seems to have been in vain, for ‘I now sadly fear (if all I hear be true) that a leading man will divide, and I must slowly and sadly prepare to act accordingly’. Ellicott the politician would have to give way to Ellicott the bishop. ‘I know acutely all the dangers both to my order and to the House of which I am a member – yet, I cannot stand aside; Bishops are not in the House to be Cyphers in a Church question. I cannot vote for81 – for with my poor Spelmanesque views82 it would be impossible. I should dread the curse of a crossed ministry for life for having swerved from defending convictions for tactical and political considerations’.83 The truth was that the English bench was really in favour of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; they regarded its position as indefensible. However, they did not want to be seen as condoning its dismemberment from the Church of England, and they viewed the potential alienation of its endowments for non-church purposes with alarm, but they hoped against hope that no vote on the second reading of the bill would be forced in the Lords, which would mean

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that they would have to openly declare their hand. An episcopal vote in favour of the bill would be interpreted as actively conniving at disestablishment and disendowment, and result in the opprobrium of many Churchmen. A vote against would be construed as obstructionism, and might well lead to more definite and vociferous calls for English disestablishment. Thus Ellicott advocated – and had worked behind the scenes for – a form of passive obedience. At the end of the Second Reading debate on 19 June, what Ellicott had feared came to pass, and the House divided. Sixteen bishops, including the Irish archbishops, voted against the Bill, as they felt obliged to do, but to no avail, and the Bill was carried by a larger-than-anticipated majority of 33. At the ensuing committee stage, as Ellicott had warned Gladstone, efforts were made to amend the disendowment provisions, and, as Bell points out, the proposed changes were drastic. On its return to the Commons, almost all of the original provisions were restored, and the scene was set for a head-on collision between the two Houses, which was only averted by informal negotiations behind the scenes, in which Archbishop Tait played an important role in helping to thrash out a compromise. In its final form, the Bill passed the Lords on 22 July and the Commons on the 23 July, becoming law on 26 July.84 A constitutional crisis had been averted, Gladstone was satisfied, the immediate threat of disestablishment and its consequences for the Church of England had been averted, and the bench of bishops, as Ellicott had predicted, had gone to the brink but no further. It was, they concluded, better to sacrifice the Church of Ireland than the Church of England. The first Lambeth Conference had been held under the presidency of Archbishop Longley in 1867, with Ellicott as secretary, an office he was also to discharge at the second and third Conferences, in 1878 and 1888.85 At the 1867 conference, Ellicott used a phrase that has since become very familiar; ‘our Anglican communion’, and he may well have been one of the first to have done so.86 However, in respect of this chapter, it is the 1878 conference which has the greater interest, especially – and for a reason which will become clearer later – very little seems to have been written about it. Chadwick passes over it in silence, and that is also virtually the case in respect of Randall Davidson and William Benham’s massive, two-volume biography of Archbishop Tait, who presided over it.87 It was at this conference that Ellicott initiated the debate, of which some mention has already been made, on ‘the nature of prevailing unbelief, and the best practical remedies’, and called upon the assembled bishops to form a committee to draw up a report.88 Reference has been made to his speech proposing the motion, and that of the bishop of Manchester, who seconded it. Fraser of Manchester posed the question, ‘What is there that is wrong with us, and in our system, which has led to the alienation of those (to whom particularly belong the Gospel of Christ) from the truth, and from the faith of Christ?’ That was at the heart of the inquiry that the bishops were to make.89 The motion was carried, and a committee was formed consisting of the archbishops of York and Dublin, and the bishops of Glasgow, Winchester, Oxford, Truro, Carlisle, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Long Island and Bombay.90

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The committee reported back on 26 July; it had failed to produce a report, not, the bishop of Oxford as spokesman claimed, because the members had disagreed, but because they had had insufficient time, and in any case a group such as theirs was really not best suited to produce a ‘Report’.91 The response was ill-tempered, the bishop of Nebraska being particularly angry, and his brother of Ohio commenting that some statement was eagerly anticipated in the United States of America, and if it was not forthcoming ‘we shall go home hanging down our heads’.92 Fraser of Manchester made an attempt to rekindle the debate, largely laying the blame for the prevailing scepticism, indifference and unbelief at the doors of the Church and her ministers. He recalled the speech in the initial debate by the bishop of Lincoln (Christopher Wordsworth), who had said that the ‘unworthiness and the slatterniness [sic] and the incompetency of so many ministers – and I have no doubt he would include bishops – that the slatterniness with which we do our work, and the way in which we set before the world what Christianity is, are among the many causes that contribute to the spread of infidelity’. Fraser warned against taking refuge in mere intellectual sparring; ‘Infidelity as a moral phenomenon is a much more formidable thing than intellectual infidelity, and I do not believe any number of essays however elaborate will really reach it unless the religion of Christ can be presented to the world in a more attractive because in a more comforting and life-regenerating form than it is ordinarily preached’.93 Fraser’s intervention was unavailing. By a majority of 52 to 18, the ‘Lambeth Fathers’ accepted the bishop of Oxford’s reasoning, and merely ‘expressed a hope’ that ‘hereafter’ the subject would be dealt with by members of the episcopate ‘assisted by such divines and other learned persons as they may call to them’.94 It was about as vague and indecisive as it could be. The archbishop of York, rather strangely, as he, as chairman of the committee had presided over its inconclusive debates, called it ‘a very impotent conclusion’.95 The opportunity for a major Lambeth Conference review of Anglican religious instruction had been lost, and would not recur. Ellicott, who must have been disappointed at the outcome of his initiative (though, perhaps, not altogether surprised, given his suspicion of some of the committee members) nonetheless moved swiftly to limit the damage. The bishop of Lichfield claimed that when the Conference proceedings were published, ‘it will be said, How does it happen that a hundred bishops met and passed over the most important subject of the day?’96 Ellicott’s response, recognising the truth of this accusation, was succinct: ‘We will not publish them’.97 It was to be almost as if the debate and the debacle had never happened. Indeed that was how it was presented. Davidson and Benham, in their Life of Tait, made only a passing reference to the conference: ‘The debates … were not published’.98 Ellicott’s personal passionate concern that ‘infidelity’ should be confronted and challenged cannot be doubted, but he was not willing to countenance the impotence of the Anglican Communion’s leadership being made public. If that meant being ‘economical with the truth’, then so be it. He had, it has to be said, never had unrealistic expectations of his brother bishops. Eleven years before, during the events that led up to the establishing of the Ritual Commission, he had

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confided to Samuel Wilberforce: ‘We have sunk back into our normal position of irresolution and unableness at a crisis’.99 Certainly Ellicott knew the truth of that, even after only four years on the bench, and no doubt so too did Wilberforce. Others, including Disraeli and Gladstone, would have at least suspected it. The leadership of the Church of England might protest, as it did over ritualism (where it tried coercion and the force of law), over Essays and Reviews and Frederick Temple’s nomination to Exeter, over the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of Ireland, but it would not carry that protest through to a logical conclusion which might risk breaking the Church’s connection with the state. The threat of the disestablishment of the Church of England and fear of its consequences were what haunted Ellicott and the other bishops. In addition, when they were confronted, as they were in 1878, with what they themselves admitted was one of the great issues of the day, however it was dressed up in their own minds or hidden from public scrutiny, they suffered a collective loss of nerve. Owen Chadwick concluded his magisterial survey of the Victorian Church with these words: ‘The Victorians preserved a country which was powerfully influenced by Christian ideas and continued to accept the Christian ethic as the highest known to man’.100 That may well have been so, but Ellicott’s correspondence and his published works show clearly that by the 1860s and 1870s the cracks in the fabric were already appearing. He lived on into the twentieth century to see them continue to widen. Endnotes 1 I am grateful to Oxford Brookes University Centre for Methodism and Church History, and especially to the Centre’s Director, Professor William Gibson, for the award of a Visiting Research Fellowship during 2010, which enabled me to complete work on this paper. I am also grateful to Professor Gibson for discussions on several occasions of ideas explored here. 2 C.J. Ellicott to B. Disraeli 27 December 1869, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Dep. Hughenden, 126/3. I am grateful to the National Trust for permission to quote from these papers. 3 Writing to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1865, he made no bones about it: ‘I say frankly what I think’. C.J. Ellicott to Samuel Wilberforce, 26 March 1865, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Wilberforce, c.15. 4 His father, Charles Spencer Ellicott, was rector of Whitwell, Rutland, for 62 years, from 1818 until his death in 1880. He was also, from 1829, Vicar of Threckingham, near Sleaford in Lincolnshire. (The Heathcote family at Whitwell, later earls of Ancaster, were the patrons of both livings.) He had been ordained in 1817 as curate to his father, John Ellicott, at Lavendon, Bucks., and after priesting in 1818 succeeded him as rector of his other parish, Whitwell. John Ellicott died in 1832. Ellicott’s family background was, therefore, a combination of ‘high and dry’ churchmanship and pre-Palmerstonian Whiggism. His own adherence to what he called ‘the old-fashioned High Church party’ and to Disraelian Toryism might be seen as a natural evolution from this. (C.J. Ellicott to W.E.Gladstone, 8 March 1869, British Library, Add. Ms. 44419). 5 There are currently 19 houses in Whitwell.

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6 His father had been at Trinity Hall. Ellicott himself graduated with an MA from St John’s in 1844, having entered the college in 1837. He was elected to his fellowship in 1845. 7 Pilton was not a college living, but in private patronage, so local and/or familial interest can be suspected in Ellicott being chosen to fill the vacancy. 8 The community has not expanded since Ellicott’s time; there were 39 inhabitants according to the 2001 census. 9 His first published work, in 1851, was in mathematics, A Treatise on Analytical Statistics. 10 The former, a series of addresses, was published by SPCK in 1887. The latter was an address delivered in his diocese at Stow-on-the-Wold on the occasion of his 1873 Visitation (London, 1873). 11 He was also physically fit and energetic. At Cambridge he had rowed for his college. He was an avid walker, skater, mountaineer (he remained on the ‘active list’ of the Alpine Club until shortly before his death), and in his 80s took up cycling. Birchington Heritage Trust Newsletter (24 May 2008), p. 2. 12 His wariness ‘of the newly emerging science of biblical criticism and … a reverence for the traditional Catholic interpretation of scripture’ (Nigel Scotland, Ellicott, Charles John, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/32998?_fromAuth-1, accessed 13 July 2007) brought him in 1858 to the professorship of New Testament at King’s College, London – which he held from 1859 with the Hulsean professorship at Cambridge – in 1861 to the deanery of Exeter, and then, in March 1863 to consecration as bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. (The two sees had been united in 1836, and remained so until 1897, when Ellicott resigned from Bristol, retaining Gloucester until 1905.) 13 There is a useful summary in Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II, 2nd edn. (London, 1972), pp. 40–111. 14 The kind of critical biblical scholarship that emanated from Germany particularly disturbed him. The work of, for example, Johann Semler (1725–91) with its call for a free enquiry into the origins and authority of the canon of scripture, not only undermined ‘the supremacy of the blessed Word of God’ but also, as Ward points out, had the potential of calling into question the authority of a confessional establishment. W.R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Regime 1648–1789 (Cambridge, 1999) pp. 174–6. Gotthold Lessing’s publication of the work of Hermann Reimarus, undermining biblical revelation and miracles, had a similar, unsettling effect. (Ibid., pp. 176–9). 15 C.J. Ellicott, Some Present Dangers of the Church of England (London 1878), p. 142. The quotations are taken from a sermon printed in that volume entitled ‘Uncorrupt Doctrine’ preached at Chippenham on 15 January of that year. For Ellicott, ‘dealing deceitfully’ meant cloaking attacks on the veracity of the Christian revelation with calls for honest, scholarly enquiry. He had in mind Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 4: 2, where the Greek word for ‘deceitfully’ has overtones of guile. 16 C.J. Ellicott, Christus Comprobator: The Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament (London, 1891). The book, a series of addresses to his clergy, was primarily a response to Lux Mundi, the collection of essays by liberal Anglo-Catholic writers, edited by Charles Gore, which had been published in 1889. 17 Ellicott, Christus Comprobator, p. 29. 18 Ibid., pp. 30, 31. 19 Nigel Scotland, ‘Good and Proper Men’. Lord Palmerston and the Bench of Bishops (Cambridge, 2000), p. 123. 20 Quotations from Ellicott, Christus Comprobator, p. 212.

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21 Agnosticism he defined, in a speech to the assembled bishops at the Lambeth Conference of 1878, as ‘that perilous state of mind which doubts everything, even the very existence of the blessed God and Father of all – the First Cause’. (Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Conference Papers, LC7, fol. 292.) 22 Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Conference Papers, LC7, 1878, fols. 292, 293. 23 Ibid., fol. 299. A point made by Owen Chadwick is worth pondering here: ‘The working men never quite understood what the churches were doing in their midst. Despite an undercurrent of distrust for the institution, they often respected the individuals and were grateful. But they never quite knew what they were about. The representatives of the church were half-suspected of being agents of the Conservative party, or moral policeman in mufti, or enthusiasts odd in their intelligence and activity’. (Chadwick, Victorian Church, II, p. 266). 24 Quoted by Scotland, ‘Good and Proper Men’, p. 123. 25 C.J. Ellicott, Revision of the Rubrics. Being an Address delivered at the parish church of Cirencester on the Triennial Visitation 23rd October 1874 (London, 1874), pp. 11, 12. 26 C.J. Ellicott, Ritualism. A sermon preached in Bristol Cathedral on Sunday November 4th 1866 and Published by Request (Bristol and London, 1866), pp. 18–19. The concentration of historians on the Tractarians and the Evangelicals in the nineteenth century has tended to push a third group into the background. Ellicott would have numbered himself among those whom Peter Nockles has called ‘Protestant High Churchmen’, who were, perhaps, more influential than is generally recognised. (Peter Nockles, ‘The Changing Legacy and Reception of John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” in the “Long Eighteenth Century”: Varieties of Anglican, Protestant and Catholic Response, c.1760–c.1850’ in Robert D. Cornwall and William Gibson (eds), Religion, Politics and Dissent, 1660–1832. Essays in Honour of James E. Bradley (Farnham, 2010), pp. 219–47 at p. 246. 27 Ibid., p. 15. Such a catena of criticisms clearly establishes Ellicott’s ‘old-fashioned’ High Church credentials. He was, however, unable to persuade even the Dean and Chapter of his own cathedral at Bristol to provide a weekly celebration of the Holy Communion, which was, as Nigel Yates pointed out, in direct violation of the rubrics. Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1999), p. 196. 28 Scotland, ‘Good and Proper Men’, p. 195, quoting Ellicott, Some Present Dangers, p. 95. 29 Ellicott, Some Present Dangers, pp. 59–81. 30 Ibid., p. 77. 31 Ibid., p. 16. 32 Ibid., p. 17. As Peter Cobb pointed out, Ellicott, though he tried to be fair, ‘believed that there was an Anglo-Catholic plot to subvert the Church of England’. Peter G. Cobb, The Oxford Movement in Nineteenth Century Bristol (Bristol, 1988), pp. 21–2. 33 Ellicott’s position on ritualism has not been, hitherto, explored in any detail. For example, Dominic Janes, Victorian Reformation. The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England 1840–1860 (Oxford, 2009) covers the period before his consecration to the episcopate, when those views were developed and publicly enunciated. 34 Reported conversation between Ellicott and Canon Robert Miles, the founder of St Raphael’s, Bristol, January 1878. A.H. Ward, St Raphael’s, Bristol. The Church closed by a Bishop. Statement and Correspondence (London, n.d.), p. 78. See also Ellicott’s correspondence with F.G. Lee in February 1866, in which he agreed with Lee’s interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric, but warned, ‘Of course many things may be legal that may not be at the present time advantageous’. Quoted in Yates, Anglican Ritualism, pp. 123–4.

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35 Scotland, ‘Good and Proper Men’, p. 148, quoting C. J. Ellicott, Church Work Past and Present (London, 1873), p. 18. 36 In this respect he can be seen to be walking in the footsteps of ‘Dr Codex’, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1723–48. 37 Ellicott, Some Present Dangers, p. 18. 38 Ibid., p. 19. 39 Ibid., p. 20. 40 Ibid., p. 96. 41 In his dealings with ritualist clergy, Ellicott was not generally proactive. ‘I always deal with every case wherever any number of parishioners complain. Where there is no complaint, I don’t interpose’, he said on one occasion. Quoted by Scotland, ‘Good and Proper Men’. The ‘number of parishioners’, however, could be one individual, and, as in the cases of St Raphael’s, Bristol, and Holy Nativity, Knowle, if he did ‘interpose’ he could be ruthless. 42 Quoted in John Whitehead, The Church of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford (Oxford, 2003), p. 53. 43 Ellicott was on good terms with individual Roman Catholics. He had, for example, discussed the questions of atheism, indifference and materialism with Cardinal Manning on several occasions (Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Conference Papers LC7, 1878, fol. 294) and when assembling the team of scholars to undertake the revision of the Authorized Version of the Bible invited John Henry Newman to participate in the work; he declined. (Ellicott to Samuel Wilberforce, 31 May 1870, Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Wilberforce, c.17.) 44 For the activities of the former during this period see G.B. Roberts, The History of the English Church Union 1859–1894 (London, 1895). 45 C.J. Ellicott to Samuel Wilberforce, 25 January 1870, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Wilberforce, c.17. 46 It was the work of the Rev. John C. Chambers. Part 1, primarily a volume of moral theology and casuistry, was openly published in 1866 by Joseph Masters and sold for 2/6d a copy. Part 2, completed in 1870, Chambers intended only for private circulation and restricted the sale to priests who were active as confessors. J. Embry, The Catholic Movement and the Society of the Holy Cross (London, 1931), pp. 107–8. 47 He would probably have sided with Bishops Phillpotts of Exeter and Hamilton of Salisbury, who had spoken out in vindication of sacramental confession in the Church of England, though, unlike them, he did not speak out as unreservedly. 48 Certainly Lord Redesdale was strongly of the opinion that some sections of the volume went beyond the bounds of propriety. He highlighted parts of the text where clergy were urged ‘not to be too reserved in questions’ directed at their penitents. For example, ‘Wives should be asked if they have not caused their husbands to blaspheme by not rendering due benevolence’ – the context clearly indicates that refusal or reluctance to participate in sexual intercourse is what is meant here – and children asked ‘with whom they sleep; if they have played with their bedfellow; touched each other designedly or unbecomingly’. (http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1877/ jun/14/the-confessio … Accessed 29 January 2010.) Redesdale’s quotations were highly selective, coming primarily from three or four pages – out of 322 in Part II – but nonetheless the content of those pages, and the knowledge that clergy might be asking such questions, was enough to outrage influential strata in society. It was a ‘gift’ to the anti-ritualists.

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49 Ellicott to Tait, 18 May 1879, Lambeth Palace Library, MS Tait 233, fols. 254–5. Tait had had uncomfortable experience of a dispute over private auricular confession. As bishop of London in 1858 he had withdrawn the licence of a curate of St Barnabas’, Pimlico, for causing ‘scandal and injury’ to the church by refusing poor relief to a prostitute until she had made her confession. Scotland, ‘Good and Proper Men’, pp. 155–6. The curate in question, Alfred Poole, had been one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Society of the Holy Cross in 1855, and was thus one of those directly responsible for the circulation after 1874, though not the compilation, of the manual. 50 http:/hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1877/jun/14/the-confession … HLDeb 14 June 1877, vol. 234, cols. 1741–53. Accessed 29 January 2010. The Society of the Holy Cross could not escape implication. Chambers, the compiler of the manual, had been a member and had served a term as Master. On his death in 1874, when his executors had threatened to publicly sell the remaining stock of Part II, it had been bought in by the Society, so that Chambers’ policy of restricted distribution could be continued. Therefore, by 1877, almost by default, it had become responsible for the work, and it was highly naive to ignore the risk that, sooner or later, copies would fall into the ‘wrong’ hands. When in 1877 the furore over the book erupted, the Society’s defence was, in reality, weak and unconvincing. The dispute is discussed in Embry, Catholic Movement, pp. 106–27, and, more recently, by Kenneth Macnab in William Davage (ed.), In this Sign Conquer. A History of the Society of the Holy Cross 1855–2005 (London, 2006), pp. 90–91, 98–99. 51 London Daily News (26 July 1877). 52 Ellicott would also have been aware of the fact that the Rev. A.H. Mackonochie, who had served as Master of the Society of the Holy Cross, openly advocated disestablishment. 53 C.J. Ellicott to B. Disraeli, 26 September 1873, Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Dep. Hughenden, 126/3. 54 Ellicott was far from advocating intercommunion or mutual recognition of ministries. 55 C.J. Ellicott to A.C. Tait, 26 September 1870, Lambeth Palace Library, MS Tait 88, fol. 155. 56 Ibid. 57 Chadwick, Victorian Church, II, p. 86. 58 Scotland, ‘Good and Proper Men’, p. 80. 59 H.B. Wilson (ed.), Essays and Reviews, 7th edn. (London, 1861), Preface ‘To the Reader’, unpaginated. 60 Chadwick, Victorian Church, II, p. 79. Chadwick’s summary of the book, and the controversy it evoked, is a useful introduction to the subject (pp. 75–97). 61 Frederick Temple, ‘The Education of the World’, in Essays and Reviews, p. 47. 62 Ibid., p. 49. 63 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things. 64 It was this essay which brought him to the notice of Lord Shaftesbury, and contributed to Shaftesbury suggesting his name to the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, as a suitable candidate for the Episcopal bench. Though Ellicott did not share Shaftesbury’s pronounced Evangelical sympathies, he had proved himself a champion of received biblical orthodoxy, and that appealed to both Shaftesbury and Palmerston. 65 C.J. Ellicott to W.E. Gladstone, 17 December 1869, British Library, Add. Ms. 44423. 66 C.J. Ellicott to B. Disraeli, 27 December 1869, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Dep. Hughenden 126/3.

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67 Chadwick, Victorian Church, II, p. 86. 68 Others, like Hensley Henson and David Jenkins, would be nominated and consecrated in the twentieth. 69 C.J. Ellicott to B. Disraeli 27 December 1869, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Dep. Hughenden 126/3. 70 C.J. Ellicott to Samuel Wilberforce 2 April 1865, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Wilberforce, c.15. 71 There are two rather ingratiating letters from Ellicott to Gladstone dated 17 and 28 September 1864, which seem to have opened the correspondence between them, but in the former Ellicott claims a prior acquaintance. British Library Add. Ms. 44403. 72 He was not, of course, referring to the nobility of their birth, but to their political persuasion. 73 In the light of this verdict on the Church of Ireland, in the debate on the Second Reading in the Lords, Archbishop Tait was perhaps rather less than honest when he told the peers: ‘I will say for myself and my Right Reverend Brethren that we are sincerely attached to the Irish Church’. 74 C.J. Ellicott to B. Disraeli, 6 May 1869, Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Dep. Hughenden126/3. 75 C.J. Ellicott to B. Disraeli, 3 June 1869, Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Dep. Hughenden 126/3. 76 P.M.H. Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales (London, 1969) p. 147. 77 C.J. Ellicott to W.E. Gladstone, 22 January 1869, British Library, Add. Ms. 44418. 78 His prophecy proved correct; the Bill was carried in the Lords on second reading by 179 votes to 146. 79 C.J. Ellicott to W.E. Gladstone, 8 March 1869, British Library, Add. Ms. 44419. 80 W.E. Gladstone to C.J. Ellicott, 18 May 1869, British Library, Add. Ms. 44420. 81 Which sits rather oddly with what he told Disraeli shortly after. 82 The reference is to Sir John Spelman (1594–1643), the Royalist apologist and author of Certain Considerations upon the Duties both of Prince and Parliament (1642). 83 C.J. Ellicott to W.E. Gladstone, 20 May 1869, British Library, Add. Ms. 44420. 84 The course of the debates and the negotiations is covered in Bell, Disestablishment, pp. 141–57. 85 For the 1867 conference, and the reasons for calling it, see A.M.G. Stephenson, The First Lambeth Conference, 1867 (London, 1967). See also The Origin and History of the Lambeth Conference (London, 1889). There is a useful index to the papers and speakers – with photographs – of the Lambeth Conferences in M. Barber (ed.), Index to the Lambeth Conference Papers 1867–1958 (Typescript, 1993, at Lambeth Palace Library). 86 Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Conference Papers, 1867, LC1, fol. 161. 87 Chadwick, Victorian Church, II, has no reference to the 1878 conference in the index, passing from the first to the third. R.T. Davidson and W. Benham, The Life of Archibald Campbell Tait, 2 vols. (London, 1891). Davidson was later to edit The Six Lambeth Conferences 1867–1920 (London, SPCK, 1929). 88 Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Conference Papers, 1878, LC7, fols. 291–2. 89 Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Conference Papers, 1878, LC7, fol. 300. 90 Ellicott was no great fan of Archbishop Thomson of York. In a letter of 8 March 1870 to Archbishop Tait’s chaplain. the Rev. W.C. Sandford, Ellicott had described Thompson as ‘not a good tactician’. (Lambeth Palace Library, MS Tait 88, fol. 67). He strongly disliked Bishop Browne of Winchester.

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Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Conference Papers, 1878, LC7, fol. 242. Ibid., LC9, fol. 245. Ibid., LC9, fol. 239. Ibid., LC9, fols. 246–7. Ibid., LC9, fol. 248. Ibid., LC9, fol. 237. Ibid. Davidson and Benham, Life of Tait, vol. 2, p. 370. In fact there were printed summaries of various resolutions and versions of sermons preached to the assembled bishops, but these printed reports made no mention of the ‘Infidelity Committee’ whatsoever. Ellicott ensured that, apart from the manuscript record of the Conference, the failure of that committee – indeed, its very existence – was written out of history. 99 C.J. Ellicott to S. Wilberforce, 12 March 1867, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Wilberforce c.16. 100 Chadwick, Victorian Church, II, p. 472. 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

Chapter 10

Recreation or Renunciation? Episcopal Interventions in the Drink Question in the 1890s Frances Knight

Of all the moral questions that bothered politicians in the 1890s, none became so deeply embedded in the fabric of political life as the temperance question. The issue of liquor control dominated parliamentary time in the first half of the decade, and it cost the Liberal Party the election of 1895, resulting in their loss of power for the next ten years. Rather than being the anticipated vote winner, temperance turned out to be a social issue that turned round and bit the politicians. The wound was sufficiently painful for politicians to become immediately much more wary about incorporating sweeping drink reforms into their manifestos, although they could not let the issue go entirely, because so many questions relating to it remained unresolved.1 Late nineteenth-century Christians also had a complicated relationship with alcohol. They were far from united on what they should think about it. Moreover, the temperance infrastructure which all denominations had developed by the end of the century was consuming huge amounts of energy and resources, although it was not always clear to what purpose. Nineteenth-century Britain’s obsession with drink, and the changing nature of attitudes towards the nature, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages, had contributed to these ambiguities in the minds of church people and politicians. Over several decades, the widespread, although not universal, perception of drink had been transformed from one of a beverage that assisted health and strength, to that of a dangerous poison. By the end of the century, there was a wide range of opinion among temperance reformers as they struggled with a bewildering array of questions. Should alcohol be banned outright, and local prohibition introduced – the so-called local veto – and if so, who should make this decision, and through what mechanism? Should prohibition be rejected as unrealistic, and reform initiatives limited to reducing the number of licensed premises? In closing licensed premises, should compensation be given to those affected by the loss of their livelihood, or would compensation be tantamount to rewarding people who had made money from sinful activity? If it was accepted that some licensed premises should remain, how should they be regulated? Should temperance campaigners throw their full weight behind the Liberal Party, or would too close an alliance with the Liberals result in fatal compromises being made? Should all

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liquor be regarded as equally dangerous, or should efforts be put into encouraging people to switch to lower-alcohol-content wines and beers? Should there be a campaign against the adulteration of drink, rather than against drink itself? All these arguments, from local veto to the case for ensuring pure and unadulterated supplies of alcoholic drink, could be heard within the temperance movement in the late nineteenth century. By the early 1890s, all sides in the temperance debate were fully mobilised – even if disunited – and the battle lines were drawn: the leadership of the major Churches was dominated by total abstainers, the Liberal Party had adopted drink reform as one of its policies in the Newcastle Programme of 1891 and the Conservative Party was giving voice to the nation’s powerful and wealthy brewing and distilling interests. The temperance juggernaut, fuelled by a heady mix of local and national politics and religion, was gaining momentum, and it would have seemed hard to believe that this mighty vehicle was actually heading for rusty obsolescence in one of the lay-bys of history. But before this, it crashed spectacularly with the Liberal defeat in the 1895 election. Once in power, the Conservatives, prompted by Archbishop Benson, stalled on the drink question for the next few years, by appointing a Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing Laws, which lasted from 1896 until 1899, and which was unable to produce a unanimous report.2 In the early years of the twentieth century, the Conservatives introduced some legislation designed to appease the drink trade, and in particular to ensure compensation for loss of licences. When the Liberals did finally return, they passed the Children Act 1908 in order to remove children from public houses.3 Less successful was Asquith’s Licensing Bill also of 1908, which was passed in the House of Commons but defeated in the House of Lords, in what was the first of a number of notorious rejections at this time of the will of the House of Commons by the upper chamber. If the Bill had passed, it would have brought about the gradual abolition of compensation for the loss of publicans’ licences, and established the ‘local option’ system, which would have allowed individual localities to determine drink policy for themselves. But the moment was lost: the Liberals became embroiled in a whole variety of more urgent domestic issues, and the temperance campaign began to run out of power. In the end, the battle against drink became almost inadvertently part of the battle against the Kaiser: Lloyd George decided to regulate the sale of liquor under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1915.4 By 1921 the system of ‘permitted hours’ for the sale of drink was put on a footing that would remain intact until the end of the twentieth century, and in 1923 the legal drinking age was raised from 14 to 18. From a parliamentary perspective, the drink issue receded. In England and Wales, consumption of beer had fallen from 34.1 million barrels in 1914 to 12.7 million barrels in 1918.5 From the perspective of Christian moralists, society appeared more sober, although some would argue that the ‘permitted hours’ mentality was at the root of a mindset that would later come to express itself in the bouts of binge drinking for which British town centres became unhappily notorious. Total abstinence was also on the wane in Christian circles, and it was

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only generally among Protestants of a particular type that teetotalism remained in vogue – although sometimes for personal reasons of dislike of the taste or effect of alcoholic drinks, rather than because of anything more doctrinal. Once again, a sizeable proportion of Christians in British Isles began to enjoy a glass of wine or a pint of beer, just as they had in earlier times. Alcoholism, alcohol-fuelled violence or drink-driving were one thing, but there was almost no one left who would argue that a convivial drink shared with family or friends, or indeed the consumption of communion wine, could pose a moral danger. This chapter begins by sketching out the general contours of the developing love affair between temperance and the Churches, arguing that by 1890 it had reached a point where it was difficult to be sure where one ended, and the other began. The chapter then investigates specifically the episcopal interventions of the 1890s, which illustrate that even among the bishops of the Church of England, there was no agreement about how the temperance objectives should be promoted. It also considers some reactions to the bishops’ activities, and concludes with a brief evaluation of the overall significance of the late nineteenth-century temperance campaign. The Churches and Temperance: The Background to their Developing Union In the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, the Churches’ relationship with the Temperance movement had seemed fraught with pitfalls at every turn.6 There had been the not unjustified fear that the temperance cause was in itself emerging as an alternative to religion, and as we shall see later, it can be argued that the anti-drink campaign did indeed develop as a form of practical secularism. There are parallels here with the more or less simultaneous rise in the active promotion of sport and recreation among Christians, as explored by Dominic Erdozain.7 Christians frequently expressed concern at the way in which turning away from drink and signing the pledge had parallels with turning away from sin and being converted or baptised. It seemed a parody of faith to suggest that man could be ‘saved’ entirely by his own efforts, but this was what temperance advocates preached. It also seemed to suggest that a person’s destiny was to some extent determined by their dietary choices – a concept that was largely alien to the early Victorian mind (it became less so later, when teetotalism and vegetarianism often became linked lifestyles, although vegetarianism was seen as by far the more cranky choice). The opening of temperance halls – which were intended as social space for working people away from the pubs – also offered a secular public space which appeared threatening to that provided by churches and chapels. Furthermore, temperance advocates were often active on Sunday mornings – for when else could they reach their potential converts? This, however, was interpreted as directly challenging and profaning the sanctity of the Sabbath. Indeed, in England, although not in Wales, temperance began in the first half of the nineteenth century as a movement closely aligned to radical free thought, and not in sympathy with Christianity.

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The lack of sympathy was mutual, for English Christians noted with disapproval that temperance devotees often seemed very materialistic – always stressing the money that could be saved once drink was renounced, and the range of material comforts that could be purchased as a result. Temperance used much of the idiom of Christianity – preaching, singing, catechisms, emotional calls for a change of life – probably because that was the most readily understood idiom then available. But the frankly consumerist temperance message, that happiness could be achieved through new clothes, better food and more comfortable housing, proved unsettling to Christians, although of course they knew that ragged clothes, adulterated food and squalid housing were major problems facing millions of people, and that these problems were exacerbated when what little money the poor had was squandered on drink. Drink was a problem, but was dressing up the temperance message in a religious costume really the answer? Meanwhile, the temperance prosperity gospel lodged readily in the popular imagination, as people dreamed of the purchasing power that their teetotal lifestyle might bring. The rather positive evaluation of wine in the New Testament might also have been expected to hit Christian support for teetotalism on the head. Not only was the ritualised consumption of wine at the heart of Christianity’s sacramental life, but Jesus’ first miracle, at Cana, involved the creation of copious extra supplies (John 2: 1–10) and in the First Letter to Timothy, Timothy is urged to ‘Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities’ (1 Tim 5: 23). Such passages hardly contributed to a teetotaller’s charter. The standard teetotaller’s response was to suggest that references to the wholesome use of wine in the Bible referred to unfermented grape juice, and that the wine at Cana had been created so fast, and was so pure, that it would not have had time to ferment.8 Equally, it was argued that in giving Timothy permission to take a little wine because of his digestive ailments, Paul was not setting himself up as ‘physician-general to the Christian world in all ages’ and that in selecting a wine with which to dose himself, it was likely that Timothy chose one of those kinds ‘that were least exciting and that ministered least to sensualism and public vice’ – in other words quite probably a non-alcoholic variety.9 In the 1880s, there was much debate about the use of non-alcoholic grape juice for Holy Communion, and sustained criticism of Canon Henry Ellison, the founder and leader of the Church of England Temperance Society, for advocating unfermented grape juice. Even teetotal Anglican clergy were often opposed to it, but sometimes relented under pressure from those who would otherwise be excluded from the sacrament, because they believed that the sacramental cup might revive their craving for intoxicants.10 After the passing of the Welsh Sunday Closing Act (1881), it was noted that the only place in Wales where alcohol could be obtained on a Sunday was at the communion rail.11 The Lambeth Conference settled the matter for Anglicans in 1888, ruling in favour of alcohol, by declaring that the use of unfermented grape juice ‘or any liquid other than true wine, diluted or undiluted’ was an unauthorised departure from the custom of the Catholic

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Church.12 This was evidently disliked in some Anglican temperance circles, but it seems to have been largely obeyed. Some Christians were shocked to discover that temperance advocates were prepared to indulge in a contextual reading of the Bible in order ease their consciences: the temperance advocates argued that drinking wine might have been acceptable at the time of Jesus, but that did not mean it was acceptable in, say, nineteenth-century Leeds. This train of thought, however, could lead people to conclude that the whole of Jesus’ teaching had only limited relevance to nineteenth-century Britain. Frederic Lees, a veteran temperance campaigner who with Dawson Burns had published the high selling Temperance Bible Commentary in 1868, was particularly shocking when he declared that if it could be proved that Jesus had handled alcoholic wine, rather than unfermented grape juice, he would give up Christianity, rather than teetotalism.13 By the second half of the century, the temperance crusade was being gradually transformed from a working-class radical movement into something else – a movement which reached far into the middle classes, and as it did so embraced large numbers of clergy and lay people of all denominations.14 Brian Harrison notes that in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of ministerial abstainers were Nonconformists. In 1848 only 4 per cent of ministerial abstainers were Anglicans, but by 1866 this number had grown to 22 per cent, making the Anglican clergy the largest denominational group. Catholics were also extremely well represented, although Catholic priests were not included on these lists.15 In the second half of the century, there were large numbers of teetotallers of all denominational perspectives, and a bewildering network of temperance organisations that operated at local, regional and national level. Indeed, the movement had become so large and complex that space permits us simply to pick out five of the major trends. First, there was a subtle, but discernible, shift in emphasis from dealing directly with drunkards, to encouraging those who had never been drunk to live in an alcohol-free environment. Secondly, there was growing support for the view that alcohol had no nutritive or medical benefit.16 Thirdly, among those for whom the prospect of a permanent alcohol-free life was a step too far, there was the development of a form of internal pluralism that allowed them to express solidarity with the movement without actually giving up drink themselves. However, as we have seen, this eventually led to the gathering under the temperance banner of people with essentially irreconcilable beliefs. An example of this was the Church of England Temperance Society’s adoption of the ‘dual basis’ in 1873. This allowed supporters who did not wish to become teetotal to sign up instead for a modest and responsible approach to drinking. By the end of the century CETS had 7,000 branches and between 150,000 and 200,000 subscribing members, making it probably the most significant pressure group of its day.17 Fourth, some temperance groups began to spin out into other types of social concern. Thus CETS developed Christian welfare work in a number of offshoots, of which two of the most notable were the Police Court Mission and the Prison Gate Mission, from which the modern National Probation Service for England

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and Wales has its origin. By 1885, Bishop Magee of Peterborough was pointing to the very broad range of CETS-originated welfare work, as a justification for the Church’s continued establishment status.18 Fifth, in the period from 1877 until the end of the 1880s, the gospel temperance movement – sometimes known as the Blue Ribbon Movement – swept across Britain from America, although it did not take permanent root. Similar in style to Dwight Moody, American gospel temperance missionaries like Richard Booth travelled the towns holding large meetings in halls (but never in churches) at which people were invited to come to the front and sign the pledge and adopt the blue ribbon – the allusion being to Numbers 15: 38. It was estimated that over one million people did so by the end of the 1880s. Local ministers were invited to pray for the success of the event, and whatever they thought about it, it must have been hard for them to decline to do so. Roman Catholic teetotallers who regarded the blue ribbon as too Protestant a symbol to be wearing adopted a green ribbon; it was not the colour stipulated in the Lord’s instruction to Moses, but the idiom remained the same. Gospel temperance, with its curious blend of a secular message presented in a religious package, seemed to act as a spur to further denominational temperance efforts.19 By 1890, therefore, the line between temperance and Christianity, and Christianity and temperance had become blurred almost to the point of invisibility. Bishops and Drink in the 1890s It was into this world that there came a sudden flurry of contradictory private member’s Bills, brought by bishops of the Church of England. On 2 March 1893 Francis Jayne, Bishop of Chester, and formerly the second Principal of St David’s College Lampeter, presented the first reading of his Authorised Companies Liquor Bill in the House of Lords. His arguments against drink were the same as those almost universally employed by Christians – drink was the sin which led to many other sins and misfortunes: he listed pauperism, crime, insanity and boundless expenditure – nearly one eighth of the wages of working people were spent on drink, he claimed.20 But his solution was radically different from anything which was under current parliamentary discussion: he was arguing for a version of the Gothenburg system, which had been adopted widely across Scandinavia from 1866, and which involved profits from state-regulated licensed outlets being ploughed back into public welfare. The Gothenburg system had attracted some favourable notice from a House of Lords Committee on intemperance which had reported in 1879, and also from Joseph Chamberlain, who was predisposed to try it in Birmingham. In Jayne’s proposal, all those with the local government franchise (which included women) would be given the opportunity to vote on the matter, and those entitled to vote would also be eligible to set up an Authorised Company in order to run their own public house – which would thus be ‘public from beginning to end’ – because it would be run with full public scrutiny. Existing licensees would

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10.1  Bishop Francis Jayne Source: Courtesy of Trinity Saint David College, University of Wales.

be compensated, and he hoped that ‘many of the better class of publicans would be re-employed by the company to conduct the reformed houses under conditions which would be more wholesome for themselves and their families’.21 In a phrase which would have shocked strict temperance advocates everywhere, the Bishop declared that the ‘bona fide publican … deserved all consideration at the hands of the public and an authorised company which would be minister and servant of the public’.22 The surplus profits from these public houses would be applied to the recreation of the people, and to social objects which were not already directly financed from the rates – open spaces, libraries, museums, hospitals and old age pensions. In addition to well-run public houses, Jayne also envisaged temperance cafes, aimed at women and children, and people who knew their weakness for

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alcohol. As well as appealing to temperance reformers and publicans alike, Jayne hoped that his Bill would contribute to the entertainment of the people, with the provision of these new amenities. The stress on entertainment and recreation, and the desire to turn public houses into relaxing social centres, was a peculiarly finde-siècle take on the drink question. The Bill was supported by Lord Thring, who warmed to the idea of family-friendly pubs and greater popular entertainment, and the Duke of Westminster.23 The Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson, praised the Bill for safe-guarding the moderate supply of pure beverages under regulated conditions, and he alluded to the older notion that drink was in fact an article of food, and should therefore be of good quality and freely available.24 The high-profile nature of the Bishop of Chester’s Bill, which, as we shall see, attracted much discussion in the press, might have been expected to represent the agreed state of episcopal opinion on the matter, but this was not the case. Just three weeks later, on 24 March 1893, Frederick Temple, Bishop of London and lifelong total abstainer, presented his Licensing Boards Bill, which had been drawn up by CETS. Temple argued that his Bill dealt with the drink issue much more thoroughly, whereas the Bishop of Chester’s was ‘in the nature of an experiment’.25 Essentially, he wanted a reduction in the number of licensed premises to be brought down to one for every 1,000 people in urban areas, and one for every 600 in rural areas (Jayne had argued for this ratio, too) and he wanted the system to be regulated by elected local Boards, rather than magistrates. He wanted all types of premises in which alcohol could be obtained to be included, and for an inspectorate to pay surprise visits on public houses. During his Bill’s second reading, on 12 May, Temple expanded at greater length on why he wanted the change – magistrates were too paternalistic, whereas the people knew what was best for themselves, and should be empowered to become the licensing authorities; drink was such a severe temptation that he believed that even drunkards were crying out for tighter licensing laws. The Lords, however, were not persuaded by this ‘tinkering, grandmotherly legislation’, as Lord Rookwood called it.26 They questioned whether sobriety could ever be achieved through Act of Parliament, whether the magistrates were really unsuitable to be responsible for licensing matters and whether it was justified to hold expensive parliamentary-style elections to licensing boards. Bishop Temple’s Bill was clearly sinking when Lord Salisbury erupted in the fury which caused it finally to disappear below the waterline. Referring to Harcourt’s Liquor Traffic (Local Control) Bill, he demanded to know how a member of the House of Lords could promote his own Bill, when the Government was simultaneously attempting to bring forward its own comprehensive legislation in the Commons?27 Referring perhaps obliquely to Temple’s own humble social origins, and providing a more contemporary take on the old sore of the bishops’ social inferiority in the Lords, he rejected the notion that the Bishop of London was somehow uniquely qualified within the Upper Chamber to understand the notion of working-class temptation. ‘Other members of the community’, he concluded, were ‘like to us in everything else’ except that they have not had the same opportunities of education and

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enlightenment which have been bestowed on the upper and middle classes almost accidentally.28 Salisbury continued with a carefully aimed swipe at the Archbishop of Canterbury: if he wished to defend the notion that drink is a form of food, how could he and his supporters be seeking to render illegal the drinking clubs of factory girls, or, as Salisbury described them, ‘young ladies, engaged in the very honourable pursuit of providing for their own living by their industry, who like to meet occasionally, and to indulge in the consumption of what the right rev. Prelate calls intoxicating liquors’.29 Following this sustained attack by the Tory grandee on the class assumptions residing in Temple’s Bill, the Bishop withdrew it. The Bishop of Chester’s Bill also failed at its second reading on 6 June 1893. Again Bishop Jayne stressed the novelty of his Bill in first of all placing ‘before the mind of the country the idea that the entertainment of the people was of the highest national importance’.30 But just like Temple’s Bill, it was torpedoed by Lord Salisbury, who liked its proposals for compensation, but doubted whether it was a temperance Bill at all, being more likely to result in the sale of greater quantities of alcohol, ‘although probably it would be of a better sort, consumed under more civilised conditions’.31 There were no further episcopal attempts to debate licensing legislation in the House of Lords for the next 11 months, but on 5 July 1894 the Bishop of London brought forward his Licensing Laws Amendment Bill, which, like his earlier legislation, had been drafted and approved by the Church of England Temperance Society. Temple began his speech somewhat defensively, by stressing that CETS was not fanatical, and many of its members were moderate drinkers. The Society did not see the use of intoxicating liquors as sinful, nor indeed did it propose to interfere in any way with their legitimate consumption. He argued that his new Bill was considerably ‘lightened’, because it did not remove licensing authority from the magistrates, and it proposed a simpler mechanism for ensuring the compensation of those who lost their licenses, and the gradual reduction of those licenses over a five-year period.32 But Temple damaged his attempt at conciliation with the Lords temporal when he told them that they simply could not understand the temptations the working classes felt in relation to alcohol. Opening up the class issue again was a grave tactical error, and suggests that his intensely held beliefs ran ahead of his political sensibilities. Lord Norton began the counterattack, claiming – rather improbably in view of its vast membership and extensive parochial network – to know nothing of CETS. He argued that the working classes consumed alcoholic beverages as food, rather than for pleasure, and that liquor was only an intoxicant to a blockhead who did not know how to use it. You might as well call water a drowning fluid because people sometimes drowned in it. The weakness of the Bill was its attempt to control licences in an arbitrary manner, rather than relying on the laws of supply and demand. The stipulation of one license per 600 people would make for excessive provision in some localities, and be inadequate elsewhere. The real answer, he believed, was to close down disorderly drinking houses, and places where drink was adulterated with drugs, as well as providing people with what

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he termed ‘higher modes of amusement’.33 The Earl of Kimberley was next to take up the cudgels, arguing that popular control in licensing matters would in fact have been a better option than retaining the magistracy, that grocers’ licences should be retained, so that shoppers could obtain single bottles without having to resort to a wholesaler or a public house, and that the restriction on the opening of public houses on a Sunday would create further problems for those in need of refreshment.34 At this point the Archbishop of York, William Dalrymple Maclagan, entered the debate, with somewhat lukewarm support for the Bishop of London. Claiming that he was not in favour of temperance legislation generally, he suggested that this Bill was the most reasonable and least objectionable of the measures that had been brought forward in recent years. He also spoke warmly of the principle of the regulation of Sunday opening, an issue in which he had a particular interest, and reminded the Lords that whatever their own opinions might be, there was a very strong opinion among the working classes in favour of temperance legislation.35 The Earl of Meath was the next to speak. He was worried about the effects of drink in the Empire, where the arrival of the British could lead to ‘broken bottles, broken hearts and broken heads’. He was pleased to note the increasing number of total abstainers in the army and navy, and that among the others, moderate, rather than excessive drinking more generally prevailed. He did not believe that it was possible to make men more moral by legislation, although it was possible to assist them in becoming more moral by removing the temptations to immorality.36 Lord Salisbury echoed this sentiment by suggesting that people can only be reformed by the power of public opinion, not by legislation which actually stood in the way of allowing public opinion to grow. He returned to Norton’s theme of the law of supply and demand; a reduction of pubs to one per 600 of population might result in people having to travel three quarters of a mile for their beer. Rather flippantly, he concluded that as men were tempted by public houses, so women were tempted by the desire to buy new clothes – but was anyone suggesting a reduction in the number of haberdashers?37 On this occasion, the Bill proceeded to a division. Twenty voted in favour, and 49 against.38 Although the Bill was lost, this was the moment when the bishops came closest to getting their views on the drink question enshrined in law. Reactions to the Bishops’ Bills Reactions to the Bills promoted by the Bishop of Chester and the Bishop of London were predictably mixed. Archbishop Benson despaired of bishops bringing forward Bills which had the certainty of rejection, believing that it was essential that support was obtained from politicians from both parties before Bills were introduced.39 The Church of England Temperance Society faced the immediate problem of needing to remain loyal to its chairman (Bishop Temple) and to the legislation that it had been closely involved in drafting, while at the

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same time not appearing to denounce the efforts of another episcopal drink campaigner. There was, however, exasperation that just as it seemed that temperance societies throughout the land were coming to an agreement on the issue, the Bishop of Chester should have come up with his own and entirely unrelated scheme.40 Its initial approach to Bishop Jayne’s proposals was cautious, and the Society kept him at a distance, saying officially that it knew little of his proposals, until October 1892, when he explained his scheme at a meeting of the CETS council, in a way which evoked their ‘friendly sympathy’.41 Before that, they had used the pages of their newspaper, The Church of England Temperance Chronicle, to provide extensive coverage of Jayne in the secular press. Some of it was positive, commending the bishop on his recognition of the importance of entertainment, rather than prohibition, but much of it questioned, with varying degrees of mockery, the realism of Jayne’s vision of state-run public houses, with high quality food and drink, and space for recreation, music and reading the papers. A remark made by the bishop to the effect that he himself would enjoy the opportunity to run a public house was particularly ridiculed, and his credentials for expressing a view on the matter were frequently questioned. As The Morning Leader put it: ‘The public house question is too practical and everyday a problem to appeal to the ecclesiastical mind. Bishops and cardinals, as a rule, take more delight in questions like marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, which depend on Hebrew linguistic subtleties’.42 The Glasgow Evening Post was even more withering: ‘The Bishop of Chester is nothing if not sensational, particularly on the question of temperance. His latest idea is that the publican should be bought out by the state. The plan would seem to mean, from further explanations, that in handing a bottle of lemonade to the customers the waiter should have a countenance radiant with smiles, only to be transferred into one of sadness if the order were for stronger potations’.43 Bishop Temple was also hostile, but had to remain diplomatic. Interviewed by the Daily Telegraph, he agreed on the need for better recreational facilities, but said that ‘if these places of recreation are supplied with an abundance of liquor, they will be no whit better than the public house’.44 By March 1893, the Church of England Temperance Chronicle was trying to act as a broker between the two episcopal positions, urging their readers to purchase a CETS pamphlet on the Gothenburg system, and deciding that the real enemy was the Government. Once both of the 1893 Bills had been lost, the Lords themselves became an obvious target. The Chronicle lambasted them as ‘absolutely ignorant of the whole question before them … they have shown a great ignorance of the wishes and feelings, no less than the temptations, of the working classes. They have not the faculty of putting themselves in the circumstances of those for whom they are called upon to legislate, and are apt to judge the conditions of the masses by the circumstances, environments and lack of special temptations with which they themselves are surrounded, forgetting how greatly their education and social position has removed them from the sphere of temptations which beset less favoured mortals’.45 The earlier worry that the two episcopal projects might

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cancel each other out was put aside to make room for deeper anxieties about the class tensions that existed between the Lords and the rest of Britain. In 1894, Bishop Temple continued with his legislative crusade, while Bishop Jayne began to enact his dream of running a chain of public houses. He founded the Public House Reform Association, which in 1896 became the People’s Refreshment House Association Ltd. Also on the Board of the PRHA were Bishop E.S. Talbot of Rochester, and Cardinal Vaughan. The PRHA ultimately ran more than 170 inns and hotels, on the Scandinavian system of fixed pay for landlords irrespective of the amount of liquor sold, good quality food and drink (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) and profits ploughed into community projects, after dividends had been paid to the shareholders. Its history has two distinct phases, the first from 1896 to 1901, and the second after 1901. In its first phase, Bishop Jayne put great emphasis on the recreational facilities in its admittedly small number of houses. Refreshments, games, music, books and newspapers were to be enjoyed. There was, however, a backlash from those supporters who feared that these public houses would be attracting new drinkers, rather than simply making existing drinkers more cultivated. Jayne had to row back, and the emphasis was refocused on food and drink, rather than entertainment, although cards, dominoes and draughts continued to be generally permissible. Financial difficulties meant that the PRHA began to work closely with the Central Public House Trust Association, a well-funded organisation that was founded in 1901, in which Jayne also became involved.46 By the early 1920s, the total number of pubs run by both organisations had reached almost 500, and by 1930, the amount of money donated to public utilities had reached £30,000. As well as the pretty country inns which graced the pages of Country Life, and which provided reliable and congenial refreshment for cyclists, motorists and locals, sometimes with croquet or lawn tennis thrown in, the trusts also ran many unglamorous canteens at industrial works and collieries.47 On 11 October 1896 Archbishop Edward White Benson died of heart failure shortly after morning prayer in Hawarden parish church. Breaking his journey on his way back from Ireland, he had spent three hours the previous evening discussing with Mr Gladstone how best to reply to the papal bull Apostolicae curae, which had declared Anglican orders to be utterly null and void. He was, self-evidently, an archbishop who had had many other matters on his mind besides the drink question, and the correspondence preserved at Lambeth suggests that he found it somewhat irritating. He declined the invitation to make a special subscription to CETS, and he declined to give public support to Jayne, when Jayne was in the early stages of organising the People’s Refreshment House Association. At the time when the schemes of Temple and Jayne were being presented in direct contradiction to each other, he no doubt wisely felt the need to steer clear of giving public support to one bishop at the expense of the other.48 He was also clearly angered by Jayne when Jayne became deeply and publicly embroiled in a dispute with a Times journalist over the details of the Gothenburg system in January 1895. The Archbishop of Canterbury delivered a headmasterly rebuke to the Bishop of Chester, essentially accusing him of entrapment by writing letters to the journalist

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‘which seemed misleadingly friendly’,49 although the issue was complicated by the fact that the journalist was one of Dr Jayne’s former students. It was probably this issue, which certainly caused a degree of short-term reputational damage to the Church of England, coupled with a fresh agitation from CETS, who in February 1896 sent an 11-bishop delegation headed by Bishop Temple to meet with the new prime minister, Lord Salisbury, which prompted Benson to come up with the proposal which would be guaranteed to ensure a long delay in any further temperance legislation. The meeting between the bishops and Salisbury had been sticky. They had demanded Sunday closing and a reduction in the number of licences issued. Salisbury was blunt. He would not support any further legislation – and as we have seen, he had certainly not supported any earlier episcopal attempts.50 There seemed to be a stand-off. Benson wrote to Salisbury on 20 February. Salisbury wrote back on 5 February, marking the letter ‘Private’: I have deferred answering your letter of the 20th ult. because it involved much consultation with others. On the question of the appointment of a Royal Commission upon the licensing question, the Cabinet would not themselves have taken any action in this direction: but they are not blind to the considerations urged by your Grace, and are quite willing to consult in such a matter the wishes of those who represent a large body of opinion. If therefore a Royal Commission is urged upon them by those who speak with authority, either on the side of the (moderate) temperance reformers, or on the side of the trade, they will give [it] their most favourable consideration.51

The Royal Commission, rather than being the delaying tactic of the Conservative government, as historians have tended to assume,52 was in a real sense the brain child of Benson. His sudden death meant that he had no part in following its deliberations. Less than a month after Benson’s death, Frederick Temple was nominated as his successor. The Church of England Temperance Chronicle was jubilant. But one of Temple’s first actions was to indicate that he would not be able to continue as the chairman of CETS, although he did serve on as the only episcopal representative on the Royal Commission.53 The chairmanship of CETS was taken over by Bishop Ernest Wilberforce of Chichester, and although CETS remained a formidable pressure group throughout the Edwardian period, episcopal interventions on the drink question largely ceased after Randall Davidson’s attempt to get some of the Royal Commission’s recommendations enacted in legislation brought forward in 1901 and 1902.54 As CETS activities remained focused on seeking reform through legislation, the People’s Refreshment House Association, in tandem with the Central Public House Trust Association, went from strength to strength. Bishop Jayne had shown that despite the unfavourable comments of The Morning Leader newspaper back in 1892, the public house question was not ‘too practical and everyday a problem to appeal to the ecclesiastical mind’. His apparently pie-in-the-sky scheme actually resulted in pie-in-the-pub – a network of family-friendly inns and hotels serving good food and drink in

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pleasant surroundings. Bishop Jayne is little remembered for this achievement, and is seen as having been more significant in his role as second principal of Lampeter, where he also worked tirelessly and introduced much needed reforms.55 But his undoubted success in bringing what he termed ‘Scandinavian principles’ to a section of the hotel and catering industry in the early years of the twentieth century is an interesting epitaph to his work as a bishop in the Church of England. Conclusion The temperance movement is a very intriguing aspect of nineteenth-century British history. It was one of the largest, most influential and far-reaching movements of its time, and yet its significance has been insufficiently appreciated, and its achievements, such as the Police Court Mission, the beginnings of the treatment of alcoholism as a disease and the People’s Refreshment House Association, have been almost entirely forgotten. A.E. Dingle suggests that because it failed in its objectives, and ‘left no obvious imprint on contemporary society’, it could find no place in a ‘Whig’ interpretation of history as a process of progressive improvement and success, and was largely ignored for this reason.56 But although the narrow objective of prohibition failed, one has to wonder about the veracity of the judgement when, as we have seen, so many other aspects of the temperance campaign have made their mark. Temperance may yet be important for a completely different reason: the light it sheds on the complex processes which occur when a Christian society becomes a predominantly secular one. Charles Taylor does not refer to temperance in his much discussed book The Secular Age, but in his chapter on ‘Nineteenth-century Trajectories’ he does describe what he identifies as a new space in which unbelief emerges. This is characterised as, A humanism of altruism and duty, often rooted in an enriched materialism. This leaves much of the reigning synthesis intact, which linked Britishness, law, decency, civilization and religion. It lops off the last element, but insists just as much on discipline, will, character-formation, and the long but successful historical struggle to realize the synthesis of this happy Isle. A quite new set of spaces open up, however, when this synthesis is challenged.57

Temperance, with its strongly altruistic principles of social welfare, its emphasis on self-discipline and strong character, its strongly materialist ethos and its ambiguous relationship with religion, seems to fit perfectly into Taylor’s imagined category. It is perhaps not surprising that it has also featured prominently in Dominic Erdozain’s recent work on the secularisation of sin, cited earlier. Brian Harrison commented that with the benefit of historical perspective: We can now see that, like so many organisations attached to religious congregations, the temperance society constituted a half-way house between

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participation in and rejection of Christian association. So in ultimate effect, although not in original intent, the temperance movement was one among several agencies which in modern times have gradually eroded the churches’ social function.58

Yet as Harrison finally concludes, what was the alternative? Could Victorian Christians have been expected to avoid harnessing the temperance movement to their particular purposes, or in an age of rapidly growing awareness of social problems to have ignored Christ’s injunction to look after the vulnerable? We may be correct to conclude that in its late-nineteenth century guise, secularism, turned up at the door holding a pledge card and humming a temperance hymn. We may even conclude that he was a less than welcome visitor. But as a late-nineteenth century reality, what else could Christians do, beside invite him in, and offer him some cocoa? Endnotes 1 J.M. Lee, ‘The Political Significance of Licensing Legislation’, Parliamentary Affairs, 14 (1960), pp. 211–28; David M. Fahey, ‘Temperance and the Liberal Party – Lord Peel’s Report, 1899’, Journal of British Studies, 10 (1971), pp. 132–59. 2 See Fahey, ‘Temperance and the Liberal Party’. The final report and other documents relating to it are to be found on the website of House of Commons Parliamentary Papers. The durable URL for the Final Report of 1899 is http://gateway.proquest.com/ openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:hcpp&rft_dat=xri:hcpp:rec:1899-077038. 3 Although it was seen by reformers as having undesirable consequences, as many children were simply left on the pavement, or in the pub doorway. See Stella Moss, ‘“A grave question”: The Children Act and Public House Regulation, c.1908-1939’, Crimes and Misdemeanours; Deviance and the Law in Historical Perspective, 3 (2009), pp. 98–117. SOLON on line journal available at http://www.perc.plymouth.ac.uk/solon/journal/ Issue%203.2/MOSS%20Grave%20concern%20edited.pdf accessed 7 June 2010. 4 John R. Greenaway, ‘The “improved” public house, 1870–1950: the key to civilised drinking or the primrose path to drunkenness?’, Addiction, 93 (1998), p. 176. 5 Moss, ‘Children Act’, p.102, citing PP Statistics as to the Operation and Administration of the Laws relating to the Sale of Intoxicating Liquor in England and Wales for the year 1918 (1919) Cmd. 352 vol. Ll.413, p.3. 6 See Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872, 2nd edition (Keele, 1994), especially chap. 8; Lilian Lewis Shiman, Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England (Basingstoke, 1988), especially chap. 3. Both books contain extensive bibliographies of further reading on the question. The insights in this and the following three paragraphs are largely drawn from Harrison and Shiman, and also from A.E. Dingle, The Campaign for Prohibition in Victorian England (London, 1980) and W.R. Lambert, Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales c.1820–c.1895 (Cardiff, 1983). 7 D. Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Woodbridge, 2010) and D. Erdozain, ‘The Secularisation of Sin in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62 (2011), pp. 59–88.

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8 F.R. Lees and Dawson Burns, The Temperance Bible Commentary, 3rd edn (London, 1872), p. 304. The authors argued that the miraculous creation of pure grape juice was ‘a closer imitation of the creative plan of Providence’ than calling a decaying and disintegrating substance into existence would have been. 9 Lees and Burns, Temperance Bible Commentary, p. 374. 10 Lambeth Palace Library (LPL) Benson 8 fols 382–9. Printed open letter from Edgar Jacob, vicar of Portsea, 24 April 1883. 11 Lambert, Drink and Sobriety, p. 123. 12 Lambeth Conference Resolutions from 1888, Resolution 2 http://www. lambethconference.org/resolutions/1888/1888-2.cfm accessed on 7 June 2010. For more on sacramental wine, see Shiman, Crusade against Drink pp. 68–73. 13 Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. 173. 14 Gerald Wayne Olsen explores the social expansion of the temperance movement in Anglicanism in Olsen, ‘From Parish to Palace: working class influences on Anglican temperance movements, 1835–1914’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 40 (1989), pp. 239–52. 15 Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. 167–8. 16 Gerald Wayne Olsen, ‘“Physician heal thyself”: drink, temperance and the medical question in the Victorian and Edwardian Church of England’, Addiction, 89 (1994), pp. 1167–76 explores the relationship between Anglican temperance and medical science. The paper emphasises the very great extent to which mid-nineteenth century medical men relied of prescribing alcoholic beverages. 17 Shiman, Crusade against Drink, pp. 99–109. The figures come from the Report of the Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing V, XXXIV p. 25. 18 CETS Annual Report 1886 cited in Shiman, Crusade against Drink, p. 107. 19 For Gospel Temperance, see Shiman, Crusade against Drink, pp. 109–21. The finances of CETS suffered as a result of the Blue Ribbon movement. See G. Howard Wright to Fowler, 2 October 1885, LPL Benson 29 fols 23–4. 20 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 9, col. 765. 21 Ibid., col. 776. 22 Ibid., col. 776. 23 Ibid., cols 779–81. 24 Ibid., col. 783. 25 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 10, col. 993. 26 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 12, col. 745. 27 See A.E. Dingle, The Campaign for Prohibition in Victorian England (London, 1980), pp. 144–51, for an account of the Liquor Bills of 1893. 28 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 12, col. 750. 29 Ibid., col. 751. 30 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 13, col. 290. 31 Ibid., col. 310. 32 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, Fourth Series, vol. 26, cols. 921–2. 33 Ibid., col. 927. 34 Ibid., cols 929–30. 35 Ibid., cols 931–2. Archbishop Maclagan was much more interested in controlling the sale of alcohol on a Sunday, promoting (unsuccessfully) a Bill on this issue on 26 March 1896. 36 Ibid., cols 933–4.

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37 Ibid., col. 934–6. 38 Ibid., col. 938. 39 LPL Bishops’ Meetings 3, fols 304–12 and fols 368–83. I thank Susan Willmington for sharing with me her findings on this topic in the Bishops’ Meetings papers. 40 Correspondent to Church of England Temperance Chronicle (26 August 1892), p. 416. 41 Church of England Temperance Chronicle (13 July 1894), p. 340. 42 The Morning Leader cited in Church of England Temperance Chronicle (12 August 1892), pp. 396–7. 43 Glasgow Evening Post cited in Church of England Temperance Chronicle (12 August 1892), pp. 396–7. 44 Church of England Temperance Chronicle (21 October 1892), p. 513. 45 Church of England Temperance Chronicle (9 June 1893), p. 270. 46 See David W. Gutzke, ‘Gentrifying the British Public House, 1896–1914’ International Labor and Working-Class History 45 (1994), pp. 29–43 for a full discussion of this, of how the Gothenburg system played out in Britain. 47 The Times (13 May 1919, 1 May 1923) and Gutzke, ‘Gentrifying the British Public House’, pp. 34–40. 48 Benson to Jayne, 11 December 1893, LPL Benson 130, fol. 260; Eardley Wilmot to Benson, 14 December 1894, Benson 135. 49 Benson to Jayne 16 January 1895, LPL Benson 135, fols 109–26. 50 Shiman, Crusade against Drink, p. 236. 51 Salisbury to Benson, 5 February 1896, LPL Benson 146, fol. 355. 52 See for example Fahey, ‘Temperance and the Liberal Party’, p. 133. 53 Church of England Temperance Chronicle (30 October 1896), p. 526. 54 Although in 2008 Archbishop Barry Morgan, together with the four Welsh police forces, launched Alcohol Pledge Wales, which advocated ‘Calling Time on Binge Drinking’. There is, however, no evidence of its website having been updated since its launch. http://www.alcoholpledge.co.uk/ accessed on 7 July 2010. For Davidson, see G.K.A. Bell, Randall Davidson: Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford, 1952) pp. 322–6 and John R. Greenway, ‘Bishops, Brewers and the Liquor Question in England, 1890–1914’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 1890–1914, 53 (1984). 55 See D.T.W. Price, ‘Francis John Jayne (1845-1921)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 56 Dingle, Prohibition, p. 7. 57 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2007), p. 398. 58 Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, p. 175.

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Chapter 11

Reactions to the Didache in Early Twentieth-century Britain: A Dispute over the Relationship of History and Doctrine? Thomas O’Loughlin

Kurt Niederwimmer is the author of what is currently the most comprehensive lineby-line commentary on the Didache, or ‘The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’, the early Christian text which most scholars date to the late first or early second century. After referring to an eccentric group of studies of that early Christian text from the 1930s and 1940s, he wrote: Of course, one comes to a completely different conclusion [regarding the date of the Didache] if one regards the Didache as a deliberate literary fiction. This is the opinion of some English-speaking scholars. The forerunner was Robinson, who [in 1912] … undertook a first foray in this direction. The thesis was further developed in his Donnellan Lectures in 1920. … For Robinson, the Didache is the camouflage of a later author who artificially places himself in the apostolic period and imitated (using copious amounts of NT material) and faked apostolicity. … The liturgical formulae and the canonical situation that is presupposed are, correspondingly, the products of fantasy.1

Niederwimmer continues to list a number of authors – and his list is not exhaustive – who either directly argued this position or who used the fraud-hypothesis as a premise in the other researches on early Christianity and its literary products. However, apart from this notice by Niederwimmer, this ‘British School’2 has not attracted much attention from scholars,3 despite the fact that they were very influential in their time and, indeed, continue to impact on English-language scholarship through their influence on secondary literature and some liturgists.4 The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to this group, to consider the extent to which they can be properly spoken of as a school of thought, and to explore their rationale for breaking with the consensus of other scholars, whether working in French, German or English, on this text.5

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J.A. Robinson Until the late nineteenth century, despite the occasional sceptic who, following in the ancient steps of Porphyry, dismissed the history of the first Christians almost entirely,6 most scholars, whether they viewed themselves as exegetes of the New Testament or as Church historians, were content to write the history of ‘the apostolic period’ using a mixture of the Acts of the Apostles and Eusebius’ Historia ecclesiastica, with a seasoning of bits from Philo, Josephus, and a few lines from classical authors such as Pliny’s comments on the Essenes or his son’s comments on the Christian Sunday gathering. While the major fault lines, Catholic and Protestant, can be discerned in virtually every book on the subject, the consensus about the elements of any history ensured that for each group the possibility of a major upset to their view of their apostolicity, and so to their authenticity, was minimal.7 Each group manoeuvred to show that their opponents simply did not read the evidence aright; however, they not only agreed on the extent of the available information, but, more importantly, were convinced of its sufficiency to guarantee the integrity of the various theological edifices that stood on those early historical foundations. Discoveries might be made, such as that by Tischendorf,8 but new materials would be fitted into the existing historical scheme.9 By contrast, today we have not only vastly more information about Christian origins, the results both of discoveries and of new methods to investigate our evidence, but also a profound awareness of our fragmented picture of those first decades.10 The process by which we moved from one state of scholarship to the other can be said to have begun with the publication of an edition of the Didache by Philotheos Bryennios in 1883.11 While the significance of that publication was immediately recognised across the scholarly world with further editions, translations and studies appearing within a couple of years in German, French and English, it took decades before many of the implications of that discovery began to be appreciated – and, arguably, many of them have still not been taken fully into account in the work of systematic theologians.12 Indeed, the arrival of the Didache presents us with a pattern that would be repeated with the discoveries of the codices in Nag Hammadi in 1945–46 and of the scrolls in the Judean desert in 1947 (to name but the most famous): immediate recognition that the find is of great significance, but it being a matter of decades before the implications of what is contained in the discovery began to be felt in the theological world beyond those concerned specifically with the study of ancient texts. If we think of the older world as a cosy, well-organised edifice, then the Didache was the first bombshell, but one with a long time fuse! While the Didache posed awkward problems from its first appearance to many theologians whose focus was on doctrine as a body of knowledge almost immune from the vagaries of history, on the whole the growing body of Church historians whose agenda had moved beyond the apologetic of doctrinal positions greeted it as a document of the later first or early second centuries which should be used as a primary source of evidence of what was happening on the ground rather than

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11.1  Philotheos Bryennios. From the Frontispiece, Philip Schaff, The Oldest Church Manual, Called the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (New York, 1886)

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as a threat to theology.13 Moreover, British scholarship stood very much in line with that being produced elsewhere. We see this in two synoptic studies, from very different Church traditions, produced in the first decade of the twentieth century. J. Vernon Bartlet dated the work to around 100 A.D., if not earlier;14 while John Chapman, having made allowances such that the Didache would not threaten Catholic dogma on the Eucharist,15 recognised that it must predate ‘Clement of Rome’s’ Letter to the Corinthians16 and so must belong to the first century.17 Both scholars faced squarely the problems that it posed to established ideas, and both suggested, though Chapman made the argument more explicit, that any difficulties encountered would have to be resolved by appeal to ‘the development of doctrine’. The Didache was a significant document for the most primitive state of the Church, genuine and precious, and a product of the first century. Joseph Armitage Robinson was a most able scholar, at home in both New Testament and patristic studies, attentive to the nature of liturgy, familiar with the range of problems ancient texts pose, and in 1912 at the height of his powers.18 He was convinced that the Didache, apart from the opening section referred to as ‘The Two Ways’, was ‘an unsolved riddle’ – the first use of that phrase with reference to the Didache and a phrase that would cast a long shadow.19 For Robinson, the riddle did not arise from the text itself, but from a comparison of the text with what he took to be information about the early churches that was known with certainty: It [the Didache] does not seem to fit in anywhere in either time or place. The community which it presupposes is out of relation to all our knowledge of Church history. It is as much an isolated phenomenon after all our researches as when it surprised us at its first appearance. We still ask, Where was there ever a Church which celebrated the Eucharist after the manner here enjoined? Where was there ever a Church which refused to allow Apostles more than a two days’ stay?20

Since he was in no doubt about what the early communities looked like, how they celebrated the Eucharist and that one of the ‘Apostles’21 would have been treated with the same honour as any member of ‘The Twelve’ if he had knocked at his deanery door, the Didache clearly had to be at fault. This was the riddle he set out to solve. Robinson’s solution was that the Didache came not from the period of its title’s claim – that is, the time ‘of the twelve apostles’ – but rather was a later work that used the writings of Paul as its sources. Similarities with the accepted picture of apostolic times are, therefore, reminiscences, while the differences are the inventions of this later author who was simulating an early period. By focusing on the title of the work in the codex edited by Bryennios, Robinson had the basis for his thesis (itself a doubtful procedure as it was widely accepted that the title was an unstable element in the tradition), but he side-stepped the awkward questions that the internal evidence presented to the more traditionally historical picture. Once Robinson had posited that the Didache was not another first-century source, but was simply based on such sources, all the difficulties fell away. Indeed, the problems posed by the Didache

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moved from being contradictory evidence to being the internal anomalies that one would expect to find in a later work masquerading as an apostolic period document. These make an interesting list. First, there was the Didache’s relaxed attitude to the Law’s food regulations as being a reflection of Paul’s advice on marriage in 1 Cor 7: 36 and being based on ‘the Conference at Jerusalem’ as represented in Acts 15.22 The use of term ‘Conference’ was itself telling. By not using the more traditional word ‘Council’, he acknowledged the problems inherent in the older view, but he still wished to retain the notion of a meeting of the Apostles in Jerusalem as an historical fact recorded in Acts.23 Likewise, the Didache’s detail about the water used in baptism was a theological reflection ‘borrowed from St John’; and therefore not a case of concerns over details of ritual in the first communities. A similar explanation was offered for the regulations on fasting, the use of the Lord’s Prayer (both based, he held, on the Sermon on the Mount – which we are also left to imagine as an historical sermon recorded by Matthew) and the older injunction to pray three times daily (based on Dan 6: 11). Robinson’s greatest concern was with the Eucharist: the Didache was based on Paul’s teaching in 1 Cor combined with Luke’s Last Supper account. In relation to these sources, which Robinson viewed as representing the facts of historical practice, the author of the Didache was ready to perpetrate ‘a piece of literary perversity … and does not represent the practice of any Christian community’.24 Where the Didache differs from the others, it must be seen as a case of ‘derangement’, as where it presents a theology of the Eucharist not identical with Paul: ‘the author’s metaphor is a perverse imitation, almost a parody, of St Paul’s metaphor of the unity of the loaf’.25 Robinson was also concerned by the lack of hierarchy in the Didache, and again this showed that the document did not relate to any real community in the past. Inverting this argument allowed him to conclude: And as the instructions which [the Didache author] gives are those of the Twelve Apostles who are addressing ‘the Gentiles generally’ and not any particular community, we can draw no argument from his use of the plural ‘bishops and deacons’ to decide whether he thought of a single Church as ruled by one Bishop or several.26

Extending this principle, Robinson was able to dispose of other difficulties that had been created for the accepted view by the Didache’s silences: On the other hand the ‘silences’ of the Teaching will be no secure guide. We shall not be at liberty to conclude that the writer knew nothing of a liturgical consecration of the Eucharistic elements as the Body and Blood of the Lord, or of carrying the Eucharist to the absent, or of the Paschal fast and the Easter festival. For he may have been quite familiar with these things, and have omitted them simply for want of what he considered a definite Apostolic sanction.27

Thus the bombshell of the Didache was thoroughly defused!

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For Robinson the issues relating to the Eucharist and the three-fold structure of the hierarchy were of central importance; the Didache could not be a genuine document and also undermine them. To a lesser extent he was concerned that it seemed to impugn the image of primitive simplicity and the related notion that arguments and regulations about details belonged to a secondary, less pristine, time in the Church’s history. But the real beneficiary was the historical vision of the early Church that had its roots in Acts, Eusebius and the subsequent generations of Church historians: that tradition was secure. Robinson never wavered from his position, but rather spent much of his later years expanding it. At the end of the 1912 article he noted that ‘I make no suggestion as to a date, though I am ready to believe that both [the Epistle of ] Barnabas and [The Shepherd by] Hermas have been used’;28 by 1920 this notion had become a central plank of the argument,29 and by the time of his death – as we shall see later – it was to become the kernel of his, and others’, proof of the entire hypothesis. What we must note at this point is this: the arguments about the relationship of the Didache to the Epistle of Barnabas30 were a further elaboration of his hypothesis and not its basis. The basis of Robinson’s problem was that the Didache could not be aligned with a Church history which underpinned the ecclesial structures that appealed to that history for their authority. Connolly, Burkitt, et al. Robinson did not have to wait long to find others willing to adopt his approach to the Didache. In 1923 R.H. Connolly published an article on the Didache in the Journal of Theological Studies (in the same issue in which he collaborated with Robinson on the ‘eucharistic passages’ in Passio Polycarpi 31) which sought to advance the thesis that the earliest known evidence of the Didache is that to be found in the Didascalia apostolorum.32 Connolly based his argument for this necessarily late date (c.230 A.D.) for the Didache on that which Robinson had ‘argued with force’.33 The immediate response to Connolly’s article was a learned note by B.H. Streeter, who observed that ‘Mr Connolly … omits to notice an important piece of evidence’ that had been published from the Oxyrhynchus papyri in 1922, but otherwise Streeter did not take issue with Connolly’s hypothesis about the relationship of the Didache to the Didascalia.34 Just months later Connolly returned to the fray with a study of the fragment to which Streeter had directed attention.35 Most of the article is a learned notice of the existence and textual significance of the fragments, but Connolly mentioned in passing that one of the sentences found quoted in the fragment comes ‘in somewhat abruptly among the maxims drawn from the Great Sermon (Matthew and Luke)’, thereby showing that he was viewing the Didache through the lens of Robinson. He confirms this a few lines later by citing Robinson’s 1920 book in support of his contention that the scribe of the fragment was aware that one of his quotations ‘breaks away from the form and manner of the Teaching observed up this point’. While he

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doubted that the scribe was aware of the complex history of his passage (as set out by Robinson), Connolly did believe that the scribe’s manner of treating the text provided manuscript support for the contention that the Didache (quoting Robinson) was ‘constructed on a uniform and highly artificial plan’.36 Robinson’s theory was developing an intellectual scaffolding, but with little criticism of its foundation. At this period the only criticism of Robinson was an article arguing that Clement of Alexandria certainly knew the Didache in contrast to Robinson’s assertion that he might have used it, but the larger hypothesis that the Didache was a later composition pretending to be ‘apostolic’ was not even mentioned.37 This hypothesis received a major approbation from another quarter when F.C. Burkitt,38 then – and still today – recognised as one of the great interpreters of early Christians texts, weighed in supporting Robinson’s thesis, which he underpinned by offering detail as to the date and Sitz-im-Leben for the compilation of the Didache.39 Burkitt’s occasion for commenting on the Didache was to endorse, in a quasi-review, a Yale PhD thesis by James Muilenburg published in 1929.40 This thesis had been inspired by Robinson’s work, especially his 1920 book, where he held that the Didache was based upon the Epistle of Barnabas, and now, in Burkitt’s view, Muilenburg provided a ‘line by line’ proof of that suggestion: ‘Throughout the 170 pages of his book [Muilenburg] is occupied in proving that the Didache is dependent upon Barnabas and not vice versa’. Moreover, Muilenburg had found ‘no trace of the use of a hypothetical Jewish manual for proselytes in either document’ – itself an indication that the Didache was not genuinely primitive. Given Burkitt’s widely acknowledged expertise in determining the relationships of texts and their relative dates, this article was, no doubt, one of the most gratifying commendations a PhD thesis in early Christian theology has ever received, and it promoted Robinson’s hypothesis to the status of ‘accepted fact’ within scholarship. Burkitt, moreover, was well aware that this relationship of the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas was not an obscure detail of patristics: ‘[Robinson’s and Muilenburg’s hypothesis] might necessitate, if [the] conclusions be adopted, very serious reconstructions in current views about early Church History and Worship’. In other words, showing that the Didache was not from the first or early second centuries would undermine those who were suggesting that the traditional edifice was none too secure. With this in mind he turned to dating. He accepted, with Muilenburg, Harnack’s dating of Barnabas to 131 A.D. and placed the Didascalia at ‘about the middle of the third century’, thereby tacitly accepting Connolly’s argument that the Didascalia is the earliest witness to the Didache. He added ‘that the Didache must have been compiled between these dates, and no earlier’.41 He then noted that it was around 200 A.D. that saw ‘the beginnings of Christian archaeology, of an interest in “primitive” Christian times’. Here was an obvious location for the Didache’s compiler, and he would have shared similar interests in apostolic traditions to those seen in Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. However, while Burkitt notes that his remarks were a ‘generalized deduction’, the really important point was that what Robinson has ‘indicated and rendered extremely probable’ had now

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been ‘proved’ by Muilenburg.42 A short time later, in an obituary for Robinson, Burkitt gave his final judgement on the hypothesis: But there was yet another subject connected with early Christendom in which Armitage Robinson took a lively interest, in which indeed he is still in a minority, though in the opinion of the present writer his view will ultimately be endorsed by scholars. This is the question of the Didache, its method of composition and its historical value.43

Burkitt’s intervention of 1931 evidently encouraged renewed activity. In 1932, also basing himself on Muilenburg’s book, Connolly produced a study of the relationship of the Didache to Barnabas.44 This paper reworked the arguments that had been developed since 1920, and its central premise was that the Didache was dependent upon Barnabas. Once that dependency was accepted, the Didache ceased to be ‘apostolic’ (and so of no probative worth), and as a pseudepigraph only worthy of being placed in the pile of distained texts which scholars might designate with the appellation ‘Pseudo-’, but which simpler folk would just term ‘fakes’. However, the article made two other points worthy of note here. First, Connolly – a Catholic theologian – cited the views of Charles Bigg who in 1898 dismissed the Didache as ‘a romance of the fourth century’ because he found it incompatible with a Protestant view of the earliest Christianity, and who was the first to describe the Didache as ‘the spoiled child of criticism’.45 Connolly wanted to distance himself from Bigg’s ‘extravagant view that the Didache comes from the fourth century’ but with him he perceives of parts of the Didache as a rough patchwork of earlier materials. The second point is, almost the contradiction of the first, that ‘the compiler of the Didache is … not quite so artless a writer as at first glance he may appear’.46 But this is a back-handed compliment: the compiler ‘is by no means the innocent that he looks’. In 1933 Gregory Dix, now famous as a liturgist, produced a study to show that the Didache not only post-dated the gospels, but relied on Tatian’s Diatessaron (a text usually dated to c.170).47 This dependence would not only show that the Didache was a late text, but that it came from a circle that was ultimately disowned by the churches. Dix made explicit reference to his dependence on Robinson for his understanding of the Didache in relationship to other texts: ‘the late Dr Armitage Robinson – never more scholarly nor more acute than in his neglected Donnellan Lectures [of 1920]’.48 This prompted Connolly to reply with an article of the same title as Dix’s and ‘to welcome him as an ally’.49 Dix had argued, in addition to the relationship of the Didache with the Diatessaron, that Isaac of Nineveh (seventh century) had known the Didache, but for Connolly this additional point made Dix a troublesome ally. Connolly realised that with every new notice of the diffusion of the Didache, more difficulties were being heaped up against a later dating and of its being an anomaly within the tradition, so he pointed out that Isaac could have obtained what appeared to be Didache-material from the Apostolic Constitutions and the similarity with the Diatessaron could be

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explained by both being traced to an ‘interpolation’ found in the Codex Bezae. Dix did not reply to this criticism, so we cannot know whether he was stung by it or not, but his adherence to the Robinson hypothesis was not shaken: he would remain an ally, and would ultimately give Robinson’s views an extraordinary currency. Robinson’s final contribution now appeared posthumously, brought to conclusion and seen through the press by Connolly.50 While it added nothing new, it is perhaps their most succinct statement that once one accepts that the Didache depends on Barnabas, it follows that it cannot be the work of an Apostle who witnessed the resurrection,51 and therefore, a fortiori, it has no apostolic authority. Alas for the ‘British School’, Didache scholarship in the rest of the world was not standing still. Gradually an ever-widening number of scholars were coming to appreciate the significance of Bryennios’ discovery of an early text used by the followers of Jesus, which could throw new light on their researches. This group included the eminent Jewish scholar Louis Finkelstein, who in 1929 published what would become a ground-breaking article52 for Christian liturgists for the remainder of the twentieth century.53 Finkelstein’s interest was in the origins of the Birkat Ha-Mazon – the blessing before meals – and he recognised that the Didache’s Eucharistic Prayers were a witness to the form of the blessing from a time earlier than any extant Jewish source. Finkelstein showed how the Didache exhibited an earlier stage of what would come to be the traditional form of the Birkat, and so was not only a very early Christian document from a time before ‘Christianity’ and ‘Judaism’ were formally distinct, but that one could locate the Didache within a continuity of practice evolving from between the Judaism of the Second Temple and that of Rabbinic Judaism. In Christian terms, this assertion of the Didache’s Jewish roots was tantamount to declaring that it came from the earliest generations, and, contrary to Robinson’s opening statement, it reflected the actual usage of communities. Even more problematically, that usage would necessarily touch upon the ritual meals of Jesus; and hence the Didache must be evidence for early Christian eucharistic practice. The reply from the British School came in 1935 with an article by R.D. Middleton.54 The article’s opening sentence acknowledged its indebtedness to the work Robinson, Connolly, and Burkitt, and takes as fact that the Didache made use of the Shepherd of Hermas and was very largely dependent on the Epistle of Barnabas, the material from which he re-arranged to suit his own purpose; and also that his mind is stored with scriptural phrases which he evidently quotes from memory.55

From this standpoint it made no sense to proceed with any study of the Eucharistic Prayers qua tale as any real connection between the Didache’s text and actual liturgical practice had already been ruled out. However, this did not stop Middleton. In what must rank as one of the most crass and befuddled pieces of writing ever

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to be published in a learned journal, he proceeded to compare later Jewish forms with the Christian forms of the Didache – completely ignoring the careful methodology developed by Finkelstein. Not surprisingly, he found that there was little in common between them, while incidentally implying that Finkelstein’s comparison was incompetent! Having secured his neat picture of early Eucharistic Prayer by rubbishing any disturbing evidence, he brought his charade of learning to a conclusion thus: I do not think that he [the author of the Didache] has made any useful contribution to our knowledge of the Early Church, or that his work is worthy of anything like the serious attention that was at one time given to it. There is in it nothing of value that is original.56

Streeter and Creed The British School had never been without its critics, even in Britain. As early as 1921, Vernon Bartlet, who had written on the Didache as early as 1904,57 challenged Robinson for not taking into account the positive evidence in the Didache for its antiquity and pointed out how Robinson’s position was at variance with a range of scholarship.58 But it was not until 1936 that one of the major figures in British New Testament/early Christian studies offered a sustained critique. B.H. Streeter – in one of his last articles for he was killed in an air crash in the following year – saw himself as ‘a knight-errant … hearing repeated cries of a distressed damsel’ [the Didache] who was now, despite delays, riding to her rescue.59 As befits such a knight, his attack was both well aimed (Robinson, Connolly, Muilenburg, and ‘my old friend Burkitt’ are all identified) and swift (less than six pages). He showed that the historical method by which Robinson and Connolly had explained dependencies between texts did not produce reliable results. In no case were the proofs exhaustive of other explanations, and Streeter supported his claim by analogous cases from the transmission of the gospels. The British School, and Connolly in particular, had not only not proven their case, but they had also created barriers to other scholars seeing the evidence clearly: Dom Connolly has made it impossible for any future scholar to reverse his hypothesis and argue that Barnabas used the Didache. He has left unweakened the hypothesis that they used a common source, which neither [text] has incorporated without considerable modification.60

Streeter showed that arguments for datings from the late second century were inherently unreliable for the appearances could be saved just as well by reversing the order of the items of evidence in every case. Moreover, a claim such as Burkitt had made that the author of the Didache shared an agenda with Irenaeus and Hippolytus was problematic because:

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the form of church order represented in the Didache is one which by the time of Hippolytus was regarded as the reverse of the orthodox. And church order was not a matter in regard to which orthodoxy was at that moment indifferent. A great controversy was going on between the church authorities and the Montanists in regard to the authority claimed by the prophets; and in support of their views the Montanists appealed to primitive usage.61

With this comment the Montanists now entered the debate on the Didache – we shall hear of them again, but for now their importance is as a premise in Streeter’s dismissal of the late second-century date. Anyone arguing for such a date is left with the fact that ‘the church order of the Didache … is equally objectionable both from the orthodox and the Montanist standpoint’. Streeter then pointed out the necessary implication: This can only reflect an actual historic situation – the break-down of an old system and the beginning of a new. The situation is one which we can readily believe to have existed between A.D. 90 and 100, but with difficulty either at a much earlier or a much later date.62

It is important to take careful account of the logical structure of Streeter’s complex argument,63 because it would later baffle his opponents. If the Didache were late second century, then it would be Montanist (Step 1). If it were Montanist, then it would not be acceptable to the orthodox (Step 2). But it was acceptable to the orthodox [as Connolly has shown in his work on the Didascalia] (Step 3). Therefore, it could not have originated in the late second century (Step 4). Consequently, as a corollary, the Didache could not have a Montanist origin (Step 4.1). Connolly in 1937 would accept Step 1 without understanding that such acceptance entailed a contradiction at Step 2; while Vokes in 1938 would adopt Streeter as an ally, and accept Step 1, without noting the additional fact adduced at Step 3 which undermines the first premise, or that the ‘claim’ for a Montanist origin was purely hypothetical. However, while not paying close heed to Streeter’s logic, his attack clearly had hit its target: in its aftermath Connolly renewed his efforts and published four articles seeking to refute Streeter or remove weaknesses that Streeter had identified.64 With regard to textual issues, and the accusation that he had reversed the order of evidence, Connolly simply repeats bits of his earlier arguments. In his reliance on ever less significant grammatical details one suspects that he knew his case had been fundamentally damaged by Streeter. However, what fundamentally motivated him with regard to the Didache was ‘the appalling vista’ of an early Church that did not share later views of the Eucharist and order – a vision that now returned to a prominence not seen since Robinson in 1912. So long as the debate focused on the priority of the Epistle of Barnabas – which was the chosen battlefield from 1920 to 1936 – the debate could appear to be one about intertextuality, which had the curious consequence that the Didache was irrelevant for discussions of the life of the first-century churches. Now with the Barnabas

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argument, at least, inconclusive, Connolly actually adopted the notion that the Didache was a Montanist document! In an article of 1937 he advanced the notion that ‘the prophets’ mentioned in the Didache must be Montanist prophets, and that the fasting65 mentioned there must be part of their corruption!66 This was surely desperation because (1) it adopted a favourite Protestant argument from the time of the Reformation that organised fasting was an indication of corruption, and (2) the more Connolly pushed the Didache towards the Montanists, the greater the difficulty – as Streeter had pointed out but which he did not take on board – in explaining how the Didache was so acceptable to later canonical texts such as the Didascalia apostolorum. In the aftermath of Streeter’s demolition of the dependency of the Didache on Barnabas, Connolly developed a new attack on the Didache which was far closer to his underlying concerns.67 This was to stress that the Didache might refer to both an ‘agape’ and a Eucharist. Those elements from Didache 14 that Connolly found consistent with the notion that there was a direct historical continuity between the action and words of Jesus at the Last Supper and later practice were taken as Eucharistic; the other material related to an ‘agape, understood to be another form of ritual meal whose very vagueness has often made it a convenient dumping ground for the unwanted meal evidence of the first few centuries’.68 The growing desperation of Connolly’s position seems to have inspired what was, in effect, the coup de grâce to the whole School, at least as a force in early Christian, as distinct from liturgical, studies.69 In 1938, J.M. Creed, building upon Streeter and noting that Connolly’s four replies were increasingly feeble and off the point, produced a survey of the School’s output from 1912 onwards. He noted how they had not really addressed the fact that the Didache did have very primitive elements and that, for all the ingenuity of its supposed later compiler, it did not offer a cover story for its own invention – something of a standard element in pseudepigraphs. Creed patiently traced the weakness of the each successive contribution to the debate by Robinson, Connolly, Muilenburg and Burkitt, and he noted how at every turn, key historical issues were not addressed. The article was patient and devastating, and Creed made it clear that more was at stake in the dispute than a tussle between philologists. He began his article by citing ‘the veteran Roman Catholic scholar F.X. Funk’ and his opinion on the Didache from the beginning of the twentieth century to show that there was no necessary disjunction between taking an early date for the Didache and accepting Catholic theological positions. He closed his article by noting that a later dating would create far greater problems for a ‘church historian of the late second and third centuries’ than the School were prepared to consider, and that the most obvious reading of the Didache was that ‘the Eucharistic prayers of the Didache may well be older than the Didache itself’.70 In the aftermath of Creed’s work there were some further rumblings, notably two articles by W. Telfer71 in response to Creed, but this controversy was finished.

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F.E. Vokes In 1938, the same year that Creed demolished Connolly, a new late dating for the Didache arose from a very different quarter. F.E. Vokes published his doctoral thesis in book form with the title The Riddle of the Didache: Fact or Fiction, Heresy or Catholicism?72 At first sight this work would appear to belong firmly to the British School as its opening pages acknowledged all its members from Robinson onwards. However, it included many other figures, older and more recent – including Streeter, who saw difficulties or heresies in the Didache. Vokes agreed with those who could find Ebionitism, Antinominianism, Montanism and Paulicianism in it.73 Indeed, the Didache was so pervaded with heresies of one sort or another that it was clearly from a time after corruption had entered the apostolic church. The Didache was indeed, using Bigg’s term from 1898, ‘the spoilt child’ of early Christian studies.74 Moreover, with scholars from across the theological spectrum in agreement that it was late, who could doubt it. It pleased Vokes that he could list Catholics and Presbyterians alike condemning the Didache: it was not just one party or faction that condemned it, but all careful scholars. However, for himself, the proof of its late date and perverse origins was that the Didache proposed a religion of ‘works’ and so had rejected justification by grace which he held Paul to have preached. What was the Didache? It was the earliest evidence of that corruption that was overtaking the Church, and from which it would not be rescued until the Reformation. In adopting this line, Vokes stood firmly in an older tradition of Protestant scholarship;75 and completely apart from Robinson and Connolly whose original aim had been to defend a traditional image of the Church which stressed continuity between later and apostolic times. Vokes’ book contained little original material: he repeated the standard arguments about relative dependencies between texts, took over every piece of evidence of the Didache’s late date, and declared that it was simultaneously both the work of a Montanist and a near perfect example of Frükatholizismus. His originality lay in providing one of the few restatements by a mainstream scholar of that traditional Protestant approach that took advantage not only of new material, such as the Didache, but also of early twentieth-century advances in biblical studies. However, Vokes’ book had a curious history in that later scholars on the ‘Catholic’ wing would quote it to support their continuing hesitations about the Didache. Vokes cited the Catholic Connolly to support the Didache’s Montanism so as to remove it from his picture of the apostolic un-Catholic church; later Dix would cite the Protestant Vokes to remove the Didache so as not to spoil his view of the apostolic church as Catholic. Vokes returned to the topic of the Didache on three occasions later in life.76 On the first two occasions the old fire was kept alive, and we get a flavour in this comment:

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we tend to treat the Didache as a spoilt child, as though it were a document which the Church honoured as a relic of the earliest period of its history. Neither its textual history, so far as we know it, nor the references in ancient writers support this view at all.77

By 1993 his old passion had died down and had been replaced with a certain openness to the various ways of reading the text. Towards the beginning of the article he writes: In 1938 the present writer accepted the thesis of Armitage Robinson, R.H. Connolly and James Muilenburg that the writer of the Didache used Barnabas in his compilation of the Two Ways and, while not insisting upon this now, would draw attention to the more systematic arrangement of the Didache.78

He then proceeds to give a fairly inclusive survey of studies from the 1950s to the early 1980s, noting how that scholarship was tending to place the Didache either in the first century or the early second century – and how the bone of contention was now whether Matthew’s gospel depended on the Didache or vice versa, or both on another source.79 However, at the conclusion of the paper it becomes apparent that the new studies may have shaken, but had not destroyed his old arguments for a late dating: Whether one follows those who see the Didache as descriptive of an actual contemporary church or as prescriptive of an ideal church, or [as] a collection of attempts to reform contemporary abuses with no systematic plan or complete picture of the church, it is not possible to fix its date within narrower limits than before the end of the second century.80

He acknowledges, however, that with the exception of the occasional author who adopts the position of the British School or Vokes’ own theory from 1938, he was now virtually alone in this position of categorical agnosticism. A Complex Dispute It is almost the centenary of this debate and we can see it in its larger perspective. On the one hand it was a very modern debate. Not only was it carried out with the precision of modern technical scholarship, but it was, for its time, very ecumenical: an Anglican cathedral dean working in close collaboration with a Benedictine monk, each valuing and supporting the work of the other. It also seemed to break new ground in that these two men were, in turn, taken up by others such Burkitt and Vokes (who accepted their findings) or by Bartlet, Streeter, or Creed (who challenged them).

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But beneath this veneer of modernity there lurked much older questions and approaches to scholarship. The fundamental force that drove the School was the notion that formally defined dogma, which claimed its origins in historical events, would not be found wanting in the historical record. Later dogma and earlier history, of their very nature, would uphold one another.81 This was the common element uniting Robinson, Connolly, and Vokes: their confidence in their doctrinal assertions allowed them to promote a theory, and then search for the evidence. Although they were accounted some of the finest historians of the early church in their day, they had not made the move, in W.H.C. Frend’s phrase, ‘from dogma to history’.82 For them, there was an indissoluble link between the historical tradition of practice which was accepted by them as the will of Christ, and the willed intentions and actions of the historical Christ. This theological certainty was itself considered an historical fact which reduced contrary evidence to ‘noise’ within the system that had to be explained away. We might, as a consequence, characterise the School’s historical epistemology as being, at its core, doctrinal, rather than radically empirical; and the distinction continues to lurk in many debates about Christian origins today. Furthermore, although each of the member of the British School were expert in noting change and development within the history of the churches, none of them had a sufficiently sophisticated sense of ‘the development of doctrine’ – as it was then called – to see just the expanse of change that a theory of ‘development’ must embrace.83 In this they shared an attitude to early texts more characteristic of literalist biblical studies than that usually found among historians for whom change is, paradoxically, the only constant. Lastly, while scholars across several denominations made common cause over the Didache, this unity of purpose should not blind us to the very different agendas being pursued. All the members of the School were interested in the ‘apostolic church’ and ‘apostolic period’ – the curious time before ‘the death of the last [of the twelve] apostles’. But for Robinson this was the time of perfection and completion of the church before the closure of the content of Christianity: therefore, it was imperative for him to find the structure of Holy Order and the Eucharist before that moment. If any element of later dogma was not already present by that moment, it could not be seen as a legitimate development. By contrast, for Connolly it was continuity within a tradition that was most important. Hence Connolly’s constant concern was about the Eucharist, a topic to which he also devoted much attention apart from the debate over the Didache.84 For all concerned there were theological issues more precious than scholarship at stake – hence the intensity of their dispute about dating the Didache – but those issues were not identical for the various allies.

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Afterlife The writings of J.A. Robinson, R.H. Connolly, and F.E. Vokes may now seem to belong to a far off world whose assumptions and concerns we do not share. Moreover, they all belonged to that often ignored borderland between biblical studies and church history, with little influence outside the narrow circle of historical theologians. However, despite the refutations of Streeter and Creed, and the advances during the last 70 years, the work of the British School is still having impact. Each year a new group of students arrives to study the early church. They grab the most convenient textbook they see in the library and repeat once more the conclusions of survey works whose authors give vague references such as ‘there is a dispute about this text; it could date from any time between the first and fourth centuries’. One must then use valuable time seeking to eradicate the idea – a process that always seems more difficult than that of implanting the skills of discerning good work! But the British School has also had a more profound effect on scholarship. Their ideas gained an authority and circulation well beyond the bounds of patristic scholarship, when they were taken up by the next generation of scholars who as liturgists were concerned with the problems the Didache posed to the traditional history of the Eucharist. By far the most brilliant and influential member of this generation was Dom Gregory Dix whose book The Shape of the Liturgy not only became a standard work on the history of liturgy, but also influenced the reform of the liturgy in many Western churches in the latter half of the twentieth century.85 Dix pre-empted the problems that the Didache might cause by placing this footnote at the first mention of the text: The rite of Didache ix. And x. is often claimed as an exception [to Dix’s theory of the classic ‘shape’ of the Eucharist]. On the reasons for regarding this as intended for the agape and not for the eucharist proper (which is treated separately in Did. xiv.) cf. Dom R.H. Connolly, Downside Review, LV. (1937), p. 477 sq.; F.E. Vokes, The Riddle of the Didache, London, 1938, p. 177 sq.; Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, xi. 539 sq.; cf. also pp. 90 sqq. below.86

Dix’s work was used as a basic resource by several generations of scholars, and most liturgists in its aftermath gave scant attention to the Didache – it was not their text but that of patristic scholars or those who taught ‘NT background’. It was only in the late 1970s that some of the issues lurking behind the concerns of the British School were finally grasped, and the Didache began to reappear in studies of the earliest liturgy.87 Through Dix’s work the Didache, often up-braided as a ‘spoilt child’ and sometimes defended as a ‘damsel’, became the ‘Cinderella’ of liturgical and early Christian studies, and one suspects that, if I might pursue the metaphor, she has not yet been brought to the ball!

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Endnotes 1 K. Neiderwimmer, The Didache (Minneapolis, 1998), p. 43. 2 To be preferred to ‘English School’ as they were influential throughout the British Isles. 3 However, in a valuable paper on how underlying assumptions about canonical texts or the nature of the ‘early church’ generate curious attitudes to the Didache, J.A. Draper mentions in a footnote Vokes, Robinson and Connolly, and describes them as ‘the “English School”’ who promoted the “fraud” hypothesis: “Torah and Troublesome Apostles in the Didache Community”’, Novum Testamentum, 33 (1991), pp. 347–72 at 351, n.17. 4 C.N. Jefford, The Saying of Jesus in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (Leiden, 1989) gives a very accurate survey of the positions adopted around what he describes ‘the Robinson-Muilenburg thesis’ (pp. 14–5) as part of his survey of the history of the interpretation of the Didache in 100 years following Bryennios’ edition (pp. 1–21). 5 For a concise statement of the generally accepted position prior to the renewed interest in the Didache that followed on the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, see H. Watt, ‘Didache’ in J. Hastings (ed.), Dictionary of the Apostolic Church (Edinburgh, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 296–303; Watt was one of the first to take issue with Robinson’s 1912 statement of the central thesis of the ‘British School’. Watt’s article has frequently been overlooked in Didache studies but he deserves notice as one of the first scholars to notice that Clement of Alexandria considered the Didache as ‘scripture’. 6 On the attack on the scriptures by Porphyry, the essential guide is R.M. Berchman, Porphyry Against the Christians (Leiden, 2005), pp. 56–71. 7 See J.Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (London, 1990). 8 See S. McKendrick, In a Monastery Library: Preserving Codex Sinaiticus and the Greek Written Heritage (London, 2006) for an account of the discovery. 9 T. O’Loughlin, ‘The Early Church’ in D. Cohn-Sherbok and J.M. Court (eds), Religious Diversity in the Graeco-Roman World: A Survey of Recent Scholarship, (Sheffield, 2001), pp. 124–42. 10 See G. Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (London, 1999) for a closely argued example of this awareness. 11 T. O’Loughlin, The Didache: A Window on the Earliest Christians (London, 2010), pp. 1–5. 12 An example of this trend to see discoveries as not offering fundamental challenges to the widely accepted picture can be seen in a work by a scripture scholar, who saw himself as an exponent of an historical methodology, writing for theologians who wrote a work in 1984 on the ‘apostolic churches’ but managed to avoid mentioning the Didache: R.E. Brown, The Churches the Apostles left behind (London, 1984). 13 Watt, ‘Didache’. 14 J.V. Bartlet, ‘Didache’, in J. Hastings (ed.), Dictionary of the Bible (Edinburgh, 1904), Extra Volume, pp. 438–51. 15 He assumed that the prayers in the Didache were for use after a ‘consecration’. 16 Chapman assumed that the Letter to the Corinthians was the work of Pope St Clement and written in the last decade of the first century; cf. A. Gregory, ‘I Clement: An Introduction’, Expository Times, 117 (2006), pp. 223–30 for a summary of modern scholarship on the question.

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17 J. Chapman, ‘Didache’ in The Catholic Encyclopedia (London, 1908), vol. 4, pp. 779–81; Chapman takes account of the work of Bartlet but accepts the evidence with less reservation and so holds that the Didache must date from well inside the first century. 18 T.F. Taylor, ‘Robinson, Joseph Armitage (1858–1933)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online edn. 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article 35797, accessed 22 Sept 2010]. 19 J.A. Robinson, ‘The Problem of the Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 13 (1912), pp. 339–56. 20 Robinson, ‘Problem of the Didache’, p. 340. 21 By his use of a capital for ‘Apostle’, Robinson indicates that he was thinking in terms of one of the ‘The Twelve Apostles’ of Christian memory rather than as designation used of many in the early decades of Christianity. 22 Robinson, ‘Problem of the Didache’, p. 343. 23 For an introduction to the debates that took place about this meeting in Jerusalem that Luke describes in Acts and the need to harmonise it with what Paul says in Galatians (it was one of those harmonization issues upon which appeared to turn the veracity, and, therefore, the inspiration, of the Bible) see K. Lake, ‘Note XVI. The Apostolic Council of Jerusalem’ in F.J. Foakes Jackson and K. Lake (eds), The Beginnings of Christianity, Part 1: the Acts of the Apostles (London, 1933), vol. 5, pp. 195–212. 24 Robinson, ‘Problem of the Didache’, p. 345. 25 Ibid., pp. 346, 347. 26 Ibid., pp. 354. 27 Ibid., p. 355. 28 Ibid., pp. 355–6. 29 Barnabas, Hermas, and the Didache: Being the Donnellan Lectures Delivered before the University of Dublin in 1920 (London, 1920). 30 For a summary of contemporary scholarship on this text, see J. Carleton Paget, ‘The Epistle of Barnabas’, Expository Times, 117 (2006), pp. 441–6. 31 J.A. Robinson and R.H. Connolly, ‘The Doxology in the Prayer of St Polycarp’, Journal of Theological Studies, 24 (1923), pp. 141–6. 32 R.H. Connolly, ‘The Use of the Didache in the Didascalia’, Journal of Theological Studies, 24 (1924), pp. 147–56; on the Didascalia, see A. Stewart-Sykes, The Didascalia Apostolorum (Turnhout, 2009). 33 Connolly, ‘The Use of the Didache’, p. 154. 34 B.H Streeter, ‘Didache i 3-ii 1’, Journal of Theological Studies, 25 (1924), 78. 35 R.H. Connolly, ‘New Fragments of the Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 25 (1924), pp. 151–3. 36 Connolly, ‘The Use of the Didache’, p. 153. 37 F.R.M. Hitchcock, ‘Did Clement of Alexandria know the Didache?’, Journal of Theological Studies, 24 (1923), pp. 397–401. 38 F.F. Bethune-Baker, ‘Burkitt, Franis Crawford (1864–1935)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 2004) [http//www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32180, accessed 26 Sept 2010]. 39 F.C. Burkitt, ‘Barnabas and the Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 33 (1931), pp. 25–7. 40 J. Muilenburg, The Literary Relations of the Epistle of Barnabas and the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (Marburg 1929). It might be objected that since Muilenburg was an American this makes labels such as ‘British School’ or the ‘English School’

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inappropriate; however, the debate was largely conducted in Britain and relied to a large extent on a network of relationships between British scholars all of whom knew one another over a long period, and all of whom published extensively over a long period in the Journal of Theological Studies. Muilenburg was an outlier to the debate, and was admitted to it through Burkitt’s article. Burkitt, ‘Barnabas and the Didache’, p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. F.C. Burkitt, ‘Joseph Armitage Robinson’, Journal of Theological Studies, 34 (1933), pp. 225–31 at p. 230. R.H. Connolly, ‘The Didache in Relation to the Epistle of Barnabas’, Journal of Theological Studies, 33 (1932), pp. 237–53. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid., p. 253. G. Dix, ‘Didache and Diatessaron’, Journal of Theological Studies, 34 (1933), pp. 242–50. Ibid., p. 244. R.H. Connolly, ‘Didache and Diatessaron’, Journal of Theological Studies, 34 (1933), pp. 346–7. J.A. Robinson with R.H. Connolly, ‘The Epistle of Barnabas and the Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 35 (1934), pp. 113–46, 225–48. Ibid., p. 225. L. Finkelstein, ‘The Birkat Ha-mazon’, Jewish Quarterly Review [new series], 19 (1929), pp. 211–62. See E. Mazza, The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer (Collegeville, MN, 1995), pp. 12–41. R.D. Middleton, ‘The Eucharistic Prayers of the Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 36 (1935), pp. 259–67; Middleton refers to Finkelstein’s article on p. 263, n.3. Ibid., p. 259. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 267. [J.]V. Bartlet, ‘The Didache Reconsidered’, Journal of Theological Studies, 22 (1921), pp. 239–49. B.H. Streeter, ‘The Much-belaboured Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 37 (1936), pp. 369–74. Ibid., p. 372. Ibid., p. 373. Ibid., p. 373. Streeter’s argument is a hypothetical syllogism in the form of modus tollendo tollens. R.H. Connolly, ‘Barnabas and the Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 38 (1937), pp. 165–7; ‘Canon Streeter on the Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 38 (1937), pp. 364–79 [a work Connolly acknowledges was already in press when news of Streeter’s death reached him]; ‘The Didache and Montanism’, Downside Review, 55 (1937), pp. 339–47; and ‘Agape and Eucharist in the Didache’, Downside Review, 55 (1937), pp. 477–89. On the place of fasting in the Didache, see T. O’Loughlin, ‘The Didache as a Source for Picturing the Earliest Christian Communities: The Case of the Practice of Fasting’, in K. O’Mahony (ed.), Christian Origins: Worship, Belief and Society (Sheffield 2003), pp. 83–112.

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66 Connolly, ‘The Didache and Montanism’, pp. 341, 344. 67 Connolly, ‘Agape and Eucharist in the Didache’. 68 A. McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford 1999), p. 22. 69 J.M. Creed, ‘The Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 39 (1938), pp. 370–387. 70 Ibid., pp. 386–7. 71 W. Telfer, ‘The Didache and the Apostolic Synod of Antioch’, Journal of Theological Studies, 40 (1939), pp. 133–46, 258–71; and ‘The Plot of the Didache’, Journal of Theological Studies, 44 (1944), pp. 141–51. 72 F.E. Vokes, The Riddle of the Didache: Fact or Fiction, Heresy or Catholicism? (London, 1938). 73 Ibid., p. 5. 74 Ibid., p. 6, quoting Bigg. 75 See Smith, 1990 for an analysis of this tradition of early church studies. 76 F.E. Vokes, ‘The Didache and the Canon of the New Testament’, Studia Evangelica, 3,2 (1964), pp. 427–36; F.E. Vokes, ‘The Didache – Still Debated’, Church Quarterly, 3 (1970), pp. 57–62; and F.E. Vokes, ‘Life and Order in an Early Church: the Didache’, Aufsteig und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, 2,27,1 (1993), pp. 209–33. 77 Vokes, ‘The Didache and the Canon of the New Testament’, pp. 427–8. 78 Vokes, ‘Life and Order in an Early Church: the Didache’, p. 215. 79 On this issue in current studies of the Didache, see A.J.P. Garrow, The Gospel of Matthew’s Dependence on the Didache (London, 2004); and there is a summary of the status quaestionis in O’Loughlin, The Didache: A Window on the Earliest Christians, pp. 24–7. 80 Vokes, ‘Life and Order in an Early Church: the Didache’, p. 231. 81 This element of theological logic had been identified by Streeter in 1936, p. 373, when he wrote: ‘What Irenaeus and Hippolytus put forward as primitive and apostolic was probably far from being either; but it was the kind of teaching and church order which the church in their day regarded as orthodox – and therefore as certainly apostolic’. Streeter had identified the linkage of existing practice, authority, and apostolicity being viewed as necessarily in agreement that drove the later second-century writers; but it was the same logic that inspired the early twentieth-century debate. 82 W.H.C. Frend, From Dogma to History: How Our Understanding of the Early Church Developed (London, 2003). 83 T. O’Loughlin, ‘Medieval church history: Beyond apologetics, after development: the awkward memories’, The Way, 38 (1998), pp. 65–76. 84 For example, in the same issue of the Journal of Theological Studies that contained Creed’s article, the article next to it was by R.H. Connolly: ‘The Eucharistic Prayer of Hippolytus’, Journal of Theological Studies, 39 (1938), pp. 350–369. 85 The Shape was first published in London in 1945 and has remained in print ever since; see McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists, pp. 19–30; and P. Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins (London, 2004), pp. 51–6, for a critique of Dix’s approach. 86 G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London, 1945), p. 48, n.2. 87 For example, the first liturgist to grasp the fact that early Eucharistic Prayer did not contain an ‘institution narrative’/‘words of consecration’ was L. Ligier, ‘The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer’, Studia Liturgica, 9 (1973), pp. 161–85.

Chapter 12

Religion, Politics and Sport in Western Europe, c.1870–1939 Hugh McLeod

I shall begin with two quotations from early twentieth-century France.1 The first provides a vivid illustration of the political and religious antagonisms which divided this and many other European countries at that time. The second touches more directly on my theme, by showing how these divisions were shaping the development of sport. The first quotation comes from the recollections, recorded some 50 years later, of a schoolmaster who, soon after arriving at his first post, in a village near Toulouse, went to pay his respects to the parish priest. His gesture of friendship was politely rebuffed by the priest in the following words: Castelmayran is divided into two fiercely opposed clans, the republicans and the clericals; they keep their distance from one another, and they have sworn an eternal hatred. One side goes to the Café Bayrou and the other to the Café Bouché. Young left-wingers have their own dance hall and so do young rightwingers. Each clan has its own grocer and its own butcher … Everyone here is classified, stamped. People only associate with their own side; they run away from the others. We, the priest and the teacher are regarded as implacable enemies. You certainly have all my sympathy, but in our own interests we will not meet again. If someone caught you entering the presbytery, I would lose all my reputation with my own congregation; they would try to get the bishop to move me. For your part, the republicans would hate you, and would make such difficulties that whether you liked it or not you would have to leave.2

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Coullié, was addressing the Union of Catholic Gymnastic and Rifle Societies as follows: Catholicism and gymnastics – the bringing together of these two words may surprise some people. However, we can no longer ignore the fact that Freemasonry, in its fight to the death against religion, has mounted a general attack on the children and young people of France. For a long time it has been using sport as a means of action and influence … Courage and blessing! These two words … express my personal feelings with regard to the work which you are doing with so much devotion … and since the current struggle is all about the preservation of the faith … accept the struggle on this ground.3

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The rise of modern European sport in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place in societies deeply divided along the lines of politics, religion and class. My argument in this chapter has three main points: 1. That sport in this period acted as a powerful symbol, expressing the identities of nations or of social, political and religious groups within each nation; 2. That sport became in this period a major arena for battles between these rival groups; 3. That sport can be used as a litmus-test by means of which the extent and nature of the divisions within each society can be measured. I shall begin by outlining the rise of modern sport in this period, going on then to discuss the major cleavages within the European societies of the time, before analysing these three levels of interaction between religion, politics and sport. I The period between about 1860 and 1914 saw a great growth in the numbers of those playing sports, watching them or following them in the newspapers, as well as in the amount of time which sports enthusiasts were able to devote to these activities. The precise chronology varied from country to country, but Britain offers a clear example of the sequence in which this sporting passion spread step by step to all sections of the population. The growth in sporting practice in the 1860s was still mainly among middle-class men; by the 1870s it was also affecting men of the lower middle and working classes; by the 1880s and 1890s middle and upper-class women; and after 1900 working-class women.4 The sports boom of the later nineteenth century had two main roots: gymnastics and what were called ‘English sports’. In many parts of continental Europe enthusiasm for the former preceded and for a long time exceeded interest in the latter. Nineteenth-century gymnastics had its main root in the German states. The most influential figure was F.L. Jahn who, in the wake of Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon in 1806, had set up a network of gymnastic clubs as part of a patriotic agenda of forming disciplined and physically fit men, able to defend the fatherland.5 Bismarck played an unintended part in the spread of gymnastics, as gymnastic and shooting clubs proliferated in other European countries in the wake of defeats by Bismarck’s Prussia. This happened in Denmark in the 1860s6 and then in France in the 1870s and 1880s. Gymnastics became compulsory in French boys’ schools in 1880, and from 1882 schools were encouraged to form ‘school battalions’, each with its own flag, uniform and guns, and a combined programme of gymnastics and military activity.7 If this was an example of gymnastics promoted ‘from above’, the patriotic spirit was equally central to some of the movements

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which developed ‘from below’, notably the Czech sokol, which became the main embodiment of nationalist feeling and opposition to Austrian rule. The ‘English sports’ included football, rugby, cricket, hockey, athletics, rowing – as well as the elite sports of golf and tennis. These were essentially competitive, the competition being sometimes individual, but more often between two teams. The stress was on moral, even more than physical, fitness. Sports, especially team sports, were seen as character-building. Typical of the vast nineteenth-century British literature on the moral benefits of sport were the claims made by the Rev Edward Thring, who served as headmaster of Uppingham, a boys’ public school, from 1853 to 1887. He was an enthusiast for most kinds of sport, but the many sports practised at his school had different functions and there was a hierarchy between them. Swimming, skating and rambling were mainly for fun; gym for training the body; athletics for encouraging a competitive spirit; but at the top were football and cricket, which were said to teach the message ‘never cheat, never funk, never lose temper, never brag’.8 Thring was an exponent of the ‘Muscular Christianity’ that was a powerful influence on British sporting ideology in the second half of the nineteenth century. The pioneers in the 1850s of what eventually became a much more widespread and multifarious movement were Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, both Broad Church Anglicans and Christian Socialists.9 In promoting the association between Christianity and sport, they were driven especially by two concerns characteristic of that period: first, the ‘Condition of England’ and second, the reaction against what seemed to many to be the excessive and damaging influence of Evangelicals and Tractarians on English religion. The provision of sporting and other leisure facilities could be a means of improving the lives of the workers, while sport could provide an arena in which members of different social classes could meet, and mutual suspicions and antipathies might be softened. At the same time the Christian sportsman rejected the ‘Manicheanism’ which had led many religious zealots to separate the things of the spirit from the things of the body, the sacred from the profane: Christianity was a gospel for ‘the whole man’ and all aspects of life were of Christian concern. Muscular Christianity soon outgrew its origins, attracting followers from all sections of the Church and from all points on the political spectrum. But traces of this original vision remained, including the view of sport as morally beneficial, the ethos of ‘fair play’ and resistance to the trends towards commercialisation and professionalisation. The sports boom of the later nineteenth century was made possible by a combination of rising real wages and reduced hours of work. A clear example of this was the introduction of the Saturday half-holiday by many British industries in the 1870s, which established Saturday afternoon as the main time for sport of all kinds, and provided an immediate boost to working-class participation and spectatorship.10 But churches, political parties and governments made a major contribution to the boom by encouraging sport and providing facilities – often in fierce competition with one another.

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The years around 1870 saw the beginnings in many parts of Europe of mass politics, involving large sections of the male population of all classes, rather than small property-owning and educated elites. For example, in the 1870s manhood suffrage was introduced in both the German Empire and the French Third Republic, while in the United Kingdom, the Second and Third Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 enfranchised a large part of the working class. New political parties were formed to represent the interests of the newly enfranchised voters – Socialists, peasant parties, anti-Semitic parties, Catholic parties, Protestant parties – while older Liberal and Conservative parties were forced to widen their appeal and adopt new methods of winning support. Meanwhile, nationalist parties arose to champion the rights and promote the claims of the minority nationalities within the multi-national Empires that encompassed large parts of Europe. The later nineteenth century therefore saw intense competition for votes, with a vituperative press often having a key role in the denigration of political opponents and the hostile stereotyping of their followers. At the same time the churches were often making vigorous efforts to strengthen their popular base, especially where competition from secular ideologies was strong: in Britain, church-based ‘clubs’ and ‘institutes’ were already multiplying in the 1850s and 1860s. The first may have been F.W. Robertson’s Working Men’s Institute founded in Brighton in 1848 as a response to the political convulsions of that year and to the ‘width and depth of the gulf’ between the working class and the clergy.11 Peter Bailey found 20 examples of similar bodies founded in the 1850s.12 One of the largest of these was the Birmingham Working Men’s Association, founded in 1854 by the Rector of St Martin’s, the Rev John Cale Miller. The programme was initially based on lectures, discussions, outings and indoor games, but cricket was added in 1855.13 Miller provided the rationale for his experiment in a sermon of 1854. The alienation of the working class from church and clergy was such that special measures were needed to gain the ‘ear’ and the ‘heart’ of the workers. ‘We have provided them with work – churches – schools – but we have left it to the devil to find them recreation’. He therefore urged the general introduction of the Saturday half-holiday and the provision of parks where athletics could be practised and cricket played. In view of the fact that many workers had become ‘dupes of frothy and mischief-working demagogues’, he argued that in larger cities like Birmingham the need was for many smaller parks rather than one big one, as ‘it is desirable to avoid the gathering of large masses of people’.14 While in the 1850s working men were regarded as the group posing the greatest challenge to the churches, by the 1880s and 1890s the principal concern was with youth, and especially teenage boys. Beginning with the Boys’ Brigade in 1883, a series of religiously based youth organisations were founded, including the Church Lads’ Brigade, the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, the Boys’ Life Brigade and eventually the most successful of all, the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides.15 Uniforms were a feature of most of these organisations, as were marching, drilling and music – but so too was sport. Sport had also been since the 1870s a major part of the programme of the Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCAs), which had been founded in 1844 for

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the purposes of prayer and Bible-study. In the 1860s educational and social activities were being added to the programme, and by 1875 the programme of the Manchester branch included ‘recreations of a healthy and manly character’. A cricket club had been formed in 1871 and a swimming club in 1873, and by 1876 the Manchester YMCA had built a gymnasium which was said to be the best in the city.16 The intensity of the religious and political conflicts of this period was exacerbated by the absolute claims made by many of the most influential political and religious ideologies of the time, most notably Ultramontane Catholicism and Marxist Socialism. Moreover intransigence and intolerance were by no means limited to followers of those doctrines whose truth claims were explicit. Liberals could be equally intolerant of rival creeds, as was shown by the Prussian Kulturkampf.17 Churches and political parties protected their followers from harmful influences by enclosing them within a comprehensive network of organisations. European societies of the later nineteenth and twentieth century tended to be made up of a series of mutually antagonistic sub-cultures. In his history of the Swiss Catholic ‘ghetto’, Urs Altermatt showed how many a Catholic ‘was born in a Catholic hospital, went to Catholic schools (from kindergarten to university), read Catholic periodicals and newspapers, later voted for candidates of the Catholic Party and took part as a member in numerous Catholic societies’, while also being ‘insured against accident and illness with a Catholic benefit organisation and placing his money in a Catholic savings bank’. To this list, Catholic sports clubs could have been added.18 This multiplication of religiously or politically specific (and sometimes class-specific) organisations in later nineteenth-century European societies was prompted especially by the power of the liberal bourgeoisie and the need of those adhering to other ideologies or belonging to other social classes to escape from these dominant influences. Catholics, Socialists (later Communists) and sometimes Protestants saw the establishment of separate institutions in even the most apparently non-religious or non-political areas of their lives as essential to the preservation of their own beliefs and values. This can be seen very clearly in the process by which rival sporting federations were formed. The first such body claiming to organise and regulate either sport generally or a specific sport was usually bourgeois in composition, and although claiming political and religious neutrality, it was often perceived as being underpinned by liberal ideology. So for instance in France the Union of French Gymnastic Societies, in theory neutral, but in practice Republican, was formed in 1873. The Catholics formed a separate federation in 1903, the Socialists in 1908 and the Communists in 1923.19 In Germany, the Deutsche Turnerschaft (German Gymnastics), with its roots in the early 1800s but formally organised in 1868, was regarded by its critics as liberal, Protestant, bourgeois and nationalist.20 A Social Democratic Workers’ Gymnastic League was formed in 1893, and separate Catholic, Protestant and Communist sporting federations were formed in the early 1920s.21 In England the key issue tended to be class, rather than politics or religion. Thus the Amateur Rowing Association (1879), which used a very strict definition of amateurism as a pretext for excluding working-class rowers,

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was challenged by the equally amateur but socially inclusive National Amateur Rowing Association (1890).22 And issues of class were at the heart of Rugby’s ‘Great Split’ of 1895, to which I shall return later. II No sport is intrinsically radical or conservative, Protestant or Catholic. Particular sports have been given different meanings at different times and in different countries. It remains true that at particular times or in particular places sports can act as one of the most powerful expressions of what it means to belong to a particular national, ideological, ethnic or local community. And sometimes rejection of a popular sport may carry equal political or religious significance. One example has been convincingly analysed by Henning Eichberg in a study of gymnastics in Denmark. The 1880s and 1990s saw a struggle between an older style of gymnastics, based on German models, and a newer ‘Swedish’, ‘Nordic’ or ‘popular’ gymnastics. The former was espoused by the army and by the political Right; it emphasised discipline, hierarchy, straight lines and erect bodies. The latter was favoured by farmers and by the Left, and was promoted in the Grundtvigian Folk High Schools; it often favoured circles rather than lines and was accompanied by the singing of folk songs and hymns; and the ethos was co-operative rather than hierarchical. But here I shall look at two other examples: cycling and English cricket. In 1851 when the concept of Muscular Christianity had not yet been invented, and when some bishops regarded sport as out of keeping with the dignity of the clergy and a diversion from more essential tasks,23 there were already many clergymen playing cricket at all levels, from village to county teams. For instance there were three parsons playing for Leicestershire and two for Nottinghamshire.24 In the circumstances it is not surprising that the first book extolling cricket as the national game and the supreme embodiment of English virtues was written by a clergyman. The Cricket Field by the Rev James Pycroft came out in that year. He praised cricket as ‘essentially Anglo-Saxon’ and as ‘a standing panegyric on the English character’. It required ‘patience, fortitude and self-denial’, as well as ‘good hands and eyes’, ‘intelligence’ and an ‘unruffled temper’. ‘Such a national game as cricket will both humanise and harmonise our people. It teaches a love of order, discipline and fair-play for the pure honour and glory of victory’.25 There was perhaps an implied criticism here of sports, such as horse-racing or prize-fighting in which the rewards were more tangible. Discussion of these equally English sports might have led to a less flattering view of national identity. But it was to cricket that sporting patriots repeatedly returned. Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), the most famous exposition of Muscular Christianity, also enthused about cricket. It was ‘the birthright of British boys old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men’.26 And in the early twentieth century, E.W. Hornung, a writer of adventure stories, had three major interrelated themes – ‘the Empire, cricket and public schools’ – with cricket being ‘the

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quintessence and epitome of life’.27 Hornung, though a layman, preached sermons in which cricketing metaphors were prominent. He described God as ‘the scorer’ in ‘the game of life’ – though the methods of scoring in this game were rather different from those in conventional cricket, since God was more impressed by singles sneaked in fading light than by easy boundaries against loose bowling.28 Many of the key themes in the national celebration of cricket are here. It was distinctively English, being played in few other parts of mainland Europe, and indeed being much less popular in Scotland and Ireland than in England. It was synonymous with fair play and with the maxim that ‘the umpire’s decision is final’.29 Above all, it was one of the few sports practised by members of all social classes, and perhaps the only one in which those from widely different social backgrounds played in the same team. It thus became a symbol of social harmony. In times of acute social conflict such as the 1840s, cricket was proposed as a medium through which members of different social classes could be brought together.30 In more peaceful times it was seen either as an expression of harmony or as a means by which the extremes of class war, as seen in neighbouring countries had been avoided – as in G.M. Trevelyan’s famous claim that there would have been no French Revolution if the French aristocracy had played cricket with the peasants.31 In other contexts cricket had of course very different meanings. Precisely because it was the ‘national game’ of England it offered an ideal field for selfassertion by Indians, West Indians and indeed Australians.32 But its role as the ‘national game’, as it was in the nineteenth century and remained in the eye of so many in the twentieth century (in spite of the rival claims of football), has been mainly conservative, encouraging a self-congratulatory view of English history and institutions, and an acceptance of the class distinctions with which the game was rife33 – notably the distinction between ‘Gentlemen’ and ‘Players’, only abolished in 1962, and the tradition (maintained until 1952) that only an amateur could captain England. Other sports could convey more radical messages. While cricket was often celebrated as a link with the rural past, cycling seemed to point to the future, and evoked enthusiastic praise from groups which saw themselves as shapers of that future. In the 1890s the bicycle was associated with Socialism and women’s emancipation. To many it seemed the embodiment of modernity – a triumph of technology and a means whereby young men and women could escape the constraints imposed by their elders. As Holbrook Jackson commented, looking back from a distance of 20 years, ‘The woman cyclist was the New Woman rampant’.34 None was more rampant than Marie, the heroine of Zola’s novel Paris. She rescued the novel’s ex-priest hero, Pierre, from Catholicism, ‘the religion of death’, persuading him to abandon his soutane, and enabling him to discover a new ‘law’ of ‘earthly happiness, human justice, living love and fertility’. The turning-point in their relationship was a cycling expedition through one of the forests on the outskirts of the capital, with Marie enjoying and Pierre admiring the free movement offered by ‘rational’ dress, and both of them thrilled by the experience of speed, balance, breeze, ‘hope without limits’ and ‘deliverance from

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too heavy ties’. Pierre also listened to the doctrine of ‘the emancipation of woman through the bicycle’: Marie promised that if she ever had a daughter she would place her on a bicycle from the age of ten, so that she would learn the courage and self-determination which so many women lacked because of their over-protected upbringing.35 Socialists were often keen cyclists. The Clarion Cyclists, founded at Birmingham Labour Church in 1894, were the first Socialist sports club in Britain.36 In Italy the Red Cyclists were formed in 1912, at a time when many Italian Socialists were still suspicious of sport. One of the advantages of the bicycle for the more seriousminded Socialist was that it not only offered a pleasurable means of keeping healthy, but it was also an aid to missionising the countryside.37 The same point was noted by English Nonconformists, who shared with the Socialists a suspicion of any kind of self-indulgence, a missionary drive and a sense of being in the forefront of progress. In 1894 a writer in a Nonconformist magazine described the bicycle as ‘a thoroughly Christian machine’ and claimed that ‘a minister can preach a better sermon on Sunday if he rides a bicycle on Saturday’.38 And in 1897 the Northamptonshire Nonconformist was claiming that the invention of the bicycle was providential, coming as it did ‘in the very darkest hour of the need of the villages’. Teams of Christian cyclists could now pedal out to preach on village greens or participate in chapel anniversaries and tea meetings in tiny rural chapels.39 The image that was so attractive to Socialists and Nonconformists caused concern to some members of the Catholic hierarchy and writers in the Catholic press. In 1894 an article in L’Osservatore Romano linked cycling with anarchism,40 though two of the leading French clerical journals, the Revue du clergé français and L’ami du clergé, praised the bicycle as an aid to pastoral visiting. In both France and Italy, cycling clergy were a matter of considerable controversy in the 1890s and early 1900s, with some dioceses forbidding the practice, while others accepted it. The division of opinion was reflected in one French diocese, where the vicar-general approved the use of bicycles for visits to parishioners and fellow-clergy, but not for sport, while the bishop complained that ‘he did not like to see a priest on one of these machines’, ‘out of breath, soutane flying’.41 According to Pivato: The use of the bicycle thus became associated with a ‘secular habit’ and with a sense of modernity which was not consonant with the sacred ministry. The ecclesiastical hierarchy considered the bicycle as out of harmony with traditional ecclesiastic behaviour because of its touch of ‘mundanity’ and the modernistic ‘whirl’ it assumed and suggested.42

Yet Italian cycling also illustrates the changes in the meanings which sports could carry. In the 1930s the Catholic press discovered the cyclist Gino Bartali as the model of an alternative ideal of manhood to set against the boxers favoured by the Fascists, such as Primo Carnera, briefly world heavyweight champion. Catholic writers condemned the brutality of boxing, while praising the courage and tenacity,

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the mental and spiritual, as well as physical, strength required to win the Giro d’Italia or the Tour de France. And by now Catholic propagandists were ready to embrace ‘the attractions of speed, thus identifying the Church with technical progress whilst embodying the idea of struggle which appealed strongly to the Jesuit element in catholicism’.43 III Churches and political parties used sport as a means of attracting new members and retaining the loyalty of existing members. And while, at this time, international sporting competition was still at an early stage, sports teams represented particular religious, political or ethnic communities within the nation, and their victories were seen as a victory for the whole of that community. In the United States the boxing ring was the only arena in which black could regularly triumph over white, and black Americans accordingly followed the exploits of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis with avid interest.44 In Europe football offered an arena where the politically defeated and the religiously marginalised could seek revenge. Glasgow Celtic football club was founded in 1888 partly to raise money for Catholic charities and partly to keep footballing youth within a Catholic environment. It followed in the footsteps of Dundee Hibernian (later Dundee Harp) and of Hibernian, Edinburgh’s Catholic football club. Celtic quickly became one of the leading teams in Glasgow, its main rival being Glasgow Rangers. Rangers were not at first an explicitly Protestant club, but they soon came to be seen as the principal Protestant club in a region where sectarian conflicts were often acute. While Rangers were not closely linked with the Protestant churches, they were part of a broader Protestant culture, which included the Orange and Masonic lodges, and some of the skilled workers’ unions.45 Celtic was more closely linked with the Catholic Church. After a notable victory in the 1890s the Celtic management sent a telegram to the Pope, and in the 1930s players and management went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes.46 In France, competition between Catholics and Republicans was a major factor in the multiplication of sports clubs, often based in parishes or schools. The competition was most intense in the period from the later 1890s up to the First World War. The Republican youth clubs known as ‘Petites Amicales’, ‘Amicales laïques’ – or more often ‘Petites A’ – were based on state primary schools, and were intended principally to ensure that teenage boys remained in a morally and politically healthy environment in the period between leaving school and undertaking military service. The Catholic youth clubs, initiated sometimes by a priest, sometimes by a Catholic employer or landowner, started more slowly but grew very rapidly in the period following the Separation of Church and state in 1905, fuelling Republican fears that they were being overtaken.47 In most respects the values imbibed in the rival institutions were similar.48 Both Catholics and Republicans were trying to train a new generation that was morally as well as physically fit, sober, industrious, disciplined and fervently patriotic. Institutions of both kinds mixed gymnastics and sport with

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drilling and shooting. Both realised that the sport was likely to be the most attractive item in the package, and must not be neglected if they were to keep a step ahead of the opposition. The main difference of course lay in the political and religious agenda which this physical and moral training was intended to serve. Militants on both sides claimed that there were ‘two youths’ growing up side by side in inevitable conflict. This was the view of Dr P. Michaux, a leading figure in the Catholic sports movement, who in advocating a specifically Catholic organisation warned in 1897: ‘the enemy is there, all ready to pick up the child who has been entrusted to you and to enrol him in societies for gymnastics, shooting and physical exercises, where, under the cover of varied amusements, it is well able to destroy any religious ideas’.49 Meanwhile at the first national congress of the Petites Amicales, precisely the same point was being made from the other side of the fence: All these confessional associations attract children by their varied amusements. They have games in the open air, gymnastic sections, social events, football teams, shooting, rambling … Under this cover, our adversaries have only one goal: to attract the youth, get a hold on the spirit of these young people, and then destroy in them all the secular and rational ideas that we have been trying to inculcate in them.50

Certainly there were more moderate voices on both sides, who were prepared to suggest that sport and recreation was a field where those of different political and religious convictions might find some common ground; but in the years dominated first by the Dreyfus Affair and then by the battles surrounding the Separation of Church and state such voices were likely to be shouted down. Gigantic gymnastic displays were used by both sides as a show of strength. Pius X, like Pius XII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI a sports fan, was entertained by 600 Catholic gymnasts in 1906. In view of the recent rupture between the Holy See and the French state, the ‘neutral’ Gymnastic and Sporting Union of France responded by expelling those church-based affiliates which still belonged to it.51 In France, Catholic enthusiasm for sport was partly driven by the need to refute Republican charges of effeminacy. The early twentieth century saw a generation of ‘muscular Catholic’ priests and the Catholic press proclaimed the virtues of a Catholic youth that combined exemplary piety with physical prowess. In this period when Catholics and Republicans tried to outdo one another in professions of masculinity and nationalism, an article of 1913 describing the ‘young Catholic of to-day’ imagined him emerging from mass to be greeted by a young anticlerical shouting ‘down with the priests’ and making crow-like croaking sounds. The young Catholic responds by landing a punch on the mouth of the mocker, adding ‘We know how to box, and it’s no longer the time of the martyrs’.52 In this battle, Catholicism’s secret weapon was football. By the 1890s, there was according to Michel Lagrée an ‘irresistible’ movement in favour of football in the Catholic youth clubs,53 and in 1906 the leader of the Catholic federation declared his preference for football rather than rugby, partly because of the ‘brutality’ of the latter sport and partly because of its apparent popularity with anti-clericals.54 In

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their turn, Republicans were concerned that innocent youth were being lured into Catholic youth clubs by the promise of football: in particular it was a source of Catholic revival in ‘dechristianised’ regions, such as the rural areas round Paris.55 In 1905 at the height of the battle over the Separation of Church and state, the Catholic football champions Étoile des Deux Lacs met the Republican champions Gallia Club. When Étoile won by a score of 2–1, it was hailed by the Catholic press as a political and religious, as much as a sporting, triumph.56 IV Sporting divisions can also be used as a litmus test for locating the deepest social cleavages in the European societies of this period. In England, there was relatively little politically based sport. The Clarion Cyclists have been mentioned. After the First World War there was a Socialist British Workers’ Sport Association, which was under Communist domination from 1928.57 But the numbers involved were relatively small. Many sports clubs were formed by churches, YMCAs or Sunday Schools. But there was little in the way of a separate world of church-based sport of the kind that existed in many continental European countries. There were Sunday School Leagues, though the motives for setting these up were not so much ideological as moral. The danger was not secularism, but gambling and bad language. In fact, the Sunday School Leagues had such a prominent place in youth sport that teams unconnected with places of worship sometimes sought to join them.58 In some areas, such as Merseyside, where there were enough Catholics to make this possible, there were Catholic Leagues.59 In the 1930s Birmingham had a Methodist cricket league and Oldham a Congregational League, though this was in fact open to church teams from other denominations.60 Generally church teams played readily with teams belonging to other denominations and with non-church teams. To give one example: the first Northampton Cricket Cup in 1886 was won by a Catholic team, the other 11 competitors comprising an Anglican, a Baptist, a Wesleyan and a Temperance team, a school team and six teams apparently based simply on localities.61 In elite sport the nearest thing to a religio-political split of the kind seen in Scotland and more widely in France was the division between Merseyside’s two leading football clubs, Everton and Liverpool. Everton had been founded in 1878 by Methodists, most of whom were politically Liberal and temperance advocates. Liverpool was formed as a result of a breakaway in 1892 led by John Houlding, a Tory brewer, who was a patron of the ultra-Protestant Conservative Working Men’s Associations. Perhaps for that reason, Catholic football fans had a tendency to prefer Everton. Yet as David and Peter Kennedy have shown in the most thorough investigation of this subject, there was never an absolute divide of the kind seen in Glasgow. By the early twentieth century Liverpool was fielding some Catholic players, and there were even three Catholic directors.62 In England the biggest sporting divides were along the lines of class. Some sports, such as golf and tennis, were to a very large extent limited to the upper and middle

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classes,63 while many of the regional sports, such as potshare bowling, popular in the north-east, were limited to the working class.64 In some sports, cricket being the most obvious example, there was a division between working-class professionals and middle or upper-class amateurs; sometimes, as in rowing, there were separate organisations for elite and plebeian practitioners. But the most dramatic split came in rugby. Rugby developed as a mainly middle-class game in the south of England, but in Yorkshire and Lancashire the leading players were typically miners and workers in textile factories who could ill afford to lose earnings through time spent in travel to matches, sometimes in distant regions, such as south Wales. Some clubs responded by setting up these star players as landlords of pubs or through underthe-counter payments – proverbially, legs of mutton. There were also demands for ‘broken time’ payments – that is payments in lieu of lost wages. However, in the eyes of the officials of the Rugby Football Union, typically London-based professional men, this was professionalism, and thus a betrayal of the principles on which the Union had been founded. There was an undercurrent of resentment between players and officials of different social background. Working-class players were regularly accused of un-gentlemanly play, and they readily complained of snobbery. In 1895 the Northern Union seceded, the immediate issue being ‘brokentime’ payments. In the years following, a series of rule changes were made in order to speed the game up, and in 1922 the name of Rugby League was adopted for what was by now a separate game, with a completely different ethos.65 In France, Catholics, Republicans and Socialists played the same sports by and large (in spite of the initial tendency for football to be more Catholic and rugby more Republican). But after the Separation of Church and state in 1905 relations were so bad that teams from ‘les deux France’ would not play one another and there were two separate national football teams.66 Meanwhile Socialists were also encouraged by their political leaders to keep apart and in the 1920s there were Socialist and Communist Olympiads – the two joining together in the Antwerp Workers’ Olympics in 1937, which included athletes from the Soviet Union.67 In Ireland political and religious separation went one step further, and some Nationalists refused even to play the same sports as Unionists. In 1884 the Gaelic Athletic Association was founded, with Thomas William Croke, the Catholic Archbishop of Cashel, as patron (jointly with Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell). It championed authentically Irish sports such as Gaelic football and hurling. In a letter of support, Croke deplored the Anglicisation of his country and warned that without a return to Irish sports and customs, there would soon be no Ireland worthy of the name. He concluded: Deprecating as I do such dire and disgraceful consummation, and seeing in your society of athletes something altogether opposed to it, I shall be happy to do all that I can, and authorize you now formally to place my name on the role of patrons.68

The Association not only promoted Irish games: it expelled those who played ‘foreign games’, such as association football, rugby, hockey or cricket. The ‘ban’ was

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dropped in the 1890s, but then reintroduced in 1901 and progressively tightened up until even those watching the proscribed games were liable to expulsion. Although three of the GAA’s founders were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and many of the Association’s leaders were interned after the Easter Rising, Cronin claims that the local activists were more often moderate Nationalists. After Irish independence, however, the ‘ban’ became a symbol of the GAA’s credentials as a stronghold of militant nationalism and it was rescinded only in 1971.69 According to Cronin, Gaelic sports became the ‘national game’ with unparalleled resonance as definers of national identity. He sees this as unique in the history of British colonialism: elsewhere the colonised learnt British sports in order to beat the British; in Ireland the enthusiasm for soccer in the Protestant North was a reflection of their Britishness; only as the Nationalist and Republican tradition began to decline did soccer come to rival Gaelic sports in the Catholic South.70 V The Union sacrée of the First World War modified the antagonisms between French Catholics and Republicans. The underlying suspicions remained, but some rapprochement was possible, on the sports field, as well as in politics – and there was in any case the growing threat from the Left.71 But in most of Europe divisions along the lines of politics, religion, class and nationality were at their deepest in the years 1918–39, which saw civil wars in Finland, Ireland and Spain, and the establishment of dictatorships in Italy, Germany, Austria and many other countries. Hitler and Mussolini abolished religiously- based and Socialist sport and took the exploitation of sport for nationalist objectives to new extremes. But where not artificially suppressed by totalitarian rule, the division of European sport along the lines of politics, religion and class, with separate communities organised into tightly knit sub-cultures, survived into the 1960s. The continuing power of the religion-politics-sport triangle became apparent again in Italy after the fall of Mussolini. In the 1940s and 1950s Italian cycling was dominated by the rivalry between the two supreme stars, Gino Bartali, a Roman Catholic, and Fausto Coppi, who was seen as a Communist sympathiser. Once again the Catholic and Communist press seized upon the victories of their respective heroes as proof of the superiority of their beliefs.72 The 1960s, however, were in this, as in so much else, the end of an era. Growing affluence blurred the line between classes. Increasing individualism eroded political and religious loyalties. Vatican II, with its spirit of dialogue, weakened sectarian antagonisms.73 The ever-increasing commercialisation of sport brought in different values, in relation to which older political or religious values seemed of little relevance. Individual sports stars not infrequently drew on their personal religious beliefs to provide motivation and discipline – and help them cope with defeat. But sport was now seldom a field of conflict between rival political or religious communities or a symbol of religious or political values. There were exceptions

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– for instance the continuing role of Protestant-Catholic antagonisms in football in Glasgow or Belfast, the political ties of Italian football teams, or the politically coloured rivalry between Barcelona and Real Madrid. But these were now survivals from an earlier time, when these were normal, rather than being exotic exceptions. The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mark a key phase in the development of modern European sport. Political, religious and class antagonism gave a powerful boost to the growth of sport in this period. Sport was used as a recruiting tool by churches and parties. It also provided an arena in which rival champions could do battle for the honour of their own ideological community. In more extreme circumstances alternative and mutually hostile sporting worlds grew up side by side. The deep divisions within Ireland and between Ireland and Britain that would lead to civil strife, revolution and war were already reflected in the total separation between Gaelic and ‘foreign’ sports. The political and religious fissures in Weimar Germany that made possible the rise to power of Hitler were vividly demonstrated by the ideological fragmentation of sport. Meanwhile, the less extreme nature of political and religious antagonisms in England, as well as the fundamental importance of class differences, was also clearly evident in English sport. There is a familiar narrative, according to which religion in the modern world is in continuous retreat before the inexorable advance of the secularising forces. The history of the relationship between religion and sport suggests, however, a contest with many twists and turns, in which the forces of religion are continually seeking new ways of combating secularism or secularity, and have often had some success in doing so. The later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had indeed seen a secularisation of sport in some countries, and the emergence of sporting cultures in which the churches played little or no part. But even as the political power of those churches was being cut back in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they established a major presence in the world of sport. There certainly were those at the time, as well as historians writing more recently, who wondered if this was ‘an own goal’. Some ‘Muscular Christians’ feared that the delicate balance between body, mind and spirit was giving way to a one-sided concern with the body. Sport, it was said, was becoming a new religion, that was squeezing out the old. The two kinds of ‘religion’ were not necessarily in conflict with one another. Sporting loyalties and political or religious loyalties were often mutually reinforcing. Moreover, particular sports came to carry a rich variety of meanings. In the minds of many practitioners they embodied what it meant to be a Catholic or an Anglican, a Socialist or an Irish Nationalist. But if there was no necessary conflict between religion and sport, there was an element of competition between them. Most obviously there was competition for limited resources of time and energy – and especially for the use of Sunday. And, while ‘Muscular Christians’ and their counterparts in other countries and religious denominations saw the sports field as a place where Christian virtues could be practised, others claimed that sport was something inherently good, bringing benefits to the soul as well as the body, but needing no religious underpinnings. There also were those who hoped to find in sport a means of escape from the all too visible political and

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religious conflicts of the time. The growing European fascination with sport thus had varying and sometimes contradictory motives. This is not to say, however, that sporting passions of this kind were a cause of religious and political apathy or disenchantment. Rather, they provide new sources of identity, commitment and intense experience for those already religiously and politically detached. Endnotes 1 This chapter was written at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala. I would like to thank the Collegium for appointing me a Fellow and my colleagues, especially Jeff Cox and Hans Joas, for stimulating discussions. Earlier versions of the chapter were presented at Durham University History Society and at the Faculty of Theology, Aarhus University, and I would like to thank those who made helpful comments on those occasions. I would also like to thank Jan De Maeyer for valuable suggestions. 2 Jacques and Mona Ozouf, La République des instituteurs (Paris, 1992), p. 205. 3 Pierre Arnaud, ‘Jehanne contre Marianne: patronages et sociétés sportives à Lyon, face aux sociétés conscriptives républicaines’, in Gérard Cholvy (ed.), Le patronage: ghetto ou vivier? (Paris, 1988), pp. 231–2. 4 For the significance of this period in the development of modern British sport, see for instance Denis D. Molyneux, ‘The Development of Physical Recreation in the Birmingham District from 1871 to 1892’ (University of Birmingham MA thesis, 1957), pp. 1–2; John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870–1914 (Manchester, 1993); Kathleen E. McCrone, ‘Play up! Play up! And Play the Game! Sport at the late Victorian Girls’ Public Schools,’ in J. A. Mangan and Roberta J. Park (eds), From ‘Fair Sex’ to Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the Industrial and PostIndustrial Eras (London, 1987), pp. 97–129. 5 Christine Eisenberg, ‘Charismatic nationalist leader: Turnvater Jahn’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 13 (1996), pp. 14–27. 6 Henning Eichberg, ‘Body culture and democratic nationalism: “Popular Gymnastics” in Nineteenth-Century Denmark,’ International Journal of the History of Sport, 12 (1995), pp. 108–24. 7 Albert Bourzac, ‘Les bataillons scolaires en France. Naissance, développement, disparition’, in Pierre Arnaud (ed.), Les athlètes de la République: gymnastique, sport et idéologie républicaine 1870–1914, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1997), pp. 45–6. 8 Malcolm Tozer, Physical Education at Thring’s Uppingham (Uppingham, 1976), pp. 82–6. See also J.A. Mangan, Athleticism and the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: the Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 43–58. 9 See the broadly sympathetic Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: the Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge, 1985), and, for a more hostile view, David Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge, 1994). 10 Tony Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1863–1915 (Brighton, 1980), pp. 2–3. 11 Stopford A. Brooke, Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson (London, 1868), p. 123. 12 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London, 1978), pp. 106–8.

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13 Douglas Adam Reid, ‘Labour, Leisure and Politics in Birmingham, ca. 1800–1975’ (University of Birmingham PhD thesis, 1985), pp. 102–7. 14 John C. Miller, The Dying Judge’s Charge Echoed from the Christian Pulpit, in a Plea for the Recreation of the Working Classes, as Essential to their Social and Religious Elevation (London, 1854), pp. 13–20, 29–31. 15 John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883–1940 (London, 1977). 16 Annual Report of Manchester YMCA, 1860–63, 1873, 1877 (YMCA Archive, A27, University of Birmingham Library). For the debates within the YMCA about the role of recreation, see Clyde Binfield, George Williams and the YMCA: a Study in Victorian Social Attitudes (London, 1973), pp. 298–306; William J. Baker, ‘To pray or to play? The YMCA question in the United Kingdom and the United States, 1850–1900.’ International Journal of the History of Sport, 11 (1994), pp. 42–62. In stressing that the American YMCAs were slightly ahead in promoting gymnastics and other sports, Baker overstates the extent of opposition in the UK. 17 See for instance David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford, 1993). 18 Urs Altermatt, Der Weg der Schweizer Katholiken ins Ghetto (Zurich, 1972), p. 21. 19 See time-chart in Pierre Arnaud (ed.), Les origines du sport ouvrier en Europe (Paris, 1994), pp. 309–12. 20 Christiane Eisenberg, ‘English Sports’und Deutsche Bürger: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1800–1939 (Paderborn, 1999), pp. 128–9. 21 Ibid., p. 331; Andr Gounot, ‘Sport réformiste ou sport revolutionnaire? Les débuts du sport international ouvrier’, in Arnaud (ed.), Sport ouvrier, pp. 219–45. 22 Lowerson, Middle Class, pp. 158–62. 23 Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford in 1846 was trying to stop the clergy of his diocese from hunting or playing cricket. For him, according to Diana McClatchey, Oxfordshire Clergy, 1777–1869 (Oxford 1960), p. 230, ‘vocation to the priesthood carried with it a particular stamp of “apartness”’. 24 Bell’s Life in London [the leading sporting paper], 29 June 1851. 25 James Pycroft, The Cricket Field (London, 1851), pp. 18, 21–2, 28, 32. 26 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days (Oxford, 1989), pp. 354–5 [first published 1857]. 27 Malcolm Tozer, ‘E.W. Hornung’s “Young Guard”’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 6 (1989), pp. 158–9. 28 Ibid., pp. 162–3. 29 Jack Williams, Cricket and England: a Cultural and Social History of the Inter-War Years (London, 1999), pp. 1–3. 30 See, for instance, the speech by Baron Alderson quoted in Bell’s Life in London, 18 August 1844. 31 Keith A.P. Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians (Aldershot, 1994), p. 4. 32 See for instance Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: the Indian History of a British Sport (London, 2002); Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart (eds), Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture (Manchester, 1995); Sandiford, Cricket and the Victorians, pp. 155–6. 33 Most books on English cricket history discuss this topic at length. See especially Williams, Cricket and England, pp. 114–41. 34 David Rubinstein, ‘Cycling in the 1890s’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1977), p. 62.

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35 Paris [1898], in Emile Zola, Oeuvres complètes, 16 vols (Paris. 1967), vol. VII, pp. 1447–8, 1455. 36 Stephen G. Jones, Sport, Politics and the Working Class: Organised Labour and Sport in Inter-war Britain (Manchester, 1988), pp. 31–4. 37 Stefano Pivato, ‘The Bicycle as a Political Symbol: Italy 1885–1955’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 7 (1990), pp. 179–81. 38 Clyde Binfield, ‘Congregationalism’s Baptist Grandmothers and Methodist Great Aunts: the Place of Family in a “Felt” Religion’, Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, 2 (1978), p. 8. 39 Northamptonshire Nonconformist, August 1897. 40 Simon Martin, ‘Peasants into Sportsmen’, unpublished seminar paper, Institute of Historical Research, London, 2 November 2009. 41 Michel Lagrée, La bénédiction de Promothée (Paris 1999), pp. 240–242. 42 Pivato, ‘The bicycle as a political symbol’. 43 Stefano Pivato, ‘Italian Cycling and the Creation of a Catholic Hero: the Bartali Myth’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 13 (1996), p. 133. 44 Kasia Boddy, Boxing: a Cultural History (London 2008), pp. 181–93, 280–315. 45 G.P. Finn, ‘Racism, Religion and Soccer Prejudice: Irish Catholic Clubs, Soccer and Scottish Society, I. The Historical Roots of Prejudice’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 8 (1991), pp. 72–95, and ‘II. Social Identities and Conspiracy Theories’, ibid., pp. 370–397. 46 Bill Murray, The Old Firm (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 59–75. 47 Arnaud (ed.), Athlètes; Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (London 1981), pp. 190–211; Ted Margadant, ‘Primary schools and youth groups in pre-war Paris’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13 (1978), pp. 323–36. 48 Bernard Dubreuil, ‘La fédération catholique et la République’, in Arnaud (ed.), Athlètes, p. 212. 49 Ibid., p. 210. 50 Bernard Maccario, ‘Gymnastique, sport et éducation populaire. Le combat de la Ligue de l’enseignement’, in Arnaud (ed.), Athlètes, p. 199, note 77. 51 Dubreuil, ‘Fédération catholique’, pp. 215–6. 52 Michel Lagre, ‘Sport et sociabilité catholique en France au début du XIXe siècle’, in P. Arnaud and J. Camy (eds), La naissance du mouvement sportif associatif en France (Lyon, 1986), p. 337. 53 Ibid., pp. 327–8. 54 Alfred Wahl, Les archives du football: Sport et socit en France (1880–1980) (Paris, 1989), pp. 51–3. 55 Michel Lagre, Religions et cultures en Bretagne, 1850–1950 (Paris, 1992), pp. 414–5. 56 Wahl, Archives, pp. 99–100. 57 Jones, Sport, Politics, pp. 74–103. 58 Hugh McLeod, ‘Sport and the English Sunday School, 1869–1939’, in Stephen Orchard and John H.Y. Briggs (eds), The Sunday School Movement: Studies in the Growth and Decline of Sunday Schools (Milton Keynes, 2007), pp. 110–115. 59 David and Peter Kennedy, ‘Ambiguity, complexity and convergence: the evolution of Liverpool’s Irish football clubs’, International Journal of the History of the Sport, 24 (2007), pp. 898, 904. 60 Williams, Cricket and England, pp. 148–9. 61 Gil Sibley, Northampton Club Cricket: A Centenary History (Northampton, 1986), p. 33.

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62 Kennedy, ‘Ambiguity’, pp. 905–10; David Kennedy, ‘The split of Everton Football Club, 1892: the creation of distinct patterns of boardroom formation at Everton and Liverpool Football Club Companies’, Sport in History, 23 (2003), pp. 1–26; Peter Lupson, Thank God for Football (London, 2006), pp. 55–72. 63 Lowerson, Middle Classes, pp. 14, 125; Helen Walker, ‘Lawn tennis’, in Tony Mason (ed.), Sport in Britain: a Social History (Cambridge, 1989), p. 251. 64 Alan Metcalfe, Leisure and Recreation in a Victorian Mining Community (London, 2006), pp. 77–81. 65 Tony Collins, Rugby’s Great Split: Class, Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football (London, 1998). 66 Holt, Sport in France, p. 201. 67 Robert F. Wheeler, ‘Organized sport and organized labour: the workers’ sports movement’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13 (1978), pp. 191–210. 68 Michael Cronin, Sport and Nationalism: Gaelic Games, Soccer and Irish Identity since 1884 (Dublin, 1999), p. 82. 69 Cronin, Nationalism, pp. 78–89; Paul Rowse, ‘The Politics of Culture and Sport in Ireland: a History of the GAA Ban on Foreign Games, 1884–1971. Part One, 1884-1921’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 10 (1993), pp. 333–60. 70 Cronin, Nationalism, pp. 111–51. 71 Holt, Sport in France, pp. 202–11. 72 Pivato, ‘Italian Cycling and the Creation of a Catholic hero’, pp. 128–30. 73 I have discussed these themes in Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007).

Chapter 13

W.T. Stead, the ‘New Journalism’ and the ‘New Church’ in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain Stewart J. Brown

It was, an admirer observed, a ‘good death’. On 15 April 1912 the well-known journalist, Nonconformist social reformer, ex-convict, spiritualist and peace campaigner W.T. Stead perished in the sinking of the Titanic. There were several highly dubious ‘last sightings’ of him by survivors; some recalled him either reading quietly, or helping others into the lifeboats or standing at the rails of the sinking ship, ‘in silence and what seemed … a prayerful attitude, or one of profound meditation’.1 One survivor was certain that it was Stead who had the ship’s eight-man orchestra play ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ although there is no evidence that the orchestra actually played this piece. In truth, there are no reliable accounts of his last hours, and his body was never found. His death did attract widespread public attention. Once described as ‘the best abused man in England’,2 his foibles and follies were now largely forgotten. The prominent journalist A.G. Gardiner recalled that as news of the disaster was received there was only one question on London’s Oxford Street: ‘Was W.T. Stead among the lost or the saved?’ Stead memorial bronze reliefs were erected in 1921 both on the Embankment in London and in New York’s Central Park. William Thomas Stead was one of Britain’s best known public intellectuals of the late Victorian period. He first emerged to national prominence in the 1870s as a voice of the Nonconformist Conscience in the agitation over the Bulgarian atrocities. In the 1880s, he pioneered what became known as the ‘New Journalism’, which included sensationalist news stories, moral campaigns, interviews and aggressive investigative reporting. In 1890, he founded the highly successful Review of Reviews, which provided its readers with a digest of articles from the world’s press. He was a champion of social reform and women’s rights, an advocate of the union of all English-speaking peoples and of entente between Britain and Russia, an opponent of the South African War and an indefatigable campaigner for world peace and arbitration. He was also a significant figure in British religious life, a man whose evolving beliefs and expressions reflected larger changes in religious thought and practice. In the course of his career, he moved from his roots in evangelical Nonconformity and the ‘Nonconformist conscience’, to become an eclectic supporter of the social gospel, broad church theology, the Salvation Army,

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Source: © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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the Roman Catholic Church, spiritualism, theosophy and a new civic ‘Church of the Future’ that would be inclusive of all who sought truth and were prepared to follow a path of service to humankind. He was, as one commentator maintained, essentially a seventeenth-century Puritan, transported into the ‘multifarious modern world’ and struggling ‘to embrace in his unifying clasp every element in the modern chaos’.3 He came to see journalism as the means to express God’s will and recreate in the modern world a godly commonwealth. The standard two-volume biography of Stead was written by a fellow journalist, Frederick Whyte, and published in 1925.4 A Roman Catholic who had not known Stead personally, Whyte had little interest in or understanding of Stead’s Protestant Nonconformist roots or religious conceptions, and as a result the biography is disappointing. J.W. Robertson Scott, a journalist who had served his apprenticeship under Stead, provided a lengthy sketch of Stead, including his religious views, in his Life and Death of a Newspaper, published in 1952.5 Robertson Scott, however, was in his 80s when he wrote the sketch, and while there are some valuable insights into Stead’s character, much of the book consisted of undated passages quoted from Stead’s private journals. The American historian Joseph Baylen devoted much of his long career to the study of Stead and produced a large number of valuable articles; he did not manage to publish his projected biography of Stead before his death in 1909, though there are hopes that the manuscript may yet be published. Another American scholar, Raymond L. Schults, produced a monograph on Stead’s years as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.6 In 2007, a scholar of literature, Grace Eckley, published a biography of Stead. The work, however, was marred by a lack of clear structure and argument, and it was thin on British political and religious history. The centenary year of his death has brought a revival of interest, with a new biography of Stead by W. Sydney Robinson, with emphasis on his sensationalist journalistic campaigns and personal relationships, a major international conference at the British Library in London and a new volume of essays, W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary, to be published in late 2012.7 This chapter will explore the religious views that informed Stead’s career, including his ‘New Journalism’. It will argue that Stead’s journalism and moral campaigns represented heart-felt efforts to make religion once again a vital force in shaping Britain’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban-industrial society. Stead and the New Journalism Stead began his career as an uncompromising voice of the Nonconformist Conscience. The son of a Congregational minister of modest means, Stead was born in 1849 and raised within a strict evangelical Calvinist home in Howden-on-Tyne. ‘I was born and brought up’, he later recalled, ‘in a home where life was regarded ever as the vestibule of Eternity, and where everything that tended to waste time, which is life in instalments, was regarded as an evil thing’.8 It was a gifted family. His younger brother, Francis Herbert Stead, would become a Congregationalist minister,

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journalist, Christian social reformer and founder of an East London Settlement, ‘Browning House’. His sister, Mary Isabella Stead, was a Christian social activist, who founded a branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association at Leicester.9 W.T. Stead claimed to have experienced conversion in 1862, at the age of 13, amid the great revival movement of 1859–62. His early hero was ‘God’s Englishman’, Oliver Cromwell. As a boy, he was also profoundly influenced by James Russell Lowell, the American romantic poet and journalist. Deeply affected by stories of Lowell’s activism in the campaign against slavery, Stead would throughout his life seek out and struggle for moral causes. It was Lowell’s influence, he claimed, that convinced him to pursue a career in journalism rather than follow his father into the ministry; the editor’s desk, Lowell had taught, was a pulpit that could reach tens of thousands.10 Although Stead had only two years of formal schooling, he received a broad liberal education at home from his father, and began writing articles for the Northern Echo, a Darlington half-penny morning newspaper, while still in his teens. In 1871, at the age of only 22, he was appointed editor of the Northern Echo. He soon revealed his moralising zeal when he threw the newspaper behind the campaign, which began in 1870 and was increasingly associated with the Anglican Josephine Butler, to secure the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. These acts had been passed between 1864 and 1869, and provided for the mandatory medical examination and licensing of prostitutes in the districts surrounding army barracks and naval ports. For their opponents, including young Stead, the acts represented the state regulation of prostitution and a form of state-sanctioned sex slavery. Indeed, Stead described Butler and the other campaigners as the ‘New Abolitionists’, who fought with religious fervour to liberate women from the slavery of the sex trade and state-licensed prostitution, just as Christian Abolitionists of the previous generation had struggled to end African slavery.11 It was the agitation of 1876 over the Bulgarian atrocities that brought Stead to national prominence. The young editor was deeply distressed by the reports of massacres of an estimated 20,000 Bulgarian men, women and children, accompanied by widespread rape, by Ottoman troops and irregular militias in suppressing a revolt in 1875, and by the way in which Britain, as the ally of the Ottoman Empire, seemed complicit in the massacres. After hearing what he insisted was the ‘clear call of God’s voice’, Stead made the Northern Echo a leading voice of the national agitation to protest the massacres and call for a new, ethical purpose in British foreign policy.12 For him, the agitation was another ‘Abolitionist’ struggle, now to free the ‘slaves’ of Eastern Europe – and, he added, the American abolitionist, Lowell, ‘supplied the psalms of the Crusade of 1876–8’.13 What was needed, Stead proclaimed, was a prophet, to arouse the nation over the slaughtered Christians of Bulgaria, as Milton had roused the English in the seventeenth century over the slaughtered Waldensians. Stead believed he found his prophet in the person of the retired Liberal leader, William Gladstone, and he managed to draw Gladstone out of retirement and into the agitation. Gladstone, for Stead, was ‘the spokesman of the national conscience’, and Stead pressed for his return to the Liberal leadership.14 ‘Can you not’, he wrote to Gladstone on 6 September 1876, ‘… show that England’s Christianity as

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organised in the churches is as real as it was in the days of the Commonwealth?’15 Of Gladstone’s powerful speech on the Bulgarian atrocities in September 1876 at Blackheath, in London, Stead wrote in the Northern Echo: ‘It was as if the High Priest of humanity were pronouncing the doom which was impending over a guilty empire’ – while in the ‘tempest of applause’ on the rain-swept heath that day, Stead claimed he could hear the masses crying out to Gladstone to ‘Lead us! Lead us!’16 Through Gladstone’s influence, Stead was appointed, in 1880, assistant to John Morley, editor of the London evening daily, the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead moved with his growing family to a house in Wimbledon, joining the Wimbledon Congregational Church (which he would attend regularly throughout his life). The partnership of the evangelical Nonconformist Stead and the agnostic Morley was an uneasy one, but Stead came to respect Morley’s moral earnestness, even though it was unsupported by any Christian faith. Morley, Stead later maintained, was in truth ‘a puritan pulpiteer born in the 19th century, when our hot gospellers betake themselves to the Press instead of to the Pulpit’.17 Stead’s own moral and religious enthusiasms were held in check by Morley, until in 1883 Morley’s growing political and intellectual commitments forced him to give up the editorship. Stead now became sole editor and over the next few years, he made the Pall Mall Gazette the vehicle for a series of spectacular moral crusades, each with a strong religious dimension. In the process he transformed British journalism. The first of these was the campaign over slum housing in London, inspired by the publication in October 1883 of the anonymous penny pamphlet, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, written by two Congregational ministers, Andrew Mearns and W.C. Preston. The pamphlet portrayed the horrors of life in the London slums, drawing largely from reports of agents of the London City Mission; it depicted a dark underworld of filth, vermin, malnutrition, disease, crime, prostitution and – what was most disturbing for many readers – made allegations of widespread incest and sexual abuse of children. Appalled by the pamphlet, Stead took up the cause of slum conditions with a series of investigative articles in the Pall Mall beginning on 16 October and continuing over the next few months. The articles were intended to shock and rouse public opinion to action, and they presented further revelations of appalling slum conditions, combined with expressions of righteous indignation. Stead directed particular criticism at the churches, which as guardians of society’s moral conscience should have led the movement to redeem ‘outcast London’. Instead, obsessed with their own theological ‘wranglings’, they turned a blind eye to the human suffering around them. ‘Why all this apparatus of temples and meeting houses’, Stead asked, ‘to save men from perdition in the world which is to come, while never a helping hand is stretched out to save them from the Inferno of their present life?’18 In the second major campaign, Stead turned his moral fervour to the ‘civilising’ mission of Empire. Britain’s military occupation of Egypt in 1882 to secure the Suez Canal had been the occasion for a popular uprising in the Sudan of Islamic followers of the messianic Mahdi, or ‘expected one’. The Egyptian garrisons in the Sudan came under threat, particularly after the annihilation of a British-

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led Egyptian army of 10,000 in November 1883. Early in January 1884, Stead, who had long admired the retired military leader and former governor of Sudan, General Charles Gordon, became convinced that only Gordon could save Egypt’s collapsing control in the Sudan. He obtained an interview with Gordon, which he subsequently published in the Pall Mall. He then used his newspaper to launch a national campaign to mobilise public opinion behind the slogan of ‘Gordon for Khartoum’. The more imperialist members of Gladstone’s Liberal Government supported the idea, and late in January, Gordon left for Khartoum. Stead had felt an affinity with Gordon during the interviews. Both men were highly strung and impulsive, with a profound faith in a personal God who spoke to them directly. In Stead’s view, Gordon was an abolitionist and saint, who had campaigned while governor of the Sudan to suppress the slave trade, and who now returned to the Sudan to bring justice and peace. In the pages of the Pall Mall he provided a stirring account of Gordon’s arrival in Khartoum. ‘I come without soldiers’, Stead reported Gordon as proclaiming to the welcoming crowds, ‘but with God on my side, to redress the evils of the Sudan’.19 Stead also gave his readers a glowing account of Gordon’s unconventional religious beliefs, including his identification with the selfless Christ, his condemnation of ‘Christian pharisees’, his rejection of eternal punishment and his belief that God responded to the prayers of people of all religions.20 By March 1884, Gordon and the garrison in Khartoum were cut off by the Mahdi’s forces. Stead now sounded the call for Gordon’s rescue and kept public opinion at a fever pitch over Gordon’s fate during the coming months. The Liberals under Gladstone were in Government, and Gladstone hesitated before finally committing a British relief expedition to the Sudan. Stead viewed this as a moral failing, and lost his faith in his former prophet.21 When in January 1885 Gordon perished with the fall of Khartoum, before the relief expedition could reach the city, Stead was clearly shaken. Had those articles of his sent Gordon to his death? But he found solace in the thought that his role in sending Gordon to Khartoum, and Gordon’s ‘martyrdom’, were all part of the providential plan. ‘Your brother’s death’, he wrote to Gordon’s sister in December 1885, ‘has done more to make Christ real to people than if he had … smashed a thousand Mahdis’. ‘It needed’, he continued, ‘that one man should die for the people, that Khartoum should remind men of Calvary, and that your brother should recall to the soul of man and woman everywhere the Divine call to each one of us to be another Christ, a living sacrifice for the feeblest and most forsaken of Christ’s brethren’.22 The third major campaign – and arguably the most famous of Stead’s career – was that dealing with allegations of widespread child prostitution in London. The occasion for the campaign was the failure, in May 1885, of a parliamentary bill to raise the age of consensual sex for girls from 13 to 16. Advocates of the bill called on Stead to enlist his support. When told that the child victims of sexual abuse were often intimidated into silence, an outraged Stead exclaimed, ‘Then I shall raise hell’. He formed what he called a ‘Special Commission’ (in truth himself and a few reporters) to investigate the extent of the abuse. They received assistance

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from the Salvation Army. The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ articles on child prostitution began appearing in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885, and they roused a storm of fury with their suggestions that the children of the poor were being forced into prostitution to satisfy the lusts of upper-class men. This was the ‘maiden tribute’ paid each year from the slums to ‘modern Babylon’. Opinion was deeply divided over the articles. Many believed that the articles were little more than pornography and that Stead greatly exaggerated the extent of the problem in order to sell his newspapers. But others were outraged that such things were possible in a Christian country, and applauded Stead’s courage. Among those who gave emotional support to Stead was Cardinal Manning, the Roman Catholic Primate of England. One of the most salacious of the stories involved the purchase of a thirteenyear-old girl from her drunken mother. To demonstrate how children were being sold, Stead had personally purchased the girl, Eliza Armstrong, allegedly for sexual purposes, with the assistance of a former brothel keeper and now converted member of the Salvation Army. The girl was in fact taken to Paris, where she was lodged with the Salvation Army. Five weeks later, the mother reported her daughter as missing to the police, and Eliza was then returned to her from Paris. As the identity of the girl became publicly known, the mother claimed that she believed her daughter had been taken into domestic service. Legal charges were brought against those involved in taking the girl out of the country, and after a trial Stead was sentenced to three months of prison. Again, public opinion was divided. Some of those who had until now supported Stead, including George Bernard Shaw, became convinced that much of Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute’ reporting had been fraudulent. For Stead, his imprisonment was a martyrdom, and he discerned God’s hand when, in August 1886, Parliament passed the act to raise the age of consent for girls to 16. While in prison, he experienced another conversion, now to a highly personal faith of sacrifice for others that mirrored, in many respects, his perceptions of the ‘martyred’ General Gordon. ‘In that jail’, Stead later stated, ‘a voice came to me, “Be no longer a Christian, be a Christ”. That voice was distinct and clear as possible’. He confided this experience to Manning, who responded that it was a ‘formula no one could quarrel with’.23 After 1886, Stead’s campaigns in the Pall Mall Gazette grew more subdued. The newspaper’s proprietor had been unhappy with the notoriety of the ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign and reigned in Stead’s enthusiasm. Stead’s own ambitions, meanwhile, were turning increasingly to imperial and international affairs, and he spent more and more time on the Continent. His relations with the proprietor steadily worsened, and in late 1889, Stead tendered his resignation. Between 1883 and 1886, he had effectively created what Matthew Arnold, in an article in the Nineteenth Century of May 1887, termed the ‘New Journalism’ or the ‘Americanisation of English journalism’.24 This was a style of journalism that placed emphasis on sensationalist, emotive stories aimed at rousing public opinion for concerted action, on subjective editorials which sought an ‘emotional bonding’ with readers and on aggressive investigative reporting, interviews with prominent

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figures and moral campaigns. The New Journalism also brought changes in the layout of the newspaper, with attention-seeking headlines, frequent subheadings in articles, more copious illustrations and frequent ‘extra’ or special themed issues.25 It has been described as ‘journalism with a mission’, a description that Stead would have applauded.26 In two articles in the Contemporary Review in 1886, Stead outlined his vision of the New Journalism.27 It was, he believed, the expression of direct democracy, through which public opinion made its views clear to Parliament. The editors were the tribunes of the people and the mediators between the masses and the government.28 More than that, Stead’s New Journalism had a religious aspect. The journalist, he insisted, was often both a ‘missionary and an apostle’, discerning and proclaiming the will of God for the ‘progress of civilization’. Revelation, he claimed, was ongoing, and the journalist was akin to ‘those ancient prophets whose leaders [editorials] on the current politics of Judea and Samaria three millenniums ago are still appointed to be read in our churches’. ‘We have to write afresh’, he claimed, ‘the only Bible which millions read’.29 The editor, he insisted, was also a ‘Sandalphon’ or ‘Angel of Prayer’. ‘Into his ear are poured the cries, the protests, the complaints of men who suffer wrong, and it is his mission to present them daily before the conscience of mankind’.30 Stead and the ‘New Church’ Stead was profoundly influenced by two religious movements during the 1880s. The first was the extraordinary growth of the Salvation Army under the leadership of William and Catherine Booth. The second was the continued growth and the new social commitments of the Roman Catholic Church, under the primacy of Cardinal Manning. Stead was deeply impressed with the commitment of these very different faith communities to improving conditions for the urban poor. He also respected their global outreach, which resonated with his own interests in world peace and international justice. ‘The Church of Rome and the Salvation Army’, he wrote in 1891, ‘– these are the only two organisations which operate directly and simultaneously in all the continents and among all the nations’.31 Stead viewed the Salvation Army as the direct successor to seventeenth-century Puritanism.32 His first contact with the new organisation had been in July 1879 when two young ‘Hallelujah Lasses’ had arrived in Darlington with no money or local connections and proceeded to mount a revival campaign. They raised the money locally for the rental of the meeting hall, placed posters around the town, conducted the meetings and cleaned the hall afterwards. Although they had little education and one was physically very frail, and probably consumptive, the young women proved immensely successful, winning converts from the most hardened of working-class men. Stead was concerned about by the physical weakness of the younger woman, a Miss Clapham, and he wrote to ‘General’ William Booth to protest at his putting her in a situation in which she was likely to suffer a physical collapse. Booth responded that he appreciated the danger, but that his Army

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was involved in a desperate struggle and Miss Clapham could not be relieved ‘without entirely overtaxing someone else’. If she were to die, he added, ‘we can only regard this as an inevitable prospect for those who are liable to be suddenly surrounded with a gigantic conflict & victory and we should be compelled to abandon the work altogether if we had not men & women perfectly prepared to face the utmost risk with a changeless resolution & a calm confidence in God’.33 Stead was irritated, but also impressed by Booth’s willingness to sacrifice his ‘soldiers’ in the cause.34 On arriving in London, he sought out the Salvation Army. He was attracted by the Salvationists’ courage in the face of mob violence, by their willingness to minister to the most degraded and outcast of humankind and by the relative equality of women and men within the movement. He seriously contemplated leaving journalism and joining the Salvation Army, and he sought out Salvation Army assistance in his ‘Maiden Tribute’ investigative work. Indeed, Bramwell Booth, General Booth’s son and future leader of the movement, appeared with Stead as one of the defendants in the Eliza Armstrong case – though the charges against Bramwell Booth were subsequently dropped.35 A few years later, Stead ghost-wrote much of General Booth’s famed work of social criticism, In Darkest England and the Way Out, which appeared in 1890.36 Stead’s interest in the Roman Catholic Church was largely an outgrowth of his friendship with Cardinal Manning, which had developed during the ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign. Manning had supported Stead during that campaign, and, more importantly, he was one of the few clergymen to stand by Stead during the dark time of his imprisonment. By the later 1880s, Manning was a close friend and spiritual guide to Stead; ‘Cardinal Manning’, recalled one of Stead’s friends, ‘when he was nearly eighty years of age, used to climb up to Stead’s office on the second floor of Mowbray House from time to time. He was much attached to Stead’.37 ‘Since my father died’, Stead wrote in 1890, ‘there has been no man who has been so good to me, so helpful, so loving, and so true as Cardinal Manning’.38 Stead was attracted to Manning’s social commitments, especially his role in helping to arbitrate a settlement in the London dockers’ strike of 1889. With Manning’s assistance, in the late autumn of 1889 Stead visited Rome, met with some leading Vatican figures and sought unsuccessfully to interview Pope Leo XIII – hoping to convince the pontiff to relinquish the temporal power and take up the social question.39 He presented his impressions of the visit first in a series of letters in the Pall Mall Gazette and then in a substantial book, The Pope and the New Era, in which he argued that the Roman Catholic Church had the potential to assert leadership over the ‘onward march of Humanity’. What was needed, however, was for the Catholic Church to recognise that the centre of world power and culture had shifted from the Mediterranean to the Englishspeaking world. ‘Rome’, he observed, ‘is of the old world, archaic, moribund, and passing away. The centre, the capital, and the mother city of the new world, which Catholicism must conquer or perish, is not to be found on the banks of the Tiber, but on the Thames’. He suggested a ‘hegira of the Pope from the Latin to the English world’, with the Vatican to be relocated to London.40

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Stead’s notions were growing more and more grandiose. By the late 1880s, he was envisaging a union of all English-speaking peoples which would become the harbinger of a new world order. He had always believed that God, or the ‘senior partner’, spoke to him directly, and he became convinced that he was being called by Providence to a major role in reshaping the world. ‘I now see’, he noted in a private memorandum in late 1889, ‘that I am called to found for the Nineteenth Century a city of God which will be to the age of the printing press and the steam engine what the Catholic Church was to the Europe of the 10th century’.41 In 1890, after leaving the Pall Mall Gazette, he founded a new periodical, the Review of Reviews, to give expression to the new world faith and new world order. Of this venture, he wrote in a private memorandum: ‘Boundless possibilities, the unexpected first step in a world-wide journalistic, civic church, with a faith and religious orders and endowments and all the rest of paraphernalia of the Church Militant’.42 The aim of the Review of Reviews was to bring together articles and editorials from the best of the English-language press throughout the world, along with character sketches of major world figures. But more than that, it was to promote both the union of all English-speaking peoples for the mission of uniting the world around shared moral and spiritual values. In the introduction to the first issue, directed ‘To All English-Speaking Folk’, Stead proclaimed the larger mission of the journal. It would seek to communicate God’s ongoing revelation to the world. ‘“God is not dumb that He should speak no more”’, he observed, ‘and we have to seek for the gradual unfolding of His message to His creatures in the highest and ripest thought of our time’. This ongoing revelation continued to be given first and foremost to a particular race, a chosen people – which had once been the ancient Hebrews and was now the ‘English-speaking race’. ‘We believe’, he asserted, ‘in God, in England, and in Humanity. The English-speaking race is one of the chief of God’s chosen agents for executing coming improvements in the lot of mankind’.43 What was needed, he maintained, was a new order of the faithful, similar in missionary zeal to the Jesuit order or the Salvation Army, which would infuse the English-speaking world with a religion of sacrifice.44 Stead, a critic observed, was determined to make himself the ‘Father Confessor to the Universe’.45 Indeed, at this time Stead was in discussions with his friend, Cecil Rhodes, about the formation of a new society of dedicated supporters of the civilising mission of imperialism, to be called the Society of the Elect and to be funded by Rhodes; it would, in Stead’s conception, play a similar role in the British Empire as the Jesuit order played in the world mission of the Roman Catholic Church.46 The Review of Reviews, meanwhile, was an immense success, selling 60,000 copies on its first day of publication.47 The circulation continued at a high level, and it spawned successful subsidiaries – the American Review of Reviews and the Australian Review of Reviews. Stead was by now envisaging a new Church of the Future that would be inclusive of all honest seekers after truth and all who embraced a gospel of enthusiasm for humanity. He had first introduced his ideas about the New Church

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in an ‘extra’ issue of the Pall Mall Gazette published in June 1886, some six months after his ‘conversion’ in Holloway Prison. This Pall Mall ‘extra’ included papers on religion from over 18 prominent figures, ranging from F.W. Farrar of Westminster Abbey to Hugh Price Hughes of the Methodist Church to Frederick Harrison the Positivist and agnostic. In his editor’s preface, Stead described the ideal universal Church as one that would ‘include all who can minister to the service of humanity’ and which would seek to address the multifarious human needs. It would treat men and women equally, recognising the Motherhood as well as Fatherhood of God. He deliberately sought to distance this future Church from the Calvinist Nonconformity in which he had been raised; its aim would be to embrace humanity in all its rich diversity and it would not be restricted by a set of doctrines. ‘The ideal Church’, he insisted, ‘will include Atheists and run a theatre and a public house’.48 He explored his ideal ‘Church of the Future’ further in an interview which appeared in the journal Great Thoughts in January 1891, and then in a book which included commentary on his Church idea by a number of British religious leaders. He repeated his insistence that the Church should include atheists, agnostics and non-believers in Christian doctrine, and should run theatres and pubs. The sole requirement for membership would be a willingness to work and sacrifice for the betterment of humanity, or in Stead’s phrase, to ‘be a Christ’. He wanted a church that would be broad enough to include such figures as his friend, Annie Besant, the feminist, socialist, spiritualist and theosophist, who, although not a believer in Christian doctrine and shunned by the churches, followed the example of the historical Jesus. ‘It is not Christians who will save the world’, he added, ‘nor Churches – it is Christs’.49 For a time in late 1887 and early 1888, Stead and Besant viewed this Church of the Future as their special joint project. She embraced his ‘Church of the future’, Besant informed Stead on 1 January 1888, ‘partly because I so passionately believe in it, partly because you have so directly laid your hand on the centre of the Atheism of myself & hundreds like me. It is despair of your God that has made me Atheist’. But the Church of the Future, she continued, pointed to a ‘Golden Age’ that ‘will dawn the sooner for every life devoted to the service of Man’.50 From 1891, Stead commenced a national campaign in the Review of Reviews to establish Churches of the Future, or what he now termed ‘Civic Churches’, in towns and cities throughout Britain. Meetings were held and initiatives begun in Brighton, Bradford, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Maidenhead, Rochdale and Swansea.51 The aim of the Civic Church, he explained to a meeting in Edinburgh, was to bring together all the voluntary associations and denominational churches in each town and city, and unite and co-ordinate their efforts for social improvement. It was to revive a sense of ‘National Religion’ and elevate communities with shared spiritual and moral values.52 It would represent the older seventeenth-century Puritan striving for the righteousness of the godly commonwealth, but now transposed into the more worldly and secular language, aspirations and ideals of the late nineteenth century. From the comments by British religious leaders and the Christian press, however,

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it was clear that Stead’s ideas were gaining little favour, while they aroused often intense opposition from church leaders, especially from Nonconformist church leaders who viewed his ideas as lacking a distinctive Christian message. Catherine Booth of the Salvation Army could see little Christianity in his Church of the Future, which struck her as simply a humanitarian organisation. ‘Praise up humanitarianism as much as you like’, she advised Stead on 31 December 1888, ‘but don’t confound it with Christianity nor suppose that it will ultimately lead its followers to God. This is confounding things that differ’.53 Stead’s friend, the London-based Methodist preacher and social activist Hugh Price Hughes, had similar misgivings about the Church of the Future. ‘Of course’, he wrote Stead on 30 January 1888, ‘I approve of the object and of the method’. However, he added, ‘the great difficulty is to unite persons who do not accept a common basis of conduct’. ‘I know a great many are unconscious Christians’, he continued. None the less, ‘in the long run it would be difficult to find any solid basis of union unless we all accept the teaching of Christ’.54 When Stead brought his plan for the Civic Church to the Church Reunion Conference held at Lucerne, Switzerland, in September 1893, it was soundly rejected, with Hughes taking a leading role in the opposition. ‘He could not accept Mr Stead’s Civic Church’, Hughes stated, ‘as it was not based on any recognition of Christianity’.55 In the autumn of 1893, Stead made his first trip to America, to see the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and to explore the fast-growing Midwestern city, which he believed might be the place for establishing his Church of the Future, or ‘Civic Church’. This great New World metropolis, he believed, was destined to assume a central position in the English-speaking world. Where better to realise the Church of the Future than in this city of the future? He was a well-known figure when he arrived in the city, in part because of the success of the American Review of Reviews and in part because of the Eliza Armstrong case. He spent nearly four months in Chicago, visiting brothels, saloons, and gambling dens, exploring political corruption, class conflict, ethnic tensions and sectarian divisions, speaking at public meetings and endeavouring to unite the city’s churches in the work of civic reform. His efforts were not without success, and contributed to the formation of the Civic Federation of Chicago, which had notable success during the following decades in pressing for progressive social and political reforms.56 While in Chicago, Stead wrote a book on the social and political conditions in the city, If Christ came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer. It was a substantial volume of some 460 pages and it became one of his best-known works. As well as some offering some fine investigative reporting on the social problems of Chicago, the book developed his views on the Civic Church; indeed, it was largely an extended sermon, depicting the sin and depravity of the city, and its need of redemption through the Civic Church. If Christ now came to Chicago, Stead argued, he would find in the city hall, with its social welfare and educational programmes, the closest approximation to the original Church that He had founded almost 2,000 years ago.57 The world, he

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insisted, was on the verge of a new dispensation, which was being ushered in by a new Universal Church, based on a ministry of practical service. ‘The New Redemption’, he prophesied, ‘for which the world has long been waiting wearily is nigh at hand. The old forms having served their turn and done their work are passing away’.58 What now was emerging was a ‘new Catholicity’. ‘The new religion’, he continued, Which is but the primitive essence of the oldest of all religions, has but one formula – Be a Christ! The new Church, which is already dimly becoming conscious of its own existence under all kinds of ecclesiastical and dogmatic and agnostic concealments, is not less broad. What is the Church? It is the Union of all who Love in the Service of all who Suffer.59

The book sold some 300,000 copies on both sides of the Atlantic, and was translated into German and Swedish.60 Stead believed it was the best book he had ever written, and he followed it up with meetings in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London to promote both the religion of the New Redemption and its institutional expression in the Civic Church. In 1894, he created a new national organisation, the National Social Union, on the model of the Civic Federation of Chicago, endeavouring to unite the churches, labour organisations and progressive movements across Britain.61 And yet, despite the commercial success of If Christ came to Chicago and the interest in the idea of civic federations, Stead failed to rouse sustained public commitment to his larger prophetic visions of the New Redemption, the Civic Church or the National Social Union: nor did anything substantial come from his discussions with Rhodes about the Secret Society of the Elect. Stead was a highly successful journalist and editor, whose Review of Reviews (together with its American and Australian versions) enjoyed massive sales. However, his larger prophetic vision of uniting the English-speaking world around a new Church of the Future failed to gain a following. He was not accepted as a new Loyola for the British Empire, or a new General Booth for a godly commonwealth, or a special advisor to the Papacy, or the founder of a universal Civic Church. As his grandiose religious-imperialist dreams faded, Stead began turning increasingly for solace to another set of religious notions – those associated with spiritualism and the occult.62 Stead, Spiritualism and the Occult Spiritualism, or the effort to communicate with the spirits of the dead, had first appeared in its modern guise in Britain in the early 1850s, and had gained a number of adherents, both among the working classes and in fashionable upperand middle-class homes. For many, spiritualism took the form of a new religion, proclaiming the existence of an afterlife in which the spirits of the departed would

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continue to grow in wisdom and from which they would continue to take an interest in the living. From the late 1860s, spiritualist societies began forming local churches, or ‘lyceums’, holding Sunday services, adopting rituals and hymns, and organising spiritualist Sunday schools. A British National Association of Spiritualists was founded in 1873; it was reconstituted as the London Spiritual Alliance in 1883. Spiritualist journals appeared, including Light, which began publication in 1881 and Two Worlds, which began in 1887. Stead’s own interest in spiritualism began about 1880, at the time of his move to London. He attended his first séance in 1881, and believed that he had demonstrated psychic powers. He later told his daughter that the medium had stood and solemnly told him: ‘Young man, you are going to be the St. Paul of Spiritualism’.63 In late 1891 and early 1892, he published two sets of ghost stories in special issues of the Review of Reviews. In the early summer of 1892, he began practicing automatic writing. This was a process by which gifted individuals claimed that spirits directed their handwriting, conveying messages from the other world. In particular, Stead believed that his automatic writing became a medium through which Julia Ames, a deceased American woman from Streator, Illinois, and the former friend of a friend, communicated messages to him from the other world.64 Stead also took an intense interest in spirit photography and telepathy, linking both to developments in electricity, and to telephone and wireless communication technologies.65 In July 1893, he launched a new quarterly journal, Borderland, which was dedicated to psychic research.66 The journal, he announced in the first issue, would promote the scientific study of spiritualist phenomena and contribute to the exploration of that ‘world beyond the impalpable veil that shrouds it from our eyes, a world which is not empty but teeming with life’. The journal would also present the latest psychic research to ‘ordinary people’, or, as he put it, ‘democratise the study of the spook’.67 To assist him with the journal, he recruited his friend, Annie Besant, who was now a leading figure in the theosophical movement. The journal ran for four years, with articles on a range of subjects, including spirit photography, theosophy, hypnotism, reincarnation, telepathy, premonitions, psychic healing and ghosts. In 1897, ill health and the pressure of other work forced Stead to suspend publication. In December of that year, he published the first edition of the Letters from Julia, which purported to be a series of communications from the deceased Julia Ames, in which she described life in the other world and instructed Stead about the need to set up a bureau through which mediums would assist people to get in touch with loved ones in the next world.68 The work went through eight editions by 1910. Stead was convinced the messages were genuine, although even his sympathetic biographer, Frederick Whyte, observed that if the manuscript were to fall ‘into the hands of somebody who knew nothing of Stead … [it] would be dismissed immediately as the product of a mind unhinged’.69 In another essay published in 1897, Stead developed his own theory of the subconscious personality, or ‘subliminal self’, drawing upon the psychological writings of his friend and fellow

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psychic explorer, Frederick Myers, as well as upon recent studies of hypnotism. It was through the subconscious, Stead believed, that individuals received communications from the spiritual world. This subconscious, in short, was ‘the ghost that dwells in each of us’.70 In 1909, in obedience to Julia’s commands and distraught over the death of his son in 1907, Stead established what he called ‘Julia’s bureau’, with an office and staff in London, to assist communications between the living and their deceased loved ones. What should be made of this absorption from the early 1890s in spiritualism and the occult? Interest in spiritualism and psychic research, to be sure, was widespread in late Victorian Britain, especially in the ‘decadence’ of the 1890s, and a number of leading intellectual figures dabbled in ghost stories and séances. Many were impressed by the new developments in science, including X-rays and wireless communication, which suggested that there might be other, as yet undiscovered physical forces behind spiritualist and occult phenomena. Few public figures, however, committed themselves as fully and openly to spiritualism and the occult as did Stead. It damaged his reputation as a reliable journalist, and led many to believe that he was indeed unbalanced. ‘My violent dislike of the Spooks’, confessed the Nonconformist journalist, William Robertson Nicoll, of his friendship with Stead in May 1912, ‘prevented us from having any really intimate intercourse for the last few years’.71 Some, such as his fellow journalist A.G. Gardiner, saw continuity in Stead’s religious conceptions and argued that Stead’s spiritualism was consistent with his lifelong religious quests, from his Nonconformist veneration of Cromwell and the striving for a godly commonwealth, his admiration of the eclectic religious views of General Gordon, his elevation of the Salvation Army of the Booths and the Roman Catholic Church of Cardinal Manning, his championing of the religious strivings of Annie Besant, to his advocacy of spiritualism and interests in the occult. ‘He was a visionary from his cradle … and he had the visionary’s recklessness and reliance on emotion’.72 However, for another commentator, Hugh Kingsmill, Stead’s increasing commitment to spiritualism marked a discontinuity from his former Christian quest for the godly commonwealth. The embracing of the occult, for Kingsmill, was for Stead a response to a waning confidence in his mission of transforming the world through a union of English-speaking peoples and the ‘Universal Church of the New Redemption’. ‘Stead’s faith’, Kingsmill observed, ‘in the unique qualities of God’s Englishmen weakened, and in proportion as his hope of unifying this world dwindled, his desire to establish close relations between this world and the next increased’.73 Stead’s final years were haunted by disappointment and sorrow. In the late 1890s, after years of supporting the plans of imperial federation and the ‘civilising’ mission of Empire, he became a vocal critic of Chamberlain’s imperial policies, and a strident campaigner for international peace and the creation of an international court of arbitration. He strongly opposed the South African War of 1899–1902, and became one of England’s leading pro-Boers. For this, he was reviled by supporters of the war, while he was also despised by many anti-war

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radicals and liberals, who believed that Stead’s former imperialist visions and his journalistic touting of Cecil Rhodes had contributed to the outbreak of the war. According to the Westminster Gazette, Stead had ‘invented Cecil Rhodes’.74 Stead’s unpopularity contributed to the disastrous failure of his attempt to found a new London daily newspaper in 1903, a failure that led to a physical breakdown. He took a leading role in the peace conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, but was depressed by the failure of the conferences. His dogged efforts to rouse international support for his peace campaigns could appear naïve, and at times ludicrous, in a Europe absorbed in amassing weaponry and divided into military alliances. In 1907, as noted above, his eldest son, who Stead intended would carry on his various journalistic enterprises, died suddenly after a brief illness. Stead’s hopes for national Christianity were re-awakened with the British revival of 1904–05, associated with Evan Roberts in Wales and the campaign of the American revivalists, Reuben Torrey and Charlie Alexander. In reporting on the revival movement, he returned to his beginnings, recalling the powerful emotional experience of his childhood conversion in the revival of 1859–62. ‘It is 43 years since that Revival’, he observed. ‘The whole of my life during all these 43 years has been influenced by the change which men call conversion which occurred with me when I was 12’. It had, he added, infused him with the sense that ‘this is God’s world’.75 In the events of 1905, he saw again the vision of the Civic Church, which would elevate modern society with shared ideals.76 In 1912, Stead was travelling to the United States, in part to speak on the theme of world peace at a rally of the evangelistic ‘Men and Religion Forward’ campaign in New York, and in part to meet a leading American medium, the Detroit-based Mrs Etta Wriedt, who he hoped would assist him in Julia’s Bureau, when he perished with the sinking of the Titanic.77 His daughter, Estelle, now a successful stage actress, believed that it was for the best. ‘It was well perhaps’, she later observed, ‘that my father died when he did. Had he lived he would have been a disappointed and thwarted man’. ‘He felt’, she added, ‘… that he had lost his influence’.78 After his death, he was said to have communicated the content of several books on the afterlife through his daughter and other mediums. Stead’s life had represented a lifelong commitment to defining a religious faith that could unify society around shared moral and spiritual values. In the 1880s, he pioneered the New Journalism, with its sensationalism, its emotive investigative reporting and its sense of moral mission. For him, the editor’s desk was a new pulpit for interpreting and proclaiming God’s truth to a changing society. He was a bold and engaging writer, and his prose remains a lively expression of late Victorian and Edwardian attitudes. In the 1890s, he sought, less successfully, to point the way to new religious conceptions, shaped around the ideals of sacrifice for the good of others, and a new inclusive, this worldly Civic Church that would unite ‘all who love in the service of all who suffer’. His life was spent in trying to revive a Puritan ideal of the godly commonwealth, but now in the increasingly complex, interconnected, imperialist and urbanised world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was in many respects a conscientious Nonconformist, the son of a Congregational minister and a devout mother, shaped in a strict Nonconformist

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home, converted in the revival of 1859–62, and growing to adulthood amid stories of Cromwell’s campaigns and the evangelical anti-slavery movement. He retained the essentials of this Nonconformist conscience, including a strict work ethic, and avoidance of alcohol, cards, gambling (though in his last years, he became a devotee of the theatre and his daughter became an actor) and he was a loyal member of the Congregational Church throughout his life. But he also became intensely awake to the world religious movements of his age, overcame certain prejudices attached to his Nonconformist tradition and came to look upon Roman Catholics, Salvation Army revivalists, broad church Anglicans, agnostics, spiritualists and theosophists with admiration. His spiritualism and infatuation with ghosts included a belief that if men and women could be given clear proof of a life to come, they would become more pious and moral in this world. It would be ‘shameful’, he once wrote of his absorption in spiritualism to Robertson Nicoll, ‘that a Christian journalist should refuse to study the only proof of Christianity that can be offered to the human mind’.79 He retained a strong sense of this world as a place of spiritual pilgrimage, and he came to believe that all religions were paths to spiritual truth; this lay behind his vision of a Universal Church. Whether through the Nonconformist conscience, the social gospel, his commitment to becoming a Christ, his enthusiasm for humanity or his new Universal Church – part Salvation Army, part Roman Catholic Church, part civic religion, part humanism – he sought to make religion live as a social force in the world. Even in his darkest moments, Stead possessed an abiding faith in the providential ordering of the universe, and an abiding optimism about the progress of humankind. It was perhaps well that he did perish before the coming of the First World War, which he would have found heart-breaking. His moral earnestness, his optimism and his occult enthusiasms, meanwhile, had little appeal to a more cynical post-war generation, and his reputation rapidly faded. Endnotes 1 Report of Mrs Juanita Shelley, quoted in G. Eckley, Maiden Tribute: A Life of W.T. Stead (Philadelphia, 2007), p. 380. 2 [R. Blathwayt] (ed.), Interview with Mr W.T. Stead on the Church of the Future (London, 1891), p. 7. 3 H. Kingsmill, After Puritanism 1850–1900 (London, 1929), pp. 172, 198. 4 F. Whyte, The Life of W.T. Stead, 2 vols (London, 1925). 5 J.W. Robertson Scott, The Life and Death of a Newspaper: An Account of the Temperaments, Perturbations and Achievements of John Morley, W.T. Stead, E.T. Cook, Harry Cust, J.L. Garvin and Three Other Editors of the Pall Mall Gazette (London, 1952), pp. 72–259. 6 J.O. Baylen, ‘The “New Journalism” in Late Victorian Britain’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 18 (1972), pp. 367–85; J.O. Baylen, ‘A Victorian’s “Crusade” in Chicago’, Journal of American History, 51 (1964), pp. 418–34; J.O. Baylen, ‘W.T. Stead as Publisher and Editor of the Review of Reviews’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 12 (1979), pp. 70–84; J.O. Baylen, ‘W.T. Stead and the Boer War: The Irony of Idealism’, Canadian Historical Review, 40 (1959), pp. 304–14; J.O. Baylen, ‘W.T. Stead’s History of

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the Mystery and the Jameson Raid’, Journal of British Studies, 4 (1964), pp. 104–32; P.G. Hogan Jr and J.O. Baylen, ‘G. Bernard Shaw and W.T. Stead: An Unexplored Relationship’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 1 (1961), pp. 123–47; R.L. Schults, Crusader in Babylon: W.T. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1972). 7 W. Sydney Robinson, Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead (London, 2012); R. Luckhurst, L. Brake, J. Mussell and E. King (eds), W.T. Stead: Newspaper Revolutionary (London, 2012). 8 Whyte, Life of W.T. Stead, vol. ii, p. 247. 9 J.S. Stephenson, The Reverend William Stead and his Family (Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1987). 10 W.T. Stead, James Russell Lowell: His Message and How it Helped Me (London, [1891]), p. 10. 11 W.T. Stead, Josephine Butler: A Life Sketch (London, 1887), pp. 85–6. 12 R. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876, 2nd edn. (Hassocks, Sussex, 1975), p. 71. 13 Stead, James Russell Lowell, p. 40. 14 W.T. Stead to W.E. Gladstone, 26 August, 6 September 1876, British Library, Gladstone Papers, Add. Ms. 44303, fols 230–1, 233–4. 15 W.T. Stead to W.E. Gladstone, 6 September 1876, British Library, Gladstone Papers, Add. Ms. 44303, fols 233–4. 16 Northern Echo, quoted in W.T. Stead, Gladstone 1809–1898: A Character Sketch (London, [1898]), pp. 14–15. 17 Quoted in Robertson Scott, The Life and Death of a Newspaper, p. 69. 18 [W.T. Stead], ‘Is it Not Time?’ Pall Mall Gazette (16 October 1883). 19 [W.T. Stead], ‘Who is to have the Soudan? Gordon or the Slave Traders’, Pall Mall Gazette, ‘Extra’ (12 March 1884). 20 [W.T. Stead], ‘General Gordon’s Religious Beliefs’, Pall Mall Gazette, ‘Extra’ (12 March 1884). 21 W.T. Stead to W.E. Gladstone, 26 May 1884, British Library, Gladstone Papers, Add. Ms. 44303, fols 341–2. 22 W.T. Stead to Augusta Gordon, 31 December 1885, British Library, Moffitt Collection, Add. Ms. 51300, fols 178–9. 23 [Blathwayt] (ed.), Interview with Mr W.T. Stead on the Church of the Future, pp. 14–15. 24 Matthew Arnold, ‘Up to Easter’, Nineteenth Century, 123 (1887), pp. 638–9. 25 On the New Journalism, see especially Baylen, ‘The “New Journalism” in Late Victorian Britain’ and Schults, Crusader in Babylon, pp. 29–65; Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead, vol. I, pp. 237–89. 26 By J.W. Robertson Scott, quoted in Schults, Crusader in Babylon, p. 31. 27 W.T. Stead, ‘Government by Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 49 (1886), pp. 653–74; W.T. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 50 (1886), pp. 663–79. 28 Stead, ‘Government by Journalism’, pp. 653–61. 29 Ibid., pp. 663–4. 30 Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, p. 670. 31 W.T. Stead, General Booth: A Biographical Sketch (London, 1891), p. 91. 32 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 33 W. Booth to W.T. Stead, 19 July 1879, Papers of W.T. Stead, Churchill College, Cambridge, STED 1/8. 34 W.T. Stead, The Salvation Army and its Social Scheme (London, 1890), pp. 5–7.

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35 The story is well told in R. Hattersley, Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army (London, 1999), pp. 304–24. 36 W. Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, [1890]); for Stead’s role in writing the book, see K.S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (London, 1963), pp. 202–4. 37 H.S. Lunn, Chapters from my Life with Special Reference to Reunion (London, 1918), p. 132. 38 W.T. Stead, Character Sketches (London, [1891]), p. 145. 39 W.T. Stead to Cardinal Manning, 22, 23, 24, 31 October 1889, 5 November 1889, Papers of W.T. Stead, Churchill College, Cambridge, STED 1/51. 40 W.T. Stead, the Pope and the New Era, being Letters from the Vatican in 1889 (London, 1890), pp. 28, 89, 243. 41 Quoted in Robertson Scott, The Life and Death of a Newspaper, p. 152. 42 Ibid., p. 155. 43 [W.T. Stead], ‘To All English-Speaking Folk’, Review of Reviews (January 1890), pp. 15, 17. 44 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 45 Baylen, ‘W.T. Stead as Publisher and Editor of the Review of Reviews’, p. 71. 46 Whyte, Life of W.T. Stead, vol. ii, pp. 208–10. 47 Baylen, ‘W.T. Stead as Publisher and Editor of the Review of Reviews’, p. 71. 48 [W.T. Stead]. ‘A Church “Exceeding Broad”’, Pall Mall Gazette (10 June 1886). 49 [Blathwayt] (ed.), Interview with Mr W.T. Stead on the Church of the Future, pp. 15. 50 Annie Besant to W.T. Stead, 1 January 1888, Papers of W.T. Stead, Churchill College, STED 1/6. 51 ‘Towards the Civic Church: A Report of Progress’, Review of Reviews (March 1893), pp. 309–14. 52 Ibid., pp. 311–12. 53 Catherine Booth to W.T. Stead, 31 December 1888, Papers of W.T. Stead, Churchill College, STED 1/8. 54 Hugh Price Hughes to W.T. Stead, 30 January 1888, Papers of W.T. Stead, Churchill College, STED 1/40. 55 H.S. Lunn, Chapters from my Life with Special Reference to Reunion (London, 1918), pp. 379–81; quotation on p. 381. 56 D.B. Downey, ‘William Stead and Chicago: A Victorian Jeremiah in the Windy City’, Mid-America, 68 (1987), pp. 153–66; G. Scott Smith, ‘When Stead Came to Chicago: The “Social Gospel Novel” and the Chicago Civic Federation’, American Presbyterians, 68 (1990), pp. 193–205; Baylen, ‘A Victorian’s “Crusade” in Chicago’, pp. 420–431. 57 W.T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (London, 1894), pp. 264–72. 58 Ibid., p. 433. 59 Ibid., p. 434. 60 Downey, ‘William Stead and Chicago’, p. 199. 61 Baylen, ‘A Victorian’s “Crusade” in Chicago’, pp. 432–3; [W.T. Stead], ‘The Chronicles of the Civic Church: Is There a Remedy for the Miseries of the World?’ Review of Reviews (May 1894), p. 505; [W.T. Stead], ‘The National Social Union: Statement of its Aims, Methods, and Organisation’, Review of Reviews (September, 1894), pp. 286–96; ‘The National Social Union’, Review of Reviews (November 1894), pp. 496–500.

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62 For an excellent recent study of Stead’s involvement in spiritualism and the occult, see R. Luckhurst, ‘W.T. Stead’s Occult Economies’, in L. Henson, G. Cantor, G. Dawson, R. Noakes, S. Shuttleworth and J.R. Topham (eds), Culture and Science in the NineteenthCentury Media (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 125–35. 63 E.W. Stead, My Father: Personal and Spiritual Reminiscences (London, 1913), pp. 95–7. 64 W.T. Stead, ‘My Experience in Automatic Writing’, Borderland, 1 (1893), pp. 39–49. 65 Luckhurst, ‘W.T. Stead’s Occult Economies’, pp. 129–33. 66 J.O. Baylen, ‘W.T. Stead’s Borderland: A Quarterly Review and Index of Psychic Phenomena, 1893–97’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 1 (1969), pp. 30–35. 67 W.T. Stead, ‘How We Intend to Study Borderland’, Borderland, 1 (1893), pp. 5, 7. 68 W.T. Stead, Letters from Julia, or Light from the Borderland (London, 1897). 69 Whyte, Life of W.T. Stead, vol. I, p. 332. 70 W.T. Stead, Real Ghost Stories (London, 1897), pp. 1–23. 71 W. Robertson Nicoll to A.H. Wilkerson, 1 May 1912, quoted in T.H. Darlow, William Robertson Nicoll: Life and Letters (London, 1925), pp. 224–5. 72 Quoted in Whyte, Life of W.T. Stead, vol. I, p. 339. 73 Kingsmill, After Puritanism, p. 220. 74 Quoted in Luckhurst, ‘W.T. Stead’s Occult Economies’, p. 126. 75 W.T. Stead, The Revival of 1905 (London, 1905), pp. 3–11, quotations on pp. 10, 11. 76 Ibid., pp. 115–16. 77 A. Goldman, ‘Yeats, Spiritualism, and Psychical Research’ in G. M. Harper (ed.), Yeats and the Occult (London, 1976), p. 114–15. 78 Quoted in Eckley, Maiden Tribute, p. 373. 79 W. Robertson Nicoll, ‘W.T. Stead’, British Weekly (25 April 1912).

Chapter 14

‘An Ambitious Venture’: Oxford University Press and The Oxford History of England1 Brian Harrison

The present-day importance of state-funded humanities research masks the scale of the humanities research that has been organized and published independently of the state, most notably by commercial publishing firms. It was an enterprising publisher, George Smith (of Smith, Elder), who funded the Dictionary of National Biography [DNB]. Macmillan created the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (4 volumes 1878–89, rising to 29 volumes in its seventh edition of 2001); to this the firm added the 34-volume Grove Dictionary of Art in 1996. The Oxford University Press [OUP] promoted outstanding humanities research both directly and indirectly, and did not confine its twentieth-century scholarly role to publishing: it was itself a powerful research engine, directly funding and organizing the huge Oxford English Dictionary. Then after the Smith family gave it the DNB in 1917,2 the OUP published periodic supplements on the newly deceased. From its own resources came six-sevenths of the funding for the total revision of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography from 1992 to 2004,3 and it has funded the continuous revision of its online version thereafter. The OUP bought from Macmillan the dictionaries of art and music in 2003 and 2004, respectively. It buttressed all this through subordinate, but still substantial, projects mobilizing twentieth-century scholars who were increasingly becoming in effect employees of the state. Such projects included the Oxford History of English Literature, the Oxford History of Modern Europe, the Oxford History of the British Empire and the Oxford History of England [OHE]. The OHE’s history, surprisingly neglected, profoundly influenced United Kingdom sixth-form historians for half a century. Until the 1960s ‘England’ was a term applied to the United Kingdom without undue embarrassment, and the United Kingdom still seemed central to world events, its history central to world history and to historical study in general. ‘The completed series’, wrote G.N. Clark in 1961, reflecting on his role as the OHE’s General Editor, ‘is not simply a row of separate books in a uniform binding: it is a co-operative history’. Its omissions and inclusions reflected its volumes’ location within the sequence, and ‘each … derives something of its colour and construction from the others’.4 What, then, were the OHE’s origins and aspirations, how was it edited and organized, who wrote it and what was its impact?

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The OHE sought in 1929 to supplant two influential multi-volume series, both owing much to Oxford authors, and now unjustly forgotten. In 1904 Sir Charles Oman, General Editor of the Methuen History of England’s seven volumes, explained that ‘the general reading public continues to ask for standard histories, and discovers, only too often, that it can find nothing between school manuals at one end of the scale and minute monographs at the other. The series … is intended to do something towards meeting this demand’.5 Its first editions appeared in 1904–13, running from Oman’s own England before the Norman Conquest (1910) to J.A.R. Marriott’s England since Waterloo (1913). Six of its seven authors were Oxford men, and although no volume rivalled G.M. Trevelyan’s England under the Stuarts in justifying 21 editions by 1949, all were thought to deserve new editions over several decades. The 12 volumes of the Longman Political History of England found influential general editors in two Oxford history graduates: William Hunt and R.L. Poole. In their ‘Introduction’ to the series, first published in 1905–10, they claimed ‘that the time has come when the advance which has been made in the knowledge of English history as a whole should be laid before the public in a single work of fairly adequate size’. With authors as distinguished as T.F. Tout, A.F. Pollard and H.A.L. Fisher, the series stretched from Thomas Hodgkin’s History of England from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest (1906) to Low and Sanders’ History of England during the Reign of Victoria (1907). Oxford featured among the authors’ connections on seven of the 12 titlepages. G.N. Clark, soon to become the OHE’s General Editor, claimed in 1929 that the two series ‘represent the state of knowledge as it was about twenty years ago’. The war’s setbacks to scholarship had now been surmounted, and the fast-growing output of the university research schools was to be harnessed. For his contributors Clark favoured bypassing surviving Methuen and Longman contributors; in the absence of any obvious author ‘the best results … would be got by choosing young men and telling them not to be in too great a hurry’.6 Two publishing formats were on offer: single-author volumes under an overall General Editor, or Lord Acton’s format for the Cambridge Modern History [CMH], with a General Editor presiding over a set of multi-author volumes. The latter could more comprehensively quarry expertise and rectify default by any one author with relative ease; the former could more easily secure coherence, proportion and distinctive ‘character’ within each volume, but took the serious risk that defaulting authors would seriously delay publication. The OUP in recent decades has wavered between these two formats: the New Oxford History of England [NOHE] structurally replicated its precursor, whereas the Oxford History of the British Empire and the History of the University of Oxford followed an adjusted Cambridge pattern (in the New Cambridge Modern History), whereby each of the multi-author volumes had an editor. Oxford historians from the 1890s scornfully dismissed Acton’s pattern by deploying an industrial analogy: in the CMH­ captive authors (many, it was wryly noted, from Oxford) were allegedly being corralled into a drab conformity.7 Clark, however, looking back in 1945 and perhaps influenced by the OHE’s slow

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progress, praised the CMH, which 160 authors had completed in only eight years. This was no mechanistic and myopic industrial division of labour, he insisted: the Cambridge format ‘is the exact opposite of industrialism: each writer made a fully articulated and finished piece of history, which might have been published by itself. They worked like medieval craftsmen, some of them even grinding their own colours’.8 Still, in 1929 the OUP had briskly dismissed the Cambridge format in a decision spiced by rivalry between the two universities and their presses. Chapters in the CMH were seen as ‘sausages’, mass-produced by the ‘[Can]Tabs’ in their ‘sausage machines’.9 R.W. Chapman, Secretary to the OUP’s Delegates, saw OHE’s launch as ‘a great opportunity for forestalling the Syndics [of Cambridge University Press], who seem to be getting to the end of their sausages and are likely to turn to monographs next. I have no doubt that we shall get better books on the one man one period system than if we handed out chapters’.10 Perhaps the surprising subsequent neglect of the OHE volumes among reviews in the Cambridge Historical Journal, re-named in 1958 the Historical Journal, reflects Cambridge’s quiet revenge. The initiative for the OHE did not come from Oxford’s History Faculty, but from OUP’s commercial ambitions, though distinguished Oxford historians were OUP Delegates. Nor were the ‘Tabs’ alone in the OUP’s sights: in January 1929 Clark knew that George Bell & Sons were inviting the OHE’s potential authors to write their own projected multi-volume history of England: the OUP had to move quickly.11 Arthur Norrington, Junior Assistant Secretary to the Delegates and an early prop of the OHE, was a future President of Trinity College, Oxford. He spoke in May of ‘getting at any rate a nucleus of 6 volumes out within five years, of which it would be a help to have one or two out within the next three years’.12 In July he told Chapman with relief that Bell’s ‘rival scheme has apparently collapsed’, yet Bell were still making overtures in January 1930, and gave up only on finding that OUP had nobbled their desired authors.13 ‘The view taken in the office’, wrote Chapman in June, was ‘that this is not a gold-mine, but would probably do quite well’; he thought it ‘better worth while, from every point of view, to go for an ambitious venture than to content ourselves with monographs of a highly special kind’. The OHE’s further attraction for OUP was that it would enable the Press to move more centrally into the discipline of history.14 Yet 1929–30 was hardly the best time to invest in an ambitious new project, and in the same month the military historian and Fellow of Hertford College, C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, himself a Delegate, doubted whether the OHE could oust rival series which ‘contain a few brilliant volumes’.15 In May 1929, negotiations to make Clark General Editor went smoothly, but there were little local difficulties. Cruttwell, miffed at not having been consulted earlier, had to be outgunned. He was invited to the crucial meeting in Clark’s college, Oriel, on 24 June, where Chapman and Norrington from the OUP met Clark and two more Press Delegates: R.G. Collingwood (the philosopher and historian of Roman Britain), and J.L. Brierly (professor of international law at Oxford, and a long-standing close friend of Clark16). Brierly capably chaired the meeting, where Clark outlined his plans for the OHE in what Chapman thought

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a ‘masterly’ fashion. Alcohol helped: ‘the Steward of Common Room being one of my guests’, Chapman recalled, ‘I was able to provide a bottle of ’70 port; and it all went very well’.17 In preparation for the crucial Delegates’ meeting, the Oriel gathering encouraged Clark to confer with F.M. Powicke (recently appointed from Manchester as Regius Professor), J.R.L. Weaver (Editor of the DNB supplements, and future President of Trinity College, Oxford) and A.L. Poole (Fellow and future President of St John’s College, Oxford). Cunning weapons were joyfully deployed to contain Cruttwell. Describing an OUP meeting in June, Sir Walter BuchananRiddell (Principal of Hertford College, a rising power within the University and a useful ally) told Chapman privately that ‘the route to the Press was under heavy bombardment yesterday. Cruttwell opened a broadside as we emerged from College and the President and Cyril [Bailey?] were ready with bomb and bayonet at the door … I played the card we’d arranged at once to forestall the latter … C[ruttwell] is apt to explode over grievances real or imaginary’.18 The tactics prevailed, and during July the Delegates authorized Clark to recruit authors. Why choose Clark as General Editor? Born in 1890, he was ‘a very short, stockily built, purposeful-looking man with a broad brow set in a competent head sitting squat upon wide shoulders’ and with a very direct gaze.19 With a nonconformist Yorkshire background, he had as a Fabian undergraduate collaborated with G.D.H. Cole in organizing two local strikes in 1913–14. In their forcible joint pamphlet on the Chipping Norton textile workers’ strike of 1914, they argued that unless Oxfordshire’s more rural workers were organized, they would frustrate the organization of Oxford’s urban workers by undercutting them.20 In 1929 his origins, his early radicalism, and his age (39) made him something of an outsider, at least among Oxford dons, but a man well able to converse with younger historians in Oxford and elsewhere. On the other hand, by then his youthful reforming instincts had for some time been moderating. He had always tried to edge Cole towards moderation, and he later saw 1915 as an important moment in their slow divergence. Greatly concerned as an army officer for his men’s welfare, Clark was shocked at what he saw as Cole’s unduly crude and simplistic view of their motives for enlisting.21 As chairman in 1919–20 of a study group on Oxford’s Socialist Society, Clark found himself in a small minority for regarding the Russian revolution as ‘a calamity’,22 and other factors were slowly making him more of an insider, not least his diplomatic temperament, which won his seniors’ respect. Further qualifications for insider status were his double first from Balliol in Greats in 1911 and in modern history in 1912, his good war record (twice wounded), his Oriel Fellowship from 1919 and his editing the English Historical Review from 1920 to 1926. Approachable and unpompous yet judicious and un-self-advertising, industrious and intellectually self-disciplined yet urbane and sociable, Clark was ‘the perfect dinner companion’ who none the less knew how to manage his time.23 By 1981 E.T. Williams in his obituary could see Clark as ‘quite unspoilt’ to the end: consistently hard-working, helpful to other scholars, with ‘a deep and agreeable old fashioned courtesy, an almost sly wisdom’ and ‘a tongue which did not lack sharpness but which was never unkind’. He was ‘Mr. Reliability amongst the historians’.24

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14.1  G.N. Clark as Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, in the front quad with Princess Elizabeth on 25 May 1948, the day when she received the honorary degree of DCL, with their departure prevented by the College tortoise

Source: Courtesy of Oxford Mail/The Oxford Times (Newsquest Oxfordshire).

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Clark was also already a fine scholar in 1929, with a close understanding of Europe and well versed in its languages. His The Seventeenth Century (1929), comparative in approach, included among its many admirers R.G. Collingwood, for whom ‘this is how I have always wanted history to be written’.25 A.L. Rowse found Clark ‘a busy, fussy little man, compact with energy’, with ‘a rewarding way of feeding the hand that bit him’. Rowse found him more interesting to meet than to read, and thought his diffuse intellectual interests, relatively cautious temperament and unduly diverse activities precluded the really great book which he could otherwise have written.26 Editing the OHE did not immediately attract Clark. He did not aim to be a mainline historian of Britain, and was moving towards economic history.27 He believed, however, in collaborative history, where scholars privately corrected one another’s errors but did not get drawn into public controversy. An embarrassing episode in a Balliol College undergraduate society meeting had warned him for life against getting embroiled in academic disputes: standing up to give a witty rejoinder to remarks by a distinguished visiting speaker, Clark to his ‘great amazement’ saw that the speaker had ‘dissolved into tears’.28 It was a firm rule within the Clark family not to disparage other people, and Clark in later life refrained from habitually deploring the trends of the time; his was a constructive, optimistic and inquisitive temperament which provided a secure basis for significant achievement in an Oxford that was then all too prone to enervating gossip. Helpful, too, were his supportive and stable family, his methodical habits, and his strong sense of duty: confidences were safe with him. So when in July 1929 the Delegates authorized Clark ‘to make enquiries as to the possibility of publishing a standard History of England in a series of volumes by different authors’, he found himself drawn in, and saw the Delegates’ authorization as the OHE’s ‘birth certificate’.29 He later participated in, edited or planned several big collaborative projects (including the Home University Library and the New Cambridge Modern History), and these may have prevented him from realizing his very high potential as an author, but Rowse could hardly have denied his skill at teasing great books from others. Prudence had so far deterred Clark from publicly discussing the OHE’s possible authors, but a pre-emptive speed in choosing them was now essential. By November he had assembled ‘a team of seven authors of tried reputation or of great promise’ including Stenton and Poole, and opted himself to tackle the later Stuarts. At the Delegates’ November meeting, ‘Collingwood dramatically gave his adhesion during the course of the discussion, undertaking to do Roman Britain’, a decision (as he later told Clark) which reflected ‘my admiration for your … book’. There were now eight authors, ‘and it was agreed that there is no great hurry about [getting authors for] the later volumes’. Cruttwell recommended that the Delegates authorize Clark to go ahead, ‘and this was received with acclamation’. Chapman saw the OHE as ‘one of the best and most promising enterprises of my time’.30 In December the OHE acquired its name: ‘what I should wish for myself’, wrote Clark, ‘is to call it the Oxford History of England, which I regard as equivalent to giving the book its blue’.31 The OHE won its blue, and the important decisions

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taken in Oriel at a contributors’ meeting of 1929 included a ceiling of 175,000 words per volume, with some flexibility, and agreement that Clark should arbitrate in the inevitable authors’ boundary disputes.32 From the outset, Clark’s approach was broad: he had urged on the Oriel meeting of 24 June 1929 ‘a much greater stress on the social and economic side of history, with a consequent curtailment of military matter; and a special attention to geography’.33 For him ‘a sine qua non’ from contributors was ‘a good knowledge of recent and earlier work, including German work’.34 A draft circular to proposed contributors dated ‘1929’35 envisaged a series ‘planned more on the lines of Lavisse’s Histoire de France than on those of the existing histories of England’. The contributors’ meeting agreed that half of each volume should focus on economic and social issues, with periodic chapters surveying the state of English society.36 The new series delivered rather less, and its precursors rather more, than Clark claimed. Even the Longman ‘political’ history of England had promised, in the General Editors’ introduction, ‘notices of religious matters and of intellectual, social, and economic progress’. As for the Methuen series, Trevelyan had entitled the first chapter of his England under the Stuarts ‘The state of England 1603–40’; its broad approach no doubt owed much to Macaulay’s famous third chapter. And although The Times Literary Supplement praised Ensor’s volume in the OHE for its ‘remarkable capacity for appreciating the interconnexion of events’,37 H.G. Richardson found the OHE’s medieval volumes unduly political by comparison with Lavisse.38 A.J.P. Taylor in October 1960, when starting on his English History 1914–1945 (1965), aimed ‘to write the volume as a unity – war, politics, economics, gossip, all mixed up’, yet by December 1961 he confessed that the book ‘will be criticised … for being too political’, with even its nonpolitical material shaped by its overall political structure.39 As an historian he increasingly felt ‘that the first function of the historian was to answer the child’s question, “What happened next?”’.40 Clark initially wanted geographical aspects more coherently treated.41 Oxford historians – Cruttwell, C.H. Firth, F.J. Haverfield, J.L. Myres, Spencer Wilkinson – had helped to establish geography as a final honours school, and Oxford’s geographers from the 1930s to the 1950s viewed history as a ‘sister subject’.42 Clark told Norrington in 1943 that he reserved ‘my right to propose for your consideration, if and when the series is ever completed, or approaching completion’, an atlas volume collated from improved versions of the maps in component volumes.43 The long life of Mackinder’s classic Britain and the British Seas (1902) delayed inclusion of a volume in the OHE on ‘The Historical Geography of England’,44 but the idea persisted. When plans to replace the OHE were being discussed in 1977, an influential memorandum mentioned Clark’s chosen author, F.V. Emery (of St. Peter’s College), as still in play. It noted that ‘there is even more interest in the geographical aspects of history than there used to be among professional historians’, the general reader being ‘attracted to a subject which is bound to touch upon environment, ecology, regional problems and so on’.45 The historian of Europe, John Roberts, the NOHE’s newly appointed General Editor and the

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future Warden of Merton, did not dissent, but again nothing happened. Emery proved elusive, and no alternative seemed available. Among the OHE volumes, only the first two were specially concerned with geography, perhaps because lack of written records drove historians of the ‘dark ages’ to put their boots on. J.N.L. Myres collaborated with Collingwood in publishing Roman Britain and the English Settlements (1936), but in old age thought his section of the book much dated, so he published The English Settlements (1986) as a separate work, still in the OHE series. He recalled how salient walking, cycling, riding and sailing had been in his earlier researches, and he saw ‘my generation of historians’ as ‘perhaps the last for whom it was comparatively easy to identify and appreciate the meaning’ of the ancient patterns of human settlement; the intervening half century of motor transport had completely overlain them.46 As for F.M. Stenton’s AngloSaxon England (1943), Dorothy Whitelock noted that in his work ‘we are never allowed to forget the influence of geographical factors’: he ‘apparently carried in his head the whole map of England, its place-names and their meaning’.47 Clark held the last plenary meeting of the OHE’s contributors at Oriel on 21 March 1931. It was difficult and expensive simultaneously to assemble so many prominent historians in one place; future meetings, said Clark, would consist of separate medieval and modern groups, with J.B. Black as ‘sandwich man’. None the less, G.N. Clark, M.V. Clarke, R.G. Collingwood, R.C.K. Ensor, E.F. Jacob, J.D. Mackie, J.N.L. Myres, A.L. Poole, F.M. Powicke, F.M. Stenton, G.S. Veitch, B. Williams and E.L. Woodward were all present, together with Norrington. The meeting agreed on such details as bibliography, footnotery and order of publication.48 Early in 1931 Clark’s plan for the series was complete: he could now change gear as editor, and the volumes can now be discussed in their order of publication.49 The first, in 1934, was Clark’s own: his highly respected Later Stuarts (1934), written remarkably quickly. To have ‘the captain going in first’, as Chapman put it, was most helpful50. The volume evoked ‘delight and admiration’ from Collingwood, who told Clark that it ‘shows us all what kind of a standard we must work to’.51 Trevelyan thought Clark on Charles II’s reign ‘could hardly be bettered’, and praised his broad understanding ‘of the many sides of a nation’s life’.52 In 1936 the series revved up with three volumes (Ensor, Black, and Collingwood/Myres) published in a single year. In no subsequent year was more than one volume published, but three more (Davies, Woodward, and Williams) had appeared by 1939. War work claimed Mackie and Jacob for six years, but Stenton in 1943 kept the OHE’s flag flying. Then came a worrying interval: not till 1951 did Poole appear, the first in a burst of three (Mackie and Powicke were the other two) in the early 1950s. There followed another fallow period, again worrying for OUP; then in 1959–61 the remaining three volumes (McKisack, Watson and Jacob) appeared in successive years, with the recently commissioned Taylor delivering promptly in 1965. Giving a lead and setting an example were but two among the General Editor’s many roles. Promoting good relations with and between contributors was another. Surveying his long editorial experience in 1961, Clark noted how the boundaries

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between volumes could emerge only through compromise between the requirements of the series as a whole and the authors’ conflicting (sometimes mutually conflicting) preferences: ‘some … would have liked to cover more ground while others wished to be relieved of episodes which seemed to belong naturally to them’.53 In spring 1931 Veitch and Woodward were debating whether their frontier should be 1815 or 1822/3,54 and in 1934 Collingwood and Myres were ‘drifting towards a state of amiable deadlock’, their writing timetables unsynchronized.55 There was even a suppressed boundary dispute within their volume, given that Collingwood’s Roman Britain extended well beyond its customary terminus; decades later Myres found that Peter Salway, Collingwood’s successor in the series, did likewise in his Roman Britain (1981). In 1934 Stenton squeezed Myres at the other end through reaching much further backwards than had initially been planned.56 Myres was unhappy too with aspects of Collingwood’s interpretation, especially of King Arthur.57 In the early 1950s Watson thought Williams had encroached, and ‘said he would not be able to avoid doing tit for tat’.58 Most difficult of all was getting contributors to ‘deliver’. Clark’s voyage as General Editor lasted much longer than was planned when he first put out to sea, but with his longevity yoked to a protracted active scholarly life, he was still on the bridge when the OHE crossed the bar. It was not just a matter of inspiring, shaming or goading delinquents. How far was alleged scholarly scruple a mere mask for timid procrastination, for instance? ‘Frank knew very well that it would be useless to rush into writing the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom’, Lady Stenton recalled. ‘He had the patience of the great scholar who was ready to allow his subconscious mind to work on material long collected and stored there’.59 Clark’s editorial patience was rewarded: Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England was among the OHE’s triumphs. At least as difficult was the contributor who wrote all too easily, but uncontrollably. Powicke had not at first wanted to contribute to the OHE, and Norrington on learning in December 1930 that he had changed his mind exclaimed ‘loud and prolonged cheers, this is magnificent’; he told Humphrey Milford (the OUP Publisher) that Clark, in securing this result ‘has scored a great triumph … I think we now have absolutely the strongest team possible’.60 The outcome was rather less magnificent: in February 1944 Powicke had ‘just realised that I have got two-thirds through a big book without knowing it’; whereas the OHE target was 175,000 words, he already had 244,000.61 The OHE, like the NOHE, was important not only in itself, but for the independent OUP volumes that it inspired, and its by-products included Powicke’s two-volume King Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947). This did not end the quite unnecessary delays: in 1948 Norrington referred to Powicke’s ‘gallivanting about’ on other things and by January 1949 ‘the old villain’ got himself diverted into working for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.62 ‘I despair of Powicke, who seems to be incredibly active in all directions but the right one’, he wrote in June.63 ‘He has quite an extraordinary skill in creating awkward situations’, Sisam grumbled three years later.64 Not until 1953 did Powicke’s The Thirteenth Century appear, its scope and style probably weakened by its two-volume precursor.

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Death seriously hampered the fifth and twelfth volumes, each entrusted to three consecutive authors. Maude Clarke took on the fourteenth century, but died in 1935; Geoffrey Barraclough followed, but did nothing and in 1949 resigned,65 passing the parcel to May McKisack, for whom Clarke was the ‘incomparable tutor … whose book this should have been’.66 As for The Reign of George III, Veitch died in 1943, Pares took it over until a crippling and ultimately fatal illness forced him to withdraw in 1950,67 leaving Steven Watson to publish ten years later. From the mid-1940s Poole, Barraclough, Jacob, Mackie and Pares all seemed problem authors. In April 1946 Norrington (reporting a conversation with Clark) said that Mackie, easily distracted by other commitments, ‘has been told to get on or get out, and faithfully promised the former’; Jacob got sidetracked into writing Henry V and the Invasion of France (1947) for A.L. Rowse’s series, and was no eager beaver thereafter: he ‘seems to recognize no urgency at all’, Norrington complained in 1949.68 As for Poole, as President of St John’s (1946–57) and a prominent University administrator he was a ‘great diner and founder of clubs’,69 with numerous distractions and a gloomy temperament. The OUP had to face an impatient public: as early as December 1937 a Mr L. Schlosberg of Salford urged it to ‘get a move on’ and fill the OHE’s gaps. Sisam replied that ‘unfortunately the scholars competent to write works of this extent and character are not very many, and they are busy men’; the OUP shared his impatience, but ‘we do not think it would be brought to fulfilment by harassing the authors’.70 Mr A.R. Jacobs of Rye, inquiring in November 1939 when Veitch would publish, was told by Norrington that he wished ‘to goodness’ he could say.71 By 1949 the gaps were all the more worrying because Longmans were launching a new multi-volume series on English history, whose rapid completion might capsize the OHE.72 The OUP complicated its task halfway through the project by commissioning two authors to tackle periods chronologically at the beginning and end, neither of whom delivered. In 1946 the archaeologist Stuart Piggott had already promised the Home University Library what turned out to be his successful British Prehistory (1949), but signed a contract with OUP to produce a pre-history volume for the OHE in a minimum of five years. In the mid-1950s, however, he lost momentum; Clark in 1959 favoured accepting his offer to withdraw, and was himself losing enthusiasm for the idea. ‘Prehistory is not history’, he thought, and volumes based on archaeological evidence date rapidly.73 Many years later Clark recalled that he had at first been keen to commission only contributors who had written a book, but had later ‘learnt this further truth: to have written a book on, or almost on, the same subject is also a disqualification’. Authors over-prepared by earlier publications could get bored.74 An important OUP meeting in 1972 still favoured a pre-history volume, but nobody could think of an author.75 At the modern end Ensor caused further delay. The OUP, delighted with his England 1870–1914 (1936), invited him to write an inter-war volume; when Sisam heard in October 1939 that Ensor intended to begin it on 1 January 1940, he exclaimed, ‘loud cheers!’.76 By 1946, however, Ensor had stalled, and in 1956 old age and illness forced him to withdraw.77 Clark in the late 1940s briefly toyed with the idea of himself writing a volume on the Second World

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War, then a few months later pondered taking over Ensor’s project;78 not till 1957 did A.J.P. Taylor volunteer himself for the volume covering 1914–45. The OUP after much hesitation and consultation accepted the offer,79 and Clark readily bowed out. While admitting that Taylor was ‘not perfectly equipped on topics like philosophy and “thought”’, Clark thought he had ‘as good a range as anyone we are likely to get, and … we should get a successful book, at least from a publisher’s point of view’;80 he appointed Taylor while they were walking in Wytham Woods.81 Meanwhile the last three volumes of the OHE’s original 14 had appeared. The only problems with the conscientious McKisack’s Fourteenth Century (1959) were her disarming diffidence and a limited range which led her to omit the arts and to struggle with economics.82 Watson’s Reign of George III (1960), however, brought more serious worries. Clark in 1957 found so much to criticize in the draft of its first half that he hesitated to demoralize Watson before receiving the second half, especially as he ‘takes on far too much work of different kinds’.83 Three years later The Times Literary Supplement detected far too many surviving mistakes, and even Watson’s most charitable and expert reviewer regretted the poor standard of proof reading: ‘the Press have not done a good job in this case’.84 Likewise in reviewing Jacob’s Fifteenth Century (1961), The Times thought ‘faulty proof-reading has produced an unusually long errata slip, which itself requires at least one correction’.85 More than 30 years in the making, Jacob’s volume had a difficult birth. Clark told C.H. Roberts in October 1957 that he intended to see Jacob soon ‘and read the riot act’, but when Clark had last come near doing so, Jacob had been thrown ‘into something approaching a nervous breakdown’; if nothing arrived soon, Clark felt that Jacob should either resign or accept a young collaborator.86 Whatever criticisms could be made of Taylor, writer’s block was not among them, and in 1965 the series was complete. Taylor’s letters to Clark while writing his English History 1914–1945 testify to Clark’s editorial skills, which were so discreet and un-self-advertising as to be all too easily under-estimated. Taylor’s cocksure public manner masked his concern for his scholarly status, especially given the hostile fuss that had greeted his courageously original The Origins of the Second World War (1961). Clark backed his original appointment, reassured him throughout, read the draft chapters quickly and efficiently, provided anxiously awaited but constructive and sympathetic comment upon them, defended Taylor against OUP doubters and edged him through the narrative historian’s distaste for writing the OHE’s static survey chapters. So Taylor had begun writing by October 1960, set himself a remarkable pace during 1961, and was by December ‘over half way’ and ‘beginning to think that one day there’ll be a book’.87 Though Taylor claimed that it was Beaverbrook who got him past one serious moment of self-doubt,88 it was to Clark that he sent no fewer than three letters of thanks for his encouragement and for the ‘enormous trouble’ he had taken.89 ‘Fun’ was a word Taylor used more than once about the ‘wonderful experience’ of writing the book;90 ‘I can’t thank you enough’, he told Clark in April 1965, ‘for giving me this great opportunity’.91 In May 1964 Clark was reportedly ‘on the whole

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pleased with A.J.P. Taylor’s draft, but there are still a few impossible bits which he is trying to persuade Taylor to modify’.92 A reference to Lloyd George’s flagrant farting, for instance, over-strained Clark’s nonconformist conscience, and Taylor ‘reluctantly’ gave way.93 Throughout the OHE’s history, its General Editor had patiently, tactfully and conscientiously edged the series forward without fuss. ‘It is always a good thing when someone gets recognized for doing his proper work in an unobtrusive way … you have never sought the limelight’, wrote Sir Douglas Veale, Oxford’s Registrar, congratulating him in 1953 on his knighthood: ‘your honour strikes me as particularly pleasant’.94 Of the nine authors named in 1930 when the OHE had first been publicly announced, eight had delivered the books promised:95 illness and death may have prevented Veitch from doing likewise. Apart from helping to ensure a smooth transition from the OHE to the NOHE in the 1970s, Clark had one further service to perform. In 1953 Norrington had suggested a twovolume Shorter OHE,96 but nothing happened. In 1971, however, Clark brought out his one-volume English History. A Survey, which focused on the concept of community in English history. It traversed the OHE’s broad time-span, and its preface acknowledged its debt to the OHE’s contributors. One addition to the series Clark could not have planned: its consolidated index, linking the pre-Hitler age to the computer’s revolutionary impact on the humanities which Clark (who died in 1979) did not live to see. In November 1988 Richard Raper, the enthusiastic managing editor of Indexing Specialists in Hove, told the OUP that his team’s nine word-processors were using the latest version of the indexing package MACREX. Computerized indexes for eight volumes had already been compiled, verified and edited; with the rest completed, a grand merger would occur. The consolidated index was duly published in 1991.97 Clark’s authors deserve closer analysis.98 They were not always his first choices. In May 1929, for instance, he was contemplating Stanley Cohn for 1066–1216; Keith Feiling for 1650–1700; and Jacob as an alternative to Powicke for the thirteenth century. Among his unselected pre-moderns were Deane Jones, Goronwy Edwards, and V.H. Galbraith. At the modern end he was considering D.A. Winstanley, Wickham Legg, R.H. Gretton and Lewis Namier (an undergraduate contemporary at Balliol), with Humphrey Sumner for the nineteenth century if not already too busy.99 By January 1930 Feiling and Powicke seemed likely to decline, but Williams was almost hooked for the early eighteenth century. Also at that time, H.W.V. Temperley having ‘gracefully declined’, two Cambridge names were in the early nineteenth-century frame: Kitson Clark (invited but declined) and Charles Crawley.100 By June, Clark had Norman Sykes in mind as an alternative if Williams declined, and for the fourteenth century he wanted, first Goronwy Edwards, then Galbraith, but both declined. G.M. Trevelyan had been ruled out early as a contributor: he could hardly be asked to repeat his best-selling survey volume on his period,101 but Clark found him ‘very keen on this history and … most awfully helpful’ (though ultimately unsuccessful) in encouraging Herbert Butterfield to accept his invitation to take on 1815–70.102

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All but one of the OHE’s 16 contributors were university teachers. Williams’ private means ‘enabled him to choose and change his career at will (a liberty of which … he took advantage more than once)’; this freed him to produce learned articles from a young age, yet with no academic post till past 50.103 Several historian contributors were also ‘men of affairs’: Clark himself, Stenton, Poole, Ensor, even Taylor. In 1950 Woodward thought it ‘important to remember how much of our best historical writing … has come to us from scholars who did not work in universities and were not concerned with teaching’, adding that ‘a large part of the best English historical work during the Victorian age was accomplished outside the universities’.104 Clark at first wanted ‘some really potent star’ for what was then seen as the OHE’s final volume; he dreamed in 1929–30 of inviting Winston Churchill, but it was thought that his fee would be too high. H.A.L. Fisher was another possibility: his ‘memory of public affairs will carry him back to the nineties at any rate’, but nothing came of it.105 Ensor was the one contributor not then a university employee, and wrote one of the OHE’s best volumes. ‘He is out of a job and has all the qualifications except that of being a historian’, Clark told Norrington in July 1930. ‘It is a long shot and I think it might be a bull’s eye, but don’t like to pull the trigger until someone also has had a look along the sights. Does anyone in the office know anything about him? You as a Wykehamist possibly may’. Norrington asked Milford about Ensor, his exact contemporary. ‘He is very able’, was the reply; at Winchester he was thought politically on the far left ‘but he has now … like so many of us, mellowed into pale pink. I think he might do 1870–1930 very well’.106 By the end of November Ensor had signed up for 1870–1914. McKisack was the only woman contributor. The oldest was Williams (born in 1867), the youngest Steven Watson (born in 1916), but most were lateVictorian by birth (11 born between 1880 and 1900). Only three contributors were younger than McKisack (born in 1900), yet when completing her Fourteenth Century in 1958 she thought it ‘terribly old-fashioned. All its underlying assumptions are Edwardian, if not Victorian, and the young just don’t think like that nowadays’.107 Even Taylor, the youngest contributor but one, was dismissed by 1966 as out of date: his volume, said K.V. Thomas, was ‘a brilliant swansong for the dying concept of real history as past politics, and social history as an undemanding subsidiary’.108 Seven of the 16 were educated at leading public schools, several others at grammar schools. Theirs was an age when other universities delivered undergraduate talent to Oxford, and four owed much to other universities before getting there. All 16 took Oxford undergraduate degrees, of whom eight took all or part of the classical Mods/ Greats combination, Mods and Greats then being seen as the precursor to success of any kind; four of the eight then took modern history degrees. Eight of the 16 took only modern history degrees. Some contributors or near-contributors were closely linked educationally, by friendship, or by Oxford College. Powicke’s guidance in 1907 had helped to get Clark into Balliol, and decades later Powicke nostalgically recalled Clark’s ‘boyish eager face’ when receiving that guidance;109 it was through Powicke

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that Manchester University virtually offered Clark the chair of modern history in 1925.110 Education at the Quaker-run Bootham School, York, linked Clark, Barraclough and Taylor; Clark later gave tutorials to the other two. On the other hand, some contributors were on bad terms: in 1954, for example, Woodward told C.H. Roberts that A.J.P. Taylor’s attacks on the editing (by Woodward, among others) of documents on British inter-war foreign policy had become actionable.111 Another connection was through All Souls, where Clark, Jacob and Pares were Fellows.112 Six of the 16 served in the First World War, of whom three were wounded. When his wife collected Clark from Oxford railway station after a veterans’ reunion in the late 1930s, he could not restrain himself from weeping, and the family was always careful to divert conversation away from the war. The 16 were a distinguished group, with 17 first-class degrees between them and only six second-classes; ten got into the DNB. The contributors’ Oxford flavour is reinforced by the presence of seven among the History Faculty’s Ford lecturers: Clark, Myres, Poole, Powicke, Stenton, Taylor and Williams. How far, though, did the OHE emerge from Oxford’s Faculty of Modern History? Even to ask such a question is to forget how fragmented was the Faculty before the 1950s, and it remained fractious for long after that. Interwar Oxford history tutors focused on tutorial teaching; if fame was sought at all, it came through their pupils’ achievements, not through published research. Oxford tutorial teaching was then very demanding in ways now unfamiliar: it required long hours and a very broad historical range, and it was difficult to combine with what only later became a university’s main source of status: research. Oxford’s inter-war tutorial teaching centred upon the colleges, not upon the professors; ‘research’ was seen as Germanic or Americanized, and Faculty buildings consisted of little more than a library. In such a climate, specialization seemed somewhat vulgar, even un-English. The college tutor’s expertise lay more in selecting the pupil, eliciting his talents and then formally examining pupils not his own. Oxford postgraduates embarked upon ‘further study’, not on ‘research’. Meetings of the Faculty – broadly speaking, the college history tutors assembled – were summoned by the University’s Secretary of Faculties, and at an ill-attended meeting focused on formally scrutinizing the University’s lecture-list. Contacts between members of History Board and Faculty ‘tended to be casual, partial and unofficial’, if they occurred at all.113 It was seen as ‘an unusual occasion’ on 25 May 1939 when 43 of the Faculty’s 80 members attended. The meeting aimed to co-ordinate opinion on reform of the first-year examination, so as to prevent the Faculty’s divisions from being embarrassingly advertised before the entire university assembled in Congregation.114 Even in 1946 the Board admitted in the quinquennial grant application for government funding that ‘the Faculty is … recruited largely without a plan and must be so as long as the subject remains a popular one and Colleges continue freely to elect their own Fellows’.115 In such a climate, the research student’s life was lonely. The influential and prolific Sir Charles Oman, Chichele Professor of Modern History from 1905 to 1946, did not believe in organized research or formalized postgraduate studies

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at all: if you had any aptitude, you would just get on and do it.116 Seminars, libraries and research training none the less grew up outside the collegiate structure through the rather lonely dedication of distinguished scholars such as Paul Vinogradoff, C.H. Firth and Powicke, who sought tentatively and usually unsuccessfully to secure changes in the undergraduate history syllabus that would give undergraduates (should they so wish) a taste or training for research. Such pioneers often gained more backing from universities not their own. With ‘Powickery’ brusquely dismissed in Oxford, Powicke told Alan Bullock in the late 1930s that moving from a Manchester to an Oxford chair was ‘like coming from a provincial to a parochial university’.117 So the OHE’s contributors, committed to research and writing large books, were not in Oxford’s inter-war mainstream, if indeed any such stream existed. Such warmth as Oxford could offer was provided in the Oxford colleges’ tight interdisciplinary communities, and even these contained psychological ‘outsiders’ who did not feel they belonged. Something of a rebel as an undergraduate, Clark’s waning radicalism did not preclude his attending meetings of the Oxford Reform Committee, gathering evidence for Asquith’s royal commission on Oxford and Cambridge (1919–22); furthermore, he declined to sign the Committee’s report because its recommendations implied that no significant action was needed to promote research.118 Two of Clark’s authors were much more restive in Oxford. Collingwood, for all his distinction (or perhaps because of it), was an archetypal Oxford outsider, spending more time at home than his college (Pembroke) expected.119 Lacking sympathy with Oxford’s philosophers, he could not ensure examination success for his pupils, and decided that ‘I must do my own work by myself, and not expect my colleagues in the philosophical profession to give me any help’.120 Woodward, too, often complained about inter-war Oxford. Fully alert to growing American competition on the research front, he pressed in vain for professionalism in the University’s administration and for radical (and in retrospect far-sighted) reforms in the Bodleian Library.121 He sensibly suggested in 1925 that the University should give its lecturers a sabbatical term every four years; replacement teaching would come from new graduate students who sorely needed the experience.122 So the OHE did not emerge from Oxford’s History Faculty, though if the OHE had been organized on the more fragmented Cambridge ‘sausage’ principle, with its smaller demands on any one scholar, it might have enlisted more of Oxford’s distinguished historians. If the OHE was a product of Oxford at all, it was the product of the OUP, surprisingly distant from the Faculty then and now. The OUP had suggested the OHE in the first place, had funded it, and (in conjunction with Clark) had organized it throughout. The OHE’s overall impact was cumulative, and its volumes’ impact can be discussed in order of publication. His clear, down-to-earth unpretentious style, and capacity for smoothly integrating his diverse material, ensured that Clark got the OHE off to a good start with his Later Stuarts. The Times Literary Supplement in 1934 overflowed: ‘nothing could be more satisfactory than the general design … Dr. Clark’s approach to his subject and his method of treating it is

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so uniformly admirable that it is hard to say exactly where his chief excellence lies’.123 Ensor’s England 1870–1914 (1936) benefited from J.L. Hammond’s generous help,124 and from Ensor’s practical knowledge of public affairs; it was unusual, too, for so smoothly integrating analysis with social context. Acclaimed at once as memorably exemplifying the contemporary historian’s potential, the book remained a gem securely lodged in Clark’s diadem. Denis Brogan praised Black’s Reign of Elizabeth (1936) for displaying ‘an almost superhuman skill’ in remaining impartial throughout a period so controversial; its rejection of moralism was, said The Times, a ‘refreshing change’.125 A.F. Pollard’s review, however, piled up alleged errors, and seemed to Black an ‘ill-natured attack’. Pollard thought the book’s ‘freshest and most satisfactory’ parts were the non-political, but at the price of crowding out much of Elizabeth’s domestic and foreign policy, and its chapter on Ireland was ‘somewhat perfunctory’.126 An ‘ill-natured’ review from that ‘nasty piece of work’, A.L. Rowse, rankled with Black for over 20 years.127 In Roman Britain and the English Settlements (1936), Collingwood had ‘digested an amazing complex of knowledge into a thing of lightness and charm’, and if Myres could not match such skill, the fault was ‘rather of the material than of the man’, given the sources’ complexity. Both historians demonstrated ‘in appropriate degree the caution and the daring of the true historian’.128 In selecting Davies for The Early Stuarts (1937), Clark envisaged at the start the need for ‘holding his hand firmly’,129 and with justice, given that this was generally considered the OHE’s weakest volume. Woodward’s Age of Reform (1938), however, though lacking Ensor’s sparkle, originality, and skill in smooth integration, was a valuable and respected contribution, and The Times Literary Supplement welcomed the ‘swift and stimulating judgments … opening up endless vistas of speculation’ which lent the book ‘its highly individual charm’.130 The eighteenth century, not the OHE’s strongest suit, posed problems from the start. In February 1929 the Oxford Magazine, organ of Oxford’s inter-war donnish opinion, anonymously reviewed Namier’s two-volume Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III: Namier had ‘managed to destroy more legends and modify more pre-conceived ideas than any historian of this generation’, so that ‘the reading and digesting of these two volumes is, at this moment, the first duty of every serious student of modern English political history’.131 Clark wanted Namier to contribute to the OHE, but in May 1929 was pessimistic on two counts: Namier’s recent volumes had not sold well, though their reviews had been ‘carefully engineered’; nor was he likely to accept. In the following month Clark told Norrington he had received ‘an absolutely firm and final refusal from Namier’.132 In 1939 The Times Literary Supplement welcomed Williams’ Whig Supremacy (1939) for its political interpretation and broad scope: Williams displayed a ‘deep and sympathetic insight into the art and literature of the period’.133 Yet for Pares as Williams’ obituarist, this was ‘the work of an old man’ who wrote with gusto, ‘but … clearly had not taken much account of the recent work in the field. One would not say he had not read it, but it had not sunk in; indeed, he did not think very much of it’. Furthermore, when in 1959 C.H. Stuart came to revise Williams

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for a second edition, he was diverted from his original focus on interpretation into laboriously correcting the numerous small-scale errors that he discovered.134 Soon after El Alamein, the OHE experienced its own turn of the tide, for Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England (1943) surpassed the worthy volumes published immediately before, and attained the summits earlier scaled by Clark, Collingwood and Ensor. There was ‘nothing to approach’ it, said The Times Literary Supplement, ‘for a broad and balanced survey of every aspect of AngloSaxon society’: ‘written in lucid and dignified English prose’, it drew together diverse types of source to illuminate ‘the many-sided life of that society … with a clearness of vision no previous historian has equalled’.135 Stenton’s combination of deep knowledge, scrupulous scholarship and alert imagination was also praised in the learned journals, and in Whitelock’s obituary quarter of a century later.136 No subsequent contributor could match this. Poole’s From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, published eight years later, came from a serious-minded and learned scholar without sparkle; to a later generation it seemed ‘one of the dullest contributions to a much-loved series, reflecting a tradition and rehearsing lines of argument that would have ruffled few feathers in the Oxford of Bishop Stubbs’.137 ‘Thoroughly competent’ was The Times Literary Supplement’s view of Mackie’s somewhat conventional Earlier Tudors (1952); even its welcome for Mackie’s ‘breezy narrative style’ was somewhat nervous.138 The Times was more enthusiastic, praising Mackie for skilfully integrating politics with art, society and the economy, and exonerating him from G.R. Elton’s subsequent complaint that he had underestimated continuity with the medieval period. While admiring the breadth of Mackie’s sympathies, however, it regretted his ‘abdication of the historian’s duty of moral judgment’: how could he simultaneously portray Henry VIII as ‘brutal, crafty, selfish, and ungenerous’ and yet also as ‘a great king of England’?139 Powicke’s Thirteenth Century (1953) fell below high expectations. ‘No one else could have written it’, wrote D.C. Douglas, praising its wealth of detail and total familiarity with the century’s monarchs and magnates. Yet despite this expertise, Edward Miller regretted Powicke’s narrowly political interpretation of his brief: ‘we know how much better Sir Maurice could have treated of the intellectual life or the religious life of this century than anyone else’.140 A decade later Southern pronounced Powicke’s ‘a difficult and sometimes bewildering book’, the ill-constructed work of a tired old man ‘no longer capable of the intense imaginative and intellectual effort of a long book’.141 McKisack’s Fourteenth Century (1959) evoked complaints about both structural defects and superficiality on economic and cultural topics. David Knowles, in an otherwise sympathetic review, regretted her omission of the English mystics and her almost complete neglect of ‘the cultural and spiritual life of the age’.142 None the less, with her ‘command of the trenchant phrase’ and her ‘balanced presentation of controversial themes’, she won respect.143 Watson’s Reign of George III (1960) incurred quite fierce criticism for its rather mannered style. According to one reviewer, it unduly neglected the constitutional approach to history in a period when ‘constitutional principles … interested our ancestors so greatly’.144

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Jacob’s Fifteenth Century (1961) brought the original series to a somewhat downbeat conclusion. Regretting its lack of colour, The Times Literary Supplement reviewer thought it significant that its index did not include ‘Agincourt’: the OHE’s volumes had grown heavier in both senses since the early days, more to be consulted than consecutively read. None the less, the OHE had by now ‘become an integral part of English academic instruction’, inspiring ‘confidence … both in teachers and in taught’ for the integrity of its scholarship: ‘all alike inspire confidence, and all command respect’.145 ‘Respect’ was not Denys Hay’s mood: he made angry accusations of plagiarism, and not only on his own behalf.146 For different reasons, ‘respect’ was hardly the word for so mischievous a contributor as A.J.P. Taylor, who claimed to have read all the OHE’s 14 volumes before starting on his own. He later recalled finding most of them ‘heavy going’, especially Stenton’s and Powicke’s, whereas his own was ‘the best book technically I have written … scholarly and readable at the same time [,] which cannot be said of all the other volumes’.147 His delight in cocking an occasional snook at the dignity of the series was linked to his anti-establishment outlook: ‘I like the English people very much’, he told Clark in 1964, ‘and have a poor opinion of those who claim to guide them’.148 The anonymous author of a pompous article in The Times derided Taylor’s jokes and media activities as unprofessional: he ‘cannot resist a phrase that may be expected to shock or raise a laugh, even if it happens to be untrue’. Rather more damaging, though remediable, was Henry Pelling’s long published list of Taylor’s errors,149 comparable with Pollard’s on J.B. Black. F.H. Hinsley in The Times Literary Supplement, however, relished Taylor’s ‘staccato sentences, the aphoristic phrases … the crisp dismissal of accepted opinions’; it ‘must be the most readable book of its size that we have been given for many a day’. He perceptively added that ‘the books that are easy to read are the books that are hard to write’.150 The book sold well: its initial print order of 40,000 was soon exhausted, and 54,484 copies were sold in the UK in the first ten years.151 The OHE’s impact was more than the sum of the response to its parts, and Taylor wanted not just money, but the status brought by contributing. When, uniquely in the series, OUP gave him an illustrated cover, he objected strongly: this would reinforce his reputation for being journalistic and ‘an elderly enfant terrible’, whereas he had devoted years to the book ‘partly with the intention of showing that I was a serious scholar. This jacket will ruin all my efforts’. OUP then agreed to re-jacket all the stock not already sent out to reviewers.152 The series made a special contribution by extending the historian’s reach into contemporary history. Until 1935 Oxford’s history syllabus had stopped at 1885, from 1936 until 1963 it had stopped at 1914, and from 1964 to 1994 it had stopped at 1964; not till 1994 was the terminal date abolished altogether. Ensor’s success had made the line hard to defend, but Oxford’s historians were long content to abandon history’s most recent decades to the students of ‘politics’ in the University’s Philosophy, Politics, Economics [PPE] course. Even Ensor in 1936 thought history could not be written ‘scientifically’ beyond 1914,153 and when in 1939 he was discussing his hypothetical inter-war volume, he thought it ‘impossible to write historically – i.e. with proper

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documentation – for the last 10 years or so’.154 The OHE was also thought to have broadened perception of the historian’s concerns: less political and military, more economic and social. At its best it was praised for integrating history’s several dimensions smoothly and almost unobtrusively; at its worst, its coverage of art and literature degenerated into lists or was lacking altogether. Here it was Ensor and Clark who shone, Davies, McKisack and Williams whose lights were dim.155 Furthermore, the OHE seemed in this area too preoccupied with elite culture, and too neglectful of popular attitudes, whether to culture or to anything else. Inevitably the OHE failed to establish an overall uniform pattern: General Editors must ultimately defer to the intellectual market-place, and when deadlines loom they often welcome receiving anything at all, however distant this might be from their initial hopes. Besides, attitudes to history inevitably changed between the OHE’s first volume (1934) and its last (1965). In a meeting on 23 May 1953 of authors yet to deliver, Clark said that if on social, economic, or cultural matters they ‘felt uneasy about including these fields he would rather they omitted them than undertook what they did not feel competent to do’.156 Taylor in 1965 was quite shameless in refusing to discuss subjects (usually scientific) that he did not understand;157 he was criticized for it, and to some extent regretted his stance.158 With Powicke as the extreme case, said H.G. Richardson, the authors ‘had freer rein than is usually expected in a … coordinated … work’.159 W.N. Medlicott, when launching his nine-volume Longman series on British history eight years earlier, was perhaps more realistic in rejecting the very idea of uniformity: ‘each period has its special problems, each author his individual technique and mental approach; each volume will be able to stand by itself not only as an expression of the author’s methods, tastes, and experience, but as a coherent picture of a phase in the history of the country’.160 In one important respect the OHE’s medievalists excelled: they rejected insularity. Bishop Stubbs’ inaugural lecture of 1867 had welcomed the rise of a European community of scholars,161 yet in 1922 the Asquith Commission still thought Oxford and Cambridge historical studies ‘in danger of becoming provincialised and cut off from the investigation of all records save those of our own island’.162 Among Oxford’s inter-war medievalists, Poole and Powicke were in their teaching and writing far from guilty, but McKisack was criticized on this ground,163 and both Williams and Watson offended some by their ‘Anglocentricity’. Watson wrote of ‘our’ rather than of ‘British’ possessions, and Williams incurred the wrath of a Mr. R.E. Griffin: when one’s paid 42 s for a book, he wrote in 1968, one ‘deserves better than to have the writer take sides in such a schoolboyish manner’.164 So far did the subsequent trend against Anglocentricity extend, that Britain’s history eventually lost its grip on even Oxford’s history syllabus. The OHE exemplified parochialism within the United Kingdom, too. Scottish and Welsh nationalism had not advanced far enough by 1965 to shame Taylor into compromise;165 ‘to hell with Scotland, Northern Ireland and still more the Empire!!’ he had privately exclaimed in 1961.166 Even when the NOHE was launched in the late 1970s there were surprisingly few heart-searchings about the series title: eight of the titles in the eleven NOHE volumes so far published contain the word ‘England’.

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Postwar university and sixth-form growth caused the OHE’s annual sales to leap forward in 1949–51, according to a survey of six titles; Ensor was then selling an annual average of 2,500 a year, Davies and Woodward 2,000, Clark, Black and Collingwood/Myres 1,500.167 By 31 March 1955 the total sales of all the OHE volumes was 188,000, of which the USA had taken 18,200.168 During the five years to June 1976 the annual sales of each volume still averaged at 1,140,169 but they were declining, and the volumes were beginning to look old-fashioned. This did not preclude a large and lucrative book-club deal in the 1980s whereby Book Club Associates marketed the whole series. The NOHE innovated in several respects. It did not replicate the great conventional historical divides, which had been still largely accepted by the OHE: the boundaries between the NOHE’s volumes include 1603 and 1918, for instance, but not 1066, 1485, 1660, 1760 or 1815. And whereas the words ‘century’ or ‘reign’ or names of monarchs appeared in eight of the OHE’s 15 volumes, they appear in at most three of the NOHE’s ten volumes so far published; the NOHE’s overall emphasis moved from chronicling English government to analysing British society. Yet this diminished political emphasis simply carried forward Clark’s priorities of 1929. Indeed, the NOHE’s format as planned in the late 1970s implicitly endorsed its precursor’s approach: the OHE’s protracted publication sequence did not deter the NOHE’s General Editor from following the same overall plan for a sequence of single-author volumes. With the NOHE as with the OHE, the OUP’s commercial impulse launched the new venture, but into a publishing environment that was now far more competitive, given that by the 1970s there were more rival series in the field. Once again the motive included the OUP’s desire to stake its claim to a central role in historical publishing: merely to go on reprinting, or even revising, the OHE would mean that ‘we shall soon have lost all hold on this commanding centre in history publishing’.170 With Clark’s full endorsement,171 it was time for the OUP to begin again, all the more secure for being able to draw upon young authors to whose education the OHE had contributed so much.

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Appendix I The Oxford History of England: Its Chronology Order of publication

Volume

Author/s

Title

1st edition published

1

R.G. Collingwood J.N.L. Myres

Roman Britain English Settlements

1936

4

(Salway 1981) Myers 1986

F.M. Stenton

Anglo-Saxon England

1943

8

1947, 1971

A.L. Poole

Domesday to Magna Carta

1951

9

1955

4

M. Powicke

Thirteenth Century

1953

11

1962

5

M. McKisack*

Fourteenth Century

1959

12

6

E.F. Jacob

Fifteenth Century

1961

14

7

J.D. Mackie

Earlier Tudors

1952

10

2 3

Later editions

8

J.B. Black

Reign of Elizabeth

1936

3

1959

9

G. Davies

Early Stuarts

1937

5

1959

10

G.N. Clark

Later Stuarts

1934

1

1955

11

B. Williams

Whig Supremacy

1939

7

Stuart 1962

12

J.S. Watson*

Reign of George III

1960

13

13

E.L. Woodward

Age of Reform

1938

6

R.C.K. Ensor

England 1870–1914

1936

2

A.J.P. Taylor*

English History 1914–45

1965

15

R. Raper (ed.)

Consolidated index

1991

16

14 15 16

1962

Authors for all but vols 5, 12, 14–15 had been commissioned by 1931, not necessarily to the author of first choice. Collingwood was replaced by Salway’s Roman Britain (1981). Myres published the revised edition of his contribution to Collingwood & Myres as a separate volume, The English Settlements in 1986. *  Replacements for ghost authors: M.V. Clarke, initially chosen for Vol. 5, died 1935, was replaced by G. Barraclough, who resigned in 1949, and was replaced by Clarke’s pupil McKisack. G.S. Veitch, initially chosen for Vol. 12, died 1943, was replaced by R. Pares (withdrew due to illness, 1950) and was in turn replaced by J. Steven Watson. Taylor’s volume was originally to be written by Ensor, who delayed for many years. Clark toyed with the idea of writing it himself, then readily accepted Taylor’s suggestion of 1957 that he should take over. Ghost volumes: Stuart Piggott signed contract for Pre-Historic Britain in 1946, but by 1958 wanted to withdraw. Clark in 1943 was still contemplating an Atlas volume ‘if and when the series is ever completed or approaching completion’. F.V. Emery never delivered his volume on The Historical Geography of England.

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Appendix II Contributors to the Oxford History of England Author

Date of birth

School

Oxford College

Degree

*Collingwood

1889

Rugby

Univ

Mods (1), Gts (1)

*Myres

1902

Winchester

New

Gts (1), MH (1)

*Stenton

1880

Minster GS Southwell

Keb

MH (1)

Poole

1889

Magd CS, Oxford

CCC

MH (1)

*Powicke

1879

Stockport GS

Ball

Gts (2) MH (1)

McKisack

1900

Bedford HS

Som

MH (2)

Jacob

1894

Winchester

New

Mods (2)

Mackie

1887

Middlesbrough

Jesus

MH (1)

Black

1883

Glasgow University

Ball

MH (1)

Davies

1892

Chipping Campden GS

Pem

MH (2)

*Clark

1890

Bootham, Mcr GS

Ball

Gts (1), MH (1) Mods (1), Gts (2)

*Williams

1867

Marlborough

New

*Watson

1916

Mercht Taylors’

St.J

MH (1)

*Woodward

1890

Mercht Taylors’

CCC

Gts (2), MH (1)

*Ensor

1877

Winchester

Ball

Mods (1), Gts (1)

*Taylor

1906

Bootham

Oriel

MH (1)

Notes: All the contributors took undergraduate degrees at Oxford, but four before coming up spent some time at universities elsewhere: Stenton (Reading), Powicke (Manchester), Jacob (Manchester) and Black (Glasgow, where he obtained a First in English). Williams volunteered to serve in the South African War, and Collingwood (intelligence), Poole (wounded), Jacob (wounded), Mackie, Clark (wounded) and Woodward all served in the First World War. McKisack is the sole woman contributor. * = entry in DNB

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Endnotes 1 I gratefully acknowledge generous help received from G.N. Clark’s daughter, Mrs Patience Bayley, and from his grand-daughter Rosalind Bayley, including interviews on 25 and 18 Nov. 2009, respectively, to which I owe the unfootnoted reminiscences of the family in this article. Ivon Asquith, formerly of the OUP, commented most helpfully on an earlier draft. Alan Bell, ever meticulous and generous, rescued me from errors and improved my style. 2 For its subsequent history see R. Faber and B. Harrison, ‘The Dictionary of National Biography: A Publishing History’ in R. Myers, M. Harris and G. Mandelbrote (eds), Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century (2002), pp. 171–92; and B. Harrison, ‘The DNB and Comparative Biography’, Comparative Criticism, 25 (2003), pp. 3–26, and ‘“A Slice of their Lives”: Editing the DNB 1882-1999’, English Historical Review, 119 (2004), pp. 1179–1201. 3 B. Harrison, ‘Introduction’ to H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vol. I, p.vii. 4 Sir George Clark, ‘Changing Views of English History’, The Times (15 Nov. 1961), p. 15. 5 ‘Introductory note’ (1904) to H.W.C. Davis, England under the Normans and Angevins (1905), p. vi. 6 Oxford University Press Archives: PB/ED/015659: undated memorandum in Clark’s hand. All material from the OUP archives has been quoted by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press. 7 See, for example, Pollard to his parents, 15 Dec. 1896, 31 May 1898, University of London Library: A.F. Pollard papers (uncatalogued). 8 G.N .Clark, ‘The Origin of the “Cambridge Modern History”’, Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 8 No. 2 (1945), p. 58. 9 R. W. Chapman to C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, 11 June 1929; A.L.P. Norrington to G.N. Clark, 7 Dec. 1929, PB/ED/015659. 10 Chapman to Cruttwell, 11 June 1929, PB/ED/015659. 11 Clark to K. Sisam, 30 Jan. 1929; see also Norrington to Clark, 2 Feb. 1929, PB/ ED/015659. 12 Norrington to Clark, 15 May 1929, PB/ED/015659. 13 Clark to Chapman, 2 July. 1929, 19 Jan. 1930; Norrington to ‘Billy’ [Hogarth, of OUP New York], 25 Jan. 1930, PB/ED/015659. 14 Chapman’s undated letter to an unnamed correspondent reporting on the Oriel meeting of 24 June 1929, PB/ED/015659. 15 Chapman to W.R. Buchanan-Riddell, 28 June 1929, PB/ED/015659. 16 G.N. Clark’s typescript ‘Notes on My Education and Historical Studies’, British Academy Archive, fol. 17. 17 Chapman to Buchanan-Riddell, 28 June 1929, PB/ED/015659. 18 Buchanan-Riddell to Chapman, 15 June 1929, PB/ED/015659. 19 E.T. Williams’ obituary in Balliol College Record (1981), p.11. 20 G.N. Clark and G.D.H. Cole, The Strike at Chipping Norton (n.p., [1914]). 21 See Cole’s rather innocuous comment in Labour in War Time (1915), p. 62, but cf. Clark to Margaret Cole, 11 July 1961, 14 Sep. 1964, G.N. Clark MSS, file 204 (in the care of Clark’s daughter Mrs. Bayley). 22 Clark to Margaret Cole, 14 Sep. 1964, G.N. Clark MSS file 204.

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23 G. Parker, ‘George Norman Clark’, P[roceedings of the] B[ritish] A[cademy] (1980), p. 420. 24 Balliol College Record (1981), p. 12. 25 Collingwood to Clark, n.d. [c.1934], Bodleian Library, Oxford: G.N.Clark MSS, file 50. 26 A.L. Rowse, Historians I Have Known (1995), pp. 20–23; Sir Keith Thomas referred me to this nuanced memoir. 27 ‘Notes on My Education’, fols 31, 33. 28 V. Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle. Encounters with British Intellectuals (Boston, [1962]), 248. 29 Clark’s typescript memo (?Nov. 1961), PB/ED/015661: fol.1. No author is specified for the memo, but Davin to the Secretary to the Delegates Colin Roberts, 7 Nov. 1961, PB/ED/015660, claims that it was written by Clark with annotations by Chapman. Collingwood to Clark, n.d. [c.1934], G.N. Clark MSS file 50. 30 Chapman to Bishop Strong of Oxford, 30 Nov. 1929, PB/ED/015659. 31 Clark to Norrington, 8 Dec. 1929, PB/ED/015659. 32 Clark’s typescript memo (?Nov. 1961), PB/ED/015661, fol.3. 33 Undated memo in Clark’s hand, PB/ED/015659. 34 Undated memo in Clark’s hand, PB/ED/015659. 35 In PB/ED/015659. 36 Clark’s typescript memo (?Nov. 1961), PB/ED/015661: fol. 3. 37 T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] (29 Feb. 1936), p. 171 (H.M. Stannard). 38 Reviewing E.F. Jacob in E[nglish] H[istorical] R[eview], July. 1963, p. 552. 39 Taylor to Clark, 11 Oct. 1960, 20 Dec. 1961, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 30. 40 A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (London, 1983), p. 236. 41 Chapman’s undated letter to an unnamed correspondent reporting on the Oriel meeting of 24 June 1929, PB/ED/015659. 42 The phrase recurs in the inaugural lectures of K. Mason, The Geography of Current Affairs. An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford, 1932), p.4; and E.W. Gilbert, Geography as Humane Study. An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford, 1955), p. 9 (delivered 12 Nov. 1954). 43 Clark to Norrington, 6 Aug. 1943, PB/ED/015660. 44 Clark’s memo dated 7 Feb. 1975, headed ‘Proposed Geographical Volume for Oxford History of England’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, File 24. 45 OUP Archive: unlisted file endorsed ‘A New Oxford History of England’: Davin’s minutes of meeting on the OHE, 15 Dec. 1972. Merton College, Oxford: John Roberts Collection: grey folder marked ‘Papers’: I. Asquith’s typescript headed ‘A New Oxford History of England’ (23 Sep. 1977). 46 J.N.L. Myres, The English Settlements (Oxford, 1986), p.xxviii (‘Introduction’, 1985). 47 ‘Frank Merry Stenton’, EHR, 84 (1969), pp. 7, 10. 48 PB/ED/015659: note of contributors’ meeting in Oriel on 21 Mar. 1931. 49 For the publication sequence, see Appendix 1 below. 50 Clark’s typescript memo (?Nov. 1961), PB/ED/015661, fol. 5. 51 Collingwood to Clark, n.d. [c.1934], Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 50. 52 Observer (21 Oct. 1934). 53 Clark, ‘Changing Views of English History’, p. 15. 54 Veitch to Norrington, 26 Apr. 1931, PB/ED/015659. 55 W.D. Hogarth to Clark, 18 May 1934, PB/ED/015660.

‘An Ambitious Venture’ 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

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Stenton to W.D. Hogarth, 8 June 1934, PB/ED/015660. Myres to Clark, 8 July 1977, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 37. Davin’s report (28 May 1953) of meeting at Oriel on 23 May 1953, PB/ED/015660. D.M. Stenton, ‘Frank Merry Stenton 1880-1967’, PBA (1968), p. 398. Norrington to Clark, 8 Dec. 1930; Norrington to Milford, 8 Dec. 1930, PB/ED/01569. Powicke to Sisam, 7 Feb. 1944, PB/ED/001213; cf. R. W. Southern, ‘Sir Maurice Powicke, 1879–1963’, PBA (1964), p. 293. Norrington to Davin, 25 Sep. 1948; Norrington’s typescript memo to Davin, 20 Jan 1949, PB/ED/001213. Norrington to Clark, 3 June 1949, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 29. Davin to Clark, 1 July 1952, PB/ED/001213. See his correspondence with Clark in 1946–9 in Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 39. McKisack, Fourteenth Century (1959), p. v (Preface). Pares to Norrington, n.d. (copy), written before 29 Nov. 1948, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 29. See file 39 for Clark’s correspondence with Pares from c.1946 to 1950. Norrington to Clark, 3 June 1949, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 29. V.H. Galbraith, ‘Austin Lane Poole 1889-1963’, PBA (1963), p. 439. Schlosberg to OUP, 9 Dec. 1937; Sisam to Schlosberg, 11 Dec. 1937, PB/ED/015660. Sisam was Secretary to the Delegates 1942–48. Norrington to Jacobs, 17 Nov. 1939, PB/ED/015660. Norrington to Clark, 10 Jan. 1949, PB/ED/015660. Clark to Davin, 22 Sep. 1959, PB/ED/015659. OUP Archive: unlisted file endorsed ‘A New Oxford History of England: G. Richardson to D. Davin, 9 May 1977’: Clark to Davin, 19 Nov. 1977. OUP Archive: unlisted file endorsed ‘A New Oxford History of England: G. Richardson to D. Davin, 9 May 1977’: Davin’s minutes of meeting on the OHE, 15 Dec. 1972. Sisam to Norrington, 25 Oct. 1939, PB/ED/015660. Ensor to Clark, 29 Sept. 1956, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 30. Sisam’s typescript memorandum, 5 Sep. 1946, after a meeting with Clark; Clark to Sisam, 18 Feb. 1947; Clark to Davin, 25 Sep. 1948, PB/ED/015660. Davin to C.H. Roberts, 26 Feb. 1957; Davin to A.L. Poole, 6 Mar. 1957; Davin to Clark, 11 Mar. 1957, PB/ED/015660. As cited in Davin to Poole, 6 Mar. 1957, PB/ED/015660. A. Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor. A Biography (first published 1994, paperback edn 1995), p. 241. Her correspondence with Clark 1949–59 is in Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 39. C.H. Roberts’ typescript memorandum, 10 Oct. 1957, of discussion with Clark, PB/ ED/015660. M.G. Brock, Oxford Magazine (23 Feb. 1961), p. 253. See also TLS (7 Oct. 1960), p. 642. The Times (16 Nov. 1961), p. 16 (anonymous). C.H. Roberts’ typescript memorandum, 10 Oct. 1957, of discussion with Clark, PB/ ED/015660. Taylor to Clark, 20 Dec. 1961, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 30.

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88 Taylor, Personal History, pp. 237–8; cf. Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 30: Taylor to Clark, 25 Aug. 1962. 89 Taylor to Clark, 12 June 1964, cf. 7 Dec. 1962, 6 Oct. [1964], Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 30. 90 Taylor to Clark, 18 Apr. 1965. For ‘fun’ see Taylor to Clark, 17 Jan. [1961], Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 30; Taylor, Personal History, p. 237. 91 Taylor to Clark, 18 Apr. 1965, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 30. 92 PB/ED/015661: Davin to Roberts, 1 May 1964. 93 Taylor to Clark, 31 Dec. 1964, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 30. 94 Veale to Clark, 1 June 1953, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 82 (in Mrs Bayley’s care). 95 Clark’s typescript memo (?Nov. 1961), PB/ED/015661, fol.4. 96 Norrington to Clark, 30 Mar. 1953, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 27. 97 Raper to Dr A. Morris, 9 Nov. 1988, PB/ED/O19698. See also the Preface to Raper’s The Oxford History of England. Consolidated Index (Oxford, 1991), p. v. 98 See Appendix 2 below. 99 Norrington’s typescript memo, 21 May 1929, of discussion with Clark on 17 May, PB/ ED/015659. 100 Norrington’s typescript memo, 25 Jan. 1930, of meeting with Clark, PB/ED/015659. 101 Chapman’s undated letter to an unnamed correspondent reporting on the Oriel meeting of 24 June 1929, PB/ED/015659. 102 Clark to Norrington, 30 Jun. 1930; Clark to Norrington, 2 July 1930, PB/ED/015659. 103 R. Pares, ‘Basil Williams 1867–1950’, PBA (1950), p. 252. 104 E.L. Woodward, ‘Some Considerations on the Present State of Historical Studies’, PBA (1950), p. 96. 105 Chapman to Milford, 20 Mar. 1930, PB/ED/015659. 106 Clark to Norrington, 2 July 1930; Milford to Norrington, 7 July 1930, PB/ED/015659. 107 McKisack to Clark, 13 Feb. 1958, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 39. 108 ‘The Tools and the Job’, TLS (7 Apr. 1966), p. 276. 109 Powicke to Clark, 21 Oct. 1951, enclosing Clark’s original very detailed letter of thanks dated 12 Dec. 1907; see also Powicke to Clark, 30 Feb. 1946, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 203 (in Mrs Bayley’s care). 110 Powicke to Clark, 12 Feb. 1925; Clark did not wish to be put forward. Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 203. 111 Sisman, Taylor, p. 225. 112 I owe this point to Alan Bell. 113 University of Oxford, [Franks] Commission of Inquiry, Written Evidence. Part Six (Oxford, 1965), p. 2 (Observations by E.H.F. Smith, Chairman of the Faculty of Modern History). 114 Oxford Magazine (1 Jun. 1939), p. 670. 115 Hebdomadal Council Papers, Vol. 185 (Sep.-Dec. 1946), p. 93. 116 See C.G. R[obertson?]’s obituary in Oxford Magazine (17 Oct. 1946), p. 11. 117 Author’s tape-recorded interview with Lord Bullock, 14 Oct. 1985; cf. Southern, ‘Sir Maurice Powicke’, pp. 287, 289. 118 Clark, ‘Notes on my Education’, fols 13, 30. 119 R.B. McCallum, et al., ‘Robin George Collingwood, 1889-1943’, PBA (1943), pp. 465–6. 120 R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (first published 1939, paperback edn, Harmondsworth, 1943), p. 40.

‘An Ambitious Venture’ 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159

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E.L. Woodward, Short Journey (London, 1942), pp. 172, 174–5. Hebdomadal Council Papers, No. 133 (May 1925), p. 36. TLS (29 Nov. 1934), p. 849 (John Davy Hayward). As generously acknowledged in Ensor to Hammond, 29 Oct. 1935, Bodleian Library, MS Hammond 25 fols 137–8. TLS (16 May 1936), p. 405. The Times (26 May 1936), p. 10 (anonymous). Black to Clark, 8 Sept. 1937, Bodleian Library Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, 39. History, 21 (1937), pp. 368–70. Black to Clark, 10 Feb. 1956, Bodleian Library Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, 35. TLS (23 Jan. 1937), p. 52 (R.W. Moore). Norrington’s typescript memo, 21 May 1929, of discussion with Clark on 17 May, PB/ ED/015659. TLS (1 July 1939), p. 3 (Dermot Morrah). Oxford Magazine (14 Feb. 1929), p. 418. Norrington’s typescript memo, 21 May 1929, of discussion with Clark on 17 May; Clark to Norrington, 6 June 1929, PB/ED/015659. R. Pares, ‘Basil Williams 1867–1950’, PBA (1950), p. 259. TLS (9 Sep. 1939), p. 529 (Roger Fulford). Stuart to Clark, 3 Sept. 1959, Bodleian Library Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 2. TLS (5 Feb. 1944), p. 66 (Dermot Morrah). P. Grierson, EHR, 60 (1945), p. 249; 84 (1969), p. 7. N. Vincent, EHR, 116 (2001), p. 410 (reviewing Bartlett’s successor-volume in the NOHE). TLS (5 Dec. 1952), p. 792 (C.H. Williams). The Times (22 Oct. 1952), p. 8 (anonymous); cf. Elton, EHR 68 (1953), pp. 276–80. History (1955), p.124. Douglas, TLS (11 Dec. 1953), p.793. Southern, ‘Powicke’, p. 294. Tablet (24 Oct. 1959), p. 910. D.C. Douglas, TLS (6 Nov. 1959), p. 644. The Times (13 Oct. 1960), p. 17; see also TLS (7 Oct. 1960), p. 642. D.C. Douglas, TLS (15 Dec. 1961), p. 896. Envelope endorsed ‘confidential’ and ‘E.F.J. Correspondence’, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 25. Quotations from Taylor, Personal History, pp. 236, 244. Taylor to Clark, 12 June [1964], Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 30. ‘Taylor’s England’, Past and Present, 33 (1966), pp. 149–58. TLS (16 Dec. 1965), pp. 1169–70. Sisman, Taylor, 334. K. Burk, Troublemaker. The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (New Haven, 2000), p. 308. Sisman, Taylor, p. 334. R.C.K. Ensor, England 1870–1914 (1936) p. v (Preface). Ensor to Sisam, n.d. [stamped 28 Oct. 1939 by OUP], PB/ED/015660. TLS (5 Jun. 1937), p. 423 (Morrah). EHR (Jan. 1940), p. 136 (Pares). Davin’s report (28 May 1953) of meeting at Oriel on 23 May 1953, PB/ED/015660. A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (1965), p. vi (Preface). For criticism see Cambridge Review (23 Oct. 1965), p. 61. For Taylor’s regrets see Taylor to Clark, 7 Dec. 1965, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G. N. Clark MSS, file 30. EHR (July 1963), p. 552.

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160 Medlicott, ‘Introductory Note’ to F. Barlow, The Feudal Kingdom of England 1042–1216 (1955) p. v. 161 W. Stubbs, ‘Inaugural lecture 7 February 1867’, in W. Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History and Kindred Subjects, 3rd. edn (Oxford, 1900), pp. 13–14. 162 Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Report (1922, Cmd.1588), p. 30. 163 By J. Le Patourel, History (Feb. 1961), p. 47. See also Galbraith, ‘A.L. Poole’, p. 433; Southern on Powicke in the ODNB. 164 On Watson see J.P. Carswell’s complaint in TLS (7 Oct. 1960), p. 642; cf. The Times (13 Oct. 1960), p. 17. On Williams see R.E. Griffin to Clark, 14 Feb. 1968, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N.Clark MSS, file 22. 165 Taylor, English History 1914–1945, p. v (Preface). 166 Taylor to Clark, 16 May 1961, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 30. 167 Davin to Clark, 31 Jan. 1952, Bodleian Library, Oxford, G.N. Clark MSS, file 27. 168 Unknown correspondent to Dr T.K. Derry of Harpenden, 22 Mar. 1956, PB/ ED/015660. 169 OUP Archive: unlisted file endorsed ‘A New Oxford History of England: G. Richardson to D. Davin, 9 May 1977’: papers for meeting, 10 Jun. 1976, on the OHE. 170 OUP Archive: unlisted file endorsed ‘A New Oxford History of England: G. Richardson to D. Davin, 9 May 1977’: papers for meeting, 10 Jun. 1976, on the OHE. 171 OUP Archive: unlisted file endorsed ‘A New Oxford History of England: G. Richardson to D. Davin, 9 May 1977’: Clark to R. Denniston, 23 Nov. 1978; Davin to G. Richardson, 18 Oct. 1977. Merton College, Oxford: Roberts MSS: file marked ‘OUP correspondence 1963–1979’.

Select Bibliography of the Publications of Keith Robbins Brian Ll. James

Book reviews, newspaper articles and minor writings are not included. 1967 ‘Lord Bryce and the First World War’, The Historical Journal, 10 (1967), pp. 255–77. 1968 Munich 1938. London: Cassell, 1968. x & 398 pp. A translation into German was published in Gütersloh in 1969. 1969 ‘Konrad Henlein, the Sudeten Question and British Foreign Policy’, The Historical Journal, 12 (1969), pp. 674–97. 1970 ‘Martin Niemöller, the German Church Struggle, and English Opinion’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970), pp. 149–70. 1971 Sir Edward Grey: a Biography of Lord Grey of Fallodon. London: Cassell, 1971. xv & 438 pp. ‘British diplomacy and Bulgaria, 1914–1915’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 49 (1971), pp. 560–585. 1972 ‘Appeasement: New tasks for the Historian’, International Affairs, 48 (1972), pp. 625–30. ‘The Great 20th-Century Serial’, History, 57 (1972), pp. 248–50.

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‘History and Politics: the Career of James Bryce’, Journal of Contemporary History, 7 (1972), pp. 37–52. Reprinted in Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse (eds), Historians in Politics. London: Sage Publications, 1974, pp. 113–28. 1973 ‘Sir Edward Grey and the British Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 1 (1973), pp. 213–21. 1975 ‘Institutions and illusions: the Dilemma of the Modern Ecclesiastical Historian’, in Derek Baker (ed.), The Materials Sources and Methods of Ecclesiastical History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1975, pp. 355–65. (Studies in Church History, 11.) ‘Church and Politics: Dorothy Buxton and the German Church Struggle’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Church Society and Politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1975, pp. 419–33. (Studies in Church History, 12.) 1976 The Abolition of War: the ‘Peace Movement’ in Britain, 1914–1919. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976, 255 pp. 1977 ‘The Foreign Secretary, the Cabinet, Parliament and the Parties’; ‘Public Opinion, the Press and Pressure Groups’; ‘Foreign policy, Government Structure and Public Opinion’, in F.H. Hinsley (ed.), British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 3–21, 70–88, 532–46. 1978 ‘Free Churchmen and the Twenty Years’ Crisis [1919–1939]’, The Baptist Quarterly, 27 (1978), pp. 346–57. ‘John Bright and the Middle Class in Politics’, in John Garrard, et. al. (eds.), The Middle Class in Politics. Farnborough: Saxon House, [1978], pp. 14–34. 1979 John Bright. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. xvi & 288p.

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‘The Spiritual Pilgrimage of the Rev. R.J. Campbell’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), pp. 261–76. 1980 ‘Social and Political Ideas in Europe, 1939–70’, in Conflict and Stability in the Development of Modern Europe, 1789–1970. Milton Keynes: Open University, 1980, pp. 77–104. ‘“This Grubby Wreck of Old Glories”: the United Kingdom and the End of the British Empire’, Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (1980), pp. 81–95. ‘Palmerston, Bright and Gladstone in North Wales’, Caernarvonshire Historical Society Transactions, 41 (1980), pp. 129–52. 1981 Religion and Humanism. Papers read at the eighteenth summer meeting and the nineteenth winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Edited by K .Robbins. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1981. xii & 365 pp. (Studies in Church History, 17.) ‘Britain in the Summer of 1914’, Moirae [Ulster Polytechnic], Trinity 1981, pp. 82–94. (Enid Muir lecture at Newcastle upon Tyne.) ‘The Churches at the Cross-roads’, History Today, 31 (1981), pp. 21–5. ‘History, the Historical Association and the “National Past”’, History, 66 (1981), pp. 413–25. 1982 ‘The Churches in Edwardian society’, in Donald Read (ed.), Edwardian England, London: Croom Helm, 1982, pp. 112–27. ‘Papal Progress’, History Today, 32 (1982), pp. 12–17. ‘Religion and Identity in Modern British History’, in Stuart Mews (ed.), Religion and National Identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1982, pp. 465–87. (Studies in Church History, 18.) 1983 The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain, 1870–1975. London: Longman, 1983. xi & 408 pp. (Foundations of Modern Britain.) ‘Forum. Keith Robbins Ponders on How Historians can Construct a UnitedKingdom’, History Today, 33 (1983), pp. 3–4. ‘Update: Nazi Germany. Professor Keith Robbins Provides a Guide to Some of the Most Significant Publications of the Last Decade’, The Historian, 1 (1983), pp. 20–23.

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1984 The First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. viii & 186 pp. An Italian translation was published by Mondadori in 1998. ‘Core and Periphery in Modern British History’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 70 (1984), pp. 275–97. (Raleigh lecture on history, 1984.) 1985 ‘L’ambiguit du mot “paix” au Royaume-Uni, avant 1914’, in Johannes Vandenrath (ed.), 1914: les Psychoses de Guerre? Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen, 1985, pp. 59–73. ‘Britain, 1940 and “Christian civilization”’, in Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (eds), History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick. Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 279–99. ‘Labour Foreign Policy and International Socialism: MacDonald and the League of Nations’, in Enzo Collotti (ed.), L’Internazionale Operaia e Socialista tra le due Guerre. Milano: Feltrinelli Editore, 1985, pp. 105–33. ‘Wales and the Scottish connexion’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1985, pp. 57–69. (A.H.Dodd lecture at University College, Bangor, 1984.) 1986 ‘John Bright and William Gladstone’, in Chris Wrigley (ed.), Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics: Essays in Honour of A.J.P. Taylor. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986, pp. 29–41. ‘1945: British Victory’, History, 71 (1986), pp. 61–6. 1987 ‘The Freedom of the Press: Journalists, Editors, Owners and Politicians in Edwardian Britain’, in A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds), Too Mighty to be Free: Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Netherlands. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1987, pp. 127–42. 1988 Appeasement. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. vi & 89 pp. (Historical Association Studies.) Nineteenth-Century Britain: Integration and Diversity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. viii & 199 pp. (The Ford lectures, University of Oxford, 1986–1987.) Paperback edition published by Oxford University Press in 1989 with title: Nineteenth-century Britain. England, Scotland, and Wales: the Making of a Nation.

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‘North and South Then and Now’, History Today, 38 (1988), pp. 23–8. 1989 ‘Arthur Henderson – die Welt braucht Abr stung’, in Michael Neumann (ed.), Der Friedens-Nobelpreis von 1933 bis 1945. München: Editions Pacis, 1989, pp. 44–51. (Der Friedens-Nobelpreis von 1901 bis heute, 5.) ‘John Bright – Quaker Politician: a Centenary Appreciation’, The Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 55 (1989), pp. 238–49. 1990 The Blackwell Biographical Dictionary of British Political Life in the 20th Century. Edited by K. Robbins. Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1990. xii & 449 pp. British Culture and Economic Decline. Edited by Bruce Collins and K. Robbins. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. x & 208 pp. (Debates in Modern History.) Includes ‘British Culture versus British Industry’, by Keith Robbins, pp. 1–23. Insular Outsider? ‘British History’ and European Integration. Reading: University of Reading, 1990. 16 pp. (The Stenton lecture, 1989.) Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America, c.1750–c.1950. Essays in honour of W.R. Ward. Edited by K. Robbins. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1990. (Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 7). xii & 369 pp. Includes ‘On Prophecy and Politics: Some Pragmatic Reflections’, by Keith Robbins, pp. 281–96. Europe: a History of its Peoples. [By] Jean-Baptiste Duroselle. Translated by Richard Mayne. Advisory committee: Juan Antonio Sanchez Garc a-Sauco, Sergio Romano, Keith Robbins, Karl Dietrich Erdmann. London: Penguin Group, 1990. 423 pp. ‘Fifty Years On: Recent Scholarship on the Origins of the Second World War’, German History, 8 (1990), pp. 339–45. ‘The Imperial City [Glasgow]’, History Today, 40 (1990), pp. 48–54. ‘Local History and the Study of National History’, The Historian, 27 (1990), pp. 15–18. ‘National Identity and History: Past, Present and Future’, History, 75 (1990), pp. 369–87. ‘Varieties of Britishness’, in Maurna Crozier (ed.), Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland. Belfast, Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast, 1990, pp. 4–18. 1991 ‘History through Four Nations’, Welsh Historian, 16 (1991), pp. 3–4.

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‘Prime Ministers and Primates: Reflections on their 20th Century Relationship’, in Friends of Lambeth Palace Library Annual Report (Lambeth, 1991), pp. 17–29. 1992 Churchill. London: Longman, 1992. viii & 186 pp. (Profiles in Power. General editor: K. Robbins). ‘History, Historians and Twentieth-Century British Public Life’, in Hartmut Boockmann and Kurt Jurgensen (eds), Nachdenken der Geschichte: Beiträge aus der Ökumene der Historiker in Memoriam Karl Dietrich Erdmann. Neumünster, Karl Wachholtz, 1992, pp. 397–408. 1993 History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain. London: Hambledon Press, 1993. xi & 301 pp. Contains 18 reprinted articles and two published for the first time: ‘Images of the Foreigner in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, and ‘State and Nation in the United Kingdom since 1945’. Protestant Germany through British Eyes: a Complex Victorian Encounter. London: German Historical Institute, 1993. (Annual lecture, 1992.) ‘European Peace Movements and their Influence on Policy after the First World War’, in R. Ahmann et. al. (eds), The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918–1957. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 73–86. (Studies of the German Historical Institute, London.) ‘Protestant Churches and Peace’, in Maurice Väisse (ed.), Le Pacifisme en Europe des années 1920 aux années 1950. Brussels: Bruylant, 1993, pp. 223–35. 1994 The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain 1870–1992. 2nd edn. London and New York: Longman, 1994. xii & 474 pp. (Foundations of Modern Britain.) Politicians, Diplomacy and War in Modern British History. London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994. xi & 306 pp. Contains 16 reprinted articles. ‘Religion and Community in Scotland and Wales since 1800’, in Sheridan Gilley and W.J.Sheils (eds), A History of Religion in Britain, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, pp. 363–80. ‘Welsh Religious History?’, The Journal of Welsh Religious History, 2 (1994), pp. 3–13. 1995 The Macmillan Dictionary of the Second World War. 2nd edn. [By] ElizabethAnne Wheal and Stephen Pope. Consultant editor: Keith Robbins. London:

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Macmillan, 1995. xviii & 548 pp. (1st edn published in 1989 by Grafton Books; 2nd edn reprinted in 2003 by Pen & Sword Books). ‘“Disestablishment in Wales”: Report of the Welsh Religious History Society Day Conference at St Asaph, 15 October 1994’, The Journal of Welsh Religious History, 3 (1995), pp. 86–7. ‘An Imperial and Multinational Polity: the “Scene from the Centre”, 1832–1922’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 244–54. (63rd Anglo-American Conference of Historians.) ‘The Twentieth Century, 1898–1994’, in Patrick Collinson, et. al. (eds), A History of Canterbury Cathedral. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 297–340. 1996 A Bibliography of British History 1914–1989. Compiled and edited by Keith Robbins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xxxix & 918 pp. ‘The British Experience of Conscientious Objection’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H. Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: the First World War Experienced. Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1996, pp. 691–708. ‘Canterbury Cathedral: Past and Present’, Friends of St David’s Cathedral Report, 1996, pp. 25–34. ‘Episcopacy in Wales’, The Journal of Welsh Religious History, 4 (1996), pp. 63–78. ‘“Experiencing the Foreign”: British Foreign Policy Makers and the Delights of Travel’, in Michael Dockrill and Brian McKercher, (eds), Diplomacy and World Power: Studies in British Foreign Policy, 1890–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 19–42. 1997 Appeasement. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. vi & 101 pp. (Historical Association Studies.) Britishness and British Foreign Policy. London, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1997. 20 pp. The 1997 FCO annual lecture. (FCO. Historians. Occasional papers, no. 14.) 1998 Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness. London: Longman, 1998. xiv & 377 pp. (The Present & the Past.) The World since 1945: a Concise History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. x & 278 pp. ‘Britain and Europe: Devolution and Foreign Policy’, International Affairs, 74 (1998), pp. 105–17.

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1999 Present and Past: British Images of Germany in the First Half of the Twentieth Century and their Historical Legacy. With an introduction by Joseph Canning. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1999. 53 pp. (Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 8.) 2000 ‘Cultural independence and political devolution in Wales’, in H.T. Dickinson and Michael Lynch (eds), The Challenge to Westminster: Sovereignty, Devolution and Independence. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000, pp. 81–90. ‘Establishing Disestablishment: Some Reflections on Wales and Scotland’, in Stewart J. Brown and George Newlands (eds), Scottish Christianity in the Modern World. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000, pp. 231–54. ‘The Monarch’s Concept of Foreign Policy: Victoria and Edward VII’, in Adolf M. Birke et. al. (eds), An Anglo-German Dialogue. The Munich Lectures on the History of International Relations. München: Saur, 2000, pp. 115–29. (PrinzAlbert-Studien, 17.) 2001 ‘Devolution in Britain: Will the United Kingdom Survive?’, in Ulrich Broich and Susan Bassnett (eds), Britain at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001, pp. 53–65. (European Studies, 16.) ‘More than a footnote? Wales in British History’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 1 (2001), pp. 20–24. ‘The Treaty of Versailles, “Never Again” and Appeasement’, in Michael Dockrill and John Fisher (eds), The Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Peace without Victory? Basingstoke: Palgrave in association with the Public Record Office, 2001, pp. 103–114. (Studies in Military and Strategic History.) 2002 A Bold Imagining. University of Wales Lampeter: Glimpses of an Unfolding Vision, 1827–2002. Edited by K. Robbins and John Morgan-Guy, with Wyn Thomas. Lampeter: University of Wales Lampeter, [2002]. 135 pp. Includes ‘A “Lost Generation”: St David’s College and World War One’, and ‘Times Past, Times Present’, by Keith Robbins. The British Isles, 1901–1951. Edited by K. Robbins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv & 285 pp. (The Short Oxford History of the British Isles.) ‘Stafford Cripps’, in Kevin Jefferys (ed.), Labour Forces from Ernest Bevin to Gordon Brown. London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2002, pp. 62–79.

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‘Winston Churchill und Europa’, in Heinz Duchhardt (ed.), Europer des 20. Jahrhunderts. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2002, pp. 145–64. 2003 Geburt oder Leistung? Elitenbildung im deutsch-britischen Vergleich. Birth or Talent? The Formation of Elites in a British-German Comparison. Herausgegeben von Franz Bosbach, K. Robbins und Karina Urbach. München: K.G. Saur, 2003. 239 pp. (Prinz-Albert-Studien, Band 21) ‘Protestant Nonconformists and the Peace Question’, in Alan P.F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross (eds.), Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century. Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003, pp. 216–39. ‘Wales and the “British question”’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 2002, NS, 9 (2003), pp. 152–61. ‘A Welshman and the Pursuit of Peace: Henry Richard and the Path to the 1850 Frankfurt Peace Congress’, in W. Elz and S. Neitzel (eds), Internationale Beziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Winfried Baumgart, Paderborn, 2003, pp. 19–36. 2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004. 60 vols. Includes articles by K. Robbins. on Isaac Leslie Hore-Belisha; Reginald John Campbell; Sir Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon; Thomas Walker Hobart Inskip, first Viscount Caldecote; Philip Cunliffe-Lister, first Earl of Swinton; Hugh Williams; Rowland Williams. ‘British History and the Generation of Change’, in Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (eds), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 3–9. ‘Labouring the Point: Review Article’, The Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 775–84. ‘Location and Dislocation: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in their Insular Alignment’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Promotion of Knowledge: Lectures to Mark the Centenary of the British Academy 1902–2002, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 163–80. (Proceedings of the British Academy, 122) 2005 Britain and Europe 1789–2005. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. xviii & 350 pp. (Britain and Europe. Series editor: K. Robbins.) ‘At the Heart of Europe?’, History Today, 55 (2005), pp. 37–9. ‘The Book: Britain and Europe in Perspective’, The Historian, 88 (2005), pp. 40–41.

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‘Locating Wales: Culture, Place and Identity’, in Neil Garnham and Keith Jeffery (eds), Culture, Place and Identity. University College Dublin Press, 2005, pp. 23–38. 2006 Foreign Encounters: English Congregationalism, Germany and the United States c.1850–c.1914. London: Congregational Memorial Hall Trust, 2006. 24 pp. (The Congregational Lecture 2006) ‘Religion and Culture: a Contemporary British/Irish Perspective’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions – und Kulturgeschichte, 100 (2006), pp. 331–44. ‘The Voice for History’, History Today, 56 (2006), pp. 18–20. 2007 ‘Britain and Munich Reconsidered: a Personal Historical Journey’, in Mark Cornwall and R.J.W. Evans (eds), Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe 1918–1948. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 231–44. (Proceedings of the British Academy, 140) ‘The British Churches and the Process of Transformation and Consolidation of Democracy in Central Eastern Europe since 1985’, Kirchliche Zeitsgeschichte, 1 (2007), pp. 81–96. ‘England, Englishmen and the Church of England in the Nineteenth-century United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: Nation, Church and State’, in Nigel Yates (ed.), Bishop Burgess and his World. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007, pp. 198–232. ‘Reconciliation? Democracy, Peacemaking and the Churches in Britain in 1918/19’, in Katarzyna Stoklosa and Andrea Strebind (eds), Glaube – Freiheit – Diktatur in Europa und dem USA: Festschrift für Gerhard Besier zum 60. Geburtstag, Göttingen, 2007, pp. 321–36. 2008 England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: the Christian Church 1900–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xxi & 508 pp. (The Oxford History of the Christian Church) ‘Ethnicity, Religion, Class and Gender and their “Island Story/ies”: Great Britain and Ireland’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 231–55. (Writing the Nation, 3) ‘Political Anglicanism: Church and State in the Twentieth Century’, in Nigel Yates (ed.), Anglicanism: Essays in History, Belief and Practice. Lampeter: Trivium Publications, 2008, pp. 89–104. (Trivium, 38)

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2009 ‘Content and Context: the War Sermons of Hebert Hensley Henson (1863–1947)’, in Gilles Teulié and Laurence Lux-Sterritt (eds), War Sermons. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp. 188–206. 2010 Political and Legal Perspectives. Edited by K. Robbins. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010. 248 pp. (KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society: The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe, 1780–1920, 1). Includes ‘Church Establishment, Disestablishment and Democracy in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 1870–1920’, by K. Robbins. Pride of Place: A Modern History of Bristol Grammar School. Andover: Phillimore, 2010. vii & 280 pp. Religion and Diplomacy: Religion and British Foreign Policy, 1815–1941. Edited by Keith Robbins and John Fisher. Dordrecht and St. Louis, Missouri: Republic of Letters, 2010. x & 268 pp. ‘Forever a Footnote? Wales in Modern British History’, in T.M. Charles-Edwards and R.J.W. Evans (eds), Wales and the Wider World: Welsh History in an International Context. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010, pp. 218–36. 2012 Transforming the World: Global Political History since World War II. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 392 pp.

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Index

Abolitionists, 216 Abyssinian Crisis, 16 Act of Union of 1801, 130 Acton, Lord, 234 Addison, Joseph, 69, 72, 75 Alexander, Charlie, 228 Alpha programme, 117 Amateur Rowing Association, 199 Ames, Julia, 226 Anglican Evangelical Group Movement, 112, 113 Anglo-Catholicism, 132 anti-Catholic riots, 121 Apostolic Constitutions, 182 apostolic succession, 110, 127 Appeasement, 16, 18; see also Munich crisis Arminianism, 82 Armstrong, Eliza, 219, 221 Arnold, Matthew, 40, 219 Asquith, H.H., 158, 247, 251 atheism, 223 in Wales, 94 atonement, 110 Atterbury, Francis, Bishop of Rochester, 33 auricular confession, 125, 131, 141, 153–4 fn 49 automatic writing, 226 Bands of Hope, 106 Bangor, diocese of, 95 Baptists, 108, 113–14 Barnabas, Epistle of, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 242, 246, 253 Barrington, Shute, Bishop of Durham, 123–4, 125, 126 Bartali, Gino, 207 Bartlet, J. Vernon, 178, 184, 188

Bassett, T.M., 102–3 Bath, 54–5, 58 Baylen, Joseph, 215 beer consumption, in England and Wales, 158 Bennet, John, 106 Benson, Edward White, Archbishop of Canterbury, 158, 164, 166, 168–9 Besant, Annie, 223, 226, 227 biblical criticism, 33, 139–40 in Germany, 143 biblical prophecy, 108 Bigg, Charles, 182, 187 Birmingham, 51, 198 Birmingham Working Men’s Association, 198 Black, J.B., 240, 248, 252, 253, 254 Blackstone, Sir William, 36 blasphemy, in England, 27–42 Blasphemy Act of 1698, 35 Blount, Charles, 30, 31, 32 Blue Ribbon Movement, 162 Bolton, William, 56 Booth, Bramwell, 221 Booth, Catherine, 220, 224 Booth, Richard, 162 Booth, William, 220–21 Borderland, 226 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 73 Boyns, K. Harley, 112 Boy’s Brigade, 198 Boy Scouts, 198 Boy’s Life Brigade, 198 Bradlaugh, Charles, 38, 40 Brethren movement, 110, 111, 114 Brierly, J.L., 235 Bright, John, 19, 20–21 Bristol, 58 British and Foreign Bible Society, 109, 130 British Church, ancient, 84–5

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British Empire, 16, 18, 19, 21, 222, 225, 251 British National Association of Spiritualists, 226 Britishness, 12, 13, 17, 19, 21 Broad Church movement, 111, 142–3, 197 Brooke, Lord, 56, 57 Browning House, London, 216 Bryennios, Philotheos, 176, 177, 178, 183 Buchanan-Riddell, Sir Walter, 236 Buchman, Frank, 114, 115 Buck, Nathaniel, 47, 51, 56, 59 Buck, Samuel, 47, 51, 56, 59 Buckingham, Duke of, 33–4 Buckingham Palace, 52 Bulgarian atrocities, 213, 216–17 Burgess, Thomas, Bishop of St David’s, 125, 126, 129, 131–2 Burkitt, F.C., 181, 182, 183, 184 Burlington, Lord, 53 Burns, Dawson, 161 Butler, Joseph, Bishop of Durham, 31 Butler, Josephine, 216 Calvinism, 82–3, 113 Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales, 81–9, 97, 113 Cambridge Modern History, 234–5 Cana, miracle at, 160 Carlile, Richard, 37, 38 cathedrals, 49, 50 Catholic Apostolic Church, 109 Catholic Emancipation, 121, 145 Celtic Church, 125 Central Advisory Council for Education (Wales), 102 Central Public House Trust Association, 168, 169 Chalmers, Thomas, 107, 108 Chamberlain, Joseph, 227 Chamberlain, Neville, 16, 18 Chapman, J. Arundel, 112 Chapman, John, 178 Chapman, R.W., 235–6, 238 charismatic renewal, 116 Charles, David, 98 Charles, Thomas, of Bala, 83, 84, 89, 97, 98, 100–101

Charles II, King 33, 49, 51, 59 Chicago, 224–5 child prostitution, 218–19 Children Act of 1908, 158 China Inland Mission, 111 Christ, 32, 34, 35, 36, 189; see also second coming of Christ and Chicago, 224–5 infallibility of, 138 Christian Democrats, 15 Christian Socialism, 197 Churchill, Winston, 16, 19, 245 Church Lads’ Brigade, 198 Church of England, 28, 127 and blasphemy, 36 Evangelicalism in, 108, 111, 114 nineteenth-century controversies, 137–50 religious life for women, 141 and Roman Catholicism, 121–32 and Scripture, 131 and temperance, 159–70 in Wales, 88 Church of England Temperance Society, 160, 161, 165, 166–7, 168, 169 Church of Ireland, 22 disestablishment of, 140, 145–8 Church of Scotland, 21, 108, 113 Church Reunion Conference, 224 circulating schools, Welsh, 101 ‘Civic Church’, 222–5, 228 Civic Federation of Chicago, 224, 225 Clarion Cyclists, 202, 205 Clark, G.N., 233, 234–51, 237, 253, 254 Clarke, M.V., 240, 242, 253 Claude, Jean, 72 Clement, Mary, 102 Clement of Alexandria, 181 Clement of Rome, 178 Coke, Thomas, 82 Cole, G.D.H., 236 Coleridge, first Baron, 39, 40 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 109, 111 Collier, Jeremy, 31 Collingwood, R.G., 235, 238, 240, 241, 248, 252, 253, 254 Collini, Stefan, 11, 12, 23 Collins, Anthony, 30, 33, 41

Index Colmore, William, 56 Commission for Racial Equality, 28 Common Market, 14, 15 common sense philosophy, 107 Congregational Church, 113, 215 Connolly, R.H., 180–81, 182–3, 184, 185–6, 187, 188, 189, 190 Conservative Working Men’s Association, 205 Contagious Diseases Acts, 216 Copleston, Edward, Bishop of Llandaff, 124, 125 Coppi, Fausto, 207 Coullié, Pierre-Hector, Cardinal, 195 Council in the Marches, 48, 49 Council in the North, 48, 49 Creed, J.M., 186, 188, 190 cricket, 197, 198–9, 200–201, 205 Crimean War, 19, 20 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008, 27 Croke, Thomas William, Archbishop of Cashel, 206 Cromer Convention, 112 Cromwell, Oliver, 216, 227 Cruttwell, C.R.M.F., 235, 236, 239 cycling, 201–2, 207 Darby, John Nelson, 110 Darwin, Charles, 107 Darwinism, 138 Daubeney, Charles, 122–3, 125 Davidson, Randall, Archbishop of Canterbury, 169 Davies, G., 240, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254 Davies, Richard, 85 Davitt, Michael, 206 Dawkins, Richard, 42 Defence of the Realm Act (1915), 158 Defoe, Daniel, 50 Denman, Lord, 39 Derrick, Samuel, 71 Dictionary of National Biography, 233 Didache, British School of scholarship, 175–90 Didascalia, 180, 185 disestablishment, 21, 142, 150 in Wales, 100, 101, 102

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See also Church of Ireland Disraeli, Benjamin, 137, 142, 144, 146, 150 Dix, Gregory, 182–3, 187, 190 dockers’ strike, London, 221 Doyle, James, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, 130–31 Drake, Francis, 53 Dreyfus Affair, 204 Dryden, John, 33 Eagle, Maria, 28 Easter Rising (1916), 206 Eaton, Daniel, 37 ecumenism, 103 Education Act of 1870, 99 Education Act of 1902, 100 Edwards, Charles, 86 Egypt, occupation of (1882), 20, 217–18 Elias, John, 82 Ellenborough, first Baron, 37 Ellicott, Charles John, Bishop of Gloucester and biblical scholarship, 137–8 and disestablishment, 142–3, 145–8, 150 early life, 137 and Essays and Reviews controversy, 143–5 and religious doubt, 138–9 and second Lambeth Conference, 148–50 and national religion, 139–40 and ritualism, 140–2 Ellison, Henry, 160 Emery, F.V., 239–40, 253 English Church Union, 141 Enlightenment, 52, 109, 116 English, 30, 106–7 French, 107 and pragmatism, 108–9 and progress, 107–8 and theology, 110 Ensor, R.C.K., 239, 240, 242, 245, 248, 250–51, 252, 253, 254 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 71–72 Erskine, Thomas, 110 Essays and Reviews, 143–4

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eucharist, 178, 179–80, 183, 184, 186, 189 European Community, 14–15 European Convention on Human Rights, 28 European Union, 15 Eusebius, 180 Eutychus, 66 Evangelicalism, 88 and the Enlightenment, 106–9 liberal, 112 and Modernism, 115–17 and popular culture, 105–6 and Romanticism, 109–14 Evans, David, 100 Evans, Theophilus, 84, 85–6 Evelyn, John, 72, 73 Everton football club, 205 Faber, F.W., 124–5, 132 Falkland Islands, 15 Farrar, F.W., 223 fasting, 179 Feiling, Keith, 244 Fielding, Henry, 67 Finkelstein, Louis, 183, 184 First World War, 17, 18, 19, 112, 207, 246, 254 Firth, C.H., 239, 247 Fisher, H.A.L., 234, 245 folk religion, 106 football, 203, 204, 205, 207 and sectarianism, 203, 207 Foote, G.W., 38, 40 Fraser, James, Bishop of Manchester, 138, 148, 149 freemasonry, 195, 203 freethinkers, 34, 38 French Revolution, 108, 122, 123 Freud, Sigmund, 115 Funk, F.X., 186 Gaelic Athletic Association, 206 Garden City movement, 111 Gardiner, A.G., 213, 227 Gay News case, 27, 40 Gellner, Ernest, 13 Genevan movement, 113 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 86

Gibson, Edmund, Bishop of London, 31, 33, 34 Girl Guides, 198 Gittins Report (1967), 102 Gladstone, William Ewart, 19, 142, 143, 144, 150, 168, 216–17, 218 and Irish disestablishment, 99, 145–8 Glanvill, Joseph, 31 Glasgow Celtic football club, 203 Gloser, W.H., 105 Glover, T.R., 113 Gordon, Charles, General, 20, 218, 219, 227 Gordon, Lord George, 121 Gothenburg system, 162, 167, 168 Gouge, Thomas, 100 Grey, Sir Edward, 16, 17 Griffith, D.M., 101–2 Groser, W.H., 117 Groves, A.N., 110 Gymnastic and Sporting Union of France, 204 gymnastics, 195, 196, 200, 204 Hale, Sir Matthew, 36 Hanoverian England, 65 Hardy, Thomas, 105 Harnack, Adolf von, 181 Harris, Howell, 82, 83 Harris, William, 66 Harrison, Frederick, 223 Haverfield, F.J., 239 Havergal, Frances Ridley, 111 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 51 Hay, Denys, 250 Heath, Edward, 15 Hervey, Frederick Augustus, Bishop of Derry, 121–2 Hetherington, Henry, 37, 39, 40 Hibernian football club, Edinburgh, 203 High Church movement, 111, 112, 113, 123, 126, 131, 132, 142, 152 fn 26; see also Anglo-Catholicism; Tractarianism Hippolytus of Rome, 181, 184–5 Hitler, Adolf, 17, 115, 207, 208 Hobbes, Thomas, 30, 32, 33 Hobsbawm, Eric, 13

Index Hogarth, William, 70, 72 ‘The Sleeping Congregation’, 63–5, 64, 75–6 Holyoake, Jacob, 37 Holy Trinity, Brompton, 117 Home Rule, for Ireland, 20 Hone, William, 37 Hook, W.F., 132 Horning, E.W., 200 Horsley, Samuel, Bishop of Rochester, 122, 123, 125 Houlding, John, 205 Hughes, Hugh Price, 223, 224 Hughes, John, 88 Hughes, Thomas, 197, 200 Hughes, William, 101 Hume, David, 30 Hunt, William, 234 Huntingdon, Countess of, 82, 83 Huntington, Samuel, 13 hypnotism, 226, 227 incarnation, 110–11 intercession of the saints, 88 Irenaeus of Lyons, 181, 184 Irish Parliament, 121 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 206 Irish rising of 1798, 123, 130 Irving, Edward, 109–10 Jackson, Holbrook, 201 Jacob, E.F., 240, 242, 243, 246, 250, 253, 254 Jacobitism, 121 Jahn, F.L., 196 James II, 55, 59 Jayne, Francis, Bishop of Chester, 162–4, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168–70 Jenkins, D.E., 101 Jewish Lads’ Brigade, 198 Jones, David, of Llangan, 83 Jones, Griffith, 84, 88, 93, 100, 101 Jones, Robert, 84, 86–8, 89 Jones, Robert (‘Derfel’), 96 Jones, R. Tudor, 102 Jones, Thomas, of Denbigh, 81, 82, 89 Joseph of Arimathea, 84, 85 Jowett, Benjamin, 143

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Joyce, James, 115 Kelly, Hugh, 71 Keswick convention, 111, 112, 113–14, 117 Kimberley, Earl of, 166 Kingsley, Charles, 197 Kingsmill, Hugh, 227 Knowles, David, 249 Knox, Vicesimus, 67 Kulturkampf, 198 Labour party, 15 Lambeth Conferences, 140, 148, 160–61 latitudinarians, 107 Leapor, Mary, 68 Lees, Frederic, 161 Leo XIII, Pope, 221 Lhuyd, Edward, 85 Liberal party, 18, 99, 157, 158 Liberation Society, 99 Liddon, H.P., 138 Lidgett, John Scott, 111 Lloyd George, David, 158, 244 Loader, Isaac, 35 ‘local option’ system, 158 Locke, John, 106–7 London, 51, 52, 217, 218–19 preaching in, 68 London City Mission, 217 London Missionary Society, 109 London Spiritual Alliance, 226 Longman, publishers, 234, 239, 251 Lord’s Prayer, 179 Lowell, James Russell, 216 Lowther, Sir James, 52 Lowther, Sir John, 52 Mackie, J.D., 240, 242, 249, 253, 254 McKisack, May, 240, 242, 243, 245, 249, 251, 253, 254 Maclagan, William Dalrymple, Archbishop of York, 166 McLeod Campbell, John, 110 Macmillan, Harold, 14, 15 Macmillan, publishers, 233 Magee, William Connor, Bishop of Peterborough, 162

278

Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain

Mahdi, 217–18 ‘Maiden Tribute’ campaign, 218–19, 221 Manning, B.L., 113 Manning, Henry, Cardinal, 219, 221, 227 Marriott, J.A.R., 234 Maurice, F.D., 111 Mearns, Andrew, 217 Meath, Earl of, 166 Medlicott, W.N., 251 Methodism, 83–4, 89, 106, 108, 112; see also Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales; Primitive Methodism; Wesleyan Methodists Methuen, publishers, 234, 239 Michaux, P., 203–4 Micklem, Nathaniel, 113 Middleton, R.D., 183 Miller, John Cale, 198 Milner, John, 122 miracles, 34, 38 missionary movement, 108, 109, 111 moderatism, Scottish, 107 Modernism, 115, 116, 117 monasteries, 49, 50 Monroe Doctrine, 18 Montanists, 185, 187 Moral Rearmament, 114, 115 Morgan, Densil, 81, 95 Morley, John, 217 Moxon, Edward, 37 Muilenburg, James, 181, 182, 184, 188 Munich crisis of 1938, 16, 23; see also Appeasement ‘muscular Christianity’, 197, 200, 204, 208 Mussolini, Benito, 207 Myers, Frederick, 227 Myres, J.L., 239, 240, 241, 246, 248, 252, 253, 254 Nag Hammadi, 176 Namier, Lewis, 244, 248 National Amateur Rowing Association, 199 National Social Union, 225 natural theology, 107 Nayler, James, 29 Newcastle Programme, 158 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 50, 55, 59 ‘New Journalism’, 213, 215, 219–20, 228

Newman, John Henry, 125 New Testament, exegesis, 176 Newton, Sir Isaac, 106–7 Nicoll, William Robertson, 227, 229 Niederwimmer, Kurt, 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 115 Nixon, Richard, 15 Nonconformist Conscience, 213, 215, 229, 244 Nonconformists, 50, 84, 161, 202, 224 in Wales, 81, 82, 94–7, 99, 101 Norrington, Arthur, 235, 241, 242, 243, 245 North, Brownlow, Bishop of Winchester, 122 Northern Echo, 216, 217 Norton, Lord, 165–166 Old Testament scholarship, 138 Oman, Sir Charles, 234, 246–7 Orange lodges, 203 Orchard, W.E., 113 Osborne, Francis, 32 Ottoman Empire, 216 Oxford Group, 114–115 Oxford History of England, 233–54 Oxford Movement, 109, 112 Oxford University, 245 History Faculty, 246, 247 Oxford University Press, 233, 234, 235, 236, 238, 242, 247, 250, 252 Paine, Tom, 37, 38 Paley, William, 107 Pall Mall Gazette, 217, 219, 221, 223 Pantycelyn, Williams, 88 Pares, Richard, 242, 246, 253 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 206 Parry, Joshua, 75 Pattison, Mark, 143 peace movement, 19–21, 213, 227–8 penal laws, 122 People’s Refreshment House Association, 168, 169, 170 Pepys, Samuel, 72 Perrot, Samuel, 66 Peter, Hugh, 69 Phillips, Trevor, 28

Index Phillpotts, Henry, Bishop of Exeter, 131 Piggott, Stuart, 242, 253 Pius X, Pope, 204 plebian culture, 105, 106 Pluche, Noël-Antoine, Abbe, 71 Police Court Mission, 161, 170 Pollard, A.F., 234, 248 Poole, A.L., 234, 236, 240, 242, 245, 246, 249, 251, 253, 254 popular beliefs, 105 postmillennialism, 108 Postmodernism, 116 Powicke, F.M., 236, 240, 241, 245–6, 247, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254 preaching, 67–73 premillennialism, 110, 111 Presbyterian Church of Wales, 113 Preston, W.C., 217 Prichard, Rees, 84, 88 Primitive Methodism, 106 Prison Gate Mission, 161 Protestant Association, 121 Public House Reform Association, 168 public intellectuals, 11, 19, 23 Puckering, Sir Henry, 56 purgatory, 88 Quakers, 29, 63, 69 Raikes, Robert, 98, 100 Raper, Richard, 244, 253 Rebecca riots, 95 Redesdale, Earl of, 142, 153 fn 48 Reformation, 54, 84, 187 English, 122–123, 132, 139 Reformed theology, 113 Reid, Thomas, 107 Religious Census of 1851, 99 Renaissance, 52 republicanism, 37 Restoration, 28, 30, 31, 32, 51 Review of Reviews, 222, 223 revivalism, 73, 82 Revival of 1859–62, 216, 229 Revival of 1904–05, 228 Rhodes, Cecil, 222, 225, 228 ritualism, 140–42, 143 Robbins, Keith, frontispiece, 2

279

on Britishness, 13–15 and British policies towards Europe, 15–19 on peace movements, 19–21 as public intellectual, 11–12 and religious history, 21–23 on unpredictability of history, 23 on Welsh identity, 93 writings of, 261–71 Roberts, Evan, 228 Robertson, F.W., 198 Robertson Scott, J.W., 215 Robinson, Joseph Armitage, 178–80, 181, 182, 183, 184, 188, 189, 190 Robinson, Robert, 72 Roman Catholic Church, 15, 50, 88, 109, 111–12, 114 and Church of England, 121–32 and Irish diaspora, 21–2 and Scripture, 131 social commitments of, 199, 220, 221 and temperance, 161 Roman Catholics, 69–70 Romanticism, 109–12, 113, 114 in Germany, 111 Rosebery, Lord, 14 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 71 Rowland, Daniel, 66 Rowse, A.L., 238, 242, 248 Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing Laws, 158, 169 Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge (1919–1922), 247, 251 Royall, Anne Newport, 69 Royal Supremacy, 139 rugby, 197, 205–6 Ruskin, John, 111 Ryle, J.C., 111 St David’s, diocese of, 95 St Paul, Apostle, 66, 126, 160, 178, 179, 187 St Paul’s cathedral, 51 Salisbury, Lord, 14, 164–5, 169 Salvation Army, 213, 219, 220–21, 224, 227 Scarman, Lord, 27, 39 Scott, Sir Walter, 109

280

Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain

Scott, Thomas, 108 Scottish Episcopal Church, 22 Scottish Highlands, 93 Scottish identity, 14 Scottish nationalism, 251 Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 93 second coming of Christ, 108, 109–10; see also Christ Second Reform Act (1867), 99, 198 Second World War, 14, 115, 243 secularism, 37, 94, 159, 171, 208 Sedley, Sir Charles, 29, 35 Select Committee on Religious Offences, 28 Sermon on the Mount, 179 Shaftesbury, third Earl of, 30 Shaw, George Bernard, 219 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 37 Shrewsbury, Countess of, 33 Skinner, Quentin, 30 slavery, 216 slum housing, 217 Smith, Sydney, 123 Smith, William Robertson, 111 Social Democratic Workers’ Gymnastic League, 199 socialism, 14, 198, 199 Socialist British Workers’ Sport Association, 205 Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 101 Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control. See Liberation Society Society of the Holy Cross, 141, 142 Socinians, 29, 107 South African War, 213, 227, 254 Soviet Union, 17 Spanish Civil War, 16 spiritualism, 225–6, 227, 229 Stead, Estelle, 228 Stead, Francis Herbert, 215–16 Stead, Mary Isabella, 216 Stead, William Thomas, 213–29, 214 biographical studies of, 215 and the ‘Civic Church’, 220–25 death on Titanic, 213, 228

and the ‘New Journalism’, 215–20 and the peace movement, 227–8 spiritualism and the occult, 225–7 Stenton, F.M., 240, 241, 245, 246, 249, 250, 253, 254 Stocken, Douglas, 113–14 Streeter, B.H., 180, 184–5, 187, 188, 190 Sturges, John, 122 subconscious, 226–7 Sudan, 217–18 Sunday School Leagues (sports), 205 Sunday schools in England, 101, 102 in Wales, 94, 96–8, 99–100, 101, 102, 103 Sunday School Society, 97–8 Sunday School Union, 105 Swift, Jonathan, 65–6, 72 Symons, J.C., 96–7 Tait, A.C., Archbishop of Canterbury, 141–2, 148 Talbot, E.S., Bishop of Rochester, 168 Taylor, A. J. P., 11, 19, 239, 243–4, 245, 246, 250, 251, 253, 254 Taylor, Charles, 170 Taylor, Hudson, 111 Taylor, John, 35–6 team sports, 197 teetotalism, 159, 160 Telfer, W., 186 temperance, 106 Temperance movement, 159–62, 170–71 Temple, Frederick, Archbishop of Canterbury, 140, 143–4, 145, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169 Ten Commandments, 131 Thatcher, Margaret, 15 theatre, 70–71 theosophy, 226 Third Reform Act (1884), 198 Thirlwall, Connop, Bishop of St David’s, 144, 146 Thirty-Nine Articles, 81 Thom, William, 67 Thomas, K.V., 245 Thompson, E.P., 105 Thring, Edward, 197

Index Thring, Lord, 164 Tindal, Matthew, 31, 33 Titanic, sinking of, 213, 228 Toland, John, 30, 31 tongues, speaking in, 110 Torrey, Reuben, 228 Tout, T.F., 234 Tractarians, 122, 125 ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’, 89, 95–6, 98 Trefeca, Countess of Huntingdon’s College at, 82 Trevelyan, G.M., 201, 234, 240, 244 Trusler, John, 67 Ultramontanism, 109, 112, 199 Union of Catholic Gymnastic and Rifle Societies, 195 Union of French Gymnastic Societies, 199 United Kingdom, heterogeneity of, 12 United States, 17, 18, 19 universities, British, 12–13 Ussher, James, Archbishop of Armagh, 125 utilitarianism, 108 Vatican II, 207 Vaughan, Cardinal, 168 Veale, Sir Douglas, 244 vegetarianism, 159 Veitch, G.S., 240, 241, 244, 253 Vokes, F.E., 186–7, 188, 189, 190 Wales, 21, 81–9, 93–103 Anglican Church in, 99, 101 coal industry, 94 nationalism and national identity, 94–6, 98, 101, 102, 103, 251 Welsh language, 83, 95, 102, 103 working-class culture, 103 Warwick, 47–8, 48, 56–8 Watson, Steven, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245, 249, 251, 253, 254

281

Weaver, J.R.L., 236 Wells, Edward, 66 Welsh Assembly, 94 Welsh Sunday Closing Act (1881), 160 Wesley, Charles, 113 Wesley, John, 73, 82, 113 Wesleyan Methodists, 82 Westminster, Duke of, 164 Whitefield, George, 82, 83, 113 Whitehaven, 52 Whitehouse, Mary, 41 Whyte, Frederick, 215, 226 Widdecombe, Anne, 41 Wilberforce, Ernest, Bishop of Chester, 169 Wilberforce, Samuel, Bishop of Oxford, 141, 150 Williams, B., 240, 245, 246, 248–9, 251, 253, 254 Williams, Henry, of Llafwrog, 29 Williams, Rowland, 143 Williams, Thomas, 37 Williams, T. Rhondda, 113 Williams, Watkin, 99 Winston, Lord Robert, 42 Wix, Samuel, 125, 126–7, 128–30, 132 Wood, John, 58 Woods, Edward, Bishop of Lichfield, 112 Woodward, E.L., 240, 241, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252, 253, 254 Woolston, Thomas, 31, 33, 34, 37, 39 Wordsworth, Christopher, Bishop of Lincoln, 149 Wordsworth, William, 109, 111 Working Men’s Institute (Brighton), 198 World’s Columbian Exhibition, Chicago (1893), 224 Wriedt, Etta, 228 York, 53–4, 55 Young Men’s Christian Association, 198 Young Women’s Christian Association, 216