The Restraint of the Press in England, 1660-1715: The Communication of Sin (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 47) 9781783275175, 9781787448766, 1783275170

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The RESTRAINT of the PRESS in ENGLAND, 1660-1715 the communication of sin

Alex W. Barber

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY VOLUME 47

THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND 1660–1715

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107

Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND 1660–1715 THE COMMUNICATION OF SIN

Alex W. Barber

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Alex W. Barber 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation ‎no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, ‎published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, ‎transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, ‎without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Alex W. Barber to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2022 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–78327–517–5 hardback ISBN 978–1–78744–876–6 ePDF The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd ‎PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ‎and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. ‎668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA ‎website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: Guess at my Meaning, a satirical broadside, 1709. © The Trustees of the British Museum

For Rebecca

Contents Preface: The Taxonomy of the Press ix List of Abbreviations xvii Introduction: From Censorship to the Freedom of the Press

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Part I Providence, Salvation and the Lapse of Licensing 1 The Politics of Coercion: Maintaining Truth

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2 Christianity not Mysterious (1696): Deism and the Liberty of the Press

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3 Letter to a Convocation Man (1696): Restraining the Press after the Lapse of Licensing

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4 Legislation in the Late Seventeenth Century: Matthew Tindal, Francis Gregory and the Press

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Part II Freedom of the Press and Ecclesiastical Identity 5 Legislation in the Early Eighteenth Century: Anonymity and the Press

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6 High Churchmen and the Politics of the Press: Defining the Cause of Restraint

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Part III The Church in Danger 7 The Church in Danger: Prosecuting the Memorial (1705) and the Rights of the Christian Church (1706) 207 8 The Press and the Pulpit: Prosecuting Preaching

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Conclusion: Partisan Loyalties

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Bibliography 281 Index 327

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Preface The Taxonomy of the Press While recent events such as the Satanic Verses affair in 1989 have led some people to think differently about the freedom of the press, most modern liberals still include freedom of speech among the ‘equal basic rights and liberties’ of Western citizenship.1 Unsurprisingly, considering its diversity, modern liberalism does not agree on exactly why freedom of speech should be defended.2 Nevertheless, from discussion of how public truth might be attained, to understandings of self-fulfilment and self-autonomy, there is a general agreement that democracy itself can only be nourished and realised by an electorate that is able to debate and to exchange ideas free from the restriction of censorship. In Alexander Meiklejohn’s paradigmatic formulation, democracy and self-government ‘can only exist insofar as the voters acquire the intelligence, integrity, sensitivity and generous devotion to the general welfare that, in theory, casting a ballot is assumed to express’.3 And, once free speech is guaranteed, ‘individuality flourishes; once individuality John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard, MA, 1971); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, NY, 1993), 227. The relevant literature here is vast, for the most influential discussions of how free speech underpins variant forms of liberalism see, R. Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA, 1985); R. Dworkin, Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Bridgewater, NJ, 1997); R. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (2013); M. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL, 1962); F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (2001); A. Haworth, Free Speech (1998); C. Demaske, Modern Power and Free Speech: Contemporary Culture and Issues of Equality (Plymouth, 2011); M. Bonotti, ‘Political Liberalism, Free Speech and Public Reason’, European Journal of Political Theory, 14 (2015), 180–208. For reactions to the Rushdie Affair, see Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: How the World Changed from the Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo (2017); Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (eds), The Rushdie File (1989); Simon Lee, The Cost of Free Speech (1990); Peter Jones, ‘Respecting Beliefs and Rebuking Rushdie’, British Journal of Political Science, 20 (1994), 415–37. 2 In the discussion that follows I use the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ as expedient terms for an emancipatory phenomenon of individual and collective freedoms, which found their basis in natural rights and were both expressed and defended in religious toleration, freedom of speech and contractual government. I am not defining liberalism as a coherent system of thought nor as an ideological political–economic position. For a similar definition, but with reference to Enlightenment historiography, see William J. Bulman, ‘Introduction: Enlightenment for the Culture Wars’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2016), 1–41. 3 A. Meiklejohn, Political Freedom: The Constitutional Powers of the People (Westport, CT, 1979), 255; A. Meiklejohn, ‘The First Amendment is an Absolute’, Supreme Court Review (1961), 245–66. 1

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flourishes, diversity arises; and once diversity arises, we can begin to assess competing visions of the good’.4 Recently, though, post-modern critics have questioned how freedom of speech has been applied in the last fifty years. They have advocated for protection for religious and ethnic minorities, most obviously in the form of hate speech laws, by questioning the general applicability of Western understandings of freedom and, instead, outlining how forms of restraint and control can themselves constitute freedom and produce moral good.5 As the foremost proponent of hate speech laws has commented, ‘hate speech undermines the public good, or it makes the task of sustaining it much more difficult than it would otherwise be. It does this not only be intimating discrimination and violence, but by reawakening living nightmares of what this society was like – or what other societies have been like – in the past’.6 In turn, only by controlling offensive speech can societies produce moral good and protect the dignity of the individual.7 Despite their differences over free speech and its limits both modern liberals and their post-modern critics have grounded their respective analyses in history. The most widely recognised point of departure has been John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), a work conventionally conjoined with John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689).8 On this reading, the seventeenth century witnessed a ferocious struggle between individual conscience and free expression against external power. Both Milton and Locke are held up by modern liberals as among the best advocates of freedom during the seventeenth century.9 For the eighteenth century, John Trenchard’s and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1720–1723) are similarly hailed precisely because they provide an Anglo–Atlantic bridge from English Whig A. Levin, The Cost of Free Speech: Pornography, Hate Speech and their Challenge to Liberalism (Basingstoke, 2010), 51; Anshuman Mondal, Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie (Basingstoke, 2014), 39. 5 Mondal, Islam and Controversy, 3. Paul Weller, A Mirror for Our Times: ‘The Rushdie Affair’ and the Future of Multiculturalism (2009). 6 Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (2012), 4. 7 Ibid., 5; Talal Asad, ‘Free Speech, Blasphemy and Secular Criticism’, in Talal Asad et al. (eds), Is Critique Secular (New York, NY, 2013), 14–57. 8 For a criticism of the liberal understanding of Areopagitica, see David Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, in Richard Burt (ed.), The Administration of Ethics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (Minnesota, MN, 1994), 3–33; Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (Oxford, 1994), 102–4. 9 For the connection between Milton, Locke and the free press, see Randy Robertson, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division (University Park, PA, 2009), 201; Frederick S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Controls (Urbana, IL, 1952), 261; Joris van Eijnatten, ‘In Praise of Moderate Enlightenment: A Taxonomy of Early Modern Arguments in Favour of Freedom of Expression’, in Elizabeth Powers (ed), Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea (Lewisburg, PA, 2011), 30. 4

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radicalism to the American Revolution and to the US Constitution’s First Amendment.10 Among nineteenth-century writers, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty takes pride of place in the rights story of modern free speech. Mill’s great achievement, we are assured, was generating a purely secular defence of free speech, casting off the shackles of religion that had so preoccupied Milton in Areopagitica.11 In every version of this narrative, the liberty of the press is advanced by key thinkers who are committed to freedom of thought and expression. The protagonists were often persecuted and contained, but their commitment to natural rights withstood authoritarianism and faced down various regimes and institutions. It is a narrative of elite secularity and democratic modernism, one in which the freedom of the press is indivisible, undergirding all rights and liberties.12 This liberal interpretation of the press and its methodological basis has retained its hegemony in historical scholarship of the early modern period.13 Wendell Bird, The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox’s Libel Act (Oxford, 2020), 126. Vikram Amar, The First Amendment, Freedom of Speech: Its Constitutional History and the Contemporary Debate (Amherst, NY, 2009), 75. 11 Lee Morrissey, ‘Toward an Archaeology of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Protections’, in Powers, Freedom of Speech, 165–89; Slavko Splicahl, Principles of Publicity and Press Freedom (Oxford, 2002), 10–11. For discussion of Mill and the limits of free speech, see J. Riley, ‘J.S. Mill’s Doctrine of Freedom of Expression’, Utilitas, 17 (2005), 147–79; K. O’Rourke, John Stuart Mill and Freedom of Expression (2001). 12 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard, MA, 2007); Charles Taylor, ‘What’s Wrong With Negative Liberty’, Philosophical Papers (1985), 211–29. 13 The liberal view of censorship is often reflected in studies that seek to ascertain whether censorship was or was not ‘effective’. For important examples, see Christopher Hill, ‘Censorship and English Literature’, in Christopher Hill (ed.), The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, i, (Brighton, 1984), 32–71; Blair Worden, ‘Literature and Political Censorship in Early Modern England’, in A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds), Too Mighty to be Free: Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Netherlands (Zutphen, 1987), 45–62; Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England Cambridge, 2001), Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge, 2008); Shelia Lambert, ‘The Printers and the Government, 1604–1637’, in R. Myers and M. Harris, (eds), Aspects of Printing From 1600 (Oxford, 1987); Sheila. Lambert, ‘State Control of the Press in Theory and Practice: The Role of the Stationers’ Company before 1640’, in R. Myers and M. Harris (eds), Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France, 1600–1910 (Winchester, 1992); Sheila Lambert, ‘Richard Montague, Arminianism, and Censorship’, P&P, 124 (1989); G.D. Johnson, ‘The Stationers Versus the Drapers: Control of the Press in the Late Sixteenth Century’, The Library, 10 (1988); Janet Clare, Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority (Manchester, 1990); Mark. Bland, ‘“Invisible Dangers”: Censorship and the Subversion of Authority in Early Modern England’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 90 (1996). Effectiveness as a methodological approach to censorship and the press has been recently criticised, although such criticisms still retain a model of the freedom of the press and censorship as opposites. Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007), 183–209; Jason McElligott, ‘“A Couple of Hundred Squabbling Small Tradesmen?” Censorship and the Stationers’ 10

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It is, of course, appropriate on the broadest level to depict England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as an age of increasing press freedom. The Printing Act (occasionally known as the Licensing Act) lapsed in 1679 and then again in 1695.14 From the 1690s onwards the print trade expanded exponentially and, compared to the mid-seventeenth century, the English press was highly sophisticated, generating daily newspapers in numbers never seen before and establishing comment periodicals for the first time.15 Yet historians still assume that this expansion was the result of a political struggle between proto-liberals and authoritarians. This though, is the product of faith not of evidence. For, whether they realise it or not, most historians assume that freedom of speech and censorship are opposites, two sides of a coin: they were not. Indeed, demonstrating that they were not is one of this book’s central aims. Put another way, it seeks to offer an alternative to the self-hegemonic liberal narrative of free speech. Properly to understand the nature of free speech requires thinking about how contemporaries discussed the issue, not how modern historians think they should have. As such, this book considers the character of the press in later Stuart England, how its limits and constraints were articulated and practised under a specific set of historical conditions. The first condition was the emergence and subsequent establishment of party-political identity in later Stuart England. The Glorious Revolution spurred new ideas and new ways of debating and communicating political ideas: what should constitute party identity, whether resistance was justified and the legality of the revolution. But, far from creating a new stable state in which ideas were freely exchanged, instead, the fissures in English politics – which as Geoffrey Holmes has conclusively demonstrated found expression in party organisation and identity by the reign of Queen Anne – were elaborated by public debate and in turn exacerbated fears of political volatility.16 The very plasticity of English political culture after the Glorious Revolution, and Company, and the State in Early Modern England’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe (2006), 85–102. For a more sceptical view of the model of control and freedom, see, Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, HJ, 41 (1998); Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984); Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: Shaftesbury to Hume. A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 (Cambridge, 2000), Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor–Stuart England (Pennsylvania, PA, 2006). 14 Timothy Crist, ‘Government Control of the Press after the Expiration of the Licensing Act in 1679’, Publishing History, 5 (1979), 49–97; R. Astbury, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act in 1693 and its Lapse in 1695’, The Library, (1978), 296–322. 15 J.A. Downie and Thomas N. Corns, ‘Introduction’, in J.A. Downie and Thomas N. Corns (eds), Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-Century Periodicals from the Review to the Rambler (1993), 2–7. 16 Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, rev. edn (1987).

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the inability to agree what political stability was, helps to explain why politicians continued to worry that the rules of public debate were not settled and must be legislated for.17 Or, put simply, the rancorous divisions of the age of party that had started in the 1670s not only survived the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, but were exacerbated by the lapse of licensing. In post-revolutionary politics religion remained the central concern of politicians, just as it had in pre-revolutionary politics.18 Whilst concerns with the status of the Church and the nature of public religious knowledge had existed before the Glorious Revolution, they were altered by the schism within the Church of England, and the encroachment of Protestant nonconformity. With the failure of comprehension and the enactment of limited legal toleration, contemporaries were increasingly aware of the refashioning of spiritual authority. As with party politics, the lapse of licensing aggravated concerns amongst contemporaries that the heterogeneity of religious positions were amplified by unrestrained access to public print.19 Both politicians and churchmen questioned how variant forms of public debate might be utilised, manipulated and contained to simultaneously deliver civil peace whilst allowing each individual believer to attain religious truth.20 Historians are obsessed with how early modern societies used authority to create order, which is why ecclesiology and politics feature so prominently in histories of free speech in the seventeenth century rather than religion.21 But the post-revolutionary Church and Nonconformists remained concerned with how its communicants might be led to salvation. Precisely because so many politicians, clerics and writers maintained soteriology was connected to political order, it remained crucial to understand how public debate might be used to lead people into doctrinal truth and prevent error. But, as with political stability, there was no necessary agreement on the nature of soteriology or how people might be best led to the truth. This is why post-revolutionary debates about the nature of the press focused on the authority of the Bible, the memory of the Reformation, the power of the priesthood and the right of various institutions – parliament, convocation, universities, voluntary associations and civil authorities – to set the limits of public debate. Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford, 1999), 63–104; Tim Harris, Politics Under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society (Harlow, 1993); Dennis Rubini, Court and Country (1967). 18 Steve Pincus, 1688; The First Modern Revolution (Yale, CT, 2009), 400–34. 19 John Findon, ‘The Nonjurors and the Church of England 1689–1716’, D.Phil. thesis (unpublished), Oxford (1978); G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975), 3–22. 20 Gordon J. Schochet, ‘The Act of Toleration and the Failure of Comprehension: Persecution, Nonconformity and Religious Indifference’, in Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (eds), The World of William and Mary: Anglo–Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–9 (Stanford, CA, 1996), 165–87. 21 Bernard Capp, ‘The Religious Marketplace: Public Disputations in Civil War and Interregnum England’, EHR, 129 (2014), 47–8. 17

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The debates and practices concerned with the freedom of the press and censorship should be understood not as opposites imbued with modern forms of ideological meaning, but instead as part of a contemporary process in which solutions to civil peace and religious truth were sought. That is the approach that this book takes. To do so, it describes specific interventions into debates on press freedom; it also anatomises the conditions in which those interventions were made and discusses how the press was part of political and religious conflict. Censorship and freedom of the press extended from specific events and moments of control – or different types of censorship – to erudite intellectual intervention; its history is as much a history of religion and political culture, policy making and print practices and the history of ideas as it is of proto-liberal understandings of liberty of speech. If the freedom of the press and censorship is understood in this way, as understanding the practices of communication, under specific historical conditions, we can capture why post-revolutionary England remained such an unstable political society. Like the ideas discussed in this book, my own understanding of the period and the freedom of the press have been forged in debate and discussion with others. Unlike the Trinitarian disputes of the 1690s and the ‘Church in Danger’ debates of the early eighteenth century, however, my own experience of presenting my ideas has invariably been collegial, civil and enlightening. My most important interlocutor has been Justin Champion. He supervised the PhD from which this book is drawn and talked to me endlessly about the shape of the project. Even when seriously unwell, he read my own thoughts on John Toland and responded to my criticism of his work with typical alacrity, generosity and acuity. That he is not here to see this book published is a source of great sadness: I miss him as a scholar and adviser but above all else I miss my friend. No single scholar can replace Justin, but I fear I have taken advantage of Robert Ingram’s friendship for far too long now. Robert has not only discussed my ideas at will but has read the whole text. His comments on the prose, much like his conversation, have always been helpful, penetrating and fair. He has gone beyond what anyone could reasonably expect, and I hope this book goes some way to repaying the debt I owe him. A handful of scholars were particularly influential in helping me through the thicket of later Stuart politics and historiography. Bill Bulman has been a constant source of advice and assistance. His understanding of the early English Enlightenment has been instrumental to my own project. David Hayton stands as an exemplar of scholarly interest and rigour. His knowledge of post-revolutionary political parties is second to none and he has guided me through the 1690s and suffered my questions with patience and good humour. Jason Peacey, whose friendship I have valued since I first met him, welcomed me to the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and to the Skinners Arms. We have discussed the public sphere endlessly and xiv

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much else besides. He has helped me hammer out many of my arguments. Noah McCormack has provided references, ideas and pointed me in the right direction. Likewise, Stuart Handley at the History of Parliament has discussed the scholarship of the period with me and shared his encyclopaedic knowledge of early eighteenth-century sources. David Como and Karl Gunther have offered guidance and friendship, even as they were subject to discussions of material outside of their own fields. Marco Barducci, Lloyd Bowen, Mike Braddick, Clive Burgess, Tom Cogswell, Jeff Collins, Brian Cowan, Mike Cressey, Katie East, Bill Gibson, Mark Goldie, Rachel Hammersley, Amanda Herbert, Tim Harris, Jill Ingram, Peter Lake, Peter Lindenbaum, Allan MacInnes, David Manning, John Miller, Noah Millstone, Anshuman Mondal, John Morrill, Andrew Pettegree, Steve Pincus, Nick Popper, Michael Questier, Ian Roy, Susan Royal, Gary Rivett, Scott Sowerby, Max Skjönsberg, Brent Sirota, Stephen Taylor, Ted Vallance, James Vaughn, David Wormersley and Charlotte Young all clarified my thinking, pointed out mistakes and discussed their own thoughts on the period with me. At Durham a number of people have played important roles in making this book possible. Graeme Small has proved to be an exemplary colleague. He has stoically listened to me drone on about intellectual history, and many other things besides. Ben Dodds, Jo Fox, Alan Houston, Simon J. James, Natalie Mears, Julie-Marie Strange and Philip Williamson have been crucial sources of intellectual interrogation, good coffee and humour. As always, librarians, archivists and staff at various repositories played an indispensable role in helping my research. I am especially indebted to Francis Gotto, Richard Higgins, Michael Harkness and Michael Stansfield of the Rare Books room, at the Palace Green Library, Durham. All the staff at the Lit and Phil Library at Newcastle have provided great support too. I also wish to thank friends who have kept up my spirits during long hours of research and writing. The ‘Men of Kent’, Graham Cannon, Andy Clough, Ade Green, Warren Franklin, Keith Hoare and Patrick Moorhead have provided camaraderie and boundless good cheer. Hussain Hajjaj, Kevin Petley and Shane Walsh have remained firm friends since I met them on my first day as an undergraduate at university. David Almond, Sam Booth, Roy Craddock and Guy Ramage have guided me along the way and given me steadfast support. Michael Cassidy has proved endlessly encouraging through a particularly difficult period of my life. Kurt Toulson and Simon Whitehead have made me laugh and endured me talking about the travails of academia with generous forbearance. Anth and Mel Atkinson, Julia Baker, all the staff at Gareth James, Jo and Matt Coles, have provided excellent coffee, flowers and conversation, helping to form my own Newcastle and Tynemouth public sphere. Siobhan Currell and Matthew Chase of the CFS Unit at Newcastle put me back on the right track. xv

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I would never have got this far without the support of my sister, Kate Barber. She knows why. My Mum, Valerie Barber, has always been there when I needed her. Sadly, I can no longer know for sure, but I hope this book would have made my Dad proud. Indira Birnie, Matthew Wilkie, Anne and Paul Wilkie have welcomed me into their family. My greatest debt is to Rebecca Wilkie. Since the first day I met her, she has made my life better: I cannot thank her enough for everything she has done for me. Her support and sacrifice can never be repaid, but this is for her, with love.

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Abbreviations Add. MS BL CJ CSPD CUL DWL ECS EHR HJ HLQ HMC JBS JEH JHI LPL ODNB P&P RES TNA

Additional Manuscripts British Library Journals of the House of Commons Calendar of State Papers Domestic Cambridge University Library Dr Williams’s Library Eighteenth-Century Studies English Historical Review Historical Journal Huntington Library Quarterly Historical Manuscripts Commission Journal of British Studies Journal of Ecclesiastical History Journal of the History of Ideas Lambeth Palace Library Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Past and Present The Review of English Studies The National Archives, Kew

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Introduction From Censorship to the Freedom of the Press William Wotton (1666–1727) first attacked the pernicious influence of freethought on English society in 1704. Responding to John Toland’s recent publication of Letters to Serena, Wotton described the book as designed to drive Christianity out of the world.1 In Wotton’s assessment, Toland’s methods of enquiry into religious truth were pernicious not only to the individual believer but also to the English nation. Wotton identified Toland’s anticlericalism as the key to understanding his wider project. Letters to Serena maintained that each man was born with prejudices that were then reinforced and propagated by the institutions of the Church.2 The clergy were politically motivated, grasping for power and not fulfilling their religious duty. Consequently, they taught superstition, denied men the ability to appeal to reason, which in turn barred them from locating religious truth, and condemned men to damnation. For Wotton, Toland’s suggestion that reason alone would allow correct doctrine to be ascertained struck at the very heart of the Christian religion. ‘It was impossible’, he continued, ‘for any man that believes in the doctrines of the Old and New Testament, to vent such crude and wild assertions’.3 Both Scripture and Church history proved that the clergy were able to direct their flock towards truth, and salvation could be conferred by the sacrament of baptism and regular church attendance.4 Two years later, Wotton was equally scathing of Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church. Once again, he accused an anonymous author of jettisoning the Scriptures and the apostolic rights of the clergy as irrelevant to finding the truth. Instead, Tindal had declared every man ‘is under an indispensable obligation to worship God after the manner he thinks most agreeable to his will; and in all religious matters whatever, to follow the dictates of his own conscience’.5 Whilst he acknowledged various ways to ascertain doctrinal truth, exactly like his response to Toland two years earlier, Wotton insisted that attending the Church of England, partaking of sacraments and receiving clerical instruction were essential to maintaining the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England. [William Wotton], A Letter to Eusebia (1704), 2; David Stoker, Wotton, William (1666–1727), in ODNB. 2 Wotton, A Letter to Eusebia, 3; [John Toland], Letters to Serena (1704), 1. 3 Ibid., 7. 4 Ibid., 8. 5 William Wotton, The Rights of the Clergy in the Christian Church Asserted (1706), 2; Matthew Tindal, The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706). 1

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

Historians have largely remembered John Toland and Matthew Tindal and forgotten William Wotton. When he is remembered, Wotton is known for his defence of the Royal Society and his account of the growth of scientific ideas.6 But his replies to Toland and Tindal suggest another Wotton not wholly captured by concentrating solely on his scientific endeavours. Ordained a clergyman in late December 1689, he enjoyed patronage from senior clerical figures in the clerical establishment, including Gilbert Burnet, Thomas Tenison and William Wake. Alongside his pastoral mission he was a committed Whig and defender of the established Church.7 That defence, as we have seen, took the form of aggressive counter-attacks against unorthodox authors. Or, in other words, Wotton was an example of a clergyman within the Church who saw public polemical divinity as a key component of his spiritual function.8 He sits comfortably, therefore, within a number of recent studies that have suggested that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the Church teemed with creativity in its responses to attacks from within and without.9 Wotton’s career exposes how early eighteenth-century churchmen defined the established church whilst simultaneously defending it from Nonconformist and unorthodox assaults. His response to Tindal was motivated, at least in part, by the public nature of the attacks upon the priesthood, the whole ecclesiastical office and how it derived from God.10 In other words, whilst Wotton was concerned with the status of true religion, his discontent was also with the licentiousness of the press. Not only had theological disputes heightened after the Glorious Revolution – both in tone and content – but the press had spread the debates throughout the country. Nor did Wotton’s concerns with how the press was being exploited by Toland and Tindal go away with time. In 1711, with a new ministry under the control of Robert Harley, allied with the leadership of Francis Atterbury in convocation, Wotton complained again that the country groaned under too much liberty, and this ‘licentiousness of the press will, sooner or later, M. Hunter, Robert Boyle by Himself and his Friends with a Fragment of William Wotton’s lost ‘Life of Boyle’ (1994); A.R. Hall, ‘William Wotton and the History of Science’, Archives Internationales des Sciences, 9 (1949), 1047–62; J.M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (1991). 7 Stoker, Wotton, Williamin, ODNB. 8 Polemical divinity is better studied after the Hanoverian Succession. See, R.G. Ingram, Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2018); B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998); B. Young, ‘Theological Books from The Naked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (2001), 79–104. 9 W.J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge, 2015); Brent Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (Yale, CT, 2014). 10 Wotton, The Rights of the Clergy, 2. 6

2

INTRODUCTION

if not restrained, bring us into confusion’. The current laws against the press, he continued, were defective and ought to be remedied.11 To comprehend Wotton’s position on the press correctly, however, we need to consider his private correspondence. On 21 March 1710, he wrote to William Wake (1657–1737) offering advice on how to best deal with the divisions that bedeviled the Church.12 Bishop of Lincoln in 1710, Wake was well versed in the contemporary fractures in the Church and their origins. He engaged in the struggle to redefine the religion of England in the 1680s, emerging as an effective if controversial public defender of the Church of England against the encroachments of Catholicism.13 In the early 1690s he was persuaded to moderate his polemical inclinations and he proved himself an able pastoral cleric, promoting piety through a series of sermons.14 In 1697, however, he was dragged back into public disputation when Archbishop Tenison asked him to respond to Francis Atterbury’s call for the return of convocation.15 Appointed bishop of Lincoln in 1705, he was a keen supporter of the post-revolution political settlement and was favoured by Whig politicians for his keen support of toleration.16 Wotton’s advice was offered to Wake during the worst crisis of the post-revolutionary Church. Henry Sacheverell’s two sermons delivered in autumn 1709 were relatively uncontroversial by his own standards. He had been questioning the legality of resistance – and potentially the legality of the Glorious Revolution – and the piety of the Church since 1702. Nevertheless, his sermons were a publishing sensation, selling 100,000 copies within months. In early 1710, ministers in the Whig junto made the fateful decision to prosecute Sacheverell. The subsequent trial was a disaster for the Whigs. It generated unprecedented publicity for High Church criticisms of the Whig junto, the legalisation of dissent and resistance. Whist he was convicted, the sentence imposed on Sacheverell was markedly lenient; he emerged from the trial as a persecuted preacher, standing as a hero for minor and country clergymen for defending the Church against the pernicious influence of Whigs and Nonconformists.17 William Wotton, The Case of the Present Convocation Considered; in Answer to the Examiner’s Unfair Representation of it (1711), 8. 12 Christ Church Oxford Wake Letters 17, n.43, William Wotton to William Wake, 21 Mar. 1710. 13 Stephen Taylor, ‘Wake, William (1657–1737)’, in ODNB; Norman Sykes, William Wake: Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657–1737 (Cambridge, 1957). 14 William Wake, Of Our Obligation to Put Our Trust in God, Rather than in Men, and the Advantages of it (1695). 15 Sykes, William Wake, i, 80–156. 16 Ibid., i, 157–252. 17 Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (1973); Brian Cowan, The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Oxford, 2012), 1–34; Brian Cowan, ‘The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society’, in Mark 11

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

Despite its disastrous outcome for Whig churchmen, Wake was considered by contemporaries to have had a good trial. His speech in the House of Lords concerned with the second article of impeachment was an eloquent justification of toleration and devastating to Sacheverell’s cause, proving Wake to be an erudite and effective defender of Whig church positions.18 Nevertheless, Wotton knew that the trial had gone badly for the Whigs. On the day of sentencing, he suggested to Wake it was time to ‘sweeten the country clergy’ or the Whig junto would face electoral disaster. For, in electoral politics, the clergy were a standing and powerful interest influencing the gentry’s voting intentions, who ‘upon a poll will be found Tories’.19 In addition to the disastrous prosecution of Sacheverell, Wotton suggested there were other reasons why the clergy had become such a reliable electoral constituency for the Tories. Even though they were few in numbers, High Churchmen resented the limited toleration offered to Dissenters. More telling, however, was the uncontrolled nature of public debate that had developed in recent years. ‘There is nothing that has exasperated the clergy so much as the insolent liberties that have been used against them from the press.’20 It was the publications of ‘Tindal, Collins, De Foe, Tutchin and that gang’ that had so damaged the Whigs’ standing among the clergy. Not only had they cried for the revolution at every opportunity, but their ideas had spread into every constituency, appearing as the ‘emissaries of the devil’. Even well-meaning clergy, inclined towards the bishops and supportive of the revolution, were convinced that all Whigs were disciples of ‘Toland and Tindal’.21 Wotton offered Wake a direct solution to the clergy’s anger at how the press was being used against the Church. Acknowledging that Sacheverell, a High Churchman, was likely to be barred from the pulpit, he suggested to Wake that a reciprocal policy had to be pursued. ‘A warm vote’ ought to be carried with heat in parliament by the Whigs to ‘burn a good many of those books and an order accordingly for the Attorney General to prosecute the authors’ hated by Tories and High Churchmen. Once the books of Toland and Tindal had been destroyed and they had been prosecuted, ‘sweetening papers’ ought to be put out in which ‘the clergy as such were used tenderly, with proper hints upon the real incendiaries’. The Whigs had to disarm the Tories with moderation. No longer should passive obedience Knights (ed.), Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell (Oxford, 2012), 28–46. 18 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 221; William Wake, The Bishop of Lincoln his Speech in the House of Lords (1710). 19 Christ Church Oxford Wake Letters 17, n.43, William Wotton to William Wake, 21 Mar. 1710. 20 Christ Church Oxford Wake Letters 17, n.43, William Wotton to William Wake, 21 Mar. 1710. 21 Christ Church Oxford Wake Letters 17, n.43, William Wotton to William Wake, 21 Mar. 1710.

4

INTRODUCTION

and non-resistance be railed at, for when churchmen heard these political theories cried down they considered religion to be at stake too. Wotton’s fervent hope that the heat of party debate, fuelled by the flames of the press, would be quelled continued to occupy him in the following years. In 1718 he wrote once again to Wake, who was by now Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘It is plain to me’, he told Wake, ‘that our mischiefs will not be redressed until the press is regulated, that I fear must not be attempted now for every party perhaps at the bottom would be against it’.22 These letters of 1710 and 1718 reflect the deep ideological divisions of post-revolutionary England. In Wotton’s words, he was a Whig because he was for the revolution and zealous for the Hanoverian succession but, as his letter reveals, the ideological divisions were as much religious as they were political, and they were exacerbated by authors exploiting the press. If William Wotton represented one position in the early eighteenth century, supportive of the revolution and accepting that limited toleration for Dissenters helped to secure the stability of Church and state, then Henry Sacheverell (1674–1724) wrote from a fundamentally opposed ideological perspective.23 Mounting the pulpit at Derby in Autumn 1709, Sacheverell, chaplain at St Saviour’s, Southwark, commented on the condition of the country.24 It was, he informed his listeners, ‘sunk into the lowest dregs of corruption’, no longer able to endure sound doctrine being taught, with the Church and the constitution suffering under constant attacks.25 Sacheverell’s sermons are commonly regarded by historians as routine statements, concerned with tracing a link between nonconformity and the regicides, and outlining that the Church had been infiltrated by its professed enemies.26 Indeed, both of his sermons of 1709, the Communication of Sin and the Perils of False Brethren, are considered by historians to be politically motivated. Theologically mundane, Sacheverell’s importance lies not in his defence of the Church of England, but in his censure of the Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution and denial of the legality of resistance. ‘The grand security of our government’, he thundered’, is founded ‘upon the steady belief of the subject’s obligation to an absolute and unconditional obedience to the supreme power in all things lawful, and the utter illegality of resistance upon any pretence whatsoever’.27 22

Christ Church Oxford Wake MS 20 519–20, William Wotton to William Wake, 5 Apr. 1718. 23 Wotton, The Rights of the Clergy, 20; William Wotton, A Vindication of the Earl of Nottingham from the Vile Imputations, and Malicious Imputations, which have been cast upon him in some Late Pamphlets (1714), 43–4. 24 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 56–7. 25 Henry Sacheverell, The Communication of Sin (Oxford, 1709), The Dedication; W.A. Speck, ‘Sacheverell, Henry (bap. 1674, d.1724)’, in ODNB. 26 J.P., Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977), 128–31. 27 Henry Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren (Oxford, 1709), 19.

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

This interpretation of Sacheverell as a political preacher, dedicated to reversing the 1689 post-revolutionary settlement, reflects Whig attacks upon him.28 The first and second articles of the impeachment, for example, turned on whether Sacheverell had questioned the legality of resistance or of the right religious toleration, whilst the fourth accused him of undermining the constitution.29 Indeed, many of the early replies to the Perils of False Brethren also emphasised the politics of Sacheverell’s sermon. Whig journalist George Ridpath (d.1726), in the first published reply, noted that the sermon was of the ‘most dangerous tendency to our happy constitution’ and excoriated Sacheverell’s advocacy of passive obedience.30 Even those who had previously supported Sacheverell thought his sermon went too far. Ralph Bridges, Bishop Compton’s chaplain, commented critically ‘that the more politics any sermon has in it, the worse it is’.31 If, however, we turn away from the Perils of False Brethren and instead consider the Communication of Sin, a rather different picture emerges. Readers of this sermon could find in its pages not only a religious analysis of how and why the country had gone wrong since the revolution, but solutions for how its providential status might be recovered. Sacheverell took as his text, 1Tim:5, ‘neither be partaker of other men’s sins’, a Scriptural quotation that justified the ecclesiastical authority of the Church. But the words of the text also served as an excellent maxim on the conduct of human life. In Sacheverell’s interpretation, it prohibited contributing, concurring or complying with the wicked practices of others.32 The sermon proceeded to outline types of sin in precise detail, how they might be participated in and how they might be stopped. Despite Sacheverell’s later reputation for deception – for changing the messages of his sermons between the one delivered and the one printed – his position was remarkably clear: each individual, to save their own soul, was mandated by God and therefore the Church of England to prevent and correct the sins of their neighbours; failure to do so would lead to their own damnation and the damnation of the community. Even more damaging, it was clear that with so many of the population drenched in sin, both the Church and the government had failed to deliver the promises of the Glorious Revolution. For, if the deliverance of the country in 1689 was dispensed by God, who had thus demanded his divine plan be rewarded by further reformation, governments led successively by William

The Bishop of Salisbury’s and the Bishop of Oxford’s speeches in the House of Lords (1710). The Articles of Impeachment, exhibited Against Dr Henry Sacheverell (1710). 30 George Ridpath, The Peril of being Zealously Affected (1709); G.A. Atkin, revised by John R. Young, ‘Ridpath George (d.1726)’, in ODNB. 31 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 77; Cambridge University Library, Trumbull MSS, liii, Ralph Bridges, 7 Dec. 1709. 32 Sacheverell, The Communication of Sin, 2. 28 29

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INTRODUCTION

and Anne, in Sacheverell’s view, had failed in their endeavour. Far from purifying the country, it was overrun by impiety, atheism and immorality. The commitment to controlling the spread of sin went to the heart of Sacheverell’s political and religious thought. But it was also a very specific intervention. He adumbrated one urgent problem, how men might partake of sins by, ‘authorising, propagating, or publishing any heresy, false doctrine, schism, faction, irreligion, or immorality’. Not only did these sins corrupt and debauch men’s minds, but the wicked principles imbibed by reading errant books did not lie still. The person who wrote or spread heterodox doctrines was responsible for the death of those who read and were convinced by the ideas. Most horrifically, however, any sin published in books never stopped endangering souls, errant doctrines sinned again and again. The death of the author or the reader had no effect, rather books carried on infecting individuals and the wider community. For Sacheverell, then, not only was the country soaked in sin, enduring a period of darkness, it was also a licentious age in which the press had been allowed to run free, communicating sin and damning men to hell: in conniving at, consenting to, or concealing those impieties, we ought to punish, prevent or restrain, we are positively accessory to their commission, by a tacit approbation, and a conscious, and cowardly foreberance.33

Sacheverell had evidence to support his hostility to the current conditions under which the press operated. He insisted that the accursed books of Hobbes and Spinoza strutted openly in society and had more recently been amplified by the publication of Charles Blount’s Oracles of Reason (1693) and Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706). What has been insufficiently appreciated is that Sacheverell’s lamentation of the damage caused by the press was shared across the political spectrum. Despite his reputation for being on the very fringes of High Church politics, a reputation enhanced by his prosecution in 1710, the thrust of Sacheverell’s ideas were mainstream and could be found within the Church.34 Whilst we lack a convincing study of the make-up of the Church in the early eighteenth century, most obviously whether there were distinct parties and their relationship with Whigs and Tories, concern with the pernicious effect of lax ideas and the press were shared across the theological and ecclesiological spectrum.35 For example, between 1704 and 1707, Matthew Hawes took extensive notes on sermons he attended, and he was present at an early 33

Ibid., 31. 1688: The First Modern Revolution, 15–16. 35 George Every, The High Church Party, 1688–1718 (1956); Christian Anderson Griggs, ‘High Churchmen and Tories in Late Stuart England’, PhD thesis (unpublished) Purdue University (2011); Robert Cornwall, Visible and Apostolic: The Constitution of the Church in High Church Anglican and Non-Juror Thought (Newark, DE, 1993). 34 Pincus,

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

version of Sacheverell’s Perils of False Brethren in 1705. Just a week before, he had taken notes on a sermon delivered by John Baron (1660–1722), master of Balliol College, Oxford. Taking Romans 16.17 ‘avoid those that cause division’ as his text, Baron assailed Dissenters as schismatics who had afflicted the Church, and he prayed for deliverance from ‘all sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion … false doctrine, heresy and schism’.36 There were, of course, significant differences between Wotton and Sacheverell. Most obviously, Sacheverell’s depiction of Dissenters as schismatics was anathema to Wotton. Nevertheless, both men accepted that the country was riven by party arguments, and that the identity of each party was as much religious as it was political. Both men also understood that the press, far from proving an outlet for discussion and debate, was licentious, extending liberty beyond reasonable grounds and damaging English political culture. Wotton and Sacheverell recognised a position shared by many across the political spectrum. Politicians and bishops had to learn the lessons provided by the upheavals of the seventeenth century. To survive rebellion and revolution they had to enforce correct limits on debate. This did not mean, however, that all debate must be closed down or for licensing to be re-established. Both Sacheverell and Wotton saw no hypocrisy or paradox in their desire to persuade the public of their message through different forms of media whilst simultaneously seeking more control.37 Historians rarely acknowledge the voices of men like Wotton and Sacheverell when they talk about the press in the early eighteenth century. Instead, the period from the accession of William to the trial of Henry Sacheverell is commonly termed an age of transition and progress, from the tyrannous right of the Crown to enforce press control, represented by licensing, to the establishment of propaganda as a permanent feature of political life, which in turn led to the acceptance of a free press.38 In this sense, then, despite the turn against Whig narratives from the 1960s onwards, recent scholarship concerned with the power of the press after the Glorious Revolution preserves T.B. Macaulay’s famous account of the lapse of licensing.39 By Macaulay’s reckoning, the accidental failure to renew press 36

Bod. MS Eng. Th f.136, Oxford Sermon Notes of Matthew Hawes of Christ Church, 16 Dec. 1705. 37 Geoff Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, in Jason McElligott (ed.), Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s (Aldershot, 2006), 67–90; Dorothy Turner, ‘Roger L’Estrange’s Deferential Politics in the Public Sphere’, Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998), 85–101. 38 Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005), 7, 15–18, 262–71; D. Thomas, A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (1969); Michael Foot, The Pen and the Sword (1984); Siebert, Freedom of the Press; Laurence Hanson, Government and the Press 1695–1763 (Oxford, 1936). 39 For the turn against Macaulay, and the argument that the objectives of those in the revolution were explicitly limited see, J.R. Jones, ‘Introduction’, in J.R. Jones, Liberty

8

INTRODUCTION

legislation signalled the establishment of the liberty of the press as ‘English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of government.’40 Whilst it is now commonplace to question the implications of Macaulay’s emancipatory narrative, with historians pointing out that post-publication censorship continued into the eighteenth century and there were a series of unsuccessful attempts to introduce press legislation, historians have nonetheless retained his underlying methodology: that a starting point for the free press can be located, that it is then relentlessly expanded and that it is absolute and indivisible.41 The commitment to a method that emphasises emerging freedom in opposition to control is not only reinforced by the recent adoption of Habermasian theory, it has helped to extend Macaulay’s methods and conclusions back into the Restoration. It is now routine to suggest that the modern concept of public opinion found its origins in the seventeenth century, and that some version of that public found its full expression in the early eighteenth century.42 The prevailing tendency of historical – and literary – scholarship of the period continues to be viewed in terms of the progressive expansion of the press, both in size and sophistication, and the containment of forms of cultural and intellectual suppression.43 Whether Secured? Britain Before and After 1688 (Palo Alto, CA, 1992), 1–9; John Morrill, ‘The Sensible Revolution’, in Jonathan Israel, The Anglo–Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge, 1991), 73–104. 40 T.B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (1877), iv, 278, 434; David Lowenthal, ‘Macaulay and the Freedom of the Press’, The American Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 661–4. 41 For insightful criticisms of how historians continue to adopt Macaulay’s position whilst denying its worth, see Thomas Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 (Oxford, 2019), 2–26. Macaulay’s expansive model is also criticised in Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Beckenham, Kent, 1987), 1–24. See, for example, attempts to ‘date’ when a free press started and when censorship ended: Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 269, J.A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979), 118–19; John Feather, ‘The Book Trade in Politics: The Making of the Copyright Act’, Publishing History, 8 (1980), 19–44; G.H. Kemp, ‘The “End of Censorship” and the Politics of Toleration, from Locke to Sacheverell’, Parliamentary History, 31 (2012), 47–68. For a corrective see, R.E. Carroll, ‘Ridicule, Censorship, and the Regulation of Public Speech: The Case of Shaftesbury’, Modern Intellectual History, 15 (2016), 353–80. 42 Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Introduction: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, in Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2012), 1–30; Steve Pincus, ‘The State and Civil Society in Early Modern England: Capitalism, Causation, and Habermas’ Bourgeois Public Sphere’, in Lake and Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere, 213–31; Mark Knights, ‘History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift’, in History and Compass, 3 (2005). 43 The steady quantitative expansion of the press as an indicator of political and social change undergirds Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 15–16. On how censorship had little or no effect on press output, see D.F. McKenzie, ‘Printing and

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

or not historians taking such positions specifically acknowledge their intellectual debts to Habermas, it is clear they accept one central aspect of his position. Especially from the Restoration period onwards, historians assume the relationship between state and society was oppositional.44 Thus, in this analysis, print culture was the face of a progressive public opposed by a state committed to the Renaissance notion of arcana imperii.45 When government did engage and communicate with a putative public, it was only in moments of crisis. They were, in effect, forced kicking and screaming into an uncontrolled and oppositional public sphere against their will.46 To the extent that such perspectives discuss the centrality of forms of media to government policy making, they are often hived off into propaganda narratives.47 There are hard and soft versions of this approach. The harder versions tend to dismiss both Charles II and James II as recidivist politicians, committed to restraining the press, either failing to understand the new realities of political culture created by the unique conditions of the English Civil War, or pursuing tyrannous Catholic policies.48 Thus, whilst both monarchs were able to damp down the more extreme elements of public Publishing 1557–1700: Constraints on the London Book Trades’, in J. Barnard and D.F. McKenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume IV 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002), 566–7. Michael F. Suarez S.J., ‘Towards a Bibliometric Analysis of the Surviving Record, 1701–1800’, in Michael F. Suarez S.J. and Michael Turner (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume V, 1695–1830 (Cambridge, 2009), 39–65. 44 Recent attempts to portray an oppositional relation between state and the public are rebutted in William J. Bulman, ‘Publicity and Popery on the Restoration Stage: Elkanah Settle’s “The Empress of Morocco” in context’, Journal of British Studies, 51 (2012), 308–39. For the later period see, Alex Barber, ‘“The Voice of the People, No Voice of God”: A Political, Religious and Social History of the Transmission of Ideas in England, 1690–1715’, PhD thesis (unpublished), Royal Holloway, University of London (2010); Brian Cowan, ‘Mr Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37 (2004), 346–66. 45 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989), 57–8; David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 44–67; Pincus, ‘The State and Civil Society’, 213–31. 46 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005), 213–14; Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1679–81 (Cambridge, 1994), 306–44. 47 In his otherwise exemplary work on the period, whilst not quite describing a strict division between restraint and propaganda, Downie does suggest Harley was always reluctant to control errant publication. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press. W.A. Speck, ‘Political Propaganda in Augustan England’, The Royal Historical Society, 22 (1972), 17–32; James O. Richards, Party Propaganda under Queen Anne: The General Elections of 1702–1713 (Georgia, GA, 1972); Mary Ransome, ‘The Press in the General Election of 1710’, HJ, 6 (1939), 209–21. 48 This model is most forcefully advanced by Steve Pincus. Outlining a model of bullying, restraint and persecution, he suggests James II was consciously emulating the policies of Louis XIV. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, 150–3.

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INTRODUCTION

debate so important to the identity of the mid-century, their desire to return England to the communicative conditions of the 1630s could never hope to be fulfilled. Unlike later Stuart kings, William III and his court engaged the public. Even here though, historians detect a distinct reluctance on behalf of elite political actors to engage the wider public. William’s propaganda was based as much on need as it was a positive policy decision, driven by the weakness of his own divine position and the refusal of James to renounce his right to the throne.49 This softer version insists we should take seriously attempts to control the press.50 But even here, these accounts of later Stuart political culture, whilst placing print at the centre of democratic change, dismiss forms of control as ineffective and continue to rely on an approach of opposites and dichotomies, positing an oppositional relationship between the tightening and expanding public sphere. This narrative, however, leaves a logical lacuna; ideas of the liberty of the press have been strangely absent from historical discussions of the later Stuart period. The Revisionist and post-Revisionist turn against the Whig progressive narrative from the early 1970s onwards, an historical reaction dedicated to uncovering the explicitly limited objectives of the chief participants of 1688–1689, downplayed the significance of ideas.51 In doing so, scholarship has denied the revolution was a watershed in the history of the freedom of the press. Not only did the Bill of Rights have nothing to say on the topic, scholars assure us that the freedom of the press could not be traced back to the ancient constitution nor did it form part of natural rights theory. There was no ‘theoretical vocabulary at hand that revolutionary leaders might have employed had they been interested in the liberty of the press’.52 Any association between the freedom of the press and the Glorious Revolution, on this Revisionist reading, was merely a rhetorical invention of the later eighteenth century, designed to paint political opponents as abandoning the constitution.53 Attempts to eliminate ideas from the understanding of the press in the post-revolutionary world have perversely reinforced certain components of the Whig interpretation of the 1695 lapse of licensing. Macaulay had puzzled over why so little had been said about the lapse of licensing. Unaware of the revolution they were making, contemporaries pointed only to the technical Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996). Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, in Jason McElligott (ed.), Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s (Aldershot, 2006), 67–90; Dorothy Turner, ‘Roger L’Estrange’s Deferential Politics in the Public Sphere’, Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998), 85–101. 51 J.R. Jones, ‘Introduction’, 3. 52 L.G. Schwoerer, ‘Liberty of the Press and Public Opinion: 1660–1695’, in Jones (ed.), Liberty Secured?, 199. 53 G.C. Gibbs, ‘Press and Public Opinion: Prospective’, in Jones (ed.), Liberty Secured?, 231–64; John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), 139. 49

50 Geoff

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

absurdities of pre-publication censorship, but ‘on the great question of principle, on the question whether the liberty of unlicensed printing be, on the whole, a blessing or a curse to society, not a word is said’.54 In fact, Macaulay had recognised one discussion of the press that served as a precursor to the lapse of licensing. Taking a minor dispute in 1693 between the licenser Edmund Bohun and Charles Blount to illustrate his point, Macaulay suggested there was an intimate connection between the lapse of licensing and Blount’s promotion of a free press.55 Blount had made use of the controversy to publish Reasons Humbly Offered for the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, which drew direct inspiration from Milton’s Areopagitica. Not only did this tract, and further work by John Locke, lead directly to parliament refusing to renew licensing, it also allowed Macaulay to map discussions of the press on to his wider narrative of dichotomies and opposition. The use of licensing was ‘in perfect harmony with the theory of government held by the Tories’, whilst Whigs in turn posited a direct connection between freedom of the press and freedom of thought.56 Whilst Macaulay’s comments suggest an ideological coherence and unity of purpose that was lacking in the political parties of late seventeenth-century England, it has set the tone for future scholars. For instance, it has remained familiar to suggest that the theoretical case for the freedom of the press emerged from the neo-republican wing of Whig political thinking.57 In this interpretation, the 1690s were marked by the spread of freethinking polemic that challenged the hegemony of clerical power. At first Charles Blount, and then more provocatively John Toland, Matthew Tindal and Anthony Collins, simultaneously defended a radical Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution, attacked the status of the Bible and engaged in theological speculation. According to historians, for many freethinkers they simply extended claims concerned with freedom of conscience to freedom of expression, not only because it was a logical corollary development but also because expanding theological debate would inevitably corrode clerical power. Freedom of expression, then, has been taken to be one vital way of establishing civil religion.58 The History of England, iv., 351–7, 542; Hanson, Government and the Press, 7–8; Ernest Sirluck, ‘Areopagitica and a Forgotten Licensing Controversy’, Review of English Studies, 11 (1960), 260–74. 55 Macaulay, The History of England, iv. 278, 288. 56 Ibid., iv. 278, 288. 57 For a portrayal of conflict between parties that also maintains the fluidity of their internal structure, see Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 30–3, 411. On understandings of the relationship between neo-republicanism and freethought, see J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), 46; J.A.I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), 179–95; C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Harvard, MA, 1959). 58 M. Brown, A Political Biography of John Toland (2012), 45–7; W. Hudson, The English 54 Macaulay,

12

INTRODUCTION

Historians of mainstream politics have suggested an alternative model to explain the emergence and establishment of the free press. As the press became a permanent component of political life, the public were increasingly convinced that ideas should be answered not controlled. From here, it was just a short step from engaging in public printed debate to ‘claiming a duty or even a right to publish, in the public interest’. By the reign of Anne, then, the public were not just the arbiters of religious and political truth, their thirst and demand for debate meant the freedom of the press was an established constituent of the post-revolutionary political settlement. There was an increasing acceptance that writers should censure their opponents not censor them. Once again, this is a narrative of emancipation, one in which an expansive and powerful print culture can be connected to the utility of the press and the idea of its liberty.59 Even J.A. Downie, who has done more than any other scholar to question the applicability of public sphere theory to the post-revolutionary period, suggests that the most sophisticated approaches to the press taken by politicians in the early eighteenth century relied on embracing the liberty of free discussion whilst simultaneously resisting the recidivist temptations of restraint and censorship.60 Despite the sophistication of recent studies of radical and mainstream politics in the later Stuart period, the liberal interpretation of the freedom of the press has survived intact. Historians continue to describe the press as part of a wider programme of emancipatory freedom, one in which benighted radicals or innovative politicians advanced an absolute and indivisble free press so that Dissenters, freethinkers and eventually the whole nation might free themselves from the yoke of clerical tyranny.61 Or, more recently, a second story has emerged that emphasises the revolutionary nature of the 1688 revolution. Far from restoring the old order, the post-revolutionary settlement was a competition between two different versions of political economy. Again, that interpretation has self-consciously preserved the methodology of a relentlessly expanding free press, one in which revolutionaries cast off the tyrannical shackles of James II and allowed information to flow freely so that Deists (2009), 108; Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics, and Newtonian Public Science (Manchester, 2009), 31–3; Champion, Republican Learning, 244–5. 59 T. Ross, Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore, MD, 2018), 1. 60 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 191–5; J.A. Downie, ‘Public and Private: The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere’, Literature Compass (2005), 1–19. 61 E. Tortarolo, The Invention of the Free Press: Writers and Censorship in EighteenthCentury Europe (Dordrect, 2016), 35–6; J.A.I. Champion, ‘Making Authority: Belief, Conviction and Reason in the Public Sphere in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in Libertinage et Philosophie au XVIIe Siècle. Le Public et le Privé (1999), 143–90; Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (Abingdon, 1999), 17–20; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 267; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 137.

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

the economy might expand.62 Either way, these are stories of opposition and dichotomies, fought out against reactionary, persecutory clerics.63 A better understanding of the freedom of the press in later Stuart England would not be guided by modern liberal ideas. Instead, it would be guided by how contemporaries actually talked about the press. Both the Glorious Revolution and the lapse of licensing catalysed intensive discussion of how the press should fit into managing public debate. A series of texts, clustered around 1698, 1704 and 1710, provide a compact body of evidence with which to test the recent claims about the existence and nature of public debate after the revolution, its ideological and political timbre. Rather than merging them together as part of a wider ideological project, each text ought to be understood as an intervention into a particular pre-existing debate.64 After the Glorious Revolution, and particularly after the lapse of licensing, contemporaries produced tracts that look like calls for absolute freedom of the press.65 Equally, in the early eighteenth century, as ministries of various political persuasion failed to effect legislation, there were increasingly visible concerns with the licentiousness of the press and the free expression of unorthodox opinions.66 But, once we strip away teleological understandings of texts and stop treating them as canonical statements of political intent, the usual story of the press in later Stuart England can no longer be sustained. The agendas expressed in tracts and pamphlets are better understood as complex discussions of how the press might be configured to establish and maintain civil and political stability and to allow individuals to locate religious truth, not as simply for the free press or against censorship. Many of the individuals discussed in this book also thought ideas should be coerced and controlled. As we have seen, Henry Sacheverell and his fellow High Churchmen worried that errant ideas, freely expressed, would 1688: The First Modern Revolution, 150–2. Representation and Misrepresentation, 267; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 137; Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in O.P. Grell, J.I. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), 331–68. 64 J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford, 1975), 116–20; R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939), 39; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Vol. I, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), 57–89, 115–117. For additional discussion of the historiography of intervention, see Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999), 31–77. The most recent defence of combining texts of different eras to justify the development of a free press is Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 269. This does not mean that the relevant context for each author and text was immediate; often their responses were conditioned by historical examples and different cultures. See, Skinner, Visions of Politics, 116; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech’, Political Theory, 1 (1973), 27–45. 65 Matthew Tindal, A Letter to a Member of Parliament, showing, that a Restraint on the Press is Inconsistent with the Protestant Religion (1698). 66 Philip Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Cambridge, 2016), 12–13. 62 Pincus,

63 Knights,

14

INTRODUCTION

infect others’ souls and damn them into hell. As Sacheverell explained, sin was an utter abomination before God, and all those who committed, consumed and propagated sins were subject to his infinite wrath and punishment. In this, Sacheverell was simply following what he considered Church of England teaching. In his reading, the Church had always affirmed the paramount need for believers to abstain from sin and to do good works. Thus, Sacheverell maintained that both his fellow clergymen and his flock remained subject to sin and ought to be corrected in their theological, moral and spiritual transgressions. Authors and books, if they muddied the truth, infected others with erroneous understandings of the Bible or the status of the Church or encouraged moral laxity amongst readers, and must be controlled for the good of the individual and the collective Providential status of the visible Church. Nor was such thinking confined to High Churchmen. Both Whig and Low Churchmen insisted much the same, that souls were endangered by errant and heretical publications. From this perspective, many of the participants vital to this book fit into recent discussions of the identity of eighteenth-century clerics. Whilst they understood that Christ’s death on the cross was indispensable to man’s deliverance, salvation remained conditional, and still required each Christian to fulfil certain requirements to realise salvation.67 As Gregory Scholtz had demonstrated, those requirements could be described and fulfilled in various ways: obedience, virtue, holiness, good works, morality, duty and sincere endeavour, but salvation remained conditional upon the performance of pious and spiritual acts. And, for most churchmen, ensuring that bad ideas did not infect others was one of those acts.68 How churchmen negotiated the complex relationship between justification by faith alone and their commitment to outward holiness and the importance of religious duties, under the new conditions of the post-revolutionary world, has clear implications for how we understand post-revolutionary society, the nature of the Church and religion, and reactions to the licentiousness of the press. These complex relationships cannot be characterised by the categories of Calvinism and Arminianism, nor did early eighteenth-century England experience an effortless shift from 67

Gregory F. Scholtz, ‘Anglicanism in the Age of Johnson: The Doctrine of Conditional Salvation’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22 (1988–1989), 182–207; Gregory Scholtz, ‘Sola Fide? Samuel Johnson and the Augustinian Doctrine of Salvation’, Philological Quarterly, 720 (1993), 185–212. For criticisms see, Donald J. Greene, ‘Latitudinarianism and Sensibility: The Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling” Reconsidered’, Modern Philology, 75 (1977), 159–83; D. Greene, ‘How “Degraded” was Eighteenth-Century Anglicanism?’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24 (1990), 93–108. 68 Scholtz, ‘Anglicanism in the Age of Johnson’, 188. For a discussion of the disputes between Arminianism and the Reformed tradition over justification and faith in this period, see, Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008), 39–76; Dewey D. Wallace, Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (Oxford, 2011), 159–61.

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

religion dependent upon theological certainty to one in which salvation could be guaranteed by moral conduct and sincerity.69 No doubt those explanations form part of the picture of later Stuart politics. As described at the beginning of Chapter 1, the new Williamite regime did attempt to inculcate and enforce morality amongst the wider population, both through sermons and through instruction and enforcement in the parish. Often depicted as a crucial constituent of the movement for the reformation of manners, these enterprises employed traditional rhetorical tropes and theological motifs that were common to all churchmen to justify how and why the press should be controlled: namely that immorality and errant behaviour was a sure sign of ungodliness and sin. The emphasis amongst churchmen on the severe consequences of unrestrained sin should alert us to the fact that spreading errant doctrine was itself an immoral act. There was not, as has been recently claimed, a strict division between concerns with immorality and heresy, in which immorality was dealt with by the secular authorities, and heresy was considered an ecclesiastical matter.70 Whilst memories would fade with the passage of time – and they were reshaped by the events of 1688–1689 – the rancorous divisions of the Civil War served as a reminder to contemporaries of the dangers caused by unrestrained public debate. But conversations concerning the nature of true religion, its status and how it should be promoted were at the root of the English Reformation and they were reshaped by new post-revolutionary contexts.71 The emergence of freethought, the Trinitarian disputes and the legal protection of dissent, exacerbated extant Reformation debates concerned with how religious truth was constituted and how it might be ascertained. But, crucially, all of the divines discussed in this book continued to assert that one of the conditions of faith, and thus salvation, was an intellectual and practical commitment to doctrinal truth. Whilst, as post-revolutionary religion assumed even more plasticity, churchmen of various inclinations might have differed on what that truth was, indeed most considered it ineffable, all churchmen agreed that the truth was ultimately identifiable.72 The continued insistence that truth was vital to salvation has clear implications for how we understand the nature of the press and religious–political identity in post-revolutionary England. Most obviously, it suggests that the period under discussion here did not witness a smooth development 69

Nicholas Tyacke, ‘From Laudians to Latitudinarians: A Shifting Balance of Theological Forces’, in Grant Tapsell (ed.), The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 (Manchester, 2017), 55–60. 70 Geoffrey Kemp, ‘Ideas of Liberty of the Press, 1640–1700’, PhD thesis (unpublished) Cambridge University (2001), 252. 71 R.G. Ingram, Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2018), 8–10. 72 For the claim that truth remained vital to mid-eighteenth-century divinity see, Ingram, Reformation Without End, 8.

16

INTRODUCTION

from religious passion and enthusiasm to one in which the Church taught civility and good moral conduct so that Anglicanism was transformed in a civil religion.73 Latitudinarians and rational divinity did not triumph in the Church; very few clerics accepted that sincerity, whether it was sincere enquiry or belief, was enough to satisfy what God required for salvation to be achieved.74 Instead, clerics within the Church continued to discuss how they might inculcate the truth amongst their flock and prevent them from consuming the poison of unorthodox ideas. Again, this took the form of emphasising divine rewards and punishments. It was an orthodox commonplace that alighting on errant doctrine would be punished, and to suggest otherwise would likely lead to the breakdown of societal order.75 For all of the authors discussed in this book, however, the epistemological debates of the post-revolutionary era, ones in which the status of the Bible and the sacred nature of the Godhead were discussed, could still be aided by carefully constructed forms of public discussion. None of them argued for total censorship, nor did they argue for an absolute free press. As Edmund Hickeringill (1631–1708) noted in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, the Church’s ministry and the status of religious truth were not threatened by wider debate. Vicar of All Saints, Colchester, Hickeringill had taken part in a number of rancorous religious disputations throughout the Restoration. Intervening in the parliamentary post-revolutionary debates, he contended that the Church’s mission was apostolic at its inception. It was dedicated to public persuasion drawing the flock further into the Church: in short, it had nothing to fear from public discussion. Indeed, the worst of all doctrinal error, heresy, could be corrected by public debate, drawing people to recant and abate their huffing pride.76 Equally, William Sherlock (1639–1707) in the midst of the Trinitarian disputes insisted that the Church would die as a 73

J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello et al. (eds), L’età dei Lumi: Studi Storici Sul Settecento Europeo in Onore di Franco Venturi (Naples, 1985), i, 531–4. 74 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: Shaftesbury to Hume. A study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 (Cambridge, 2000); Gerald R. Cragg, Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1964); Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 53–98; H.R. Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (1967), 193–236. 75 Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge, 1994); D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussion of Eternal Torment (Chicago, 1964). For John Locke’s denial that errant ideas poisoned the soul, see John Marshall, ‘Defining and Redefining Heresy up to Locke’s Letters Concerning Toleration’, in David Loewenstein and John Marshall (eds), Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 260–1. 76 Edmund Hickeringill, A Speech Without-Doors: or Some Modest Inquiries Humbly Proposed to the Right Honourable the Convention of the Estates (1689), 30. L. McNulty, ‘Priests, Church Courts and People: The Politics of the Parish in England, 1660–1713’, PhD thesis (unpublished), University of London (2005); J.A.I. Champion and J.L.C. McNulty, ‘Making Orthodoxy in Late Restoration England: The Trials of Edmund Hickeringill, 1662–1710’, in M. Braddick and J. Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

persuasive force if it did not engage in discussion and rebuttal of abhorrent ideas.77 For Matthew Tindal, a fellow of All Souls and a lawyer, the English Reformation had succeeded because of persuasion. English people had been led to the truth because Luther had embraced the press.78 Yet, Hickeringill, Sherlock and Tindal were not advocating a progressive total freedom of the press in the manner that modern liberal historians understand the issue to be confgured.79 The issue was, in Tindal’s words, how public debate might be directed so that each individual might be led to salvation; only then would political stability be guaranteed. Indeed, this book suggests that for post-revolutionary society the ability for each individual to attain religious truth defined political stability. Discussing and setting the rules for the nature of the press after the Glorious Revolution, then, saw direct lines drawn between the political and the theological, but the debates concerned with the press drew in discussions of morality, theological certainty and connected to the providential claims of the Williamite regime. Yet, as churchmen increasingly pointed out, allowing the publication of blasphemy and heresy was not just endangering the salvation of individuals; it was a rejection of the providential foundation of the revolution and engendered immorality. When in 1709, Henry Sacheverell suggested that the leaders of the Church and the Whig ministry, by refusing to control errant ideas in the press, were conniving in spreading sin and failing the nation, he was pursuing ideas that had their origins in the early 1690s.80 In consequence, and despite the prevailing scholarship, the debate concerned with the nature of the press was a polemical discussion across society. It was not a straight fight between priest and freethinker, radical and conformist; it proceeded in productive tension between all forms of churchmen, who also engaged the challenges offered by freethinkers.81 The history of the freedom of the press is not simply a history of ideas nor is it a history of canonical texts repackaged by lesser figures. Instead, from 1688 onwards, it is a history that has implications for other forms of enquiry. To follow interventions into how the press should be constructed is to encounter sets of other debates and issues. The rancorous debates concerned with the Trinity in the early 1690s, discussed in Chapter 1, and Francis Atterbury’s successful calls for convocation to be recalled, discussed in Chapter 3, were not just theological or institutional debates; they were Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 227–48; J.L.C. McNulty, ‘Hickeringill, Edmund (bap. 1631, d.1708)’, in ODNB. 77 William E. Burns, ‘Sherlock, William (1639/40–1707)’, in ODNB. 78 Tindal, Letter to a Member of Parliament. 79 Tortarolo, The Invention of the Free Press, 34. 80 Henry Sacheverell, The Communication of Sin: A Sermon Preached at the Assizes held at Derby (Oxford, 1709). 81 Contrast Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, Connell, Secular Chains, Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken.

18

INTRODUCTION

equally concerned with the nature of public disputation. Nor were they strictly ecclesiological: parliament and ministries of various political persuasions were compelled to consider the disruption caused to the state by the rancour caused by the press. Equally, by 1705, the cry of ‘Church in Danger’, considered in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, which had originated in 1696, was the dominant ideological issue of the age, revealing disgust with occasional conformity and the failure of Anne and her ministers to understand how public debate should be conducted. The last observation goes some way to explaining the disaster of the Sacheverell trial in 1710. That the Whig ministry was brought to its knees by a minor cleric cannot be explained by recourse to either political thinking or structural narrative. Rather, it can only be captured by taking a more holistic view of how the use of the pulpit and the press was contentious across the spectrum of religious positions and helped dramatically to destabilise English society. In the end, there should be nothing unusual or enigmatic about Sacheverell’s comments made twenty years after the Glorious Revolution. Nor is there anything confusing about the scores of other texts that discussed the press both before and after the lapse of the licensing act. In a very important sense, thy were debating how the press should be correctly configured. As they looked back on the violence and disruption of the seventeenth century, the need for political stability was the one issue on which they could agree. And yet, they also wrote under the conditions of religious pluralism. Any successful proposal for the settlement of public debate had to balance the continued need for theological truth to be ascertained whilst accepting that there was no agreement of what that truth was. The combination of these factors ensured the press was considered in multiple registers and across the religious spectrum. This period was neither a period of freedom nor of control; such a stark dichotomy cannot hope to explain the complexity of public debate after 1688. When, in 1717, John Toland privately excoriated Papists, Nonjurors and other disaffected persons for appealing to the mob, he was condemning them for disturbing the public peace.82 Despite his reputation amongst a wide range of scholars for his radicalism, radicalism which took in a desire for an absolute free press, Toland shared the same common aim of Henry Sacheverell: for both men, a licentious press threatened political stability. Both men, however, disagreed vehemently over how their aims could be achieved. What follows is therefore the story of a dialogue – a sometimes acrimonious discussion – that took place both within and outside the Church, between clerics and freethinkers and between clerics and politicians, concerned with the limits of free expression. These discussions were, at bottom, a contest to use the press to delimit the nature and shape of true 82 BL

Add. MS 4,295 ff.49–50, John Toland to ? c.1718, proposals for regulating newspapers.

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

godliness: it was a war for the souls of men and women and considered whether the country was fulfilling the providential plan set out by the new Williamite regime. This last observation goes some way towards explaining why this is a book of two halves. The first four chapters discuss how the Williamite regime tried initially to forge a providential godly nation – both in and out of the Church – by using linguistic and theological motifs that were common currency throughout the godly community of the dangerous consequences of unrestrained sin. The government nurtured and spread their message using sermons and national and parish injunctions to inspire piety and to control immorality. These chapters demonstrate, however, how this policy was derailed by the emergence of unorthodox thinking: first by the Trinitarian disputes of the 1690s, then by John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious, and by a generalised fear that a coherent movement of deism was establishing itself in England. In turn, the seeming inability of church leaders and politicians to control the press, illustrated first by the lapse of licensing and then by the failure to enact corrective legislation, caused rancorous divisions to emerge within the Church. Those divisions, granted, could already be seen in 1689, but they were cemented and exacerbated by the seeming inability to put a stop to the likes of John Toland. A little over a decade after the Williamite revolution, Robert Harley, the most skilled press operator of his day, and Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, could reflect on the acrimony within the Church on how the press should be dealt with. The second half of this book details how concern within the Anglican establishment at the loss of its power, and the legal toleration of Protestant nonconformity, shaped the dynamics of the Whig–Tory conflict, as well as the debate with the press. Both Harley and Tenison fought desperately to take the ‘heat’ out of religious disputation by enacting legislation that removed anonymity from the print trade. Their failure to control the press ran parallel with increasing High Church anger at what they perceived as attacks on the Church in the press from both heterodox thinkers and Dissenters. Thus, the ideological contours of early eighteenth-century attitudes towards the press took on new shape. Whilst High and Low Churchmen both agreed that the likes of John Toland and Matthew Tindal should be controlled, High Churchmen also increasingly wanted Dissenters controlled too. In turn, Whig churchmen reacted by helping Church in Danger legislation to be passed in parliament. In effect, then, press legislation was passed in the early eighteenth century, but it was passed by Whig churchmen preventing High Churchmen from criticising church policy.83 As a result, Henry Sacheverell was prosecuted for High Crimes and Misdemeanours in 1710. 83

In this sense, then, this book disagrees with recent work that has emphasised the ideological continuities between the Restoration and post-1688 Church. For which, see Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment; Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 223–51.

20

INTRODUCTION

Much of this assessment will now strike us as antiquated in both tone and content. The discussions concerned with the press were not expressed in terms of absolutes, nor did those taking part in them consider it to be a paradox that they might engage with ideas that they also thought should be controlled. Rather, they were part of the spiritual warfare that clerics engaged with in the early eighteenth century. But it suggests the need to think again about the freedom of the press and censorship, and the relationship between the politics of disputation and religion in the post-Revolutionary period. It must be stressed again that this book is not intended as an assessment of when and if a free press was established, measured either quantitatively or qualitatively. Such a premise obliges historians to grade the freedom of the press on an absolute scale, in which they are forced constantly to engage with liberal proponents of freedom. Instead, this book concerns itself with how contemporaries talked about the nature of the press, public debate and how it might be correctly configured. The churchmen discussed in this book were not enamoured by persecution and driven to close down all debate. Rather, in various ways, they worried about how individuals might be led to eternal torment by imbibing errant doctrine from books and pamphlets. The clarion calls of Henry Sacheverell and Francis Atterbury, for example, were not driven by a desire for increased control, in opposition to calls for increased freedom and emancipation, but by a desperate cry for institutions to lead people into heaven.84

84

Peter Lake, ‘“A Charitable Christian Hatred”: The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), 145–83.

21

Part I Providence, Salvation and the Lapse of Licensing

1 The Politics of Coercion: Maintaining Truth Historical understandings of the press after the Glorious Revolution are almost exclusively committed to an analysis of opposites. On the one hand, historians have characterised the king and his godly court as committed to promoting its own providential message. Precisely because of the problems with William’s legitimacy as monarch, he promoted his invasion as favoured by God, proceeding to a divine plan and furthering the unfinished English Reformation.1 Whilst historians have been sceptical about the originality and influence that providence really had, with one historian dismissing it as ‘little more than the expression of a devotional platitude; it did not change men’s minds’, most have accepted the basic premise behind it.2 William and his advisers, most importantly Gilbert Burnet, were convinced of the need for propaganda and readily engaged the public.3 On the other hand, where historians have considered how and why William and his advisers controlled public debate, they have focused on how supporters of Jacobitism were ruthlessly pursued and punished, so their message did not reach the wider public.4 To be sure, the Williamite government often presented the supporters of the previous king as their most dangerous opponents; the government executed a Jacobite printer in 1693 and sought new treason legislation in 1694.5 William III and the Godly Revolution, 28–52. J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977), 25; Gerald Straka, ‘The Final Phase of Divine Right Theory in England 1688–1702’, EHR, 305 (1962), 655; Gerald Straka, Anglican Reaction to the Revolution of 1688 ( Madison, WI, 1962). 3 Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution; Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument: An Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets on the Allegiance Controversy’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1990), 473–564; Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–9’, The American Historical Review, 82 (1977), 843–74; W.A. Speck, Political Propaganda in Augustan England’, The Royal Historical Society, 22 (1972), 17–32, Richards, Party Propaganda Under Queen Anne. 4 Paul Monod, ‘The Jacobite Press and English Censorship, 1689–95’, in Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp (eds), The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites (1995), 125–42. 5 Reflections Upon a Form of Prayer, lately set forth for the Jacobites of the Church of England (1690), preface. Paul Hopkins, ‘Anderton, William (1663–1693)’, in ODNB; A True Copy of the Paper Delivered to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex, by Mr. William Anderton, at the Place of Execution, which he Designed there to have Spoken (1692); Samuel Grascome, 1 Claydon, 2

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THE RESTRAINT OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND, 1660–1715

Yet astute observers of late Stuart politics suggested that, to survive, all governments needed to place correct limits on debate and to engage the public. In that sense, then, early Williamite governments replicated the attitude to the press of the regimes of Charles II and James II but with one crucial difference. Whilst they continued to acknowledge that the Anglican Church was responsible for promoting moral virtue throughout the country, William’s close advisers increasingly empowered various Anglican voluntary movements, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, to change behaviour, through restraint, coercion and exhortation.6 In fact, these movements for moral reformation promoted a vision of society in which sin was controlled precisely because it endangered the life of the individual, the community and the country in much the same way Sacheverell was to argue in 1709. To illustrate the theological impulse behind controlling errant ideas that coursed through the period, the first section of this chapter discusses how various members of the Church used the text explicated by Sacheverell in his sermon the Communication of Sin, ‘neither be a partaker of other men’s sins’, to justify why individuals should be coerced away from blasphemous expression. It makes the case that as the period progressed, churchmen of various leanings, initially concerned by the spread of oral blasphemy, became increasingly concerned by the seemingly unchecked ability of authors to publish blasphemy too. They recognised that the poison being spread by errant expressions could not be adequately controlled by local prosecutions; instead they mobilised Scriptural citations and analysis to exhort people to restrain their behaviour. Once we understand this, it should come as no surprise that the impetus for the 1698 Blasphemy Act, a piece of legislation that attacked the licentious press, drew its inspiration from members of parliament committed to the programme for the Reformation of Manners. There is no doubt that Sacheverell detested the moral reformers, he saw them as ineffective and wrecking the authority of the established church, but in the early 1690s it was not clear that attempts to reform morals would be delegated to Dissenters and secular authorities. Rather, the impetus for reform came from within the Church. Sacheverell’s hatred for what he saw as a coherent Dissenting movement bound to senior politicians, should not blind us to their shared endeavour of controlling errant expression in the name of piety. Sacheverell and his fellow High Churchmen, moral reformers, Whig Divines and Dissenters all agreed that incalculable damage would be done to their society if ideas were not restrained. Put simply, bad An Appeal of Murther from Certain Unjust Judges … Containing a Relation of the Tryal, Behaviour, and Death of Mr. William Anderton, executed June 16. 1693, at Tyburn, for Pretended High-Treason (1693); BL Add. 29595 f.68, Daniel Finch, earl of Nottingham to Hatton, 22 Dec. 1694. 6 Brent Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT, 2014), 94–5.

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THE POLITICS OF COERCION: MAINTAINING TRUTH

ideas expressed out loud spread poison and damned their receivers to hell; they clashed over the method of control and coercion, not its aim. The key, then, was establishing what those bad ideas were and considering how they should be restrained. Or, put another way, whilst churchmen increasingly clashed over how to deal with errant expression, they had a propensity to borrow rhetorical and theological resources from each other to justify controlling errant expression. There is another connection between Sacheverell’s sermon and the early 1690s, which the second section of this chapter unpicks. Sacheverell not only insisted that the Church was the guarantor of salvation but that it was the duty of the clergy to rebuke error and to promote truth, piety and virtue.7 As early as 1706, he had concluded that claims to a free conscience by Nonconformists were simply a shadow for heresy, schism and rebellion.8 Sacheverell’s and others’ concern with the spread of heresy, the damage it caused to society and the inability of the Church to coerce and punish, no doubt had a long history but it was given new focus in the Trinitarian disputes of the 1690s. The publication of Arthur Bury’s Naked Gospel (1690) sparked rancorous debates concerned with the crucial Christian question of the Godhead’s nature. These debates were not limited to erudite university discussion. Instead, they were played out in print for consumption by the wider public. Again, for many churchmen this raised the spectre of spreading theological poison; unchecked it would infect individuals and endanger the Williamite Providential project. Sacheverell’s solution to unchecked theological disputation was not just a re-empowered Church, it was the return of licensing. Pre-publication censorship, correctly applied, stopped the poison spreading; indeed, in the words of one contemporary it killed bad ideas at birth. The understanding of ideas spreading, moving beyond the control of the author, was inextricably linked to pre-publication control. Whilst churchmen would continue to praise government and parliament when they restrained errant books and authors, post-publication control was neither systematic nor could it control the poison. The third section of this chapter discusses how contemporaries understood and represented licensing, how they suggested it fitted in to and shaped religious culture in the 1690s, and whether it should be maintained as a solution to maintaining the rules of public debate and promoting piety amongst the population. These three areas of investigation – the theological understanding of the problems caused by errant expression, the Trinitarian disputes and the lapse of licensing – are rarely, if ever, connected by historians; instead they are treated as discrete categories of enquiry, hived off respectively into religious and social, theological and press history. If, however, we dispense with the modern terms of freedom of the press and censorship and, instead, consider The Communication of Sin, 14. Henry Sacheverell, The Nature, Obligation, and Measures of Conscience, delivered in a Sermon at Leicester (1706), 5, 32. 7 Sacheverell, 8

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how contemporaries understood and discussed practices of communication and, crucially, how they considered the consequences for individuals, communities and nation, of imbibing errant ideas, then they become not only compatible and connected, but they combine to provide a full picture of how contemporaries considered the press might be used to help people towards piety and prevent political instability. Blasphemy and policy

In the early spring of 1700, a Bedfordshire minister complained to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) of the danger caused to the country by the unchecked growth of licentious publications. One vile book, he noted, ‘would send more souls to hell than all the religious pamphlets streaming from the press; the business must be stopped’.9 Within a year, Josiah Woodward, the first historian of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (SRM), offered a solution to the anonymous cleric’s complaint.10 Woodward’s reforming impulses led him to urge the current ministry to keep advancing piety and virtue, for the public good of both Church and state.11 He recognised that the Christian endeavour of religious societies with the encouragement of William had suppressed high levels of profanity and vice but noted the continued hold immorality had on the country. Urging the new regime to put extant laws into full effect, he humbly asked the new queen to give effectual orders ‘for the suppressing of all pernicious books and pamphlets, which contain in them impious doctrines’ against the Holy Trinity, and other fundamental articles of faith’. Such books, Woodward knew, subverted the Christian religion and ought to be discountenanced and punished.12 Both Woodward’s tract and the anonymous letter from a Bedfordshire cleric reveal a series of truths about the campaign to improve the morality of the nation in the post-revolutionary period. Reformers were never united on which wickedness posed the greatest danger to society. Consequently, campaigns against vice emphasised different problems and were stimulated by outside pressures.13 The empowerment of moral crusades in the early 1690s initially concentrated on the general problem of vice, whilst targeting the personal failings of drunkenness, fornication and gambling. But the attention of the reformers could often be drawn to a specific issue by an intervention or 9

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), Original letter 91, 27 Apr. 1700; Dudley W.R. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, CT, 1957). 10 John Spurr, ‘Woodward, Josiah (1657–1712)’, in ODNB. 11 Josiah Woodward, An Account of the Progress of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in England and Ireland (1701), to the author. 12 Ibid., b4. 13 Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688, 2.

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problem. For example, Jeremy Collier’s attack on the immorality of stage in 1698 pushed plays and the theatre to the forefront of the reformers’ minds.14 In much the same way, with the lapse of licensing and with legislative attempts against the press failing, by the early eighteenth century the licentiousness of the public debate became an increasing concern. Despite the varied forms of vice, the reformers always justified their interventions with recourse to theology and how salvation might be achieved. As the Bedfordshire minister noted in 1700, reading and consuming immoral and spiritually incorrect books, particularly texts that were blasphemous, endangered the soul of the individual. The campaigns from the early 1690s onwards, then, on the surface look like attempts to impose discipline and order based on coercion, but they were underpinned by Scriptural justification for why errant behaviour should be brought within acceptable limits, both for the good of the individual and for wider society.15 Whilst historians disagree on the intimacy between the movements and the regime, here represented by propagandists and godly reformers, their approach to moral reform has barely changed since the 1950s, remaining a curious mix of high politics and social consequences: we continue to think of a dynamic relationship between political motivation, which sometimes came from godly reformers clustered around the king’s court, and the effectiveness of moral prosecutions at a local level.16 The consequences for our understanding of how blasphemy was approached by contemporaries in the 1690s has not been entirely fruitful. Whilst historians of the press, political thought and religion have largely ignored the 1698 Blasphemy Act 14

Eric Salmon, ‘Collier, Jeremy (1650–1726)’, in ODNB; R.D. Hume, ‘Jeremy Collier and the Future of the London Theater in 1698’, Studies in Philology, 96 (1999), 480–511; Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698); William Bisset, More Plain English. In Two Sermons Preached for Reformation of Manners (1704), preface. 15 Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, 254. 16 For the disagreement over the political make-up of the movements and the nature of the relationship with the Williamite Court, contrast Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution, 112–21 with, T.C. Curtis and W.A. Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform’, Literature and History, 3 (1976),45–64, and David Hayton, ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons’, P&P, 128 (1990), 48–91. For moral reform and prosecutions at a local level, Robert B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991); 48, 98, 239, 248; Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688, 32, 54–5. The best evidence for the local impetus of the movement and their ability to prosecute offenders can be located in the publication of blacklists: A Sixth (–Seventh, –Eighth, – Tenth, Thirteenth) Black List of … Lewd and Scandalous Persons, who by the Endeavours of a Society for Promoting a Reformation of Manners in the City of London and Suburbs thereof have been legally Prosecuted and Convicted, etc. (1699/1700–1706/1707). They are statistically collated in: Andrew Gordon Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688–1715’, PhD thesis (unpublished), Edinburgh University (1980), 65–9.

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as irrelevant to their topic of investigation, those working on moral reform have ignored the implications of blasphemy for the wider topic of public disputation and have, instead, confined it to an oral category, concentrating on examples of profaning the Sabbath and swearing, seeing them only as local complaints connected to other prosecutions for drunkenness and infidelity, under the broad nomenclature of vice. Of course, there are good evidential reasons for this approach.17 Nevertheless, understanding blasphemy as a largely local problem, if driven by a national impetus, has marginalised the issue from the wider issue of freedom of expression. As the Williamite regime fought to establish itself with godly reformers, they naturally drew on the most powerful and tested techniques available to them: they pushed the distribution of sermons through the Church’s hierarchy down to individual parishes.18 In doing so, ministers and godly preachers at court also bound in MPs and peers to their propaganda endeavours. Throughout 1689 and 1690 trusted churchmen delivered sermons charting the providential deliverance of the nation whilst emphasising the English Church as a crucial pillar of the international Protestant community. These sermons looked backwards and forwards: the future piety of the nation was contrasted with the tyranny under which the country had recently suffered. Thus, early sermons by Burnet and Sharp contrasted the new king with his predecessor and thanks were offered to ‘the clergy who had written against Popery and refused to read the Declaration and that opposed the ecclesiastical commission’.19 It is of course easy to describe this aggressive propagation of the new Williamite regime as an obvious practice of wide and open engagement with the public. Yet, in spreading their message so widely, Anglican divines were also making a connected point about control. The very identity of these sermons was protected. In autumn 1689, for example, the chaplain to the bishop of Durham was prosecuted in the King’s Bench for turning an officially sanctioned sermon into a ‘virulent ballad’.20 This protected identity was emphasised by the presence of physical sanction: godly sermons carried official sanction, printed at the request of the new king. Yet despite the regime’s use of sermons and public occasions to promote its religious and political identity, there were limits to what could be achieved.21 The reach of printed material into the wider country and 17

Robert B. Shoemaker, ‘Reforming the City: The Reformation of Manners Campaign in London, 1690–1738’, in Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Kearns and Robert Shoemaker (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England (1992), 99–120. 18 Claydon, William III and the Godly Reformation. 19 Folger Library Newdigate Newsletters L.C. 1967, 2 Feb. 1689; Morrice Entring Book, Q453, 2 Feb, 1689; Commons Journal, x, 16, 1 Feb. 1689 and x, 422, 22 May 1690. 20 TNA, SP 44/97 f.177, Greenwich Hospital Newsletters, 29 Oct. 1689. 21 Contrast Claydon’s emphasis on the successes of printed propaganda, see Claydon, William III and the Godly Reformation, 80–1.

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down into the localities was mitigated by issuing injunctions to each parish priest. In early 1689, Charles Talbot (1660–1718), earl of Shrewsbury, secretary of state for the southern department, issued a letter to the bishop of London that was to be further communicated to the provinces of York and Canterbury, and to reach every parish in the realm.22 The Injunctions noted the need for spiritual unity under the umbrella of revolutionary signs of providence, but also raised the spectre of irreligion and the danger of vice to the country. As initial way of fulfilling the revolution and rewarding God’s faith, the Injunctions utilised the existing structure of the Church, to fulfil the providential preservation of the Protestant religion. The bishops were instructed to take special care in the ordination of ministers. Careful enquiry was made into their lives and learnings and they were to carry out their duties diligently, ‘performing their public offices of worship gravely and devoutly, preaching the word of God plainly and practically without running into needless controversies’.23 Tracing a direct connection between the behaviour of clergy and the morality of his parishioners, the Injunctions demanded a general reformation of the lives and manners of all subjects. The nation could never be secure, nor religion returned to happiness and peace whilst sins and vices prevailed in the nation. The instruction from the king and Shrewsbury combined the preaching authority of the clergy with the extant penal laws of the state. Each clergyman was required to exhort his flock to avoid the sins of vice and blasphemy and at the same time any person guilty of such sins was to be presented to the magistrate.24 The success of these efforts depended on local action as much as on published sermons. Indeed, the constant barrage of publications emanating from the court could have the opposite effect to that intended. In 1693, for example, Robert Harley (1661–1724), as the Commons ordered Burnet’s Pastoral Letter burnt, commented ‘the Bishops have preached themselves, printed themselves, voted themselves, and flattered themselves out of the esteem of all honest Englishmen’.25 Considering the importance the Williamite Court placed on taking control of the Church’s structure to pursue providential ends, it should come as no surprise to find Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715) was vital to their agenda.26 22 Stuart

Handley, ‘Talbot, Charles, Duke of Shrewsbury (1660–1718), in ODNB; TNA, SP 44/97 f.261, A Letter from the King to the Bishop of London, to be circulated throughout the Provinces of Canterbury and York, 13 Feb. 1690; His Majesties Letter to the Lord Bishop of London, to be Communicated to the two Provinces of Canterbury and York (1689); Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688–1715’, 17–18. 23 His Majesties Letter to the Lord Bishop, 3. 24 Ibid., 4. 25 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the manuscripts of his grace the duke of Portland, preserved at Wellbeck Abbey (5 vols, 1894), iii, 512, Robert Harley to Sir Edward Harley, 21 Jan. 1692. 26 Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688; Brent Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 110–48, 187–222; Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, 253–5.

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Not only had he been William’s chief propagandist in the 1680s, he assumed the same role after the revolution.27 Within days of the initial injunctions being issued, Burnet stepped into the fray. Recently appointed a bishop, he sent his own instruction to his new diocese. Adopting the king’s language, Burnet expected that all clergymen would demonstrate to their flock what ‘a terrible affront it is to Almighty God to profane his Holy Name by rash and vain Swearing, and what a dreadful thing it is to swear falsely, even in common Discourse’.28 It was not enough to engage the parish in prayer. Burnet demanded that every clergyman go among his flock and ‘exhort, admonish or reprove them’.29 Once again, reinforcing the providential message of the new regime, Burnet riveted the moral and ecclesiological connection between monarch, priest and people. But, politically expedient as his new instructions were, designed to cement the stability of the new regime, they were underpinned by theological understanding. The newly appointed bishop urged his clergy to think: how Sacred a Trust that of Souls is, which the Son of God has purchas’d with his own Blood: and how severely he will reckon with you, if through your ill Example, bad Doctrine, or the other neglects of your duty, those Souls perish, for which he died.30

By noting a direct connection between the ministry of the clergy, errant doctrine and ill behaviour, Burnet was pointing to a perennial dispute concerned with the nature of salvation: if ill doctrine was not corrected, he suggested, it could lead to a host of dangers. He warned both the clergy and the wider nation that sinners and blasphemers could not hope to enter into the kingdom of God. To fulfil both their redeemed destiny and the programme of the reformed Church, each person must frequent the public worship of God, receive the Sacrament and read ‘Scriptures, or other good books, both together and apart in their families, that so they may grow up in grace’.31 As he exhorted others, so Burnet predicated his own position with Scriptural evidence. Explicating Tim. 5:22 he noted the clergy were to ‘lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be a partaker of other men’s sins; keep thy self pure’.32 Burnet endorsed a means of inculcating good behaviour, through control of the local parish and justified with a very specific Scriptural citation. But Clarke and H.C. Foxcroft, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (Cambridge, 1907); Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution, 28–63; Martin Greig, ‘Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715)’, in ODNB. 28 Injunctions for the Arch-Deacons of the Diocese of Sarum (1690), 6. 29 Ibid., 6. 30 Ibid., 6. 31 Ibid., 7. 32 Ibid., 4. 27 T.E.S.

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this specificity often exposed tensions within the Church, tensions that were not calmed by William and found full expression in the early eighteenth century with the accession of Anne. Burnet’s recommendation of Tim. 5:22 as the model by which the Church might control moral behaviour in the parish possessed two different yet connected interpretations.33 For many clerics in the Restoration, it was a straightforward discussion of the laying on of hands as a physical confirmation of admitting elders to the local church, and could thus be confined to understandings of ecclesiastical rites and the power of ordination.34 Increasingly from 1688, however, clerics used the text not just to define the power of the Church, but to identify and understand how they might exercise authority over their community and, crucially, how sin might be prevented and punished.35 The ambiguity of this text, its consequences for how contemporaries came to consider sin and its control in post-revolutionary England, are both laid bare in a sermon delivered by William Wake. Wake’s position at the revolution was decidedly more ambiguous than Burnet’s. No doubt his anti-Catholic polemics of the mid–1680s helped him enjoy patronage from the new king. And, in 1690 he became his chaplain. However, during this period Wake appears to have taken to heart his mentor William Claggett’s advice to moderate his polemical intentions and public musings.36 And there is ample evidence for Wake’s aversion to polemic in this period. It is telling that Wake, as a skilled theologian and occupying a position at the heart of the ecclesiastical establishment in London, refused to engage in the nonjuring, allegiance and trinitarian controversies. Nevertheless, to define his work during this period as pastoral is to misunderstand how his sermons were designed to reshape religious society.37 On 2 April 1690 he preached before the queen at Whitehall on the fifth Wednesday of Lent and took as his text Tim. 5:22.38 From the start, Wake explicated and expanded on Burnet’s position. What, he asked, is it that the ‘laying on of hands here spoken of is to refer’?39 The difficulty of the interpretation had divided both ancient and modern interpreters and rested on one John Barton and John Muddiman (eds), The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford, 2001), 1226–7. 34 See for example, Simon Lowth, Of the Subject of Church Power (1685); Nathaniel Bisbie, The Bishop Visiting (1686); Thomas Godwin, Moses and Aaron (1685); Richard Hudleston, A Short and Plain Way to the Faith and Church (1688). 35 See for example, John Kettlewell, Of Christian Prudence, or Religious Wisdom (1691); John Flavel, An Exposition of the Assemblies Catechism (1692); Benjamin Keach, The Glory and Ornament of a True Gospel-Constituted Church (1697); Edward Stillingfleet, A Sermon Concerning Sins of Omission (1694). 36 Sykes, William Wake, i, 33; Claydon, William III and the Godly Reformation, 65–6. 37 Stephen Taylor, ‘Wake, William (1657–1737)’, in ODNB. For a discussion of the pastoral as the political, see Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, 199–203. 38 William Wake, A Sermon Preached before the Queen (1690). 39 Ibid., 3. 33

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question. Did the laying on of hands refer to receiving penitents into holy orders or into communion? As Wake noted, there was acceptable evidence for both interpretations and, whilst not unsympathetic to Burnet’s reading, was minded to promote the latter interpretation. Based on a wider understanding of St Paul, Wake contended that the apostle and the penitential canons of the Church proved that the text was intended to set out the rules for being ‘received again into Communion after having fulfil’d the Penance impos’d upon them for their Sins’.40 After settling his interpretation of the first clause of the text, Wake moved on to the second. Here, it was unambiguous. The latter was a straightforward instruction on how the Church should censure sinners. The point of censure was twofold. The sinner, under pain of punishment, was earnestly moved to repent whilst at the same time others were deterred from sinning by the threat of the same correction. The text then allowed an intimate discussion of whether a man may have other sins imputed to his account when he was judged by God. In simple terms, the sermon explicated the key question of men being responsible for ‘all those Crimes which he neglected to punish with that severity he ought to have done’.41 For Wake, as with all divines of the period, it was clear that salvation was the key issue by which people should understand forms of punishment: there must be an Universal Holiness in all other respects too, and without which no man shall ever see the LORD. And yet perhaps even in this Case also, tho by our neglect in other matters we should be so unhappy as to come short of Heaven, our Charity nevertheless may not lose its reward; but may serve to make us less miserable, if not more glorious; to allay our Damnation, if not to encrease our Reward.42

Wake’s sermon was a framework for how religious society might face down the threatened encroachments of vice and impiety. As he explained, clergymen had to make sense of how the godly should react to those ‘who not only live in an habitual commission of the most heinous sins themselves, but take a great deal of satisfaction, and even make it their daily Employment, to draw as many others as they can into the Commission of them’.43 He made clear at the start that no man could partake of the sins of another ‘but by his own Act’, but vice had risen to such a vicious level that he had to reflect on two key propositions: 1st. What those Circumstances are whereby we may be most likely to render our selves partakers of other mens sins? From whence it will appear,

40

Ibid., Ibid., 42 Ibid., 43 Ibid., 41

4. 4. 33. 5.

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2dly. How careful we ought to be, of ourselves and our Actions, that we may keep our selves from being so.

Having established the rules for his sermon, Wake turned to providing specific evidence for partaking of sins. He split his first proposition into three more subheadings: ‘by giving Occasion to other mens sins. By approving of them when Committed. By neglecting to hinder them from committing them when we might and ought to have done it’.44 The full extent of Wake’s doctrine need not concern us here. Nevertheless, there are some key issues in Wake’s sermon that help to explain clerical approaches to the freedom of expression. Like Burnet, Wake advanced the proposition that any man may be judged to endanger his own salvation and damn others by expounding wicked doctrine, for it was a sin either to ‘deceive Men into the commission of Sin, or to Strengthen them in it, does thereby render himself Partaker of their Evil-doings’.45 Scriptural justification could be easily found for such a position. In Ezek. 12, God had condemned the prophets for seducing his people with vice and not alerting them to the danger they were in; too many men had refused to deny the danger of sin, thinking a sinful action would only lead to a little ‘sorrow’. In fact, for Wake, nothing could be further from the truth. Expounding incorrect doctrine and leading others into temptation had horrible consequences. Profaneness, for example, would involve ‘Souls in a greater Destruction’ and God would pronounce ‘Severe Denunciation’.46 It might be legitimately asked by both contemporary and historian what this meant in practice. The answer lay in Wake’s final question: whereby we become partakers of other men’s sins, by ‘neglecting to hinder them from committing them, when we might, and ought to have done it’.47 On this question Wake’s answer was very carefully constructed. He noted that God has ‘appointed some certain Persons to watch more than others for your salvation’; however, he also contended: yet whosoever he be that sees another about to do that which he knows will be odious to God, scandalous to Good men, and without a timely Repentance ruinous to his own Soul, and has an opportunity to admonish him of his Sin, and to hinder his committing of it, and yet neglects so to do; let him fear, lest what God once denounc’d against the Prophet Ezekiel.48

The Hebrew prophet was well chosen by Wake. Ezekiel was denounced by God and informed he would surely die an iniquitous death. Turning to 44

Ibid., Ibid., 46 Ibid., 47 Ibid., 48 Ibid., 45

7–8. 13. 15. 29. 29.

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how sin could be prevented, Wake reiterated that all members of society should discourage sin and demonstrate through personal behaviour the folly and vanity of wickedness. If positive instruction did not work, punishment and severe enquiry were the appropriate response. Wake was advocating a religious society in which the Christian magistrate was largely responsible for restraining errant behaviour and could be aided by the behaviour of the whole of society. Rethinking the relationship between Church and state was essential to Wake’s project and it was at the heart of the Williamite vision of society too. Wickedness, profanity and lax morality were inextricably linked to a doomed monarchy. The propaganda that emphasised William was a providential monarch also required that the nation should be regulated towards godliness to reflect God’s deliverance. Yet, and as Wake recognised, the policy could not be executed by the Church alone. All sinners, he stated, cannot be called into the Church. The task must be left to the civil magistrate for he has ‘great opportunities of supplying this Defect; and no doubt God will require it so much the more at their hands, in that it is now no longer in ours’.49 The thrust of Wake’s sermon was to establish that all men must consider the nature of their own and their neighbour’s moral behaviour and adherence to correct doctrine. Salvation was to be employed as both a social and political tenet to ensure that society was correctly restrained: That if it shall please God we may yet gain them at the last, and deliver them out of the Snares of the Devil: but if this we cannot do, yet at least let us save our own Souls, tho we cannot theirs, and not partake with them in their sins, lest we also partake with them in their Destruction.

It was also clear that Wake had thought carefully about how a policy based on damnation could be executed. He reinforced the commitment of Church, state and people to restrain errant morality yet left intact the power of the state to punish people. In other words, the Church was to take a subordinate role. That was not to say that the Church would be unimportant. To the contrary, as Wake was keen to suggest, all men must understand that they were in danger of the wrath of God on a daily basis and therefore the godly must not ‘cease Day nor Night, in Publick and in Private, to intreat and beseech them to consider these things’. Wake’s sermon was a set piece of propaganda critical to the thinking of the Williamite regime. The sponsorship of the sermon by the queen is significant, underscoring the importance of salvation to both Mary and William, who personally wrote to Wake, thanking him and commenting that it must be the duty of his chaplains ‘if they observed or knew of anything in their conduct that was displeasing to God or dangerous to their salvation, to 49

Ibid., 31.

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come to them and lay it freely before them’.50 Wake’s sermon was published in a political context that made a connection between immorality, belief in errant doctrine and the consequences to the individual and the country of unrestrained sin. Yet it was not a text that directly mentioned the licentiousness of the press. In 1690 licensing had not lapsed and the consequences of the Trinitarian controversy had not yet been understood by the bishops of secretaries of state. Instead, courtly reformers were concerned with setting out the problem of vice, broadly defined. Nevertheless, in the early 1690s, Wake’s positioning on the consequences, should vice and doctrinal error be left uncontrolled and why they should be prevented, drew on the rhetoric and tropes that Sacheverell and High Churchmen would use in the early eighteenth century. The campaign for moral reform drew on enduring models from previous puritan campaigns and the Anglican Restoration Church.51 The same mixture of anxiety and concern with the ill effects of profanity can be found in the works of William Assheton (1642–1711). Baptised just at the outbreak of the English Civil War, he came from a family and an area dominated by puritan gentry.52 He benefited from the patronage of James Butler, duke of Ormond, and was a vicar in both Ireland and England.53 Assheton spent much of his life, both in the pulpit and in print, attacking nonconformity and defending the Church of England. In fact, he despised Dissenters and much of his printed output was concerned with attacking any relaxation of the penal laws.54 Understandably perhaps, with the accession of William III he moved away from attacks on the dangers of Protestant toleration and produced a series of commentaries on the dangers posed to the laity by lax immorality. Whilst seemingly not self-identifying as a member of the Reformation of Manners, Assheton acknowledged the inspiration of William’s proclamations, and resolved to preach against the sin and vice of swearing.55 He expressed his concern at the dangers posed by unchecked swearing and blasphemy. Indeed, by 1692, there was a direct split in people addicted to vice, and thus a divide in how blasphemers should be approached. The first, were a set of swearers who denied God and the difference between good and evil; they were effectual atheists. This set of men were damned for they were beyond the reach of society and censure. They could only 50

Ibid., 52. John Spurr, ‘The Church, the Societies and the Moral Revolution of 1688’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Church of England c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 127–42. 52 Newton E. Key, ‘Assheton, William’ (1642–1711), in ODNB. 53 Bod. MS Tanner 42 f.77, Isaac Barrow to William Sancroft, 30 Jan. 1676; Bod. MS Tanner 42 f.59, George Seignior to William Sancroft, 17 Nov. 1676. 54 William Assheton, Toleration disapproved and condemned (1670); William Assheton, The danger of hypocrisy (1673). 55 William Assheton, A discourse 1. Drunkenness 2. Swearing and cursing (1692); William Assheton, A discourse against blasphemy (1694). 51

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be controlled by a notion of sociability, in which their friends demanded their discourse be controlled.56 The second style of blasphemer understood there to be a God and providence; they were convinced of the ‘nature of sin and its demerits’.57 It was incumbent on the clergy to teach their flock to repent and stop swearing, for they would inevitably be judged. They would surely be damned, were they aware of the everlasting fire and the sentence of condemnation they faced.58 These types of warnings and exhortations coursed through published debate in the early 1690s. The anonymous author of a Friendly discourse on Profane Cursing and Swearing recounted in print a conversation with an acquaintance who regularly profaned and blasphemed. Worryingly his respondent appeared to be unaware that he must answer for every idle word and without punishment and true repentance would be consigned to ‘the regions of Eternal Horror, prepared for the Devil’.59 Benjamin Jenks, a curate of Harley in Shropshire, attacked the sin of swearing as a challenge against heaven, and noted: God has his Book of Accounts, in which all the Oaths stand upon Record; and he hath said, He will not hold him Guiltless: And the Blasphemous Wretch will be like to find a Meiosis too in that Threat, which imports thus much more than is expressed, that such shall be proceeded against as the most guilty.60

There are a number of intertwined arguments taking place here. The first, and most obvious, is that many of these authors, clergymen and pamphleteers aimed their discussions at the pious and societal problems caused by verbal blasphemy and profanity. Or, put simply, their complaints concerned the alehouse. Beneath the theological analysis of men like Thomas Doolittle, Wake and Assheton, they worried about the commission of sins in ‘markets, taverns, open streets and shops’.61 For this reason, the regime could continue to maintain that the threat of blasphemy and profanity was being contained. After all, as many authors pointed out, swearing remained a product of drunken sociability that might be controlled by local prosecution. Indeed, in 1695 the government passed further legislation against

56

Ibid., 32–8. Ibid., 33. 58 Ibid., 38–48. 59 A friendly discourse against swearing (1697) 3, 6. 60 Warren Johnston, ‘Jenks, Benjamin (1648–1724)’, in ODNB; Benjamin Jenks, A letter to a gentleman of note, guilty of common swearing (1690), 15. 61 Thomas Doolittle, The Swearer Silenced: The Evil and Danger of Prophane Swearing and Perjury (1689), 2; The friendly monitor laying open the crying sins of cursing, swearing, drinking (1692), 23, The reformed gentleman (1693), 151. 57

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swearing and cursing, requiring all magistrates and principal parish officers to keep a register of convictions.62 Yet, in the early 1690s, at least one author had begun to make the connection between the spread of verbal blasphemy and the emergence of new types of heterodox thinking. In 1694, William Assheton returned to the theme of blasphemy and the dangers it might cause to the Church and Christianity. The foundation of his complaints remained constant. Excessive speech and blasphemy not only offended the Majesty of God and his providence but were based on denying ‘the immortality of the soul, rewards and punishments in another world; particularly against the certainty and eternity of hell torments’.63 Such anxieties were heightened by broader intellectual antagonisms. The principal target of Assheton’s ire was not now blasphemers of spoken discourse, but rather the penmanship of atheists and their milder cousins, deists. In contrast to the localised, spoken problems he had previously considered, deists were now perpetrating anticlerical attacks and denigrating the authority of the Bible. Further, the two issues of authority were connected. In abusing the authority of the priesthood, they denied the revealed nature of Scripture, and reduced it to the self-interested testimony of carnal men.64 The remainder of the tract made clear that deists were not just engaged in a scholarly exercise of establishing the veracity of Scriptural authority. Their real aim was removing the fear of hell from society. He condemned them as a sect, maintaining there was no life after this, and, thus, there was no account to be given in another world. As we have seen, Assheton lived his life in fear of the dreadful punishment of the fire of hell, maintaining that deists were wicked men, ‘liable to a further punishment after death’, for God was able to ‘destroy both body and soul’.65 On one level, the problem of deism could be resolved by personal piety and correct epistemological reasoning. God was indulgent, and had provided each person with the Scriptural instruction to achieve redemption: ‘he will guide us by his counsel here, and if we follow his conduct, will at last bring us to his glory’.66 On a different level, however, Assheton pointed to the spread of deism as political problem that required a punitive response. The libelling and reproaching of God, the description of him as an unjust tyrant, deceiving people with Scripture, required government and subjects alike to bring ‘the rebel to a sharper account’.67

62 63

64 65 66 67

Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688–1715’, 78–9. William Assheton, A discourse against blasphemy, being a conference with M.S. (1694), 1. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 3.

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The Trinitarian Disputes

These theological conversations amongst clerics from various sections of the Church, concerned with understanding the consequences for individuals and communities of promoting and imbibing errant doctrine, took place concurrently with other theological and ecclesiological discussions. That the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent Toleration Act failed to calm religious disputation can be seen in the debates concerned with what constituted the true nature of the Trinity. Indeed, the concerns with unorthodox books and the deep fissures in the Church over how they should be controlled were crucial to the failure of Nottingham’s comprehension proposals. In December 1689, not only did convocation refuse to countenance comprehension, the lower house requested that several books of ‘very dangerous consequences to the Christian Religion, and the Church of England particularly’ be brought to their attention.68 The clergy sent three books to the bishops: Stephen Nye’s heterodox Brief Notes upon the Creed of St. Athanasius, which refuted Trinitarian orthodoxy, alongside two books both by Williamite divines, the first by Gilbert Burnet and the second by Humphrey Prideaux.69 Convocation was prorogued before any action could be taken against the books, but the presentment is revealing. No doubt the clergy were concerned by the problems caused by anti-Trinitarianism, but the books by Burnet and Prideaux were guilty of nothing more than ‘a conspicuous lack of charity toward the clerical enemies of comprehension’.70 On the surface, this looks like petty politicking, accusing books of unorthodoxy in order to attack an opponent. But the lower clergy’s presentment had wider consequences. First, it suggested that in a new age of religious pluralism they would countenance very little theological variance from the Thirty-Nine Articles. Second, if the government would not control the press through licensing, then they considered convocation to be the correct forum to enforce orthodoxy. Whilst the Toleration Act had redrawn the coercive power of the Church of England, it had reaffirmed statutory protection for Trinitarian belief. Despite the reaffirmation of Trinitarian belief as essential to orthodox Protestantism, the fears of the clergy of the lower house were quickly For the failure of Comprehension, see, Henry Horwitz, Revolution Politics: The Career of Daniel Finch Second Earl of Nottingham, 1647–1730 (Cambridge, 1968), 87–93, 100–1; Bod. MS Smith 57 f.127, Thomas Smith to Edward Bernard, 27 Mar. 1690; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 46–7; Bod. MS Smith 57 f.133, Thomas Smith to Edward Bernard, Apr. 1690. For the presentation of books, see, Thomas Long, Vox Cleri:, or, the Sense of the Clergy (1690), 72; Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 85–6. 69 Gilbert Burnet, A Letter from a Minister in the Country to a Member of the Convocation (1689); Humphrey Prideaux, A Letter to a Friend relating to the present Convocation at Westminster (1690). 70 Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 86. 68

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affirmed by the publication of Arthur Bury’s Naked Gospel in spring 1690.71 Bury (1623/4–1713) was a fellow at Exeter College, prebend at Exeter, and a royal chaplain to Charles II. He was involved in a college dispute at Oxford in 1689 and was accused of heresy.72 In Bury’s view, his Naked Gospel was an attempt to promote doctrinal comprehension and to free Christianity from corruption, by arguing that the original understanding of the Trinity had been distorted. Despite its irenic claims, the book created significant controversy, it was condemned by the university’s convocation, publicly burnt on 19 August 1690, and Bury was deposed and excommunicated.73 Two responses to Bury help to explain how the publication of the book and its subsequent restraint caused contemporaries to worry about the relationship between public debate and dispute, and public order. James Parkinson (1653–1722) was a popular tutor at Lincoln College, he was also a firm supporter of Whiggish principles during the 1680s and had dabbled in republican politics.74 In 1683, just as the university was keen to demonstrate publicly its unwavering loyalty to the Crown, he was accused by college fellows of expressing ‘unwarrantable and seditious principles’.75 Expelled from the university, the Glorious Revolution strengthened his political commitment, before he was readmitted to Oxford after the intervention of Archbishop Tillotson.76 Within a year of the revolution he commented on Bury’s Naked Gospel. Indeed, he accepted and recapitulated Bury’s own version of the publication. Far from an attempt to create controversy, the book was no more than an intervention in post-revolutionary religious debates, designed to advise the members of convocation in how they might reconcile their various factions.77 The sincerity of Bury’s Anglican Enlightenment, 266–71, and Brent S. Sirota, ‘The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State: Religious Controversy and the Making of the Postrevolutionary Church of England’, JBS, 52 (2013), 26–54. For Socinianism and trinitarian discussion in England over the longer period, see Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (2003); P.C.H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012); H.J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1951); E.M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 1945). 72 Jim Benedict, ‘Bury, Arthur (1623/4–1713)’, in ODNB. 73 Ibid. 74 J.H. Curthoys, ‘Parkinson, James (1653–1722), in ODNB. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid.; James Parkinson, An account of Mr Parkinson’s Expulsion from the University of Oxford in the late times (1689); James Parkinson, An examination of Dr Sherlock’s book, Entitled, the Case of the Allegiance due to Sovereign Powers (1691). 77 On Bury as attempting to establish comprehension, see Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy During the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Oxford’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), Aspects of English Protestantism c.1530–1730 (Manchester, 2001), 305–7. For discussions of the Naked Gospel promoting comprehension but in the process destroying the Catholic Church, see Thomas Long, An answer to a Socinian treatise, called the Naked Gospel (1691), 12–13. 71 Bulman,

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attempt to reinforce Anglican unity was demonstrated by the publication and circulation of the text. Parkinson maintained that Bury had never meant to publish the Naked Gospel: ‘because a direct address might appear too great a boldness’. Bury had only printed a limited number of his treatise so he might ‘steal a copy of it into the hand of every member of the convocation without publishing it to the world’.78 In Parkinson’s reading, there was no antecedent connection with earlier Socinians such as John Biddle and Stephen Nye and thus the book should not have invoked fears of a return to the theological anarchy of the 1650s, as it did for so many divines.79 Indeed, in Parkinson’s view the controversy was manufactured. The book had been stolen from a distributor in Holland by Bury’s opponents and then republished to a much wider public to give deliberate offence.80 Parkinson’s initial narrative emphasised how the publication of the book had been used to attack its irenic aims. He suggested the text of the Naked Gospel was in stark contrast to its emerging contemporary reputation. Where contemporaries unpicked Bury’s Trinitarian pronouncements and his obsession with the Athanasian Creed, Parkinson accentuated the need to reconcile controversies so that post-revolutionary England might become a stable polity.81 The design of the book was to reconcile religious controversies by distinguishing necessary articles to make it plain and clear to ‘vulgar capacities, and apt to remove doubt and fears, and uncertainties, and to satisfy good people’s minds touching their being in the true way of salvation’.82 In this reading, Bury’s book was framed as a contribution to the much broader issue concerning how truth might be determined in a religiously plural society. Bury acknowledged there were disputes amongst conscientious men over theological issues, many of which could never be determined with the current recourse to ‘rents and divisions, heats and matters about matters hardly determinable’.83 Both the Church and the James Parkinson, The Fire’s Continued at Oxford: or, the Decree of the Convocation for Burning the Naked Gospel (1690), 1. 79 H.J. McLachlan, ‘Nye, Stephen (1647/8–1719)’, in ODNB; Stephen D. Snobelen, ‘Biddle, John (1615/6–1662)’, in ODNB. For Socinianism and the 1650s see Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinanism (Cambridge, 2010). 80 Parkinson’s account of the Naked Gospel’s publication history is confirmed in an exchange of letters between Edward Bernard and Thomas Smith. See, Bod. MS Smith 47 f.62, Edward Bernard to Thomas Smith, 22 Mar. 1690; Bod. MS Smith 57 f.127, Thomas Smith to Edward Bernard, 27 Mar. 1690; Bod. MS Smith 47 f.63, Edward Bernard to Thomas Smith, 1 Apr. 1690; Bod. MS Smith 47 f.133, Thomas Smith to Edward Bernard, April 1690; Bod. MS Smith 57 f.143, Thomas Smith to Edward Bernard, 17 June 1690. 81 Thomas Long, An Answer to a Socinian treatise (1691); William Nicholls, An answer to an Heretical book called the Naked Gospel (1691). 82 Parkinson, The Fire’s Continued, 2. 83 Ibid., 2. 78

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state should encourage a turn away from opinions and speculations to ‘practical piety, devotion toward God and Christ, and love toward all Christians of all persuasions’.84 This defence of Bury also brought with it a connected question. If, as Parkinson claimed, the Naked Gospel was an irenic attempt to promote biblical interpretation as the key to the joint aims of religious truth and political stability, then why had the book caused so much controversy? In a scathing passage blaming the convocation of Oxford for the public reputation of the book, he railed against the university for prejudicing people against Bury through their rash and presumptuous decrees.85 Even worse, the control of the book by Oxford’s authorities was merely the latest manifestation of Papist partiality within the university.86 This claim of malevolent absolutist influence found instantiation in the Oxford Decree issued almost a decade earlier. By referring to one of the most notorious examples of press restraint in the period, Parkinson pointed backwards to make a contemporary point.87 Bury was not being controlled after careful theological disputation. Instead, as it had done in the 1680s, the university and its leaders were intervening in religious politics to push their own agenda of Toryism and sympathy to Catholicism. Such concerns suggest an anxious subtext to the politics of the early 1690s. Parkinson was worried about the political loyalty of Oxford when the revolution settlement and the safety of the new regime had not been established. Opponents of Bury, he suggested, were once again promoting ‘their horrid design of introducing popery and arbitrary government into these kingdoms, and rooting that pestilent heresy of Protestantism out of all nations’.88 This was an early sign that Whig polemic was ready to exploit the association between press restraint and tropes of Catholic tyranny. And, the Oxford Decree provided an opportunity for that connection to be given 84

Ibid., 2. The best account of the case, albeit from the perspective of Oxford religious politics is, G.V. Bennett, ‘University, Society and Church 168–1714’, in L.S. Sutherland and I.G. Mitchell (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, v. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), 394–8. See also, Bod. MS Smith 47 f.70, Edward Bernard to Thomas Smith, 17 August 1690; MS Smith 48 fos.. 333, 334, Thomas Crosthwaite to Thomas Smith, 17 Aug. 1690. 86 Parkinson’s history of conflict with the university was noted during the Trinitarian controversy in, Bod MS Smith 65 f.217, Thomas Smith to Abednego Seller, 23 June 1689; Bod. MS Ballard 22 f.50, James Newton to Arthur Charlett, 21 Nov. 1689. 87 Gilbert Burnet, A collection of papers relating to the present juncture of affairs in England (1688), 8; Samuel Johnson, Reflections on the history of Passive Obedience (1689), 5. 88 Parknson, The Fire’s Continued, 2. Because book burning had been such a frequent reaction to unorthodox publications, its history could always be exploited to contemporary ends. See, Jean Le Clerc, An historical vindication of the Naked Gospel recommended to the University of Oxford (1690), 45–6; William Sherlock, A vindication of the doctrine of the holy and ever blessed Trinity and the incarnation of the Son of God (1691), 38. 85

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concrete evidence. Parkinson stopped short of suggesting Catholicism would return, but his understanding of the 1680s and Catholic involvement in later Stuart politics shaped his approach to expression after 1689 and allowed him to criticise the taxonomy of his opponents. The Church of Rome, he commented, prohibits people from reading the Bible, so that doctrines may never be questioned; in response the Protestant Church insisted Scripture must be available to all people. This nexus rendered the restraint of Bury abhorrent in the wake of the Toleration Act. The ‘burners’ as Parkinson referred to them, would allow the Bible to be read, but would ‘persecute us if we believe not, and profess more than, or contrary to what is therein contained’.89 The point was not to emphasise dichotomous categories between Catholicism and Protestant, restraint and freedom, nor to employ them as abstract concepts; rather, it was to embed the lessons of the 1680s in the new political realities of the 1690s.90 After the Toleration Act, the behaviour of Oxford divines and their polemicists in the Church would deny Dissenters access to Scripture and salvation. The prosecution of Bury was a first step, designed to enable a general persecution, to let loose all ‘the penal laws, hungry Chancellors, peevish or bigoted justices, and rascally informers against them’.91 Parkinson’s description of the behaviour of Oxford divines resorted to a trope of Anglican intolerance with implications of Papist persecution. But, he also used his text to introduce an ambitious contemporary account of how public religious debate might be managed. He accepted the need for sincere religious enquiry of all religious sects so long as they did not impose their beliefs on others through force or coercion. And, once again, the understanding of debate and discourse sketched in Parkinson’s response to the Bury case identified the intrinsic relationship between public religion, knowledge and salvation: The Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor can be proved thereby, is not to be required of any one to be believed as an Article of Faith, or of necessary to salvation’.92

James Harrington (1664–1693) offered a very different perspective on the burning of the Naked Gospel. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, by 1690 he was a respected-enough lawyer to be employed by the university in their disputations.93 In response to Parkinson’s tract, he defended the univer89

Ibid., 11. Thomas Smalbroke makes the same point but with reference to patristic sources rather than the 1680s. Thomas Smalbroke, The judgment of the father concerning the doctrine of the Trinity opposed to Dr G. Bull’s defence of the Nicene faith (1695), 63–4. 91 Parkinson, The Fire’s Continued, 11. 92 Ibid., 11. 93 Jonathan Pritchard, ‘Harrington, James (1664–1693), in ODNB. 90

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sity’s action against Bury as ‘fair and honourable’, condemning the book as blasphemous, and full of heresy, bribery and other gross immorality.94 An extended account of the technicalities of the university’s jurisdiction, Harrington founded his Defence on questioning Bury’s account that he meant to keep his book private. If the Naked Gospel was designed only for a select audience, targeted at the deans of the university, then the print run should have amounted to no more than five hundred, and yet the book had been very publicly paraded. It was likely true that Bury had deliberately spread the book beyond his supposed audience and it allowed Harrington to make a wider point. There were widespread concerns amongst clerics that noxious books were being spread to a much wider public. Whilst many dons and senior clerics accepted that difficult theological disputation should take place within the academic sphere, wider publication exacerbated concerns that an unwary public beyond the universities were being drawn into theological error by heretical books.95 In 1693, Jonathan Edwards (1638/9–1712) published his own comment on how theological disputation had taken shape in the last three years.96 From 1689 to October 1692, Edwards served as vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford.97 Published with the encouragement of the new vice-chancellor Henry Aldrich and the Regius Professor of Divinity, William Jane, Edwards’s publication marked an additional phase of the Trinitarian crisis, which had also started in 1690 when William Sherlock had published a reply to Stephen Nye’s Brief Notes. Sherlock (1639/40–1707) was one of the most celebrated polemicists of the period. Originally a Nonjuror, he swore loyalty to the new monarchs in 1690.98 His response to Nye employed Cartesian theory to suggest that the Trinity was best conceived of as three minds, whose unity was founded in mutual consciousness.99 Sherlock’s tract gave the Trinitarian disputes impetus away from the controversy concerned with the Naked Gospel, eliciting a number of replies, and extending theological debate into the late 1690s.100 Of more importance here is how James Harrington, A Defence of the Proceedings of the Right Reverend the Visitor and fellows of Exeter College in Oxford (1690), preface; Bod. MS Tanner 27 f.215, James Harrington to Anthony Wood, 9 Oct. 1690; Bod. MS Ballard 45 f.45, Richard Sare to Arthur Charlett, 14 Feb. 1691. 95 Harrington, A Defence of the Proceedings, 47. 96 Jim Benedict, ‘Bury, Arthur (1623/4–1713)’, in ODNB. For Edwards and practical Calvinist theology see, Wallace, Shapers of English Calvinism, 205–42. 97 Philip Dixon, ‘Edwards, Jonathan (1638/9–1712)’, in ODNB. 98 William E. Burns, ‘Sherlock, William (1639/40–1707)’, in ODNB; William Sherlock, The Case of Allegiance due to the Sovereign Powers (1690). 99 There is an excellent discussion of Sherlock’s position in, Samuel David Fornecker, ‘Arminianism and Anti-Remonstrant Polemic in the Later Stuart and Early Hanoverian Church of England’, PhD thesis (unpublished), Cambridge University (2019), 44–67. 100 William Sherlock, A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Every Blessed Trinity (1691); Robert South, Animadversions upon Dr Sherlock’s Book (1693); William Sherlock, 94

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Sherlock and his interlocutors discussed how public disputation in the press should be pursued. Edward Wetenhall (1636–1713), bishop of Kilmore and Ardaghcase, maintained that the disputes were raising uncertainty about the Church’s right to monopolise and proclaim the truth. Anti-Trinitarians were subtle, sober and industrious and would not accept public refutation. Indeed, ‘they have a Zeal too, no less ardent than that of Church-men: And Presses, at home or abroad, are and ever will be open; so that they will never be silent. An Answer will only breed a Reply.’101 Yet, Sherlock took a different position. Having been accused of unorthodoxy, he insisted that the Church would die unless it engaged in arguments and rebuttal. As he noted, it was better that heterodox pamphlets ‘should be in a hundred hands with an answer, than in five hands without one’. Indeed, in the midst of the dispute he had also dismissed the point of a convocation being empowered to control books, suggesting it would take too long to control controversial ideas, and they would spread unanswered.102 Jonathan Edwards’s condemnation of anti-Trinitarianism generally, and Socinianism specifically, as corrupt sects lying in error, was based on historical research, tracing credal corruption from the Apostolic age, through the reformation and into the 1650s. Far from a desire to revive primitive Christianity and to facilitate doctrinal comprehension, as Bury and his supporters claimed, the recent and widespread dispersal of error was merely heresy repackaged, hiding Socinians’s joint endeavours to corrupt the Church of God.103 Alongside his historical analysis, Edwards set the emergence of erroneous doctrine within a specific contemporary context. Never in history, he claimed, had the nation been so pestered with such large numbers of Socinian books.104 Since the revolution Edwards had been concerned with the dangers caused by speculative publications. In 1690 he corresponded with the earl of Shrewsbury on the issue, eventually eliciting a response from the secretary, ‘I find these impertinences obtruded upon all kinds of people in most parts of the kingdom. I hope the endeavours that are being made to discover the authors will meet with success.’105 Three years later, however, the A Defense of Dr Sherlock’s Notion of a Trinity in Unity (1693); Robert South, Tritheism Charged upon Dr Sherlock’s New Notion of the Trinity (1693). 101 Alexander Gordon, revised by S.J. Connolly, ‘Wetenhall, Edward (1636–1713)’, in ODNB; Edward Wetenhall, An Earnest and Compassionate Suit for Forbearance to the Late Learned Writers of Some Controversies at Present (1691), 9. Kemp, ‘Ideas of Liberty of the Press’, 213. 102 William Sherlock, An Apology for Writing Against Socinians (1693), 10.22, William Sherlock, A Defence of the Dean of St Paul’s for Writing Against the Socinians (1693), 55–6; Kemp, ‘Ideas of Liberty of the Press’, 213–15. 103 Arthur Bury, The naked gospel (1690); Edward Stillingfleet, The mysteries of the Christian faith asserted and vindicated (1691); John Tillotson, A sermon concerning the unity of the divine nature and the B. Trinity (1693). 104 Jonathan Edwards, A preservative against Socinianism (1693), preface. 105 SP 44/97 f.235, 16 Jan. 1690, The Earl of Shrewsbury to Dr Edwards.

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contagion of books was not just political, it was now theological and taking place within Edwards’s institution. Not only had books been published in direct opposition to the divinity and cross of Christ, the enemies of the holy religion had ‘the confidence to publish their impious opinions, not only without leave, but in opposition to the just authority and the known and standing laws of this nation’.106 The failure to take action against Sherlock’s books was not just a failure of jurisdictional authority. In the absence of effective and ferocious control, unwary readers, Edwards maintained, would have their minds corrupted from the simplicity of Christ. Nor was the threat posed by Socinian books merely personal. The coldness and indifference shown to the great mysteries of religion had diffused amongst men of all ranks, causing England to become a nation of never before seen infidelity.107 Despite this pessimistic view of early 1690s England, Edwards did acknowledge one positive aspect provided by the Trinitarian controversy. ‘Our writers have been employed with great success’, he commented, ‘in vindicating our Holy Religion, from the bold and impudent cavils of these heretics; and so have stood upon the defensive part’.108 In 1693, the time was now ripe for defence of orthodox Christianity to build on their initial accomplishments. Every man was a soldier; they were required to undertake an offensive war against infidels, to fight against all enemies of Christ and pernicious opinions.109 Edwards’s personal exhortation for opponents of Bury and Sherlock to go further than they had already done underscores the worries of many churchmen caused by the advent of a new and deeply divisive religious controversy. Whilst Edwards and his supporters understood that William’s new government was committed to public engagement through print and sermons, they also wanted there to be rules and limits applied to public disputation, especially when salvation was at stake. Instead, the rules of disputation were constantly being debated and had not been settled by the Williamite regime. No doubt, Edwards accepted that any government had to provide the nation with policies that achieved peace and political stability, but he continued to insist on the promotion of religious truth so each man might enter heaven.110 At first, church leaders seemed content to take the course offered by Sherlock, engaging in disputation and allowing the debates to run their course. By early 1695, however, Archbishop Tenison (1636–1715) appears to have despaired of the behaviour of many churchmen. He suppressed John Bradock’s Deus unus et trinus, a supportive defence of Sherlock, just

A preservative against Socinianism, preface. preface. For Edwards’s complaint of infidelity within a context of reason see Connell, Secular Chains, 139. 108 Edwards, A preservative against Socinianism, preface. 109 Ibid., the preface. 110 Ibid., the preface. 106 Edwards, 107 Ibid.,

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before publication.111 Within the year, in consultation with the secretary of state, he issued a new set of injunctions to the clergy.112 Directions to our Archbishops and Bishops, signed by the earl of Shrewsbury, made full use of the structure of the Church, and was commanded to be published and observed in every diocese. It acknowledged that discussions of the Trinity in writings and sermons had been of dangerous consequence to the Church and state and must be prevented.113 This was a basic attempt to use the structure, jurisdiction and existing canons of the Church to contain theological discussion of the nature of God. Shrewsbury demanded that any sermon on the Trinity must conform to the Holy Scriptures and must agree to the three creeds and the Thirty-Nine Articles. Equally, no new terms concerned with the Trinity were to be used in any sermons. This doctrinal orthodoxy was to be enforced by strict observation of the fifty-third canon, forbidding public disputation between preachers, and that above all else, they must ‘refrain from bitter invectives and scurrilous language against all persons’.114 By 1695 it was axiomatic that the concerns with preaching also extended to printing. The Injunctions instructed that the clergy should desist in the pulpit and demanded that discussions of the Trinity should no longer be spread in books and pamphlets. Both the government and Church instructed the clergy and civil officers to do their duty by executing the existing laws against all persons, not just the clergy, who ‘give scandal and disturbance in our church and Kingdom’.115 This material provides us with a textbook example of the tensions caused by the Trinitarian crisis. This evidence demonstrates just how far the public manifestation of controversial theological debate, in this case, exemplified by the Trinity, caused grave concern amongst the government and the church establishment. Indeed, this appears to be a rare moment when William’s government was provoked to such an extent that they stated openly what they believed an orthodox theological position to be, and at least to threaten its uniform imposition through ecclesiastical and civil structures. One might go as far as to say that the Injunctions seemed to threaten toleration itself. For, as some people were to point out three years later when the government enacted blasphemy legislation, the Trinity could not be easily defined by Scriptural evidence. Indeed, using the Bible 111 Andrew

Starkie, ‘Bradock, John (1655/6–1719)’, in ODNB. to our Archbishops and bishops for the preserving of unity in the Church, and the purity of the Christian faith (1695). Issuing injunction in this way suited Tenison’s use of injunctions and visitations to enforce the canons of the Church, Edward Carpenter, Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Times (1948), 131–41; SP 44/150 f.153., 15 Feb. 1696, Ecclesiastical injunctions issued by the king to the archbishops of York and Canterbury. 113 Ibid., 4. 114 Ibid., 5–6. 115 Ibid., 7. 112 Directions

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to limit theological expression might well drag at least some Dissenters into illegality. The rarity of such a strident demand for compliance to the rubric of the Church suggests we need to examine the Trinitarian controversy once again. However, it is crucial that we do not just consider it to be an internal religious matter fought out in hallowed university halls. Rather we need to unravel the composite connections between theological disputation, ecclesiastical jurisdiction, public debate and, crucially, freedom of expression, in order to understand why, by 1695, the government was so desperate to limit Trinitarian discussion in the name of the ‘preservation of the peace and unity of the church, together with the purity of the Christian faith’.116 The Injunctions were taken seriously by the Williamite episcopate. Henry Compton (1631/2–1713), bishop of London and an assiduous diocesan, wanted the Injunctions enforced and commented on them publicly.117 He concurred that there was an increasing propinquity between Trinitarian debate in the early 1690s, deist publications and atheistic practices, which were bound together by sceptical attitudes to the truth of Scripture. Much like godly reformers, he maintained the clergy were required to fulfil their apostolic calling to instruct the public in books and through the pulpit. Compton’s vision that the wider populace might be brought to salvation through plain explication of biblical texts was tempered by concerns that Socinians, ‘under pretence of some masterly argument’, seem to ‘despise and reject all others that have been urged before theirs, as if they alone had found out the infallible touchstone of truth’.118 As a practical solution, he not only instructed his clergy to desist from Trinitarian debate but also offered his parishioners a list of books for their edification, ‘to give them time to examine more than what was absolutely necessary to furnish them with a compendious notice of the principles of the Christian religion’.119 Compton was inverting the tradition of the Oxford Decree, binding books together so they might provide a more complex overall picture of required belief beyond the reach of a single publication. In fact, at the end the list, Compton also provided the reader with a summation of the horrid assertions and blasphemous principles promoted by Socinians and their fellow travellers. The fundamental aim was to confute the consequences that flowed from the deist’s claim of God’s anthropomorphic nature. This central point introduced an implication for how men might live their lives and a godly society might be constituted. For, in Compton’s eyes, the portrayal of God’s human qualities and the denial of his omniscience 116 Ibid.,

4. MS Ballard 5 f.158, Edmund Gibson to Arthur Charlett, 23 May 1699. 118 Andrew M. Coleby, ‘Compton, Henry (1631/2–1713)’, in ODNB; The Bishop of London’s Tenth Conference with his Clergy, upon the King’s directions to the Archbishops and Bishops (1701), 25. 119 Ibid., 26. 117 Bod.

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had two direct conclusions: ‘they deny his justice, by asserting that there is nothing in his nature to exact a punishment for sin’ and, ‘they assert, that God, notwithstanding his positive declaration to the contrary, may shorten the punishment of sin by making it finite’.120 The new Injunctions were initially applied to control clerical disputation. On Trinity Sunday, 1696, William Payne (1649/50–1697) preached a sermon in Westminster Abbey.121 Taking as his text Tim. 3, the mystery of the faith in good conscience, the sermon expressed sympathy for Sherlock’s interpretation of the Trinity. White Kennett noted in his diary that the sermon caused enough offence for Dr Peter Birch and Dr Bravat to complain to the dean of Westminster that it contained false doctrine.122 The dean requested that the two complaining clergymen provide him with the specific heterodox elements of the sermon in writing, ‘I That the Divinity is ascribed only equivocally to the Son and Holy Ghost. II That always when the Scriptures speaks of one only God; they are to be understood of the father only. III that the trinity of the three divine persons is a kind specificial numerical trinity.’123 The two complainants insisted the sermon was blasphemous and heterodox and the bishop of Rochester instructed Payne to desist from preaching anti-Trinitarian sermons.124 The restraint of Payne rested on ecclesiastical discipline. The success of the act of censorship by the bishop rested on two interconnected ideas: the clergyman had to accept the censure and, if he did not, the bishop had to know that Payne did not possess a powerful public to appeal to over the case. Such a policy required careful negotiation. In late 1695, Payne wrote to the archbishop informing Tenison that he had meant no offence, but merely meant to defend Sherlock.125 He continued in a conciliatory manner that he would no longer preach or publish without ‘your consent at least in private’. Indeed, Payne accepted the archbishop’s view of who was the real enemy to the Church. ‘I am of the opinion’, he wrote, ‘that it is necessary both to write and preach too against Socinianism, as formerly against Popery, avoiding all differences among our selves as much as possible’.126 At the same time, however, Payne worried that Socinianism was being used to promote political division. In his view, the clergy had to engage in debate, otherwise the occasion would ‘be given to the Jacobites and others to clamour that Socinianism is both connived 120 Ibid.,

28. Greig, ‘Payne, William (1649/50–1697)’, in ODNB; William Payne, The Mystery of the Christian Faith and the Blessed Trinity Vindicated (1697). 122 BL MS Lansdowne, f.107, side note; Robert D. Cornwall, ‘Birch, Peter (1651/2– 1710)’, in ODNB. 123 BL MS Lansdowne, f.107, side note. 124 BL MS Lansdowne, f.107, side note. 125 LPL MS 930, no.29, William Payne to Archbishop Tenison, 26 Dec. 1695. 126 LPL MS 930, no.29, William Payne to Archbishop Tenison, 26 Dec. 1695. 121 Martin

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at and encouraged, and as they pretend, got very much into the Court and Whiggish party’.127 In fact, Payne refused the censure. He wrote an open, and published, letter to the bishop, complaining of his restraint, questioning the validity of his treatment by the bishop and asserting his own orthodoxy. Payne effectively destroyed the policy of Thomas Sprat, bishop of Rochester, to keep the case away from the gaze of the public.128 Indeed, to use the language of Payne, we might suggest that his defence rested on appealing to his fellow clergymen and threatening to create ‘further quarrel and disturbance’.129 Sprat’s authority was preserved, and the case was brought to an end by Payne’s untimely death in 1697. Despite the Injunctions, any politician choosing to believe that revolution would usher in a period of political stability based on a new mature understanding of public discussion had their naivety exposed quickly. In the autumn of 1696, Humphrey Prideaux informed Tenison that the philanthropist and associate of John Locke and Archbishop Tillotson, Thomas Firmin (1632–1697), had recently passed through his archdeaconry.130 According to Prideaux, for the last seven years Firmin had been continually sending Socinian pamphlets into the country and the Injunctions had not stopped him. Not only did he deliver books to the gentry and tradesmen but he sent also packets of heretical books to ministers.131 The discussions outlined above were not defined by freedom and restraint, nor were men like Arthur Bury being persecuted, as some historians have insisted.132 Instead, churchmen of various ecclesiastical positions were negotiating how public debate should be conducted – and those discussions took place at the very top of the Church. Much like Tenison, Edward Fowler, bishop of Gloucester saw the Glorious Revolution as an opportunity for irenic, moral and spiritual renewal.133 Unlike Tenison, an early supporter of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (SRM), Fowler (1631/2–1714) also intervened in the Trinitarian disputes.134 In 1695 both men corresponded, discussing the best response to the continual public Trinitarian debates.135 Whilst both men agreed that the doctrine of 127 LPL

MS 930, no.29, William Payne to Archbishop Tenison, 26 Dec. 1695. Morgan, ‘Sprat, Thomas (bap.1635–1713)’, in ODNB. 129 William Payne, A Letter from Dr Pro the Bishop of R––––––– in Vindication of his Sermon on Trinity Sunday (1696), 3. 130 LPL MS 930, no. 56, Humphrey Prideaux to Archbishop Tenison, 22 Oct. 1706. For Firmin see, Philip Dixon, ‘Firmin, Thomas (1632–1697)’, in ODNB; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 106–7. 131 LPL MS 930, no. 56, Humphrey Prideaux to Archbishop Tenison, 22 Oct. 1706. 132 Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 107. 133 John Spurr, ‘Fowler, Edward (1631/2–1714)’, in ODNB. 134 Edward Fowler, Certain Propositions, by which the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity is so explained According to the Ancient Fathers (1694). 135 LPL MS 933, no. 37, Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester to Archbishop Tenison, June 1695. 128 John

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the Trinity had to be maintained, they also concurred that closing down on debate offered two serious dangers. First, it gave succour to opponents who might well take it as a tacit admission that the Church was unable to defend its central creeds. Perhaps worse, banning discussions of the Trinity insulted orthodox divines ‘who have done almost the whole service against fanaticism and Popery’.136 A sober assessment of the rancorous Trinitarian disputes – sometimes confined to private elite university disputation but often seeping into the rancorous cut and thrust of 1690s pamphleteering – indicates the problems that resorting to post-publication censorship, as a means of regulating politico-religious disputation, might cause. If, for one moment, we return to John Edwards’s publications in the 1690s, we can see him forewarning any alert reader that the casual loss of pre-publication restraint, a practice that many believed was essential to prohibiting the spread of poisonous doctrine, far from healing wounds would create further division. In 1695, he explained how many recent texts, by endeavouring to prove that books of Scripture were merely fragments, imperfectly passed down through generations, were presenting a perversely inverted vision of true Protestantism in which anti-Trinitarianism and ultimately atheism would surely triumph.137 Edwards’s response to his theological and doctrinal enemies was at once positive and negative. In print he recognised that he had little chance of convincing atheists to turn away from their aberrant creed, whilst at the same time insisting his duty was to do something towards ‘preventing the spreading of that pernicious infection which they are the authors of: I hope I shall effect something towards checking the progress of that hellish ferment which works in the world at this day’.138 Representing Licensing

The language of infection employed by Edwards is vital to understanding how the lapse of licensing contributed to political instability. Although they never agreed on its exact definition, both reformers in the SRM and clerics engaged in Trinitarian disputation lamented how errant ideas endangered the deliverance of individuals to heaven and problematised Williamite providential claims. As we have seen, this did not mean the relationship between debate and control were orthogonal. Instead, churchmen and politicians engaged the perpetrators of controversial doctrine in disputation whilst simultaneously seeking restraint and punishment. But the 136 LPL MS 933, no. 37, Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester to Archbishop Tenison, June 1695. 137 John Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism (1695), 45–6. 138 John Edwards, A Demonstration of the Existence and Providence of God (1696), vii.

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reality was that post-publication censorship and refutation still allowed errant ideas to spread and infect the nation. Seen in this way, licensing was a crucial policy position, for it offered an antidote to poison, stilling ideas before they infected others. In this sense, then, offering understandings of how and why licensing fell, or describing a transition between a pre-publication and post-publication world, valuable as they are, are missing the point.139 The existence or not of licensing remained a leading source of partisan controversy throughout the post-revolutionary period. These circumstances provide an important context for the charges of laxity that were levelled at various ministries. But they also reveal the problems caused by the granularity and plasticity of religious politics in the period. The dizzying array of opinions created by the Glorious Revolution, many of which competed with each other, coupled with mixed ministries, a diverse bishops’ bench and a body of clergy made up of variant theological and ecclesiological positions, ensured that there was little agreement on what should or should not be licensed. Despite the shifting political and religious identities of the early 1690s, licensing remained an essential policy option when controlling debate. Within months of assuming power the new regime signalled its commitment to pre-publication oversight, appointing James Fraser as the new licenser to the press and initiating prosecutions for altering books post-licensing and printing without an imprimatur.140 To at least one contemporary observer, the most striking feature of Fraser’s tenure was his partisan positioning. Edmund Bohun, a future licenser, complained that within days of the revolution and Fraser’s appointment, ‘we had all the traitorous books of 1640 reprinted to justify our revolution; and the doctrine of passive obedience became the most scandalous notion in the world; and men spoke and wrote, with authority, against the divine right of princes, and against the hereditary succession of the crown’.141 Nor did the burden of licensing rest solely with the secretary of state and their licensers; bishops and their chaplains and the universities continued to scrutinise and approve material for print.142 Nor was licensing used just as a means of control. Much as 139 Raymond

Astbury, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act in 1693 and its Lapse in 1695’, The Library (1978), 296–322; N.M. Dawson, ‘The Death Throes of the Licensing Act and the “Funeral Pomp” of Queen Mary II, 1695’, The Journal of Legal History, 26 (2005), 119–42; Hanson, Government and the Press, 7–35; Philip Hamburger, ‘The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press’, Stanford Law Review, 37 (1985), 661–765; Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester, 1977), 113–14, 152–3. 140 TNA, SP 44/338 f.236, Authority given by the earl of Shrewsbury to James Fraser to act as his deputy in licensing books and papers, 19 Mar. 1689; TNA, SP 44/97 f.57, The Earl of Shrewsbury to the Master and Wardens of the Stationers Company, 9 Apr. 1689, Stationers Company F. ff.114–15, Langley Curtis, 6 Mar. 1689. 141 Edmund Bohun, The Diary and Autobiography of Edmund Bohun, with Memoir (1923), 84. 142 Bod. MS Tanner 33 f.176, Thomas Comber to William Sancroft, 15 Jan. 1689; Bod.

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occurred in the 1620s, there is some evidence that the new regime, by utilising informal contacts and pointing authors to sympathetic licensers, privately shaped material to suit their desired public position.143 In autumn 1691, for example, Robert Southwell wrote to William King, describing his attempts to obtain a license for the archbishop’s State of Protestants of Ireland. Not only did Southwell approach the earl of Nottingham he also showed the manuscript to Lord Worcester and the bishop of Sarum. Nor was this a simple attempt to obtain official approval. The manuscript was returned to King with advice for placing marginal notes in the finished book so that the present reign was compared favourably to James II’s.144 Other luminaries in the new regime also engaged in discussions of how licensing might be applied. In 1689, Gilbert Burnet was asked whether a set of manuscript sheets were illegal. He thanked the earl of Shrewsbury for the material but considered that there was little point in seeking a prosecution. Even if the material was problematic, it could be answered easily, and he saw ‘nothing in the sheets that is punishable, so this can be carried no further than any unlicensed pamphlet may be’.145 The manner in which ministries in the early 1690s used licensing to control and gloss books, to create new ideologies, suggests that pre-publication control was crucial to how they shaped the perception of their position, at a time when they were establishing the stability of the new regime and negotiating the emergence of religious pluralism. In recent years our understanding of the specifics of the renewal of the Printing Act in 1693 and its eventual lapse of 1695 has increased immeasurably. Historians have unpicked the negotiations in parliament concerned with the technicalities of licensing, how and whether it worked, and considered what type of legislation might replace pre-publication control.146 In light of this recent research, the final section of this chapter concerns itself with how licensing was represented in the early 1690s. It takes Charles Blount’s Reasons Offered for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1693) to consider how one contemporary placed licensing in historical and contemporary context. Charles Blount (1654–1693) was a prominent freethinker. Contemporaries dismissed him as an unoriginal disciple of Hobbes and Spinoza, but more recently he has been appreciated as a publicist of the early English MS Cherry, 22 f.64, Henry Dodwell to Henry Compton, 25 Apr. 1692. 143 Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, HJ, 41 (1998), 625–51. 144 William King, The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the late King James’s Government (1691); HMC, Second Report, 235–6, Publication of ‘State of Protestants of Ireland’, 6 Feb. 1691. 145 TNA, SP 32/2 f.8, Gilbert Burnet to the earl of Shrewsbury, 7 Sept. 1689. 146 For an excellent discussion of licensing legislation and Locke’s role, see, Kemp, ‘Ideas of Liberty of the Press’, 222–33. Kemp also makes the point that licensing lapsed in 1694 and was not revived.

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Enlightenment.147 His Reasons offered for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing is more normally seen as part of a wider campaign to discredit the activities of Edmund Bohun and bring about the end of licensing. Although Blount’s responsibility for the text has recently been brought into question, the book’s precise authorship is less important than its content, which allows revealing insight into how a prominent freethinker considered the rules of public debate might be arranged and enforced.148 Framed as a letter from a gentleman in the country to a member of parliament, it began with a preamble: the author wanted an end to the Printing Act coupled with a firm wish that the press be open to all.149 From the start, then, the author appealed to variegated audiences. The tract was a lobby document to parliament, providing MPs with information so that they might make an informed decision about whether to renew pre-publication restraint. Simultaneously, it appealed to the print trade, seeking the support of printers, publishers and authors in the name of wider learning. To these ends, the author rehearsed a set of positions, at least some of which, although in different form, could be found in previous tracts concerned with the press: the history of licensing, its operation and its effect. The author then turned to the first issue, his contention that licensing found its origins in the inquisition. This permitted a narrative account of the restraint of books, which carefully outlined how the Catholic Church had steadily corrupted the initial relationship between secular and ecclesiastical power to take control of the print trade. Far from licensing being a concern of the early Church, the power to prohibit and burn books had only been restricted to the emperor taking advice from the General Councils. In a manner echoing almost verbatim previous comments by Paolo Sarpi and John Milton, the author excoriated the Papacy for distorting this initial settlement.150 Until the year 800, bishops had left it to the individual’s conscience whether books were commendable. But soon after, precisely because they desired political power, various popes impinged on individual consciences. For a time after the turn of the millennium, the censuring of books was sparing; the Papacy was contented with occasionally burning and prohibiting books. But this benign attitude was altered by the emergence of new types of heresy, and eventually the Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 142–8; Dario Pfanner, ‘Blount, Charles (1654–1693)’, in ODNB; Kemp, ‘Ideas of Liberty of the Press’, 218–21; John Redwood, ‘Charles Blount, Deism, and English Freethought’, JHI, 35 (1976), 490–8. 148 Mark Goldie, ‘Edmund Bohun and Jus Gentium in the Revolution Debate, 1689–1693’, HJ, 20 (1977), 569–86; Mark Goldie, ‘Charles Blount’s Intention in Writing “King William and Queen Mary Conquerors” (1693)’, Notes and Queries, 223 (1978), 527–32; Randy Robertson, ‘Charles Blount, Plotter’, Notes and Queries, 51 (2004), 375–7. 149 Reasons humbly offered for the liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1693), 3. 150 John Milton, Areopagitica; a Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing (1644); Paolo Sarpi, The Historie of the Council of Trent (1620). 147 Champion,

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advent of the Reformation. The opposition of Wycliff and Hus to the political pretensions of the Roman Church drove the Papal Court to a stricter policy of prohibition. In keeping with their avaricious desire for power Martin V and Leo X used the inquisition to introduce catalogues and indexes of prohibition. They raked through the entrails of good authors, extending their power beyond heresy to politics until their final invention, ‘that no book, pamphlet or paper should be printed, as if St Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of paradise unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of two or three glutton-friars’.151 This was a stark political vision, portraying licensing as merely a function of Catholic tyranny. No ancient state, polity or church had approved of pre-publication control. Instead the author asked his readers to understand books as a metaphor: until the intervention of the Papacy, ‘books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb’.152 As a number of historians have pointed out, if it was written by Blount, the tract also operated at the very personal level of attacking the licenser Edmund Bohun. Yet the author’s excoriation of Bohun as a person and as a licenser also operated at an ideological level. Whoever the person was, controlling books on behalf of the Church and state before the audience had judged them was an intellectual impossibility: it required a licenser to possess the grace of infallibility and immunity to corruption, attributes that were impossible to assume in the judgement of books. Equally, this particular form of restraint was an affront to learning. According to the author, every man who writes summons up all his reason and deliberation, takes himself to be informed in his writing and confers with judicious friends. To use a licenser to judge this pure intellectual process was not only a dishonour and derogation to the author, it was also an insult to the privilege and dignity of learning.153 This understanding of the writing process as oppositional, between the pure intellectual exercise of writing and the Machiavellian politique of licensing, could equally be used to make a wider ideological point. In Blount’s view, licensing reduced the quality of the country. Again, at least initially, this point was negatively demonstrated and linked back to the origins of restraint. Precisely because it was a form of Catholic political tyranny, to uphold licensing was equivalent to allowing the French to invade, blockade ports, and deny the English nation trade and wealth. Blount’s interpretation of history posed him a problem. If, as he maintained, licensing was an extension of Catholic tyranny, how had it endured so long in England? This problem permitted a more nuanced intervention into contemporary politics. Returning to the sixteenth century, the 151 Reasons 152 Ibid.,

4. 153 Ibid., 7.

humbly offered, 4.

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author claimed that licensing had been given impetus by the Reformation. In the face of a new religious challenge, popes, by subterfuge and desperate to defend malice and mystery, had used licensing to extinguish the light of the Reformation.154 This suggestion provided an important context for England in the seventeenth century. Whilst Protestantism had been established, in Blount’s eyes it had been only malformed and precarious, susceptible to further distortion. To illustrate the point, he turned to the most famous licensers of the seventeenth century: Archbishop Laud and Roger L’Estrange. Both men had distorted the system; although they had not established an expurgatory index, they had established an expurgatory press, all in the name of popery and tyranny.155 Blount’s association of licensing with Catholic tyranny was not just a negative stance. He constructed a positive sense of how the Williamite regime might reset the rules of public debate in the absence of pre-publication restraint. Returning once again to the Reformation, he insisted that the point of Luther’s movement was to allow all the winds of doctrine to be let loose to play upon the earth. In other words, truth and falsehood would be set against each other in a free and open encounter, and truth would surely win out, for it is ‘strong next to the almighty, she needs no policies, nor strategems, nor licensing to make her victorious’.156 Nor had English clerics always resisted Luther’s entreaties. In Blount’s historical interpretation, Archbishop Abbot was happy to engage his opponents in religious disputation. Laud, however, had distorted his predecessor’s policy, preferring an approach of tyranny in which ‘to publish a good book was made then a sin, and an ill one virtue; and while one came out with authority, the other one could not have a dispensation … and the most religious truth might be expunged and suppressed in order to the false and secular interests of some of the clergy’.157 Alluring as this combination of philosophical assertion and historical evidence might be, an astute contemporary reader would surely have recognised the problem in Blount’s reasoning. Whilst an environment of open disputation might create truth in which each man might find salvation, it might also create a kind of ‘sectarian slurry’ generating multiple theological positions and further unsettling political stability.158 Careful reading of Blount’s text reveals how little he cared for specific theological exactitude. Rather, his defence of the press as a conduit by which the truth might be established saw religion as a cipher for politics. For he wove into his account a blistering attack on people in the new regime who had justified licensing 154 Ibid.,

8. 9. 156 Ibid., 8. 157 Ibid., 9. 158 For a similar comment but in a different context see David Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), 206. 155 Ibid.,

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and continued to see it as a policy solution. The success of the recent revolution, he argued, was down to a few men of note who had circumvented licensing and enlightened the people. It might be reasonably hoped, he continued, that none of these persuaders will resort to the bondage ‘which they themselves have wrought so much good by condemning, and execute the most Dominican part of the Inquisition’.159 If Blount’s reasoning and compilation of historical sources marshalled to attack licensing at first glance seem like an argument for a free press, further examination suggests a rather more complex reading. In keeping with the concerns of many in government, Blount insisted licensing was inefficient for the ends it should achieve. ‘Do we not see’, he asked the reader, that the weekly and daily printing of Jacobite libels, against the establishment of a new Protestant regime, was precisely the material that licensing should prevent. The failure to protect the state from Jacobitism only confirmed Blount in his position that a new policy should be initiated: And as for regulating the press, surely no better advice can be given, that no book be printed, unless the publisher and the author’s name, or at least the publisher’s be registered. Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man’s prevention can use.160

Far from arguing for a free press, then, Blount suggested that the extant system of licensing might be used to control errant books post-publication. And such a policy was perfectly compatible with the government’s insistence on the continued prosecution of Jacobite authors and printers in the early 1690s. At the same time, however, Blount left unsaid the nature of religious restraint and offered few practical solutions to the poisonous spread of noxious ideas that concerned so many churchmen. Neither freedom nor restraint

In early 1695 Edward Bernard, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, turned to the recent theological disputes that had so rocked the stability of his own university and the wider nation. Taking note of recent government intervention, he informed his friend Thomas Smith confidently, ‘the new instructions against writing or printing about the Trinity otherwise than what the 3 creeds express has laid that fierce dispute’.161 Despite Bernard’s optimism, the sheer desire of so many to debate and settle the true nature of 159 Reasons

humbly offered, 8. 8. 161 Bod. MS Smith 47 f.193, Edward Bernard to Thomas Smith, 15 Feb. 1695; H. De Luzancy, A Sermon Preached at Colchester, June 2. 1697 (1697), preface. 160 Ibid.,

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the Godhead ensured the continuance of public and rancorous Trinitarian debates well into 1695. Joseph Bingham and Arthur Charlett, for example, exchanged concerned letters in the winter of 1695/6, discussing Bingham’s sermon and printed tract attacking William Sherlock. Indeed, Bingham’s search for reassurance from his friend no doubt sprang from a description of his own work by an opponent as ‘dangerous or scandalous, or in the least prejudicial to the Holy Catholic Faith, or to my Holy Mother the Church of England’.162 In the face of such committed ideological debate, it took Bernard only a month to alter his perspective. Writing again to his friend and bemoaning the ineffectiveness of government instructions, he observed, ‘the Socinians who write well for their old heresy should be answered’.163 These letters reveal a private and public concern with establishing how various institutions – here the government and the University of Oxford – might try to control Trinitarian debate, and in doing so, might also point to how the wider public might engage with theological problems. By the end of 1695, respondents began to describe how Trinitarian heresy was transforming into a wider entity they labelled deism. On 19 November 1695, for example, William Lloyd, bishop of Worcester, complained of weekly blasphemous pamphlets, many of which under the guise of promoting Socinianism now formed a coherent campaign of deism. Disturbed by their free public circulation and protesting his own modesty, he believed it fell to him to take up his pen in defence of orthodox Christianity, informing his friend Henry Dodwell, ‘I considered myself as a merchant ship that hath no great store of powder and shot; but seeing others weaker than myself like to be taken by the Turks I should think it my duty to spend what I had in their defence against the enemies of God and his religion.’164 Within the year, the worries of Lloyd and Edwards that anti-Trinitarianism was morphing into a coherent campaign of deism, the concern that the government and the Church had failed to set the correct limits to public debate and had now allowed licensing to lapse, were given a very public face. Sometime in early 1694, a cleric left John Toland a letter expressing his concern that he had ‘great learning but little religion’.165 Within a year the ecclesiastical establishment was aware of just how unorthodox Toland was. Even before the publication of Christianity not Mysterious, Archbishop Holdsworth, Impar conatui, or, Mr J.B. the author of an answer to the animadversions on the Dean of St. Paul’s vindication of the Trinity rebuked (1695). Holdsworth was responding to the pseudo-anonymous J.B., The doctrine of the fathers and schools considered: concerning the articles of a trinity of divine persons, and the unity of God (1695), unpaginated. ESTC attributes the tract to John Bradock, but the following letters suggest Bingham was the author: Bod. MS Ballard 15 f.9, Joseph Bingham to Arthur Charlett, 12 Dec. 1695; Bod. MS Ballard 15 f.12, Joseph Bingham to Arthur Charlett, 21 Jan. 1696. 163 Bod. MS Smith 47 f.161, Edward Bernard to Thomas Smith, 23 Mar. 1695. 164 Bod. MS Eng. letters 29 f.111, William Lloyd to Henry Dodwell, 19 Nov. 1695. 165 Champion, Republican Learning, 69. 162 Thomas

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Tenison was told by Arthur Charlett that Toland was ‘trampling on the Common, talking against the Scriptures, commending Commonwealths, justifying the murder of King Charles, railing against Priests in general’.166 Toland was in the throes of writing and publishing Christianity not Mysterious, a book that was to become notorious for attacking the very foundations of the Christian faith. The next chapter explains how Toland thought public debate should be managed, and uses the furore created by his publication to explain how others thought Toland, his book and the wider print trade should be controlled.

166 LPL

MS 942 110, Arthur Charlett to Archbishop Tenison, 25 Oct. 1695.

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2 Christianity not Mysterious (1696): Deism and the Liberty of the Press William Morgan, an obscure army officer, agreed with the Williamite project to improve the morals of the country.1 Unlike those involved in Anglican renewal, however, he suggested that godly providence could only be delivered by clerical reform. For too long the country had been plagued with priestcraft, practised by a sect of men who had abandoned their reason and were addicted to controversy. Far from bringing men to salvation and peace, as they were ordained to do, too many English clerics engaged in disputes, writing books and pamphlets to the ‘disturbance and confusion of mankind’. In Morgan’s view, priests were hypocrites, seeking power for self-interested ends, creating tumults and disturbing the civil peace. Their hypocrisy was most graphically exposed by their attitude to public disputation. It was impossible to say anything against them for they insisted they must not be meddled with, for the press would be broke and the ‘book burned’, and yet far from engaging in reasonable debate they promoted unnatural heats from the ‘pulpit and the press’ constantly disturbing the nation’s peace.2 What good, he continued, had their canting, their ‘preaching and prating, their scribbling and printing’ done in the last sixteen hundred years?3 Morgan’s tract offered little solution to the canting priests of the age, insisting reform was the duty of politicians. But his tract points to an important development in the 1690s. Both John Locke and John Toland supplemented their anticlericalism with attacks on how clerics distorted public debate with tyrannous actions and their exclusive claims to mediating the truth.4 In this sense, then, both Locke’s and Toland’s anticlericalism might be considered as a continuation of Whig ideology, which has been traced back to the exclusion crisis.5 Anticlericalism can, of course, be made to wear many different guises, but the broad argument has remained much the same in the last decades. Attacking priests for their imposture, distorting William Morgan, Religio Militis: Or, A Soldier’s Religion. Writ by a Field–Officer of the Army (1695), the epistle dedicatory. 2 Ibid., 3–4. 3 Ibid., epistle dedicatory. 4 Kemp, Ideas of Liberty of the Press, 235. 5 Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in Nicholas Phillipson (ed.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 209–31. 1

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power for their own tyrannous ends, helped to form the early English Enlightenment: it was anticlericalism that formed the backbone of Whig civil theology.6 Whilst Locke’s attitude to the press has been extensively studied, it has never been particularly clear how John Toland conceptualised the relationship between anticlericalism and the freedom of the press.7 It has been assumed that he moved rather seamlessly from arguing that men might think and read for themselves to a fully explicated theory of the freedom of the press.8 Chapter 2 will seek to complicate such claims by reconsidering Toland’s understanding of the rules of public debate, which he proposed in Christianity not Mysterious. It will suggest that Toland saw a direct philosophical connection between thought and action, consequently he considered that reading and thinking free of clerical interference would lead individual members of the community to truth and salvation. In this respect, he did not propose a free press in the manner understood by modern historians. Nevertheless, his opponents from across the clerical spectrum realised that he was proposing a scheme that destabilised how religious knowledge was authorised. The responses to Christianity not Mysterious and attempts to prosecute Toland reveal how clerics, depending on their own theological and ecclesiological positions, understood and explicated how the status of public debate should be configured and understood. In this sense, there was no coordinated clerical response to Toland but, instead, a series of replies that reveal the diversity of religious thinking that had already emerged by the mid-1690s.9 For orthodox clergymen the publication of Christianity not Mysterious also heightened two significant fears. First, they concluded that the lapse of licensing meant that the press could now be exploited at will by unorthodox writers. There is, of course, no direct evidence that Toland did wait until the lapse of licensing to publish his book, but its open publication heightened fears that Christianity was now open to attack, undefended by the government or the Church hierarchy. Second, because Toland addressed many of the same concerns discussed in the Trinitarian debates but in an even starker fashion, many clerics worried that the failure to restrain the press in the previous years had fostered a coherent deist movement. On 20 March 1695, for example, Humphrey Prideaux, who had himself been attacked in convocation six years earlier, wrote to William Lloyd, bishop of Worcester, describing his attempts to reclaim the conscience The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 17; Mark Goldie, ‘Civil Religion and English Enlightenment’, in Gordon J. Schochet et.al. (eds), Politics, Politeness and Patriotism (Washington D.C., 1993), 31–46. 7 Geoff Kemp, ‘Locke the Censor, Locke the Anti-Censor’, in John Coffey et.al. (eds), Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth– and Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie (Woodbridge, 2019), 161–80. 8 Champion, Republican Learning, 80. 9 Contrast with Champion, Republican Learning, 69–90. 6 Champion,

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of a young gentleman who had been drawn into spiritual confusion and impiety by reading deistic books.10 Of late, there had been a significant spread of atheist and deist books, which had prejudiced many against the Scriptures. In Prideaux’s view, a mark to indicate heterodoxy ought to be fixed in books, whilst others should be burnt and authors forced to public recantation.11 This chapter explains why and how clerics tried to restrain Christianity not Mysterious, but it also emphasises that the lapse of licensing did not necessarily indicate a free press. Instead, it exacerbated extant fears that the Glorious Revolution had ushered in a new period of laxity, helping to corrupt even further the nature of public debate. William Stephens’s An Account of the Growth of Deism

Even before the publication of Christianity not Mysterious, the fears of churchmen that the lapse of licensing might lead to further unorthodox publications were heightened by the anonymous publication in early 1696 of An Account of the Growth of Deism.12 Despite its anonymity, it is likely that the tract was written by William Stephens (1649/50–1718). Having matriculated from Oxford in 1664, he had been a preacher in a number of parishes before being made rector of Sutton, Surrey in 1690.13 His only previous foray into print was in 1694 when he had preached on 30 January and drew a sharp contrast between the current king and Charles I.14 He insisted that William was the perfect model of how a monarch should behave: not only was he a benevolent father of the country, providing for the education of people, he did so by retraining ‘the publishing of bad principles; he checks ill tempers, and chastises those wicked servants who by their ill examples would endanger the corrupting of his family’.15 Whilst the sermon was published with the approbation of the Presbyterian mayor, Sir William Ashurst, the Whig view of the constitution expounded by Stephens, which he was to develop even further in subsequent publications, was not without its critics.16 Thomas Rogers accused him of deliberately underplaying the malevolent intentions of the king’s opponents in the 1640s. According to Rogers, in a flagrant attempt to justify the recent revolution, Stephens had represented Charles I as impious when he 10

Spencer Library, University of Kansas MS P515:1, Humphrey Prideaux to Bp Lloyd, 20 March 1695. 11 Spencer Library, University of Kansas MS P515:1, Humphrey Prideaux to Bp Lloyd, 20 March 1695. 12 William Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (1696). 13 Stuart Handley, ‘Stephens, William (1649/50–1718)’, in ODNB. 14 William Stephens, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London (1694). 15 Ibid., 6–7. 16 William Stephens, A Letter to his most Excellent Majesty King William III (1699).

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had in fact, shown an ardent ‘zeal for the church’.17 Nor was the Stephens’s sermon a singular example. According to Rogers, it was representative of the ‘licentious principles which are so much in vogue; and which naturally tend to shake our fundamental establishment’.18 In his Account in 1696, Stephens set out to explain why deism had recently assumed so many adherents and, crucially, how it should be controlled. His account was not an example of simple anti-deism, as has recently been claimed.19 Rather, it used the emergence of unorthodox thinking to explain how the rules of public disputation ought to be employed to ensure personal piety and establish political stability. Nor can Stephens’s account be completely captured by labelling him anticlerical.20 No doubt, he was critical of his fellow clergy and their tendency towards popish practices. But his aim was to improve the status of the clergy, by explaining how they might react to recent circumstances so that his vision of the revolution settlement was fulfilled, and political stability achieved.21 It was the lapse of licensing and the establishment of toleration that preoccupied his thinking. Both the loss of pre-publication censorship and removal of the Church as a single coercive force meant that the clergy could no longer rely on their own apostolic status or the divine authority of the Scriptures to inspire internal piety in parishioners and external assent to the Church. Instead, he maintained, the correct response was for the clergy to engage in debate with their opponents; to understand the intellectual thrust of their arguments and to refute them.22 In doing so, by persuading friends and enemies of the glory of the Church, the newly formed Williamite state would keep at bay the threat of tyrannous political power backed by foreign Catholicism. Stephens’s vision relied on defining two different sets of deist, the first of which were men of loose and sensual lives. Inspired by reading Hobbes and Spinoza, they had been gulled into opposing the essential Christian doctrine of self-denial and subsequently ridiculed miracles and revelation. Far from forming a dangerous or coherent group, they were marked only by their commitment to scepticism, were likely practical atheists and did not deserve to be taken seriously. For Stephens, this type of deist only existed as a figment of the imagination of High Churchmen, who used Thomas Rogers, A True Protestant Bridle (1694), 19. Ibid., A2. 19 Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, 26–7; Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci and Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, “Introduction: Atheism and Deism Revived”, in Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci and Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth (eds), Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain, 1650–1800 (Farnham, 2014), 2. 20 Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 17–18. 21 Stephens fits rather well into recent studies of the Restoration Church, which have emphasised the vitality of clerical responses to pastoral and political challenges. See, Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment; John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (1991), 166–233. 22 Stephens, Account of the Growth of Deism, 24–8. 17 18

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them as a type of intellectual bogeyman, invoking their supposed existence to tar the respectable position of scepticism towards clerical authority with the taint of unbelief.23 Having dismissed the threat posed by practical atheists, Stephens turned to history to illustrate the danger posed by his second set of deists. The principal reason for the recent emergence of unorthodox religious expression was not, as many assumed, personal weakness or the communal impiety of the nation. Instead, Stephens maintained, deism’s roots could be traced back to the 1630s. Disillusioned by Caroline religious policies, the sons of influential men had travelled to Europe to widen their education and seek further religious knowledge. Faced with corrupt Catholic practices, however, they developed even more distaste for the practices of Laudian bishops and ministers. Thus, their nascent disgust with what they saw as the self-interest of the clergy was transformed into a general contempt for priestcraft, conceiving of all clergy, whatever their denomination, as peddling superstition and deceiving their flocks for their own politique interests. This analysis of religion in the 1630s was also linked to the mismanagement of public debate. Far from using disputation to ascertain the truth and promote piety, men in the 1630s began to realise debate between clerics was conducted ‘under the pretence of religion’ by priests who were ‘only grasping at power, and that the controversy at bottom, was not who’s religion was best, but only what sect of the clergy should make the best market of the lay-men’.24 This initial historical analysis provided a seamless chronological explanation for contemporary deism. Despite English society experiencing multifarious change through the English Civil War, the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Church of England remained unreformed and society immoral. In this analysis, deism was merely the latest manifestation of necessary opposition to a corrupt church and priesthood. For, although ‘nothing be more certain than the baseness and falsehood of man can never disprove the truth of God’, Stephens commented, ‘when men are highly scandalised, and greatly deceived by those for whom they had esteem, and by whose authority they in great measure governed themselves, they will stretch their conclusion beyond their premises, and disown religion in their principle, because it is disregarded by some great men in their practice’.25 Stephens’s historical analysis was meant to advance the cause of the Church and state, leading the nation to peace and individuals to salvation. He insisted the mysteries of Scripture were unnecessary to the fundamental doctrines needed for redemption, and he commented that those who were sceptical about the authority of revelation might still be men of ‘sobriety and probity’ who could be led to the right path.26 His anticlericalism was 23

Ibid., Ibid., 25 Ibid., 26 Ibid., 24

5. 6. 14. 5.

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designed to promote a vision of church reform. Much like Burnet’s earlier instructions, he insisted that a reformed national church was the route to stability. Stephens emphasised that only by living pious lives could the clergy inspire their own flocks, encouraging all their parishioners to take the sacrament and saving their souls. He completed this analysis by suggesting that the clergy must engage their opponents publicly. Only by facing down arguments might society be able to ‘stop the mouths of their adversaries, and compel the deists to become Christians’.27 An Account of Deism stimulated a series of private and public replies.28 A number of respondents agreed with Stephens that the early 1690s was an ungodly age, with at least one author suggesting the cause was the unrestrained nature of public debate, for the air was ‘thick with profane and blasphemous discourse and a lack of personal piety and holiness’.29 But Stephens’s anticlericalism was widely rebuffed; his description of clerics as politically manipulative was universally condemned.30 Contrary to his desire to lead further souls into heaven, his motives were impugned, with one author accusing him of bantering religion and God inappropriately and endangering the salvation of men with ‘sickly brains, and crazed religion’.31 Richard Willis (1664–1734) was disgusted by Stephens’s tract. A future bishop of Winchester, he graduated from Oxford in 1688 where he had enjoyed the patronage of William Hayley (later dean of Chichester). He was a firm supporter of the revolution, accompanied the king in 1694 to Holland as his chaplain and would go on to be a vocal proponent of the SPCK.32 In 1696 he accused Stephens of perpetrating a dangerous fiction. Whilst he did accept that dangerous amounts of irreligion had emerged, Willis rejected the narrative of priestly corruption going back to the 1630s. He noted, ‘it’s a common opinion in this age, that men are under no laws or obligations as to their belief and opinions of things’, before commenting: But it’s very plain on the other side, that God may command his creatures to take notice of some things at their peril; and if their disbelief of what he reveals comes by their own fault, this is then as criminal as any other 27

Ibid., 32. For private discussion of the most appropriate response to Stephens see: Bod. MS Rawl. Letters 91 f.332, Henry Hill to Thomas Turner, 8 Aug. 1696; Bod. MS Rawl. Letters 91 f.338, Henry Hill to Thomas Turner, 1 Sept. 1696; Bod. MS Rawl. Letters 91 f.346, Henry Hill to Thomas Turner, 15 Sept. 1696. 29 Richard Willis, Reflections upon a pamphlet entitled the growth of deism in England (1696), 1–5. 30 Willis, Reflections upon a pamphlet, 15–42, Henry Hill, A Dialogue Between Timotheus and Judas, Concerning a Pamphlet Called, the Growth of Deism in England (1696), 3–19; Humphrey Prideaux, A Letter to the Deists (1696). 31 Hill, A Dialogue between Timotheus and Judas, 39. 32 W.R. Ward, ‘Willis, Richard (bap. 1664—1734)’, in ODNB; Bahlman, The Moral revolution, 100; Richard Willis, A Sermon Preached at Whitehall (1700). 28

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immorality. And therefore our religion frequently reckons infidelity among those sins for which men shall be punished in the other world.33

Willis’s connection of truth and infidelity was an early sign, at least in the minds of some churchmen, that corrupted religious debate might precipitate the nation falling into more immorality. Compared to Stephens, Willis proposed a different solution to the rise of deism. He insisted that the status of the clergy and therefore political stability could be maintained by following rules of literary civility. Both the government and the Church were instructed by God to maintain and speak the truth, their debates should avoid contradictions and no man should be censured for the incivility of others. Had these rules been followed, Willis commented, ‘we should hardly have seen this pamphlet’.34 Despite their distaste for their respective solutions, Stephens and Willis shared an analysis of the problem that was destabilising society in the 1690s. Whilst they might disagree on its origins, they both agreed that deism might gull people into errant doctrine and endanger their souls. And they both concurred that deism was a coherent movement, given momentum by the Trinitarian disputes, and was likely to act as precursor for further debates concerned with the very status of religious knowledge. Both men worried how the state and the Church might be engaged in saving souls; a debate that had initially found expression in the relationship between morality and doctrine but was increasingly concerned with the status of the Bible and the very rationality of religious belief.35 As early as 1696, concerns over the power of the press, particularly with the lapse of licensing, were taking on new characteristics. As the Trinitarian disputes began to lose their initial fervour, the supposed establishment of a coherent deist movement exacerbated concern that further forms of religious scepticism could now be freely expressed. Or, put another way, by 1696 increasing numbers of people believed the Williamite providential project had not fulfilled its promises. For many, England was an impious and irreligious nation precisely because such ideas were now left unchecked. If by 1696 clerics were not prepared to say out loud the ‘church was in danger’, nor had a coherent High Church movement emerged, many recognised civil stability could only be provided by the limitation of ideas and persistent religious instruction, ‘and that whatever motives may force men into societies (conveniency, protection, or whatsoever else they be) it is only the belief of a deity, and the consequences of that belief, religion that makes a cement capable of uniting these societies in any manner of stability’.36

Reflections Upon a Pamphlet, 64. Ibid., 13. 35 Ibid., 20. 36 Prideaux, Letter to the deists, 80–1. 33 Willis, 34

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John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious

These worries about the unchecked nature of public debate and how it might endanger the providential status of the church and country were reinforced and amplified in 1696 by the publication of John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious. Toland (1670–1722) is now known to historians as the foremost freethinker of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.37 Previously dismissed by Leslie Stephen as an unoriginal thinker and unworthy of serious attention, his reputation has been rescued by a series of scholars who have placed him within Republican and radical Whig contexts.38 He was both a skilled pamphleteer and a controversialist, circulating manuscripts and books in English and European erudite circles. Most importantly, he is now known for his desire to return religion to its natural and anthropological beginnings.39 Often defined by opponents for his virulent anticlericalism, Toland is now known as the most sophisticated proponent of civil religion in the later Stuart period.40 Thus, his attacks on the conventional understanding of Christian knowledge, Scripture and clerical authority were not indicators of disguised atheism but were explicitly religious; designed to return England to peace and civil stability.41 Despite widespread interest in Toland’s career on the part of historians and literary scholars, our understanding of his attitude towards the press remains surprisingly indistinct.42 When it has been discussed, historians have assumed his advocacy of freethinking must therefore equate to a desire to establish free expression. This position is bolstered by Toland’s work as an editor. His repackaging of Milton’s work in the 1690s, a project designed to legitimise republican thinking, is taken to indicate Toland’s agreement with the arguments made in Milton’s Areopagitica and underline his commitment to the liberty of public reason. His reputation as a proponent of the free press may also be attributed to his authorship of a Letter to a Member of Parliament (1698). As we shall see in Chapter 4, however, both Stephen H. Daniel, ‘Toland, John (1670–1722)’, in ODNB; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 10; Champion, Republican Learning; Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (1982); Stephen Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners and Mind (McGill, 1984). 38 Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1962), i., 78; Blair Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow: A Voyce from the Watchtower (Camden Society, 1978). 39 Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 140–7. 40 J.A.I. Champion, ‘”May the Last King be Strangled in the Bowels of the Last Priest”: Irreligion and the English Enlightenment, 1649–1789’, in Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (eds), Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830 (Cambridge, 2002), 29–44. 41 David Berman, ‘Disclaimers and Offence Mechanisms in Charles Blount and John Toland’, in Michael Hunter and David Wootton (eds), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992). 42 Connell, Secular Chains, 134, 150–2. 37

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bibliographic and textual evidence demonstrates that the publication was written by Matthew Tindal not Toland. The following section will seek to build on and complicate the recent picture of John Toland by reconsidering his arguments in Christianity not Mysterious. It will suggest that Toland did not propose a free press in the way historians have thought. It accepts, in the view of one recent historian, that he wanted to establish the social understanding of the production of knowledge and remake the relationship between individual conscience and public authority.43 But the creation of knowledge was not the singular and ultimate goal of Toland. Rather, he insisted that each man must find truth so that they might find salvation. To achieve the aim, he did not propose a free press. Instead, he proposed the rules of public debate must be ordered by authorities, free from clerical interference, so that individuals could use reading to achieve religious certainty. Seen in this way, Toland was not engaged in a discussion of censorship or the free press as modern historians understand. Instead, he was debating the practices of communication and their consequences in the specific political and religious conditions of the 1690s. John Toland published Christianity not Mysterious some time between December 1695 and June 1696. The work was advertised for sale in the Post-Man with no publication details, but in late June he revealed his authorship.44 Despite the title page suggesting that the author was a sincere Christian – it carried a quotation from Archbishop Tillotson – from the start the book criticised the condition of the country and the Church. Because it was impossible to take part in open debate, Toland suggested, England was a deplorable nation labouring under conditions of epistemological falsity. No author or reader was able to ‘openly and directly own what he thinks of divine matters’ but was instead forced to keep silence or ‘to propose his sentiments to the world, by way of a paradox, under a borrowed or fictitious name’.45 This was, of course, an inversion of traditional thinking. Indeed, it was an inversion of many churchmen’s point of view: that the providence of the country was endangered by the spread of poisonous ideas. To develop his point, Toland turned to other spheres of debate to illustrate their success in enlightening readers. Physics and other arts and sciences, he noted, had witnessed significant improvements and discoveries, whilst religious ideas remained stunted, mired in impiety by corrupt and self-interested parties. Christianity not Mysterious was a project that described English public religious debate as corrupt. Instead of irenic enquiry, religious shibboleths were maintained by the threat of restraint and punishment. Those committed to new modes of sacred enquiry and debate, far from being praised – as they should be – were pursued by clerics, ‘with the hue and cry of heresy: and if he values censures, compelled to make Republican Learning, 80. Ibid., 70. 45 Toland, Christianity not mysterious (1696), preface, iv. 43 Champion, 44

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honourable amends; or if he proves contumacious, he falls a sacrifice, at least in his reputation, to their implacable hatred’.46 Toland decried the clerical order as self-serving for corrupting the correct conditions of debate. Far from guiding men to the truth and thus to heaven, priests preserved their position as ‘the only dispensers of the favours and oracles of heaven’ for political gain and not for religious assurance. Indeed, their behaviour was a specific affront to Christian liberty: That any should be hated, despised, and molested; nay, sometimes be charitably burned and damned, for rejecting those fooleries superadded, and in many cases substituted to the most blessed, pure, and practicable religion that men could wish or enjoy, is matter of astonishment and grief to such as prefer the precepts of God to the inventions of men, the plain paths of reason to the insuperable labyrinths of the Fathers, and true Christian liberty to diabolical and antichristian liberty.47

Toland’s understanding of public communication and its consequences was forged by questioning the revealed status of the Bible and the right of clerics to monopolise Scriptural interpretation. Toland’s specific exegetical practices have been considered at length by historians.48 His point was to render Scripture explicable to the entire nation by stripping away mystery and in the process to remove the need for clerical mediation in all categories of interpretive societal behaviour. In Toland’s understanding, God was incapable of creating paradoxes or ambiguities, and reason provided assurance of thought and redemption; rational analysis was all God required of any man to confirm his providential existence and to guarantee salvation. This was not just an anticlerical position – although that was clearly there – it was also a wider point about the creation of civil stability. By stripping away the power of priests to act as spiritual guides, Toland maintained each man would pursue and find religious truth, guaranteeing their salvation and happiness. Thus, he rejected any need to suspend judgement where linguistic difficulty existed, instead arguing that each man must come to a reasonable assessment of meaning whilst rejecting the need for help from self-interested arbiters. Partly, this was a personal (perhaps even boastful) assertion, for Toland professed never to have been confused by an ambiguous text. But it was also a political point, inherently anticlerical, painting any man giving up his reason as not only insensible but likely destined for hell, a position Toland believed was justified by Scripture itself: ‘such are unreasonable 46

Ibid., preface, vi. Ibid., preface, xxi–xxii. 48 Diego Lucci, Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the Eighteenth-Century British Deists (Bern, 2008), 65–133; Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture Princeton, 2005); 40–3; J. Champion, ‘Père Richard Simon and English Biblical Criticism, 1680–1700’, in J. Force and D. Katz, Everything Connects (Leiden, 1999), 39–61; Justin Champion (ed.), John Toland Nazarenus (Oxford, 1999), 1–107. 47

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men, walking after the vanity of their minds, having their understandings darkened, being strangers to the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their hearts’.49 Beyond the aspiration of providing a model of biblical criticism that might enable each individual to find truth and, commensurately, salvation, this Reformation-derived model of polite public discourse had further important implications for how society might find political stability after the Glorious Revolution and the lapse of licensing. In dismissing clerical intervention and supplementary books of criticism as extraneous to the task of adjudicating on cases of linguistic ambiguity, Toland tried to alter how priests monopolised truth claims.50 But the issue here was not just to dismiss clerical intervention but to dismiss all scholarly intervention. No longer should all the people be held in bondage through limited access to knowledge. As with much of Toland’s future writings, this was in part, at least, a political–religious point designed to dismiss the clergy as self-interested and tyrannous. Indeed, the alert reader only needed to consider the preface of Christianity not Mysterious to understand Toland’s deep distaste for the clergy and his reverence for the people. There was no justification for why the vulgar should be subjected to religious, arbitrary dictates when they had the critical ability to be the ‘judges of the true sense of things, although they understand nothing of the tongues from whence they are translated for their use’.51 Toland was able to maintain basic assumptions designed to exploit egalitarian access to knowledge. Building on the Reformation debates of sola scriptura, which had concentrated on forging a single authoritative text, Toland maintained the biblical text produced by sixteenth-century polemic ensured ‘the facility of the Gospel is not confined only to method; for the style is also most easy, most natural, and in the common dialect of those to whom it was immediately consigned’.52 Minutiae of theological debate were not the main point here: by insisting that the English New Testament was pure and providentially delivered, he also consequently maintained that the text should be open to all. Indeed, any attempt to intervene in biblical interpretation was likely a form of socio-cultural domination: Christianity not Mysterious, 37; Ephes. 4. 17, 18. Anthony Ossa-Richardson, ‘The Naked Truth of Scripture: André Rivet between Bellarmine and Grotius’, in Dirk van Miert et al (eds), Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God’s Word Questioned (Oxford, 2017), 109–32. 51 Toland, Christianity not Mysterious, preface, xix. William Payne went on to accept Toland’s position, see, William Payne, The mystery of the Christian faith and the blessed faith (1697), 2. 52 Toland, Christianity not Mysterious, 50; Orlaith O’Sullivan (ed.), The Bible as a Book: The Reformation (2000); R.A. Muller and J.L. Thompson (eds), Biblical Interpretation in the Era of Reformation (Michigan, MI, 1996); See J.A.I. Champion ‘Apocrypha, Canon and Criticism from Samuel Fisher to John Toland 1660–1718’, in A.P. Coudert et al. (eds), Judaeo–Christian Intellectual Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Klewer, 1999), 91–117. 49 Toland, 50

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No pretences therefore can be drawn from the obscurity of the language in favour of the irrational hypothesis: for all men are supposed to understand the daily use of their mother-tongue; whereas the style of the learned is unintelligible to the vulgar. And the plainest authors that write as they speak, without the disguise of pompous elegance, have ever been accounted the best by all good judges.53

This idea of all society having access to the Gospel and interpretive techniques – here defined as a reasoned and common-sense approach to the definition of words – was fundamental to Toland’s solution to the problems caused by religious plurality and the degradation of public debate in the mid-1690s. Access to scripture and reason, he maintained, would overwhelm the paucity of current debate. Adopting the sarcastic third-person voice of a commentator, he wondered why so many people accepted opinions simply because they admired the author. In daily conversations in parishes, it was possible to find clergymen denigrating bad books, calling authors dangerous men and demanding their communicants reduce all their books to waste paper.54 Whilst the parishioner might question this particular requirement of book destruction, he might also suggest to his clergyman that there were more traditional solutions to bad books: ‘why don’t you excommunicate the author, and seize his books?’ Time was, replied the clergymen, but now ‘it seems a man may believe according to his own sense, and not as the Church directs; there’s a toleration established you know’.55 Despite this comment, based on an attack on parish clerical practices, which had been overcome by the post-revolutionary settlement, Toland was not committed to a free press; instead, Christianity not Mysterious explicated the nature and consequences of communicative practices to establish how doctrinal truth might be ascertained privately. In fact, if anything, his position suggested reading texts other than the Bible was unnecessary. Once each member of a community has understood the correct rules of biblical interpretation, they would find their own doctrinal truth and achieve salvation; in Toland’s reading, they had no need of further debate. Responses to Christianity not Mysterious

The more we study the replies to Christianity not Mysterious, the more central the restraint of the press appears. Toland’s book did not mark the beginning of the freedom of the press, nor the tying in of freedom of expression to the

Christianity not Mysterious, 51. Ibid., 110. 55 Ibid., 110. 53 Toland, 54

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early English Enlightenment.56 Rather, it exacerbated extant concerns that the lapse of licensing was leading inexorably to degraded public debate. The responses to Christianity not Mysterious reveal the sheer diversity of religious culture in the 1690s. Or, put another way, there was no single or organised clerical response to Toland’s book, nor do the responses reveal that Toland was being persecuted, as historians have suggested.57 For many interlocutors, it was not enough for the book to be answered and refuted: they wanted both Toland and Christianity not Mysterious controlled. The responses discussed below were not simply carefully constructed pieces of abuse, nor were they recidivist, looking back to a seeming golden age of complete control. Rather, the position any given author took on the nature of the Church, the relationship between Church and state, what was fundamental to salvation and the relationship between private and public knowledge, influenced how and in what way they suggested that Toland’s book should be dealt with. Already concerned by the Church’s weakened authority, clerics viewed Toland’s attack on the status of Scripture, and the interpretive authority of the priesthood in the name of creating true religious knowledge, as a horrific spectre, likely to aid generalised irreligion spread throughout all levels of society. Thus, as much as authors attacked Toland to fight his ideas and to motivate prosecutions against him, their books served an edifying spiritual purpose. In laying out a theological response to establishing religious truth, maintaining the public doctrine of the Church and controlling lax expression, authors tried to lead readers away from Toland’s poison back to the path of truth. Within two years, Toland’s book elicited eighteen replies.58 All were concerned with discussing the limits of public debate and considering how unchecked religious disputation would spread immorality throughout the country. As one respondent commented, the recent Trinitarian controversy had given rise to substantial controversies and the largest catalogue of primitive heresies in recent history.59 Both the stability and theological purity of English society was now being placed under insufferable pressure by ‘absurd and blasphemous expositions’, which had ‘contributed to the prejudice of religion, and the scandal of its professors’.60 For all the attempts of the Williamite regime to place limits on debate, for many authors Toland’s publication suggested England was now a licentious country. John Norris’s (1657–1712) research was learned and erudite. His early leanings were Tory but in the late 1680s he turned away from politics to Platonist and Cartesian reasoning.61 Nevertheless, his alarm at the John Toland and the Deist Controversy, 244. Republican Learning, 77. 58 Giancarlo Carabelli, Tolandiana (Italy, 1975). 59 Francis Gastrell, Some considerations concerning the Trinity (1696), 1. 60 Ibid., 1. 61 Richard Acworth, ‘Norris, John (1657–1712)’, in ODNB; Norris was a skilled 56 Sullivan,

57 Champion,

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dangerous consequences of unchecked heterodox publications led him back to more popular debate, for Christianity not Mysterious was ‘one of the most bold, daring and irreverent pieces of defiance to the mysteries of the Christian Age’.62 He expressed the fear of many clerics when he suggested that this was now the most licentious age and complained that recent religious controversies had been ‘managed of late with that intemperance of passion and indecency of language’.63 Sick of passionate debate, horrified by the lapse of licensing, and concerned by Toland’s desire to raise the ‘rabble’, Norris determined to rebut Toland in print, with the key weapons of truth and decency: ‘I have endeavoured’, he wrote, ‘to use such Christian temper and moderation as becomes the search of truth, and may argue a mind concerned only for the finding it’.64 The anonymous author of a Free but Modest Censure joined Norris in urging moderate debate, whilst maintaining that single truths must be the aim of all discursive projects.65 ‘It was an odd humour in some men’, he noted, ‘to cry down all books that look towards polemics … but those that believe there is, and think (as with reason they do) that truth is worth the contending for, have an other apprehension of those writings that are controversial, and know them to be of great use in the world’.66 Properly understood and constituted, printed debates could unveil truth. England had witnessed controversial print exchanges for some time. There was therefore no point in returning to previous debate. For whilst there was a connection between all disputes his aim was to: offer a few remarks upon some other controversies that have been started of late, wherein one or two of the aforementioned combatants are engaged, as well as other fresh ones, who have lately appeared on the stage, and have invited a great number of spectators to observe them.67

Beyond general concerns with licentiousness, authors proposed various solutions to the threat posed by Toland’s book: some complained that Toland had miscegenated public and private belief, others complained he had marginalised the right and power of the Church to maintain public truth, whilst others accused him of distorting civil debate. Thomas Beconsall respondent in pamphlet controversy. See, W.J. Mander, The Philosophy of John Norris (Oxford, 2008), 101; Richard Acworth, The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton: (1657– 1712) (New York, NY, 1979), 212. 62 John Norris, An Account of Reason of Faith: In Relation to the Mysteries of Christianity (1697); Champion, Republican Learning, 80; Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy, preface. 63 Norris, An Account of Reason of Faith, preface. 64 Ibid., preface. 65 A Free but Modest Censure on the Late Controversial Writings and Debates (1698), 3. 66 Ibid., 3. 67 Ibid., 3–4.

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(1663/4–1709), Church of England clergyman and significant critic of John Locke, insisted that the answer to Toland lay in the authority of the Church.68 The critical role of the Church of England, he maintained, was to be the advocate, defender and enforcer of the truth; if it was not regulated by the Church, then the truth would become partial.69 Despite Toland’s claim to the contrary, the reduction of revealed truths to the level of human reason in Christianity not Mysterious was a distortion of understanding and would damn readers to hell. In Beconsall’s view, the fundamentals of Christianity, which were essential to salvation, were mysteries; they were in their own nature incomprehensible and should be presented as such. Toland was guilty of prostituting sacred and solemn truths, leaving true believers to the mercy of atheists and unbelievers, advocating rationality whilst marginalising truth. Attacking the intellectual foundations of Christianity not Mysterious was one means of rebutting its impious implications. In fact, Beconsall insisted he initially had no intention of replying to the book. Only when he realised that there were multiple editions, parading in a triumphant manner, ‘owned by both its relations, as well as editor as author’, did he resolve to investigate further. Nevertheless, and regardless of its theological, philosophical and ecclesiological content, he also placed great emphasis on controlling Toland’s book. The key point was simple. The book was fraught with malice, error and malignant tendencies, designed to ‘lodge in the hands of unwary readers’.70 And, it was the phrase ‘unwary reader’ that unlocked Beconsall’s concern. Because the book was simultaneously erudite and malignant, employing traditional Christian sources to overturn the fundamental articles of faith, it was highly likely to infect the population, duping an innocent Christian, spreading errant ideas through multiple editions, endangering the soul of the reader and the providence of the nation. While Toland invoked rationality, reason and careful reading of Scripture to locate the truth, Beconsall identified the constitution of the Church to make much the same point. ‘Every established constitution is supposed to make as great pretensions to truth, as any private persons, that declare against any of her articles, or sanctions.’71 In Beconsall’s thinking, Toland had collapsed the essential division between the public and the private. This was a crucial problem, for, as Beconsall pointed out, it was possible to offer indulgences for private 68 The

authorship of Beconsall’s book has caused some confusion. For Beconsall as the author see, G. Carabelli, Tolandiana. Errata, addenda e indici (Ferrara, 1978), 39. Beconsall’s criticism of Locke is discussed in Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke, Thomas Beconsall, and Filial Rebellion’, in Sarah Hutton and Paul Schuurman (eds), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries and Legacy (Dordrecht, 2008), 127–42. Thomas Beconsall, The Grounds and Foundation of Natural Religion, Discovered, in the Principal Branches of it (1698). Mark Goldie, ‘Beconsall, Thomas (1663/4–1709)’, in ODNB. 69 Beconsall, Grounds and Foundations of Natural Religion, v. 70 Ibid., ii–iii. 71 Ibid., vii–viii.

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opinions. But public opinions designed to question the authority of the Church, particularly if they were spread widely, required ‘censures and punishments, even civil as well as ecclesiastical, against those that publicly oppose her sanctions or decrees, and disturb her peace’.72 In response to Toland, Beconsall outlined his own plans for a settled church, and a stable community, through a carefully constructed discussion of the connection between theology, ecclesiology and authority. Precisely because the doctrines of the established church were true because they had drawn inspiration and certainty from revelation, ‘an established church may rightfully assert her own truths’ but was also authorised to ‘suppress all attempts that are made to perplex or disturb them’.73 In taking this line, Beconsall’s tract emphasised how the demands of political stability required a differentiation between private thoughts and public expression, and empowered the Church to set the limits to public debate. Those limits, much as Gilbert Burnet had previously insisted, could only be reinforced by the clergy, appearing ‘for truth, and for the authority of her constitution, upon a principle of trust, for truth, God and the church’.74 Beconsall expressed one clerical point of view: that the stability of society rested on maintaining a symbiotic relationship between Church and state. In this interpretation, the truth was not the responsibility of the clergy if ideas remained private. But public debate must be restricted. William Payne (1649/50–1697) took a different view. A clergyman who had previously intervened in the Allegiance Controversy, Payne recapitulated Beconsall’s differentiation between public and private thoughts and expressions but turned to secular authority to maintain doctrinal convention. Peace could only be preserved by Williamite ministries using injunctions and legislation to ‘keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, and hold the mystery of the faith in pure conscience’.75 Thomas Beverly responded in a different way to Toland. He insisted that Christianity not Mysterious misunderstood how knowledge was created. For any reader to accept a message as truthful, they first had to understand that there was a hierarchy of authority in texts; only then might they test the truth claims of authors and institutions. Because wisdom and reason were innate to being, they helped to set true ideas, for each man ‘holds all in himself, as the foundation of being, and according to his own will concerning them all these are held’.76 But truths could not be solely proved by human reason. Once ascertained they must be tested 72

Ibid., viii. Ibid., ix. 74 Ibid., ix;. Burnet, Injunctions for the Arch-Deacons. 75 William Payne, A letter from Dr Payne (1696), 1, 14; Martin Greig, ‘Payne, William (1649/50–1697)’, in ODNB; Samuel Grascome, A letter to Dr W. Payne (1689). 76 Thomas Beverly, Christianity the great mystery. In answer to a late treatise, Christianity not mysterious (1696), 16–17. 73

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against and compared with the divine authority of Revelation. Thus, the relationship between temporal and divine interpretation was hierarchical: ‘there are various degrees and elements of reasons and wisdoms, and we must distinguish from the lower to the higher’.77 Precisely because God generated truth through the gospel, it should not be necessary for the Church to protect and delimit truth claims as long as clerics maintained the Bible possessed divine status. Far from it, ‘the best antidote against the poison of an infectious age’, Beverly noted, ‘is the inward experimental sense, that God has chosen us to salvation, through sanctification of the spirit, and belief of the truth’.78 But Toland’s denial of the inward spirit and denigration of Revelation meant his book needed to be stopped, burnt and removed from circulation. The anonymous author of a Letter to J.C. also objected to the reasoning and use of Scripture in Christianity not Mysterious but concentrated his ire on Toland’s misapprehension of the fundamentals of religion. In this analysis, it was Christianity not Mysterious’s dismissal of the efficacy of the sacraments that caused the author to call for Toland’s prosecution.79 Taking a sacerdotal view, the author noted that the Sacraments were the only necessary ceremony for salvation and were the foundation of Church and state. Because Toland had denied the efficacy of the Church’s status and Sacraments, his book endangered the lives of its readers. ‘We shall all of us one day stand in need of a saviour’, he suggested to his readers, ‘let us take heed to secure him our friend, the neglect of whose salvation we shall one day so sadly rue’. There was one obvious way to incur the wrath of God; ‘the excusing this book, or the author, or the ridiculing, or otherwise baffling the just prosecution and censure of it and him’ would also lead the authorities and individuals to hell if they failed to act.80 Edmund Elys, with a slightly different emphasis, also turned to this theme. Eschewing the importance ascribed by the anonymous author to sacramental piety, he attacked Toland’s understanding of order. He bitterly criticised the detachment of knowledge from the hierarchy of the Church, noting, ‘a man ought not to be his own expositor, minister, bishop, and council’.81 Where Toland had detached truth from salvation, or at least had denied the right of clerics to enforce public knowledge, Elys reconnected them. Insisting that the Church retained the right to punish heterodox publications, he cited Hebrews as proof of the danger caused by disobedience, ‘obey them that 77

Ibid., 15. Ibid., to the truly Christian readers; Edmund Elys, A letter to the honourable Sir Robert Howard (1696), 8. 79 A letter to J.C. Esq; upon Mr Toland’s book (1697), 3; Toland, Christianity not Mysterious, 107; Peter Browne, A letter in answer to a book called Christianity not mysterious (1697), 190–8. 80 Ibid., 4. 81 Elys, A letter to the honourable Sir Robert Howard, 5. 78

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have the rule over you, and submit yourselves, for they watch your souls, as they that must give account’.82 The threat to the stability of the country and to the souls of individuals underpinned the responses to Toland. Authors of various religious and political persuasions simultaneously rebutted Christianity not Mysterious and called for the book to be restrained and for its author to be punished. The responses took place in reference to the failed campaigns of Shrewsbury and Tenison to calm the Trinitarian disputes. Francis Gastrell (1662–1725), future bishop of Chester, was well connected in elite ecclesiastical circles, enjoying the friendship and patronage of Archbishop Tenison and Francis Atterbury.83 He insisted that the nature of the Trinity should ‘not be the subject either of dispute or enquiry’, yet he also rejected previous restraint of theological debates. ‘There was’, he continued, ‘no likelihood of suppressing doubts or disputes in religion’ by burning books and imprisoning authors. The nature of man, alongside the natural propensity of the soul was to search for the truth. To supress debate would cause even more strife. Instead, Gastrell insisted on the rights of all men to give a reason for the faith they possess and that faith must be proved against false and unjust imputations.84 Only by pursuing debates civilly and, crucially, piously acknowledging the limits of humane knowledge could salvation be achieved and peace guaranteed.85 Thus, Gastrell’s tract was a call to arms. Government and Church needed to learn the lessons of the earlier 1690s in dealing with Toland and future debates: may it please God to make these endeavours of the author successful to satisfy and unite the minds of men in their belief of the doctrine of the Trinity; or may he direct some abler persons to find out more effectual methods of establishing the primitive faith, and settling the present peace of the church.86

Prosecuting John Toland

The replies to Toland in 1696 and 1697 all agreed that his book was dangerous; it threatened the stability of the nation and spread poisonous religious principles to its readers. They all offered differing reasons why Ibid., 5; Hebrews 13.17.; Plain truth, or, a seasonable discourse of the duties of people to their pastors (Edinburgh, 1693). 83 Stephen B. Baskerville, ‘Gastrell, Francis (1662–1725)’, in ODNB. 84 Francis Gastrell, Some Considerations concerning the Trinity (1696), 50–1. 85 The claim of civility could also be used to differentiate between opponents. Stillingfleet, for example, suggested Locke wrote in a grave and civil manner whilst condemning Toland whose style was ‘trifling and too scurrilous in matters of religion’. Edward Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worceester’s answer to Mr Locke (1697), 136. 86 Ibid., preface. 82

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Christianity not Mysterious was so pernicious, and differing ways in which it might be controlled. Nevertheless, none of Toland’s interlocutors produced coherent suggestions of how the press might now be restrained: the options of book burning, secular and ecclesiastical control, and the return of licensing all remained as possible solutions. The varied responses to Toland’s book took place against the backdrop of its prosecution. Having foolishly revealed that he was the author of the now infamous book, he was chased in Dublin by the House of Commons. On 14 August 1697 Toland’s work was presented to the Committee of Religion and was quickly declared heretical. By 11 September it was ordered that the book be burnt, once before parliament and once before the civic buildings; all extant copies were to be impounded and further imports were banned. More worryingly for Toland, considering that a number of members of the committee had suggested that the author should be burnt on the fire with the book, he was to be brought into custody by the Sergeant at Arms and further prosecuted by the Attorney General.87 Toland promptly fled the country in disgrace. Unfortunately for the hunted author, the notoriety of the book reached England before him. On arriving in England Toland faced not only condemnation in print but also the presentment of his book to the Middlesex Grand Jury: for the second time in the space of a year Toland’s work was declared blasphemous.88 In recent years, our understanding of Toland’s prosecution has reached new levels of sophistication.89 No longer a minor event in the life of an obscure thinker, new research has elucidated how and why Toland was restrained. Nevertheless, this new work retains some problems. Most obviously, it continues to consider the attempts to control Toland as a historical precursor to more and more freedom of the press. Or, put simply, it is often seen as one of the last gasps at control of backward-looking recidivist clerics, determined to revive their hegemonic power, persecuting Toland.90 Not only does this approach replicate Toland’s viewpoint, it reinforces the sense that those who disliked his book were involved in tyrannous restraint.91 There were complex reasons, epistemological, soteriological, ecclesiological and political, as to why so many thought Christianity not Mysterious had to be extirpated from public life. But, understanding the Commons Journals Ireland ii (1698), 645, 903–4; T.C. Barnard, ‘Reforming Irish Manners: The Religious Societies in Dublin during the 1690s’, HJ, 35 (1992), 805–38; Champion, ‘Making Authority: Belief, Conviction and Reason’, 143–90. 88 N. Lutterell, A brief historical narration of state affairs, 6 vols (Oxford, 1857), iv 226–7. The presentment of Toland can be seen in J. Gailhard, The epistle and Preface to the book against the Blasphemous Socinian Heresy, 82–3. 89 Champion, ‘Making Authority: Belief, Conviction and Reason’, 157; Champion, Republican Learning, 76. 90 Champion, Republican Learning, 77, 127. 91 A position revealed by the suggestion Gailhard was an ‘unpleasant antagonist’, in Champion, ‘Making Authority: Belief, Conviction and Reason’, 150. 87

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trial(s) of Toland as a straight fight between restraint and freedom flattens the complexity of religious culture in the 1690s and leads us back to the liberal and oppositional understanding of the press. The final section of this chapter traces Jean Gailhard’s responses to Toland and his prosecution. It makes the case that the confessional crisis caused by Toland’s publication was far from resolved by the burning of the book.92 Instead, Toland’s prosecution reveals quite how deep the fear went of a perceived lax press policy that continued to allow poisonous books to spread and, consequently, threatened the providential claims of the king and the salvation of individual readers. Gailhard (1659–1708) moved from France to England in the early 1660s.93 He was a predestinarian Calvinist and a dedicated heresy hunter all his career, obsessed with extirpating Socinianism from the public arena.94 An extended and meandering account of the current and parlous state of the nation, his reaction in 1697 to Toland specifically, and to Socinianism more generally, starkly laid out the consequences to the nation and the individual should the government choose not to control the press and leave magistrates to prosecute books. As we have seen, Gailhard was not alone in conveying his discontent with the spread of pernicious expression, but he was the most strident, and the most open in lobbying parliament for a solution to the press. He dedicated his 1697 tract to the Lords and the Commons, suggesting that they had been convened to fulfil the initial providential promise of William by maintaining the peace of the Church and the defence of doctrine. It was also clear what the threat was. Through justice and wisdom, they were required to stop and curb the ‘boundless and blasphemous impiety which seems to openly defy heaven’.95 With such poisonous ideas in the air, it was no surprise that Gailhard considered the situation urgent. ‘Time is short’, he warned members of parliament, and if the opportunity to legislate was lost it might never be recovered. The depth of impiety and blasphemy had reached new and potentially unbearable levels. Toland and his book were merely the tip of the iceberg. Further enemies were massing at the gates, and some were already in the body of the parliament and in the bowels of the Church, for ‘blasphemous Socinianism attended by atheism, deism, prophaneness, immorality, yes and idolatry does bare and brazen-walk in our streets’.96 Although he had been an inveterate public opponent of heresy for some time, reserving much of his ire for the theological problems posed by John Toland, An apology for Mr Toland in a letter from himself to a member of the House of Commons in Ireland (1697), title page, 24–5. 93 Mark Goldie, ‘Gailhard, Jean (1659–1708)’, in ODNB. 94 Jean Gailhard, A Plea for Free-Grace against Free-Will (1696); Jean Gailhard, Serious Advice to a Preservative against the Blasphemous Heresy of Socinianism (1695). Champion, Republican Learning, 71–2, 81–2. 95 Jean Gailhard, The Blasphemous Socinian Heresy Disproved (1697), A2. 96 Ibid., A3.

92

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Socinianism, by 1697 Gailhard’s concerns were taking on new shape. In 1695 he had rehearsed Scriptural arguments against the devil and disguised sin, and suggested that all Christians avoid Socinian discourse, and have nothing to do with unorthodox books.97 Unlike Toland, this approach differentiated between types of public. Where Toland claimed that access to books allowed reasoned discussion of redemption, Gailhard suggested a more sophisticated understanding of print culture might well lead individuals to spiritual illumination. He argued the government should intervene and prevent the ‘ignorant and unlearned’ from accessing unorthodox publications. Instead, both the government and senior members of the Church must instruct uneducated people to rely only on the works of sound divines, where they might find ‘strong and full proofs, with demonstrations of the divinity of our blessed saviour, of the holy Ghost, and of every high and necessary point of our faith’.98 Before the publication of Christianity not Mysterious Gailhard had accepted the possibility that orthodox clerics might be able to stem the tide of theologically unsound books. But the seemingly unfettered publication of Toland’s book convinced him that Trinitarian disputes could not be confined to elite intellectual circles, only occasionally seeping into the minds of the public via pamphlets and print. Consequently, his previous attacks on single books modulated into an attack on the press more generally. He used the free availability of Toland’s book as representative of the wider print trade. In a tacked-on animadversion to his 1697 tracts, he berated Toland for his use of reason and made clear the consequences should he not be stopped. Painting a graphic picture of judgement day, he insisted that one day all people would face Christ. All would be asked about their attitude to Toland: had they disowned him, had they stopped his mouth, were they shameless and brazen?99 Far from William ushering in a new godly period in English history, in Gailhard’s view not since the birth of Christ had the future of the country looked so bleak. For ‘as formerly, so now in the Christian world we may say, Christ is again crucified between two malefactors, the Socinian blasphemy of one side, and the Popish idolatry on the other’.100 Gailhard insisted that salvation was the correct paradigm through which to view the restraint of the press. As with so many other of Toland’s opponents, he utilised the imagery of infection and poison. The devil had several instruments to spread unorthodox thinking. He might well seduce the unknowing through conversation or books, spreading poison and suffering. Should errant expression not be controlled then individuals and the nation could expect divine retribution. Gailhard’s God was vengeful; paying careful attention Serious Advice to a Preservative, 40. Ibid., 40. 99 Gailhard, The Blasphemous Socinian Heresy, 44. 100 Ibid., A4. 97 Gailhard, 98

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to essential commands and promises, God threatened consequences for those he identified as breakers and neglecters. It was essential not to read Christianity not Mysterious for fear of impious infection. But it was also essential to extirpate the book. God kept careful score of positive sins and negative sins; not to control the press was a sin of omission and would be severely dealt with in the next life. This analysis of personal responsibility based on soteriology was applied to the national picture. For Jean Gailhard, Christianity not Mysterious was merely the most notorious example of a multitude of unorthodox publications. The slow expansion of the print trade in the early 1690s, hastened by the lapse of licensing, was propelling further theological and ecclesiological innovation. Consequently, Gailhard suggested, theological unorthodoxy was now within the Church. Both the Church and state were under siege, endangered from all sides by multivalent publications. In the ancient world Christians had established their religion through apostolic teaching and engaging non-believers. By the mid-1690s, however, the Church had grown weak, constrained by the Toleration Act and facing the twin threats of Catholicism and Socinianism, and the clergy were no longer in a position to convert opponents as their forebears had done.101 If the Church could no longer defend the nation, then the government had to act to restrain unorthodox publications or bring down the wrath of God on the whole nation. Gailhard warned the Williamite regime that it was the watchman’s duty to take notice of spiritual danger. If they refused to blow the trumpet of concern and defend the Church’s mission then ‘every one concerned in the community has the right to do so for the preservation of their whole’.102 It is tempting to conclude that these were the musings of a lone voice, far outside a more moderate mainstream distaste for excessive print. Nevertheless, and despite the successful prosecution of Toland in Dublin, the burning of his book and his forced exile from Ireland, Christianity not Mysterious exposed the limitations of governmental approach to the press. The Middlesex presentment, republished word for word by Gailhard, not only demonstrated the jurors’ detestation of other publications, but they called for further press control and severely criticised lax attitudes to controversial print. All such books, they insisted, must be speedily located and punished severely; if already printed, they must be completely supressed.103 In the press, too, opponents complained that the book continued to flourish. Gailhard regarded it as essential that further punishment be visited on Toland and all errant authors. Citing the precedent of Emperor Theodosius and the burning of the work of Porphiry, he suggested that all 101 Ibid.,

A5. A2. 103 Jean Gailhard, The Epistle and Preface to the Book against the Blasphemous Socinian Heresie Vindicated and the Charge Against Socinianism Made Good (1698), 82–3. 102 Ibid.,

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anti-Trinitarians should be ‘burnt at the Fingers end, to disable them from dropping their Poison upon Paper’.104 For Gailhard, all the trajectories of sin met around the synecdoche of the press. The danger to individual and nation was so pressing that both ecclesiastical and civil government needed to intervene. Thus, while there was ample Scriptural justification for further restraint, it was clear that both bishops and parliament needed to enact further legislation against blasphemy and heresy.105 The evangelical purpose behind such passages was to force institutions to recognise the sin of bad books and to make and externalise soteriological language within legislation. The controversy concerned in the early 1690s with allowing controversial theological books to be published, was framed in terms of the dangerous consequences for the individual and the nation of unrestrained sin. Gailard suggested that social and political order relied on controlling unorthodox theological positions. Not all respondents to Toland agreed. For example, the author of the anonymous Apology for the Parliament accepted the sincerity of Toland’s assertion of sola scriptura and suggested Socinians formed part of the wider Protestant Church. Precisely because he accepted the sincere intentions behind theological speculation, the anonymous author denied there was any logical connection between unorthodox religious thinking, blasphemy and immorality.106 Instead, the pamphlet suggested the real danger to English political stability came from Papal tyranny. Whilst all Protestants agreed with Catholics that the word of God was the rule of faith, they disagreed on interpretive rules: Papists depended on authority, Protestants on multiple and unstable rules of understanding how salvation was achieved. In this view, far from defending orthodoxy, Gailhard was nothing more than a Papist, controlling thought and expression through authority. The evidence for this accusation of tyranny could be found in 1695, when Gailhard had quoted approvingly from the Oxford Decree, a sign he ‘would have the extreme remedy used not only against atheists and Deists, Papists and Arminians, French refugees, Jews and Turks, but also against all heretical tritheists’.107 In other words, Gailhard was seeking to restrain the press to roll back toleration, employing forms of restraint used in the 1680s to control all forms of religious dissent. This chapter began with a discussion of William Stephens’s discussion of a coherent set of deists, who were committed to spreading their ideas through publication. Gailhard’s concern with Toland was underpinned by Stephens’s analysis: Christianity not Mysterious would be followed by further poison and came from a significant and coherent body of deists. Peter Browne’s (d.1735) censure of Toland’s book mined the same material. A lecturer at St Bride’s The Blasphemous Socinian Heresy, 24. epistle dedicatory. 106 An Apology for the Parliament, humbly Representing to Mr John Gailhard (1697), 6, 8, 18–20. 107 Ibid., 35–6. 104 Gailhard, 105 Ibid.,

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Church, Dublin, his response to the prosecution of Toland was commissioned by Archbishop Francis Marsh of Dublin.108 According to Browne, Toland’s book was the result of the joint endeavours of a secret club, one that had been transformed recently into formidable numbers.109 Far from being a product of heterodox thinking, they found inspiration in the lack of control perpetrated by the Williamite regime. ‘They begin to speak out their infidelity and prophaneness, as plain as some of them do treason’, and they possessed emissaries into all parts, supported by contributions.110 In this reading, the circulation of blasphemous and profane publications under the name of theological disputation was a concerted propaganda campaign, reaching to the highest echelons of political society. Much the same claim was repeated by Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699), the bishop of Worcester.111 He was certain that the 1690s was witnessing a breakdown in press control and the prosecution of Toland had not solved the problem. In two answers to Toland, Stillingfleet outlined why deists had turned to print to promote their vision. They were skilled practitioners of public debate, setting up natural religion in opposition to revealed. It was a campaign that, unless it was stopped, would ‘loosen and unhinge the faith of most men, which with great reason is built on the Scripture as the finest foundation’.112 As ever, then, there was an intimate connection between the sociology of religion and theological error, but it was always bounded by concerns with the nature of the press and free expression. Despite his loyalty to the Williamite regime, Stillingfleet complained that the king had not stopped ‘all those swarms and pestilent books which have come abroad of late years among us’.113 Deists and atheists, defined by loose living, had been free to spread infectious doctrine throughout the nation and the clergy must be at leisure to defend the church.114 If Stillingfleet had previously been committed to defending orthodoxy by means of argument and rebuttal, Toland’s and the debacle of its prosecution changed his mind.115 Or, at least to have persuaded him, that answering unorthodox books would not prevent further unorthodox publication. Rather, in the last few years deists had gained collective strength and were in a position to publish even more material. 108 Toby

Barnard, ‘Browne, Peter (d.1735)’ in ODNB. Browne, A Letter in Answer to a book Entitled Christianity not Mysterious (1697). For the use of secret clubs as a literary artifice in the next decade, see Roger D. Lund, ‘The Atheist Cabal and the Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England’, Albion, 34 (2002), 391–421. 110 Browne, A letter in answer, 209. 111 Barry Till, ‘Stillingfleet, Edward (1635–1699)’, in ODNB. 112 Edward Stillingfleet, A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (1697), xlviii. 113 Edward Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worcester’s answer to Mr Locke’s Letter (1697), 146. 114 Stilllingfleet, A Discourse in Vindication, lviii. 115 Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment, 266. 109 Peter

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Such interpretive subtleties are largely irrelevant to historians of the press. In their rush to suggest that the free press was established after the lapse of licensing or, at least that more publications indicated ambivalent attitudes to restraint, they have dismissed the prosecution of Toland’s book as merely the last gasp of a set of clerics desperate to retain their power. Indeed, it is noticeable that such an interpretation reflects exactly Toland’s own analysis. Yet Toland remained notorious, in the early eighteenth century he represented the dangers caused by allowing supposedly unfettered discussion of religion. As we shall see in Chapter 3, in the absence of licensing and no new legislation being enacted, contemporaries stepped into the void and suggested different ways of controlling the press. Some of these debates were concerned with political and clerical jurisdiction, considering and promoting which institution was most suitable to restrain books. But jurisdictional issues elide the central problem: how might the rules of communication practices be correctly established to save the souls of individuals and to maintain the country’s godliness?

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3 Letter to a Convocation Man (1696): Restraining the Press after the Lapse of Licensing With the death of Queen Mary on 28 December 1694, bishops and clerics committed to the goal of godly reform lost their most significant supporter at the Williamite court.1 Her death was marked by a series of sermons and elegies bearing testimony to her personal piety and support for her husband in establishing a new godly regime.2 Thomas Tenison’s funeral sermon epitomises the Williamite court’s veneration of the departed queen. Recently appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Tenison ministered to the queen on her deathbed, and counselled William in his grief.3 Whilst praising the queen’s personal virtue, Tenison noted why her death was such a grievous loss to the country. Tracing the principles and establishment of infidelity back to the previous reign, Tenison noted that Mary had advanced piety in a most ‘atheistical and profane age’.4 That promotion of piety and virtue, both by her own godliness and the advancement of movements against vice, was essential to fulfil God’s providence. The last king had lost his throne because he prevailed over a nation beset by sin and immorality. The nation was still wicked, Tenison acknowledged, but Her Majesty’s Letters for Reformation had gone some way to satisfying God’s plan for the country and averting its degradation.5 This official funeral sermon was supplemented by prominent supporters of the queen, many of whom echoed Tenison’s assertion that her sponsorship of the campaign against vice had saved the nation from ruin.6 Nevertheless, there were dissenting voices. Thomas Ken (1637–1711) fundamentally disagreed with Tenison. Previously bishop of Bath and Wells, Ken refused

William III and the Godly Revolution, 70–1, Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics, 143–4; Dawson, ‘The Death Throes of the Licensing Act’, 123–4. 2 Dawson, ‘The Death Throes of the Licensing Act’, 123. 3 William Marshall, ‘Tenison, Thomas (1636–1715)’, in ODNB. 4 Thomas Tenison, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Her Late Majesty Queen Mary (1695), 8. 5 Ibid., 9. 6 William Bates, A Sermon Preached Upon the Much Lamented Death of our Late Gracious Sovereign Queen Mary (1695); William Payne, A Sermon Upon the Death of the Queen (1695). 1 Claydon,

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to swear the oath to the new king and queen in 1689.7 He suggested the new archbishop had failed the queen. Far from examining the truth of her repentance from sins, he had simply praised and accepted her godliness. For Ken, this was not just a personal failure on the part of Tenison; it was a deliberate decision so that he might praise and preserve the queen’s legacy. It was designed to justify the revolution and to promote the Church’s approach to vice. For Ken, far from society being preserved, the country was mired in an athesitical and prophane age precisely because of the prevarications of the clergy and their accommodation with the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution. Stripped of their sole power to interpret Scripture and faithfully guide souls to heaven, the clergy and the Church were unable to fulfil God’s will.8 Ken maintained that his response was not disloyal but designed to wake the clergy out of their slumber. They had to reinvigorate the Church’s mission, rooting out impiety and vice and controlling the liberty of the press.9 As we have seen, although Tenison disagreed vehemently with Ken’s depiction of the Church, he was not unaware of the wider issues being raised. He had already issued Injunctions against the clergy debating the Trinity and had asked the king for further help to restrict controversial theological discussion in the wider press. Nor was Tenison necessarily convinced that the campaign to reform morals was the solution to the spread of vice and impiety. In the early 1690s he had misgivings about delegating moral control of the country to the civil magistrate not the clergy.10 It was not until the late 1690s that he endorsed the movement for moral and religious renewal, and, even then, he insisted on clerical involvement.11 Despite attempts by the new regime to portray itself as facing down impiety, by the time the queen died it was clear that in the minds of many clergymen there was an inextricable link between concerns with the prevalence of immorality and the expansion of the press. Within months of the lapse of licensing there were reports that London was swarming ‘with seditious pamphlets’.12 The Commons were cognisant of the problem. In late 1695 leave was granted to Robert Harley and Edward Clarke to bring in a new bill for the regulating of printing and printing presses, which proposed making the licenser, not the author, responsible for any errors in

7

William Marshall, ‘Ken, Thomas (1637–1711)’, in ODNB. Thomas Ken, A Letter to the Author of a Sermon Entitled, a Sermon Preached at the Funeral of her Late Majesty, Queen Mary (1695), 6. 9 Ibid., 8. 10 Thomas Tenison, A Sermon Concerning the Folly of Atheism (1691), 15. 11 Thomas Tenison, His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter to the Right Reverend the Lords Bishops of his Province (1699); Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 105–7. 12 Astbury, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act’, 317; Nottingham University Library, PWA MSS 1434; Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics, 113–14, 152–3, 178, 190. 8

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any published book.13 But, the bill presented a serious problem for Tenison. In effect, it was a heavily neutered form of pre-publication censorship in which licensers possessed little power to check material they objected to, rarely able to prevent publication. Indeed, astute observers not only considered the bill likely to be ineffective from the start but suggested it might degrade the condition of public debate even further. In March 1695 Thomas Bayley wrote to Thomas Jervoise, MP for Stockbridge and a firm supporter of the SPCK, asking him to delay the new bill for it will ‘let in all heresy, blasphemy, atheism and irreligion in the world among us; especially the Socinian heresy (which is at this time most prevalent in the kingdom) which denies the Christians God and the satisfaction of Christianity’.14 Perhaps more problematically for the archbishop, Nonconformists would gain the right to appoint their own licenser. Whilst the Act of Toleration had nothing to say on the rights of Nonconformists to publish, such a move would likely be inflammatory. Whilst many clergymen had subscribed to the revolution settlement, that did not signify an acceptance of even limited legal toleration. Humphry Prideaux, archdeacon of Norwich, for example, complained that in his diocese there was all manner of worship that would inevitably lead to ‘perfect irreligion’ and ‘turn the nation into downright atheism’.15 Bishop Lloyd of Coventry simultaneously described the printing act as necessary to ‘stop the press against Socinian books’ and complained that his diocese was a ‘nursery of schism’.16 To sanction effectively the right of Dissenters to print would inflame anger at the Church’s loss of authority, which coursed through the lower clergy and was flourishing by the middle years of William’s reign.17 An unsigned paper to Tenison, dated 2 December 1695 and headed ‘Objections to the scheme of the printing Act 1694/5’, elucidates the problems the archbishop faced.18 How was it possible, the paper asked, to avoid books and pamphlets from ruining and undermining the Protestant religion? But, perhaps even more complex, how was it possible to defend orthodoxy from, on the one hand, popery and, on the other hand, Socinians, Anabaptists and other sects. In the last few years, attacks on religion had moved beyond acceptable limits and had taken new shape in atheists, anti-Scripturists and 13

Ibid., 318. Hampshire Record Office 44M69/F6/8/5 n.f., Thomas Bayley to Thomas Jervoise, 10 Mar. 1695; Paula Watson and Ivar McGrath, ‘Jervoise, Thomas (1667–1743)’, in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690–1715. 15 Hugh de Quehen, ‘Prideaux, Humphrey (1648–1724)’, in ODNB; E.M. Thompson (ed.), Letters of Humphrey Prideaux to John Ellis, 1674–1722 (1875), 65–91. 16 Doctor Williams’s Library MS 201.38, ff.69–73, bishop Lloyd of Coventry to bishop Stillingfleet, 28 Jan. 1695. 17 G.V. Bennett. ‘Conflict in the Church’, in Geoffrey Holmes (ed.), Britain After the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1714 (1969), 163. 18 Astbury, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act’, 321: Lambeth Palace Library MS Tenison, 929, f.10 14

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such as ‘deny the being or Providence of God, the souls of immortality; the rewards and punishments of heaven and hell’.19 The sheer plurality of religious positions that had emerged in the last century had, at least in the words of this anonymous author, rendered control of public debate fiendishly complex. Indeed, Tenison did complain to one of the sponsors of the bill ‘that more care might be taken of the Church’. John Freke’s comment to John Locke, that the archbishop’s comments were ‘reasonable and fair’ but that the ‘rest of the clergy’ would not be satisfied, likely pointed to the heart of the problem.20 Freke recognised the complexity of Tenison’s and other leaders of the Church’s problem. A committed Whig and confidant of John Locke, Freke understood that the Church was significantly split over how to control the press, and promote orthodoxy without trampling the rights of Dissenters.21 In the years between 1695 and 1700 bills to control the press were introduced every year apart from 1699.22 Whilst we know very little of their content, we know that all of them failed to pass into law. This chapter considers two different solutions that were proposed to deal with the press in the absence of licensing. The first can be found in the pages of a new publication, the Occasional Paper. A joint enterprise between prominent churchmen, many of whom were close to the Williamite godly court, the Occasional Paper proposed a type of hybrid licensing system. The second solution can be found in Francis Atterbury’s Letter to a Convocation Man. Atterbury’s tract lobbied for convocation to be recalled and for the restraint of unorthodox books to be remitted to the jurisdiction of the Church. Both schemes, the Occasional Paper and the Letter to a Convocation Man, reveal the divisions emerging within the Williamite Church; about how the press should be dealt with, the seeming unchecked ability of writers to question Christian doctrines and to attack the Church with no punishment was as much a grievance to the clergy as was toleration, the establishment of Dissent and clerical poverty.23 This is not to say, however, that the divide was for and against the press. Rather, there were differing positions on which books challenged doctrinal purity and how they should be dealt with. But there was broad agreement within the Church with bishop Burnet’s words. By the mid-1690s, Burnet commented, it had become a common topic of discourse to treat all mysteries as the contrivances of priests to bring the world into blind submission to them; ‘priestcraft grew to be another word in fashion, and the enemies of religion vented all their impieties under the cover of these words’.24 19 20 21 22 23 24

Lambeth Palace Library MS Tenison, 929, f.10. Astbury, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act’, 321. Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Freke, John (1652–1717)’, in ODNB. Feather, ‘The Book Trade in Politics’, 19–44. Bennett, ‘Conflict in the Church’, 163. Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time (Oxford, 1823), iv, 378.

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The Occasional Paper (1696–1697)

The Occasional Paper was first published in late 1696.25 It was a new style of periodical designed to intervene in contemporary religious politics. The anonymous editor told his readers that they could expect reviews of new books and comments on specific issues of contention. He expressed his worry at the damage caused to society by the ‘heat’ of party scribblers and their concomitant insistence on attacking rivals in print. In response, he asserted, each new issue of the Occasional Paper would not attack books for party gain, but rather reviews would be pithy, moderate and candid, designed to take notice of unorthodox publications in a civil and moderate manner.26 The Occasional Paper has been attributed to Richard Willis, although his single authorship is unlikely.27 This new project was more likely a collaborative project between different churchmen. A contemporary annotation of the work attributed each issue to a different author, naming Samuel Bradford, Gilbert Burnet, William Hayley, James Hodges, Richard Lucas, Charles Trimnell and Richard Willis as contributors.28 How much this was a collaborative project, and how much each author agreed with other contributions, is impossible to ascertain; we can, however, make some general comments about the collective identity of the authors. A number of them were close to the Williamite court, serving as chaplains to the king, and all of them had taken the oath of allegiance in 1690.29 Three preached The Post-Man, 22 Dec. 1696. The reviews were as follows: no.2, Gilbert Burnet, Concerning the late unfortunate death of J. H—en esq.; no.3, Richard Willis, Being reflections on Mr Toland’s book, called Christianity not mysterious; no.4, Richard Lucas, Containing reflexions on a book, entituled, The lady’s religion; address’d to the honourable the Lady Howard; no.5, Samuel Bradford, Containing a defence of the ministry and ministers of the Gospel; against the suggestions of some late writers. In a letter to a friend; no.6, Charles Trimnell, Containing some considerations about disputes in religion; no.7, has no authorial annotation, Showing the usefulness of human learning in matters of religion; no.8, Samuel Bradford, Showing the necessity of such a Christian discipline as is consistent with civil power; no.9, Charles Trimnell, Containing some considerations about the danger of going to plays; no.10, James Hodges, Concerning self-murder. With some reflexions upon the verdicts often brought in of non compos mentis. In a letter to a friend. 27 Mark Goldie and Geoff Kemp (eds), Censorship and the Press, 1580–1720 (2009), iv, Introduction, 301. The ESTC attributes the Occasional Paper solely to Willis; an attribution that appears to be taken from Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Secombe (eds), British Newspapers and Periodicals 1641–1700: A Short-Title Catalogue (New York, NY, 1987), 462. 28 The contemporary annotations to The Occasional Paper can be found at Eton College, shelf mark Fl.3.13(16–23), Fl.3.13(26–7). Many thanks to Jonathan Craig Walmsley for this reference. 29 Edward Vallance, ‘Lucas, Richard (1648/9–1715)’, in ODNB; W.M. Jacob, ‘Trimnell, Charles (bap.1663, d.1723)’, in ODNB; Rebecca Louise Warner, ‘Bradford, Samuel (1652–1731)’, in ODNB. 25

26

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sermons before the societies for the reformation of manners and two of them were appointed bishops on Tenison’s recommendation.30 Whether this gives them a collective identity is, again, rather, difficult to prove, but it seems likely that they were collectively supportive of the Williamite revolution, engaged with movements to fulfil the providential promise of the new regime so central to the propaganda of the 1690s and opposed the High Church movement. Along with Burnet, for example, Charles Trimnell was a prominent opponent of Francis Atterbury’s claim that convocation should be placed on an equal footing with parliament.31 While, then, they may have been drawn from across the political spectrum, the publication was dominated by Low Churchmen.32 Issue one of the Occasional Paper was written by William Hayley (d.1715), rector of St Giles in the Fields, Chaplain in Ordinary to King William and one of the founding members of the SPCK.33 He would be promoted to be dean of Chichester and was a patron of Richard Willis at All Souls College.34 As the aim of the periodical was to deal with the problems caused by ‘party heat’, it is not surprising to find Hayley addressing the consequences of the lapse of licensing. He insisted that England suffered under unprecedented liberty of the press and needed better regulation. Indeed, it was bewildering to him as to why any society should allow ill-men to vent what they please and to ‘disperse abroad in the world discourses which tend to the perverting of our faith, or the corrupting of our manners’.35 He lamented that so many souls were now endangered by new ideas. The danger of infection from new plays particularly vexed him, for they expressed contempt for all things sacred, disregarded virtue and gloried in the dregs of corruption. Rather than looking back to a utopian and fictitious age of complete restraint, Hayley understood both the challenges and opportunities offered by a rapidly developing press. Far from only allowing heretical ideas to run free, he acknowledged that the press was equally open ‘for the lovers of religion and morality, to give a counter-poison against the infection and it is not to be denied but much good may be done this way’.36 Hayley worried that answering books did not remove the danger posed by their impiety. There was little chance, he mused, of ensuring that bad books be answered, and it was impossible for the government to insist that Samuel Bradford, A Sermon Preached at the Church of St Mary le Bow, to the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (1697); Gilbert Burnet, Charitable Reproof. A Sermon Preached at the Church of St Mary le Bow, to the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (1700); Charles Trimnell, A Sermon Preached to the Societies for Reformation of Manners, at St Mary le Bow (1712). 31 W.M. Jacob, ‘Trimnell, Charles (bap.1663, d.1723)’, in ODNB. 32 Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 117. 33 William Hayley, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons (1696). 34 Ward, ‘Willis’, in ODNB. 35 William Hayley, The Occasional Paper: number 1, 1. 36 Ibid., 1–2. 30

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men read orthodox responses. Nor did he agree that dialogic print culture was ever going to provide English society with political stability. In fact, even those authors he considered within the realms of religious orthodoxy were prone to heat public discourse beyond measure precisely because they were so passionate about their own views. Far from saving souls and creating new rules for public discourses, the recent brickbats thrown by believers from all sides destabilised the polity. Hayley insisted on the efficacy of restraint, ‘so upon the whole matter, it were much more desirable that the monster should be stifled in the birth, than that he should be hunted down when he is grown up, and has done mischief’.37 William Hayley was not simply a critic of the lapse of licensing, nor did he necessarily believe that England could somehow be returned to a pre-revolutionary state. Instead, he offered new solutions to the degradation of public discourse caused by the loss of licensing, which drew on the disputes of the early 1690s. Understanding that pre-publication restraint was unlikely to return, his preferred solution combined pre-existent formulas of post- and pre-publication control. In both seeking to defuse debate and to restrain pernicious ideas he suggested that all ‘ill books as they are published’ might be ‘considered calmly by some men of temper and moderation, who are friends to morality of the church and government’.38 This new system, he explained, was simultaneously an attempt to mollify critics of the licensing system whilst reassuring those who lamented the granular efficiency of pre-publication control. Consequently, the initial scrutiny of books had only to take notice of what was ‘truly material; and if anything had an ill tendency, show it and set the public right in it’.39 His scheme mandated that any controversial book would have a short and charitable rejoinder attached, pointing out errors and cautioning the reader to take care. It was, he maintained, a cheap and easy modification of licensing that offered a practical solution to the degradation of public discourse. Hayley’s scheme illuminates how contemporaries tried to find solutions to the loss of licensing. He attempted to create new rules for print culture so that books might lead individuals to salvation, whilst taking the heat out of political debates and providing national political stability. He acknowledged that print might enhance the understanding of the godly, providing theological reassurance and edification, whilst at the same time allowing for religious plurality. But this formulation of instructional debate had to be carefully weighed against the dangers to the soul caused by unwary readers consuming dangerous books. Hayley continued to depict his concept of controlled comment as setting men right before they are fixed in their error and to ‘stop its propagation’. At the same time, he insisted that his official criticism must avoid insults and division, authors should be ‘treated 37

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 4. 39 Ibid., 4. 38

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with charity, and so possibly reformed, at least not exasperated, and made worse’. This delicate balancing act between author and reader, restraint and control, and the rights of Dissenters and the established church, acknowledged the potential destabilising effect of the burgeoning print trade, whilst at the same time promoting his desire to ‘prevent evils, heal divisions, and promote the honour of God, and the real good of mankind’.40 The theoretical approach taken by Hayley, that books should be scrutinised, marked as orthodox or not, coupled with an insistence that printed debate should remain civil to help the cause of political stability, was reinforced by the reviews in further issues of the Occasional Paper. In issue three of the Occasional Paper, Richard Willis engaged with the recent publication of Christianity not Mysterious. As we have seen, Willis was no stranger to printed debates, having already rejected the reasoning of Stephens’s Account of Deism in the previous year. Willis justified his recourse to print by dwelling on the points of Toland’s work that he considered dishonourable to God and dangerous to religion. He concentrated on two arguments: whether anything in the Gospel was contrary to reason, and whether God had demonstrated his truth to all people. Refuting Toland, he concluded that there is nothing contrary to reason in the Gospel. He conceded there were points of linguistic ambiguity but insisted their meaning could not be settled by common-sense reason. Instead, the confused reader should look to the learned men in all ages who ‘have done the best they can to give light to them, and to clear the difficulties’.41 And he went further, acknowledging parts of the Bible would always remain opaque to men and would do so until ‘we get to heaven, where we shall not know in part, as we do in this world, but shall know even as we are known’.42 In opposition to Toland, Willis reinstated historical biblical commentaries as one route to etymological certainty, whilst maintaining there were issues of Christianity that simply remained unknowable. Willis’s account invited his readers to see a contrast between his conclusions and Toland’s. For, whilst he contended personal Scriptural reading could achieve religious truth, such a practice would only get the believer so far. Only faith, bolstered by the divine authority of revelation, would guarantee salvation for the individual – for no ‘method we can take, will secure persons, that have no greater abilities than we have, from all error: but this I take to be the wisest, and what providence designed we should take in our search after truth’.43 This goes some way to explaining why Willis believed reason was limited in ascertaining truth. Indeed, far from it being a problem, imperfect knowledge was demonstrative

40

Ibid., 5. Richard Willis, The Occasional Paper: number 3, 8. 42 Ibid., 8. 43 Ibid., 14. 41

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of the great foundation of faith and formed the chief parts of the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ.44 It is noticeable that Willis’s response to Toland reflected Hayley’s strictures. Willis highlighted his differences with Toland on how religious truth might be located, and questioned Toland’s approach to public discussion. But it is noticeable that Willis did not impugn Toland’s piety or call for Christianity not Mysterious to be restrained. Despite his palpable distaste for the book, Willis maintained his civility, hoping that his literary opponent was sincere and ‘designed the honour of the Christian religion in endeavouring to free it from mysteries’.45 Despite Willis’s civility in reviewing Toland, other authors in the Occasional Paper remained concerned by how authors were freely undermining the status of the Church. In issue five, Samuel Bradford (1652–1731) outlined the connection between the press and anticlericalism. By the mid-1690s Bradford was lecturer at St Mary-le-Bow and a favourite of the king. A Low Churchman, he emphasised Christian unity and charity in his sermons.46 Whilst he acknowledged that the roots of anticlericalism had their origins in the Reformation, he worried that it was taking on new forms in the 1690s. In his view there was a concerted campaign amongst a band of dedicated writers to reduce the clerical profession to a mere trade, stripping the clergy of sacral rights and denying priests had any ability to inspire piety in their flock.47 For Bradford, the denigration of the clergy was always connected to an unrestrained press. He feared that anyone reading books and pamphlets would soon conclude that there was no need for such an order of men. The lapse of licensing had, it seemed to Bradford, permitted the publication of anticlerical thinking, which suggested society might be remade simply by individuals reading material free from admonition or interpretation: Any man may teach another what he understands himself; and every man may be his own priest. But to pretend to instruct others in the name of God, and by an authority received from Jesus Christ; or to offer up the directions of the congregation by way of office, one appointed to this work, according to an institution of the Gospel, to claim a peculiar right and privilege to administer Sacraments, and to guide the Church in matters of spiritual concernment, this is all usurpation, imposition and Priestcraft.48

Having unmasked the malign consequences of anticlericalism, Bradford devoted the bulk of his text to laying bare the biblical justification for 44

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 36. Toland took note of Willis’s response, see John Toland, An apology for Mr Toland in a letter from himself to a member of the House of Commons in Ireland (1697), 47. 46 Warner, Bradford, Samuel; Samuel Bradford, A Persuasive to Peace and Unity (1698); idem., The Excellency of the Christian Revelation (1699). 47 Samuel Bradford, The Occasional Paper: number 5, 3. 48 Willis, The Occasional Paper, number 3, 4. 45

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the clergy’s spiritual rights and working out how they maintained their relationship with their flock. In effect, the anticlericalism of Toland and others caused Bradford to promote the rights of the clergy. The historical record left no doubt that priests were extraordinary officers appointed directly by the Lord. But it was the contemporary lessons that were drawn from biblical evidence that occupied the bulk of Bradford’s text. On a political level, stability would never be achieved while the wicked and dangerous practice of despising the clergy remained a topic of discussion.49 On a general level, it was equally clear that the political stability of society could only be sustained by a combination of priestly edification and parishioners partaking of the sacraments. At a more specific level, however, Bradford was keen to emphasise two more dimensions of priestly life that needed to be the centre of any transaction between God and English society: preaching and admonition. Parishioners could only be led to religious truth by listening to and understanding an ordained minister, not just reading books. Precisely because the clergy received their power from God, through the apostles, preaching reflected the wisdom of God, and thus, ‘they who receive the word, as they ought, receive it not as the word of men, but, as it is the truth, the word of God, which effectually works in them that believe, namely, as being accompanied with the assistance and benediction of heaven’.50 Hayley maintained preaching was designed not only to harvest disciples but also to send forth labourers to promote the word of God; the clergy had been instructed by the Father to ‘go teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you’.51 While preaching could be relied upon to draw the godly into uniformity and pull the disbeliever into the flock, for a peaceful society to exist it was still necessary for clergymen to exert discipline. That ability ultimately rested on their divine function. Governors and guides of the Church had duties beyond the power to teach. They were equally required to command, reprove and rebuke, and they received from God, through Jesus and the apostles, the duty to maintain discipline. Bradford assumed that the very nature of civil society required some punishments to be inflicted on those who broke the rules, because England was a spiritual society, he observed, and therefore legitimate censures had to find their authority in apostolic custom. Turning to St Paul, it became obvious what apostolic censure denoted. In the name of Jesus Christ, inspired by God, and to maintain the security of the civil state, the apostles had seen fit to condemn unrepentant blasphemers to Satan. Drawing a contemporary comparison, he noted that the current parlous condition of England required following the actions number 5, 6–7. Ibid., v, 23. 51 Ibid., v, 9. 49 Ibid., 50

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of primitive believers, employing exemplary punishment to deter future sinners: ‘it is what has been practised in the Church of Christ down from the Apostles times, and what the nature of such a society requires, to censure, and, if occasion be, to cast out of their communion disorderly members’.52 Bradford’s argument was underpinned by a commitment, justified by divine revelation, to maintaining the stability of civil society through spiritual censure, excommunication and denying the right of heresy to be published. Yet, his writing also focused on the needs of the individual and explicated relationship between state and community. He clearly wanted to make sure the sinner could be rebuked but also offered redemption: And in the same manner as this censure was inflicted, it was again, if occasion were to be taken off, as the apostle, in this very instance exhorts the Church of Corinth, in the next Epistle to them, to forgive, and comfort, and receive again into their communion, him, who upon his first writing to them, they had thus cast out.53

Here, while part of the social utility of religion continued to rely on a conventional register of preaching and edification, Bradford laid an equal and corresponding stress on the need for admonition and excommunication. Replicating Burnet’s earlier strictures, Bradford acknowledged that control of society by the clergy rested on their social legitimacy, which could only be demonstrated by strict adherence to sound doctrine and a pious life. Only once these religious basics had been established could jurisdictional authority be exercised. Citing the Epistle to Titus, he emphasised how apostolic authority was useful in facing down anticlericalism, ‘these things speak, and exhort, and rebuke with all the authority. Let no man despise you. A man that is an heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject.’54 In his view, leaving theological discussion about the nature of redemption to personal investigation or to the vagaries of printed debate was a recipe for disaster. Essential doctrines would be subject to individual and partisan opinions and political chaos would ensue. As with his solution to the print trade, however, he did not look back to a mythical utopian age in which the established church was able to control all opinions both through licensing and spiritual censure. His approach both to the authority of the clergy and to public discussion concentrated on maintaining civility and allowing some plurality of belief. The articles in the Occasional Paper worried that the licentiousness of the press after the lapse of licensing would have a pernicious effect on society. Nor did those concerns go away with time. In a sermon delivered three years later, Bradford depicted Trinitarian discussion as a sham to strike at 52

Ibid., v, 21. Ibid., v, 20. 54 Ibid., v, 21. 53

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all revealed religion.55 The proliferation of Socinianism and Arianism, gross scepticism and downright infidelity, must be rebutted by preaching and reading the scriptures, which would make men ‘wise unto salvation’, glorify God and provide national unity of spiritual purpose.56 The Occasional Paper was written by members in the heart of the ecclesiastical establishment, men who were significant to the Williamite project of godly reformation, producing a vision in which control of the press could run alongside, indeed benefit from, pastoral concern and for the edification of sermons provided by preaching. In a sense, this discussion of the Occasional Paper fits in with our extant understanding of the movements for moral reformation. As has been revealed by previous historians of the 1690s, members of the movements designed to promote piety were committed to distributing devotional books to the unlearned.57 At the same time, however, churchmen in the Williamite establishment were equally keen to see curbed the levels of freedom that the press enjoyed in the wake of the lapse of licensing; they were not just committed to the politics of persuasion.58 The solution offered in the Occasional Paper emphasised the status of the clergy to coerce ideas; crucially, however, it did not suggest that the Church, and the Church alone, might posses the jurisdictional authority to control unorthodox books. Francis Atterbury’s Letter to a Convocation Man (1696)

Francis Atterbury’s thinking was as much a product of the Trinitarian disputes in the early 1690s as it was of the Glorious Revolution. Ordained in 1687, early in his career Atterbury (1663–1732) enjoyed the patronage of Henry Aldrich, the High Church subdean of Christ Church, Oxford, who was intimately involved in the Arthur Bury affair and the furore around the publication of the Naked Gospel.59 Atterbury went on to enjoy further ecclesiastical patronage. Henry Compton, bishop of London, recommended him to the vestry of St Bride’s, Fleet Street and he preached before the queen in the Chapel Royal in the early 1690s.60 Atterbury’s early sermons, whilst not directly concerned with the right of convocation to sit or the nature of the press, help explain his later comments on both topics. They reveal a strong emphasis on the reality of sin and salvation through grace; he exhorted his listeners and readers of the need for prayer and taking the sacraments to A Persuasive to Peace and Unity (1698), 15. Ibid., 11. 57 Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688–1715’, 132, 151. 58 Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution, 76. 59 D.W. Hayton, ‘Atterbury, Francis (1663–1732)’, in ODNB; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 33–4. 60 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 26–38. 55 Bradford, 56

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fulfil their duty, he both rejected the rationalism of Toland and opposed Tillotson’s practical Christianity.61 In 1694, in a sermon delivered before the queen, Atterbury complained of a set of men who scorned religion. Men of no religion themselves, they despised those who were, and looked down with contempt on the Church.62 Errantly using their reason to find truth, and scorning the authority of Scripture, they were not content to keep their opinions private. Instead, they had set themselves up as proselytes and formed a party, running down all religion and scorning piety and virtue. If this was not yet an outright attack on the power of the press, it was a sermon that pointed towards the dangers that the providential project of William III faced. Were this new band of men not opposed and controlled the country would soon be awash with sin. In 1694, Atterbury was convinced this new sect could be defeated by the power of prayer, by pious sermons and by answering their errant reasoning in print.63 Atterbury’s pamphlet concerned with convocation found its origins in his discussions with the Tory lawyer, Sir Bartholomew Shower.64 A Letter to a Convocation Man was a brilliant piece of journalism. It appealed to the ordinary clergy, rehearsing their growing concerns with the effects of toleration and their inability to enforce morality and excommunication through the church courts, and their unhappiness that the Williamite moral revolution was increasingly advanced by Dissenting societies using secular courts.65 Atterbury’s solution to the grievances of the clergy was ingenious. He invoked the ‘rights, powers and privileges’ of the Church to call convocation. In effect, he challenged the right of the king to silence convocation, as he had done in 1690, and contended that the sitting of the deliberative assembly relied on the independent authority of the Church alone.66 As has been pointed out, Atterbury’s theory of two societies, one in which the Church enjoyed independent power from the state, was not novel in 1696. Rather, it found its origins in discussions of the ancient church and had been discussed throughout the seventeenth century and could be found in a number of nonjuring pamphlets.67 How Atterbury’s Letter reshaped and asserted the status and authority of the Church has been extensively discussed. Atterbury’s concern in his Letter with theological laxity and, crucially, the dangers caused by the press spreading ideas he considered Ibid., 37–8; Francis Atterbury, The Power of Charity to Cover Sin (1694). Francis Atterbury, A Scorner Incapable of True Wisdom (1694), 3; Roger D. Lund, Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England (Farnham, 2012), 11. 63 Ibid., 23. 64 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 48. 65 Ibid., 12–16. 66 Ibid., 48. 67 Mark Goldie, ‘The Non-Jurors, Episcopacy and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, in Eveline Cruickhanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), 18; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 47–52.

61

62

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dangerous and unorthodox, has received significantly less attention. This section seeks to remedy that relative lack of attention.68 Atterbury’s Letter was founded on three connected questions: ‘1. What occasion there is at present for a Convocation? 2. What Law there is, that commands or permits their Sitting and Acting, but the absolute free Pleasure of the Prince? 3. Of what Validity their Acts and Resolutions are, unless confirmed and approved by Parliament?’69 It was answering question one, the laxity of the press and the dangerous consequences to the individual and wider society, that most urgently occupied Atterbury’s mind. At a general level, he opined, the last few years had seen a loosening of men’s principles and religious practices, which, when combined, had bred contempt for the priesthood and the established church. Despite the claims of Williamite bishops, the country was confronted by a deluge of heresy, scepticism and atheism, which when combined together threatened to overrun the nation’s providential status. This depiction of the emergence of licentiousness since the revolution was supported by placing the origins of Socinianism in a European context. Looking to Holland, Atterbury contended that the imposition of universal toleration had caused clerics to turn a blind eye to Socinianism. Nor was this solely a continental problem. Since the English Revolution settlement, French ministers in London, under the cover of limited toleration, actively taught heresy, perniciously hiding their poison.70 This was hardly subtle. Ignoring the longue durée of English heretical thought, which stretched back into the seventeenth century, Atterbury placed the blame for the current rash of heresies squarely at the feet of the recent religious policies pursued by the bishops in conjunction with the king.71 They had weakened the Church’s ability to oppose heresy, imposing toleration and empowering Dissenting and secular societies to control morality. ‘You may well remember’, Atterbury reminded the clergy, the zeal with which ‘the judgment and example of the reformed abroad have been pressed upon us’. Beyond general complaints with the spread of Socinianism and heresy, Atterbury supplied his readers with specific evidence to support his analysis of secular and ecclesiastical failure to control the press. The republication of Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious animated his thinking. The inability to control Toland had exposed the impotence of Church and state. Far from hiding in fear, as Toland should have been, it had been thought fit:

Kemp, ‘Ideas of Liberty of the Press’, 234; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 48, Goldie, ‘The Non-Jurors, Episcopacy and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy’, 15–16. 69 Francis Atterbury, A Letter to a Convocation-Man Concerning the Rights, Powers and Privileges of that Body (1697), 1–2. 70 Ibid., 5. 71 Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, 39–62. 68

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to dispatch this warm missionary into those parts, once more to try his fortune in making proselytes; in which they have some hopes he will succeed better than formerly, since he has erected himself into an author, and has had the honour of being answered, and has made some little noise in the world.72

A Letter to a Convocation Man was not just an abstract intervention designed to establish the independent power of the Church. It was precisely because Christianity not Mysterious was not a single example of an errant book but was, instead, representative of the wider failure to regulate public discourse correctly, that Atterbury demanded convocation ought to be recalled so that public orthodoxy might be reimposed. As various clerics had already contended, Toland’s book was a licentious publication, detrimental to individual salvation, corroding the moral and doctrinal authority of the Church and endangering the providential project of the new regime. Atterbury’s intervention drew a direct line between Toland and other heterodox books, Locke and Sherlock most obviously, but he also suggested it would lead to more outrages, if Toland was not subject to exemplary punishment. Atterbury’s work gave a very public, national voice to other writers, who since the revolution had expressed their concern with the pernicious effects of the licentiousness of the press and that the unchecked spread of false opinions would endanger the providential status of the country. Peter Heald, prebendary of Chichester Cathedral, for example, publicly reprimanded senior figures in the Church and the ministry for failing to control the press.73 Whilst Atterbury pointed out how errant doctrine had already corrupted the morals of the nation, he counselled the nation, ‘you cannot imagine the mischievous effects, which these various opinions and heresies of late published and vindicated, have produced amongst the laity … such are the inferences which the gentlemen of this age make from the books above mentioned, and the opinions delivered in them’. Again echoing one of the dominant themes in the responses to Toland, he reiterated a previous monarchical declaration ‘that there is a religion enjoined by Heaven; for otherwise you must expect, that the next age will believe none; I am loath to be more particular, but the cause and effect are both plain’.74 A Letter to a Convocation Man continued the themes expressed in Atterbury’s earlier sermons, reiterating that the expression and consumption of errant doctrine would endanger the redemption of souls. In this, he was echoing many of the responses to Christianity not Mysterious. Securing personal deliverance as well as saving the souls of others was a dominant and urgent preoccupation A Letter to a Convocation-Man, 11. Peter Heald, A sermon preached before the Right Honourable Lord Chief Justice Treby (1697), 2. 74 Atterbury, A Letter to a Convocation-Man, 7. 72 Atterbury, 73

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of the wider godly community, both in and outside of the Church: unorthodox books and expression unequivocally threatened the afterlife of the individual. But for Atterbury, personal redemption was indivisible from civil peace of the wider nation; a peace that could only be guaranteed by empowering the Church. A Letter to a Convocation Man repeatedly argued that it was clerics – both individually and acting together in a synod – who were jurisdictionally and intellectually best suited to control the spread of pernicious ideas. In doing so, Atterbury brought into question ongoing Williamite attempts to control the press. He acknowledged that the king possessed the power, according to the laws of the land, to oblige the clergy to do their duty, and had achieved some success in calming debate. Tenison’s and Shrewsbury’s Injunctions had restrained some of the Trinitarian disputations that had so blighted the previous years, and he acknowledged that both bishops and the heads of the universities had some limited power to investigate heresy and punish individual authors.75 Nevertheless, the expansion of the press had rendered individual efforts to control books and authors ineffective. ‘It cannot be pretended reasonable’, in the light of the lapse of licensing and an expansive licentious press, ‘to expect the suppression of heresy from their single endeavours (and they cannot act otherwise than singly unless in Convocation).’76 Indeed, the position was now urgent. It was reasonable for Tenison and ministers to insist on ‘forbidding under the highest censures, all persons ecclesiastical or secular, to vent them either in their sermons, lectures, or even private conversations; and ordering the private persons found faulty in that kind, to be excommunicated, and the ministers to be suspended from their charge’. But, such a policy could now only be a stop gap until ‘the next Synod should determine farther concerning them’.77 Atterbury’s distaste for how, since the revolution, the bishops had tried to maintain doctrinal orthodoxy through the parochial structure and pastoral function of the Church, was supplemented by political analysis. Waiting for parliament to intervene and set suitable limits for public religious discussion not only continued the diminution of the Church’s authority, but was also politically naive. Divines were not only confirming the Catholic accusation that ‘our religion is merely parliamentary, and changeable at the will of the prince’, but it was guileless to suppose: Country Gentlemen, Merchants, or Lawyers, to be nicely skilled in the languages of the Bible, Masters of all the learning of the Fathers, or of the History of the Primitive Church, which they must, in some measure be, who sit Judges of religious doctrines and opinion.78 75

Ibid., Ibid., 77 Ibid., 78 Ibid., 76

8. 9. 5. 15.

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The more partisan loyalties of Atterbury’s tract were expressed with sufficient caution to avoid any accusation of disloyalty to the king. But, Atterbury did have one more dynamic accusation, one that was to find even wider expression in the early eighteenth century amongst High Churchmen. Whilst not an outright charge, Atterbury suggested that there was a conspiracy in which the bishops and the enemies of the Church were colluding in the press to undermine the Christian faith. ‘Deists, Socinians, Latitudinarians, deniers of mysteries, and pretending explainers of them’ were now allies, striking at the Church. The implication was clear; not only was deism a coherent and organised force, it had friends within the ecclesiastical establishment. The real reason that bishops did not want the recall of convocation was because they had sympathy with men like Toland; if they were not themselves deists, they were Latitudinarians, committed to doctrinal freedom, considering the mission of the Church only to inculcate morality in its parishioners. If this sounded suspiciously like a conspiracy theory then Atterbury provided a case study to prove his point. Returning to the Trinitarian disputes of the early 1690s, he suggested the failure to restrain Bury correctly was compounded by how Jonathan Trelawny, bishop of Exeter, had been treated. Setting out to conduct a formal visitation at Exeter College, Trelawny had the doors to the college slammed in his face by Bury. Although the author of the Naked Gospel was excommunicated, the case dragged on until 1696.79 For Atterbury the case served as an example of the Williamite bishops’ sympathy for heresy; they refused to support their brother in the face of theological innovation. Whilst Trelawny had struggled under the weight of numerous law suits, Bury ‘enjoys … a Living with Cure of Souls, untouch’d by Another, who wants not Courage or Zeal, we know, for the Honour of his Character, but is more wary than to cast himself into the expense and uncertainties of a long Lawsuit’.80 William Wake’s Authority of Christian Princes

Atterbury’s tract was a direct challenge to the leadership of the Church. As he noted of the bishops, they may not miss their seat in a convocation house, but the inferior clergy, the constituency to which he was directly appealing, ‘are at leisure often to reflect on the neglect with which they are

79

Andrew M Coleby, ‘Trelawny, Sir Jonathan, third baronet (1650–1721)’, in ODNB; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 33–5; Sykes, William Wake, i, 116–18; James Harrington, A Defence of the Proceedings of the Right Reverend the Visitor and Fellows of Exeter College in Oxford (1691); Bod. MS Smith 47 f.64, Edward Bernard to Thomas Smith, 9 Apr. 1690; Bod. MS Smith 47 f.66, Edward Bernard to Thomas Smith, 27 July 1690. 80 Atterbury, A Letter to a Convocation-Man, 10–11.

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used, and the methods that are taken of making them useless’.81 Indeed, it was a direct challenge to Archbishop Tenison. Whilst he had not been archbishop when convocation was dissolved in 1690, he had kept the organisation from doing mischief by accepting prorogations ever since.82 Worried by such a skilled piece of journalism, Tenison summoned William Wake, canon of Christ Church and an expert in convocation, and instructed him to reply to Atterbury. Wake’s response, the Authority of Christian Princes, has a mixed reputation amongst historians. On the one hand, he is considered to have proved Atterbury’s claim for an independent convocation to be historically incorrect. Atterbury had ignored that there were two different summons and therefore two different forms of convocation. Using impressive historical research, Wake proved conclusively that there was no right for the current form of convocation to be called independently by the Church.83 On the other hand, however, Wake spent almost a quarter of the work insisting that, from the age of Constantine, Christian rulers had possessed an absolute control over church synods. He not only seemed to be stressing that the Church was totally subordinate to the state, but also dismissing the real concerns many of the clergy had for the condition of the Church.84 Historians have mainly concerned themselves with describing Wake’s erudition and the supreme quality of his historical research. Nevertheless, Wake did concern himself with rebutting Atterbury’s description of the moral condition of England. Where Atterbury saw an urgent need for a synod to control heresy and the press, Wake suggested that alternative methods might be used to ensure the civility of debate. In doing so, however, he did admit a number of concerns with the nature of public debate, for: mens passions are let loose, and their minds disordered: when their interests, and designs; their friends and their parties; nay, their very judgments and principles, lead them different ways; and they agree in nothing so much, as in being very peevish and angry with one another: when their very reason is depraved; and they judge not according to truth, or evidence, but with respect of persons; and everyone opposes, what another of a different persuasion either moves or approves of; what good can the prince propose to himself, or any wise man hope for, from any assembly that can be brought together, under the unhappy influence of these, and the like prepositions?85

81

Ibid., 63.

Thomas Tenison, 250; Thomas Lathbury, A History of the Convocation of the Church of England: From the Earliest Period to the Year 1742 (1853). 83 Sykes, William Wake, i, 88–96. 84 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 51. 85 William Wake, The Authority of Christian Princes over their Ecclesiastical Princes (1697), 316–17. 82 Carpenter,

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Unlike Atterbury, Wake considered that recalling convocation would exacerbate men’s passions not calm them. He conceded that there was a need to reform the recent looseness in men’s religious principles, but he questioned whether convocation was the appropriate body for the task. The recent emergence of party heat would surely find further expression in the clerical body. Far from establishing orthodoxy, the reality of entrenched schisms would likely harm the Church further, for the clergy will ‘fly into heats and parties; and after much contention, nothing to be done: And the enemies without will smile, and tell the world, that when it came to the trial, the convocation itself could not agree about this matter; and from thence draw an untoward consequence, against the very doctrine itself’.86 Wake suggested the enemies of the Church would be fortified by the inevitable failure of convocation. Witnessing the disputes between the upper and lower house, Socinians, deists and atheists would be fortified by the conclusion that the Church was divided both theologically and ecclesiologically. It is hard to understand whether the difference between Atterbury and Wake was theological. Certainly, Wake was happy for the Church’s mission to be advanced by lay involvement, whereas Atterbury elevated the status of the Church. Further, they clearly disagreed about whether a clerical synod had any chance of controlling errant expression. But, as we have seen, Wake was keen to emphasise how swearing might well bring damnation on to an individual and suggested the Church was responsible for bringing sinners into the light, and he understood that errant ideas might spread further poison into the souls of others. But Wake rejected Atterbury’s suggestion that the bishops had allowed deism and Socinianism to spread unopposed. He maintained the doctrine of the Church was pure and the clergy and the bishops had been assiduous in responding to opponents, ‘our sermons, and our writings, declare against them. And what can any, abroad, or at home, desire, either the church, or her ministers should do more? Or what more could a convocation, were it to meet tomorrow, do?’87 Wake’s position resembles that taken by Whig clerics in the Occasional Paper. The Church was and ought to be assiduous in opposing and engaging errant doctrine, but the process of control and the assignment of punishment should be left to the secular state; the rationale of the Church was apostolic teaching and instruction, not restraint. What Wake presented was a desire to preserve Protestant unity. His rejection of convocation and the universities as inappropriate forums for theological control was to be supplemented by effective public defence of Anglicanism and for parliament to provide control. Against Atterbury’s complaints, there was no need for MPs to possess particular theological knowledge, nor did they need to be masters of the fathers or the primitive church; instead, the secular state should stick 86 87

Ibid., 319–20. Ibid., 322.

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to the rule established in the first year of Elizabeth’s rule, that ‘nothing in religion be innovated, or attempted, contrary thereunto’.88 Wake also confronted Atterbury’s suggestion that the bishops denied the need for convocation because they were infected with heresy. To reinforce his point, Wake returned to the case of William Sherlock. Ignoring Atterbury’s contention that churchmen were theologically speculating, aligning with Locke and Toland, he defended Sherlock’s intention: For my own part, I am neither engaged by my opinion to support Dr Sherlock’s explication; nor will I ever become an advocate for any man, to the public detriment of the church, or its doctrine. But as I am persuaded he had no heretical design, nor is, knowingly, involved in any Tritheistical opinion.89

The wider fear, from the point of view of both Wake and Tenison, was concerned with how convocation would operate once it had been called. Both men doubted whether the clergy in the Lower House would content themselves with condemning Locke and Toland. The slow emergence of religious parties in the Church likely ensured convocation would be employed to heighten broader politico-religious antagonisms: the proceedings of large bodies are very uncertain; and it is hard to calculate beforehand how they will act, when they come together … a very little matter throws them into disorder; and when men think they have made their party so strong that nothing can oppose them, yet we know how mistaken they have oftentimes been.90

Despite Atterbury’s stern warning that for the sake of the nation both the Church and the government had to pay immediate attention to the parlous nature of morality caused by errant and licentious publications, Wake suggested Atterbury was making a political not a theological point. Although he never accused him of wanting to roll back toleration, he was clear as to what he considered to be the real aim of the Letter: he would have the bishops, or rather, the convocation, empowered to determine what they please, to be heretical: and when they have done so, to proceed against their own members. By virtue of this power, whatsoever books were published by men, whom they did not like, should be censured; and executed as heretical; and the authors be obliged to a retraction of them.91

88

Ibid., Ibid., 90 Ibid., 91 Ibid., 89

340. 330. 343. 337.

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Matthew Tindal’s Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate (1697)

Historians have assumed that the initial convocation dispute was an intra-clerical affair; in the words of the foremost historian of later Stuart ecclesiastical politics, it was a ‘controversy within the gate’.92 Yet the realisation that the dispute about the authority of convocation was as much about how to restrain the press as it was about jurisdictional issues might invite a sharper appreciation of its wider implications. Responses from two authors who were not clergymen – William Wright and Matthew Tindal – reveal how elite, non-clerical Whigs considered the press, and the implications should convocation be successfully recalled. The remainder of this chapter will seek to show how these two authors, both of whom considered forms of free expression and public disputation vital to establishing true public religion, articulated different responses to the lapse of licensing to those offered by clergymen. William Wright came from a Whig family. His father was MP for the City of Oxford and supported the revolution in 1688. Wright stood unsuccessfully as the Whig candidate for the same constituency in 1695 and was subsequently made recorder of Oxford in the late 1690s.93 His reply to Atterbury, published in the spring of 1697, was likely his only publication. Wright suggested Atterbury’s case for convocation was evidentially inaccurate, but his reaction to A Letter to a Convocation Man concentrated on setting out a positive vision for how public debate might be conducted in post-revolutionary England. Wright was sure that the civil state needed to confront vice and immorality because it threatened the stability of civil society, and he was equally sure the English Church did not need to resort to censorship to maintain the godliness of the nation. In a highly selective historical survey, he pointed out how often the Church had been defended from attacks. In the earlier seventeenth century, for example, he maintained the innovations of Archbishop Laud were not extirpated by the Civil War. Rather, scholarly divines, through their publications and ecclesiastical disputation, had revealed Laudianism as intellectually and spiritually bankrupt in the 1630s. This partial historical enquiry provided a narrative in which churchmen used religious discussion to maintain the Church’s exalted position. Ignoring the difficult periods of the Civil War and the events of the 1680s, Wright contrasted the behaviour of divines in the 1630s favourably with the present day. Where Puritans had successfully rebutted their Arminian opponents by engaging in debate, clergymen in the 1690s had failed to learn the historical lesson. Like Wake, Wright employed the example of William Sherlock to demonstrate his point. Shocked by the surge William Wake, i, 80–156. Leonard Naylor/Geoffrey Jaggar, ‘Wright, William (1619–93)’, in B.D. Henning (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1660–1690 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1983).

92 Sykes, 93

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in Trinitarian discussion and concerned at new techniques of Scriptural analysis, post-revolution Anglicans, instead of rebutting ideas, resorted to incivility and abuse and had demanded restraint. Rather than discussing Sherlock’s positions, they had unleashed an: uncharitable fury which has pursued him, has wounded religion more, than any inferences which can be forced from his works: it is strange that men, even when they are disputing about the Articles of Faith, should forget all charity, and the precepts of the holy religion, which they would be thought so earnestly to contend for.94

Wright was unconvinced by complaints of the weakened jurisdictional authority of the Church, which so exercised Atterbury and the lower clergy. The Church’s purity and holiness and its doctrinal orthodoxy ensured restraint of ideas was irrelevant. All men could find salvation by adhering to the creeds of their national religion. Precisely because the Scriptures were plain in matters of salvation, exegesis was an indulgence, practised only to destabilise the polity: ‘the Scriptures have revealed plainly enough all that is necessary to salvation; and the curious enquiries, which are beyond that, serve only to amaze and puzzle us, and to make the way more dark and obscure’.95 A willingness to use restraint of ideas to defend the Church was also an anathema. Indeed, he commented that both the Trinitarian disputes and the Oxford Decree had gone some way to destabilising the country further: the authority of declaring and making heresy, may be of such pernicious consequence to the peace of any church, that it is not fit to be entrusted with any body of men … for otherwise we may have as many different, and contrary religions, as there are declarers and decreers of heresy.96

Matthew Tindal’s Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate was forged in conversation with Atterbury. Tindal (1657–1733) was the son of a clergyman, educated at Lincoln College, Oxford, and elected to a law fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 1678. He converted to Roman Catholicism and regularly attended Mass but returned to the Church of England just before the Glorious Revolution.97 He was a successful lawyer in the early 1690s, practising at Gray’s Inn and spending much of his time at All Souls,

William Wright, A Letter to a Member of Parliament; Occasioned by a Letter to a Convocation Man, 9. 95 Ibid., 7. 96 Ibid., 72. 97 B.W. Young, ‘Tindal, Matthew (bap.1657–d.1733)’, in ODNB; Stephen Lalor, Matthew Tindal, Freethinker: An Eighteenth-Century Assault on Religion (2006), 9–36; The Religious, Rational, and Moral Conduct of Matthew Tindal, L.L.D. Late Fellow of All Souls College in London (1735); Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, 17–20. 94

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and was an associate of John Locke.98 Alongside practising law, he was a regular pamphleteer and made consistent use of anonymity. In a publishing career that spanned forty years, he put his name to one tract. In the early 1690s, he concentrated on two connected issues. He was an ardent defender of the revolution, promoting a radical Whig interpretation that James’s abdication had returned the country to a state of nature.99 Alongside his political interests, he defended toleration and dismissed the clerical claim to sacerdos. He was committed to teasing out the implications of the English Reformation settlement being unfinished, contending that the defence of Erastianism would finally provide England with political stability. Much like Toland, the man he is most associated with, his analysis of the Reformation found expression in a radical assault on the status of the clergy.100 Tindal’s Magistrate was composed of two unequal parts. The first section reflects his concern not only that the Williamite revolution was malformed, but also that it was increasingly under threat.101 The initial section of the pamphlet was a lengthy critique of clerical claims to authority, coupled with maintaining that the civil magistrate possessed supreme power over the ecclesiastical state. It defended the revolution for returning England to a natural state and set out how and when the Magistrate might intervene in a man’s life to sustain political stability. The second section was a tacked-on postscript, which replied directly to A Letter to a Convocation Man. Textual evidence, then, suggests that Tindal came upon Atterbury’s text rather late in the writing process, but that he immediately recognised its importance. No doubt Tindal’s response could be composed quickly because his thinking was already concerned with the same issues explicated by Atterbury. Tindal had also already engaged in discussions of the limits of public disputation. He had contributed to the Trinitarian debates, discussing how each man might conceive of God, and commenting that far too often priests, ‘thunder it from their pulpits, that matters of faith are above reason, and that God has a right to require to believe on his word what we do not apprehend or understand’.102 E.S. de Beer (ed), The Correspondence of John Locke (Oxford, 1989), v, 749, Matthew Tindal to John Locke, 10 Jan. 1697. 99 Matthew Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Laws of Nations, and the Rights of Sovereigns (1694); Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics & Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton University Press, 1986), 569, 576, 589, 598. 100 Matthew Tindal, An Essay Concerning Obedience to the Supreme Powers, and the Duty of Subjects in all Revolutions (1694); Matthew Tindal, A Letter to the Reverend the Clergy of both Universities Concerning the Trinity and the Athanasian Creed (1694); Matthew Tindal, The Reflections on the XXVIII Propositions Touching the Doctrine of the Trinity (1694). 101 Matthew Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, and the Rights of Mankind in Matters of Religion (1697). 102 Matthew Tindal, A Letter to the Reverend the Clergy of both Universities, Concerning the Trinity and the Athanasian Creed (1694), 3; idem., The Reflections on the XXVIII Propositions Touching the Doctrine of the Trinity (1695); Stephen Nye, A Reply to the Second Defence 98

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Tindal worried that there was a canker at the heart of the polity. Far from being grateful for their deliverance from Catholic and French danger in 1689, a cadre of churchmen had recently emerged who resented the marginalisation of their power. Most obviously Francis Atterbury but Nonjurors too, under the guise of worrying about the status of the Church, wanted to roll back legal toleration. They had never accepted the right of the new king to the throne and rejected his religious policies too. Through ‘daily invective, discourses and sermons (besides a great many other malicious insinuations)’, they were determined to describe the Church in the greatest danger so their own power might be returned.103 Having unmasked the malign intent of his opponents, Tindal set out to controvert their position and provide his own vision of how English society might develop. On the surface, the answer to self-interested clerical assaults on the condition of post-revolutionary England was to reiterate, indeed reshape, the power of the magistrate so that he, in turn, might settle the relationship between politics and religion. Tindal linked the power of the magistrate to innate rights. There was no right of interference in affairs concerned with ‘life, liberty and property’, and morality could only be adjudicated when it related to the duties of man to man. In turn, this political position prevented clerics according power to their church. For, if men understood and maintained their natural rights, Tindal reasoned, disputes would be kept to a minimum and the magistrate would intervene in humane affairs rarely. But, this utopian proposition – a kingdom in which there was very little hierarchy, and participants understood and exercised their own power responsibly – was not just a proposition for future settlement. On the contrary, it looked backward to criticise how the Williamite regime and the Church had tried to establish stability. Tindal rejected all clerical attempts to coerce behaviour, whether it was Church or voluntary movements, as merely the action of self-interested clerics, interfering in the morality and lives of men when they had no right to do so. Not only should piety remain a private matter, which could only be discussed within communities, it was irrelevant to salvation. Whether they be High or Low Churchmen, clerics who promoted moral reformation, far from inculcating piety in the community, were pursuing their own political ends by ensnaring people who were already godly, in insincere, outward religion. The recent behaviour of clerics, using their own religiosity as a disguise for the political ambition of rolling back true religion, had been aided by their claims to be the arbiters of doctrinal truth, and subsequent disputation. They obliged the people to believe ‘contrary to the law of God; but that for the sake of the church’s peace, they have a right to determine those controversies that may arise among the faithful; and when they have done of the XXVIII Propositions, Said to be Wrote in Answer to a Socinian Manuscript (1695); Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, 17; Lalor, Matthew Tindal, 54–90. 103 Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, 1–2.

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so, none ought to examine those points again’.104 For all his reputation as a disguised atheist, Tindal insisted that each man must ceaselessly seek salvation by ascertaining his own personal truth.105 It was a spiritual gift for each individual to discern between ‘truth and falsehood, good and evil’; it followed there was a direct link between thought and action. God required each man to be fully satisfied of their thoughts before they committed to action, for ‘he that acts when he doubts is damned; and whatsoever is not of faith, is sin’.106 Far from requiring clerical guidance, and much like Toland, Tindal insisted the only way to judge the sense and meaning of God’s laws was through reason. He also endorsed the literary habit contained in Christianity not Mysterious of combining biblical citations to simultaneously demonstrate the intellectual efficacy of reason and to prove his wider epistemological point. Tindal legitimated his approach to the truth by quoting Thess. 5:21: ‘prove all things, hold fast that which is good’. Tindal suggested this particular text justified the use of personal rationality, asserting that no interference from clerics or the Church was necessary to arbitrate biblical meaning. Others thought differently and often maintained it was not always possible to be so sure of the meaning of Scripture. As one contemporary commented of the same text, ‘but suppose we are not fully satisfied in this point; suppose we have some little Doubts and Scruples’.107 For most churchmen, doubt required a return to the Church, where assurance could be found, buttressed by the godly status of the Church and by the authority of clerical Scriptural interpretation. Yet, for Tindal, not only was this position unscriptural, it was also ungodly, for he only required each man ‘try the spirits; to let no man deceive us; to beware of false prophets, seducers, deceivers; to judge ourselves what is right’.108 There were clear similarities in the approach of both Toland and Tindal to the Bible. Both men suggested self-interested priests had claimed interpretive rights of Scripture for their own political ends. Tindal drew a direct comparison between the behaviour of English Protestant clergymen and Catholic priests, asking his readers to consider ‘which is worse, to give men leave by reading the Scripture, to judge for themselves, and then use force to make them act contrary to their judgments, or to make them follow their guides with a blind implicit faith?’109 Ultimately, linking together Catholic and Protestant clergy in this way was little more than a literary artifice to make a political point. Whatever Tindal thought of the Glorious Revolution and the insecurity of the subsequent settlement, he was sure Catholicism had 104 Ibid.,

178–9. Matthew Tindal. 106 Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, 19. 107 Offspring Blackall, A Sermon Preached at the Chapel of Brentwood in Essex (1693), 19. 108 Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, 18. 109 Ibid., 121. 105 Lalor,

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been extirpated as a direct threat by a just war and a providential Protestant monarch.110 Papist priests were simply a convenient stick with which to beat their English counterparts. Indeed, satisfied there was no chance of foreign invasion, he acknowledged the behaviour of Catholic priests was at least honest. Denying access to the Bible and leading people blindly in thought were, after all, the marrow of Catholic behaviour. Protestant priests possessed a different intellectual tradition, their denial of biblical access was underhand, conniving and hypocritical. The clergy had abandoned their principles and Lutheran legacy, descending into the political malaise of their opponents and unintentionally revealing their own spiritual frailty: That the principles of the Protestants, by which they endeavour to justify their separation from her, are so absurd that themselves are obliged to act contrary to them, and do the very same things they condemn in her. Thus the persecution of the Popish Church has been kept in countenance by the Protestants following her example, which otherwise would have appeared so odious, that all must have abhorred her for it, or else obliged her to grant the liberty which would infallibly ruin her.111

The deliberate concurrence in Tindal’s writing between all religious styles of clergymen helped to serve a narrative designed to produce a solution to the failing post-revolutionary settlement. The control of the Bible, the insistence by all priests that their calling allowed them to mediate in doctrinal disputes ‘without hearing or reading some learned men of their party, suffering to make them understand the controverted points’, had stunted the progress of the Reformation and now threatened the Williamite settlement. For Tindal it was a historical betrayal. The Reformation was, at first, a mighty torrent sweeping away opposition. The first reformers deserved great commendation. Despite their own upbringing in darkness and superstition, they had seen the corruption of religion and started the cleansing process to achieve pure faith. Yet, as the first fathers of the Reformation had died, their intellectual legacy had been deformed by lesser men, who, seeking to claim unauthorised authority, had cut off the Bible from the people and distorted the Reformation to a disastrous contemporary result. England had been left with a riven religious polity, so that ‘instead of examining one another’s opinion sincerely and impartially, they ran daily further into ignorance, superstition, narrowness and uncharitableness’.112 This historical analysis of deception, control and self-interested manoeuvring in the name of clerical politicking served to illustrate a deliberate negative, so that a positive might be drawn of how English society might be remade in the specific conditions of the 1690s. Because the Reformation Tindal, An Essay Concerning Obedience to the Supreme Powers (1694). An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, 122–3. 112 Ibid., 124. 110 Matthew 111 Tindal,

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had been stunted by preventing freedom of enquiry and true religion had never been attained, English society should return to Luther’s ideas to achieve religious truth and political stability. Solitary reading of the Scriptures, even if done with reason, as Toland had advocated, in the eyes of Tindal was a malformed concept that lacked understanding of human nature. Confined to reading books alone, people would only ever hear one side of the argument; they would never form true judgements. Equally, and from the other end of the religious spectrum, truth would also be stunted if jurisdictional authority was used to control ideas. The solution to the instability of the 1690s, an instability that many saw as caused by the lapse of licensing in combination with religious plurality, could be found in embracing the free exchange of ideas: In short, did the priests of any Protestant party act consistent with their own principles, and had a mind that the people should not blindly follow them, they would be so far from hindering them (by restraining the liberty of the press and pulpit) from examining the reasonableness of those opinions that are contrary to theirs, that they would make it their business to persuade them to it, and obtain an entire liberty for their adversaries to preach and print what they think good.113

In late seventeenth-century England, the aspiration that political stability might be achieved by allowing people to hear all arguments required further explanation. Tindal clearly considered it essential for each person to find their own truth. For him, contemporary religious debate was too often characterised by sophistry based on maintaining hierarchical clerical and political power. The way of managing disputation ought to be the measure by which churches judged themselves. Man should be led to truth through charitable direction, so that ‘the strong should bear with the weak, and the weak not judge the strong; and that every one is to be fully persuaded in his own mind, and not to judge his brother, but to leave him to the judgement of God’.114 Dismissing hierarchy, whether secular or clerical, as inadequate for establishing truth, led Tindal to suggest community ought to be the backbone for how 1690s English society should be constructed: The kindest office one man can do to another is, if he thinks him in an error, to endeavour to convince him of it; who although he continues in his former opinion, yet the obligation to the other for his good intention still remains, and this benefit he may obtain by it, that by examining the reasons on both sides, he is more likely to discover the truth; yet should he mistake after he has impartially examined the point, his error would be wholly innocent, since he has done what he can to find out the truth, and God requires no more; but to cause a person to be persecuted for 113 Ibid., 114 Ibid.,

122. 75.

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being instrumental in this, is the most unnatural and diabolical thing that can be.115

Contemporaries feared that Toland and Tindal were forming a coherent deist movement that insisted on the individual right to seek truth, and which thus denied the right of the clergy to intercede between the earth and heaven and attacked the sacral status of the Church.116 Alexander Pope was later to insist, for example, that ‘Toland and Tindal, prompt at Priests to jeer’.117 This accusation, of course, provided Tindal’s opponents with a political advantage, suggesting the Church was under coordinated attack and requiring national authorities to come to its defence. But attention paid to the consequences of Toland’s and Tindal’s ideas suggest that they were engaged in very different intellectual projects. Most obviously, their ideas on how correct knowledge might be achieved were significantly at variance. Despite his reputation for corrupting the very basis of Christianity to the end of destroying religion, in 1696 Toland remained wedded to using the Bible as the route to godliness but he denied the need for primers and clerical guidance, insisting reason was sufficient.118 Whilst he complained about the incivility of his opponents’ responses and hinted at how the rules of public debate might be established, Toland did not articulate a direct relationship between freedom of thought, enquiry and expression. Or, put simply, for Toland the connection between thought and action remained private. For Tindal, however, Toland’s reasoning did not go far enough; it was too individual. He insisted that once men had found the truth, they must communicate their findings with others. In short, debate and discussion would lead people to heaven. This was a bold departure from conventional religious thinking on the relationship between investigating ideas, establishing truth and salvation. Ever since the Glorious Revolution, under-girded by the SRM, government injunctions, and also seen in Atterbury’s Letter, there had been a widespread and repeated insistence on the danger that unchecked discussion of ideas posed to men’s souls. The decision by Tindal to break with this position was not because he did not look to heaven; it was the opposite. Mere opinions had no fatal consequences for the souls of men: it was examining matters of religion freely and debating ideas that led to redemption. This approach yielded advantages. Most obviously, for Tindal, in a tract opposing Atterbury and riven with anticlericalism, it once again allowed him to paint clerics as persecutors. By using brute force to impose their own opinions 115 Ibid.,

30–1. Hoadly’s Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Enquired into, and Disproved (1711), preface; Dr Sacheverell’s Real Diary; Being a True and Faithful Account of Himself (1715), 14. 117 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1729), 121. 118 Peter Browne, A letter to a book entitled, Christianity not Mysterious (1697), 229. 116 Mr

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they were simply punishing people for their own temporal advantage. But, crucially, the liberty of the press and the pulpit, by ensuring free permission for different opinions to be debated and discussed, by denying the efficacy of restraint and control, would finally deliver the peace so many craved: And since nothing can, at least so certainly, root out such opinions, as putting the professors of them to death, is it not the highest charity to the souls of others to serve them so? Nay, it’s more for the safety and interest of a nation, that a few should be destroyed upon that account of religion, than the great numbers by lesser punishments, which suffers them to increase, should be grieved and provoked; which must necessarily create disturbances, tumults, wars.119

Tindal argued that it was the nature of the enquiry that was godly, not the object of belief; indeed, he suggested freedom of enquiry and debate would create godly community and thus ensure peace and stability. To outsiders and to many historians this has looked like an attempt to create a press somehow based on liberal ideas of freedom. In fact, Tindal acknowledged some groups were beyond the pale. The magistrate, for example, was perfectly entitled to restrict the spread of atheistical ideas for they were destroyers of conscience and would subvert all religion. Therefore, in order to preserve the civil peace, the magistrate must punish those who denied the existence of God. The same logic could also be applied to blasphemy as long as correct definitions were in place. Tindal acknowledged that Christians had always possessed the power to punish formal blasphemy (by which he meant swearing and insulting God) but not worshipping false gods, which was simple material blasphemy. Reverting to previous arguments, he insisted punishing wrong doctrine would simply destabilise the polity and might only be punished by God in the afterlife.120 The previous two chapters have qualified the assumption that anticlerical rhetoric provided the basis for a free press. Although Toland and Tindal agreed that religious enquiry, free from clerical interference, formed the basis for finding doctrinal truth, they did not agree whether religious knowledge, once it was acquired, needed to be communicated to the wider community. For Toland, private reading of Scripture formed the basis of his civil religion. Tindal, however, went further. For him, it was a godly instruction to communicate religious knowledge, which in turn would lead the way to Erastian civil religion. This variety of Whig polemic traded on the assumption that the Glorious Revolution should have extirpated the ancient corruption of religion by the clergy. As that promise was unfulfilled, Matthew Tindal looked to the press to help resist the renewed sacerdotal

An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, 102. 78.

119 Tindal, 120 Ibid.,

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claims of the priesthood, epitomised by Francis Atterbury’s Letter to a Convocation Man. By the mid-1690s, the alliance between radical Whig polemic and freethinking anticlericalism had assumed complex political ramifications. Francis Atterbury called for the return of convocation to deal with theological latitude; in doing so, he made it clear that he considered much of that latitude to be in the Church. For the lower clergy, alarmed by the ramifications of unorthodox religious thinking, the return of convocation offered the chance to attack John Toland, Matthew Tindal and doctrinal laxity within the Williamite episcopate and their allies.121 In turn, Wake’s rejection of Atterbury’s sacerdotal claims seemed to rest on an Erastian vision that Matthew Tindal might accept, reinforcing the false impression of an alliance between radical Whigs and Williamite bishops.122 These debates revealed two vital changes. First, by 1697, party ideology was starting to emerge in and around the Church. If they were not yet a fully formed movement, Francis Atterbury was appealing to a constituency that wished to see the status of the Church restored, which would eventually find expression as a High Church party. Second, one part of that appeal was to argue for the press and errant doctrine to be dealt with by Church structures, not by voluntary movements. In the eyes of High Churchmen, recent attempts by Tenison to control Trinitarian discussions with Church Injunctions and to improve the morality of the nation with practical Christianity were not only a failure, they endangered the providential claims of the Williamite regime and weakened the Church. Wake accepted that the press needed reform, but with the backing of Archbishop Tenison suggested a better solution might be found in the secular arm of the state. It is to attempts by parliament to reform the press that the next chapter turns.

121 G.V.

Bennett, ‘King William III and the Episcopate’, in G.V. Bennett and John Walsh (eds), Essays in Modern English Church History (Oxford, 1966), 128–9. 122 Wake, of course, in opposition to Toland and Tindal, maintained that the clergy were apostolic and fulfilled a divine function. For which, see William Wake, The Bishop of Lincoln’s Charge to the Clergy of his Diocese (1706); Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 179–86.

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4 Legislation in the Late Seventeenth Century: Matthew Tindal, Francis Gregory and the Press John Toland was not just a religious radical. He was a skilled editor, adeptly repackaging the works of Edmund Ludlow, reshaping his image from regicidal republican of the mid-century to a Commonwealthman, who shared the anticorruption interests of the country politicians of the 1690s.1 With less editing, Toland also attempted to transform the reputation of John Milton. He provided a prefatory biography to a new edition of Milton’s prose works, likely under the supervision of the printer John Darby, whilst other authors in the ‘Calves-Head’ circle completed the editing.2 Much like Ludlow, rather than a regicidal radical, Milton was transformed into a moderate man of letters, suited to combatting clerical claims to power in the 1690s and fighting religious and civil corruption.3 Milton’s Areopagitica was central to the project. Again, with Toland’s skilled intervention, the most famous text of the freedom of the press was made a republican critique of tyranny, in which censorship was dishonourable. In the new words of Toland, any attempt to reassert press control was ‘more dangerous even than a standing army to civil liberty’.4 Many authors objected to Toland’s new project. The rehabilitation of John Milton, a man with a reputation for being a traitorous regicide, elicited a number of replies.5 One author, the anonymous ‘R.E.’, looked beyond Republican Learning, 80–2; A.B. Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower. Part Five: 1660–1662, (1982); Blair Worden, ‘Whig History and Puritan Politics: The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow Revisited’, Historical Research, 75, (2002), 209–37. 2 Champion, Republican Learning, 100; Connell, Secular Chains, 150. 3 Champion, Republican Learning, 101; George Frank Sensabaugh, That Grand Whig Milton (Stanford University Press, 1952); Nicholas Von Maltzahn, ‘The Whig Milton, 1660–1700’, in D. Armitage, A. Himy and Q. Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995), 229–53; Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Rematerialising Milton’, Publishing History, 41 (1977), 5–22. 4 Champion, Republican Learning, 101. 5 Offspring Blackall, Mr Blackall’s Reasons for not Replying to a Book lately Published, entitled Amyntor (1699); Samuel Clarke, Some Reflections on that part of a Book called Amyntor, or the Defence of Milton’s Life (1699). 1 Champion,

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the anticlericalism and anti-Scriptural attacks of Toland’s book and, instead, took it as axiomatic that the unhindered republication of John Milton was just another example of why the press must be further controlled. The recent publication of a number of virulent ill-natured pamphlets was a conspiracy amongst Catholics, Socinians and republicans, dedicated to retarding the advance of reformed religion and destabilising the peace of the nation. According to R.E. the conspiracy to maintain the divisive power of the press was proved by the opposition of Jacobites and Commonwealthmen to the passage of the Blasphemy Bill. Only further legislation against the press could possibly hope to bring the nation back to peace and advance further reformation.6 Another anonymous author was clear that the republication of Milton’s works was an example of the resurgent revolutionary threat to the Williamite government.7 The Commonwealthmen were now supplemented by new incendiaries, ‘Libertines, Deists, and Socinians’, who had recently ‘vomited out odious heresies’.8 The short pamphlet was quick to identify the religious radicalism of this new club, as defined by their enmity towards revealed religion and their commitment to liberty, which was merely a mask for licentiousness. Indeed, so opposed were the club to the recent passage of a successful Blasphemy Bill into legislation that they had been prompted into rage and revenge.9 These two responses to the attempts by Toland and others to enlist Milton in support of a radical Whig agenda of anticlericalism and civil liberty demonstrate surviving worries about the pernicious influence of the press on English political and religious culture. In hindsight, the failure of blasphemy legislation to produce significant prosecutions might appear to signal the freedom of the press’s triumphant incorporation into the English constitution as a fundamental right.10 But, that is not how contemporaries considered their situation. This chapter considers how three anonymous tracts reacted to, and commented on, the passing of blasphemy legislation and how a further three authors – Matthew Tindal, Francis Gregory and an anonymous author – reacted to attempts to pass press legislation in the late seventeenth century. All of the responses to possible legislation provide further insight into how contemporaries tried to tease out the intimate Remarks on the life of Mr Milton (1699), 50–1. Mark Knights, ‘The Tory Interpretation of History in the Rage of Parties’, HLQ, 68 (2005), 353–73. 8 Reflections on the Short History of Standing Armies in England (1699), 17. For the connection between Toland and the Standing Army debates of the late 1690s see, Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies’: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (1974), 173–4. 9 Reflections on the Short History of Standing Armies, 18. 10 Eckhart Hellmuth, ‘“The Press Ought to be open to All”: From the Liberty of Conscience to the Liberty of the Press”, in Gordon Pentland and Michael Davis, Liberty, Property and Popular Politics: England and Scotland, 1688–1815. Essays in Honour of H.T, Dickinson (Edinburgh, 2016), 9–25. 6 R.E., 7

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relationship between freedom of expression, sin and salvation, and the providential status of the country. I am not here concerned with the mechanics of how legislation was passed (or rejected), but rather how reactions provide further understandings of the difficulties caused by the emergence and establishment of religious plurality in late seventeenth-century England. Proclamations and Blasphemy Legislation (1698)

In the short term, the origins of the legislation against blasphemy can be found in a speech delivered by the king to parliament in late 1697. With the Treaty of Ryswick bringing the Nine Years’ War to an end, the king turned his attention to domestic matters.11 In a speech to parliament, he maintained that he had rescued the country from extreme danger by promoting piety, but, like many of his supporters, he acknowledged that profanity and immorality still coursed through society.12 The king’s entreaty was taken seriously. Sir John Philipps, a vocal supporter of the SPCK, asked for the king’s speech to be translated into legislation. In an address to the Commons, Philipps made clear that general attacks on immorality would not suffice. The country now faced a licentious press that pursued irreligion and spread Socinianism.13 Indeed, a proclamation by the king earlier in 1697 had already connected immorality and unorthodox books. Wicked persons, the proclamation noted, have presumed ‘to print and publish several pernicious books and pamphlets, which contain in them impious doctrines against the Holy Trinity and other fundamental articles of our faith’. Aping the language of previous proclamations concerned with morality, the king demanded that all persons must now desist from publishing any such books and instructed all magistrates to prosecute any future offender to the maximum limit of the law.14 From here a bill was introduced into parliament, where it passed the Upper House, was sent to the Commons and was eventually taken through to royal assent later in the year.15 The legislation set out stringent punishment. A first conviction disabled the offender from holding civil or ecclesiastical office, whilst a further offence would lead to imprisonment for three years without bail.16 In addition to punishments, the legislation Parliament, Policy and Politics, 222. His Majesties Most Gracious Speech to both Houses of Parliament, on Friday the third day of December, 1697 (1697), 2. 13 TNA SP 32/9 f.178, Proceedings in the House of Commons, 9–11 Feb. 1698. 14 By the King, a Proclamation, for Preventing and Punishing Immorality and Prophaneness (1697). 15 See Eloise Davies, ‘English Politics and the Blasphemy Act’, EHR, 575 (2020), 811–13. 16 William III, 1697–1698: An Act for the more effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Profaneness. 11 Horwitz, 12

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set out what the limits of religious printing should be. It became illegal to deny any of the persons in the Trinity to be God, to assert there are more gods than one, to deny the Christian religion to be true and to deny the Scriptures to be of divine authority. Neither the passage not the immediate aftermath of the bill were without problems. Early in 1698, an anonymous author questioned the definition of anti-Trinitarianism contained within the legislation. Some Considerations Upon the Bill complained that the understanding of the Trinity was likely unscriptural, an irony, he noted, as the bill defined both the Old and the New Testament to be of Divine Authority.17 It was the use of ‘persons’ that was particularly vexing. Was it not better, the author contended, to use a direct Scriptural quotation here, I John 5:7: ‘bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word, or the Holy Ghost to be God’. This Scriptural definition did not contain the plural persons, a term that had caused controversy during the Trinitarian controversies. Despite these concerns, the anonymous author accepted the need to restrain the press, and that unorthodox definitions of the Trinity lay at the heart of those concerns. But they worried the legislation would be used to accuse Dissenters of heterodoxy. If the definition of the Trinity was not strictly Scriptural, surely invidious informers would accuse orthodox Christians of heresy even though they own the substance of the Trinity in terms of Holy Scripture.18 Although there is no doubt this tract approved of the new legislation, it was excoriated by two anonymous responses, for two reasons: first, that the comments concerned with definitions of the Trinity were nothing more than an attempt to sow division; second, it was merely an underhand attempt to deny the right of the civil magistrate to intervene in spiritual affairs.19 The anonymous Considerations Upon the Bill was also broadly supportive of legislation against the press. It was underpinned by an emphasis on the strength provided by a close relationship between Church and state. Far from the doctrinal orthodoxy of the Church being exclusively reliant on Scripture, as had been claimed, Anglicanism derived its authority from its spiritual purity, which could be found in the creeds of the primitive church and were expressed in the doctrinal sections of the Thirty-Nine Articles. The Anglican Church was a confession of faith that had been affirmed by numerous Acts of Parliament. The author accused his opponent of being a Socinian. The previous authors’ reliance on Scriptural purity was merely a guise for doctrinal unorthodoxy, and his questioning of the role of parliament in religious affairs was exactly the same position taken by John Toland and fellow deists. This position, the author maintained, should open Some Considerations Upon the Bill for the More Effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Prophaneness (1698), 1. 18 Ibid., 1. 19 The Considerations Upon the Bill for the more Effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Prophaneness, Animadverted (1698). 17

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the eyes of how dangerous Socinianism was to the stability of the nation. A pernicious sect, they would not allow parliament or the Church to meddle in religious affairs and were committed to never coercing society in matters of religion.20 According to the anonymous author, blasphemy legislation was crucial to the stability of the state and to settle the erratic nature of religious disputation. Any idea that the current bill would cause further disputes on issues of ambiguity was dismissed as specious nonsense. In any case, at the root of Christianity was the need to adjudicate difficult questions. Christ may have been the Prince of Peace, but the Scriptures plainly revealed that there must be divisions, heresies and offences. When differences were about fundamentals, the ‘growth of evil must by punishment be prevented’ and the recent legislation was designed to support the Church.21 The second response was likely written by William Penn (1644–1718).22 By the late 1690s Penn’s political influence was waning. A prominent Quaker since his conversion in the late 1660s, he was a leading adviser to James II in the 1680s.23 Penn survived the revolution, and whilst he never enjoyed political power again, he cultivated useful contacts with Godolphin, Sunderland and Harley. Much like the first tract, Penn rejected the need for blasphemy legislation. Unsurprisingly, Penn worried that such legislation would proscribe honest Dissenters: that it may not prove, in practice, a greater snare and suffering to good men, than a restraint upon ill ones. For it be left ambiguous, so that it may affect religious, as well as lewd and wicked people, it will, like the Trojan Horse, carry an army in the belly of it, to serve the spleen of pride of every party, in their turn of government to oppress the rest.24

Nor, he claimed, was it possible for the legislation to identify true blasphemy. The authorities, he maintained, must take all care to identify blasphemy: ‘a presumptuous and despiteful expression or opinion about the nature and being of God’, or an ‘irreligious and scornful treating of the divine majesty in his nature and attributes’.25 It was not necessary for parliament to instruct the civil magistrate, sincere blasphemy was a matter of incorrect doctrine, the rectification of which was better left to the jurisdiction of individual churches where removal from communion may be the most effective penalty. Far from policing religious orthodoxy and providing political stability the legislation would lead to ‘the distraction of churches and the destruction of the people, that it was a great pity fresh 20 21 22 23 24

25

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 1. Andrew Murphy, William Penn: A Life (Oxford, 2019), 251. Mary K. Geiter, ‘Penn, William (1644–1718)’, in ODNB. William Penn, Caution Humbly Offered about Passing the Bill against Blasphemy (1698), 1. Ibid., 2.

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occasions should be given to revive a controversy so well laid’. Previous attempts to define true religion in such a way, he noted, had ‘smeared the church in blood’.26 It has been claimed that the passing of the bill rested on cooperation in parliament between country Whig MPs who were sympathetic to Dissenters, as long as they professed the orthodoxy of the Trinity, and High Church Tories.27 This may well be true for the restricted period of the debate and passing of the legislation. But the three tracts described above suggest that whilst a political alliance might have held for long enough to pass legislation, once it was subject to wider debate problems immediately became apparent. All three authors offered a critical summary of the problems of definition of blasphemy. In different ways, they suggested that religious unorthodoxy could not be simply restricted to Trinitarian orthodoxy; rather, the status of the Bible, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the relationship between Church and state all contributed. Perhaps crucially, members of parliament already understood that legislation against blasphemy could not hope to deal with the problems posed by the press, for there were almost immediate attempts to pass further legislation against the press. This chapter now turns to those attempts and wider discussions of how religious truth might be ascertained and maintained outside of the scope of blasphemy. Matthew Tindal and the Freedom of the Press (1698): Scripture and the Reformation

Alongside the passage of the Blasphemy Bill, members of both the Lords and the Commons continued to pursue further press legislation. On 24 February the Lords ordered a bill to restrain the licentiousness of the press but it was another year before a draft was drawn up by Sir John Powell. The bill passed the Lords on 4 January 1699 but was dismissed by the Commons.28 Much like the passage of the Blasphemy Bill, renewed parliamentary discussion of press legislation caused authors to pass further public comment on the nature of public debate. In the midst of initial legislative discussions, on 3 March, the Postman carried an advert indicating that a Letter to a Member of Parliament, Shewing that a Restraint of the Press is Inconsistent with the Protestant Religion was available for purchase at the Cross-Keys and Bible bookshop. The press tract was printed by J. Darby and sold by Andrew Bell. John Darby senior was a well-respected and prominent member of the Stationers’ Company. Born in 1662 and deceased in 1704 he operated from 26

Ibid., 7. Eloise Davies, ‘English Politics and the Blasphemy Act’, EHR, 575 (2020). 28 Goldie and Kemp (eds), Censorship and the Press, iv, 122; CJ, xii, 93, 99, 103 and 104; Lords Journal xvi, 217. 27

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a shop in Bartholomew Close, he was an Assistant Renter Warden for the Stationers’ Company from 1694 until the end of his life, and his business appears to have been successful enough for him to have bound and freed a number of apprentices.29 According to John Dunton, he was a ‘religious printer. He goes to Heaven with the Anabaptists … and is a true assertor of English Liberties.’30 If Dunton believed that Darby was going to heaven, Roger L’Estrange believed no such thing, suggesting that Darby was in fact a bold, cunning and bloody Anabaptist. L’Estrange’s opinion of Darby was undoubtedly driven by his own strident Toryism, but such a belief found firm evidence in Darby’s publication of Lord Russell’s speech, which marked him out as a prominent Whig.31 Darby’s career was one that saw him develop a thriving publishing and bookselling career, one built on a broad Whig outlook and a position within the bookselling establishment as an accepted member of the Stationers’ Company.32 The publication of the tract by Darby in 1698 points to a wider publishing project, one that Blair Worden has described as one of the main forces in creating a ‘canon of real Whig doctrine’.33 This project was built on the ability of key authors and publishers to cooperate; alongside Darby were Richard and Abigail Baldwin, both of whom had already worked with John Toland and it has been established that Andrew Bell was part of the venture as the son-in-law of John Darby.34 This network had repackaged the works of John Milton and Edmund Ludlow.35 The tract on the press was part of that project. It was never advertised as a free-standing book, rather, in its initial phase it was sold with the Militia Reform’d.36 The book Court Books of the Stationers’ Company, f.2021, f.2151, f.2191 and f.235v. John Dunton, The life and errors of John Dunton late citizen of London (1705), 247. For Dunton see Stephen Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade: A Study of his Career with a Checklist of his Publications (New York, 1976). 31 CSPD, Chas. II, v. 425, n. 75. For the printing by Darby of Russell’s speech see CSPD Chas. II, Case G London. Additionally, the Newdigate newsletters comment on the successful prosecution of Darby, Folger Library MS Newdigate newsletters 2 February 1683 f.1491. ODNB; National Archives probate 11/496, fols. 352r–352v; H.R. Plomer, A dictionary of the printers and booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1688 to 1725 (Oxford, 1922), 97–8. 32 For an additional comment on Darby’s political viewpoint see Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 239. 33 Worden, ‘Whig History and Puritan Politics, 210. For radical Whigs see also Melinda Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (Pennsylvania, PA, 1999). 34 Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow, 19. 35 Worden, Edmund Ludlow; Champion, Republican Learning, 93–115. 36 Tindal, Letter to a Member of Parliament, p. 34. For a contract between Toland and Darby see BL Add. MS 4295 ff.4, 6, 10. Bibliographic approaches to advertising are relatively unsophisticated and tend to concentrate on the economic advantages of advertising. James Tierney, ‘Book Advertisements in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Newspapers: The Example of Robert Dodsley’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Winchester, 29

30

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contained an expansive advertisement that listed Matthew Tindal’s work on the Magistrate from 1697, with Slingsby Bethel on the Providences of God and the General History of England by James Tyrrell.37 In 1699 a second edition of the press tract was published by Darby with an amended advertisement for Algernon Sidney’s Discourses of Government and the Complete Collection of the Works of John Milton.38 Finally, in 1699, Darby released a tract by Bartolomé de las Casas entitled An Account of the First Voyages. At the back of this work was another advertisement for the press with books by Toland, Sidney, Bethel and Shaftesbury.39 The tract of 1698 concerned with the press was intimately connected to John Toland’s work, revolving around John Darby’s bookshop and designed to rework and promote a Whig Commonwealth tradition.40 The anonymity of the tract has caused some confusion as to its authorship. It has been attributed to Daniel Defoe and John Toland, but it is clear

1995) 103–22; C.Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1997) 189–94; James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT, 2007) 193–220, 257–93; Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in EighteenthCentury Britain, Ireland and America (2006) 267–74. 37 [John Toland], The militia reform’d (1698), 94–5. Toland’s work was an attempt to draw a contrast between the virtuous behaviour of the Hanoverian and Prussian governments and that of popish decadence. Additionally he also used the tract to advertise future scribal projects – Champion, Republican Learning, 48, 131. Slingsby Bethel, The providences of God observed through several ages toward this nation (1697). Bethel is described as a republican merchant in ODNB. For more on Bethel see Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow; Worden, ‘Whig History and Puritan Politics’; Anne McGowan, ‘The Writings and Political Activities of Slingsby Bethel, 1617–1697’, M.Litt. thesis (unpublished), Cambridge University (2000). The Tyrrell work appears to have never come to fruition; it may have been an attempt to produce interest in a work that was still only in its early stages. For such an idea see Champion, Republican Learning, 48. 38 [John Toland], The militia reform’d, 2nd edn (1699), 92. Algernon Sidney, Discourses concerning government (1698); Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow, 20–1, 26–8; Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, 1998); Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991). John Milton, A complete collection of the historical, political, and miscellaneous works of John Milton (1698). For the publishing project of Milton at this time see Worden, ‘Whig History and Puritan Politics’; Worden (ed.), Edmund Ludlow, passim. 39 Bartolomé de las Casas, An account of the first voyages and discoveries made by the Spaniards in America (1699), preface. 40 Tindal, Letter to a Member of Parliament. This, then, is close to the standard imprint that Michael Treadwell has identified; the copyright of the work almost certainly belonged to Darby and was available for sale by Andrew Bell, who operated a shop from Cross-Keys and Bible in Cornhill; Michael Treadwell, ‘On False and Misleading Imprints in the London Book Trade 1660–1730’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), Fakes and Frauds: Varieties of Deception in Print and Manuscript (Winchester, 1989) 29–46; Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers 1675–1750’, The Library, 4 (1982) 99–134.

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Matthew Tindal was the author.41 Although he refused to put his name to any versions of the book in the early eighteenth century, his publication of the Four Discourses in 1709, just before the Sacheverell affair, holds the key to the attribution.42 This work collected together a number of publications from the 1690s, including Tindal’s Letter from 1698. The second piece in the collection was an Essay Concerning the Laws and of Nations and the Rights of Sovereigns, which was the only publication, over a career of forty years, to which Tindal ever openly put his name.43 In addition to this bibliographic evidence, there is one final piece of private, circumstantial evidence that seems to affirm his ownership of the title. In 1704 a tract was released that commented on new attempts to enact legislation against the press. Entitled Reasons against Restraining the Press, it was clearly derived from the 1698 tract. Despite its anonymous publication, in 1768 Richard Baron noted of it, ‘I have a copy of this tract, which belonged to Anthony Collins, esq.; wherein it is ascribed to Dr Tyndal and therefore there can be no doubt that he was the real author.’44 Tindal’s tract has two main reputations amongst historians. It is often depicted as a simple repackaging of Milton’s Areopagitica.45 There is no doubt that, much like Blount, Tindal was influenced by Milton, but his 1697 discussion of the press in the Magistrate suggests he had already formed his views and simply used Areopagitica for further development. Second, some historians have suggested that Tindal’s tract demanded a free press. The case made here is that Tindal, much as he had already done, suggested that the press, correctly used, would allow each individual to establish truth and achieve salvation. It was an argument situated in virulent anticlericalism, using the press to establish civil religion and political stability. It was not a claim a that public discourse should be defined by complete freedom of the press nor that individual claims to a free conscience could simply be extended to free expression.46 The tract is erroneously attributed to Toland in Champion, Republican Learning, 244–5, and Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, 32. Attribution of the work to Toland suggests that he was a consistent proponent of a free press, which is an errant interpretation, see British Library Add. MS 4295, ff.49, 50. 42 [Matthew Tindal], Four discourses on the following subjects: I. Of obedience to the supreme powers. II. Of the laws of nations. III. Of the power of the magistrate. IV. Of the liberty of the press (1709). 43 Matthew Tindal, An Essay Concerning the Laws of Nations, and the Rights of Soveraigns (1694). Additionally, Ernest Sirluck has provided convincing comparative literary evidence that the Tindal press tract was by the same author who wrote the 1697 Tindal tract concerning the power of the magistrate, although he did not notice the republication of the tracts in 1709, see Ernest Sirluck, ‘Areopagitica and a Forgotten Licensing Controversy’, The Review of English Studies, new series, 11 (43) (August, 1960), 263. 44 [Matthew Tindal], Reasons against restraining the Press (1704); [R. Barron], The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (1768), 281. 45 Sirluck, ‘Areopagitica and a Forgotten Licensing Controversy’, 260–74. 46 Compare with Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, 32–3; Champion, 41

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Tindal’s press tract of 1698 is compatible with his previous comments on how knowledge should be constructed, but also reflects the changing political circumstances of an emergent if not entirely established High Church party. He started, once again, with a discussion of what God expected from men. In the state of nature, God granted only one capacity to humans, the ability to reason. In life, God commanded all to employ reason, ‘the light God has given him’, to differentiate between true and false religions. This advent of reason, applied properly in life, would bring the believer into heaven. In other words, this was not just an intellectual exercise dedicated to creating variant types of social knowledge. To the contrary, the Letter emphasised a style of divinity for how salvation might be guaranteed in the new realities of the late seventeenth century. God required neither faith nor knowledge to be mediated by clerical hierarchy. Instead, Tindal emphasised that it was how doctrinal knowledge was created that was essential to salvation, not what the actual belief was: He that does this, may have the satisfaction of doing his duty as a rational creature, and may be sure, although he misses the truth, he shall not miss the reward that is due to him who obeys his maker, in following as well as he could, and no more could be his duty.47

Again, this was an epistemological approach similar to Toland’s. But, as before, the crucial difference remained whether correct knowledge might be communicated to others, and whether knowledge was created in conversation with other ideas. In the early years of the Church both Christ and his apostles had obliged men ‘to try all things’. Taking this quotation, Tindal made explicit how people might put their own reason into action. At the core of his vision was an almost obsessive emphasis that Christian life was embodied by enquiring after all knowledge. If salvation was achieved by finding truth through reason, then it was clear that each man must examine ‘those proofs, arguments and mediums, that either himself or others have found out’. Such a position was not a personal quest, but must take place within a community, for ‘it was men’s mutual duty to inform each other in those propositions they apprehend to be true’. The development of knowledge was best implemented by ‘printing them ten thousand books after the letters are once set, being sooner printed than one transcribed’.48 On Tindal’s account, Christians had nothing to fear from the press; rather they should embrace it. Indeed, the 1690s offered an almost unique opportunity to remake how public truth was generated, so that assurance of redemption could be offered to the whole nation. The lapse of licensing, far Republican Learning, 244–5; Ross, Writing in Public, 188; Hellmuth, ‘The Press Ought to be Open to All’. 47 Tindal, Letter to a Member of Parliament, 4. 48 Ibid., 4.

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from signalling a descent into hell, potentially allowed people to maximise their opportunities to grow in grace: reading widely, using the press to communicate to local and national communities, aided the essential spiritual quest to find truth. To further his position, he went straight to the heart of Christian sources. His epistemology, he insisted, could be applied to the Bible. Indeed, we might observe that Tindal’s analysis of Scripture served as a microcosm to adumbrate the connections that he saw between freedom of expression and the power of the clergy, all held together by political and historical evidence. For, if salvation was best achieved by investigation of all ideas and the Bible elucidated difficult doctrinal positions, it was a logical step that men must see ‘the different translations and explications’ of the Bible, so that they may decide for themselves the difference between truth and error.49 Such a move accorded with a wider anticlerical and political reading of how the press should be managed by Church and state. Here, what was at stake was a form of tyranny in which priests, unsure of their religious convictions, sustained their power over society by refusing to allow the laity to freely read the Bible. Priests were committed to fallacious and self-confirming tyranny, unable to accept that their views should be questioned, conscious of the falseness of their own religion. This situation was confirmed by priestly hypocrisy. How, Tindal asked, can Anglicans possibly condemn Catholics for preventing the laity from reading Scripture when they were committed to the same practice; they were as ‘ambitious for the most part as the Papist themselves’. These charges of tyrannous hypocrisy were sustained by historical evidence, so that they might better be contrasted with contemporary events. Turning to the Reformation, Tindal supplied evidence from Protestant history to suggest the contemporary situation should move beyond freedom of enquiry. His history turned on one crucial question with which Protestantism had always grappled. How had Martin Luther managed to break down the edifice of the Catholic Church? In Tindal’s vision, the answer was obvious. The Reformation was wholly owing to the press. Before Luther there had been men who had opposed the corruption of the Catholic Church, but with the invention of printing: a poor monk who discovered at least the grosser cheats of the priesthood, was made capable of imparting those notions, which drew almost a moiety from the Romish superstition, which lost ground every where, as the press was either more or less free. Therefore it was not strange that the Popish clergy, since they could not confound the Art of Printing, should endeavour to turn it to their own advantage, not only by hindering any new book from being printed, but by expunging out of old ones whatever did not serve their turn.50 49 50

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 12.

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Tindal’s view of how religious knowledge was constructed, ascertained and communicated was met with immediate opposition. Francis Gregory (1623–1707), rector of Hambledon, a small parish in Buckinghamshire, had lived through many of the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century. His political position during the mid-century is difficult to determine, but at the Restoration he was a confirmed Royalist, writing a well-received elegy for Charles I.51 He was looked upon favourably by Charles II and preached a number of anti-Catholic sermons. He conformed in 1689 and delivered two sermons thanking God for the deliverance of William III.52 His Modest Plea for the Due Regulation of the Press, published within months of Tindal’s intervention, concentrated on refuting the methods of enquiry employed by Tindal before moving on to the consequences of accepting doctrinal heterodoxy. Reason, he acknowledged, was an essential part of human armoury in the search for assurance of salvation, but Tindal had exalted human understanding ‘far above its proper sphere, advancing it to that sublime and sacred office, which, as now, it can never discharge’.53 In fact, seen from within a paradigm of a hierarchical church and the mystery of divine revelation, reason could only hope to uncover limited truth: ‘the light of reason is but as the light of a glow worm; the light of the law is but the light of a star; but the light of the gospel of the light of the sun, a very glorious sight indeed’.54 If Tindal’s book was driven by fears of a powerful clerical party establishing itself, Gregory’s was forged in the Trinitarian disputes. In recent times, he noted, false teachers had emerged to bring in damnable heresies of denying the dignity of the Lord.55 He emphasised both that consuming errant doctrine would damn the reader, and that orthodox clergymen ought to engage in debate. ‘We are all commanded’, he noted, ‘to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once delivered to the Saints’.56 For Gregory, whilst the unity of the Catholic Church and the revealed nature of the Bible maintained doctrinal purity, it was the clergy’s duty to defend all three. And, if the clergy did engage, they would surely win the argument for they relied on ‘the sword of the spirit, and that must be fetched and drawn from the armoury of God; for there is none like that’.57 Unlike Tindal, Gregory maintained that at least some essential components of belief were unknowable, but he recognised his faith ought to be defended by refutation and through forms of restraint. In 1698 he repeated word for word

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Francis Gregory, The Last Counsel of a Martyred King to his Son (1660). Francis Gregory, A Thanksgiving Sermon for the Deliverance of our King (1696). Francis Gregory, A Modest Plea for the Due Regulation of the Press (1698), 4. Ibid., 7. Francis Gregory, The Doctrine of the Glorious Trinity (1695), 4. Ibid., to the Christian Reader. Ibid., to the Christian Reader.

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statements made three years earlier, ‘we are all commanded, to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once delivered to the saints’. Hardly surprisingly, Gregory also took a keen interest in how Tindal used the status and use of Scripture to underpin his arguments. Gregory accepted that allowing the lay reader access to the Bible, so they might find doctrinal truth, was a vital component of the success of the Reformation. Undoubtedly, there were some aspects of Scripture in which the meaning was plain and obvious and the intelligent person might be left to judge for themselves. But this was not true for all aspects of Scripture. Sections that were abstruse and difficult, especially those that were fundamental to doctrine and caused controversy, required the judgement of the Catholic Church, and the guidance of learned men ‘versed in holy writ, as able interpreters of Scripture’.58 Here, biblical interpretation and the authority of the Church moved to the centre of Gregory’s response and were used to refute Tindal’s demands for a more promiscuous mode of enquiry. Where salvation was at stake, the Bible was either clear or could be clarified by authority. Nor was there any need for further discussion. There were sufficient tools for biblical interpretation: ‘are there not already great numbers of printed books, exposed to common sale, wherein the different opinions of men about matters of religion are thoroughly discussed’, Gregory commented. It was clear that the 1690s had proved not only how new books were unnecessary to salvation but also how pernicious the press could be: Now, since we the Church of England are blessed with the free use of our Bibles; and favoured with the judgment of the best expositors about the sense of those texts, which tend most to determine those disputes, which have arisen between Protestants and Papists, between Trinitarians and anti-Trinitarians, we can have no need, of any search for truth, to consult the printed papers of this age, many of which do tend to promote error much rather than discover truth. And verily when the licenser of books does reject and suppress heretical papers, he does good service both to God and men; and if such papers chance to steal the press, they ought to be treated like other thieves, who to prevent their doing any future mischiefs are apprehended, condemned, and executed.59

The discussion concerned with the status of Scripture and its relationship to free enquiry and expression was further explicated by another reply to Tindal. The anonymous Letter to a Member of Parliament Shewing the Necessity of Regulating the Press has been attributed to Daniel Defoe, but this seems unlikely considering Defoe’s life and politics at the end of the seventeenth century.60 The tract took an Ersatian view that a restraint of Modest Plea for the Due Regulation of the Press, 16. Ibid., 17. See page 24 for how interpretations of the Bible were also defended by ancient councils. 60 A Letter to a Member of Parliament, Shewing the Necessity of Regulating the Press (Oxford, 58 Gregory, 59

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the press by the civil magistrate would defend the interests of the national church.61 Where Gregory elevated the status of the priesthood as the arbiters of faith, an educated body of people uniquely qualified to interpret Scripture, the anonymous author of the Letter accepted that the status of the Bible was crucial to understanding correct doctrine. The Holy Scriptures were a complete rule of faith and were, therefore, a competent standard by which the governors of any church might try the sincerity of their communicants’ faith. Yet, the matter of interpretation again caused further questions. Scripture could not be a sufficient rule on its own, for the author was assured, it contains ‘a great many things, hard to be understood, which the ignorant and unlearned wrest to their own destruction’.62 The result again was that Scripture could not be relied upon to guarantee truth. Where Tindal saw reason and wider reading as the solution, and Gregory saw the irenic instruction of the priesthood, this author amalgamated the powers of the civil magistrate and the clergy in the name of censure and discipline. Pastors were authorised by God, drawing their power from the rulings of the apostles and the ancient church, to expound the sense of Scripture and to make judgement in matters of dispute. All of this returns us to a previous point. From where did the authority for or against a free press come from? As we have seen, for Tindal it was the Reformation, and for the anonymous author, the case against unchecked publication could be found in the rulings of ancient councils and the primitive church. All three authors, one a radical Whig, one a churchman and one promoting an Erastian vision, understood that Tindal was committed to questioning the divine status of the Bible and the clergy’s right to interpretation. Indeed, seventeenth-century developments in biblical hermeneutics had rendered discussions of the status of the Bible more not less urgent. And, that urgency had been hastened even further by recent freethinking assaults.63 But, a signal feature of Tindal’s position was how his biblical hermeneutics and anticlericalism justified both free enquiry and free expression. In that sense, in 1698, although they were part of a cooperative publishing project, Tindal emphasised both his indebtedness and distinction from John Toland. 1699); Tortarolo, The Invention of a Free Press, 35–6; Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge, 2008), 61. 61 A Letter to a Member of Parliament, Shewing the Necessity of Regulating the Press, 2. 62 Ibid., 28. 63 Ingram, Reformation Without End, 73; Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Early Modern Biblical Interpretation and the Emergence of Science’, Science and Christian Belief, 23 (2011), 99–113; Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Origen against Jerome in Early Modern Europe’, in S. Bergjan and K. Pillman (eds), Patristic Tradition and Intellectual Paradigms in the 17th Century (Tübingen, 2010), 105–13; S. Mandelbrote, ‘Isaac Newton and Thomas Burnet: Biblical Criticism and the Crisis of Late-Seventeenth-Century England’, in R. Popkin and J. Force (eds), The Books of Nature and Scripture (Dordrecht, 1994), 149–78; Champion, ‘Père Richard Simon and English Biblical Criticism’, 39–61.

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Tindal’s claim that the Reformation was due to the freedom of the press was further rebutted by Gregory. On one level, he agreed that Luther had made good use of printing. Its invention, he acknowledged, ‘has proved very beneficial to the Christian Church’, and furnished libraries with vast numbers of excellent books and bestowed churches and families with Bibles. Yet the production of some ‘good’ books hardly justified heresy or blasphemy. Instead, the spiritual duty of clerics and government was fulfilled by preventing the writing and circulation of dangerous and ‘bad’ books. Again, in Gregory’s words, ‘it is certain that the art of printing has done a great deal of good, and we are to bless God for it; but withal, it is as certain, that it has done, and still may do a great deal of mischief, and we are to lament it’.64 From this general position Gregory proceeded to add some specificity. He accepted that the press could be used to promote religion and virtue, but far too often in the 1690s it was being used to promote vice and irreligion. The press tended: to debauch the lives, and corrupt the judgments of men; such are our obscene poems, our profane and wanton stage-plays, where vice is not only represented but so promoted that we may justly fear, that as all their spectators lose their time; so many of them may lose their innocence too. For since the hearts of men are so prone to evil, apt to take fire from every little spark, it is hard to see those vices, which are pleasing to flesh and blood, represented upon a public stage, and yet not to be infected by them.65

Again, the language of infection was used by a churchman to justify restraint. In fact, Gregory was drawing on his previous work. In 1696 he had excoriated John Smith for promoting Socinianism.66 Smith’s book, which had already been burnt by the authorities, incensed Gregory.67 Heretics, he noted, spread their erroneous doctrines by ‘writing and publishing books, wherein they offer such seeming arguments in defence of their ill opinions, as the generality of men know not how to answer’.68 In their words, he continued, are poison which they eat like a canker, like a gangrene. So dangerous were Socinian books that, ‘if not timely prevented spreads further in the flesh, so heresy, if not restrained by authority, and confuted by solid arguments, is apt to grow until it becomes epidemical’.69 Two years later, in 1698, the situation had worsened. Printed papers of all religious hues Modest Plea for the Due Regulation of the Press, 8. Ibid., 8–9. 66 Francis Gregory, A Divine Antidote against a Devillish Poyson, or, A Scriptural Answer to an Anti-Scriptural Heretical Pamphlet, entitled A Designed End to the Socinian Controversy (1696). 67 Anita McConnell, ‘Smith, John (1647/8–1727)’, in ODNB; John Smith, A Designed End to the Socinian Controversy (1695). 68 Ibid., 6. 69 Ibid., 6. 64 Gregory, 65

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were corrupting the judgement of readers: at one end of the spectrum the government seemed content to allow the publication of popery and, at the other, perhaps worse, they were seemingly impotent in the face of ‘books printed in the defence of Arianism, Socinianism, and other heresies justly condemned in the first and purest ages of Christianity’.70 This last comment was an explicit blast at the failure of the Williamite regime to control the print trade and heresy. All the time that the government vacillated or parliament did not legislate, souls were being lost to damnation. The rhetorical skill of Socinians and their counterparts would ‘make many more proselytes to their dangerous opinion, if the press be still permitted to publish whatever they think fit to write’. It was precisely the potential for books to infect and damn souls that caused Gregory to reject any idea that public discourse should be left somehow to correct itself free from authority. The multitude were in no capacity to discover fallacies and, since the press would do as much harm as good, it was ‘reasonable that it should be well regulated to promote that good, and prevent that harm; it is very fit that no new books should be published, until they have been first supervised and allowed’.71 Nor was Gregory alone. The anonymous author of 1699 equally worried about the pernicious effects of spreading heresy, noting that: again, as the mischief is more successfully propagated; so it is more difficultly removed. The men of learning, judgment, and probity, may be engaged in matters of too great importance to be at leisure to obviate the mischiefs of every poisonous libel; but if it happens to receive a just confutation, it’s odds it either reaches not the deluded reader, it loses its just efficacy by not presenting itself before the infection is riveted, and the defence of the error become a point of interest or honour.72

In taking up the consequences to the state and individuals of both possessing and promoting mistaken doctrine, Gregory contended that a controlled press offered political stability and the religious liberty of salvation. On Tindal’s view, it was completely the opposite. He acknowledged that many people understood that a free press would seduce people into false religions, heresy and schisms, even in the face of vigorous clerical opposition; he continued to maintain entry into heaven could only be sustained by seeking individual truth, free from hierarchical direction. It was true, he observed, that two men holding different opinions would equally find redemption as long as they had both been sincere in their religious examination. In fact, heresy was not doctrinal perversion; rather it was holding religion on trust, so that ‘it is not what a man professes, but how that justifies or condemns Modest Plea for the Due Regulation of the Press, 9. Ibid., 9. 72 Letter to a Member of Parliament, 41. 70 Gregory, 71

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him before God’.73 He also denied that his positions would lead to schism. In his response to such charges, we can also see that Tindal was seeking to place his tract very specifically in the religious conditions of the 1690s. He maintained that all sects were entitled to promote their own opinions; he insisted they must maintain freedom of expression for all their fellow Dissenters, doing as they would be done to, sustaining a universal liberty to communicate to others what they judged to be true. Thus, the central aim of ascertaining truth could only be helped by unlimited public discourse: An entire liberty of the press would by degrees establish religious truth, because that is supported by better, plainer and more cogent proofs than any false opinions are; which are either mischievous or burdensome, or at the least useless whilst the other by its excellency and usefulness carries evidence and conviction with it.74

The debate between Gregory and Tindal concerned with establishing the correct connection between communication and soteriology, based on the interplay between reading Scripture and hierarchical instruction, is further exposed by considering how both men used detailed biblical citations to establish the veracity of their positions. At a most basic level, Tindal noted the Bible obliges all people, not just the clergy, to ‘exhort, warn, rebuke, and use all means possible to bring his mistaken brother into right way’. This quotation was not just an attack on the authority of the priesthood, it set up the contention that truth must be sought within the wider godly community – for the greater men’s zeal for their God, the more they will communicate their ideas to their neighbours: the more they will seek to communicate the righteousness of their doctrine to the wider community. Throughout his publishing career, Tindal very rarely provided extensive scriptural exegesis of quotations. His normal practice was to provide the reader with an intellectual assertion accompanied with a marginal note to the relevant biblical citation. In the Letter he followed this method exactly and provided his reader with three citations, all of which were designed to bolster his position that neighbours should lead each other into the truth: Lev. 19:17, ‘you must not hate your fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your fellow Israelite strongly, so you do not become responsible for his sin’; 1.Thess. 5:14, ‘and we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone’; and Heb. 3:13, ‘but exhort one another daily, while it is called today; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin’.75 Tindal’s vision of the godly community was promiscuous. He played on the central sources of Christianity to insist that all people could be brought to heaven: Letter to a Member of Parliament, 17. Ibid., 18. 75 Ibid., 7. 73 Tindal, 74

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by using arguments to persuade him who he judges in the wrong; and then by using arguments to persuade him whom he judges in the wrong to desist from it. And if, as the Scripture supposes, no man can neglect to do this without hating his brother; every one has a right to print his sentiments as the best, if not the only way to exhort, rebuke, reprove myriads of brethren at the same time.76

Scripture helped Francis Gregory to pursue a different vision of public disputation. He accepted that all believers were bound not only to profess a religion but also to promote it. Quoting St Paul in 1.Thess. 5:11, ‘edify one another … teach and admonish one another’, he reaffirmed Tindal’s own reading that we must teach and instruct our neighbour in all aspects of religion.77 How could each individual know the religion that they were promoting was true? ‘We must be sure’, he maintained, ‘that we plant not weeds instead of flowers, that we sow not tares instead of wheat’. It was on this point that the disagreement rested. Where Tindal explained that public discourse itself was truth, Gregory and many churchmen insisted that truth must be found before discussion, ‘for to promote a religion, which may possibly be false, were a desperate venture indeed, and he that does it, hazards the honour of God, and the souls of men’. Instead, and again quoting St Paul, the biblical lesson was much more complex than public engagement. ‘Their mouths must be stopped’, Gregory commented, and men taught that they may not be permitted to communicate ill opinions either personally or publicly. But, crucially, these biblical citations provided examples of how to deal with errant doctrine. In the first and perhaps second occasions of professing heresy, it was perfectly acceptable to admonish and rebuke, but eventually the persistent offender must be cast aside, for his ‘breath is infectious. His words eat like a canker; and as to his writings, there is in his ink more poison than one.’78 This analysis could have been applied at any time in Gregory’s life. But his work also took on an added urgency in the 1690s. Gregory and many others in the godly community abhorred the danger caused by the lapse of licensing: Now, since there are so many heretical pens at work, amongst us, there is great need now, if ever, that some spiritual Argus should attend and watch the press, unless more venomous doctrines should steal from thence to infect and kill the souls of men.79

Matthew Tindal, Letter to a Member of Parliament, 7. Modest Plea for the Due Regulation of the Press, 20. 78 Ibid., 22. 79 Ibid., 22. 76

77 Gregory,

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The System of Licensing

Despite the tensions being played out here between Tindal and his interlocutors, we are not witnessing a simple competition between freedom and restraint of the press. Instead, we are seeing complex attempts to remake public discourse so that it might help to achieve the twin aims of personal piety and civil stability. This point can be best illustrated by considering how authors talked about the system of licensing. To see licensing as Matthew Tindal and Francis Gregory saw it is to witness how they explicated the relationship between religion and politics so that they might understand the consequences of free expression. Tindal reminded his readers that the country had recently overthrown an arbitrary monarch. Not only could the success of the Glorious Revolution be attributed (at least in part) to the power of the press, were licensing now to be reinstated it was possible that a new magistrate with arbitrary designs might use printing to overthrow the current government. Tindal’s vision of the Glorious Revolution is much the same as historians of Williamite propaganda, for under James II: nothing came out with allowance but what was to justify such opinions; and if some good men (not to mention the Prince of Orange’s third declaration) especially about the time of the revolution, had not had the courage privately to print some treatises to undeceive the people, and to make them see the fatal consequences of those doctrines which by the restraint of the press passed for divine and sacred truths; the nation had tamely submitted to the yoke.80

If licensing was returned to as a matter of political policy, Tindal feared that the press would once again be perverted, and ‘would be employed only to extend beyond all bounds, and to extol the promoters of arbitrary power as the chief patriots of their country, and to expose and traduce those that were really so’.81 Here, Tindal’s understanding of 1688 was given a direct contemporary context. ‘In a word, if the pulpits and Westminster-Hall (as we have lately seen it) should chime in with an arbitrary court, what can warn the people of their danger, except the press?’ What was true for politics, Tindal insisted, must also be true for religion, especially considering that the establishment of toleration remained perilous. For the press were jackanapes: ‘he who has him in his hands may make him bite whom he pleases, and therefore it is the safest way to keep their jackanapes in their own hands’.82 He was making the case that both sects and the established church must understand that, unless they accepted a free press, Letter to a Member of Parliament, 26–7. Ibid., 26. 82 Ibid., 28–9. 80 Tindal, 81

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they would suffer the consequences, for many people might be satisfied ‘with having such or such sects restrained from printing, but would be glad that others had that liberty; a fourth, who cares not how all the sectaries are dealt with, is yet afraid, that if the press be in the hands of moderate church-men, none will be suffered to write any more’.83 The parlous position of toleration and the suggestion that it was defended by free debate were reinforced by reference to the fate of two contemporary books should licensing be returned. Neither Francis Atterbury’s Letter to a Convocation Man nor Samuel Hill’s Municipium Ecclesiasicum, both books that justified a powerful state church, would ever see the light of day if licensing fell into the hands of trimmers or Latitudinarians. The point was, of course, twofold. Not only were Francis Atterbury and Samuel Hill hypocritical in calling for restraint, as they were merely seeking to dominate public discourse for their own Machiavellian ends, but they had misunderstood the religious realities of the 1690s. There was now so much diversity in religious opinion that neither the government nor the Church could hope to find ground on which all sides could agree: ‘so that if all parties cast up their accounts, there are very few of them but will find a restraint of the press to be against even their present interest’.84 ‘This may be an argument’, Tindal wrote, ‘for the forbidding all printing, but none for appointing licensers’; for it is much more reasonable for all to have the liberty to vindicate themselves the same way they chance to be aspersed, than to let the ‘licenser’s party abuse all others, and the press not open for them to justify themselves’.85 If Tindal’s readers accepted his account that licensing was tyrannous and unsuitable to the new political and religious conditions ushered in by the post-revolutionary settlement, it remained true that he did not approve of an absolute free press as described by historians. He maintained that sedition and treason required restraint and he refused to grant freedom to Catholics or atheists, two sets of people who had no ability to reason and find the truth. And, in exactly the same fashion as Charles Blount, he provided a contemporary solution to the employment of public discussion to establish truth and provide civil stability: Make the laws against such things severer, and to oblige either the printer or the bookseller to set his name to all books whatever, will take away all pretence for appointing licensers, and will be the most effectual way to prevent publishing such books.86

Francis Gregory continued to insist not only that licensing was the best way to save souls, but also that it was the best way to provide civil harmony. In his own search for stability in the 1690s, he insisted on the value of the 83

Ibid., Ibid., 85 Ibid., 86 Ibid., 84

29. 29. 32. 18.

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Anglican clergy as guarantors of public doctrine. The clergy, he maintained, were men ‘bred up in the principles of learning; men of complete knowledge and good ability to judge between vice and virtue’.87 The need for the clergy to be the final arbiters of truth was the consequence of two problems that occurred in two different contexts. First, Gregory denied Tindal’s claim that all men had the facility to judge for themselves free from spiritual guidance. He observed that the vast multitude of men were ‘not blessed with a liberal education’ and were ‘so dull and stupid that they cannot apprehend, much less remember the strength of an argument’.88 Such men were in no condition to judge for themselves, as Tindal insisted. Far from it, ‘they must rely upon the judgment of their teachers, and upon their credit and authority, take up some religion or other’. In this context, the press should not be censored, but rather that it need not exist at all. Since Gregory believed that salvation lay in the Bible, the touchstone of faith, it was only necessary for the clergy to provide direction on unclear matters and, therefore, the recent ‘voluminous writings of men, which the press has now brought forth’, were simply superfluous to the needs of society. Gregory did admit there were occasions where controversy might arise. In such cases, where several parties of men laid claim to the truth and produced evidence to support their claim, it was the duty of each man to consult his minister, ‘who, by evidence of Scripture, which in this case is the only law, assures his neighbour the truth lies here or there’.89 As he explained, Scripture stipulated that the minister was the appropriate judge: ‘the priest’s lips should preserve knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts’. With the clergy placed at the heart of the system of control, it was clear that pre-publication control was the correct from of restraint to restore civil harmony, whilst at the same time preserving men’s souls: In short, the substance of my answer to this allegation is this, that it is not lawful for men of weak understandings to mind subtle arguments contained in heretical books, lest thereby they might be ensnared; and for that reason, the press should not be permitted to publish any such books, unless security could be given that they should never come into vulgar hands.90

While Gregory based his position on high regard for the clergy of the Church of England, in the 1690s this argument for stability faced a difficult conundrum: the fate of Dissenters, if licensing was to be imposed and enforced. Drawing on the ancient church, scriptural training and his Modest Plea for the Due Regulation of the Press, 12. Ibid., 12–13. 89 Ibid., 23. 90 Ibid., 30. 87 Gregory, 88

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day-to-day experience of ministering a parish, Gregory denied that there was a right to a ‘universal liberty of conscience, and unlimited toleration of all opinions and practices’, for it was in direct contradiction to the Decrees and Canons of Ancient Councils.91 Unlike Tindal, he was exercised by the capacity of those outside the Church to express their judgements freely. Returning to St Paul once again, he reiterated that the Church and society had a right to restrain immorality and errors in judgement, and also a duty to punish severely, to deliver a man in error to Satan.92 In response to his own evidence, Gregory made it clear that there could be no unlimited press, as it tended to bring in and spread errors and heresies. The threat of complete control and a return to pre-publication restraint was, however, tempered by toleration. Gregory maintained he had no desire to impinge on the rights of Dissenters, as long as they were sober and peaceable and differed only on circumstantials.93 Gregory’s tract rested on a divide between Church and state. He wanted the press regulated to reinforce his concern for ‘morality, faith and religious worship’, whilst matters of ‘sedition, treason and rebellion’ might be left to the cognisance of the civil magistrate. In opposition to Gregory and to Tindal, from the very beginning of his tract, the anonymous author of the 1699 Letter was fixated by the civil magistrate’s obligation to provide order. Not only was the magistrate required to cherish the Church, he was obliged to defend it, because he was ‘not only entrusted to enforce the observance of all social virtues, upon which the peace and interest of government moves, as upon its axis; but a true and orthodox faith and a pure worship, and the honour and glory of that great God’.94 Again, this jurisdictional argument coalesced with a craving for stability. The magistrate could only fulfil his apostolic design by defending a single national church because the one great design of Christianity was unity.95 And, the situation was urgent because the country suffered under a luxury of impiety and licentiousness, ‘so that the greatest libertine may plead a right, not only to erect his own scheme, but to whatever seems right in his own eyes’.96 Far from the utopian vision of Matthew Tindal, one in which all people wrote and exchanged ideas to find truth, the country, under pressure, was close to collapse: In a word, an establishment as such, is marked out as common enemy, against who every tribe and sect, of how different a make and complexion whatsoever, are prepared to unite and arm: and when they may do it at so easy an experience of danger, or rather under the banner of freedom 91 92 93 94

95 96

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 51. A Letter to a Member of Parliament, 11. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 35.

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and liberty, no wonder if they shoot forth their arrows, even bitter words; and are content with nothing less, than reducing the whole economy to desolation and ruin.97

To provide evidence for his claims to the reader, he explicitly recalled the technique of Francis Atterbury in A Letter to a Convocation Man and churchmen in the Oxford Decree and he listed books and ideas most responsible for the corruption of Church and state, books that were the blessed products of the press, and yet were ‘but the small gleanings of that mass of filth and corruption’.98 Listing books together in this way served two purposes. It demonstrated just how out of control the press was. Simultaneously, it illustrated that the orthodoxy of the Christian faith could not just be reduced to Trinitarian orthodoxy. In recent years, it was true that the doctrine of the Trinity had been attacked, but the whole design of Christ’s mission had been industriously overturned, and the doctrine of redemption and satisfaction was reduced to absurdity.99 Other authors had asserted that reason was the only measure of faith; acknowledging Jesus as the messiah was supposedly the only article of faith necessary to salvation, and revelation had been disputed and rejected.100 Finally, the press had brought scandal and reproach upon the two solemn anniversaries of the Church, the martyrdom of Charles I and the restoration of Charles II. The republication of Milton and Ludlow had vindicated the violence of the English Civil War and stigmatised the Church’s support for monarchy.101 This aspect of the author’s worries, the unchecked spread of licentious doctrine, led back to an attack on the haplessness of the political establishment to regulate public discourse. The recently enacted Blasphemy Law, he acknowledged, may serve as a bridle to the deist, atheist and anti-Trinitarian, but it ‘can by no means obviate the mischiefs of a licentious press’. But, echoing some of the initial concerns expressed over legislation in 1697, he also objected, ‘there are other truths and doctrines set forth in the Christian religion and this established church’. Were ideas that questioned the fundamentals of the Christian faith allowed to go unchecked they would prove highly injurious to religion as well as ‘the peace of the present establishment’.102 And, therefore, much the same as Gregory, but from a different perspective, he contended that the press must ‘be regulated by the received 97

Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. 99 Ibid., 37; Thomas Emes, The Atheist Turned Deist (1698). 100 A letter to a Member of Parliament shewing the necessity of regulating the press (1699), 11; Toland, Christianity not Mysterious; John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695); Charles Blount, The Oracles of Reason (1693). 101 A letter to a Member of Parliament shewing the necessity of regulating the press, 37. 102 Ibid., 48. 98

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doctrines of a national establishment’.103 Hardly surprisingly, and again much like Gregory, the author was at pains to point out that Dissenters could be accommodated within licensing. As long as they differed only in circumstantials, they would never be caught in the snare of licensing. But, however the position was arrived at, ultimately the cry remained the same: the press must be used to promote morality and correct doctrine, ‘the magistrate is absolutely entrusted with the preservation of the public peace; and consequently may rightfully suppress everything that is levelled against any branch of the public establishment’.104 The differences of tone and outlook discussed in this chapter, often expressed in polemical terms, should not lull us into thinking that authors were advocating outermost positions of freedom or restraint. Rather, in the wake of the lapse of licensing, often allied with competing and variant interpretations of what the post-revolution settlement meant, they were describing how public politics and religion should be practised. This is to suggest that the Glorious Revolution at once destabilised understandings of the correct place of the press within society, and it did so within a historical register. And it reveals that Tindal and Blount were attempting to make the case that the solution to public politics could not be a return to licensing. Whether their description of pre-publication restraint as tyrannous and effective was fictive is hardly the point; their responses to attempts to legislate against the press were not just rhetorical strategies to avoid any form of restraint. Instead, they were meant to point to and exploit a set of tensions amongst their opponents. After all, the understanding that bad books were a disease, designed to infect the soul, spreading across the nation unchecked, was an analysis that pointed inexorably to pre-publication restraint as a solution to public politics. Yet, not all the godly agreed. As we have seen, in Richard Willis’s and many others’ writing, there were a variety of sensible responses to the loss of licensing: post-publication restraint and banishment from communion to name just two. As the new queen took the throne in the early eighteenth century, as convocation began to sit, and, most crucially, as High Churchmen began to form a more coherent lobby grouping, armed with sophisticated propaganda techniques, the tensions that attempts to legislate against the press exposed, demonstrated in this chapter both within and between the texts discussed, were remade again. Despite the new queen’s agenda, and advice from a very skilled propagandist, as we shall see, she proved no more successful in finding a peaceful solution to the problems posed by an ever more expanding and sophisticated print trade.

103 Ibid., 104 Ibid.,

65. 58.

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Part II Freedom of the Press and Ecclesiastical Identity

5 Legislation in the Early Eighteenth Century: Anonymity and the Press A letter written by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) to Robert Harley provides revealing insight into the changing religious and political atmosphere of the early eighteenth century. Pointing to the instability of the country, Defoe lamented to his patron and employer, not only that we are divided ‘into parties and factions’ but also that their members constantly seek to ‘supplant the other’.1 He traced England’s afflictions back to the reign of Queen Mary in the sixteenth century, for ‘the Papist, the Church of England, and the Dissenter, have all had their turns in the public administration; and whenever any one of them endeavoured their own settlement by the ruin of the parties dissenting, the consequence was supplanting themselves’.2 According to Defoe, since the Reformation, all monarchs and governments had ruled by and been beholden to the machinations of party interest. And yet early eighteenth-century factional infighting marked a new stage in the history of division. Where previously parties had been primarily religious, sometimes having political effect, the Glorious Revolution had irreparably connected religion to politics and hardened party identity until it was solidified by 1702.3 It is hardly credible, Defoe told Harley, how opponents ignored their shared values and instead emphasised differences for polemical purposes. Defoe’s concerns were being shared in government before the rise to power of Robert Harley. On 1 September 1701, James Vernon wrote to the duke of Shrewsbury outlining the political situation in London. A largely George Harris Healey (ed.), The Letters of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 1955), 50: Daniel Defoe to Robert Harley, August–September 1704. 2 Ibid. 3 It would take a footnote of epic proportions to document the bibliographical state of scholarship on the emergence of party identity in the period. The argument being made here concurs with David Hayton’s assessment that although country and court interests were occasionally seen in the 1690s, first and foremost the guide to division in parliament was Whig and Tory. See, David Hayton, ‘The “Country” Interest and the Party System, 1689–c.1720’, in Clyve Jones (ed.), Party and Management in Parliament, 1660–1784 (Leicester, 1984), 65. J.P. Kenyon dates the establishment of ideological party identity to 1697 after the collapse of the Whig junto; Kenyon, Revolution Principles, 55. The most notable and convincing work of the establishment of ideological party identity in the early eighteenth century is, Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, passim; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 69–108. 1

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undistinguished secretary of state, Vernon’s sympathies for the court Whigs and diplomatic skills ensured he was well informed of political affairs.4 Situated within a discussion of the rights of the Commons and Harley’s status as speaker, Vernon suggested that politics had not been so divisive since James II had attempted to introduce popery. ‘The partys are every day writing and printing against one another with great bitterness’, he commented, and the ‘chiefs seem to have a hand in it’.5 Vernon’s concerns were not confined to politics. Scribblers from both sides seemed to take great delight in slurring the piety and religious positions of their opponents. Lord Somers had recently been libelled as a Socinian, whilst Lord Rochester, the great political hope of the High Church party, had been subject to false and scandalous reports.6 Vernon was so concerned by the press and its seeming ability to spread partisan religious-politics unchecked, that he wrote to the king the next day commenting that ‘we have nothing here but pamphlets and libels that come out fresh almost every day’.7 The concerns with the nature of the press can also be found in Defoe’s letter to Harley. Dissenters had been insulted in the street and their opponents had: proceeded to libels, and lampoons, and from thence to the pulpit and the press; until Mr Sacheverell in a sermon preached at Oxford, and licensed by the university, told his hearers that whoever was a true son of the church or wished well to it, was obliged to hang out the bloody flag of defiance against the Dissenters.8

In his letter to Harley, Defoe weaved together analysis of the instability caused by party identity and how the press and the pulpit were sowing further division. But he also pointed to a significant change from the 1690s. Defoe now acknowledged that the press was being distorted by High Churchmen. Disillusioned by the failure to enact legislation to restrain the press and to roll back toleration, men like Sacheverell, Francis Atterbury and others were employing press and the pulpit to spread their ideological bile.9 4

Alan Marshall, ‘Vernon, James (bap.1646, d.1727)’, in ODNB. Northamptonshire RO, Montagu (Boughton) 48/140, James Vernon to duke of Shrewsbury, 1 Sep. 1701. 6 Northamptonshire RO, Montagu (Boughton) 48/140, James Vernon to duke of Shrewsbury, 1 Sep. 1701. 7 BL Add. MS 40,775 f.16, James Vernon to the king, 2 Sep. 1701. 8 George Harris Healey (ed.), The Letters of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 1955), 52: Daniel Defoe to Robert Harley, August–September 1704. 9 As a number of scholars have pointed out, the relationship between religious groupings cannot necessarily be reduced to corresponding binaries of High and Low Church, Whig and Tory. Nevertheless, the argument being made here is that that opponents depicted their enemies with increasingly regularity in a prejudiced and pejorative fashion. See, inter alia, Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 3–22, 44–80; G.V. Bennett, ‘Conflict 5

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Defoe offered Harley a solution. The nation could be healed by turning away from the heat generated by party extremes, and by ‘wise conduct, wary councils, moderate measures and moderate men’.10 Defoe suggested that this also required the monarch to set limits to public debate. One speech from Anne, either in council or at the next session of parliament, that she desired the general peace of the people and that ‘by writing, preaching, or printing promoted the fatal strife of parties should meet with no encouragement from her’, would stop the raillery and strife of the country.11 Contemporaries never agreed on when party division had started nor the exact identity of those parties. Nevertheless, they agreed that the depth and ferocity of partisan religious divisions were significantly exacerbated by the press. The first half of this book set understandings of the press against a backdrop of emerging, but not entrenched, party and religious identity. The second half argues that the factionalised religious politics of Augustan England made the debates concerned with public communication increasingly fractious and ideological. This is not to say that attitudes to the press can be easily divided into binary categories in which Whigs and Low Churchmen supported freedom, whilst Tories and High Churchmen advocated restraint; indeed, as this chapter demonstrates, Whigs like Archbishop Tenison sought legislative solutions to restrain the press. But it is to say that, increasingly, High Churchmen and Tories portrayed their opponents as quietly yet deliberately undermining attempts to reintroduce licensing and were, therefore, supporters of licentiousness. From the start of Anne’s reign, it was clear that there would be attempts to restrain the press. The first section of this chapter outlines the monarch’s initial instructions, both proclamations and speeches, demanding that licentiousness be controlled. It uses John Tutchin’s comments in the Observator to anatomise the relationship between the press and the new ideological conditions of the eighteenth century. The second section outlines how Harley and Tenison responded to the establishment of factional religious politics by attempting to remove anonymity from the print trade. As with the previous chapter, the parliamentary machinations of legislation are discussed only to provide context to the public discussion of the legislation they proposed. Tracts by Daniel Defoe, Matthew Tindal and the Quaker, Francis Bugg, reveal why Harley’s and Tenison’s desire to take the ‘heat’ out of public debate failed. The establishment of the nature of the press as a part of factional debate is illustrated by these tracts and is further developed by Defoe’s campaign against the High Church press in the 1705 general election. in the Church’, in G. Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution (1969), 155–75; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 29–47. For a differing perspective and the longevity of the Reformed tradition with Anglicanism, see, Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008). 10 Bennett, ‘Conflict in the Church’, 54. 11 Ibid., 55–6.

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The Accession of Queen Anne and the Press

For many churchmen, angered not just by the establishment of toleration but by the increasing spread of dissent, the accession of a committed Anglican to the throne held great promise.12 Indeed, the most preceptive historian of the new queen’s reign has described the effect of her accession on the Church of England party as ‘intoxicating’.13 The initial anticipation of High Churchmen that the queen would support their agenda of empowering the Church, stopping occasional conformity and restraining the press, was heightened by Anne’s speech, likely written by Robert Harley, to close parliament on 25 May 1702.14 Speaking only two months after her accession, Anne indicated her priorities. After thanking the Commons for supply, she explained that she hoped to check the heats and animosities amongst her subjects by maintaining toleration and setting the ‘minds of all my people at quiet’.15 This desire for her subjects to eschew party division and divisive public debate seemed to rest on Anne’s religious objectives. Her own principles, she acknowledged, ‘must always keep me entirely firm to the interests and religion of the Church of England, and will incline to me to countenance those who have the truest zeal to support it’.16 Lurking behind these concerns with restraining party division was a more complex contest for the nature of the Church and religious worship, and a discussion whether maintaining the Church and toleration were compatible principles. Anne and her ministers were involved in a process of negotiation between her personal commitment to the status of the Church, protecting the position of legal dissent and maintaining peace and union amongst her subjects. It seems clear that, whilst Anne was personally a committed High Anglican, she also recognised the political necessity of maintaining toleration.17 The problem, of course, was whether such a policy could secure support in parliament and the wider nation. At the very least, many High Churchmen considered Anne should follow her commitment to the Church and not pursue politically expedient religious policies.18 The hopes of High Churchmen were also raised by Anne’s first cabinet, led by Godolphin as Lord Treasurer, Marlborough as Captain-General, and formed of nine The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 63–8; Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 98–102. 13 Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 99. 14 Joseph Hone, Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Anne (Oxford, 2017), 12–47. 15 Her Majesties Most Gracious Speech to both Houses of Parliament, on Monday the twenty fifth day of May, 1702 (1702). 16 Ibid., 3; Bod. MS Ballard 6 f.70 Edmund Gibson to Arthur Charlett, 8 April 1702. 17 Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 99. 18 Ibid.; Rachel Carnell, Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne (Charlottesville, VA, 2020), 114. 12 Bennett,

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Tories, including three High Tory leaders (Rochester, Nottingham and Seymour) and only three moderate Whigs.19 Despite the hopes of Tories and High Churchmen, Anne quickly became frustrated by the behaviour of militant Tory backbenchers and their High Church leaders.20 Consequently, her speech to close the first session of the 1702 parliament, likely written by Robert Harley, bitterly disappointed her core supporters. She resolved to defend toleration, although she also restated her personal commitment to the Church and emphasised her sense that peace between subjects was the first defence against the country’s enemies.21 The speech also signified a policy failure. ‘I think it might have been for the public service to have had some further laws for restraining the great licence, which is assumed of publishing and spreading scandalous pamphlets and libels’.22 For the moment, this legislative failure could be mitigated in one way only. ‘As far as the present laws will extend, I hope you will do your duty in your respective stations to prevent and punish such pernicious practices’.23 The queen’s frustration with the first session of her new parliament did not just reflect a failure of the political process, a failure of parliamentary management or an inability to build wider political coalition. It pointed to fundamental problems at the heart of the polity. How could a monarch in the early eighteenth century transcend the dilemma left by William III and previous governments? How could Anne choose between claims that the Glorious Revolution had embedded toleration in the constitution and those who thought the Anglican Church suffered under sustained attack from the emergence of dissent? In one sense, the answer was obvious; no policy could possibly hope simultaneously to satisfy the competing demands of a plural religious society. The potential solution to the conundrum might, however, lie in finding a better approach to the nature of public debate, which might calm the temper of the nation, forcing fractious opinions to be kept private and away from public debate. Whilst the queen lamented the inability of parliament to pass legislation, she and the new ministry demanded extant laws be put in force. On 25 February Anne issued a proclamation for the encouragement of piety and virtue, and for punishing vice and immorality. This public declaration replicated the text and intent of William III’s previous proclamations of 1692 and 1697. By 1702, however, there were a few crucial distinctions. The queen both accepted and anticipated criticism by many across the religious spectrum, that too many people of authority were engaged in impious practices. Not only would British Politics in the Age of Anne, 449. Ibid., 208–9. 21 Her majesties most gracious speech to both Houses of Parliament, on Saturday, the twenty seventh day February, 1702 (1702). 22 Her Majesties Most Gracious Speech, the twenty seventh day February (1702). 23 Ibid. 19 Holmes, 20

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ungodly people not be promoted to the top of the new regime, it was expected ‘all persons of honour, or in place of authority will give good example by their own virtue and piety’.24 While Anne was sure that the devout identity of her own regime would pacify critics on all sides of the religious divide, she was also keen to isolate the potential problems caused to the country by any tendencies towards irreligion. The personal piety of the new regime would be matched by new policies. There could be no deliverance from the imminent dangers faced by the country without a strict observance of God’s laws; indeed, her proclamation noted, if the country did not face down heresy and vice it would forfeit the ‘blessing and goodness of almighty God’.25 In indicating her desire to renew the country, Anne signalled a new way forward and distanced herself from the previous reign. No longer could the country be awash with sin and expect to benefit from God’s exceptional benevolence. Within days Anne and her ministers issued a proclamation dealing specifically with the press. Where previous proclamations by the Williamite regime had been content to attack specific outputs, Jacobitism for example, and talk in general terms about laws that might be used to control the press, Anne’s position reminded the country of the historical right of government to restrict public debate.26 Thus, an act in the third year of the reign of Edward I was cited as restricting any false words that might sow discord between monarch and people, as was an act in the reign of Richard II, which outlawed ‘false news, lies or other false things, of prelates, noblemen, and officers of the crown’.27 This historical reiteration was designed to help make a specific contemporary point. It was the lapse of licensing that now endangered the nation. It was a mistake historically to allow Charles II’s act to fall, since it had expired the nation had faced sets of evil persons, many of whom had unleashed an unprecedented wave of ‘diverse heretical, blasphemous, irreligious, treasonable and seditious books, pamphlets and papers’. The relentless movement between three different pieces of legislation, between three monarchs – Edward I, Richard II and Charles II – made the central point: not only had the lapse of licensing stimulated unparalleled amounts of printing, it had also altered the issues on which discord might be sown between monarch and people. Far from sedition and treason being the major worry of the government, it was now heresy, blasphemy and irreligion that endangered the new reign. As a result, the proclamation demanded all subjects must desist from printing any blasphemous or heretical material By the Queen, a proclamation for the encouragement of piety and virtue (1702). For affirmation of the monarch’s approach in an Irish context, see By the Lords Justices and Council, a proclamation for the encouraging of piety and virtue (1702). 25 Ibid. 26 See, for example, By the King and Queen, a proclamation for the better discovery of seditious libellers (1692). 27 By the Queen, a proclamation for restraining the spreading false news, and printing and publishing of irreligious and seditious papers and libels (1702). 24

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under pain of the strictest exemplary punishment, and all legal officers were commanded to take effectual care of any offences. The government offered a vision that bound religion to politics. Heresy and blasphemy were not just theological errors, but threatened the proper status of government and monarchy.28 In the absence of the immediate return of licensing, Anne made clear that irreligious publishing must stop. John Tutchin’s comments on Anne’s proclamations help to elucidate the problems faced by the new regime. Having taken part in the Monmouth rebellion, Tutchin (1660–1707) had been sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment and to be whipped through all the market towns of Dorset once a year. A proponent of John Locke’s contract theory, he was a firm supporter of the revolution and a radical Whig.29 In the early eighteenth century he became a prominent journalist. His tri-weekly periodical the Observator, first published on 1 April 1702, promoted his own Whig principles and was severly critical of Queen Anne’s Tory-dominated first ministry.30 He was also no stranger to the dangers of pubishing problematic texts. His work the Foreigners, which attacked William III’s Dutch favourites, was presented as a libel in 1700 and he was prosecuted for seditious libel in 1703.31 Tutchin often took notice of new proclamations, and acknowledged they were the crucial form of publication in the war against vice and debauchery and in establishing the new queen’s authority.32 He readily accepted the queen’s right to start her reign by concentrating on, and restraining, the press. Admiring the skill of publishing two complementary proclamations, Tutchin understood they were an attempt to maintain a causal link between the new monarch, the country and God’s providence: to begin her reign in the fear of him, to whom all the crowned heads of the universe are subjects, and to whom every sceptre must bow, is the truest earnest she could give her people of future blessings, and of a glad succession of happy days; and if her people follow their royal leader in the paths of righteousness, may we not expect the smiles of heaven upon our enterprises? May we not yet see peace in our Israel? And may not, by this means, the judgments of the Almighty be diverted from falling on our heads?33

Tutchin was also happy to accept two more policy positions set out by the proclamation. Not only did the government have the right to control debate, but punishment was also an essential component of the armoury 28 Ibid.

J.A. Downie, ‘Tutchin, John (1660–1707)’, in ODNB; Kenyon, Revolution Principles, 19. Robert Harley and the Press, 66–7. 31 Lee Sonsteng Horsley, ‘The Trial of John Tutchin, Author of the Observator’, The Yearbook of English Studies, iii (1973), 124–40. 32 The Observator, 10 Jun. 1702. 33 The Observator, 8 Apr. 1702. 29

30 Downie,

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of godly government, for ‘men are sooner deterred from vice by outward punishment than allured to virtue by the charms of eloquence and the force of persuasion’. For Tutchin, controlling public debate was itself a pious act; ‘if all profane and vicious persons were banished from the courts of Princes, and not suffered to enjoy places of profit and trust, the powerful argument of interest would oblige men to be virtuous, or at least to seem so’.34 Although he accepted the right of Anne to set the limits on public debate, his commentary elucidated the problems the new queen faced. Tutchin was not alarmed by the supposed spread of heresy. Instead, he attacked those who had libelled the previous reign, especially nonjuring clergymen and statesmen addicted to corrupt principles and practices. Even if one left aside the danger offered by full-blown Jacobitism, Tutchin argued, the clergy possessed influence over the populace and had drawn many of their flock against the Glorious Revolution. This distortion of clerical authority would continue in the present reign, for Nonjurors were ‘hardened sinners, whose chiefest virtues are impenitence and obstinacy; who like genuine sons of Lucifer, inspired with infernal pride, can never be brought to retract an error, or acknowledge themselves in the wrong’.35 Tutchin’s Observator expressed loyalty to the new queen, but worried about the consequences of her committed High Church supporters. According to Tutchin, they were a sect vomiting ‘wild-fire, instead of divinity’.36 Tutchin’s analysis of Anne’s proclamations and her first ministry’s attempt to calm public debate was archetypal of how authors attacked their opponents in the early eighteenth century. His labelling of High Churchman as allied to Nonjurors and Jacobites accentuated the more extreme edges of political and religious parties. On another level, however, it reveals the problems faced by Anne and her advisers. It remained a truism for most of her subjects that restraint of errant books was essential to good government. But the establishment of complex party identity rendered it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain how agreement could be achieved on what constituted the limits of acceptable religious and political debate. Removing Anonymity

In fact, a debate about how the press should be controlled had already taken place at the highest echelons of the new government. Shortly after the 1701 election Archbishop Tenison wrote to Robert Harley, recently re-elected as speaker of the House of Commons, expressing his concern at the licentiousness of the press.37 This exchange of letters has been portrayed Observator, 8 Apr. 1702. Observator, 8 Apr. 1702. 36 The Observator, 15 Jul. 1702. 37 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 940, 25, Mr Harley about the press, 8 Jan.1702. 34 The 35 The

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as Harley resisting Tenison’s entreaties for restraint.38 This interpretation is hardly surprising. No one understood the potential of propaganda more brilliantly than Robert Harley (1661–1724). He was elected as an MP in 1690, organised the country opposition in the early 1690s and by 1695 was the acknowledged leader of the court’s opponents.39 With his increasing authority in Anne’s first ministry in conjunction with earl Godolphin and the duke of Marlborough, Harley was able to create a propaganda operation of unparalleled quality. By the time he was appointed to secretary of state for the north he was committed to creating a periodical published in support of the government. Writing to Godolphin in 1704, he commented, ‘I cannot but upon this occasion, again take the liberty to offer to your lordship that it will be of great service to have some discreet writer of the government’s side’.40 Although it took some years to construct, by 1704 Daniel Defoe’s Review was established as the official organ of the Harley Ministry.41 But the exchange of letters between Tenison and Harley suggests a more complex picture than a simple confrontation between a proponent of restraint on the one hand and a promoter of propaganda on the other. In his response to Tenison, Harley noted that the laxity of the press caused ‘heats and animosities which are greatly increased by the many scandalous, lying pamphlets which are daily propagated by the designing knaves, to the scandal not only of the nation but of common Christianity’.42 Harley proposed two solutions to the problem of the press. First, he insisted that the extant laws – the Blasphemy Act and laws against seditious libel – should be consistently and rigorously applied. Second, he proposed those laws might be supplemented by a new bill to make ‘a printer or author answerable for everything which is published, but there must be something severer taken afterwards with the libellers which present laws are sufficient for’.43 Harley’s plan to enforce extant laws and to remove anonymity from publishers further illustrates how the establishment of religious and political parties rendered licensing problematic. The exchange between Tenison and Harley suggests both men understood that no single party could be entrusted with the reins of licensing without, as Matthew Tindal had already pointed out, cutting one side of the argument out of political debate and creating tyranny. Indeed, in 1702 Charles Davenant, a Tory writer and opponent of the Whig junto, savagely satirised the Whigs for their attitude to the press: Robert Harley and the Press, 55. W.A. Speck, ‘Harley, Robert, first earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724)’, in ODNB; Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 19–40. 40 BL Add. MS 28055 f.3, Robert Harley to Sidney Godolphin; Henry L. Snyder, ‘Godolphin and Harley: A Study of their Partnership in Politics’, HLQ, 30 (1966–1967), 241–71; Angus McInnes, ‘The Appointment of Harley in 1704’, HJ, 11 (1968), 255–71. 41 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 57–79. 42 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 940, 25, Mr Harley about the press, 8 January 1702. 43 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 940, 25, Mr Harley about the press, 8 January 1702. 38 Downie, 39

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but besides, supposing the press should be restrained; will it not be easy for us, who have the power of our side, so to order matters, that no notice may be taken of the libels we print; and that everything may be suppressed, which the other side publish in their own defence? So that we shall be free to offend and wound a party that have their hands tied behind them, which is as much odds, I think, as we can wish for.44

It is possible that removing anonymity suited Harley’s and Tenison’s temperament.45 Both men disliked rancorous disputation and favoured moderation in their public politics. But it is also true that it was potentially a solution to the problem caused by the establishment of party identity. Legally ensuring publishers and authors were responsible for the problems caused by their output might produce a mandated policy of self-censorship. Underneath Tenison’s and Harley’s desire to force authors and printers to reveal their names, and thus to be subject to post-publication prosecution, lay an assumption that authors would moderate their views. Harley and Tenison translated their discussion of removing anonymity into attempted legislation. An initial bill did not reach the Commons, having been voted down in the Lords on 24 January 1702.46 There was another attempt to legislate against the press in late 1703. A copy of this bill was sent by Tenison to the leading Whig parliamentarian, William Cowper, and it was a direct attempt to remove anonymity from publishers and printers.47 Nevertheless, there was no agreement that removing anonymity was the preferred solution to the press. As we have seen, for many churchmen, licensing remained the preferred form of legislation, precisely because it stopped pernicious ideas before they could be spread. In early 1704, there was another attempt to introduce pre-publication censorship. The bill was sponsored by Tory and High Church members of the ministry: Seymour, Jersey and both secretaries of state, the earl of Nottingham and Sir Charles Charles Davenant, Tom Double returned out of the country (1701), 62; Julian Hoppitt, ‘Davenant, Charles (1656–1714)’, in ODNB. 45 Historians have rarely noticed how important the culture of anonymity was to the early eighteenth-century book trade. For exceptions see Richards, Party Propaganda under Queen Anne, 7; Pasi Ihalainen, The Discourse on Political Pluralism in Early EighteenthCentury England: A Conceptual Study with Special Reference to Terminology of Religious Origin (Helsinki, 1999), 53. For cautionary comments on consistently linking anonymity to censorship see D.F. McKenzie, ‘Trading Places? England 1689–France 1789’, in Haydn T. Mason (ed.), The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 2–3. For literary scholars, the lapse of licensing indicates the emergence of the author function, and the authorial name as property. The account given here disputes such an easy transition. For further criticisms see, Robert J. Griffin, ‘Anonymity and Authorship’, New Literary History, 30 (1999), 877–95. 46 Commons Journals, xiii, 699, xiv, 249–338, Luttrell, Diary, iv, 132. 47 The technicalities of the various bills and their differences are well discussed in Goldie and Kemp (eds), Censorship and the Press, iv, 122–3; Hanson, Government and the Press, 8–9. 44

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Hedges.48 Even though this later bill fell as well, much like attempts to legislate in 1698, all of these parliamentary attempts to restrict the press gave rise to further debate. The first comment on the bills in the early eighteenth century was offered by Daniel Defoe who, by this point, was in the pay of Robert Harley and was his trusted if secret propagandist.49 The anonymous publication in early January 1704 of an Essay on the Regulation of the Press, just as legislation was being debated, likely reflects Harley’s position rather than Defoe’s. Nor, as one commentator has recently claimed, was Defoe’s Essay committed to the freedom of the press in unambiguous terms.50 Rather, it projected the typical Harleian ideal of moderation, suggesting anonymity would calm the press, whilst describing licensing as a form of priestly tyranny.51 Defoe maintained that control of the press was crucial to political stability. His claim was justified by listing recently published books that ‘no nation in the Christian world, but ours, would have suffered’.52 Again, this employed the rhetoric of the Oxford Decree, combining books together to form a coherent whole as conclusive proof of press excesses. In Defoe’s case, his inventory confirmed how the lapse of licensing had occasioned press outrages. John Asgill’s book on death, Coward’s on the immortality of the soul, Charles Leslie’s on polygamy, an unnamed tract on the Trinity and Burnet’s theory, all served to demonstrate the laxity of press control, which, in turn, undermined the English claim to godliness and tended to ‘atheism, heresy and irreligion’. In no other place in Europe, Defoe claimed, would the authors have gone without censure and punishment’.53 Defoe’s attack on lax control and his promotion of post-publication punishment thereby raised the question of whether licensing should be revisited as a policy solution. Adopting Tindal’s 1698 position, Defoe defined pre-publication restraint as impossible under the conditions of Robert Harley and the Press, 68. Ibid., 57–79. 50 Tortarolo, The Invention of Free Press, 35. There is an excellent discussion of Defoe’s Essay, his personal interest and the use of innuendo, in: Thomas Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 (Oxford, 2019), 121–3. For Defoe, copyright and this tract see, Jody Greene, The Problem with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (Pennsylvania, PA, 2005), 107–11. 51 For Harley’s understanding and approach to moderation see, Angus McInnes, ‘The Political Ideas of Robert Harley’, History, 170 (1965), 309–22. Alan Downie takes a subtler position on Harley’s political thinking, suggesting he was ‘anti-party’ rather than moderate, see Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 20–3. 52 Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704), 4. 53 Ibid., 4. John Asgill, An Argument Proving, that According to the Covenant of Eternal Life Revealed in the Scriptures (1700); The Way to Heaven in a String (1700); Edward Nicholson, An Answer to Mr Asgill’s Book (1702); William Coward, Second Thoughts Concerning Human Soul (1704); Charles Leslie, A Letter of Advice to a Friend, upon the Modern Argument of the Lawfulness of Simple Fornication (1696); Thomas Burnet, The Theory of the Earth (1690). 48 Downie, 49

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established party politics. But, while Tindal had gone to some lengths to clarify how licensing was tyrannous and contextually impossible, Defoe collapsed the two stances together. Licensing, he argued, was characterised by making the press a slave to party, for one side of the argument would ‘have the whole power of keeping the world in ignorance, in all matters relating to religion or policy, since the writers of that party shall have full liberty to impose their notions upon the world’.54 This position traded on commonplace assumptions deriving from Charles Blount, that licensing was arbitrary precisely because it found its origins in popery. In the English context, the connection was made explicit by pointing to James II’s reign. The 1680s had been a step towards arbitrary government, both in religion and press control. To go back to licensing would usher in a new period of despotism and repeat previous mistakes, for ‘to go back again to that which we once complained of as arbitrary, is a tactic acknowledging the former complaint to be groundless, and giving us cause to think that there’s more steps of that nature to be introduced’.55 Defoe’s assertion that press control would inevitably usher in Catholic tyranny was a tactic that allowed him to make a more positive association between freedom and the post-revolutionary settlement. Since 1695, press legislation had been put before parliament a number of times and, whilst members had been keen to restrain licentiousness, they had always avoided ‘pernicious remedy, as a thing of much worse consequence to the constitution and privileges of Englishmen, than the licentiousness of the press can be to government’.56 Defoe’s account here is strongly indebted to Tindal’s suggestion that no parliament could restrain the press whilst maintaining its commitment to the post-revolutionary settlement. At the same time, however, it took on a different contextual shape in reaction to anti-press campaigns. Thus, while Defoe admitted the problems that licentiousness caused the country, he denied books might infect souls in the manner churchmen had proposed. ‘To cure the ill use of liberty, with a deprivation of liberty’, was, he pointed out, like cutting off the leg to cure gout in the toe. It was, he complained, applying poison to cure poison. Defoe’s rebuttal of any connection between the licentiousness of the press and sin, whether that sin was personal, communal or national, indirectly reveals the dominance of religious campaigns against the press. Despite the alacrity with which Defoe made the press an engine of Protestant learning, he was forced to acknowledge the power of opposition arguments. Indeed, far from reading his tract as a political call for a free press, it was, instead, in direct conversation with opponents from across the religious spectrum: An Essay on the Regulation of the Press, 4. Ibid., 7. 56 Ibid., 8. 54 Defoe, 55

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for as to its being a sin against God, the laws have nothing to say to that, and as to a sin against civil government, there can be no such thing as a crime until the fact is committed, and therefore to anticipate the man by laws, before the crime, is to abridge him of his liberty without a crime, and so make a punishment without a transgression, which is illegal in its own nature, and arbitrary in the most intense degree.57

Defoe wanted to ensure the impossibility of the return of licensing. He also endeavoured to acknowledge the inadequacy of the present solution to the press. This was a difficult balancing act to achieve. Any astute observer might find it apposite to point out that a government propaganda sheet, inspired by Harley, was criticising a system for which the secretary was responsible. This problem was solved by bringing Defoe’s voice, based on his personal unhappy experience of restraint, to the fore.58 It was within this context that we should understand the tract’s anger against the arbitrary character of both pre- and post-publication restraint. In the early eighteenth century, the crime of the author is unknowable, he complained. As someone who had himself been prosecuted, Defoe possessed unique insight into the problems the book trade was encountering. Again, his central point was not just to illustrate the tyranny of restraint, but also to balance his analysis against the political instability being created by the seeming unchecked spread of dangerous books. The labile nature of the law ensured that the courts and the wider public filled the policy vacuum caused by ministerial inertia, and truth was no defence against conviction.59 The current system of post-publication restraint was arbitrary. The courts often came under public pressure to prosecute any book as a scandalous and seditious libel. The crime of the author was not known and any author was susceptible to the rhetorical and textual skills of cunning lawyers who might place innuendo upon meaning and make authors criminal.60 Such anxieties of arbitrary legal procedure were heightened because ministers, often in conjunction with sympathetic lawyers, were permitted to write general indictments, accusing authors of disturbing the peace of the nation. Supposedly neutral legal procedures, it appeared, were subject to the whim of political motivation, a situation compounded because juries were barred from factual interpretation in libel cases: ‘nothing is more ridiculous than the letter of an indictment in such cases, and the jury being accounted only judges of evidence, judges of fact, and not of the nature of it, the judges 57

Ibid., 7. Daniel Defoe, A Hymn to the Pillory (1703). 59 Truth as a defence was discussed in the 1704 trial of John Tutchin, see BL MS Add. 61496 f.96 John Tutchin to Lord Sunderland 23 June 1704; Lee Sonsteng Horsley, ‘The Trial of John Tutchin, Author of the “Observator”’, The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 3 (1973); Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory, 122–3. 60 Defoe, An Essay on the Regulation of the Press, 15. 58

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are thereby unlimited’.61 Indeed, Defoe continued, Thomas Delaune died in prison because of a general indictment and an exorbitant fine, Algernon Sidney was subject to an ambiguous legal charge and William Anderton was executed because of much the same behaviour.62 Far from the emergence of deism and dissent being the cause of licentiousness, it was the ambiguity of post-publication restraint that was destabilising the polity, for ‘men are apt to be bold in a thing which they cannot find expressly condemned by the letter of the law’. Here again, the crucial conundrum was how the press might be regulated to provide political stability in conditions of religious plurality. Defoe wanted to avoid the tyranny of licensing with a mode of post-publication self-correction, determined by legal certainty. Thus, he proposed MPs should approve new legislation in which no man should, by writing or printing, argue or dispute ‘such and such points’ concerned with the state of the Church.63 Any person transgressing would be punished in ‘such and such a manner’. Defoe left it to MPs to determine the precise content of his phrase ‘such and such’. His position, of course, skirted the problem: could there be agreement on what was illegal. If parliament could not pass such legislation, Defoe had a simpler suggestion. Defoe blamed the licentiousness of the press on anonymity. Licensing, he admitted, snuffed out an author’s ability to hide their responsibility for errant publications. But with pre-publication restraint tainted as tyrannous and impossible under a divided political society, he demanded a new law be made ‘to make the last seller the author, unless the name of author, printer or bookseller, be affixed to the book’. At a practical level, this new law would offer obvious advantages. Since the prosecution of John Toland, many of the more despised authors, men like Matthew Tindal, had refused to put their names to publications and had acquired new skills of hiding their identity by resorting to trade publishers.64 From a personal level, a new law removing anonymity helped ministers from becoming mired in complex and frustrating investigations to uncover responsibility for problematic books.65 Beyond the practical and the personal, removing anonymity offered a compelling policy solution to the problem of public speech. As Defoe explained, making each author responsible for their ideas, 61

Ibid., 14. Samuel Grascome, An appeal of murther from certain unjust judges (1693), 2; Paul Monod, ‘The Jacobite Pess and English censorship, 1689–95’ in E. Cruickshanks and E. Corp (eds), The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites (1995), 125–152; Paul Hopkins, ‘Anderton, William (1663–1693)’, in ODNB; Thomas De Laune, De Laune’s Plea for the Non-conformists: Shewing the True State of their Case (1704) frontispiece; Jonathan Scott, ‘Sidney, Algernon (1623–1683)’, in ODNB. 63 Defoe, An Essay on the Regulation of the Press, 14. 64 Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers, 1675–1750’, The Library (1982), 99–135. 65 Folger Shakespeare Library, Newdigate newsletters, L.c. 3003, London 8 Jun. 1706. 62

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and making it clear they would be reasonably punished for crossing boundaries, would force authors into more consideration of their ideas, whilst maintaining the newly emerging right to engage in debate. The implicit assumption was that the constantly mutating tensions and persistent confrontations over sets of essential wide-ranging issues might, overnight, assume a more irenic character: But leaving the press in the full enjoyment of all its just liberties, and answer all these ends, while it is yet fenced about with due restriction of laws, every man may have full freedom of promoting the extent of learning, exercising his parts, defending his arguments, and answering his adversary, and yet at the same time will know how far he may go with safety, and when he transgresses: if any man then gives offence, he knows it, and what he must expect; if any man does thus offend, the law knows the offender, and how to punish him: all things would run in the open free course of laws.66

The Quakers also offered comments on the new attempts to pass a press bill. Published in 1704, Some Considerations on the Bill served as an official response from the sect. As they had in 1697, the Quakers continued to insist on the right of government to punish treason, sedition and any scandalous pamphlets tending to ‘vice and immorality’.67 The new attempt to impose licensing caused them severe problems. Much like Tindal and Defoe, they outlined both the practical inefficiency of pre-publication restraint and its capricious possibilities. A licenser alone, they insisted, would be able to allow what he found to be sound and orthodox and reject what he might find to be heretical or offensive. Aside from practicality, the Quakers’ objection was historical and contemporary. Arising from different interpretations of Scripture, the lessons of history had taught them how heresy was an obscure political term, used in an artful manner by opponents, turned and used against primitive Christians and brave reformers merely to blacken their name as erring Christians, theologically mistaken and threatening civil stability. In the Quakers’ account, the correct response to licensing was to emphasise the Scriptural underpinning of Christianity, whilst allowing a certain amount of latitude for errant forms of ideas to publicly self-correct: the different apprehensions men have of diverse parts of Scripture, gives birth to different persuasions, who yet all make the Scripture the test thereof; which by the kindness of the government being tolerated, they conceive, they ought to be left free to defend them, from

An Essay on the Regulation of the Press, 17–18. Some considerations Humbly Offered by the People called the Quakers, Relating to the Bill for Restraining the Licentiousness of the Press (1704). 66 Defoe, 67

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the misrepresentations, prejudice, or mistake of others, without being subjected to the censure of a licenser of a different persuasion.68

This positive analysis of how public disputation might develop in the new century free from government interference co-existed, however, with an alternative, legalistic strain of Quaker thinking. By the early eighteenth century Quakers and other Dissenters were increasingly willing to endorse the Toleration Act as not only guaranteeing their freedom of worship, but also their right to access the press. Nothing, they contended, must be enacted to ‘lessen their own enjoyment of toleration, a right they enjoyed under the favour of the government’.69 A reply to the Quakers’ tract, written and signed by Francis Bugg (1640–1727), provides a revealing insight into the political and religious atmosphere in 1704. A Quaker apostate, he left the movement in 1680, conformed to the Church of England and developed a career attacking the Quakers in print.70 Pointing to the original claim by the Quakers that ‘to limit the press we conceive unsafe’, Bugg set out to enquire whether ‘the Quakers themselves are not guilty of printing and publishing seditious and scandalous pamphlets’.71 Mirroring the literary technique of Defoe and the Oxford Decree, he reproduced sets of Quaker writings to prove that they were blasphemous and anti-Trinitarians, and belittled the authority of the state. Far from the press being able to self-correct, Bugg maintained it was in chaos and endangered the providence of the country. Perhaps more to the point, the Quakers’ desire to oppose their enemies in print was spreading heresy and driving instability. Their apostacy demonstrated: the necessity of restraining the press, as well on a religious account, as on some others; especially since the Quakers are so bold as not only to vilify the Scripture, deny Jesus to be Christ the Son of God, blaspheme the blessed Trinity, neglect his ordinances; but also reproach his ministers under the most contemptible names they can invent.72

Bugg’s hatred of Quakerism was visceral. This does not, of course, invalidate the thrust of his criticism. Indeed, many High Churchmen shared his distaste for Quakers. His argument, held by many others, insisted that the government had to intervene in the print trade more effectively. If the Quakers were orthodox, if they existed within a wider sense of Scriptural tradition, as they claimed, ‘why should they fear the restraint of the press: 68

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 1. 70 Caroline L. Leachman, ‘Bugg, Francis (1640–1727)’, in ODNB. 71 Francis Bugg, A brief reply to the Quakers allegations against the bill for restraining the licentiousness of the press (1704). 72 Ibid., 4. 69

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for if what they write be orthodox, I hope such licenses as the government shall think fit to assign will do you justice’.73 Unsurprisingly, Bugg’s attack was rejected by the Quakers. George Whitehead (1637–1724), a leading Quaker writer, accused Bugg of being nothing more than a mercenary scribbler, perpetuating a perverted tract that was full of forgeries.74 In fact, Whitehead suggested Bugg’s abuse served as the justification for their own liberty of the press. If the best of people were misrepresented in this manner, ‘therefore the more need of the liberty of the press for just vindication’.75 Daniel Defoe’s Private Views on the Press

Defoe’s first tract concerned with the press in 1704 likely reflected Harley’s position. For Harley, removing anonymity and making the limits of transgressions obvious, coupled with condign punishment, was the course of action most likely to pass into legislation, it also reflected his own position of moderation. Indeed, Defoe framed the removal of anonymity as a responsible reaction to the excesses provided by the religious and political extremes, without returning to the tyranny of licensing. This did not reflect Defoe’s private position. While he was writing publicly in support of Harley’s agenda, he was circulating and publishing his more personal reflections on press restraint in the early eighteenth century. On 1 April 1704, an anonymous correspondent forwarded Harley an underground broadsheet, which he maintained was written and circulated by Defoe. Far from advancing Harley’s agenda, the broadsheet ruthlessly satirised the High Church position on the press.76 This new, anonymous broadsheet took a different approach to the problems of the press. Far from emphasising how the excesses of English political and religious debate should be curbed, Defoe blamed political instability on High Churchmen. Atterbury and Sacheverell were presented as the leaders of a coherent High Church movement, desperate for a church licenser to be placed in charge of print so ‘we may with greater freedom write what we please without the hazard of being replied to’.77 The broadsheet suggested High Churchmen had been intellectually defeated by their opponents in debate. They desired the return of licensing, so ‘we may have the freedom under a church licenser to impose any thing upon the 73

Ibid., 6. George Whitehead, A Brief Answer to F. Bugg’s Brief Reply to the Considerations Humbly Offered (1704), 2; Nigel Smith, ‘Whitehead, George (1637–1724)’, in ODNB. 75 Whitehead, A Brief Answer, 2. 76 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 68; J.A. Downie, ‘An Unknown Defoe Broadsheet on the Regulation of the Press?’, The Library (1979), 51–8. 77 To the honourable the Commons of England assembled in Parliament (1704). 74

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world, and to forge as many histories of New Associations and the like, as we find convenient, we may then challenge them without answers’.78 This description of the connection between High Churchmen and pre-publication restraint was merely the latest manifestation of Defoe’s detestation of his opponents. Privately freed from the moderate influence of Harley, he provided his readers, and lobbied parliament, with a description of licensing as tyrannous: Having thus represented to your Honours the reasons which make it necessary for the present prosperity of the church, that the bill now depending in your house should be passed with all possible speed, we further humbly petition your Honours in your abundant tenderness for the poor CHURCH of England, compass about with Dissenters, Fanatics and Schismatics, and betrayed by Whiggish members and Presbyterian bastards, that you would be pleased only to pass the said bill, but so to furnish it with needful clauses, that the press may for the time to come be wholly in the power of the church, and that nothing be printed and published but what the loyal zealous members of the church may license and approve, and to that end the superintendency of the press, and of all things belonging to books and letters may be in the hands of the church, that we may meet with no more interruption in our proceeding with all the churches enemies that the Shortest way.79

Defoe’s basic satirical technique, the elision of High Church intellectual inadequacy with tyranny, was ultimately designed to expose their true ambitions beyond the return of licensing. It was not just the domination of public instruction that Atterbury and Sacheverell desired, but the prohibition of dissenting schools or academies that were depicted as ‘seminaries of sedition’, designed to the ruin of the Church of England. Yet the objects of Defoe’s critique extended even further. For he knew High Churchmen would use the return of licensing to roll back all of the gains made since the advent of toleration. He also outlined their disillusionment at the policies of the queen. They prayed, Defoe suggested, that the licenser might not receive his commission from the queen, for Her Majesty has ‘lately left us in the lurch’. Nor, he continued, should it be left to the bishops, for they were tainted and infected with ‘Presbyterian, factious, moderate, low church principles’ and were therefore ‘unfit to be trusted with so weighty and extraordinary concern, we cannot think the church safe under their conduct’. With the Church under attack from all sides, hemmed in by powerful factions, licensing could only be left to the Lower House of convocation or ‘such other body of the pious and learned clergy’.80 Defoe’s satire was astute. He reflected the concern that licensing might well roll back 78

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 1. 80 Ibid., 1. 79

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the post-revolution settlement. But he also denied the sincerity from High Churchmen. Far from a genuine desire to ensure the press did not spread blasphemy and heresy, in Defoe’s formulation Atterbury was acting out of pure self-interest. The elaboration of these conflicts can also be found in John Tutchin’s Observator. By this point, in the early spring of 1704, Tutchin had already been arraigned for seditious libel and was engaged in an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid jail.81 Indeed, his comments from this period reflect his own personal interest in the course of legislation against the press. His enemies in a local coffee house, he noted wryly, had told him that his mouth would be stopped by the new bill. Despite this personal interest, Tutchin maintained the need for further control, for he thought such a law ‘would be very necessary, provided it put a stop to all scribblers in general, and the exorbitant-grant-men and the Scots Non-juring priests, and other libellers of the government that stir up sedition and faction in our country’.82 As with Defoe, Tutchin was concerned with how a solution might be found to the excesses of the press; he also acknowledged how forms of restraint must somehow circumvent the partisan clashes of the age: ‘indeed I think a restraint on the press very necessary this juncture, when so many evil men write pamphlets on purpose to make a disunion amongst us’.83 Tutchin acknowledged the need for further control, he mused over how this might be achieved. Licensing, he noted, was not only unlikely to make a bad book a good book, but licensing now had a history of discredited partisanship. Were it to return, it would be necessary for the office of the licenser to be ‘accountable for such books as bear his imprimatur, that are against either the rights of the Crown or the liberties of the people’. But, Tutchin considered the best solution to the press was post-publication control. What need of a license is there, he asked, when there are laws ‘already for punishing such as displease the Court by writing’? Tutchin’s uncertainty of how the press might be dealt with is understandable given his own experience. He was a writer who had little recourse to anonymity; his name was intimately associated with the Observator. These circumstances ensured he concurred with Defoe and Harley in remedy: But certain it is, no man ought to publish a book without the authors, booksellers or printers name to it, and I did not care if such books were esteemed in the eye of the law as libels. I am sure such an act would not affect me, for I never yet wrote a book that I dare not own.84

81

Horsley, ‘The Trial of John Tutchin’. Observator, 29 Jan. 1704. 83 The Observator, 29 Jan. 1704. 84 The Observator, 29 Jan. 1704. 82 The

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Matthew Tindal and the Press in 1704

Matthew Tindal must have regarded fresh attempts to control the press with considerable interest. He had intervened in 1698 to discuss the press, and he reissued his tract in 1699 and 1700. In the wake of new legislative attempts to control the press, he released a reworked and shortened version of this tract on 12 January 1704. The speed of his publication, which took account of Defoe’s tract and was published just five days later, can likely be attributed to his ability to precis his previous work and his well-developed relationships with a set of publishers and printers who were prepared to send his new work quickly to press.85 Indeed, and despite Tindal’s continued insistence on retaining his anonymity, we know beyond textual analysis that Tindal was the author. In the Daily Courant, Abigail Baldwin, one of the most prominent Whig trade publishers of the day, advertised the new work to be purchased together with a Letter to a Member of Parliament on the same subject.86 Readers of Tindal’s new tract were being asked to read it in conjunction with his 1698 intervention. Tindal’s tract in 1704 is rarely commented on by historians. His only biographer ignores the book, and more recently it has been depicted as a mundane reworking of Charles Blount.87 Yet Tindal’s tract in 1704 reveals how he altered his positions slightly to take account of changing political circumstances. For Tindal, it was increasingly obvious that his previous anticlericalism was too general – aimed at all priests, regardless of their denominational identity; by 1704, he recognised religious freedom was endangered by an increasingly organised and vocal High Church faction. Second, aware of potential legislation, he changed his position on the removal of anonymity. In some cases, the amount of reworking was slight indeed. In a manner entirely consistent with his previous work, Tindal continued to insist on the direct connection between freedom of enquiry, freedom of expression and salvation, and, crucially, he maintained that his own vision of public debate would deliver political peace. Yet it was increasingly apparent that the emergence of ever more vocal clerical opposition to the press in the six years between his two tracts had caused 85

In his publishing career Tindal only dealt with four publishers. He used Richard Baldwin in the early 1690s and then Abigail Baldwin, his widow, some years later. He also passed copy to John Darby (Toland’s publisher) and Benjamin Bragg, John Tutchin’s publisher. For a complete list of his publications, see, Alex Barber, ‘The Voice of the People, No Voice of God’: A Political, Religious and Social History of the Transmission of Ideas in England, 1690–1715’, PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London (2010); Leona Rostenberg, ‘Richard and Anne Baldwin, Whig Patriot Publishers’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1953), 1–42; Beth Lynch, ‘Darby, John (d.1704)’, in ODNB. 86 The Daily Courant, 12 Jan. 1704. 87 Lalor, Matthew Tindal; Tortarolo, The Invention of Free Press, 63.

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some rethinking. His continual insistence on God’s rejection of impossibilities, the acceptance that only reason could ensure sacral knowledge, now morphed into a negative rejection of clerical attacks on his position. ‘To affirm mistakes are sinful’, he protested, is to make God the author of the sin, and it was the height of impiety ‘to condemn one of sin for obeying God’s commands in impartially examining, it can be no less impious to affirm the opinion unavoidably caused by so doing to be a sin’.88 As he had in the 1690s, Tindal continued to insist salvation was achieved by reason, by how knowledge was achieved, and not by doctrinal belief. God only judged men as rational creatures; ‘their reward, whether they hit or miss the truth, will be in an exact proportion to the use they make of their reason: and consequently no opinion can be a sin, but for want of an impartial examination; and according as that has been more or less omitted, so one is more or less accountable’.89 Tindal continued to marshal the commonplaces of the godly in his campaign for a free press. Freedom of enquiry, he insisted, was the key to the door of salvation, not a hierarchical society in which access to knowledge was restricted by clerics. Far from dragging people into error, examining reason on all sides of the argument was not only what God required, but it also prevented doctrinal mistakes. Thus, God had commanded all men to judge for themselves, to try the spirit and to prove all things. By 1704, Tindal’s anticlericalism had taken on even more vehemence. The unevenness of the Reformation was attributable to priestly self-interest; ‘it is not the man, but the Bishopric, the Deanery, the Prebend, the Reectory that preaches and prints nemine contradicente, popery in one place, Lutheranism in another, Calvinism in a third’.90 While Tindal’s distaste for clerics led him to describe licensing as tyranny, his work also acknowledged one of Defoe’s worries. In the last four years, since his last publication, a set of skilled High Church preachers had emerged. If it was the duty of every government to restrain the liberty of printing, then they surely must restrain preaching, as otherwise public discourse would be defined by the blind leading the blind. The central preoccupations of Reasons against Restraining the Press may thus be seen as continuous with Tindal’s long-running anticlericalism and his association of licensing with self-interested tyranny. In his later tract, however, he promoted the press as crucial to the maintenance of civil stability. Whereas in 1698, Tindal had upheld the right for government to restrain errant civil publication and denied the right of atheists and Catholics to access public discourse, he now contended that the liberty of the press was essential to ‘keep a Ministry within some tolerable bounds, by exposing their ill designs to the people’, for the arts of the state were [Matthew Tindal], Reasons against restraining the press (1704), 3–4. Ibid., 4. 90 Ibid., 6. 88 89

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designed to keep the people in slavery. Perhaps most crucially, the policies being pursued by Harley, in the guise of removing anonymity, ensured Tindal altered his position: As to the obliging authors to set their names to their work, that can only serve to hinder the publishing the most useful books, viz. those designed to rectify abuses. Besides, this prejudices people for or against a book, and serves as a handle for fulsome flatteries, or gross abuses; and we have too frequent instances of men’s thinking to atone, for not answering the arguments, by railing at the authors. And therefore those writers, such as the author of the Whole duty of man, &c. that design the utmost good, have industriously concealed their names.91

In terms of strict self-interest, Tindal was likely correct in trying to preserve the right to anonymity. His ability to deny responsibility for publications likely saved him from successful prosecution two years later. Even though his contemporaries often suspected he was responsible for the Rights of the Christian Church, they found it difficult to prove while Tindal stayed silent. In 1707, for example, Arthur Charlett wrote to William Wake. Commenting approvingly that ‘Dr Potter, Mr Hoadly and Dr Hicks had attacked that wretch Tindal’, he lamented that the warden of All Souls still had to get sufficient evidence of his authorship, for then ‘he would quickly deliver the College and the University of this viper, who yet in this place does the least harm, because no living human creature will converse with him’.92 Tindal was well aware of the consequences of admitting authorship. Despite clerical distaste for the bungled prosecution of Christianity not Mysterious, in which observers complained that Toland had not been sufficiently punished, from the late seventeenth century onwards Toland availed himself of anonymity. In 1705, for example, Toland sent the earl of Shaftesbury a new book but begged his friend to conceal his authorship. Even here, Toland recognised the importance of anonymity, commenting, ‘perhaps I may be named among others by the town, although my not haunting any longer in coffee houses, nor keeping so much tattling company as I formerly used to, may probably keep me out of remembrance on this occasion’.93 Nor did Toland’s desire for anonymity go away with time. Five years later, he wrote again to Shaftesbury asking him to conceal his identity.94 Equally, Thomas Curteis endeavoured to retain his authorship of a tract behind ‘the curtain’ because he did not want to ‘run the gauntlet in these extremely censorious times’.95 91

Ibid., 14–15. Christ Church, Wake Letters 17, f.172, Arthur Charlett to Wake, 23 May 1707. 93 TNA, 30/24/20, f.262, John Toland to earl of Shaftesbury, 20 Oct. 1705. 94 Hampshire RO 9M73/G258/7, John Toland to earl of Shaftesbury, 1710. 95 Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone U1007/C13/3, Thomas Curteis to David Polhill, 18 May 1701. 92

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Freedom of the Press and the 1705 General Election

Edmund Poley served the English state as a diplomat throughout the later years of the Stuart kings and into the early eighteenth century.96 In 1705 he was serving as the diplomatic envoy to Hanover. Well connected in English politics – his brother was a leading tacker – Poley satisfied his interest in politics by subscribing to a number of scribal newsletters.97 On 23 March 1705, Poley received a newsletter describing the political conditions of London. ‘The town swarms with pamphlets and nothing is to be heard in the streets but a list of the Tackers a character of the Tackers’.98 The anonymous writer revealed a truism concerned with the aftermath of the failed tack. The realisation amongst High Churchmen and their Tory supporters that the hated practice of occasional conformity would likely never be outlawed caused even more ideological rancour to divide the country. As the anonymous newsletter writer noted, there had been altercations at court and the queen would likely make changes to her government after the next general election. That election, he noted, would be a great struggle upon what we ‘call Whig and Tory as has been known in the kingdom’.99 The newsletter writer was correct in his assessment. The 1705 general election has been convincingly assessed as the most ‘ideologically rancorous and warmly contested elections of the reign’.100 The Tories attacked the ministry relentlessly as irreligious, responsible for the continued existence of the hated policy of occasional conformity. High Churchmen ridiculed Harley’s claims to moderation, arguing that he was failing to save the Church from the poison of Latitudinarians within the Church and Dissenters without.101 One contemporary commentator suggested that the Tories won many seats because of their cry that the ‘Church was in danger’.102 These ideological positions were reflected and reinforced through pamphlets and regular periodicals with repeated comments that, ‘all the distinctions of parties were not confined to High and Low Church only, but tackers, sneekers and what not were continually trumped up’.103 In turn, Harley, through Defoe, sought to broaden

96

Stuart Handley, ‘Poley, Edmund (1655–1714)’, in ODNB. Beinecke, OSB MSS 1, Series 1, Correspondence, 1680–1705. 98 Beinecke, OSB MSS 1, Box 3, Folder 161, Newsletter to Edmund Poley, 23 Mar. 1705. 99 Beinecke, OSB MSS 1, Box 3, Folder 161, Newsletter to Edmund Poley, 23 Mar. 1705. 100 Richards, Party Propaganda under Queen Anne, 54–80; Elisabeth G. Cunnington, ‘The General Election of 1705’, MA thesis (unpublished), University of London (1938); Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 336. 101 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 81. 102 Beinecke, OSB MSS 1, Box 3, Folder 163, Newsletter [Dyer] to [Edmund Poley], 15 May 1705. 103 BL Add. MS 4743, f.32v. 97

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support for his policy of moderation, consensus and stability at home and pursued the war against the French threat.104 The 1705 election fulfilled another of Poley’s correspondents’ predictions. Once again, ideological escalation, both political and religious, was exacerbated by the licentiousness of the press. The country abounded with scandalous libels of which the government had failed to take notice and failed to punish either the authors or the printers.105 Some writers seemed to recognise that the election had pushed the boundaries of the press even further. John Tutchin, who had broadly used the Observator to accuse High Churchmen of desiring tyranny and to support Harley’s moderate aspirations, worried about new levels of licentiousness.106 The country had abounded with venomous libels, he worried, many of them anonymous, and none had been prosecuted. He insisted, now the election was over and for the sake of political stability, that the ministry must enforce extant laws, put a stop to libelling and prosecute errant scribblers. Despite his insistence that he was concerned with the peace of the nation and wanted libels across the political spectrum to be stopped, Tutchin’s analysis soon collapsed into a partisan assault. The High Church cause had been thoroughly nourished by lies and forgeries; they had used the artillery of hell for their defence, constantly accusing opponents of impiety.107 Now there was a new ministry, they had to learn from previous failures. ‘We may thank the late ministry for this licentious trade of scribbling’, he noted, ‘for had they, upon Her Majesties accession to the throne, with an impartial justice, prosecuted all offenders, there would have been no need for my writing’.108 The anonymous newsletter writer was correct in one more piece of analysis. His information that the queen would remake her government was fulfilled after the election. As the animosity of the election gave way to a new parliament, evenly split between the Whigs and Tories, a new ministry was constructed under the control of junto Whigs, in which Harley was the Secretary for the North and solely responsible for the behaviour and control of the press. Harley now instructed Defoe to launch an attack on High Churchmen.109 The Review, before, during and after the election, provides us with a textbook example of how Harley and members of the Whig junto viewed the press and its exploitation by their opponents. Faced by a powerful High Church opposition, they began to suggest that the licentiousness of the press was a consequence of partisan politics; it was threatening public tranquillity and should be moderated.110 Review, 12 May 1705. OSB MSS 1, Box 3, Folder 161, Newsletter to Edmund Poley, 23 Mar. 1705. 106 The Observator, 25 Jul. 1705. 107 The Observator,, 25 Jul. 1705. 108 The Observator, 25 Jul. 1705. 109 Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 263; E.L. Ellis, ‘The Whig Junto in Relation to the Development of Party Politics and Party Organization from its Inception to 1714’, D. Phil thesis (unpublished), Oxford University (1961). 110 The Review, 13 Oct. 1705. 104 The

105 Beinecke,

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Where Harley, with Godolphin’s and Marlborough’s tacit approval, had previously supported removing anonymity as the solution to the press, he now instructed Defoe to use the Review to anathematise the press. Over the next few months, as the new parliament sat, Defoe berated High Churchmen as wicked and revengeful. Finally, in early November, he stopped attacking their ideology, and concomitant disloyalty to the queen, and turned to the way they communicated their message: in turn, the pulpit, the tongue and the press. The first edition of Defoe’s new project amounted to a broadside against the distortion of the pulpit. It was supposed to be an ecclesiastical engine, but it had become a mere hieroglyph, a political vessel ‘adapted to the more modern, although less Christian employments of railing and buffoonery’.111 This position built upon previous comments. High Churchmen, here defined broadly as the inferior clergy, were theologically errant and, crucially, politically disloyal. They were the dead weight against the nation’s settlement of 1689 and their railings, exclamations and reviling of government were designed to ruin the constitution and the monarch. In turn, the clergy should restrict their activities in the pulpit to expounding Scripture, finding the truth of religion and preaching a gospel of peace. In Defoe’s interpretation society was not endangered by deists, Socinians or Latitudinarians. Nor did Dissenters offer a political or religious problem. Their ministers behaved as instructed: they preached peace, discharged their function and acted as a spiritual guide. On the contrary, it was the railing of the established clergy that was leading to the decay of religion and tending to introduce atheism. They were addicted to bringing the worship of God into contempt, and rendering the pulpit odious, political and scandalous to the people.112 Defoe urged the Commons to put an end to the disorders caused by errant preaching, lest it would be fatal to the public peace of the kingdom. He praised parliament’s previous efforts to set out the limits of religious instruction from the pulpit, but noted that many of his opponents were so sure of their position that they took especial care ‘not to be concealed’. Not only were many preachers expressing their contempt for the government, they were becoming odious to their hearers, perverting the doctrine of the gospel, and were a disgrace to the whole nation. Open contempt for their own church, in violation of the gospel, deserved suppression, and he hoped the Commons would have their eyes open to: restrain the exorbitant latitude of a sort of men, who as much as in them lies, turn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, which it ought to be their business to preach, to state-projects, incendiarism, and to raising commotions in a peaceable country.113

Review, 28 Oct. 1705. Review, 28 Oct. 1705. 113 The Review, 28 Oct. 1705. 111 The 112 The

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Defoe presented a deeply troubling view of England in 1705, in which party and religious divisions were out of control, viciously propelled from the pulpit and destabilising the country. There was a central reason why Defoe and Harley were so concerned by incendiary sermons preached from the pulpit. A few days later, Defoe switched to a discussion of what he termed ‘common discourse’. Amongst the wider community, debate of politics and religion was unchecked. High Church sermons had inspired rebellion amongst the common people; they ‘talk gospel to a kettle drum’ and ‘all methods of discourse are run down with the clamour of their tongues’.114 For all his faith in his own writing as a means of persuasion, Defoe worried that the government had no ability to stop the influence of High Church sermons. Although he never suggested what type of restraint should be used, the ability of men such as Henry Sacheverell to influence their parishioners made the need for legislation even more urgent. Defoe insisted that he was not instructing parliament, but that it must soon ‘examine this spreading contagion, and prescribe proper remedies for it’. Only then, he maintained, ‘might we once again be a quiet nation’.115 In the next edition of the Review, Defoe expressed his horror at the power of the press. Unlike previous comments, the press was problematic because it was distorted by all parties. Readers were subject to treason, seditious libel and blasphemy, which ‘assault heaven, death, the soul, deny principles, forge systems, invert creation, and bully their maker’.116 Defoe also went on to make a distinction about the effect of licentiousness on the country. Whilst the authors of problematic books were often discovered and punished, those in the regions were able to carry on, free from the authorities able to ‘blind, hoodwink, and impose upon the ignorant people, as infinite and intolerable’.117 The Review’s campaign against unchecked forms of communication in late 1705 was likely an attempt to pressure the new parliament to pass legislation. Harley’s desire for moderation, which he had promoted as a political position in the recent general election, manifested itself as a deep distaste for the extreme nature of party politics. For Harley, employing the voice of Defoe, it was clear that unrestrained debate could not continue. Both seditious and irreligious ideas would infect the people and destabilise the nation. Defoe finally completed his project in early November with a final plea: That this author and his paper may both move the party-scribblers to peace, and make way for the law, he humbly moves may be passed, for that end, he humbly shows them an example, lays down before them, and puts an end to the long discourse of peace he has been upon; firmly believing God has heard the prayers of this distressed nation, and has sent Review, Review, 116 The Review, 117 The Review, 114 The 115 The

28 Oct. 1705. 28 Oct. 1705. 5 Nov.1705. 5 Nov. 1705.

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them such a representative, as will fix her peace beyond the attempts of men, and devils to interrupt.118

The attempts to remove anonymity as a solution to increasing ideological tensions were a failure. As we will see, authors continued to hide their identity when they published controversial books. But the comments on those failures illustrate the alarm in Harley’s circle, and also in Whig thinking in the shape of John Tutchin, at the emergence of powerful High Church sermons and publications that appeared able to influence the electorate and parishioners. Consequently, they lampooned and satirised their opponents as tyrannous, seeking power for themselves. Indeed, it is striking how much both Defoe and Tutchin accepted and repackaged Blount’s and Tindal’s previous arguments made in 1693 and 1698 respectively. The next chapter turns to High Church responses to the press. It argues that, as Anne’s reign became established, High Churchmen, disillusioned by Anne’s ecclesiastical policies, argued even more vehemently that the spread of errant ideas endangered salvation and destabilised the state. Despite the politics discussed in this chapter, the press continued to drive religious disagreements and ideological escalation between parties. It is noticeable, after all, that Tenison was involved in discussions of why and how the press might be controlled. His increasing alarm at the divisions in the Church and how they were intensified by public debate was reflected amongst the Williamite bishops. In the aftermath of the 1705 general election, bishop Burnet composed a manuscript advice to the clergy of the Church of England. Unlike the Injunctions he issued in wake of the Glorious Revolution, Burnet condemned the behaviour of some of the clergy. There were now ‘virulent strains in which some seem to take pleasure, they pour them out so often, and with such a keenness of spittle, show what spirit they are of’.119 Instead, the clergy needed to keep a kindly and brotherly correspondence with each other. Echoing Tenison’s position, Burnet insisted that the Church needed to unite to fight the real enemy, the Church of Rome. After all, he lamented, ‘what is the meaning of distinction of High and Low Church when we both agree in doctrine, worship and government’.120 Precisely because of the shared views of the clergy, they now ought to manage their arguments with soft words, strong reasoning and tenderness for each other.

Review, 5 Nov. 1705. MS Add.d.23, Papers of Bishop Burnet, f.91v, Advice to the Clergy of the Church of England, 1705. 120 Bod. MS Add.d.23, Papers of Bishop Burnet, f.91v, Advice to the Clergy of the Church of England, 1705. 118 The

119 Bod.

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6 High Churchmen and the Politics of the Press: Defining the Cause of Restraint The threat posed by a licentious press to the providential status of the country and to the soul of each individual might have been expected to favour the cause of Protestant reconciliation and Anglican unity. Yet the growing realisation that Anne’s ministries, in conjunction with parliament, either would or could not successfully legislate against the press caused certain churchmen to call for other solutions to the spread of deism, infidelity and impiety. Before Anne had succeeded to the throne, however, William had made a policy decision that intensified religious division in the eighteenth century. By the end of 1700, King William’s parliamentary affairs were in disorder and the junto administration was in disarray. To form a new government he turned to the earl of Rochester (1642–1711), the leading Tory of the day and an ally of Atterbury. As a price for his return, Rochester extracted a concession from the king that convocation would return.1 In accordance with his wishes, convocation was called and sat from spring 1701 until William’s death and then from 1702 to 1705. Almost from the start of its meeting, the clergy in the lower house attempted to employ the jurisdictional authority of convocation to censure heretical and dangerous books that the bishops rejected on legal grounds.2 The insistence by the bishops that convocation lacked jurisdictional authority struck many clergy as a dishonest way to avoid restraining books and amplified their anger. As a result, the debate between the two houses spilled out from private discussions into public debate. In the first section of this chapter, both the private discussions and printed pamphlets of the houses of convocation are used to outline the increasing anger of the clergy at the refusal to restrain the press, and their increasing concern at the danger caused by the spread of impious books. It details the rearguard action fought by the bishops and their allies to refute the accusation that they approved of a free press and that they themselves were infected by heresy and unorthodox ideas. The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 55; Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 82–115. 2 Lambeth Palace Library, MS Conv. IX 5/1736v, The answer of the archbishop and bishops to the representation of the lower house of convocation concerning Toland’s and other books, 1701. 1 Bennett,

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These debates emphasised the jurisdictional authority of convocation to control books and paid little attention, aside from general assertions of impiety, to the reasons why they should be stopped, whether they endangered the souls of individuals or corrupted the status of the Church, for example. Alongside these debates Henry Sacheverell began to publish his sermons. From the start of his clerical career, Sacheverell worried about the pernicious effect of the press on the Church and the country. The second section of this chapter tells the story of Henry Sacheverell’s career up to and including the publication of the Communication of Sin (1709) and the Perils of False Brethren (1709). History has largely portrayed Sacheverell as a political figure, his reputation deriving from the judgement of his opponents, as a preacher looking backwards to an Anglican golden age, seeking to reverse the revolution settlement, and largely eschewing theological discussion.3 Whilst hardly a sophisticated theologian, Sacheverell was committed to emphasising the dangers posed by imbibing and spreading errant ideas. His sermons pointed out the perceived dangers posed to the Church by the unfettered spread of deism, immorality and infidelity. But they also demonstrate how frustrated certain churchmen – often defined as High Churchmen – had become by the belittlement of church power since the 1690s, and its replacement by voluntary movements to coerce behaviour, and the freedom enjoyed by Dissenters to spread their ideas. If, as has recently been claimed, the familiar Anglican anathemas of fanaticism and popery were increasingly displaced by the threat of deists and Socinians in the 1690s – a point that is demonstrably correct – then a close analysis of Sacheverell’s career demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century nonconformity was added back into their concerns.4 Or, put simply, Sacheverell considered the publications of deists and Dissenters to be on a par. In his eyes, both were pernicious sects, dedicated to undermining the Church through their publications, which would also damn their readers to hell. Nor was Sacheverell alone in this view. In June 1700, for example, Mary Clarke observed in a letter, that ‘I suppose at the next election there will be a great bustle again for fear of the Church, for most of the parsons that I hear preach seem to intimate as if it were in as much danger of falling into the hands of the Dissenting party as ever it was into the Papist.’5 Seen in this way, in addition to highlighting the press’s potentially destabilising role, Sacheverell’s career illustrates concretely the coercive side of early eighteenth-century polemical divinity and the price he and his fellow High Churchmen suggested would be paid by individual, community and nation for allowing unorthodox expression. The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 51; Hanson, Government and the Press, 46. Secular Chains, 139. 5 Somerset Archives, DD\SF/7/1/31/3, no. 176, Mary Clarke to Edward Clarke, 18 June 1700. 3 Holmes,

4 Connell,

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If we remember Henry Sacheverell for his sermons as well as for his indictment and subsequent trial, it becomes easier to situate him historically.6 His sermons demonstrate one strand of the reaction to the early English Enlightenment and the attempts by some to establish civil religion as the final solution to the troubled legacy of the 1650s.7 The exchanges between churchmen described in this chapter also bring into question claims that there was a comfortable transition from promoting theological rectitude – as the guide to spiritual illumination – to one that instead emphasised civility, reasonableness, virtuous conduct and sincerity as the route to heaven.8 Sacheverell insisted that it was not enough for the Church to promote social discipline and moral conduct. Rather, he asserted that the Church must enable parishioners to find the truth, reject sin and achieve redemption, and that it must also punish those who erred, so they might be corrected to the true path. In this sense, then, the nature of public communication and its practices were essential to Sacheverell and churchmen, because a licentious press endangered souls, disrupted the Church’s mission and marked the country out as festering in immorality. Convocation and the Press (1702–1705)

The convocation session of 1701–1702 was marked by rancorous disagreements between the upper and the lower houses, concerned with the right to prorogation and the investigation of heretical books.9 Whilst we have no satisfactory prosopographical study of the identity of convocation, it is generally assumed that it split along party lines: the upper house representative of Low Church positions, and the lower house strongly High Church.10 By mid-August 1701, it was already clear to well-informed observers that the first session of convocation was a disaster. Robert Harley expressed his sympathy to Tenison for his travails: ‘I have long lamented the scandalous heats which have been of late amongst churchmen, and upon all occasions have taken your Grace’s part in discourse relating to the B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998); Kenyon, Revolution Principles, 83–101. 7 Mark Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), 197–222; ‘Ideology’, in Terrence Ball et al. (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989), 266–91. 8 Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce’, 532–4; Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution; Blair Worden, ‘The Question of Secularization’, in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (eds), A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration (Cambridge, 2001), 20–40. 9 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 56–62. 10 For comments on elections to convocation see, Paul Langford, ‘Convocation and the Tory Clergy, 1717–61’, in Eveline Cruickshanks and Jeremy Black (eds), The Jacobite Challenge (Edinburgh, 1988), 107–99; Sykes, William Wake, ii, 189–93. 6

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affairs of Convocation.’11 Despite Harley’s empathy, he also attacked the archbishop’s management of convocation. Tenison was too much under the influence of a body of men who had discharged themselves of religion and had promoted Socinianism, then Arianism and now deism. According to Harley, Tenison promoted those who hired writers and revised books ‘which destroy all religion and so consequently dissolve the bonds of all society’.12 Although William dissolved convocation in November, the disputes between the upper and lower house continued in print. Indeed, it was clear that the new ministry formed under Anne was concerned by the acrimonious public debate to which convocation gave rise. Shortly after the accession of Anne, in October 1702, Lord Godolphin left a book at Robert Harley’s house for the speaker to peruse. Some days before, Archbishop Tenison had left the book for Godolphin to demonstrate to the government ‘how little inclination the convocation were like to have towards an accommodation’.13 Whilst Godolphin left no comment on which book he was passing on, it is likely that it was Atterbury’s anonymous, Rights, Powers and Privileges of an English Convocation. Atterbury’s response to Wake was to once again sound the clarion call for the defence of the Church.14 He asserted the right of convocation to sit independently of parliament and demanded the lower clergy assume the power to censure books. It was another inspired piece of journalism and Maurice Wheeler informed Wake that Atterbury’s pamphlet was spread throughout the nation and sought to destroy the unity of the Church from below.15 ‘What a flame has sprung’, he continued, ‘from one paltry pamphlet’.16 Indeed, Tenison revealed that he was so distressed by the public debates concerning convocation that he had actually taken out of the press some books, and: hindered others designed to have been written upon the subject of contention, on purpose to avoid all occasion of increasing the flame and that divisions that had been so violently and unfortunately kindled and fomented in the church.17

11

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath Preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire (3 vols, 1904–1908), i, 52, Robert Harley to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 11 Aug. 1701. 12 HMC, Bath MSS, i, 53, Robert Harley to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 11 Aug. 1701. 13 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 48, Lord Godolphin to Robert Harley, 19 Oct. 1702. 14 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 52–3. 15 Christ Church Wake Letters 23, no. 134b, Maurice Wheeler to William Wake, 8 Sep. 1701; [Francis Atterbury], The Rights, Powers, and Privileges of an English Convocation, Stated and Vindicated (1701). 16 Christ Church Wake Letters 23, no. 135, Maurice Wheeler to William Wake, 27 Sep. 1701. 17 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 48, Lord Godolphin to Robert Harley, 19 Oct. 1702.

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Godolphin professed himself unsuited to judge these matters, but his message for Harley was clear. The relationship between both houses of convocation had collapsed, defined by mistrust and rancour that was being played out very publicly. The government needed to find some way to calm debate amongst churchmen in convocation and in the public arena. Nor were these worries to go away. Within a month Tenison wrote again to Godolphin complaining of further heats in the lower house of convocation.18 Tenison’s worries were merely the latest manifestation of the Anglican factionalism that often bedevilled convocation. It had, after all, been prorogued in 1690 after failing to agree with the king’s and Nottingham’s request to ratify comprehension.19 Yet, Tenison’s concern reflected a new phase in the tensions in the Church. Not only had the king’s recall of convocation, on the insistence of Lord Rochester, hardened the identity of a High Church party, but it had also seen certain clergy increasingly identify their own position as Low Church.20 Clerics of both sides now took to the press to express their disgust with the policies and behaviour of the bishops in the upper house and the clergy in the lower house.21 Nor did the fall of Rochester and the appointment of a mixed ministry under Anne help to calm convocation debates. The failure of Harley‘s and Tenison’s reforms to moderate the press by removing anonymity not only ran parallel to the recall of convocation – and they predated them – but both clerics and bishops used their sitting as an opportunity to comment on and explain how the press should be controlled. Nor did these concerns dissipate with time. Indeed, by 1708 Maurice Wheeler was worried by the public nature of convocation disputes. Writing to his friend and confidant William Wake, he complained that ‘the pamphlet written by the mutineers in convocation was very industriously spread in these parts’. Such public discussion of ecclesiastical disputes, Wheeler reasoned, had severely damaged the reputation of the Church, for ‘a bad cause being ever best solicited, while the truth is generally left to shift for itself’.22 The tensions between both houses of convocation often took the form of bitter debates concerned with the right of prorogation, and their specific rights and duties as laid down in law.23 But these disputes were vital because they concerned the ability of both the bishops and the clergy to Portland MSS, iv, 49, Lord Godolphin to Robert Harley, 3 Nov. 1702. Revolution Politics, 87–93, 100–1; Bod. MS Smith 57 f.127, Thomas Smith to Edward Bernard, 27 Mar. 1690; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 46–7; Bod. MS Smith 57 f.133, Thomas Smith to Edward Bernard, Apr. 1690. 20 Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 17, 29; Bennett, White Kennett, 37–8. 21 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 57. 22 Wake Letters 23, 87, Maurice Wheeler to William Wake, 22 Dec. 1708; Stuart Handley, ‘Wheeler, Maurice (1647/8–1727)’, in ODNB. 23 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 59–63; Bod. MS Ballard 7 f.92, White Kennett to Arthur Charlett, 1 Mar. 1701; Bod. MS Ballard 35 f.91, John Hutton to Arthur Charlett. 18 HMC,

19 Horwitz,

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use convocation to shape the future of the Church. And, nothing exacerbated their mutual distrust and anger more than the seeming unchecked spread of errant books. Convocation’s recall gave a new urgency to the anger felt by many churchmen over the loss of licensing and the failure of parliament to enact press legislation. Within days of their calling in 1700, the lower house set up a committee, chaired by William Jane and containing Francis Atterbury, to examine books for heretical opinions, and they set to work drawing up a detailed indictment of John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious and Gilbert Burnet’s commentary on the Thirty-Nine Articles.24 By 20 March 1700 the committee reported, judging that Toland’s book was full of ‘pernicious Principles, of dangerous consequence to the Christian Religion’.25 Receiving no answer from the bishops, the prolocutor sent a message to the upper house reminding them of the ‘application made by this house to their lordships, desiring their advice in reaction to a book of Mr Toland’s, and the reason why we thus renew our application is because we are at a stand what is fit to be done, with relation to other books now under consideration, till we know your lordships’ opinion therein’.26 It is clear that many of the bishops hated Toland’s book: Tenison detested it and Wake rejected its approach to Scripture.27 But, the simultaneous presentation of Toland and Burnet posed two significant problems. First, it was perfectly obvious now that the lower house, under the leadership of Jane and Atterbury, would not simply attack books on the very edge of orthodoxy but would also censure books they considered theologically lax. Second, to censure both books simultaneously would look dangerously like there was a connection between Toland and Burnet. Or, put simply, it would justify the High Church claim that there was little difference between the Latitudinarian bishops in the 24 Martin

Greig, ‘Heresy Hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the Convocation Controversy of 1701’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994), 569–92; for more details on attempts to restrain Toland see Champion, Republican Learning, 72–3; J.A.I. Champion, ‘Making Authority: Belief, Conviction and Reason in the Public Sphere in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in Libertinage et philosophie au XVIIe siècle. Le Public et le Privé (1999), 143–90; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 58–9; Lambeth Palace Library, MS Conv. IX/5.17 f.12. For the early sessions of convocation see Bennett, White Kennett, 38–71; Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 56–80; Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1669–1748 (1926) 31–53; Norman Sykes, William Wake Archbishop of Canterbury 1657–1737 (Cambridge, 1957) I, 88–121; [White Kennett], The History of the Convocation of the Prelates and Clergy of the Province of Canterbury, summon’d to meet … on February 6. 1700 (1702), 73. For the details of joint committee to examine books see Lambeth Palace Library, MS Conv. IX/5.17 f.12. For the attacks on Toland see also [White Kennett], The History of the Convocation of the Prelates and Clergy of the Province of Canterbury, summon’d to meet … on February 6. 1700 (1702), 73–4, 148–54. 25 [White Kennett], The History of the Convocation of the Prelates and Clergy of the Province of Canterbury, summon’d to meet … on February 6. 1700 (1702) 73; ibid., 73. 26 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 934/83 f.35, anonymous account. 27 Sykes, William Wake, i, 226, ii, 169–71.

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Church and deists outside. Indeed, in 1698 Matthew Tindal had predicted that should convocation gain the power to restrain books, then the clergy would run down all their opponents as ‘Trimmers, Latitudinarian, and what not’, and Atterbury had previously suggested there was a universal conspiracy amongst a ‘sort of Men, under the Style of Deists, Socinians, Latitudinarians, Deniers of Mysteries, and pretending Explainers of them, to undermine and overthrow the Catholick Faith’.28 There is no doubt that in 1696 Atterbury considered Christianity not Mysterious a detestable book, and by 1702 he had been joined by many of the lower clergy. But the simultaneous presentation of Toland’s and Burnet’s books by the lower house was a textbook example of partisan religious politics. Faced by an impossible choice, of either refusing to punish Toland, or seeing one of their own bishops attacked, the upper house resorted to legality, informing their clerical counterparts that: upon our consulting with counsel learned in the law concerning heretical, impious and immoral books, and particularly concerning a book of Toland’s sent up to us from the lower house, we do not find how, without a licence from the king, which we have not yet received, we can have sufficient authority to censure judicially any such books.29

The danger for Tenison, of course, was that he and his fellow bishops could now be associated with licentiousness, seemingly supporting Toland: a charge that was hardly fair. In fact, only two days after the lower house had tried to censure Toland, the upper house took notice of a book entitled Essays Upon the Balance of Power. Published anonymously but written by Charles Davenant, a man committed to the country cause and critical of the Whig junto, it suggested that some leading bishops possessed enmity towards Christ.30 Archbishop Tenison was so outraged by such a claim that he ordered that a paper should be fixed over several doors in Westminster Abbey. That paper required that the author of the anonymous tract should reveal himself and name the ecclesiastics who he believed did not revere Christ.31 Once the author had been revealed, he would ‘be proceeded against in a Judicial Way; which will be esteemed a great service to the Church; otherwise the above-mentioned Passage must be looked upon as a PUBLICK SCANDAL’.32 Letter to a Member of Parliament, 29. Lambeth Palace Library MS Conv IX/5/16, the answer of the archbishops and bishops to the representation of the lower house of convocation concerning Toland’s and other books. 30 [Charles Davenant], Essays upon I. The balance of power (1701) 40; ODNB. 31 [White Kennett], The History of the Convocation of the Prelates and Clergy of the Province of Canterbury, summon’d to meet … on February 6. 1700 (1702), 75; Whereas this day a book intituled, Essays upon I. The balance of power (1701). 32 Ibid., 76; Charles Davenant, Tom Double Returned out of the Country (1702). 28 Tindal, 29

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Despite the attacks on Toland and Burnet, the intention – certainly from the lower house – was not just to restrain single books. William Binckes (1653–1712), future dean of Lichfield, supported Atterbury’s campaign to establish independent rights for convocation.33 He was one of the proponents of censuring Burnet, attacking his book for introducing anti-episcopal, anti-Trinitarian and pro-dissenting interpretations of Anglican doctrine.34 He also emphasised that convocation should not spend its stime censuring single books, but ought to be empowered to control the ‘licentiousness of the Press in matters of Religion’.35 Indeed, the committee’s report to the bishops recognised as much. Censuring Toland signified the first step to suppressing ‘all other pernicious Books already written against the Truth of the Christian Religion, and to prevent the Publication of the like for the future’.36 Of course, if the committee did not quite say it out loud, the implication here was clear. The lower house wanted to prevent publication precisely because it would stop the unholy spread of poison. The 1701 session of convocation was so riven by partisan wrangling that the two houses could not agree on the traditional Representation of the session. Normally comprising of a report of their work and setting out the agenda for the future, the only extant copy exists in manuscript. Written by the lower house it reveals just how much antipathy there was between the two houses over the issue of free expression.37 The clergy argued that the bishops had deliberately misunderstood the questions that they were being asked. They had misapprehended ‘the nature and design’ of Atterbury’s representation and had instead sought a judicial censure and, consequently, had given ‘too much advantage to such loose and impious writers’.38 The vacuum caused by the absence of an official Representation was filled by partisan and supposedly complete narratives of the proceedings of the 1701. Although released anonymously, they were based on the observations of

33

Lambeth Palace Library, MS 934/10, 67, eye-witness account of the Lower House of convocation. 34 Tony Claydon, ‘Binckes, William (1653–1712)’, in ODNB. 35 [William Binckes], An expedient propos’d: or, the occasions of the late controversie in Convocation consider’d (1701) 20; ODNB. 36 Ibid., 74. 37 Lambeth Palace Library, MS Convocation, IX/5/14; MS 934/22, 31. 38 Ibid. In fact, the Lower House were later to question whether the legal answer was even correct, ‘the clergy of the lower house found no success from these their reiterated addresses to your lordships who had been pleased to acquaint them upon consulting counsel learned in the law concerning heretical opinions and immoral books … though they were fully satisfied that your lordships might have complied with their desires without a royal license, or might have obtained a license if requisite’, Lambeth Palace Library MS Convocation I/2/7–9 Lower House ff.47–8. Also this legal opinion was eventually utilised as the basis for a tract to attack the Lower House, Opinion and matter of fact: or, a seasonable caution to the present Conv–n (1711).

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Francis Atterbury and White Kennett.39 These two narratives competed to present a true account of the session. Atterbury’s text revealed his position on the attempt by Tenison (and Harley) to enact a secular bill to restrain the press.40 The attempt to remove anonymity through parliamentary legislation was an obvious ruse. According to Atterbury, Tenison knew it would fail and was merely disguising his rejection of press control, a control that, in any case, ought to fall to the Church, not the secular state, and, thus, would form part of a wider programme to reinvigorate the power and authority of the national church.41 Tenison was so infuriated by these accusations that he instructed Edmund Gibson (1669–1748), rector of Stisted, Essex, and future bishop of London, to reply publicly.42 Far from hiding behind legality, the bishops looked for a legal way to prosecute authors. They were so concerned by the licentiousness of the press that they had prepared a bill to restrain the press. Gibson finally thundered at Atterbury and his allies, ‘whoever, upon this or any other occasion, can suggest the want of zeal or courage in their Lordships, must have forgot their undaunted opposition to Popery’.43 The partisan tensions between the two houses continued throughout the 1702–1705 session were exacerbated by the publication of further heretical and immoral books. In late December 1704, a committee of the lower house issued a private complaint to the bishops that the sitting convocation had achieved nothing to benefit the public.44 Once again it complained about the refusal to punish Toland and now explained the effect of the upper house’s inertia. In the last two years, several more pernicious books had been published and authors had been empowered to ‘vent their impious opinions with greater assurance and licentiousness’.45 They begged the upper house to take notice of the evil caused by errant books, which were ‘published and industriously dispensed to the dishonour of God and the great scandal of the church’, and to act against the licentiousness of the press.46 Within days the upper house replied accusing the lower house of false, bitter and scandalous reflections.47 And, once again, they agreed that Toland’s book was pernicious, but they A narrative of the proceedings of the Lower House of Convocation, relating to prorogations and adjournments (1701). 40 Ibid., xv. 41 Ibid., xv. 42 Stephen Taylor, ‘Gibson, Edmund (1669–1748)’, in ODNB; Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson Bishop of London, 1669–1748: A Study in Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1926), 40–52. 43 Edmund Gibson, A Letter to a Friend in the Country, concerning the Proceedings of the Present Convocation (1701), 7. 44 Lambeth Palace Library, MS Conv. I/2/9 57, 47r, The report of the committee appointed to consider the method of hearing counsel before the lower house of Convocation. 45 Ibid. 46 Lambeth Palace Library, MS Conv. I/2/9 57, 49r, The report of the committee appointed to consider the method of hearing counsel before the lower house of Convocation. 47 Lambeth Palace Library, MS Conv. IX/5/10. 39

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maintained the lower house and convocation possessed no legal power to censure and restrain books.48 In 1705, these private disputations were made public. The lower house published their Representation with a subtitle, the ‘Dilligence of the Lower, and Remissness of the Upper-House, in suppressing Books published against the Truth of Christianity’.49 This comment was bolstered by the assertion that they had ‘Hopes, that all the Differences between the Two Houses about Forms, would more easily and sooner be compos’d’.50 But it was clear that there was an irreconcilable breach between the clergy and the bishops. The Representation, written by Atterbury, reminded the bishops that ‘the Lower House did in this convocation, in all humble Manner remind your Lordships of this daring Liberty of the Press’.51 The bishops had ignored ‘the many evil and pernicious Books, which are Publish’d and Dispers’d, to the Dishonour of God, and the great scandal of this Church’, when they should have restrained them.52 As he had done four years earlier, Edmund Gibson took to print to correct the accusations against Tenison and the bishops. Far from approving of the press the bishops had wanted to control it. As Atterbury knew, Tenison had ‘twice attempted in vain, to procure the consent of the two houses of Parliament against the licentiousness of the press’.53 Henry Sacheverell

The disputes in convocation exerted a profound influence on the lower clergy. For Henry Sacheverell, the liberties and privileges of the Church could be protected by electing faithful clergy to the lower house.54 The anxieties with the nature of the press, expressed in convocation, were also debated publicly both in print and from the pulpit by High Churchmen, and Henry Sacheverell was their most significant proponent. At the turn of the century, Sacheverell was a minor clergyman. He graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1693, obtained his MA in 1695 and took up the living of Cannock in Staffordshire in 1697. In 1701 he returned to Oxford, assuming a fellowship at his old college.55 His fame and influence were never going to come from his pastoral commitment but rather from his 48

Lambeth Palace Library, MS Conv. IX/5/10. A Representation made by the Lower House of Convocation to the Archbishops and Bishops (1705) frontispiece. 50 Ibid., 5. 51 Ibid., 5. 52 Ibid., 8; compare with Lambeth Palace Library. MS Convocation 1/2/9 Session 59/64. 53 Edmund Gibson, The Complainer Further Reproved (1704), 24–5. 54 Henry Sacheverell, The Character of a Low-Church-Man (1702), 28. 55 W.A. Speck, ‘Sacheverell, Henry (1674–1724)’, in ODNB; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 3–20. 49

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preaching. Even before he had reached Oxford, one contemporary noted his predilection for preaching seditious sermons.56 Henry Sacheverell’s first published sermon, the Political Union, was delivered on the Fast Day 10 June 1702. It has normally been dismissed as a stock statement of a certain type of High Church political creed, based on a defence of the relationship between Church and state, in which he emphasised his desire for a close union between the de jure divino authorities of the monarchy and the clerical order.57 This position was clearly an intervention in the broader politico-religious position. It was designed as an intervention in the electoral politics of 1702 and as a direct comment on the recent tension in convocation.58 Sacheverell’s first published sermon was forged in dialogue with what he considered to be the lack of care shown for the Church by successive ministries and the Williamite bishops. The epistle dedicatory in the Political Union, to George Sacheverell, a relative and veteran of the Royalist cause, described the true distinguishing traits of religious character.59 George Sacheverell stood as a shining example as to how the Anglican Church should be sustained, supporting the purity of its doctrine, the decency of its discipline and worship, and understanding that providential glory would, therefore, be delivered to English society.60 George Sacheverell’s powerful personal piety was contrasted with the false friends in the Church who distorted the pure doctrine of the Church. Henry Sacheverell’s analysis of the inadequate support for the Church at both an elite political level and amongst the bishopric was an early hint that he considered the Church to be in danger, for it would inevitably fall if it was divided.61 The lack of support had allowed atheism and infidelity to overrun the country. Should the press be restrained and the doctrine of the Church be promoted as the route to redemption for the population, there would be little need of discourses from the pulpit or the press. The destruction of doctrinal purity by the enactment of toleration and unorthodox publications had forced Sacheverell into print. Once the discipline of the Church was re-established, there would be no need for man to make an appeal to another in print to vindicate the truths of Christianity, for they would become self-evident and peace and stability would return to the nation.62 William Bisset, The Modern Fanatick (1710), 27. W.A. Speck (ed), F.F. Madan: A Critical Bibliography of Henry Sacheverell (Kansas, KN, 1978), 1; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 177; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell. 58 Connell, Secular Chains, 149; Hone, Literature and Party Politics, 149. 59 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 4–5. 60 Henry Sacheverell, The Political Union. A discourse showing the dependence of government on religion (Oxford, 1702), epistle dedicatory. 61 Ibid., epistle dedicatory. 62 Ibid., epistle dedicatory. 56

57

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Much of the subsequent publication was devoted to providing Scriptural evidence of why and how daily godly life might be rewarded. Sacheverell crafted a vision of the path to salvation, which was based on fearing the punishment of hell. Should men have no other restraint on their spirits than the rewards of this life, they would lack the awe and terror of eternal punishment and would turn away from God. It was a central duty of the Church and its clergy to provide examples of spiritual obedience and extol the consequences of impiety. The pains and terrors of daily life must be embraced because they reminded the believer of the consequences of ill-behaviour. The ‘eternal and unspeakable torment’ that awaited them could only be mitigated by true religion, which provided both a rich daily life and the promise of eternal salvation.63 Sacheverell’s desire for a close, symbiotic relationship between Church and state was merely a means to an end. It allowed people to live pious lives and submit to God for their own redemption. Banishing true religion out of government would inevitably lead to the damnation of individuals and lead the whole country to irreligion.64 Sacheverell’s love for the established church was mirrored by his hatred for Dissenters; they were ‘the confused swarm of sectarists’, gathering around the body of the Church, but he reserved his true ire for the bishops. Not only were they betraying the Church with their Latitudinarian poison, but they were also endangering the flock, by acquiescing in toleration they were failing to lead people through grace into heaven. Only by maintaining the doctrinal purity of the Church and propagating the truth through government, pulpit and press could England hope to avoid another ruinous civil war.65 The Political Union passed with little comment. John Tutchin in the Observator accused him of promoting ‘feuds, animosities and misunderstandings’.66 Such stirring of hatred against toleration would end in nothing less than the destruction of the constitution, for the ‘heats and feuds’ perpetrated by churchmen would weaken the body politic until it collapsed. Far from being engaged in serious debate or theological investigation, as Sacheverell and his allies maintained, they were merely engaged in disguising their political ambitions to control Church and state. They wanted to return the clergy to the status they enjoyed under Charles II and James II. For his part, Tutchin maintained that the campaign would fail. The Church, he suggested, was now split, and we ‘have a clergy valuable for their learning, but much more for their moderation and temper towards Protestant dissenters’.67 Tutchin’s position accords with the interpretation of historians. High Churchmen are best described as a faction bent on re-establishing the power of the Church for political gain, opposed by a bishops’ bench 63

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 28–9. 65 Ibid., 48–62. 66 The Observator, 20 May 1702. 67 The Observator, 20 May 1702. 64

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composed of moderate and peaceable divines, dedicated to the Whig cause.68 Yet Tutchin’s own intervention was more complex. He recognised that the problems raised by Sacheverell were not just jurisdictional. High Churchmen were concerned with managing religious differences and the consequences caused by schism. Despite his own support for what he termed moderate churchmen, Tutchin recognised that English religion was fragmented between ‘a churchman, a Presbyterian, a Baptist, a Quaker … and they differ in their sentiments about religion’.69 Differences between all of these sects was inevitable because of their doctrinal practices. Scripture, he acknowledged, was the most certain rule to go by in religious controversies, and ‘one man is as much a judge as another of the meaning and intent of the Scriptures, and may apply it to his own opinion as he pleases’.70 For Sacheverell and other High Churchmen, religion, and thus the fate of souls, could only be secured from vice, schism and heresy if the clergy controlled the interpretation of disputatious scriptural passages. Leaving biblical interpretation open, as John Toland had maintained, would, in the words of Sacheverell, leave the Church and the nation dependent on ‘the will and humour of the senseless and giddy multitude’.71 Sacheverell’s sermon pointed to another vital change. Thus far, all churchmen had agreed that the press was a problem, particularly when it allowed unorthodox thinking and impiety to spread. Yet, by the time Anne had ascended the throne, High Churchmen began to modify their position. As seen by the attack on Burnet in convocation, Sacheverell was beginning to suggest that all doctrinal laxity was a threat to the stability of the country and the Church. Thus, the problem posed by errant expression could be applied to Dissenters as much as to deists, to laxity within the Church as much as to Socinianism. In turn, Tutchin expressed his own concern at the emergence of a new party of which Sacheverell was merely the first example, they are: industrious in spreading their notions, tending to strife and discord, in all pubic coffee houses in and about the cities of London and Westminster; and therefore these reflections were thought necessary. That where ever they come, so they may find an answer to their mischievous talk.72

Representation and Misrepresentation, 146–8. Observator, 20 May 1702. 70 The Observator, 20 May 1702. 71 Henry Sacheverell, The character of a low-church man (1702), 11. 72 The Observator, 20 May 1702. 68 Knights, 69 The

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Henry Sacheverell, Richard West and John Dennis

The initial themes developed by Sacheverell, emphasising the connections between a godly daily life and salvation, bound together by warnings of damnation, and, most crucially, the relationship between the doctrinal purity of the Church and political stability dominated the rest of his life: they occupied his sermons, the occasional anonymous pamphlet and his trial in 1710. He placed different emphasis on these themes according to context: the imminence of general elections, the sitting of convocation and the sympathies or not of Anne’s various ministries. Nor were these themes directly explained by reference to the freedom of the press or proposing direct censorship, but they were always made with reference to the styles and nature of communicative practices of the early eighteenth century. Thus, Sacheverell’s sense that the Church must maintain and propagate pure doctrine was often secreted in other issues and it was also forged in his own personal experience of the cut and thrust of public debate. Sacheverell’s next sermon was the result of a direct attack in print on his future patron Sir John Pakington. Pakington (1671–1727) was Tory MP for Worcestershire and had been a strong supporter of the ‘country’ reform programme in the 1690s.73 Both the second election in 1701 and the election in 1702 were marked by a virulent public dispute with bishops William Lloyd of Worcester and William Talbot of Oxford. Lloyd used his episcopal visitation to Pakington’s constituency to campaign against him and accuse the MP of debauchery and Jacobitism. Both Pakington and Sacheverell assumed an anonymous pamphlet that questioned Pakington’s religious commitment, the True Character of a Church Man, was written by Lloyd; in fact, it was written by the little-known Whig cleric Richard West.74 Far from just attacking Pakington, West’s pamphlets and sermons offered a solution to the tumults coursing through the Church and into wider society. Much like High Churchmen, he started by acknowledging the Church of England was the best ‘constituted church in the whole world, and its doctrines the most pure and primitive’.75 That initial purity was constantly reinforced by the pious care and zeal of previous bishops, whilst its current leaders continued to reflect and amplify the piety of primitive church and the Protestant ideals of the Reformation. Since the Glorious Revolution, West maintained, the Church’s parishioners, clergy and bishops, through 73 Stuart

Handley, ‘Pakington, Sir John, fourth baronet (1671–1727)’, in ODNB; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 18–19. 74 Richard West, A Sermon Preached at the Anniversary Meeting of the Sons of Clergymen, St Paul’s Cathedral (1700); Hone, Literature and Party Politics, 145; Mark Goldie, ‘Locke, Proast and Religious Toleration’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Church of England c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 171; Kenyon, Revolution Principles, 133. 75 Richard West, The True Character of a Church-Man (1702), 14.

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the pious campaigns of the 1690s and godly preaching, had further rendered the gospel’s spirit peacefully and would be rewarded by a strengthened Church and personal redemption.76 For West, the foundation and mission of the Church was enhanced by the personal behaviour of clerics who lived virtuous lives and practised personal piety. In doing so, they not only guaranteed their personal salvation, but set an example of goodness, charity and virtue that would inspire a peaceable community. West applied these historical insights and propositions to the early eighteenth century, with specific reference to the establishment of tolerated dissent. Precisely because England was now a religiously plural nation, it was essential to maintain love and tenderness, so that truth might be achieved. A sour or ill-natured argument would never convert an adversary.77 Truth was bold and could withstand gentle enquiry, whereas counterfeit ideas were swelled with pride and ostentation. The best of churches, as the Church of England was, must suffer great prejudices, but it must continue to preach the truth, and maintain purity and civility in the face of opponents’ attacks. In West’s analysis, God reserved his ire not for Dissenters, but for those in the Church who refused to live piously and publicly advance the redemptive value of virtue. There may be, he commented, ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ who only pretended zeal for God. Such people, who ought to be teachers and guardians of the Church, should be punished by their leaders, otherwise their abhorrent examples would be imitated by other men.78 West’s description of how the Church might defend itself and settle disputes was borne out in the revolution settlement. He accepted the legality of toleration but was firmly committed to comprehension (or reincorporation). It rejected, therefore, Pakington’s and Sacheverell’s commitment to a political union between Church and state, built on a dominant clerical order. His distaste for certain churchmen was confirmed by Francis Atterbury’s behaviour in convocation. As West was writing, the second edition of Atterbury’s Rights, Powers, and Privileges of an English Convocation was published. First published in 1700, Atterbury’s work responded to Wake’s Authority of Christian Princes. It excoriated Wake as a literary hack, writing to the order of the archbishop, and exhorted the clergy to defend the Church against arbitrary and absolutist notions.79 West rebutted Atterbury’s analysis that there was any convincing historical evidence for an independent clerical synod. But his main point was that Atterbury exemplified how public debate was being distorted for ideological ends. As at least one author had already pointed out, convocation was being 76

Eamon Duffy, ‘Primitive Christianity Revived: Religious Renewal in England’, in Studies in Church History, 14 (1977), 287–300. 77 West, The True Character, 15. 78 Ibid., 8–9. 79 Francis Atterbury, The Rights, Powers, and Privileges of an English Convocation, Stated and Vindicated (1701); Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 52–4.

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deliberately used by High Churchmen not to settle disputes, but to aggravate party political difference for public consumption. Instead of looking for common ground, or engaging in civil debate, authors traduced opponents as traitors and rebels, enemies of the Church and state.80 West suggested that the debates in convocation were ungodly, and were distorting how disputation should take place. The second edition of Atterbury’s book was full of factual errors. He had had the chance to correct his mistakes and had chosen not to do so. Thus, whilst it was a Christian duty to debate and engage in dispute in a charitable and virtuous way, it was also a Christian duty to rectify mistakes.81 Atterbury’s failure to correct his errors meant he refused to honour the truth. A position exacerbated even further by the style of his work: he was ‘abusing and misrepresenting his adversary … stating his arguments unfairly, and answering what he never said’.82 The Character of a Low-Church-man, Henry Sacheverell’s response to West, has been characterised by historians in two ways. The first is as an all-out assault on toleration. Sacheverell’s sermon questioned how toleration had undermined the Church, but also ‘flayed the dissenters’ for their personal impiety. His sermon in 1702, then, was merely a precursor to the Perils of False Brethren (1709), which caused his impeachment.83 The second is as the sermon that caused Defoe to be imprisoned. Defoe’s satire of Sacheverell, in which he advocated hanging Dissenting preachers, was taken seriously by many readers and resulted in a successful prosecution for seditious libel.84 From the start Sacheverell’s attack on Dissenters and his defence of the Church confronted the manner in which public debate was being conducted. The policies of recent ministries, pursued by the bishops, were not just inimical to inculcating piety in parishioners and the country, but they were only successful because bishops and MPs had actively corrupted and bribed the electorate with propaganda. The electorate were misguided in supporting Whig MPs, who would never defend the Church, especially as they had maligned the true defenders of the Church with lies and slanders as ‘sour, discontented and malignant Jacobites’.85 Again, the nature and style of debate was crucial to the argument. Sacheverell outlined the techniques of his opponents: they were weighed down by spiritual pride, White Kennett, Ecclesiastical synods and Parliamentary convocations in the Church of England historically stated (1710), 106. 81 Richard West, The Principles of Mr Atterbury’s Book (1701), preface. 82 Ibid., preface. 83 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 17–19. 84 Daniel Defoe, The Shortest-way with the Dissenters (1702); Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 61–4; M.E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford, 2001), 172–6; M.E. Novak, ‘Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Hoax, Parody, Fiction, Irony, and Satire’, Modern Language Quarterly, 27 (1966), 402–17. 85 Henry Sacheverell, The Character of a Low-church-man (1702), 1–2; Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 188; Bennett, White Kennett, 103. 80

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casting villainous names upon others under the pretence of godliness and piety. But their behaviour also revealed their identity. Their unmannerly and reproachful style marked Sacheverell’s opponents as enthusiasts; they were blasphemers and ridiculers of Scripture, and likely Republicans too.86 In Sacheverell’s view, seventeenth-century Dissenters had not remained static, but had morphed into ‘deists, Socinians, Quakers, Anabaptists, or independent Turks, or Jews’, committed to promoting any doctrine, and suggesting any religion would provide redemption. Toleration was a betrayal and threatened any claim that England was godly when any religious doctrine could be maintained; atheism and infidelity ran free and the ‘ridiculing of religion, and the scriptures, and blaspheming of God’ were written with impunity.87 The Character of a Low Churchman presented an inextricable link between Low Churchmen and the movements for moral reform. In conjunction they had systematically undermined the Church and its mission. Their opposition to various vices – adultery, blasphemy, drunkenness – was merely a varnish, an outward simplicity; in fact, Low Churchmen and Dissenters were promoting policies that elevated the liberty of the subject and encouraged sinning.88 The remainder of Sacheverell’s sermon made clear just how misguided the campaigns against vice had been. To prove a love for the people, and to prove they were not unorthodox, Low Churchmen and the movements for reform should control the real source of depravity, and concentrate on the mischievous effects of the unlimited license of the press, which had the capacity to ‘corrupt and destroy both the religion and morality of the nation’, for the country was now swarming with atheistical pamphlets.89 Sacheverell, of course, was now drawing on and adding to two constant problems. The inability of any ministry to replace licensing exercised many divines across the religious spectrum. But, some five years after its initial publication, it was the failure to control Christianity not Mysterious that stood as a paradigm of the failure to deal with heterodox books and authors. For many, Toland had overturned all the tenets of Christianity, his books had spread damnable tenets and pernicious principles and it continued to pass with impunity and freedom.90 This aspect of Sacheverell’s comments contributed to the broader process through which churchmen sought to connect dissent to the press. Dissenters were increasingly depicted as enthusiasts inextricably linked with deism, Socinianism, heresy and atheism, they were ‘patrons of rebellion, regicide, republicanism and paganism, with all their scurrilous and reproachful writings’.91 The Character of a Low-church-man, 4. 5. 11; ; Philip Stubs, Of religious charity, and religious loyalty (1704), 11. 10. 9. 9–10; Philip Stubs, Of religious charity, and religious loyalty (1704), 11.

86 Sacheverell, 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

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John Dennis (1658–1714) was concerned by the implications of Sacheverell’s sermons. He was connected to the leading literary figures of the 1690s – Dryden, Whycherley and Congreve – and cultivated friendships amongst politicians of Whiggish sympathies.92 Whilst it is true that Dennis attacked the behaviour and sacerdotal claims of the clergy as inimical to good government, and in doing so repudiated Sacheverell’s claim that only the Church could secure religion from vice, immorality, schism and heresy, he also confronted what he termed the ‘folly of deism’.93 By concentrating his fire on deism, a religion that could not possibly be true because it was based purely on reason, Dennis disassociated Latitudinarians, Socinians and deism from the Church. Dennis had recognised that the campaign in convocation and Sacheverell’s sermons were designed to yoke together Latitudinarian apologetic with more heterodox elements of religious thinking, and restrict them from access to the press. As Philip Connell has noted, Dennis’s defence of the Church and dissent was not just political, attempting to disassociate John Toland, for example, from any connection to Church of England bishops. Dennis’s defence of the Church was theological. In his thinking, the ruins of the fall were not repaired by divine grace, instead salvation might be delivered by moderate divinity and human discussion in the press.94 From a High Church perspective, not only was Dennis’s soteriology ill-developed, he appeared to be defending the right to debate ideas freely as a route to salvation. For Sacheverell, Dennis was one voice in a wider campaign to marginalise the salvic potential of the supernatural, and simultaneously promoting the laicisation of public debate. In his 1704 sermon, the Nature and Mischief of Prejudice and Partiality Stated, Sacheverell confronted these issues.95 He devoted much of his text to outlining how true religious knowledge might be achieved. His exalted vision of the Bible, the certainty and authority of divine revelation coupled with reason and natural methods of knowledge, guaranteed truth and salvation.96 Men, he noted, were always tempted by forms of persuasion outside of the Church. Drifting away from their spiritual governors, they would surrender themselves to passion and prejudice, endangering their souls, for evil spirits animated delusions

92

Jonathan Pritchard, ‘Dennis, John (1654–1734)’, in ODNB; this paragraph is indebted to the analysis in Connell, Secular Chains, 145–51; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 177–9; H.G. Paul, John Dennis: His Life and Criticism (New York, NY, 1911); J. Wood Krutch, Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (New York, NY, 1949). 93 John Dennis, The Danger of Priestcraft to Religion and Government (1702), 16–17; John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701). 94 Connell, Secular Chains, 151. 95 Henry Sacheverell, The Nature and Mischief of Prejudice and Partiality Stated in a sermon (1704), the epistle dedicatory; Bod. MS Rawl. 37 f.12, Thomas Hearne to Thomas Smith, 15 March 1704. 96 Ibid., 14.

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and would break through the restrain of reflection, carrying men ‘like the swine in the gospel, headlong into perdition’.97 Sacheverell’s sermon described England as an immoral country. By 1704 it was impossible to breathe untainted air; infection flooded England. The country was dominated by subtle and designing men, misrepresenting the truth of religion, employing harangues to spread lewdness and profanity.98 Again, this collapsed into an attack on the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which were apostles of darkness and emissaries of the devil. The previous association between dissent and unorthodox thinking, deism and atheism, was reinforced, but now embellished with more detail of the damage caused by corrupt ideas. Loose and cursed tenets corrupted and perverted judgement and sowed the seeds of damnation.99 The licentious and intolerable heresies spreading throughout the country, the poisonous and heterodox opinions, particularly when read by unwary minds, would bring down dreadful vengeance on individuals, communities and ultimately the country. Nor was Sacheverell alone in his analysis. Sacheverell laid out a vision of universal concern for the salvation of individuals, the providence of the country, contrasted with the damnable ideas of deists, Socinians and atheists, who were inspired by the father of all falsehood, Satan. They were nonsensical and flagitious, drawing men into sin. In contrast to two years earlier, however, his position on the dangers caused by the press firmly included all forms of dissent. The country was now subject to multitudes of opinions, ‘classes, sects, divisions and sub-divisions of pretended Christians and churches’.100 Thus, Jews, papists and Socinians could be bracketed with Lutherans and Calvinists. All of them spread prejudice; if their mouths were not stopped they would endanger England, for: the great day of final retribution is drawing near; and men’s sins and prejudice are ripe for divine judgment and call down vengeance upon that wicked earth, in which scarce any true faith shall be found.101

Sacheverell’s preaching can be placed in a context of theological discussion of the dangers posed by errant thinking and expression in the press, but that is not how his respondents saw him. Instead, they accused him of being an impolite preacher, employing the pulpit to preach politics inappropriately and attack toleration. He was railing from the pulpit, exuberantly using his wit and superfluities of invention to traduce dissent and return the country to 1641.102 Equally, he was accused of overestimating the threat to 97

Ibid., 15.

Nature and Mischief of Prejudice, 25. Ibid., 25–6. 100 Ibid., 49. 101 Ibid., 52. 102 A letter to Mr Sacheverell, Occasioned by his Assize Sermon: Preached at St Mary’s in Oxford (1704). 98 Sacheverell, 99

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the state from Dissenters, who were content in their toleration, and had no desire to dominate the monarch’s thinking, to secure further concessions as Sacheverell had suggested.103 Above all, his opponents thought his position was intemperate, ignoring the advantages of moderation and needlessly advancing division.104 Not only was he ignoring the edifying effects of Dissenting preaching, he was wilfully corrupting the lessons learned from the Reformation.105 By insisting that the right to interpret Scripture lay only in the Church and with clerics, he was cutting away Dissenters from the Church and aping papist practices.106 Not only did he promote the authority of the Church, he sought to collapse together Whig churchmen, deists, Latitudinarians, Socinians and Dissenters: they all endangered the souls of individuals, and it was the diversity of judgements that caused vices to emerge, ‘according to the different capacity, or use of reason, the sundry tempers, inclinations, interests and designs of parties, that form and espouse such and such jarring sentiments’, and would damn the country.107 Despite Sacheverell’s reputation as a political preacher, railing from the pulpit against Dissenters, a reputation derived from his opponents, his underlying positions remained remarkably consistent throughout his life: how best might religious truth be ascertained so that every individual might be saved and the country continue to enjoy God’s divine blessing?108 Sacheverell’s message was always underpinned by his soteriological thinking. In 1706, he described how all people were required to investigate and understand the true nature and just bounds of conscience. Taking Acts 23, in which Paul lived in a good conscience before God, Sacheverell outlined how Paul’s life was based on practising divine law.109 Applying this lesson to the early eighteenth century, Sacheverell maintained that the fundamentals of Christian religion were clear in Scripture. Guided by Revelation, the soul made judgements according to what it might do well or badly, and it directed each person to the legality or efficacy of practice. It was these two ideas in combination, accepting the truth of Revelation and acting through it on good conscience, by which each person would be judged by God. Sacheverell also separated out what constituted a good conscience: a clear, upright and well-instructed conscience; a probable conscience; a doubtful or scrupulous conscience; an erroneous conscience. 103 Mr

Sacheverell’s Assize-sermon, Preached at St Mary in Oxford (1704); An Antidote Against Rebellion: or, the Principles of the Modern Politician Examined and Compared (1704). 104 Moderation Still a Virtue: in Answer to Several Bitter Pamphlets (1704); Bod. MS Rawl. 4 f.462, Abraham Kent to Thomas Hearne, 9 Feb. 1706. 105 Ibid., 38. 106 Ibid., 36–8. 107 Sacheverell, Nature, Obligation, and Measures of Conscience, 4. 108 Ibid., 4; see also An Appeal from the city to the country, for the preservation of her majesty’s person (1710). 109 Sacheverell, Nature, Obligation, and Measures of Conscience, 7.

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The first two were easily dealt with. They indicated issues of salvation that were clear, with exact distinctions, and were clearly taught from revelation and reason.110 The third and fourth offered each person more difficult epistemological challenges. Faced with equal laws, if the conscience was in a state of neutrality, the mind must choose not to offend against any positive and plain prohibition of law; to do so was to be guilty of sin. Lastly, if the mind is not rightly instructed or informed, and framed a wrong judgement from false or confused apprehension, then such an action was clearly sinful and would bring irretrievable guilt upon the actor. The point here was to reinforce how the Church and its adherents had a specific celestial function. Whilst all people had to consider their soul, at least in part by living a godly daily life, they must also have faith and consider the connection between their thoughts and actions. In this reading, virtue alone would not save a soul: ‘no crime may pass unretracted, no slip unobserved … no presumptuous sin, unsubdued’. Where people erred, when they slipped into sin, it was incumbent on the community and pastors to punish, restrain and control the sin, so that the sinner may be led back to redemption.111 The simplicity of Sacheverell’s warnings served one more purpose. The threat to the Church and the stability of the body politic continued to come from Dissenters, but now they were designated as a malevolent group of sects, trying to complicate God’s message. Sacheverell posited a conspiracy of self-exalting predestinarians, using mystical snares, Spinozist obstacles and spiritual gins to catch the unwary. They were spiritual craftsmen complicating God’s word, aiming to draw men into temptation.112 Thus, dangerous ideas, particularly when spread by the press, were part of the wider conspiracy. Dissenters and their supporters in the Church and government were political atheists hiding behind liberty of conscience, they were for a ‘latitude, both of thought, and action, a licentious immunity from all legal restraint’.113 Hoadly and Atterbury

Sacheverell did not publish another sermon until the Communication of Sin in October 1709. Nevertheless, his sermons in the early eighteenth century raise a number of connected points. They illustrate the thinking of High Churchmanship, which had first emerged in the late seventeenth century, and been further developed in the crucible of convocation debates.114 The arguments of Sacheverell also point towards what the High Church 110 Ibid.,

13–14. 42–7. 112 Ibid., 10; Charles Leslie, The new association, Part II (1705), 18–19. 113 Sacheverell, Nature, Obligation, and Measures of Conscience, 19. 114 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 54–9. 111 Ibid.,

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programme entailed; based on a visceral distaste for laxity of opinion, perhaps punished by church courts, alongside the reinvigoration of the rights and revenues of the clergy secured.115 But the programme was not jurisdictional for its own sake. Rather, it rested on the soteriological consequences of missing the truth. Increasingly, both Sacheverell and Atterbury thought they were being overrun by a coordinated set of churchmen promoting the position that sincere belief would be rewarded in heaven. Gilbert Burnet, for example, had argued in 1694 that God would forgive those in error, but by 1706 High Churchmen increasingly associated the doctrine of sincerity with moral laxity and the excesses of the press.116 The next section of this chapter discusses these issues further with reference to a public dispute between Francis Atterbury and Benjamin Hoadly (1676–1761). But first, this chapter discusses a tract that further highlights just how much concern there was at the damage caused by the unrestrained press. Although sometimes attributed to Charles Leslie, the Axe Laid to Christianity is sometimes attributed to Francis Atterbury.117 Framed as a discussion between two friends, the tract discussed the character of the constitution, a good Christian, and a good Englishman.118 The constitution, both men agreed, rested on moderation and ecclesiastical and civil liberty. But here the agreement ended. In recent years, the good Christian argued, liberty had been indulged too far, for such ‘a boundless license, as shall undermine the foundation of religion and government’ had been established.119 This excess liberty took the form of writing and publishing. The government had failed to quell the questioning of the most unquestionable truths and had allowed Christianity to be ridiculed; blasphemies had been published and no one had been punished for them. To prove his point, the author transcribed sections of the most offensive texts. What followed, then, was not just an account of offensive books, but a stinging criticism of the Whigs and Low Churchmen and how they had refused to restrain the press to the detriment of the nation, and the Church. In turn, Atterbury attacked Charles Blount, William Stephens, John Toland, John Asgill and Edmund Hickeringill. Nor was this list complete. The good Christian noted he had many more examples but had tired of his task. The value of this task for Atterbury was that it illustrated the problems faced by the country. Previously England had more than an ordinary regard for religion. But since the revolution, ecclesiastical policies had caused the country to suffer under an unprecedented amount of ‘levity, lewdness and 115 Ibid.,

92–3; BL Add. MS, 29/194 f.267, Francis Atterbury to Robert Harley, 20 Sept. 1707. 116 Gilbert Burnet, Four Discourses Delivered to the Clergy of the Dioceses of Sarum (1694), 15. 117 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 317. 118 Francis Atterbury, The Axe Laid to the Root of Christianity (1706), 1. 119 Ibid., 1.

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irreligion’.120 As Sacheverell had previously argued, it was now almost impossible not to breathe in the poison of the press. Indeed, those with religion were now too ashamed to raise their head against atheism and blasphemy, for the professors of heterodoxy now walked open and barefaced; they had ‘taken possession of the press’. If errant ideas were not controlled soon, Atterbury argued, ‘we shall soon sink under the weight of impiety; for it is not enough to blast all our wisest and best-laid designs, and to render all our successes abortive’.121 The good Christian was at pains to explain he was not discussing the need to prosecute single books but the whole of the press. Not only were there too many authors traducing the power of the clergy; many people with substantial positions in Church and state were convinced that the press posed no danger because the truth was irrelevant to salvation. Instead, they maintained, simple sincerity of belief was all that God required for entry into heaven. This last point found further explication in a contemporaneous dispute between Atterbury and Benjamin Hoadly. From the start of his publishing career in the early 1690s, Francis Atterbury had developed a close relationship with the bookseller Thomas Bennet.122 His first sermons were entrusted to him and, although A Letter to a Convocation Man was published anonymously and had no bookseller’s mark, Bennet supported Atterbury enthusiastically in the new century, publishing almost all of his material concerned with convocation.123 By the time Bennet died on 26 August 1706, he was a trusted bookseller of other High Churchmen and considerably wealthy.124 When Atterbury preached his funeral sermon, he made it clear that there was an indivisible relationship between Bennet’s trade and his personal piety.125 Bennet had lived an exemplary life in which he ‘highly valued, and heartily loved that Church’. His devotion was reflected not just by being a constant frequenter of worship. As he neared the end of his

120 Ibid.,

2. 2. 122 Francis Atterbury, The power of charity to cover sin (1694). 123 See for example, Francis Atterbury, The rights, powers and privileges, of an English convocation, stated and vindicated (1700); A letter to clergyman in the country, concerning the choice of members and the execution of the Parliament-writ, for the ensuing Convocation (1701); The power of the lower house of Convocation to adjourn itself, vindicated from the misrepresentations of a late paper (1701); The case of the schedule stated (1702). 124 James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (New Haven, CT, 2007), 100; Norma Hodgson and Cyprian Blagden (eds), The Notebook of Thomas Bennett and Henry Clements (1686–1719) (1953/56); Bod. MS Smith 53 f.193, Humfrey Smith to Thomas Smith, 27 Nov. 1701; Plomer, A dictionary of the printers and booksellers, 29. 125 Raven, The Business of Books, 363–4; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL, 1998), 141–3. 121 Ibid.,

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life, Bennet was a ‘never-failing Monthly Communicant’.126 Atterbury made clear that God’s providence worked through Bennet; his publishing was serviceable to religion, and ‘had so remarkably blessed him’.127 If Atterbury had left the sermon there, as a standard discussion of Bennet’s life and the book trade, then it would have passed with little further comment. But Atterbury went on to expand and sharpen his argument. The body of the sermon was an exegesis of 1Cor. 15:19, ‘if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable’. Atterbury struck a serious and contemporary tone. His text from St Paul emphasised the suffering of the Church, both the persecution of the clergy and their lack of political support. At the same time, he advised his flock how to conduct their lives. Without heaven and the concern of the afterlife, Atterbury suggested, men would suffer more than beasts. They must not indulge in corporal and sensual pleasure. Instead, to enjoy salvation, each man must embrace and manage ‘anxious and tormenting thoughts’, which would perpetually haunt his life on earth.128 Atterbury’s commentary was riddled with denunciations of the avarice and immorality of modern life. He expressed alarm at man’s loss of the sense of the imminence of damnation from their minds. Whilst fear and tormented thoughts were difficult, they were a warning essential to maintaining a godly life and achieving salvation. True happiness in life could only be found in piety and moderation; time must be left for reflection; humility and meekness should be practised as a true reflection of piety. This moral exhortation was complemented by an attack on the modern age, as one that was ‘loose and licentious’ in practices, thoughts and free expression. This was a sincere and zealous reaffirmation of the position that fear of damnation and love for redemption were the essential tenets for the Church to instruct its flock. In the face of a licentious, vice-ridden country, every man must understand that their difficult thoughts were warnings, designed to exhort them to piety, fulfilled by taking sacraments and promoting the glory of the Church. In turn, the clergy exhorted their flock, leading them to truth and disciplining expression of errant doctrine. Through divine inspiration, the clergy possessed the power to restrain and control man’s corporeal life. When coupled with Atterbury’s commitment to the apostolic nature of the Church and sacerdotal vision of the priesthood it was clear that Paul’s text was essential to an everlasting life: man was by nature fallible and could not be left alone to sin. The clergy must control access to ideas; in short, they must be allowed to mediate knowledge and to discipline errant doctrine.129 Atterbury, A sermon preached in the cathedral church of St Paul; at the funeral of Mr Tho. Bennet (1706), 14. 127 Ibid., 16. 128 Ibid., 4. 129 Ibid., 4. 126 Francis

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In the seventeenth century, 1.Cor. 15:19 had been an extremely popular sermon text. For obvious reasons it was often employed at funerals and was occasionally used to explain sanctification.130 Those previous discussions were given new meaning by the conditions of the early eighteenth century. For High Churchmen the establishment of toleration and, to them, at least, the seemingly unchecked conditions of the press, ensured that discussions of sin and the piety of daily life took on a political urgency not seen before. Two years before Atterbury’s sermon, Luke Milbourne (1649–1720) had preached a sermon in which he too explicated Cor. 15:19.131 Milbourne, a firm supporter of Sacheverell, had already outraged the Whigs by condemning them to damnation along with all ‘our Knoxes, Buchanans, Miltons, Baxters, Sidneys, Lockes, and the like Agents of Darkness’.132 In 1704, as Atterbury was to do in 1706, Milbourne insisted that God required doctrinal purity, and it was the apprehension of punishment at the end of life that maintained that purity.133 The Church was required to emphasise the love of God, and the discipline of the Church to confront the profane swearer, the loose blasphemer and the perjured wretch.134 Not to face down England’s blasphemous modern scribblers would surely return the return the country to 1641.135 Milbourne’s sermon passed by largely unnoticed, but Atterbury’s sermon reawakened a dispute with Benjamin Hoadly, which had started some years before.136 So offended was Atterbury by a sermon in which the Whig cleric had attacked passive resistance, he had ensured the Lower House of convocation had voted it a scandal and a grave dishonour to the Church.137 Rector at St Peter le Poer, Hoadly was one of the most effective proponents of the revolution settlement and toleration for Dissenters.138 Perhaps nursing Pierce, Death considered as a door to the life of glory penned for the comfort of serious mourners (1690); Abednego Seller, A funeral gift: or, a preparation for death: and consolations against immoderate grief, for the loss of friends (1690); Humphry Smith, Two funeral sermons preached at St Saviour’s Church in Dartmouth (1690); Samuel Slater, A funeral-sermon upon occasion of the death of Mrs Lobb (1691); Walter Marshall, The gospel-mystery of sanctification opened in sundry practical directions suited especially to the case of those who labour under the guilt and power of indwelling sin (1692). 131 Luke Milbourne, The hope of a future life, the sole foundation of a Christian’s happiness (1704). 132 Luke Milbourne, A Sermon Preached at the Parish Church of St Ethelburga (1708), 16; Kenyon, Revolution Principles, 76–7; Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Milbourne, Luke (1649–1720’, in ODNB. 133 Ibid., 5. 134 Ibid., 21. 135 Ibid., 25. 136 Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 105. 137 Ibid., 106; Benjamin Hoadly, The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Considered (1706), 5–8. 138 Stephen Taylor, ‘Hoadly, Benjamin (1676–1761)’, in ODNB; William Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate: Benjamin Hoadly, 1676–1761 (Cambridge, 2004). 130 Thomas

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personal resentment, Hoadly excoriated Atterbury. He had falsely misrepresented St Paul, rendering Atterbury’s whole sermon false and pernicious. According to Hoadly, St Paul was in fact establishing the reality of the resurrection of Christ to the weak persons of Corinth. Only within this historical context could St Paul’s exhortation be truly understood. The saint was establishing the connection between the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of men. For Hoadly one obvious conclusion could be drawn: man could enjoy resurrection by faith alone, ‘The Result of the whole is this: The Apostle speaks of Christians professing Faith in Christ: You speak of Persons practising the Moral Precepts of Religion.’139 This was not a minor dispute concerned with Scriptural interpretation. Both men were laying out a wholly different approach to their own church. Hoadly was contending that sincerity alone was the only requirement to achieve salvation. Indeed, this view could be interpreted as suggesting that the Church was not necessary for salvation but could be achieved outside in a conceptual invisible church. For Hoadly, virtue and sincerity alone ensured redemption for it was a true imitation of Jesus Christ; heaven and hell being more detached concepts from daily life. In Atterbury’s view, allowing men to base their faith on virtue alone as a guarantee of redemption was tantamount to allowing men of little faith to live an ill-disciplined and blasphemous life, guaranteeing damnation and infecting wider society. The dispute between Atterbury and Hoadly rumbled on for two more years, before being brought to a conclusion in late spring 1708. The exchange appears to have settled little. They continued to joust in public on fundamental theological and ecclesiological issues. If nothing else, however, the dispute revealed a series of problems that were now firmly embedded in English religious and political society. There was a fundamental division at the heart of the post-revolution English Church centred on how discipline should be applied in order to guarantee salvation. That division was always exposed and debated further when the licentious nature of the press and the problems caused by forms of freedom of expression were considered. The Communication of Sin

On 30 January 1709, a little-known High Churchman, Nathanael Whaley, mounted the pulpit in St Mary’s Church Oxford to preach a sermon commemorating the execution of Charles I.140 The sermon was a defence of the High Church bishop of Exeter, Offspring Blackall, who had been recently affronted by Hoadly, rather than a lamentation of the late Hoadly, A Letter to the Reverend Dr Francis Atterbury (1706), 19; Benjamin Hoadly, A Second Letter to the Reverend Dr Francis Atterbury (1708). For Hoadly and sincerity see, Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 143, 181–3, 287. 140 Nathanael Whaley, The gradation of sin both in principles and practices (1709). 139 Benjamin

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king’s execution.141 Whaley attacked Hoadly as nothing more than a mob scribbler, questioning Hoadly’s exegetical skills and dismissing him as a patron of resistance.142 But Whaley’s sermon was as much a discussion of the fallen nature of man as it was political.143 This much is certainly suggested by his early comments on the correct understanding of good and evil. A villainous man, as well as a perfect man, he noted, was the work of some time. All men made regular progress through their lives, both confronting evil and occasionally committing acts of villainy. This explicit rejection of predestination, instead moving the fear of sin to the front of all men’s lives, served to mark out opponents as irreligious, but it also set out how the relationship between individuals, community, state and Church was to be set and negotiated. The daily striving for a godly life, confronting vice and licentiousness and promoting virtuous practises, had to be inspired by the clergy, it required biblical instruction, personal piety and state support, channelled through the Church. Like Sacheverell, Atterbury and Milbourne, Whaley warned his audience that there was a direct relationship between detestable opinions, impious practices and eternal punishment. He acknowledged it was difficult to truly ascertain whether men became debauched in their lives and manners first and consequently slipped into intellectual error, defending their impious behaviour with false reasoning; or, was it true that false judgement allowed men to fall into impieties and great absurdities in opinion, before swallowing damnable doctrines and tenets? Either way, false opinions crept throughout society, poisoning minds and creating religious corruption and political instability.144 While the symbiotic relationship between false opinions and an impious nation was crucial to Whaley’s outlook, lurking behind it was a further point that underpinned many churchmen’s attitude to the press. Indeed, Whaley put the point baldly: ‘one sin, or one wicked opinion is naturally the cause of another. One sin, naturally draws another after it.’145 Or, put in distinctly contemporary terms, reading and publishing errant

Whaley, Discourses on several subjects (1698); Andrew Starkie, ‘Blackall, Ofspring (bap.1655, 1716)’, in ODNB; Offspring Blackall, The divine institution of magistracy (1709); Benjamin Hoadly, Some considerations humbly offered to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Exeter (1709); Andrew Starkie, The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721 (Woodbridge, 2007), 50; Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 80–98; Jennifer Farooq, Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London (Woodbridge, 2013), 124–30; Benjamin Hoadly, Sermon at Oxford Assizes (1708); Benjamin Hoadly, A sermon preached at the Church of St peter Poor, on May 29 1709 (1709); Bod. MS Rawl. 38 f.264, Thomas Hearne to Thomas Smith, 25 Feb. 1710. 142 Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 94–5; Luke Milbourne, The measures of resistance to the higher powers (1710); Whaley, The gradation of sin. 143 See also Nathanael Whaley, A preparatory discourse of death: in two parts (1708), 15. 144 Whaley, The Gradation of Sin, 4. 145 Ibid., 4. 141 Nathanael

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books was not just one sin, it might well spread further impiety, endangering the soul of both the writer and the consumer of books. This exposition on sin was to be given graphic instantiation by Sacheverell’s first sermon in 1709, the Communication of Sin. As we saw in the Introduction of this book, this was the first of two sermons delivered in 1709 for which he was prosecuted. Delivered in Derby on 15 August 1709 but not published until 27 October, the sermon is barely mentioned in the scholarship. It is dismissed by the foremost historian of his trial as a ‘harangue’ and a mundane rehashing of previous sermons.146 There is good reason for the importance historians have ascribed to Sacheverell’s second sermon, the Perils of False Brethren. The articles of indictment at the subsequent trial mainly referred to the second sermon, primarily because the Whigs considered Sacheverell to have impugned the reputation of the revolution, if not to have suggested it involved resistance, and was therefore illegal.147 The contention in this section, however, is that Sacheverell’s first sermon deserves much more attention. It was the ultimate expression of High Church discontent at the licentiousness of the press. It also helps to illustrate the highpoint of the campaign, which had been brewing since the 1690s, to associate the problems posed by the press with Whig churchmen, Latitudinarians and Dissenters. Sacheverell took as his inspiration 1Tim. 5, ‘neither be partaker of other men’s sins’, the same text employed by Burnet and Wake in the 1690s to justify their own position on coercion. Indeed, when Sacheverell first delivered the sermon in 1707, one observer noted that it might well have been delivered by a member of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners.148 Sacheverell noted that all humankind was utterly and desperately lost in sin. There was, he claimed, ‘a heavy Burthen of Guilt, which lies upon every Man’s own Conscience’.149 Consequently, men must not sin, nor should they allow, connive or partake in other men’s sins. In short, redemption could only be attained by correctly restraining and punishing those who perpetrated sin. He railed against those who did not realise quite how endangered man already was; for, until one realised how much of a burden of guilt a man carried, he could never be saved. As Sacheverell noted, even a just man falls seven times a day. But to lessen that guilt, that sense of fall, man must take on the weight of others, for ‘that in itself (God Knows) is enough to sink us, without his Infinite Mercy, and the All-atoning Merits of our Saviour’.150 In the context of 1709, fourteen years after the lapse of licensing, Sacheverell reserved his ire for one particular form of sin: publishing unorthodox religious literature. Unlike other forms of vice, crimes that lay The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 59–60. Revolution Principles, 128–30. 148 Bod. MS Eng. Th.f.15, f.352, Oxford Sermon Notes of Matthew Hawes of Christ Church, 1707. 149 Sacheverell, The Communication of Sin, 32. 150 Ibid., 32. 146 Holmes,

147 Kenyon,

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under some limitation, or a sin that dies with the death of the perpetrator, publishing books poisoned even after the author’s death: But here a Man’s sin survives his Funeral; and even when he is Dead, he sinneth. He that Propagates, or Publishes any pernicious Writings, or Tenets, knows not how far their Poyson will reach, or where the Deadly Contagion will stop.151

The consequences of publishing errant material were therefore significant beyond other vices or acts of impiety both for the sinner and the rest of society. A bad book, ‘in the hands of that Destroying Angel, the Devil, can taint whole Families and Kingdoms, and transmit its venom down to Posterity, and continue Spiritual Death to the End of the World’.152 As a medium, the press was capable, through sophistry and disguise, of hoodwinking the orthodox and the simple, for ‘they easily Seduce and beguile the Ignorant’.153 By contrast to a simple act of profanity the press was a pernicious and vile engine of corruption, for, it ‘is very rarely seen, that wicked Principles lie still, and dormant in the Conscience, and not exert, and shew themselves in Action: And he that lays the Poyson is the Cause of his Death who swallows it’.154 Here, then, was Sacheverell’s vision laid bare. Humanity was drenched in sin; those who read and propagated unorthodox religious views were endangering both their own and their nation’s salvation. England had good reason to be concerned. In 1709 the state was, according to Sacheverell, faced with an unprecedented quantity of disturbing publications. Much like Atterbury’s comments in 1706, Hobbes and Spinoza could be bought in abundance, whilst Blount’s the Oracles of Reason and Tindal’s the Rights of the Christian Church were published freely to debauch the nation. Sacheverell’s sermon, apparently eagerly received, painted a picture of both tortured souls and a tortured state, of the inexorable pain that awaited sinners: If there are Different Degrees of Glory in Heaven, as the Apostle tells us, and by Analogy we may conclude, that there are different Degrees of Torment in Hell, according to the Size, and Quality of the Offendor, no Mansion in that Dismal Place will be too Bad, for such excessive, and Abominable Criminals; where were they to meet with no Aggravation to their Misery, but that of Beholding, and Conversing with so many Wretched Objects, whom they brought into that Place of Torment, it would heat the Furnace seven times hotter, add fury to Hell-Flames, and a Double Weight to their Damnation. Now from this Tremendous Sin, which no Good Man can think of, without Horror, or speak of, without Trembling.155 151 Ibid.,

33. 34. 153 Ibid., 30. 154 Ibid., 29. 155 Ibid., 36. 152 Ibid.,

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The good Christian had to be cognisant of two forms of sin: internal and personal, external and derivative. Sacheverell thus repeated the familiar Protestant claim that an internal sin was confined within an offender, a sin that was circumscribed within a man’s own soul, to be dealt with in a private conversation between god and sinner. It was the second form of sin, the external, that formed the true basis of Sacheverell’s sermon. These were sins of a much higher order, offences that grew and multiplied. Accordingly, Sacheverell dedicated much of his sermon to explaining exactly how men may be partakers of other’s external sins and outlining the six laws that governed sins: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Commanding, or Commissioning their Execution. Conniving at, Consenting to, or Concealing them. Administering Counsel, Direction, or Assistance towards them. Commending, Approving, Excusing, or Defending them. Giving Offence, or Scandalous Example. Authorising, Propagating, or Publishing any Heresy, False Doctrin, Schism, Faction, Irreligion, or Immorality.

Of these, two sections are particularly important for our purposes: the first, commanding or commissioning sins; and the sixth, authorising or publishing heresy. On Sacheverell’s account, men in authority may have a double portion of guilt visited on them, if they either connive in a sin or fail to prevent a subject from sinning. He pointed to various scriptural texts, all of which confirmed that magistrates and civil powers held their authority in trust from God. Making explicit what superiors must do to fulfil a godly life, he noted in failure they ‘will bear the Load of a double Damnation, when the Souls are lost thro’ their Misconduct’.156 Again, there can be no doubt whom he held ultimately responsible for the supposed free press and the lapse of licensing: all such as are invested with any Jurisdiction, or Authority over their Inferiors, all Princes and Magistrates, Civil and Ecclesiastical, Masters and Governors, Parents and Guardians, or any others that enjoy a Right of Dominion or Discipline.157

Sacheverell’s sermon was close to seditious, not because he blamed the degradation of the Church on the bishops and the leaders of the ministry, as he was to do a few months later, but because he excoriated them for their failure to restrain the press. It was not just a failure of public policy; 156 Ibid., 157 Ibid.,

9. 5.

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bishops and ministers had wilfully refused to understand how sin was being spread in early eighteenth-century England through the press. Nor had they correctly understood the consequences of their policies: they had endangered the souls of authors and readers alike, whilst squandering the nation’s providential status. Drawing a direct comparison with the establishment of toleration, the inability to control public debate properly suggested the Glorious Revolution was a terrible mistake. Sacheverell had given a very public face to complaints from High Churchmen that had begun with Atterbury in 1697. Sacheverell was not the first to express these sentiments, nor were they brought to an end by his prosecution. In a similar manner, but with less vehemence, other High Church supporters deployed the sentiments of Sacheverell. George Smalridge (1662–1719), dean of Carlisle and bishop of Bristol in 1714, was committed to the High Church cause.158 In 1709 he was a vital member of Sacheverell’s defence team. Indeed, when Sacheverell achieved bail in December 1709 he turned to Simon Harcourt, Francis Atterbury and Smalridge as his principal defence advisers.159 In 1711, after the conviction of Sacheverell, Smalridge preached and published a sermon on the same text as Sacheverell: ‘Neither be partaker of other Mens Sins’.160 He appears to have shared with Sacheverell a concern that too many men were endangering their salvation. Early in his sermon, he remarked that ‘we are then Partakers of their Sins, when We use any Means to induce them to Sin; or when We do not Use those Means which are in our power, and which We are in duty bound to Use for Preserving or Reclaiming them from Sin’.161 This was a position in almost every respect indistinguishable from Sacheverell: men were drenched in sin and they must prevent others from sinning in order to secure their election to heaven. In almost every way, Smalridge adopted positions that were at the heart of Sacheverell’s argument. Hence, he borrowed the idea that the communication of false principles would double a sin back against the person who initiated the false doctrine. This was an argument that was found in St Peter, a now traditional motif that eternal punishment awaited those who spread false doctrine: The Heresies bought in are declar’d to be Damnable, hazarding the Salvation of those who Embrace them; and it is but just that Those, who are so diligent to Destroy others, should be over-taken by a swift Sharp, ‘Smalridge, George (1662–1719)’, in ODNB; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 180–1; George Smalridge, The Thoughts of a Country Gentleman upon Reading Dr Sacheverell’s Trial (1710). 159 Alexander Cunningham, The History of Great Britain from the Revolution in 1688 to the Accession of George I (1787) vol. 2, 290. 160 George Smalridge, A Sermon, Preached at the Parish-Church of St. Dunstan in the West (1711). 161 Ibid., 2. 158 Richard

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Destruction; that Those who are so Vigilant to spread Damning Heresies, should find that their Damnation slumbreth not.162

Predictably, Smalridge’s vision of piety included books and the press. Heretical and unorthodox ideas, he claimed, had not just been spread in private, but ‘such pernicious Doctrines have been Embraced, Professed, and Propagated, amongst us; that they been everywhere spread abroad without reserve, consign’d to Writing, and deliver’d down in Books for the Poisoning of succeeding ages as well as the present’.163 Those familiar with Sacheverell’s sermon The Communication of Sin would recognise that Smalridge was applying exactly the same analysis: heretical books would lead to damnation for both present and future generations. For this reason, High Churchmen, as we have seen, reserved a special ire for a supposed free press, for it ‘hath a direct Tendency to the Destruction of Souls’.164 At least one political commentator realised the implications of Sacheverell’s commentary on the power of the press. George Ridpath recognised that Sacheverell had traced an indelible link between the press and salvation. Having taken over the editorship of the Observator from John Tutchin, he suggested that Sacheverell had collapsed the theological doctrine of salvation into a political issue. Access to heaven was under the control of the clergy, alongside a newly empowered and singular Church. In the process, the press would also be taken under the purview of High Churchmen, rendered a singular tool of propaganda and used to shut down all other opinions.165 The Perils of False Brethren made baldly clear the High Church fear, which had been developing since the mid-1690s, but had truly found aggressive expression after the accession of Anne. Toleration had robbed the Church of its status. Drawing a comparison between the circumstances of the Church of Corinth and the present Church of England, Sacheverell suggested that her Communion had been rent, divided by factious and schismatical imposters, and her sacred orders had been ridiculed.166 The mission of ministers to proselytise the word of God had been prostituted to hypocrites, Socinians and deists, not by enemies, but by the pretended friends of the Church, the False Brethren. Or, put simply, the vipers were in the Church. Nor was this only a complaint about the loss of the power of the Church. It was no longer possible to save all men because the pure doctrines of the Church had been corrupted and defiled, so that the truth could no longer be ascertained. If the Communication of Sin made explicit the connection between the press and the spreading of sin, then the Perils of False Brethren developed the idea, 162 Ibid.,

5. 8. 164 Ibid., 8. 165 The Observator, 9 Nov. 1709. 166 Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, 8. 163 Ibid.,

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but made it obvious whom Sacheverell considered responsible for the spread of licentiousness. The False Brethren, both bishops and ministers, were despisers of dominion and government, had wrested the Word of God to their own and were prepared to approve of the worst of sins.167 By 1709, therefore, the initial enaction of toleration had become commensurate with running down the mission of the Church. But, because it was within the establishment of the country, theological unorthodoxy, blasphemy and questioning the Holy Ghost were no longer confided to individuals like John Toland: poison privately and singly spread, and had been combined into communities wherein ‘Atheism, Deism, Tritheism, Socinianism, with all the hellish principles of fanaticism, regicide, and anarchy, are openly professed and taught, to corrupt and debauch the youth of the nation’.168 By 1709, therefore, Sacheverell maintained there was an ideological alliance between the latitude men in the Church and their more radical allies. Not only was that alliance designed to destroy the Church from within, it was a component of public politics: Are we not fallen into strange times, that men dare thus print and publish, even preach and their sins; even those sinful and shameless positions, to the eyes, and ears of the whole world? Whereby God’s anointed are endangered men’s souls are poisoned, Christian religion is blasphemed is a murderer of her own Kings; God in charge is openly contradicted, and men made believe, they shall go to Heaven in breaking God’s commandments.169

Most historians have dismissed Sacheverell’s religious positioning as unworthy of serious attention; they find it difficult to take seriously his desire for the Church to be reinvigorated, considering his claims, instead, as a simple revanchist grab for political power.170 Instead, they prefer to concentrate on the politics of his trial and his assertion that the revolution was an act of political resistance and potentially illegal.171 If, however, we consider Sacheverell, as he did himself, as a committed member of the Church of England, we can comprehend what he was doing. Disgusted by the unchecked press, and worried that reading and spreading false ideas would endanger the salvation of those involved, he argued for control so that doctrinal truth was maintained, and, in his view, with the Church reinvigorated political stability would also follow. It was important to distinguish what correct doctrine was because sincerity would never satisfy God. 167 Ibid.,

21. 21. 169 Ibid., 21. 170 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 64–70; Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 178–9. 171 Brian Cowan, The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Oxford, 2012), 1–34; Brian Cowan, ‘The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society’, in Mark Knights (ed.), Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell (Oxford, 2012), 28–46. 168 Ibid.,

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Nevertheless, in late 1709, Ridpath told his readers that the Communication of Sin was illegal. Sacheverell’s assertion that the country had sunk into the ‘lowest Dregs of corruption’ because of the policies pursued by the leaders of the ministry and the Church was an example of the accusation of ‘Church in Danger’; an accusation that, Ridpath noted, had been illegal to print since 1705. The ministry eventually agreed. A few months later, in Article III of his Impeachment, Sacheverell was indicted for falsely and seditiously suggesting that the Church of England was in a condition of great peril and adversity. Chapter 7 moves away from the theological discussion of why the press should be restrained and turns to the prosecution of two books: the Memorial (1705) and the Rights of the Christian Church (1706). Situated at the polar opposites of the political and religious spectrum, the books are used to reveal the relationship between the licentiousness of the press and the cry of ‘Church in Danger’. In doing so, the chapter investigates further the increasing ideological divisions after the accession of Anne, but suggests that both Whigs and Tories, High and Low Churchmen continued to argue for the press to be restrained.

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Part III The Church in Danger

7 The Church in Danger: Prosecuting the Memorial (1705) and the Rights of the Christian Church (1706) In 1707 Abel Boyer (1667–1729) declared that in the last year the government had controlled licentious writers.1 Several authors had stretched too far ‘the Liberty of English Men and presumed too much on the mildness of Her Majesty’s Government’. Consequently, the ministry had thought fit to give ‘a seasonable check to their licentious pens’.2 Boyer proceeded to give the reader eight examples of writers who had been arrested and taken before the courts. Despite Boyer’s claim that the ministry had controlled the press, alert readers will have noticed a rather more subtle narrative might be deduced from his comments. In fact, almost all of the cases named by Boyer arose from one publication, the Memorial of the Church of England, first published in the wake of the general election on or around 9 July in 1705.3 The Memorial excoriated both the queen and the ministry for failing to protect the Church. Despite Anne’s claim at the start of her reign to love the Church, it now sat at a low ebb. Occasional conformity continued unabated, toleration allowed Dissenters political rights and the ministry, with Godolphin as a lord treasurer and leader, showed no love or understanding of the Church.4 Nor was the situation calmed by the presence of Robert Harley. By now entirely responsible for the press, Harley had been ridiculed during the recent election for his commitment to moderation. That all of Boyer’s cases arose from the Memorial should alert us to another problem. None of the prosecuted authors had been accused of crimes normally associated with a licentious press. There were no charges of blasphemy or heresy, nor a discussion of religious unorthodoxy. Instead, they had been arraigned for scurrilously reflecting on senior politicians and bishops; they had abused men in authority and written scandalous and seditious libels.5 Abel Boyer, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne, Digested into Annals (1707), A2. Ibid., A2. 3 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 82. 4 The Memorial of the Church of England, Humbly Offered to the Consideration of all True Lovers of our Church and Constitution (1705); Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 80–100. 5 Boyer, History of the Reign of Queen Anne, A2. 1 2

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Abel Boyer was always likely to present the prosecutions arising from the Memorial as a success. He had tried to gain Robert Harley’s patronage for some time and tended to support Harleyite positions of moderation.6 Yet, there is a very different story to be told in this chapter. Far from being a success, the mere publication of the Memorial indicated just how disillusioned High Church clerics and writers had become by church policies by 1705. In the last two chapters, we saw how Harley and Tenison tried and failed to prevent anonymity being used to conceal authorship of controversial publications, so that partisan debate might be moderated. We also saw clerics expressing dissatisfaction with church policy and the laxity of the press. The consequences of Harley’s failure to pass legislation and increasing clerical dissatisfaction with the press are further illustrated in this chapter. It takes two case studies, the Memorial and Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church, both of which were published anonymously, to contend that the ideological escalation of the early eighteenth century can only be fully understood by including discussions of communicative practices, and the problems caused by errant public expression. The discussion of the Memorial and the subsequent debates in parliament concerned with the cry of ‘Church in Danger’ reveal, however, that attitudes to the press were not divided along ideological lines. There was no straight division between Whigs and Low Churchmen supporting freedom and Tories and High Churchmen proposing restraint. Rather, as the case of the Memorial demonstrates, Whig politicians and their supporters in the Church readily accepted restraint of ideas, when they considered it expedient or they felt their long-held support of toleration and the Protestant succession were under threat. Nor is there anything ‘ironic’ about High Churchmen facing restraint and control as has been claimed by historians, a position that can only be sustained if we are to believe that High Churchmen believed in censorship of all public debate.7 The Memorial

The Memorial is a much discussed publication. Historians have spent some time using the tract to consider its depiction of Harley’s press policy or considering the mechanics and difficulties of press investigations.8 The concentration on the investigation, and attempts to uncover the authorship, have tended to obscure the actual arguments of the Memorial. The lack of interest in the text has been compounded by treating it as a rather mundane Robert Harley and the Press, 123; G.C. Gibbs, ‘Boyer, Abel (1667?–1729)’, in ODNB; HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 94, Abel Boyer to Robert Harley, 26 Jun. 1704. 7 Goldie and Kemp, Censorship and the Press, iv, 143. 8 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 80–100; Joseph Hone, The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers (2020). 6 Downie,

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statement of High Church grievances, which had first been revealed in Atterbury’s Letter to a Convocation Man and had been aggravated further by the recent failure to prohibit the hated practice of occasional conformity.9 Country gentlemen and High Churchmen had long objected to the practice by which Nonconformists had preserved their political rights by receiving the Sacrament once a year. In the words of William Bromley, it was an abuse of the Church, and he hoped that the queen and the ministry might ‘put a stop to that abominable hypocrisy, that inexcusable immorality of Occasional Conformity’.10 Their detestation of the practice was compounded by the recent failure to ‘tack’ an occasional conformity clause to the Land Tax Bill.11 In the Memorial, the sense that parliamentarians had deserted the Church and treated its communicants with contempt was given a theatrical representation. Attending a play, a peer who had helped to vote down the ‘tack’ rolled up parchment to replicate a bill and threw it theatrically onto the stage, announcing it to be the Occasional Conformity Bill, and it was ‘immediately made the subject of the insipid drollery of all the fools that applaudd that action’.12 The peer’s scorn served as a synecdoche for how High Churchmen thought Whig clerics and churchmen despised the Church. The Church could not hope to be kept safe when senior members of the government and parliament were prepared to jest about the bill, and thus the Church, in public. Warming to his theme, the author of the Memorial noticed just how much unreasonable and uncivil clamour had rained down on men who were simply trying to defend the Church: they had been aspersed and vilified by rascals who possessed neither morality nor religion.13 These villainous slanders, he continued, are: printed and published almost daily, under the noses of some in authority, and ought to be adverted upon by them; but since by conniving, they are pleased rather to countenance than to correct or put a stop to them, and are 9

It is noticeable, for example, that G.V. Bennett, the best historian of the High Church movement, pays no attention to the Memorial. 10 Bod MS Ballard 38 f.137, William Bromley to Arthur Charlett, 22 Oct. 1702. 11 Mark Knights, ‘Occasional Conformity and the Representation of Dissent: Hypocrisy, Sincerity, Moderation and Zeal’, Parliamentary History, 24 (2005), 41–57; Martin Greig, ‘Bishop Gilbert Burnet and Latitudinarian Epsicopal Opposition to the Occasional Conformity Bills, 1702–1704’, Canadian Journal of History, 41 (2006), 247–62; John Flaningham, ‘The Occasional Conformity Controversy: Ideology and Party Politics, 1697–1711’, JBS, 17 (1977), 38–62; Henry Snyder, ‘The Defeat of the Occasional Conformity Bill and the Tack: A Study in the Techniques of Parliamentary Management in the Reign of Queen Anne’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 41 (1968), 172–92; Brent Sirota, ‘The Occasional Conformity Controversy, Moderation and the Anglican Critique of Modernity, 1700–1714’, HJ (2014), 81–105. 12 The Memorial, 49. 13 Ibid., 50.

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pleased to leave the vindication of us to our next meeting, it may be found necessary to do it in a manner more comprehensive than they will like.14

The Memorial was not just a response to occasional conformity. Since the revolution, the anonymous author maintained, the Church had been remorselessly and publicly attacked. Not content with toleration, Nonconformists and their allies in government had tried to destroy the Church with ‘libels and scandalous pamphlets openly, and by clandestine insinuations’.15 Under severe and constant attack from their enemies, unjust clamours and slanderous aspersions, clergy had borne the situation with a calmness of temper unknown by any other church.16 Replicating the concerns of Sacheverell, the author of the Memorial asserted that Dissenters, by contrast, were able to libel the Church, protected by ministers at the highest level of the state. This was a conspiracy that went right to the heart of the Church. Dissenters paraded their principles, aided by bishops, and were in an unholy alliance designed to destroy the Church: not that the Socinians or Latitudinarians have in reality more kindness for the dissenters than for the church: but because they hope, that if with their help they could pull down their church, they should be able successively to destroy them through their own divisions, and triumph severally over them all.17

The Memorial excoriated the policy of moderation in all its forms. The stated policy of Harley in the 1705 election was an act of folly that would allow Anabaptists, Quakers and Lutherans to flourish. Harley, who had previously been considered an apostate Whig, now stood charged as a turncoat Tory. Indeed, the charge caused Harley to protest to friends that, ‘I have the same principles I came into the house of commons with.’18 In fact, in a letter to his friend and fellow MP Sir Robert Davers, he acknowledged the veracity of some of the criticisms levelled at him. ‘I have publicly and privately foretold them the consequences of what they were doing’, he lamented, ‘but tares have been sown in the wheat … I defy the world to say I have directly or indirectly done anything against the common interest of the church’.19 The accusation in the Memorial that the Church was endangered by the policy of moderation distressed the queen and almost reduced Godolphin to tears.20 As secretary, the responsibility to investigate the authorship of 14

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 19. 16 Ibid., 10. 17 Ibid., 14. 18 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 83; HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 261, Robert Harley to Sir Robert Davers, 16 Oct. 1705. 19 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 261, Robert Harley to Sir Robert Davers, 16 Oct. 1705. 20 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 80. 15

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the Memorial and to prosecute any offences fell to Harley.21 The pressure to control the book did not just come from inside government. John Gellibrand, a trusted press messenger, informed Harley that the Memorial hade made a mighty noise, ‘a prosecution will be expected’.22 The subsequent enquiries reveal why Harley and Tenison had been so keen to remove anonymity. Not only was the Memorial an example of the heats of party that both men so despised, the hidden authorship of the book hampered the investigation and demonstrates how adept the print trade had become at hiding responsibility for dangerous publications. On 10 July, Harley issued a warrant to Robert Stephens and Richard Heywood to take up the printer David Edwards.23 Within a few days it was obvious that Stephens would not succeed. Gellibrand and Defoe both informed Harley that Stephens had deliberately stalled the investigation because of his sympathy for the sentiments in the Memorial.24 Although it might be observed that Gellibrand and Defoe were hardly neutral observers. Gellibrand, for example, sent Charles Spencer, third earl of Sunderland, and a secretary in the junto from December 1706, a note complaining of Charles Leslie’s seditious behaviour. He enclosed a forty-page scribal response to Leslie’s latest publication, commenting the ‘enclosed is an answer to Lesley I believe your Lordp will like It for it has wounded him in his own method, scripture, the author whom I am to conceal will handle him another method if this be thought be fitting to be published if not he will be as contented to have it burnt indeed’.25 At the same time, Defoe commented to his employer, ‘I am concerned to see your orders betrayed and buffooned. That wretch Stephens makes the government perfectly impotent in these matters and the booksellers and he together make sport at your orders.’26 After advice, Harley instructed Robert Clare, an out-of-work printer, to track down Edwards; he was apprehended and interrogated on 14 January 1706.27 Ibid., 80; For the burning of The Memorial see, Bod. MS Ballard 38 f.144, William Bromley to Arthur Charlett, 8 Sept. 1705. 22 HMC Portland MSS, iv, 207, John Gellibrand to Robert Harley, 13 July, 1705. 23 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 83. The warrant is at TNA, SP 44/77/19 f.21, Warrant to Robert Stevens to search and seize with their papers, 17 July 1705; Bod MS Rawl. letters 4 f.469, Thomas Cherry to Thomas Hearne, 8 Aug. 1705. 24 George Harris Healey (ed.), The Letters of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 1955), 92; Leona Rostenberg, ‘Robert Stephens, Messenger of the Press: An episode in 17th-Century Censorship’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 49 (1955) 152; John Robert Moore, ‘“Robin Hog” Stephens: Messenger of the Press’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 50 (1956), 381–7. 25 BL Add. MS 61546 f.18, Gellibrand to Sunderland, n.d. 26 George Harris Healey (ed.), The Letters of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 1955), 92. 27 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 84; Henry L. Snyder, ‘The Reports of a Press Spy for Robert Harley; New Bibliographical Data for the Reign of Queen Anne’, The Library, 22 (1967), 26–345; Michael Treadwell, ‘A Further Report from Harley’s Press Spy’, The Library (1980), 211–15. 21

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The examination of Edwards provides further evidence for the problems caused to authorities by anonymity. Edwards was a trade publisher. Much like many of the publishers that Tindal dealt with, Abigail Baldwin and Benjamin Bragg for example, Edwards did not own copyright and was, therefore, able to hide the names of authors by denying ownership or having any real relationship with the author. Under examination by Harley, Edwards insisted that the copy of the Memorial to be printed was delivered to his shop by a woman in a ‘Vizard mask’.28 Throughout the whole process of publication, Edwards insisted that he had never seen her face, for she had worn a mask and turned away from him. Only under further investigation did he describe her as ‘pretty fat, middle-sized, oval face & Black Ey’d’ and speculated that she was a woman he knew as Susanah Gough.29 The precious wall of anonymity was protected by trade publishers. In the case of Edwards and the Memorial, the ministry suspected the identity of the author was occluded because of their powerful political connections, a suspicion only confirmed by Edwards’s comment to Godolphin that there was ‘greatness and wealth in the case, tall trees, which may prove very difficult to climb to the top of’.30 Despite an extensive investigation, the veil of anonymity held. Suspicion fell on Sir Humphey Mackworth, but no one was ever convicted for publishing the Memorial and the junto ministry had to settle for publicly burning the book. Only in 1711 was the author confirmed to have been James Drake, who had died in 1707.31 The campaign against the Memorial did not rest with its burning. Faced with an incendiary attack, Robert Harley instructed replies to be prepared and published. As early as 2 July, Defoe informed him, ‘I send you herewith six of the High Church Legion’.32 Indeed, so keen was Defoe to answer the 28

BL Harleian Add. MS 70340, Examination of David Edwards, Printer, 14 Jan. 1706. It is possible the woman was Mrs Croom. In a lengthy letter, Gellibrand suggested a plan of action to Harley: ‘my advice is that Mrs Croom be forthwith taken up and committed to Newgate. She has confessed upon on oath before Mr Lewis that she has sold many copies of a book declared to be criminal, and she will not bring forth the person from whom she had them. If however at any time after the author, printer or original person be discovered you may drop your prosecution of her. The book has made a mighty noise and Mrs Croom having been taken from her stall at the Exchange, a prosecution will be expected; besides this woman has an ill character, and her husband is a printer and a non-juror, a viler fellow does not live. The sending her to Newgate will make her believe you more in earnest. I am morally assured if this course be taken that she produces the party from who she had the books’; HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 207, John Gellibrand to Robert Harley, 13 July 1705. 30 Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 84. 31 Goldie and Kemp, Censorship and the Press, iv, 145; Hone, The Paper Chase, Bridget Hill, ‘Drake, James (1666–1707)’, in ODNB. 32 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 200, Daniel Defoe to Robert Harley, 2 July 1705; Healey, Letters of Daniel Defoe, 92. 29

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book, that he wrote twice more to Harley, indicating he would go ahead without his approbation: I have dedicated it to my Lord Treasurer, from my hand, sir, my Lord cannot but accept it, and perhaps to my advantage, if not, I am sure it is for the public good; and if I lose by it, I’ll publish it, and flatter myself you will not be ashamed of the performance.33

Alongside Defoe, John Toland was also instructed to defend the ministry of Marlborough, Godolphin and Harley. But it was the charge of ‘Church in Danger’ that exercised most writers. Defoe suggested that it was a gratuitous libel, designed to inspire High Churchmen to rebellion.34 Far from the danger to the Church finding its origins in toleration, it came from within. The author who wrote the Memorial and others like him would enflame the Church, embroil it with parties and ‘raise a civil feud in her bowels’.35 The thrust of responses reflected Defoe’s original rebuttal. Far from genuinely expressing concern for the Church or its parishioners, High Churchmen were simply grabbing power. If the people could be persuaded that the revolution had damaged the Church, then the clergy might well become their favourites.36 Whilst the Memorial had not questioned the liberty of the press directly, preferring instead to complain of the calumnies thrown at the Church, John Toland recognised the significance the nature of the press had assumed in High Church thinking. They had no cause to complain, he commented. The Memorial, after all, hardly used good natured rhetoric.37 Toland considered High Church complaints opportunistic and highly partisan. Instead, he urged the Memorialist to embrace the new periodical press. The Whigs had their Observator but the Tories had the Rehearsal, ‘the Review does not take more liberty than the Whipping Post’.38 Writers who questioned the status of the Church or promoted their own religious positions should not be stopped, for ‘in free countries such writers abound among all parties’.39 John Tutchin joined Toland in his denunciation of the Memorial. It was a scandalous work by a scandalous party. The High Church cause was purposefully supported by a campaign of lies and forgeries. It was supported by partisans who were betraying the piety of their Church. For it was inexplicable that if the clergy Portland MSS, iv, 204, Daniel Defoe to Robert Harley, 9 July 1705; iv, 205, Daniel Defoe to Robert Harley, 10 July 1710. 34 Daniel Defoe, The High Church Legeon: or, The Memorial Examined (1705), 2. 35 Ibid., 14. 36 A Review of the Dangers of the Church (1705), 16; The Memorial of the State of England, in Vindication of the Queen, the Church, and the Administration (1705), 19–20. 37 John Toland, The Memorial of the State of England (1705), 2. For Toland and his response to The Memorial see, Champion, Republican Learning, 58–9, 127–9. 38 Toland, The Memorial of the State of England, 2. 39 Ibid., 3. 33 HMC,

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were spiritually blessed, they needed to have ‘recourse to the artillery of hell for its defence! Precious saints, that in defence of their black cause, are forced to enter an alliance with the prince of darkness’.40 To illustrate his point further, Tutchin turned to a continental example. The French king had recently committed fifteen writers to prison, an action that, in Tutchin’s view, was an overreaction to military defeats. ‘France is compelled to use political silence’ because ‘there is too much noise of its misfortunes abroad, to have any stories of its disgrace at home’.41 Both the recent defeat at Ramillies and the possibility of further invasion caused the French king to resort to tyrannous Catholic practices. Not only was controlling the press a sign of political oppression, it would result in failure, for ‘stopping the mouths and pens of men, does not shut their eyes, or prevent their thinking’.42 This description of the French king reiterated the by now familiar Whig trope of associating press restraint with Catholicism. ‘I thank God we have no such practices in England’, Tutchin commented, before continuing, ‘but herein consists the excellency of our constitution and the peculiar freedoms, that we are slaves neither in body or mind. We breathe in a free air, we think free, we are neither pen or tongue tied.’43 At a more subtle level, however, Tutchin needed to provide a more complex explanation. There was no constitutional right to a free press, and he admitted as much. There could be no unbounded liberty and it was the business of men to ‘look into public affairs, any farther than they find themselves aggrieved by public management’. This was a difficult balancing act; but Tutchin was carefully setting up the rules of public debate against the current context. Men did have a right to redress; they could petition parliament and comment on errors of political judgement. But this position was distorted: On the other hand, if too great a liberty be allowed the press, it must be injurious both to king and people. Every Englishman ought to be allowed a liberty of writing in defence of his country, and his own free birth-rights; but this not one in twenty of the scribblers of this age, do understand. All the writing now, is a jargon of parties, down-right opposition and contradiction, instead of plain and just reasoning; and what is worst of all, many of the writers oppose this very settlement of the crown, on which the English liberties and all that is dear to us depend; and on this account I took up my pen, and have often offered to lay it down for the sake of peace, but can’t find the rest inclined to accept the challenge, so little regard have they to the peace of the community.44

Observator, 25 July 1705. Ibid., 6 Nov. 1706. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 40 The 41

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Tutchin added sophistication to Toland’s position, but both men raised a crucial question. If, as claimed, the press was evenly balanced, and the Church ought to defend itself, why had the junto burnt the book and spent some time trying to locate the author for prosecution? Indeed, Charles Leslie’s the Case of the Church of England’s Memorial Fairly Stated not only defended the original publication, but also questioned why and how the book had been pursued. Whilst the pamphlet had fallen under a great noise, it enjoyed a different reception amongst churchmen and Dissenters.45 Although Leslie refused to declare Toleration illegal, he accused Dissenters of undermining the queen’s status. Right from the start of her reign, ‘pamphlets were issued out in contempt of her Royal Authority; and libels came forth, which not only pointed at her Majesty’s conduct, but that of her new ministry’.46 Leslie accused the junto ministry, Whigs and Low Churchmen of seeking free reign in the public square whilst restricting the rights of opponents to reply. The Whigs were condemning a tract that possessed no malicious purpose, in a manner that was reminiscent of the inquisition.47 Indeed, far from being for freedom of debate as they had often claimed, Whigs were for silencing a book merely as a precursor to declaring as illegal anyone who questioned the direction of ecclesiastical policy. This was not to say, however, that Leslie thought a free press desirable. He maintained that unrestricted public debate was of the most ‘pernicious consequence to prince and people, and may prove fatal to the present constitution, if not timely prevented’.48 Churchmen had always been for forms of control, but the Whigs and Dissenters were promoting control so they might have a ‘continuance of a sort of permission to libel the government in both its capacities, ecclesiastical and civil’.49 Indeed, Leslie provided further evidence. The Observator had sounded the trumpet of sedition and advanced principles destructive of civil government with the least appearance of loyalty to religion or the state. These positions had been further advanced in tandem with Daniel Defoe. They formed a collective of arrogant scribes, clogging the press and filling the stalls of booksellers with their pestilent invectives. It was a campaign, likely organised by Harley, in which rival newspapers had conspired against the claim that the Church was in danger.50 The attempt to prosecute the Memorial and to rebut it in print raised serious concerns about the nature of public debate. Defoe had warned Harley that answering books brought with it serious problems. For, they are written ‘purely to sell the book which the town is eager for, and which I think the government is highly concerned to prevent, so the answers 45 46 47 48 49 50

Charles Leslie, The Case of the Church of England’s Memorial Fairly Stated (1705), 3. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 14.

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are always trifles, and the design, which is dispersing the original, is fully answered.’51 Despite Godolphin’s fury at the Memorial and his own self-professed lack of skill in public debate, his analysis of the problem facing Harley was acute, observing to the secretary that, ‘when the Government is remiss upon such occasions, it is called negligence, and when it is careful, the effect of that care is imputed to particular industry’.52 Tutchin laid the blame for the Memorial and the subsequent furore on previous governments. Had previous ministers prosecuted authors at the beginning of Anne’s reign, then scabrous pens would have been stopped. But he also blamed Harley too. Vast numbers of libellous papers infected the minds of the public and none of them had been prosecuted.53 The situation was dire, and Tutchin commented, ‘I think the licentiousness of the press is a thing worthy of the consideration of our governors; for the scribbling trade is become so abominably nauseous, that the wise are cloyed with the exuberance, and the fools are weary of reading.’54 One author lampooned Harley, had he not pursued a policy of moderation, promising that the extremes of party would be defeated, and the press controlled: did you not use to promise you would not punish them, but let them depend on you, until you had completed their ruin? Did you not promise those that would plead guilty all the favours you were capable of conferring on them, which were fines, pillories, and imprisonment?55

The prosecution of the Memorial exposed two fault lines in eighteenth-century England. Once again, it revealed just how disillusioned High Churchmen were by Anne’s ecclesiastical policies. Whether they impugned her directly or her ministers, it was clear that their high expectations of her reign had been dashed by 1705. Perhaps worse, their resentment was now very public. Second, it was not just occasional conformity that drove their resentment, but the refusal of the government and the Church to restrain pernicious or immoral books, which threatened the peace of the Church and the stability of the state. The disastrous prosecution of the Memorial also revealed that Whigs were equally prepared to restrain the press. When faced with tracts that called into question the legality of the revolution and questioned how the Church was being treated, they, too resorted to control. But the continued existence of anonymity frustrated attempts to moderate partisan politics and attacks. These problems and frustrations are illustrated further in the next section of this chapter, which discusses the ‘Church in Danger’ debates of late 1705. Portland MSS, iv, 201, Daniel Defoe to Robert Harley, 2 July 1705. Bath MSS, i, 73, Lord Godolphin to Robert Harley, 2 Sept. 1705. 53 The Observator, 25 July 1705. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 89. 51 HMC,

52 HMC,

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The Press and the Church in Danger

The queen was sufficiently alienated by the Memorial that she turned to the Whigs. The first session of her second parliament opened with the election of the Whig John Smith to the speakership with the support of the court, and the queen delivered a speech drafted by Lord Godolphin, in which she rejected the accusations contained in the Memorial, reaffirmed her support for the Church as by law established and defended toleration.56 Having lost the control of the Commons, the Tories in the Lords resolved to debate the status of the Church.57 From the start, the discussion in the Lords was rancorous. Rochester, the leader of the High Church Tories, suggested that the recent campaign by Harley was a disguised attempt to stop men’s mouths, for fear they ‘should speak truth’.58 Not surprisingly, Rochester’s accusation was met with fury. Charles Montague, earl of Halifax (1661–1715) and a leading Whig, dismissed Rochester’s comments. Indeed, he suggested recent events had amply demonstrated that ‘all mouths have been opened in the noise of the dangers of the Church’.59 Despite their manifold differences over political issues, the Lords who spoke in the debate agreed that the queen was not responsible for the Church being in danger.60 But, the licentious freedom of the press remained a point of contention.61 Henry Compton, bishop of London, acknowledged that the queen posed no danger to the Church, but maintained libels and pamphlets were debauching men’s minds. Compton complained of a number of books that continued to circulate, often despite them being prosecuted. Edmund Hickeringill, for example, was an insolent and blasphemous writer, whilst Toland’s answer to the Memorial was equally dangerous.62 He proceeded to read passages from John Toland’s Memorial of the Church of England.63 Nor did he exempt the pulpit from his attack. Directing readers to a recent sermon by Hoadly, he complained that resistance and rebellion were regularly pushed on an unwary populace by Whiggish clerics.64 Yet, crucially, this targeted vision of dangerous 56

Clyve Jones, ‘Debates in the House of Lords on “the Church in Danger”, 1705, and on Dr Sacheverell’s impeachment, 1710’, HJ, 19 (1976), 760; HMC, Bath MSS, i, 78–9, Lord Godolphin to Robert Harley, 25 Oct. 1705; Her Majesties Most Gracious Speech to both Houses of Parliament, on Saturday the Twenty Seventh Day of October, 1705 (1705), A3. 57 University of Kansas, Spencer Research Library, Methuen–Simpson correspondence, MS c163, 4 Dec. 1705. 58 Jones, ‘Debates in the House of Lords’, 765. 59 Ibid., 765; Stuart Handley, ‘Montagu, Charles, Earl of Halifax (1661–1715)’, in ODNB. 60 Private Diary of William, 1st Earl Cowper (Roxburghe Club 49, 1833), 25, 6 Dec. 1705. 61 Jones, ‘Debates in the House of Lords’, 765. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 765. 64 Ibid., 765.

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books destroying the Church and infecting men’s minds with dangerous doctrine could be easily inverted. In response, Gilbert Burnet described a coterie of seditious preachers at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, enjoying the patronage and protection of the college whilst freely preaching against the revolution.65 Burnet’s comments went far beyond just denouncing two Oxford preachers. Tellingly, he described a ‘troop of dangerous writers’, formed around Sacheverell and Leslie, but not confined to them. They had promulgated a campaign to invoke the memory of 1641. By referring to the outbreak of the Civil War and the subsequent destruction of the Church, they were able to articulate a comparative contemporary account of the Church in peril, whilst avoiding potentially dangerous reference to the Glorious Revolution.66 Lord Wharton added William Binckes to the organised coterie of High Churchmen whom the ministry had failed to control. Like other Whig leaders, Wharton had objected to Binckes’s sermon on 30 January, preached before convocation three years earlier. Yet, his current complaint was as much to do with how Binckes had been treated as with the intellectual content of the sermon. Far from having his career curtailed by the scandal, he had been elected as prolocutor of the lower house of convocation. As Wharton noted, failing to control books and sermons in this way was a ‘shrewd temptation for taking the same way to get church preferment’.67 On 11 December the Commons held a parallel debate on the condition of the Church.68 There is less evidence on the progress of the debate in comparison to the Lords but John Pakington’s speech reveals the depth of High Church distaste for Anne’s policies. Pakington also employed the motif of fidelity to the Crown, praising the queen’s great affection and constant care of the Church; and sadly acknowledged the condition of the Church to be imperilled.69 He contended that the Church was in danger for three main reasons. First he railed against the great increase of Dissenting schools and seminaries throughout the country. They were places in which youth were ‘poisoned with principles which make them disaffected to the church, and considering the strict union between church and state I may say the Ibid., 766; William Tilly, The Nature and Necessity of Religious Resolution, in the Defence and Support of a Good Cause, in Times of Danger and Trial (1705); John Mather, A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford, at St Mary’s (Oxford, 1705). 66 Jones, ‘Church in Danger’, 766. Charles Leslie, The Principles of the Dissenters, concerning Toleration and Occasional Conformity (1705), 12; Samuel Grascome, Occasional Conformity a Most Unjustifiable Practice (1704), 46. 67 Jones, ‘Church in Danger’, 767; Tony Claydon, ‘Binckes, William (bap.1653, d.1712)’, in ODNB. 68 University of Kansas, Spencer Research Library, Methuen–Simpson correspondence, MS c163, 4 Dec. 1705. 69 Worcester County Record Office Packington letter b705:349.BA4657/(ii) ff.19–20. The speech is reproduced in ‘An Anonymous Parliamentary Diary, 1705–06’, ed., W.A. Speck, (4th series, 1969), 82–4. 65

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monarchy too’.70 His insistence on the strict union between Church and state and the danger caused by the establishment of Dissenting education was reinforced by a comparison between Dissenters and Catholicism. He asked his fellow parliamentarians to imagine papists building schools in the country; that practice, he suggested, would cause uproar and members would demand its cessation. Pakington reinforced his second point, his detestation of toleration, with further examples. The great increase of conventicles was equally concerning; and it was damaging to political stability. In Pakington’s view, far from being theological meeting places, they were ‘garrisons of sectaries’, used to promote poisonous ideas, contradicting Anglican education in schools and universities.71 Occasional conformity, which he cited as an example of hatred for the Church, was merely the tip of a political iceberg. Dissenters talked of toleration as a permanent establishment and right; given further encouragement they would seek to repeal all the laws made for the security of the Church.72 Pakington employed the situation in Scotland to add further evidence to his argument. The greatest danger to the Church in Scotland and perhaps in England was the Presbyterian Kirk. In addition to highlighting the potential problems caused by multiplicities of faith within a single Crown, the reference to Presbyterianism served as a historical reminder of the rebellious nature of Dissenters. They destroyed the church in 1641, ‘they believe and teach Episcopacy to be unlawful and contrary to the word of God’ and they would cause desolation to the Church of England.73 In taking up the relationship between the religious and the political, Pakington trod a delicate path, trying to avoid accusations of treason whilst at the same time maintaining his love for the Church and its importance to the maintenance of political stability.74 His was an approach that, with its sheen of an emphasis on the piety of the queen, and an outright cry of ‘Church in Danger’, opened up Pakington to charges that he himself was a crypto-Jacobite.75 Pakington overlay all of his previous fears, the unfettered political rights of Dissenters and their encroachment on the religious rights of the Church, with what he described as the ‘great liberty of the press’.76 The worst excesses of writing and publishing were now accepted; with writers allowed to attack the Church and clergy with impunity. Such excesses, he suggested, would 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid.

For discussions of the speeches concerned with occasional conformity see, An Account of the Proceedings of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament Assembled (1703), 29. 75 Charlwood Lawton, A Letter to a Member of Parliament, Relating to the Bill against Occasional Conformity (1703); Humphrey Mackworth, Peace at Home: or, a Vindication of the Proceedings of the Honourable House of Commons, on the Bill for Preventing Danger from Occasional Conformity (1703). 76 Worcester County Record Office Packington Letter b705:349.BA4657/(ii) ff.19–20. 74

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not be tolerated in ‘any Christian government, Popish or Protestant, but ours; not in Holland itself nor in Scotland’. The singling out of England as the most licentious country, not only suggested the present ministry was allowing people to practise vice and corruption, but that the providential claims of the queen and her personal piety were unlikely to be sustained. There never was such a liberty taken, he continued, but in the great rebellion, when the clergy were libelled out of the affections of the people before being deposed and destroyed. To Pakington, there was a direct line between the killers of the king in the mid-century and Dissenters in the early eighteenth century. Whilst he acknowledged that they had a legal toleration to worship God according to their own religions, Dissenters, through lax policy and political patronage, had extended their privileges to libel. This was an intolerable liberty and an impudent abuse; the time had now come for this house to: let them understand that it is not to be endured, and to put them in mind that an ill use of liberty is a just cause of abridging it, and when still abused after admonition a just cause of taking it quite away. Let the toleration be inviolably maintained, but not the ill use thereof.77

Pakington was not the only author to complain about the nature of the press during the occasional conformity controversies. To some, many of the wider problems of lax expression found their origins in parliament. Not only had MPs failed to legislate against the press; they themselves were guilty of breaching their own rules. The fraught political temperature of Anne’s early years were heated by constant appeals to the public. One anonymous author noted how MPs had distorted the correct relationship between parliament and people. ‘We appeal and nominate you as the wise men of our nation’, he commented, ‘but you now appeal to us, as if you have no wisdom at all’.78 Yet, the result of this new advanced form of political engagement was not concord, but an escalation of religious and political tension. On this reading, the liberty of the press would be the ruin of the nation, it would end in destruction and return the country to popery and slavery.79 To others the public nature of the debates, the discussion of the relationship between Church and state, allowed another theme to be reinforced: the pernicious nature of freedom of expression, and the connection of Dissent with further heterodox opinions. Humphrey Mackworth, for example, asked of the Dissenters and their supporters, whether they are sure ‘there are no lurking 77 Ibid.

A dialogue between a member of parliament, a divine, a lawyer, a freeholder, a shopkeeper and a country farmer (1703), 4. 79 Ibid., 5–7; Daniel Defoe, A serious inquiry into this grand question; whether a law to prevent the occasional conformity of dissenters, would not be inconsistent with the Act of Toleration (1704). 78

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deists, no Socinian politicians, who are striving for power and dominion, under the specious pretences of liberty of conscience’.80 Another author took the occasional conformity debates to outline all the heresies within the Church, which were being used to corrupt the minds of all people.81 In the end the Whigs prevailed on the issue of the Church in Danger in both the Lords and the Commons.82 The Lords committee tasked with reporting on the issue noted that the Church had been saved by William III and was equally blessed by the current queen. The Commons concurred and agreed that any person suggesting that the Church was in danger was an enemy to the queen, the Church and the kingdom. 83 This position, with advice from the Privy Council, was accepted in full by the queen and a day later she issued a proclamation, reinforcing the assertion of the Lords. Much like previous attempts to control free expression, the Church in Danger proclamation used the full weight of the local and central state to bear against errant authors: existing laws should be employed with the utmost severity and ministers and magistrates were commanded to take ‘effectual care for the speedy apprehension, prosecution and punishment of all such persons’.84 The Church in Danger debates, expressed in the subsequent proclamation, reflected previous issues and attempted to remake future policy. The claims and counter-claims of clerical machinations were not just the product of partisan politics. Instead, the debates revealed genuine concern with how the press and the pulpit were being exploited to question religious truths, destabilise the polity and, crucially, to meddle in politics. At the same time, the proclamation attempted to set the new conditions for the pulpit and the press by outlawing certain criticisms of the Church and religious policy. But we should be in no doubt what the proclamation meant. Despite previous failures to pass press legislation and claims that convocation had no legal right to restrain books, Whigs and their clerical allies had effectively outlawed the right of High Churchmen to question the legality of the revolution settlement, occasional conformity or the licentious press when it attacked the foundations of the Church. From late 1705, it was scandalous and seditious to print that the Church was in danger. Indeed, figures who were the most adept defenders of the Church and what they considered to be the Williamite settlement were well aware of the thrust of High Church criticisms. In April 1706, White Kennett drafted a visitation sermon. No doubt, he commented to the clergy, many of you

Peace at Home, 11. Samuel Grascome, Schism triumphant (1707), 3–4. 82 University of Kansas, Spencer Research Library, Methuen–Simpson correspondence, MS c163, 4 Dec. 1705. 83 London Gazette, 3 Dec. 1705, By the Queen a Proclamation. 84 Ibid. 80 Mackworth, 81

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may be discouraged at rumours and reports of the Church in danger.85 If High Churchmen were to be believed, he continued, all churchmen were in danger from ‘atheists, schismatics and libertines’.86 Echoing lines from Tenison, White Kennett informed the clergy that the attacks on the Church were nothing new and they had never stood on firmer ground. Both the Memorial and High Church sermons were an artificial cry against Dissenters, the ministry and the bishops, when in fact there was no real danger to the Church.87 But the attempt to paint High Churchmen as having little to complain about was very quickly derailed by the publication of another controversial book. The Rights of the Christian Church

Attempts to locate the author of the Memorial continued and failed.88 Nevertheless, if the Whigs and their clerical allies assumed that the proclamation against the Church in danger might curb the High Church campaign against the licentiousness of the press and the abuses of the Church, they were in for a rude awakening, if for no other reason than High Churchmen bitterly resented what they saw as a campaign to silence them. As Charles Leslie commented, if new laws needed to be put in force against errant publications, then why had they not been applied properly to John Toland or Gilbert Burnet, why were both books allowed to parade in multiple editions? ‘Either laws are asleep, or in force’, he commented. In the last ten years the press had teemed with offensive publications that had been left unanimadverted upon. But now there were clamours from Whig churchmen to prosecute those who could not be guilty of breaching the law, as they were stating orthodox doctrine.89 Within months, High Church anger at the laxity of the press found a new focus. On 9 April 1706, the Daily Courant carried an advertisement for a new book published that day, the Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, against the Romish, and all other Priests.90 The publication history of the Rights attests to the issues caused for the authorities when faced by a book they considered problematic. The Rights had no publication details, except that it was available 85

BL Lansdowne MS 996, f.121v, Speech at the Visitation holden at Huntingdon, 16 Apr. 1706. 86 BL Lansdowne MS 996, f.121v, Speech at the Visitation holden at Huntingdon, 16 Apr. 1706. 87 BL Lansdowne MS 996, f.123v, Speech at the Visitation holden at Huntingdon, 16 Apr. 1706. 88 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 277, –––– to Lord Godolphin, 3 Jan. 1706; HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 277–8, HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 278, Lord Godolphin to Robert Harley, 9 Jan. 1706. 89 Charles Leslie, The Case of the Church of England’s Memorial, 26. 90 The Daily Courant, 9 Apr. 1706.

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to buy at Benjamin Bragg’s shop, the Raven in Paternoster Row, just by St Paul’s Cathedral. Nevertheless, rumours circulated within days of who was responsible. On 9 April, Thomas Hearne noted in his diary that Henry Clements, Sacheverell’s trusted publisher, had informed him that ‘Dr Tyndal of All-Souls is author, whom he saw present one in London to a friend of his, the same principles with the Doctor.’91 Hearne wasted no time in letting his friends at Oxford University know that Matthew Tindal was responsible for the book, describing it to various friends as ‘execrable’ and cursed.92 Yet, responsibility for the book leaked only slowly to the wider public. A year later, Charles Leslie dedicated his reply with my service to ‘Dr Tindall and Mr Collins’, but George Hickes appears to have remained unaware of Tindal’s responsibility, baiting the author ‘when you please, sir, to make a reply, I hope you will put your name to it … and thereby show the world, that you are neither ashamed or afraid to own what you have written’.93 Hickes’s baiting had no effect. As we have seen in 1704, Tindal maintained that political and religious criticism was reliant on anonymity being preserved, and he steadfastly refused to put his name to publications throughout his career.94 Only in 1721 did he privately acknowledge his authorship in a letter to the earl of Sunderland.95 Tindal’s decision to preserve his anonymity was sensible, for his book caused instant offence. Within a month, authors started to reply. George Hickes suggested there was as much blasphemous malice in the Rights as there was in the Growth of Deism, and another author suggested it was blasphemous, profane and immoral.96 Considering how controversial the Rights was, it has received relatively little attention from historians. Where there has been debate, historians have concentrated on understanding how Tindal tried to resolve the relationship between Church and state so that toleration might be permanently embedded in England. At this point, the understanding of Rights begins to coalesce with a broader set of arguments concerning the nature of the early English Enlightenment. The origins of Tindal’s work, whether it found its inspiration in the more radical enlightenment of the English Republican tradition, the moderate Lockean Enlightenment or within a learned Anglican tradition, are taken as signs of the broader intellectual C.E. Doble (ed.), The Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1885–1918), i, 223. 92 Bod. MS Rawl 9 f.170, Elisha Smith to Thomas Hearne, 20 Apr. 1706; Bod MS Rawl 9 f.176, Elisha Smith to Thomas Hearne, 20 June 1706. 93 Charles Leslie, The Second Part of the Wolf Strip (1707), frontispiece; George Hickes, Two Treatises, one of the Christian Priesthood, the other of the Dignity of the Episcopal Order (1707), epistle to the reader. 94 Barber, ‘The Voice of the People, No Voice of God’, appendices. 95 BL Add. MS 61650 f.87, Matthew Tindal to the earl of Sunderland, 2 Au. 1721. 96 Hickes, Two Treatises, 143; Dangerous Positions: or, Blasphemous, Profane and Immoral, and Jesuitical Assertions, Faithfully Discovered by way of Information to the Christian Magistrate (1708). 91

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shift away from theology and towards inculcating virtue and morality as the aim of civil religion.97 Valuable as these interpretations are, they emphasise a long-term context for the Rights that downplays the influence of the early eighteenth-century clerical fightback against heterodox publications. In fact, the preaching and publications of men like Henry Sacheverell in the previous decade had caused Tindal to alter his position. In 1706, he insisted that men could possess, ‘no Power over one another except what’s reciprocal’.98 In the civil sphere the magistrate was supreme, but he could only adjudge on the ‘Preservation of the Life, Liberty, Limbs and Goods’ of man.99 This section of the Rights was largely a reproduction of his work on the power of the magistrate from 1697, with one significant alteration.100 In 1706, having seen the High Church campaign, Tindal sought to prove that there could not be two independent powers in the country, contending that ‘the Doctrine of Two Independent Governments, one belonging to the Clergy by Divine, the other to the King and Parliament by Human Right, is inconsistent with the Constitution of the Establish’d Church’.101 In 1697 his anticlericalism was more forgiving, prepared to allow the clergy some power to instruct their flock. By 1706, in the religious sphere, the magistrate held supreme power to instruct the clergy ‘where the Good of Society requires it’ and could ‘fight for the Safety of his Country against Men of his Church and Religion’.102 The Church, ‘taken in the sense of the Scripture’, signified only a collection of ‘Christian People’ and was ‘sometimes with, and sometimes without their Ministers’.103 For many churchmen, of various positions, this was a deeply offensive position. Tindal dismissed the intimate relationship between Church and state, produced a definition of the Church that emphasised voluntarism and stripped any sacramental power from the clergy. Indeed, for Tindal, the clergy had throughout history forced their way into the Church to ‘enslave the people’.104 This alteration in Tindal’s position can be explained by the change in public debate over the previous ten years. In his work on the magistrate, he had maintained that there should be a ‘free Permission from the Pulpit, or

Pillars of Priestctaft Shaken, 97–8, 136–7; Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 265–6; Dimitri Levitin, ‘Matthew Tindal’s “Rights of the Christian Church” (1706) and the Church–State Relationship’, HJ, 54 (2011), 717–40. 98 Matthew Tindal, The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, against the Romish and all other Priests who claim an Independent Power over it (1706), 6. 99 Ibid., 11. 100 Matthew Tindal, An Essay concerning the Power of the Magistrate, and the Rights of Mankind, in Matters of Religion (1697). 101 Tindal, The Rights of the Christian Church, v. 102 Ibid., 20. 103 Ibid., lxxxvii. 104 Ibid., lxxxvii. 97 Champion,

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press, for Men of different Opinions to Propose their Reasons to the People’.105 As we have seen, Atterbury, Binckes, Milbourne and Sacheverell, joined by Francis Higgins, Samuel Hilliard, Charles Lambe, William Tilly, Richard Welton, Nathaniel Whaley and Samuel Hill, used the press and pulpit to promote their message. Concerned at the popularity of High Churchmen, Tindal abandoned his previously lax attitude to the pulpit. Far from a space in which the truth could be spoken, by 1706, in the Rights, the pulpit had been a space where High Churchmen trampled on the ‘Laws and Libertys of the People’.106 A keen observer of contemporary clerical politics, Tindal provided his readers with specific examples of High Church excess. He attacked William Tilly, who had preached a radical sermon on passive obedience, as an example of tyrannous clerical ambition. Nor was Tilly a singular case. Tindal larded his Rights with comments on specific clerical opponents. Far from only being a complex ideological account of the relationship between Church and state, his book was very much concerned with the emergence of effective preaching: it was au fond a reaction to the power of a newly emboldened High Church clergy. In 1706, because of the strength and effectiveness of High Church preaching, the link between anticlericalism and the freedom of the press took on more urgency. Once again, Tindal maintained there was little significant difference between Protestant and Catholic priesthood. Protestant priests had betrayed the Reformation, the beginnings of their faith, and should now allow a ‘general Liberty of reading the Scripture’.107 Any attempt at restriction demonstrated a continued adherence to the ‘Badges of Popery’. Evidence of the tyrannous ambitions of the priesthood could be found in recent history. The imposition of penal laws and restraint of the press imposed by Laudian bishops using ‘the High Commission Court and Star Chamber’ had given the clergy ‘as great a Power over the People as the Popish Clergy’ and provided them with an independent power.108 All priests, Tindal insisted, would rather enforce ‘Ecclesiastical and Civil Penaltys’ than engage with, and answer, challenging ideas. As pressure from men like William Tilly increased, Tindal became determined to defend the press as not just a means of acquiring religious truth, but as an essential defence against clerical claims, he insisted that, were censorship to be enacted, priestly tyranny ‘would be effectually done’.109 Tindal’s Rights posed a very dangerous problem for the political and religious establishment: could they allow another book that offended Church and lay people – many of whom considered it to be simultaneously blasphemous and seditious – to go unrestrained. Always an astute reader of the public mood, Harley, along with the Whig junto, resisted any attempt An Essay Concerning the Power of the Magistrate, 78. The Rights of the Christian Church, 78, 283. 107 Ibid., 410. 108 Ibid., 412–13. 109 Ibid., 226. 105 Tindal, 106 Tindal,

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to launch an official prosecution. Archbishop Tenison faced the same challenge. Failing to prosecute Tindal might well enflame High Church critics further, convincing them that if the bishops did not welcome Tindal’s attacks, their own sympathy for Latitudinarianism precluded a prosecution. Shortly after publication, for example, Rowland Cotton wrote to Thomas Jervoise commented that the Rights contains the ‘Principles & Doctrines of Low Church & truly I can not but commend the sincerity of ye Author, he speaks plain English & discovers to us, & avows the tenets, wch we always thought that party held, tho’ they had the Art to conceal’.110 Cotton confirmed the fears of many High Churchmen, for ‘the Low Church have pull’d off their mask & have publish’d to ye world their Principles’.111 Such a position was deliberately political, occluding, as it did, the distaste felt by many bishops for Tindal’s attitude to the Church. Indeed, William Wotton, an ally of both Archbishop Tenison and Bishop Wake, explicated the problem in his own response to the Rights. How, he wondered, was it that many books that supported religion had been neutered by successive press proclamations, while Tindal’s ‘seditious as well as Unchristian’ book was seemingly protected and defended.112 Many of Tindal’s contemporaries were more than disgruntled with his book. Joseph McCormick in a letter to William Carstares considered the book to be against ‘Episcopacy and Presbytery’ and the best evidence for ‘a design, both against the protestant religion in general, and the succession in person’.113 Although Archbishop Tenison tended to eschew religious controversy, emphasising instead the unity of the visible Church, it is clear that a new controversial book caused him some concern.114 Within weeks of publication, William Lloyd commented to him that the book was ‘writ with a great deal of rebel-craft & atheist-craft to pull down all Government in Church & State wt imputation & ye men of yt party please to throw upon them under ye names of King-craft & priest-craft’.115 Privately, Gilbert Burnet informed the archbishop, ‘as for Tindal’s book, I shall be sorry if any of our friends answer it for so much must be yielded if we will defend the Reformation that it will raise a new controversy for hot people will think the Church is given up by what is yielded’.116 Despite Burnet’s 110 Hampshire

Record Office, Winchester 44M69/F6/8/18, n.f., Rowland Cotton to Thomas Jervoise, 19 Apr. 1707. 111 Ibid. 112 William Wotton, The Rights of the Clergy in the Christian Church Asserted (1706), 22–3; David Stoker, Wotton, William (1666–1727), in ODNB. 113 Joseph M’Cormick (ed.), State-Papers and Letters Addressed to William Carstares (Edinburgh, 1774), 775–6. 114 Thomas Tenison, A Discourse Concerning a Guide in Matters of Faith with Respect especially to the Romish Presence of the Necessity of such as one is Infallible (1683), 4–5. 115 Lambeth Palace Library MS 931, 18, William Lloyd to Thomas Tenison, 9 Oct. 1706. 116 Lambeth Palace Library MS 930, 12, Gilbert Burnet to Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, 15 June 1706.

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entreaties, replies flowed from the presses, with one author commenting that there was no longer any need to read the book, for there were so many ‘clear and pregnant Replies’.117 Prosecuting the Rights of the Christian Church

Multiple replies did not put a stop to calls for restraint. How, one cleric asked Tenison, could a second edition of the book strut in public, when it so obviously set out to ‘destroy all Ecclesiastical Power in the Laity, and to destroy the whole Hierarchy?’118 In a published conversation, Tenison desperately fought his corner. The problem, he suggested, was that the author had carefully hidden his identity. Treating Tenison with derision, the anonymous churchman replied, ‘as to the Man’s denying it, Cou’d your G. expect he would confess it? And is there no way of discovering him, but by his own Confession?’119 Tenison, of course, already knew that Tindal was the author. What was being played out in print was a severe fracture between the ecclesiastical establishment and the lower clergy over the status of unorthodox books. Tenison’s desperate attempt to damp down religious debate was a failure in many people’s eyes. For High Churchmen it was the archbishop’s duty to ‘enquire after and suppress such books, and to bring their Authors to condign Punishment’. Any suggestion that books should be answered was met with the reply, ‘get em punish’d, or at the least discountenanced. This wou’d be the most effectual way to answer such Wretches and their Writings.’120 The refusal of the ecclesiastical authorities to outlaw the Rights did not preclude a prosecution. As Harley had maintained, and as previous proclamations demonstrated, extant legislation encouraged people to instigate prosecutions with the support of magistrates.121 Dangerous Positions, an anonymous tract published in 1708, was a standard refutation of Tindal and stands as an excellent example of what so many people found so offensive. The Rights was an ‘impious and blaspheming Book’, which derided the deity and ‘charges our Blessed Lord himself with that notorious Work of the Devil’.122 The author’s intellectual attack was buttressed by the reprinting 117 Censura

Temporum (1708), 81. Leslie and Francis Higgins, A Postscript to Mr. Higgins’s Sermon: Very Necessary for the Better Understanding of It (1707), 3. 119 Ibid., 3. 120 Ibid., 4. 121 William and Mary, By the King and Queen, A Proclamation for the Better Discovery of Seditious Libellers (1692); Anne, By the Queen, A Proclamation, for Restraining the Spreading of False News, and Printing and Publishing of Irreligious and Seditious Papers and Libels (1702). 122 Dangerous Positions, or, Blasphemous, Profane, Immoral and Jesuitical Assertions (1708), preface, unpaginated. 118 Charles

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of Anne’s 1702 proclamation against blasphemy. Emphasising the godly duty of all magistrates to punish errant expression, the unknown author publicly reminded Thomas Lewis, a local magistrate, that he had previously demonstrated an ‘exemplary Zeal for the Preservation of Christianity’. Constraining blasphemy, he reminded Lewis, was ‘by Law happily establish’d in this Church’, and he expected the magistrate to fulfil his duty and prosecute Tindal, who was an ’avowed despiser of Revealed Religion, and all the Ordinances of Christianity’.123 Throughout his tract, the author of Dangerous Positions worried that books endangered salvation. It was essential, he argued, to restrain the ‘Impious and Seditious Tendency of these pretended Rights’, and his response to Tindal’s book existed only ‘to inform Persons, more Learned than my self, of the Errors in Doctrine, and the Unscholarly like Artifices which appear every where, even when the Assertor pretends to Learning’.124 Thomas Lewis did not respond to the entreaty to prosecute Matthew Tindal. However, in December 1707, Samuel Hilliard, a High Churchman, accepted the task. Little is known of Hilliard. White Kennett thought him a friend of Sacheverell who represented his enemies as ‘betrayers of the church’.125 His sermons suggest sympathy for Atterbury’s and Milbourne’s theological position, rejecting virtue as the prerequisite for salvation, alongside a keen emphasis on the pains of hell being pointed out to parishioners and a rejection for any justification for infidelity.126 Hilliard’s Narrative, written in the aftermath of the collapse of his attempted prosecution, offers an almost unique opportunity to study how attempts were made to restrain books and authors after the lapse of licensing. His account, of course, brings with it certain problems for the historian. His account of the trial was a blatant attempt at self-justification written in the face of public provocation by Tindal.127 By being aware of the limitations of the source and by carefully piecing together other fragmentary evidence of the prosecution, we can gain an impression of the increasing anger of High Churchmen at the failure of what they perceived as the Whig Establishment to find a solution to the latitude of free expression in the aftermath of the lapse of licensing. Samuel Hilliard described his attempted prosecution of Tindal’s Rights as pure chance. Having received an invitation to dine with the Grand-Jurors of Middlesex, he was persuaded by Mr Justice Smith to exploit the meeting to attain a presentment of the obnoxious Rights. Hilliard’s attempted prosecution of Tindal was not pure chance. Rather, Anne’s proclamations 123 Ibid.,

preface. preface. 125 White Kennett, The Wisdom of Looking Backward, to Judge the Better of one Side and the Other (1715), 13. 126 Samuel Hilliard, A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral-Church of St Paul (1709), 6. 127 Samuel Hilliard, A Narrative of the Prosecution of Mr. Sare and his servant, for Selling the Rights of the Christian Church (1708). 124 Ibid.,

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against the press were designed to allow private prosecutions that could, if necessary, be taken over by higher legal authority. The nature of the legal process of restraint was aggravated by the lack of clarity as to what constituted illegality. Neither the Blasphemy Act (1698) nor the Treason Act (1708) contained exact definitions of what could or could not be expressed.128 Despite this, the law did require a presentment to demonstrate specifically what the complainant thought was illegal, seditious and blasphemous in the Rights. Hilliard’s quest for a presentment demonstrates the loathing for Tindal’s book across the religious spectrum. He personally met with White Kennett, future bishop of Peterborough and a confidant of Tenison, who had already drawn up a comprehensive presentment. In addition, Hilliard analysed the attacks on the Rights in Charles Leslie’s periodical the Rehearsal, and he consulted George Hickes’s Christian Priesthood. Hickes, Leslie and White Kennett were not men who necessarily shared political and religious values. Nevertheless, their detestation for the Rights ensured they wrote responses to Tindal, emphasising his historical inaccuracies and epistemological illogicality. In effect, then, the analysis of Tindal’s illegality had been done for Hilliard. A series of responses emphasised how the Rights reduced the Church to possessing no more power than ‘private Companies and Clubs’. Equally, the denigration of the sacred nature of the priesthood was considered to be an affront to religious orthodoxy and blasphemous. The Rights, Hilliard railed, described a clerk as possessing the same amount of sacred power as a priest, as the whole priesthood by reducing consecration to nothing more than a simple act of conjuration.129 The book was a scandalous promoter of ‘Sedition and Prophaneness’.130 Hilliard’s presentment asked the court to apprehend the author, printer and publisher and to burn the book publicly. As the author remained unknown – at least to Hilliard – he was advised by a juror to buy a fresh copy of the Rights and prosecute the bookseller. The point was to find some way of pressurising the book trade to reveal Tindal as the author. Hilliard’s chosen victim was a bookseller named Mr Sare.131 Unfortunately for Hilliard, he had chosen badly. Sare was made of stern stuff and refused to reveal any details, for it would be a ‘betraying of his trade’.132 Even worse was to come, for Sare was a well-connected man. He had published White Kennett’s books in the 1690s, was a friend of William Wake and had been one of the most important publishers for the bishops in the convocation 128 An

Act for the more Effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Prophaneness, 9 Will. C.35 (1698); Treason. A Supplement to the Abridgement of all the Statutes of King William and Queen Mary, and of King William III. and Queen Anne (1708). 129 Hilliard, A Narrative of the Prosecution, 6–8. 130 Ibid., 8. 131 For Sare see: John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705), 296; Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers. 132 Hilliard, A Narrative of the Prosecution, 17.

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disputes of the early eighteenth century. In fact, Sare only held copies of Tindal’s books so that it could be bought with Hickes’s rejoinder; Hickes was also a personal friend of Sare. At this point, Hilliard’s case appears to have collapsed. White Kennett, who had previously been supportive, informed Hilliard that that Mr Sare is as ‘Honest a Man as any in England’. Hilliard was left fuming and humiliated. ‘It is high time some stop should be put to the prevailing Corruption among Booksellers’, he railed, ‘which is arriv’d to so great an height that if any one would be so wicked as to write a Satyr against God Almighty himself … there would be found those among ’em would greedily vend it for the sake of a Six-penny Profit.’133 Once again, anonymity protected an author. Hilliard’s new presentment failed because a mistake had been made in the indictment, with the letter R missing from Christ. Hilliard appears to have taken the mistake at face value. However, unknown to Hilliard and to most scholars, writing badly worded presentments was likely a deliberate ploy used by various ministries to discontinue cases that had become too politically sensitive. For example, the prosecution of John Tutchin fell on 24 October 1704, when the wrong date was entered in the indictment. Obviously frustrated, Lord Chief Justice Holt speculated the mistake could be by ‘way of Negligence, or for want of Skill’.134 Holt may have accepted the mistake as pure bad luck, but one commentator believed the case was lost by the ‘Direction of some of his great Friends on Purpose’.135 Equally, the same practice was used to halt an indictment in the case of the Memorial. Indeed, it was so obvious that Daniel Defoe called for an enquiry in parliament ‘to have it fully clear’d up, and the Reputation both of Judges, Advocates, Lawyers, and all concern’d, discharg’d by Parliament of all Suspicion of Mismanagement, or censur’d and punish’d, if they deserve it’.136 Whether someone in the ministry or in Tenison’s retinue deliberately killed the prosecution is difficult to prove. It is equally difficult to unpick the attitude towards the prosecution of the different wings of the Church. We know that Henry Compton, bishop of London, directed Hilliard to use Robin Stephens to uncover the author, and he was aided by Sir Edward Northey, Mr Handcock and Sir Peter King. The involvement of these men does, at the very least, reveal concern at the highest level of politics for the success of the prosecution. Northey had been attorney general and was the lead lawyer in the prosecution of John Tutchin, whilst King was a prominent independent Whig, who was offered the post of solicitor general and would eventually become Lord Chancellor. We know also that some High Churchmen suggested Tindal’s work was dealt with leniently because of his political connections. Thomas Hearne 133 Ibid.,

26. Complete Collection of State-Trials, the Fifth Volume (1730), 574. 135 John Rayner, A Digest of the Law Concerning Libels (1765), 76. 136 The Review, 7 Dec. 1708. 134 A

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noted in his diary that John Potter had written a dull and ineffectual response to the Rights, because he was ‘afraid of displeasing some great Men of the same stamp with ye Author of ye wicked tract’.137 That Potter was theologically a High Churchman – although politically supportive of the Glorious Revolution – was irrelevant to Hearne. He seems genuinely to have thought that Tindal was being defended by elite political figures who shared his ‘Republican’ beliefs.138 Tindal’s Responses to his Prosecution

As perhaps Tenison had feared, the attempted prosecution of the Rights was not without its risks. Once again, High Churchmen took the opportunity to represent Tenison as supportive of heterodox publication. In the aftermath of the botched prosecution, William Wake wrote again to the archbishop complaining, ‘Who are they yt took ye most care to defend the Ch? I believe most of the books he complains of were answr’d by men of our side of the Convocn controversy. Witness the Rights of the Ch.’139 The prosecution provided Tindal with opportunities for more publicity. The presentment of the Rights was placed in the Postman and pasted as a broadsheet throughout London, but within four days Tindal replied.140 In a Letter to a Friend he placed the accusations of the presentment directly next to the corresponding sections of his own text. Suggesting Hilliard’s prosecution was egregious, Tindal noted that the presentment ‘quite alter’d’ the sense of the work, reflecting the ‘impotent’ and ‘malicious’ behaviour of Hilliard. Perhaps worse, Hilliard exposed himself to Tindal’s charge that all priests were lazy and tyrannous. Again, the instruction of a Letter to a Friend pointed the reader to the correct interpretation. ‘I am sorry to hear’, Tindal wrote, ‘that the Informer is a Minister of the Church of England’, but the ‘best Religion has the Misfortune to have the worst Priests’, and there are certain Priests, who are no better than ‘Spiritual Make-baits’.141 The only way to find spiritual truth was to read the Rights; indeed, ‘this Presentment will do some Good in the World; for I believe it will occasion the reading of one of the best Books that has been publish’d in our Age, by many more People, than otherwise would have read it’.142 The Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, vii, 88. 99. 139 Bodleian Library MS Eng. C. 3191, f.1r William Wake to Thomas Tenison, 24 Sept. 1708. 140 Hilliard, A Narrative of the Prosecution, 15. 141 Matthew Tindal, A Letter to a Friend. Occasion’d by the Presentment of the Grand Jury for the County of Middlesex (1708), 1. 142 Ibid 1. 137 Doble, 138 Ibid.

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Stung by Tindal’s criticism, Hilliard replied. Sometime in 1708, he released an Answer to the Letter to a Friend.143 Denying his misrepresentation of Tindal’s book, he insisted the Rights was seditious, profane and blasphemous, but he also admitted there was now no chance that the author would be prosecuted. Hilliard reserved his ire for those who had refused to do their public duty for the Church. He claimed that Whig clerics were complacent in the face of free-thinking attacks. ‘Though I might reasonably have expected Assistance from all Well-wishers to the Church and Establishment’, Hilliard lamented, ‘the only return I have met with after so great Trouble and Expence, is to be Abus’d, and revil’d by some, for having done it; small Encouragement for any one after me, to attempt a Publick Service, tho’ it be against the profess’d Enemies of the Church and Establishment.’144 Tindal showed no such desire to desist from the public debate. He took most of the next year preparing his Second Defence of the Rights. Again, the work was entirely anonymous with no bookseller information, but it was available from Abigail Baldwin’s shop in Warwick Lane. As with so many of Tindal’s writings, his new book could also be purchased at a discount with his First Defence of the Rights and Jean le Clerc’s positive extract of the Rights. The provision for reading Tindal’s tracts together was crucial for his wider project. The use of trade publishers, no doubt, was designed to defend his anonymity, but they were also employed to do his bidding. Tindal had learnt his lessons in John Darby’s shop in Bartholomew Close in the late 1690s. He had come to realise that combining books was an increasingly effective means of reinforcing the doctrinal and political claims he was making. He hoped that each of his publications had value, but, to understand fully his intellectual ambition, he maintained that the interested reader must read three books together, ‘the Discourse for the Liberty of the Press, the Essay Concerning the Rights of Mankind in Matters of Religion, as well as the Rights of the Christian Church’.145 In the Second Defence, Tindal baited his old tutor, the Nonjuror George Hickes. He mocked him for a lack of intellectual consistency in lambasting Tindal for undermining the power of the Church, whilst not himself adhering to the institution he claimed to be defending. Finally, so Tindal claimed, Hickes had encouraged replies to the Rights, whilst at the same time baiting him to reveal his authorship, so that ‘vexatious and expensive Trials, Fines, Imprisonments, &c.’, could be enforced.146 In turn, Hickes lambasted the Rights and the Replies. Tindal was but one of a selection of writers who were ‘monsters of Unbelief and Blasphemy’. Were they to go unrestrained, Hickes informed his readers, they would ‘write publickly against Hilliard, An Answer to the Letter to a Friend Occasion’d by the Presentment of the Grand Jury for the County of Middlesex (1708). 144 Hilliard, A Narrative of the Prosecution, 29. 145 Matthew Tindal, A Second Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church (1708), 81. 146 Ibid. 6. 143 Samuel

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Scripture-making’ and would eventually persuade many of the nation that ‘Church Government, and Discipline is nothing but the Invention, and Craft of Priests’.147 In fact, Tindal took the time to attack every reply to his Rights.148 Once again, he was keen to clarify the importance of the freedom of the press to his project. He maintained throughout the Second Defence that it was the liberty of the press that secured all other liberties, and that the Rights had been battered by ‘heavy Artillery from the Press, while 1000 random Shot have been made at it from Pulpit Blunderbusses’.149 And, of course, he asserted the inevitable: no man had any right to judge or punish another man because of his religious views, and yet all priests continued to assert the desire for ‘Tyranny over the Consciences of the People, as they did formerly in the Popish Times’.150 The publication and failed prosecution of the Rights illustrates the problems caused by the lapse of licensing and the failure to settle how the press should be used in the early eighteenth century. Samuel Hilliard lamented that Tindal’s book should have offered the opportunity and motive to: excite all that are in Authority, (Bodies Corporate especially) to demonstrate their concern for Christianity and our Constitution; for this is a Business that requires the Heads and Hands of a Community: And if any one Body of Men in the Kingdom would but thus resolve to act for the good of the Church, the Queen, and Government, we should soon be sensible of the good Effects of it; we should have a speedy stop put to that Brood of Schism, Heresy, Blasphemy, and Rebellion, that daily comes abroad into the World, to the Debauching of Men’s Minds and Manners, and the preparing a way for the Overthrow both of Church and State, which must certainly be the consequence of it, if not speedily prevented.151

George Hickes was just as disillusioned, contending that ‘we must get some Propositions out of that Book condemn’d’, writing later in 1708 that every good Christian must do his duty and ‘put a Stop to such prevailing Impieties’.152 On 7 February 1708, Maurice Wheeler wrote to William Wake. He commented to his friend that he had been reading a recently published pamphlet entitled Utrum Horum, or Never a Barrell ye Better Herring.153 The purpose of the book, mused Wheeler, was to mortify churchmen and elicit replies and public debate. Once again, he commented, we will have ‘bearbaiting enough to divert the whole nation’. Whilst Wheeler did not Hickes, Two Treatises, one of the Christian Priesthood, the other of the Dignity of the Episcopal Order (1707), unpaginated preface. 148 See page 31 where he names four authors in one page. 149 Hickes, Two Treatises, 7. 150 Ibid.,16. 151 Hilliard, A Narrative of the Prosecution, 29–30. 152 Hickes, Two Treatises, 24. 153 Christ Church, Wake Letters 23, no.188, Maurice Wheeler to William Wake, 7 Feb. 1709. 147 George

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know who the author was, he considered ‘he seems to be one of that club, Tindal etc., who wrote the Rights of the Christian Church’.154 Wheeler was correct in his assumption. Utrum Horum, better known as New High-Church Turn’d Old Presbyterian, was written by Matthew Tindal. He had carefully concealed his responsibility but the tract shows all the signs of his work.155 It attacked High Churchmen for their hypocrisy. In recent years they had changed their minds, ‘today they shall represent a doctrine as damnable, tomorrow another as damnable’.156 The doctrine Tindal had in mind was the power and status of the Church. Previously, he suggested, High Churchmen had condemned Presbyterians for maintaining the Church’s independent status from the Civil Magistrate. Repeating the claim made in the Rights of the Christian Church, Tindal maintained that the High Church project was designed to produce an independent church equipped with the authority to coerce all of the laity. On one level, then, Utrum Horum was simply a restatement of his Rights in significantly shorter form. But Tindal’s new tract reinforced another reality of early eighteenth-century religious politics. To demonstrate his point, he reproduced a number of assertions made by High Churchmen: Francis Atterbury, William Binckes, Jeremy Collier, George Hickes, Samuel Hilliard, Charles Leslie and Henry Sacheverell, all of whom had recently written or preached in support of an independent church. Tindal was well aware that he faced a coherent set of churchmen who employed both the pulpit and scribbling to promote their own ideological positions.157 The next chapter considers the context in which Tindal’s work took place: the campaign by High Churchmen to employ the pulpit to promote their responses to the settlement of the Glorious Revolution.

154 Christ

Church, Wake Letters 23, no.188, Maurice Wheeler to William Wake, 7 Feb. 1709. Tindal], New High-Church Turn’d Old Presbyterian (1709). 156 Ibid., 1. 157 Ibid., 8. 155 [Matthew

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8 The Press and the Pulpit: Prosecuting Preaching In the midst of the trial of Henry Sacheverell, an anonymous author published the Judgment of the Whole Kingdoms and Nations.1 The tract repurposed material from Vox Populi, Vox Dei (1709), which had in turn used material from Robert Ferguson’s Brief Justification for the Prince of Orange’s Descent into England (1689). The multiple editions of the book freed it from direct association with Ferguson (d.1714), a notorious Whig plotter who had championed Monmouth’s invasion in the 1680s.2 An extended and digressive account of the Glorious Revolution, the Judgment summed up the Whig understanding of politics in the previous twenty years, taking in the origins of government, the evidence for the ancient constitution and the right to popular resistance. But, applied to the trial of Sacheverell, the tract tells a different story from merely a repetition of Whig political thinking. On the frontispiece, the book issued a challenge to ‘Dr Hicks, Dr Atterbury, Dr Welton, Mr Milbourne, Mr Higgins, Mr Lesley, Mr Collier, Mr Whaley and Mr Tilly of Oxford and the great Champion Dr Sacheverell or any other person to answer this book’.3 In its challenge, the Judgment acknowledged a key factor of religious politics of the last few years. After their initial hopes for Anne’s succession, High Churchmen – at least in the eyes of their Whig opponents – had formed a formidable coterie of preachers and pamphleteers, challenging ecclesiastical policy and promoting their positions from the press and the pulpit. Indeed, George Ridpath, author of The Observator after the death of John Tutchin, was keen to point out that Sacheverell could be included in the ‘unchristian Opinions of our Dodwell’s, Hick’s, Lesley’s, Higgins’s and Sacheverell’s’.4 The last two chapters have demonstrated the intellectual thrust of the High Church campaign against the press and why certain churchmen and politicians considered unfettered publication to be so dangerous. They also The Judgment of the Whole Kingdoms and Nations, Concerning the Rights, Power and Prerogative of Kings (1710); Speck, F.F. Madan: A Critical Bibliography of Henry Sacheverell, 55–9. 2 Melinda Zook, ‘Ferguson, Robert (d.1715)’, in ODNB; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 52–63, 569–70. 3 The Judgment of the Whole Kingdoms and Nations, frontispiece. 4 George Ridpath, The Peril of Being Zealously Affected (1709), 13; The Post Man, 23 March, 1710. 1

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demonstrated that attitudes to the press were not ideological with political parties in post-revolutionary England dividing along simple lines of promoting freedom or censorship. This much is certainly suggested by the proclamation outlawing the cry of Church in Danger; which demonstrates Whig politicians’ commitment to controlling public expression when they considered the intellectual foundation of the Glorious Revolution was threatened. All of this might suggest a degree of continuity with explanations of James II’s fall in the late 1680s in which contemporaries saw close connections between the king’s removal and his failure to control both the pulpit and the press, and the strenuous attempts by the Williamite regime to promote its own providential status through carefully sanctioned sermons and prohibiting intra-confessional debate from the pulpit. No doubt those continuities existed, and contemporaries often looked back to the Glorious Revolution for instruction on how to behave in the early eighteenth century. There were, nevertheless, distinct differences between the 1690s and the 1700s. The establishment of partisan political culture ensured the end of any government’s ability to control messages from the pulpit. Instead, it became a space if not for an outright ‘politicised clergy, then certainly as a key component of party manipulation.5 In this sense, then, this chapter is also a contribution to recent work on sermons, which has emphasised the importance of sermons to government policy making and the establishment of the public sphere.6 British Politics in the Age of Anne, xx. William III and the Godly Revolution; Tony Claydon, ‘The Sermon, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750 (Manchester, 2001), 208–34; Tony Claydon, ‘The Sermon Culture of the Glorious Revolution: Williamite Preaching and Jacobite Anti-Preaching, 1685–1702’, in Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford, 2011), 480–94; Farooq, Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London; James Caudle, ‘Preaching in Parliament: Patronage, Publicity and Politics in Britain’, in Ferrell and McCullough, The English Sermon Revised, 35–63; James Caudle, ‘Measures of Allegiance: Sermon Culture and the Creation of a Public Discourse of Obedience and Resistance in Georgian Britain, 1714–1760’, PhD thesis (unpublished), Yale University (1996); Roger D. Lund, ‘Swift’s Sermons, “Public Conscience” and the Privatization of Religion’ Prose Studies, 18 (1995), 150–74; Pasi Ihalainen, Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches (Leiden, 2005). Preaching and sermons do form a minor part of the following explanations of later seventeenth and early eighteenth century: Kenyon, Revolution Principles; Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1989); Newton E. Key, ‘The Political Culture and Political Rhetoric of County Feast Sermons, 1654–1714’, JBS, 33 (1994). For a broader concern with the ecclesiological status of the pulpit see James Downey, The Eighteenth Century Pulpit (Oxford, 1969); James Downey, Pulpit and Platform Addresses (1933); Rolf P. Lessenich, Elements of Pulpit Oratory in EighteenthCentury England, 1660–1800 (Cologne, 1972). There has also been an interest expressed 5 Holmes,

6 Claydon,

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No doubt the politicisation of the pulpit was the latest manifestation of party identity, but it also marked an important new stage in debates and practices concerned with public expression. The partisanship of the clergy amply demonstrated – at least in the eyes of opponents – by their interventions in elections and the political nature of set-piece sermons, most notably commemorations of the execution of Charles I, that sermons could also be considered licentious. But there was a subtle difference. Where the press was often attacked for endangering the salvation of readers, there was a general acceptance that sermons were meant to nourish the flock, leading them to the truth. The attack on sermons emphasised their political nature, that priests were stepping outside of their clerical position and interfering in issues they had no right to. The controversy over the trial of Henry Sacheverell and his two sermons in 1709 has usually been considered purely as an episode in politics, one in which the legality of the Glorious Revolution was tested, but it was clearly inseparable from High Church disgust with church policy, the establishment of toleration and what they considered to be an unrestrained press.7 In turn, whether their motives were political or not, Whigs in the ministry and in parliament had been attempting to restrain the pulpit for five years, outlawing any claim that the queen and her allies endangered the Church. This chapter considers High Church preaching in the early eighteenth century, attempts by the Whig junto to control sermons, and how contemporaries understood the Sacheverell trial as a discussion of the press and freedom of expression. The Church in Danger and the Pulpit

The controversy over the ‘Church in Danger’ debates has usually been considered purely as an episode in the history of ideas, but it was clearly inseparable from Whig concerns with how High Churchmen exploited the pulpit to promote their distrust with church policy and the establishment of toleration. Immediately after the accession of Anne, John Tutchin’s attitude to the clergy, for example, was relaxed, if sceptical, about their claims to authority. Quoting Thomas Blount, a loyal Whig and member of the Green Ribbon Club, and brother of Charles Blount, Tutchin noted that even in the 1690s political instability was attributable to the behaviour of the clergy in the pulpit, where they were the chief ‘promoters of civil distempers’.8 The clergy could then be a threat, especially if they engaged in set-piece sermons, Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003); Helen W. Randall, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Martyrology: Sermons of Charles I’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 10 (1947). 7 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 81. 8 The Observator, 31 July 1703.

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in politics, but in 1703 they were outweighed by ‘the many moderate and peaceable Christians’.9 As we have seen, clergymen were both enthused by Anne’s accession and quickly disappointed by what they saw as her failure to fulfil her promise to reinvigorate the Church. No doubt High Churchmen were particularly aggrieved by the failure of the ‘Tack’ but they expressed their distaste for occasional conformity before 1705. Philip Stubbs (1665–1738), for example, was dedicated to pastoral care in his various parishes and was an assiduous member of the SPCK. But he was outraged by Occasional Conformity.10 He excoriated Dissenters for falling under a ‘black imputation’ of ‘going sometimes’ to ‘one sort of Worship, at other times to another sort’.11 From the start Stubbs knew that his sermon was controversial. Unable to deny his authorship, he sought the protection of Henry Compton, bishop of London, stating at the start of his sermon that, ‘I cannot think my self secure but under your Lordship’s Protection from the far greater number of such, whose Odium I must inevitably stir up.’12 Compton’s patronage saved Stubbs from prosecution, but not responses. Daniel Defoe considered Stubbs a typical High Churchman, using the pulpit to preach politics. The press, he noted, ‘swarms with pamphlets’, but most heat was being given to the occasional conformity debates by churchmen in the pulpit, shouting ‘Exultations on one hand, and deprecations on the other’.13 Attacking Stubbs’s theological position, Defoe also condemned the new use of preaching against the queen, ‘upon this the Pulpit, that Drum Ecclesiastick began the war, and Mr. Sacheverell, in his sermon at Oxford, dooms all the Dissenters to destruction’.14 The purpose of these attacks was to demonstrate that the clergy had deviated from their religious mission. Sacheverell and Stubbs were meddling in the business of monarch and parliament. They had, Defoe insisted, distorted their calling to become pulpit incendiaries: the Trumpeter sent out by High Church Authority, in spight of the Queen and her Summons, to Preach against Union, to Proclaim open War between Parties, to Hang out Flags of Defiance, and to tell her Majesty, she cannot have a true Zeal for the Church, unless she pleases to Break her Word.15

By 1705, there was increasing concern amongst the junto that High Church campaigns were coordinated, effective and needed to be stopped. 9 Ibid. 10

Leonard W. Cowie, ‘Stubbs, Philip (1665–1738)’, in ODNB. Philip Stubbs, For God or for Baal (1702), 18; An Answer to Mr Stubbs’s Sermon, for God or for Baal (1702); A View of the Present Controversy about Occasional Conformity (1702). 12 Ibid., preface. 13 Daniel Defoe, An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity (1702), 5. 14 Ibid., 8. 15 Ibid., 26. 11

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Daniel Defoe’s Review, despite being constrained by his relationship with Harley, makes it clear he remained suspicious of the motives of many High Churchmen. But the questioning of the use of the pulpit was taken up by John Tutchin in the Observator. Where previously he had warned all churchmen to refrain from meddling in politics, by early Summer 1705 he was convinced that the stability of society was under threat from High Churchmen and their exploitation of the pulpit. ‘For God’s sake, for your Countries sake, for your Queen’s sake, for the Churches and your Religions sake’, Tutchin wrote, men must take the thick clouds away from their understanding of the clergy. Again Tutchin quoted from Thomas Blount, but with a more alarmed tone. High Churchmen had lost any sense of moderation and reason. ‘If these Men are the Church, Lord Have Mercy over the Doors of it’, Tutchin worried. The three years between 1702 and 1705 had caused an extraordinary change. High Churchmen had transformed their fortunes, by exploiting the pulpit, into a genuine political threat: The clergy won’t allow us to choose our own Pastors, our own Spiritual Physicians; if we hear them preach false Doctrines in the Pulpit we must not gainsay them under a penalty, and it is very hard that in our Civil Capacity we can’t choose our selves Members to Represent us in Parliament without their Interposition.16

Tutchin’s rhetoric became ever more alarmed. By 1707, he noted, High Churchmen objected to allowing ‘the Queen to choose her own Ministers and Officers; they must have Fleet Shepherd Key to the Door of Preferment, as well as St. Paul’s to the Gate of Heaven’.17 Nor was the alarm at High Churchmen only registered by Whig journalists. John, first earl Poulett (1668–1743), a Tory and supporter of Robert Harley, was horrified by the influence of High Churchmen in Devon and Cornwall. The clergy there ‘preach nothing but the Church being now in the greatest danger, and the Bishop himself is often named in their pulpits as an enemy to the Church’.18 Their rhetoric was having a significant effect for ‘the gentlemen are so much inflamed by these firebrands that it won’t be easy to check this temper even in this particular at Exeter, which is not yet public to any degree’.19 This alarm was felt at the heart of government. In autumn 1705, Godolphin wrote to Harley to complain of the power of High Church political preaching. ‘I have heard’, he wrote, ‘of several insolences

Observator, 9 June 1705. Observator, 1 Feb 1707. 18 J.M. Rigg, revised by M.E. Clayton, ‘Poulett, John (1668–1743)’, in ODNB; HMC, MSS Portland, iv, 177, Lord Poulett to Robert Harley, 2 May 1705. 19 HMC, MSS Portland, iv, 177, Lord Poulett to Robert Harley, 2 May 1705. 16 The 17 The

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of the clergy, which are really insufferable and next door to open rebellion.’20 The lord treasurer insisted that something must be done: I don’t find the least notice taken of it, or the least thought or disposition to reprehend any of them about it. If the Parliament be of the same mind we must submit to it, but if not, I hope they will be punished; and whether the Parliament approve of all the noise that is fomented in the kingdom of the Church’s danger, is in my humble opinion, the first thing that ought one way or other to be cleared upon their meeting.21

Although arguing the Church was in danger was outlawed, specific legislation was never passed to moderate behaviour in the pulpit. Harley, the politician who retained the most sophisticated appreciation of the power of the press and the power of the public, declined Godolphin’s attempt to get him to support legislation against the pulpit. Indeed, Harley’s attempt to outlaw anonymity as a solution to the licentiousness of the press seems to have informed his own attitude to the pulpit. Instead of publicly restraining people, he satisfied himself by privately warning clerics. William Tilly, a confidant of Henry Sacheverell, preached on all of the issues that so obsessed High Churchmen. He regularly cried ‘Church in Danger’, lamented the death of Charles I, promoted passive obedience and decried toleration.22 In 1705, he preached a 30 January sermon at the University of Oxford, which caused Whigs in parliament to call for the sermon to be burnt.23 Tilly, of course, took great delight in printing the sermon, insisting the publication was only to correct the ‘complaints, and cavils, and misrepresentations of my adversaries’. He also provided the reader with a by now familiar stipulation on how the sermon should be read. ‘I am not’, Tilly claimed, bound ‘to own every sense another shall put upon my words; when they are fairly capable of a different one, and I might very well intend it’.24 Harley was furious at Tilly’s sermon. Unable to prevent its publication, he exploded with rage at William Stratford (1662–1729), his agent in Oxford.25 ‘The sermon’, Harley ranted, is a ‘composition of incoherencys, nonsense in English, and impertinence with Greek, with the very spirit of rage that one would think it was written by some furious Presbyterian Scot’.26 Stratford was in a difficult position. Canon of Christ Church College, a centre of Bath MSS, i, 76, Lord Godolphin to Robert Harley, 19 Sept. 1705. Bath MSS, i, 76, Lord Godolphin to Robert Harley, 19 Sep. 1705. 22 William Tilly, A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford, at St Mary’s (1704); William Tilly, The Church’s Security from the Providence of God (1705). 23 Doble (ed.), The Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, vii, 70. 24 William Tilly, The Nature and Necessity of Religious Resolution, in the Defence and Support of a Good Cause, in Times of Danger and Trial (1705), preface. 25 G.V. Bennett, ‘The Era of Party Zeal, 1702–14’, in L.S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell, The History of the University of Oxford (1986), v, 86–95. 26 BL Add. MS 61110 f.31. 20 HMC, 21 HMC,

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High Church thought and preaching, Harley made it clear that he expected Stratford to moderate the clergy under his care. Indeed, Henry Aldrich, dean of Christ Church and an ally of Harley, reminded Stratford that his position was wholly owing to the power of the secretary.27 ‘I shall be very glad therefore to hear from you the state of this matter, and your opinion of the best way to cover this’, Harley wrote to Stratford, adding that Tilly’s sermon was problematic for it was the best way of ‘disabling their friends, and arming their enemies’.28 There was plenty of wisdom in Harley’s attitude to preaching, if the policy could be enacted. On 22 April 1706, Stratford reported to the secretary that a sermon had been preached at the college, which ‘I am afraid will be reported to our disadvantage’.29 The sermon, by a preacher called Read, argued that the clergy were being persecuted, people taking the sacrament were occasionally betraying the Church and God would find a way to place High Churchmen in power. Read informed his audience that they must ‘arm themselves against the fiery trial that was now approaching’.30 Stratford told Harley that he required the help of the archbishop to intercede, reminding the clergymen not to engage in controversy and to ‘contradict any worse representation that without doubt will be made of it’. In this case, Harley’s deployment of private restraint through Stratford appears to have been successful. There is no record of the sermon ever being printed, there was no controversy over the private warning, and, within a few days, Read begged forgiveness for committing any offence. The case also revealed a central problem of restraining clergymen. According to Stratford, the sermon contained only ‘general hints, that are capable by enemies of an ill-construction’. The sermon, he informed Harley, could not be prosecuted because there were no particular illegal expressions and no ‘censure could be fixed on him’.31 In microcosm, the story of Read tells us much about the power of the pulpit in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The failure to prosecute him only becomes explicable when we understand that he equivocated. His sermon, like so many others, was carefully constructed to avoid prosecution. Words were chosen with precision, so that they could be interpreted in a variety of senses. While Stratford warned that the sermon was malicious, he equally understood it could not be prosecuted. And yet Read’s sermon and the initial furore were contained because Harley adhered to a view that restraint was best played out in private. By careful use of patronage and threats (backed by authority), Read came to heel. The case was contained within the purview of Oxford University and the Church and not exposed to the public. Portland MSS, iv, 203, BL Add. MS 61110 f.31. 29 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 295, 30 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 295, 31 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 295, 27 HMC, 28

Dr Henry Aldrich to Robert Harley, 7 July 1705. Dr Stratford to his ‘brother’, 22 April 1706. Dr Stratford to his ‘brother’, 22 April 1706. Dr Stratford to his ‘brother’, 22 April 1706.

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It is important to underscore that Harley’s policy was brilliant, original, sophisticated and permeated with problems. In fact, these problems mirrored those associated with his press policy. High Churchmen believed he was allowing a free press. In the same way High Churchmen considered him enabling a licentious press, so radical and mainstream Whigs considered his policy on the pulpit a licence for High Churchmen to preach sedition. Harley’s commitment to restraining people privately meant that his policy was obscured from the public. As we have seen, Matthew Tindal, concerned by the seeming unchecked power of High Church preaching, translated his anticlericalism into very specific attacks. High Churchmen were often guilty of adding ‘absurd Glosses and false Comments’ to their sermons; nor did they ‘scruple to call their Pulpit-Speeches, the Word of God.’32 But, as the power of High Church preaching increased in the eighteenth century, the importance of attacking specific clergymen seemed never clearer to Tindal. He pointed the reader to a series of sermons delivered by Henry Sacheverell and William Tilly as clear examples of unrestrained seditious preaching.33 Where some, such as John Toland, still conceived the struggle against priestcraft as an intellectual conflict, Tindal viewed the emergence of High Church preaching with increasing alarm. In such circumstances, he undoubtedly altered his view of religion and authority. He insisted that the clergy were subordinate to parliament and, to prevent perjury, the power of the state over priests should be written in ‘Capital Letters, and plac’d in Churches directly over against the Pulpit, so that it may stare the Preachers in the face, when they are going to preach up their own Power in defiance of their rulers’.34 In fact, at least some Whig churchmen expressed their concern that the politicisation of the pulpit was fostering a growing sense of anticlericalism. Only by disengaging from politics, White Kennett argued, and engaging in an ‘honest discourse’ that was well worded, would the clergy ‘escape the open derision of the Atheist, the fly exceptions of the Deist, the torturing criticisms and cavils of the Socinian, the suspicions of Dissenters, and the misapplications of both Jacobite and Republican incendiaries to their seditious purposes’.35 White Kennett worried that distaste for the clergy’s behaviour in the pulpit was no longer confined to Matthew Tindal and John Toland, but had seeped into the discussions of the Observator, the Review and even the Rehearsal.36 Many people who had previously revered ‘the sacred Character of a Priest’ no longer respected the profession but instead thought it corrupted as ‘vile by their own Misconduct’.37 The Rights of the Christian Church, 78. Ibid., 301. 34 Ibid., 301. 35 Kennett, A Visit to St. Saviour’s Southwark, 6. 36 Ibid., 3. 37 Ibid., 3. 32 Tindal, 33

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Francis Higgins and the Church in Danger

If both the proclamation against the cry of ‘Church in Danger’ and Harley’s policies were designed to moderate High Church preaching, the career of Francis Higgins suggests they were a significant failure. Often considered the Irish Sacheverell, Higgins (1669/70–1728) was recognised by contemporaries as a skilled preacher and one of the more important High Church clergymen.38 Born in Ireland and presented to the rectory of Gowran in 1694, by the early eighteenth century he was notorious as the principal member of the Swan-Tripe Club.39 Containing Dr Edward Worth, Archdeacon Perceval and two prominent lawyers, the club was considered dangerous enough to be presented by the Dublin grand jury as a seditious and unlawful assembly, ‘with intent to create misunderstandings between Protestants … and to instil dangerous principles into the youth of this Kingdom’.40 In England he was described as a typical High Churchman who ‘thinks too little, but talks too much’. In the eyes of his opponents, he was an extremist who, nevertheless, had to be taken seriously as an effective and charismatic preacher who could charm ‘the listening throng’.41 One of his first sermons, delivered at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, in 1705, but printed and distributed in London, bears analysis, for it reveals how his preoccupations fitted in with his fellow High Churchmen. Taking as his text IIChron. 16:34–6, Higgins argued that King David and his nation had been entirely dependent on God’s grace for salvation. ‘The daily and frequent struggles, skirmishes and battles he had with the Philistines’, Higgins noted of the king, had been successfully resolved through divine intervention. David had instructed his priests to entreat their deity: ‘save us O God of our Salvation; and gather us together, and deliver us from the Heathen’.42 This simple tale underpinned Higgins’s view of how a godly society should operate. The story of a monarch saving his people from the ungodly, by entreating his priests to pray for the nation, was an allegory designed to reinforce the power of the Church and priesthood, but also served a wider discussion of High Church thinking. They were committed to a theological vision that closely connected justification and sanctification for salvation to be achieved. Whilst they accepted that God’s grace was awarded freely, they insisted that sanctification, demonstrated by a life of obedience, correct doctrine and good works – restraining ungodly books, for example – was fundamental to salvation. The result of this approach, D.W. Hayton, Ruling Ireland, 1685–1742: Politics, Politicians and Parties (Woodbridge, 2004), 135–7, 143; Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, 55–6. 39 D.W. Hayton, ‘Francis Higgins (1669/70–1728)’, in ODNB. 40 Cited in John Thomas Gilbert, A History of the City of Dublin (1859), ii, 12. 41 The Swan Tripe Club: A Satyr on the High-Flyers (1705), 6. 42 Francis Higgins, A Sermon Preach’d before their Excellencies the Lords Justices at ChristChurch, Dublin (Dublin, 1705), 5. 38

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demonstrated by Higgins’s 1705 sermon, was an essentially activist spiritual quest, in which individual members of society had to follow the doctrine of the Church of England and adhere to the authority of the Anglican priesthood to achieve salvation. As with Sacheverell, Higgins’s soteriological reasoning goes some way to explaining the High Church detestation of the Latitudinarian position within the Church. William Tilly and Luke Milbourne also berated their audience with the message that living an exemplary moral life would not ensure salvation. The message from Benjamin Hoadly, who stood as the leading example of everything they detested – that virtue, morality and good living would ensure salvation – was rebutted by the accusation that Hoadly was part of a ‘shuffling, treacherous’ sect, who should be ‘stigmatized, and treated equally as dangerous enemies to the Government, as well as Church’.43 Nor was High Church soteriological reasoning confined to a debate between them and Latitudinarians. On the contrary, the basic structure of Higgins’s narrative alluded to the claim that the Church was in danger. Echoing Atterbury’s intervention in 1697, Higgins maintained that England was a country endangering God’s mercy, because it was awash with ‘general irreligion, lewdness and prophaneness’.44 ‘Some sins’, he commented, ‘by long use and practice among us, seem to now to have lost all reproach, or offensive guilt.’45 Once again, this was a vision of a society overrun by sin, endangering God’s providence. The Act of Toleration, Higgins claimed, had embedded schism and sacrilege at the heart of political life. Worse, he continued, the lapse of licensing had unleashed ‘the growing multitude of Atheists, Deists, Arians, Socinians, Libertines’, who were multiplying because of their ‘shallow prophane writings’.46 Higgins reiterated the direct connection between the enactment of toleration and the loss of pre-publication censorship. Even worse, that political act led to theological laxity. Society no longer worried enough about the consequences of sin and had lost the fear of damnation; evidence for this assertion could be found not just in the Act of Toleration, but in the spread of unorthodox thinking perpetuated by the loss of pre-publication restraint. Although by the summer of 1705 Higgins was contemptuous of ecclesiastical policy, he remained on the side of legality. ‘God Almighty’, he proclaimed, had delivered to England a ‘great protectress, and gracious Queen’ and safeguarded the ‘Protestant line’.47 Thus, he continued to follow the position articulated by Atterbury eight years previously, that the The Political Union, 49; Hoadly, The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Consider’d; Hoadly, A Letter to the Revered Dr. Francis Atterbury; Atterbury, A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul; at the Funeral of Mr. Tho. Bennet. 44 Higgins, A Sermon Preach’d before their Excellencies, 16. 45 Ibid., 17. 46 Ibid., 17. 47 Ibid., 2. 43 Sacheverell,

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monarch needed only to enact a different religious policy to confirm her godliness. However, clear distaste for the shape of religious policy ensured that he tempered his professed loyalty to the monarch. ‘Let all sincere, and true lovers of the Church, and Monarchy’, he thundered, ‘watch against the designs and practices and of such black friends.’48 These friends were promoters of moderation, determined to lead England back to the rebellion of the 1640s. In other words, for all the impeccably loyal credentials of his sermon, Higgins was happy to point out that there were men embedded at the heart of the English political state whom he did not trust. Moderation, the favoured policy of Robert Harley, would see the Church ‘immoderately cheated, gull’d, abus’d and undone’, whilst Dissenters, many of whom had infiltrated government, were ‘pernicious and publick enemies’ to both Church and state.49 Higgins’s sermon delivered on Ash Wednesday 1707 provides further evidence of his disillusionment with Anne’s governance. With Harley marginalised and Sunderland established as southern secretary, Anne’s ministry offered little hope to High Churchmen that their aims for reform might be fulfilled. In 1707, Higgins took as his text Rev. 3.2–3. He informed listener and reader that there was a direct comparison between contemporary England and the long-forgotten church of Sardis, a church that had lost both the power and form of godliness.50 ‘Its very Angels, Watchmen, or Bishops’ had failed the Church by sinking into a state of ‘listlessness, stupidity, or lethargy’. Only a voice from heaven roused its bishops from their stupor in order to return the Church to the ‘care and diligence’ it deserved.51 Hardly subtle in its allegory, Higgins ensured that the reader and listener got the point of the sermon when he went on to suggest: ‘from this account of the Church of Sardis, he that runs may read and observe in how many particulars, we agree with them in circumstances’. As with all High Churchmen, Higgins warned his audience that they ‘must expect the same Judgments and punishments from the Divine Justice, which the Scriptures threatened’.52 This vision of the failing church of Sardis, combined with the human propensity to ignore the dangers of damnation, provided the narrative thread for the rest of the sermon. At the very root of Higgins’s distaste for current ecclesiastical policy, however, lay his hatred of the licentiousness of free expression. The connection between the lapse of licensing and the immorality of the nation was made both by generalisation and specific example. ‘Fountains of Irreligion and Lewdness’, Higgins claimed, had spread over the face of the

48

Ibid., 21. Ibid., 21. 50 Francis Higgins, A Sermon Preached at the Royal Chappel at Whitehall (1707), 3. 51 Ibid., 3. 52 Ibid., 4. 49

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land and caused a deluge of wickedness.53 The abyss of impiety that the nation so obviously faced was attributed by the preacher directly to the ‘unaccountable liberty that has of late been taken, not only in conversation, but in books publicly printed and sold about our streets’. Seen through the eyes of Higgins, the lapse of licensing was not a moment to celebrate, rather it was disastrous political miscalculation that had unleashed ‘the apostles of the devil, emissaries of the arch-rebel, and apostate Lucifer’. Of course, not everything was lost. The prosecution of three authors in Ireland, John Asgill, John Toland and Thomas Emlyn, provided examples of how the press could be restrained. All three men had been driven from Ireland, to the everlasting honour of Church and parliament. The ostensible purpose of these cases was to emphasise the importance of exemplary punishment: all three men had their books burned, were taken into custody for heresy and blasphemy and had been expelled from their home country. The loss of licensing, Higgins contended, could be offset by warning authors of the consequences of their actions. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that Toland’s ‘paws should feel the fire’.54 These examples also served another purpose. The cases of Asgill, Toland and Emlyn were employed to shame the Whig junto and their clerical allies. All three men were now living and publishing in England. Emlyn, it was claimed, ‘has publickly set up, and preaches in this city to an assembly of divines’, whilst Toland ‘revives and publishes afresh’. These three examples were carefully chosen: one was a Socinian (Asgill), one a deist (Toland) and one a Dissenter (Emlyn). Combining the three cases returned Higgins to the High Church contention that Latitudinarian Whigs were responsible for the spread of unorthodox thinking. The failure of both bishops and ministers to punish these blasphemous men was a dereliction of duty. The loss of pre-publication censorship, a blow as it surely was, still left much power in the hands of clerics to ‘brand authors and actors with ecclesiastical censures’, whilst the secular arm must preserve the ‘doctrines and orders, and ordinances of our holy religion from the visible and notorious attempts of such men, to undermine and destroy them’.55 This, then, was a cause that rested on good government. There was no need for new legislation, only for the appointment of a High Church administration that would elevate the power of the Church and restrain the press. Returning to the example of the church of Sardis, Higgins noted that only those who opposed heresy received assurance from their saviour and ascended to heaven. That God gave people grace to repent, and thus be saved, was an obvious point. However, the claim being advanced was that God required every person to confront heresy, blasphemy and licentiousness at every opportunity in order to receive grace. In other words, 53

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. 55 Ibid., 14. 54

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for Higgins and many of his brethren, the licentiousness of the press transformed salvation into a political issue. Higgins asked ‘How many of our angels and watchmen … are asleep?’ Men of power, he noted, were ‘set apart and commission’d by God and the constitution to watch and ward against the practices’ of blasphemers. Men of authority, both clergy and politicians, were obliged to ‘cry aloud and spare not, to lift up their voices like trumpets, to shew the people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins’.56 The failure of bishops and ministers to restrain the press was compounded by the abandonment of those who had done their duty. ‘Those who have sense of their duty’, the preacher thundered, have been ‘reproach’d, revil’d, and insulted, not only by the vile scribblers and pamphleteers against God, his church and his priests, but discountenanc’d, and brow-beaten by men of figure.’57 No contemporary material illustrates more vividly the connection between the freedom of the press and the cry of ‘Church in Danger’ than Higgins’s Chapel Royal sermon. In a clear reference to the controversy created by the publication and prosecution of the Memorial, he rejected the claim made by queen, Lords and Commons that the Church was not in danger. Higgins also dismissed the concomitant case constructed by the Whigs that they were leading the nation to godliness and piety. The providential claims of politicians and bishops that successes both at home and abroad signified God’s approbation were irrelevant. Quite the contrary, Higgins claimed, the nation was being destroyed by impieties and abominations. The point for Higgins, of course, was to translate his central assertion that individuals, by neglecting to condemn, confront and censor books, compromised their own potential salvation into a political claim. Indeed, the policy successes claimed by Whigs as signs of God’s providence, victory at the battle of Ramillies for example, were simply the last overtures of mercy and favour before God visited on England his just wrath. The continual attacking of great and important men was an attempt to argue that those in charge of state and Church were neglecting their duty and were, therefore, endangering the collective soul of the nation. By 1707, the standard caveat that: ‘God is pleas’d … to Bless us with a Pious Queen at Home, (whose precious Life, God, in his Mercy to these Churches and Nations, long preserve)’, looked increasingly insincere’.58 Rather, the exhortation by Higgins for his flock to pray for the preservation of people, Church and nation, lest they be ‘cursed bitterly’ was a rallying call that resonated across the pulpits of England.

56

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. 58 Ibid., 12. 57

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Prosecuting Francis Higgins

In light of the Church in Danger proclamation, Francis Higgins’s sermon, given at the Chapel Royal on Ash Wednesday in 1707, was illegal. He assaulted the policies of church government pursued by the Whig junto, suggested that they encouraged unbelief and openly questioned the queen’s commitment to true religion. However, this is only part of the story. The sermon also revealed the failure of Whig attempts to deal with the politicisation of the pulpit. Warnings, threats, proclamations and the occasional prosecution had failed to moderate High Church preaching. In this context, Higgins’s sermon posed a variety of challenges to Anne’s ministry. His behaviour confirmed the growing belief amongst Whigs that preaching was out of control. John Tutchin reflected the mood amongst his readership: the pulpit had been rendered a political space in which the ecclesiastical drum was beaten with ‘fist, instead of stick’ and the queen was affronted ‘into her face’.59 The pressure on the ministry to prosecute Higgins was fostered by replies to his sermon.60 Authors asserted that Higgins’s association of the current Church with Sardis was synonymous with the cry of ‘Church in Danger’. One anonymous pamphleteer claimed that the interpretation of the gospel revealed Higgins was a foolish man who had built his argument on a ‘house of sand’.61 From here it was but a short step to denouncing him as seditious. ‘The church’, the author continued, was ‘built upon a rock’, and was supported by a monarch who ‘had nothing more in her heart than the peace and welfare of all her subjects’. Therefore, he continued, ‘it is an unsupportable abuse to make the word of God the instrument of sedition and to move mens minds to follow the passions, party-piques, and private interests of the world’.62 There was more at stake in the replies than a simple theological dispute about the future shape of the Church. For many, as one author explained, Higgins was ‘infected with seditious principles’ that were ‘in opposition to the majority of men of all qualities and degrees in her Majesty’s Dominions’.63 The junto ministry faced a difficult challenge. Godolphin had to make a choice about whether Higgins should be prosecuted. His sermon galvanised High Churchmen and might lead others into sedition. On the other hand, Observator, 1 Feb. 1707. The Prayer of the Reverend Mr. Higgins, before his Text, and his Case (1707): An Answer to the Sermon Preach’d (by Francis Higgins, Prebendary of Christ-Church, Dublin (1707); A Word in Season, in Answer to the Preface to Mr. Higgens’s Sermon (1707); The High-Church Bully: or, the Praises of Mr. Higgins (1707); Boanerges: Or, Mr. Higgins’s History: with a Reply to his Infamous Dialogue, in a Letter to a Friend (1707); The Curtain-Lecture: or, a Dialogue between Mr. H-gg-ns and his Lady (1707). 61 A Word in Season, 2. 62 Ibid., 4. 63 Ibid., 14. 59 The 60

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it was obvious to observers that the government possessed the right and the means to restrain Higgins. One author recounted with obvious relish all the antidotes that could be applied: both the upper and lower houses of convocation and parliament had issued resolutions that could be applied to Higgins.64 Yet any prosecution posed a serious danger, as Laurence Hanson has noted, ‘particular industry was in truth necessary if libellers with popularity or backing behind them were to be prosecuted’.65 Or, put simply, Higgins’s extraordinarily provocative sermon provided him with a public constituency. Assessing the size and commitment of public support for Higgins is almost impossible. But, clergymen also had a built-in advantage when faced with prosecution. The most basic characteristic of High Church clergy was that they claimed the apostolic right to preach freely from the pulpit. A bungled prosecution, far from being a single case of restraint, ran the risk of looking like persecution and an attempt to muzzle the right to preach. One of the most remarkable features of Higgins’s sermon, however, is that it is possible he was attempting to avoid prosecution. Richard Kingston, an astute observer of the press, noted that there was a legal requirement for a preacher ‘to shew the Notes of his sermon’ to a privy councillor, if requested. In this case, the implication of Kingston’s comment was clear. Higgins, it was being claimed, had preached a sermon that was even more radical than the one he had printed. By supposedly refusing to show the original sermon notes to the ministry, he had demonstrated his seditious, underhand and unorthodox character and behaviour: He breaks in upon the constant Practice of all the Orthodox and Regular Clergy in her Majesty’s Dominions, who if at any time accused or aspersed, for what they deliver’d from the Pulpit, always deliver their Notes to their Diocesan for their Justification, or in his Absence to some Principal Magistrate in the Neighbourhood.66

Another observer added credence to Kingston’s claim. Impugning the credibility of Higgins and expressing his disgust at the preacher’s potential escape, the anonymous author suggested that Higgins had, indeed, printed a different sermon from the one he preached. He claimed that he had a signed affidavit from a member of the audience that Higgins’s spoken sermon was even more seditious than the printed version. Higgins had apparently contended that ‘those that brought the Royal Martyr to the Scaffold and the Block’ were the same as those ‘now Preferr’d to Places of the greatest Trust in the Kingdom’. This was clearly a seditious assertion that went way

Richard Kingston, The Church of England not in Danger (1707), 14–16. Government and the Press, 61. 66 Kingston, The Church of England not in Danger, 11. 64

65 Hanson,

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beyond the claims of the printed version. In light of this new evidence, the anonymous author required: Mr. Higgins to subjoin and Publish the only Paragraph of that Sermon, Wherein any Mention is made of the Royal Martyr The Scaffold or Block; and to Appeal to the Multitudes, who from Time to Time heard him preach it … whether the following be a Faithful Relation of that Passage or not.67

Higgins was well aware that he had to be careful when delivering sermons. The multitude, he complained, often attended sermons only to ‘watch and spy, and lie upon the catch for the slips, or indiscretions of the preacher’.68 Confronted by the possibility of prosecution, Higgins was aware that care should be taken, otherwise informants will ‘furnish the hired paltry scribblers of the party with dirt to throw at us, and our Holy Profession, as soon as we come out of the pulpit and church’.69 In the event, the dangers of prosecution were ignored by Godolphin and Sunderland. Higgins’s fate was almost certainly sealed by the marginalisation from power of Robert Harley and the end of a mixed ministry. Charles Spencer, earl of Sunderland (1675–1722), was a politician of a very different temperament from Harley.70 Whilst not an unskilled observer of the press, he possessed none of Harley’s subtlety and was committed to the values of his party, effectively eschewing policies that smacked of moderation.71 The Higgins case may have been the first time that Sunderland had attempted to restrain a clergyman, but, as we have seen, he was not unaware of the power of the pulpit. Returning to the letter sent to Sunderland in 1705, Edward Gould had demanded both the specific restraint of Atterbury for preaching false doctrine and parliamentary legislation, in order to: prevent the further Proceedings of such Ecclesiastical Disturbances, it would be necessary that a Law be made Penal against such as should Preach against State Affairs and seditiously disturb the nation, during her Majesties reign, or against any Protestant Dissenters whatsoever, and the Reformed Churches abroad, as is now practiced by a disaffected set of Jurant Preachers contrary to their oaths.72 Isabella Foulks a very aged poor woman swears, that Mr. Higgins utter’d in his sermon at Whitehall on Ash-Wednesday last, these following words (1707). 68 Higgins, A Sermon Preach’d at the Royal Chappel at White-Hall, 13. 69 Ibid., 13. 70 Henry Horwitz, ‘Spencer, Charles, Third Earl of Sunderland (1675–1722)’, in ODNB. 71 At this point, Harley’s influence in the ministry was marginalised as the power struggle between the Whig junto and the ministry reached its height: see Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 110–11. 72 BL Blenheim Papers, Add. MS 61546, ff.162–3: Edward Gould to Lord Sunderland, London, 19 Nov. 1705. 67

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Rather than enacting legislation, Sunderland appears to have contented himself with prosecuting single preachers. On 1 March 1707, only two days after Higgins’s sermon was preached, he ordered that Higgins be taken into custody. Within a week, Higgins wrote to the secretary to beg for relief. ‘I am sorry to find myself necessitated to give your Lordships this enclosed trouble’, he wrote, ‘I no longer want to lay under the foul imputation of those foul crimes on which the warrant was grounded.’ He had been debarred his liberty for a crime that my ‘soul abhors’, and he sought redress by being brought ‘before your Lordship, or Her Majesty and Council to answer for my self’.73 Higgins’s initial pleading had little effect. Sunderland, it seems, was determined to make an example of the errant preacher. On 24 April, the grand jury at Hicks Hall found a bill against Higgins for a sermon that asserted: ‘those that brought the royal martyr to the scaffold and the block, such as those are now preferred in the greatest places of trust in the kingdom’.74 However, on 29 May, six weeks after being taken into custody, the prosecution was brought to a halt; Narcissus Luttrell recorded in his journal that ‘yesterday the attorney general enter’d a noli prosequi to stop proceedings against Mr. Higgins, the Irish clergyman, for words in a sermon lately preach’t at Whitehal’.75 As we have seen in the case of the Memorial, discontinuing cases was a well-known technique of politicians. Used properly, it was a crucial element in the arsenal of the prosecuting authorities. Once the protagonist had been sufficiently frightened by a spell in prison, the case could be discontinued to demonstrate both the power and the mercy of authority. Such a policy also had the great advantage of denying publicity to a censorship trial. Had the Higgins case ended at the entering of the noli prosequi, it would serve as an example of skilled political manoeuvring in the new world of post-publication censorship. However, rather than being discontinued, Sunderland passed the case to the ecclesiastical authorities for resolution. Later that month, Higgins was called to Lambeth Palace where Archbishop Tenison warned him to moderate his behaviour and language. Tenison’s manuscript minute of the meeting reveals a largely convivial conversation, in which the archbishop advised Higgins ‘to keep such things to himselfe’, and Higgins, in the face of clerical authority, acceded to the archbishop’s request.76 In the summer of 1707, with the help of Charles Leslie, Higgins released his own version of his conversation with the archbishop. Masquerading as a verbatim account, Higgins openly admitted that he believed the Church was in danger, and excoriated Tenison for his stewardship. It was 73

BL Add. MS 61607, ff.24–5; Higgins to Sunderland, 8 Mar. 1706/7. Brief Historical Relations, vi, 164. 75 Ibid., 177. 76 HMC, 2nd Report, 244: notes of Mr. Francis Higgins’s conference with archbishop of Canterbury, 1707. 74 Luttrell,

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his duty, he informed the archbishop, to oppose ‘all men, and books, that attack or undermine the Christian Religion’.77 Perhaps no one tract better demonstrates that much of the ‘Church in Danger’ campaign was linked to frustration with religious and press policy in the period. As he detailed the policies and principles of restraint that represented, so Higgins claimed, a responsible press and righteous religious policy, the reader was left in no doubt that High Churchmen considered Tenison to be a weak and impotent puppet of the Whig junto. Far from being its defender, Tenison acceded to Whig policy, which allowed an out-of-control and licentious press to attack the Church. This contemptuous treatment of the archbishop was augmented by an even more dangerous assertion. Higgins articulated publicly his apostolic right to preach, and he informed Tenison and the Whig junto that neither he, nor his brethren, would be censored: I did not make the Sermon to keep it a secret, when I preach’d it, it was not a Whisper. I intend to preach it again in most of the Churches in Town; I’ll preach it before your G. where you please to command me; you are concerned in it, and I should be glad your G. would hear it from the Pulpit. For I have taken care to discharge my Duty to God in it, and to preserve my Duty to the Queen, and the Laws of the Land, which I shan’t only study to conform my self to, but to perswade all others to do so too.78

Higgins was both responding to, and exploiting, the government’s muddled response to the lapse of licensing. Embracing the opportunities offered by the pulpit, and openly arguing that he considered the Church to be under attack, he also gave notice that any future prosecution would be similarly exploited. Tenison, Sunderland and Godolphin largely lost the propaganda war to High Churchmen. The archbishop never articulated a coherent response to the loss of pre-publication censorship. Far too often he stumbled when facing provocation. Tenison was never able to decide when books should be answered and when they should be restrained. The case of Francis Higgins demonstrates as much. Tenison was left outraged. In the face of Higgins’s provocation, he manoeuvred for the House of Lords to burn Higgins’s version of the conversation and for the Lower House of convocation to issue a condemnatory proclamation.79 Tenison also attempted to combat Higgins in print, authorising two replies. Published by Benjamin Bragg, Harley and Defoe’s favoured trade publisher, the anonymous pamphlet Boanerges roundly condemned Higgins. According to the author, Higgins represented everything that the Whigs detested about High Church exploitation of the Charles Leslie and Francis Higgins, A Postscript to Mr. Higgins’s Sermon; Very Necessary for the Better Understanding It (1707), 1. 78 Leslie and Higgins, A Postscript to Mr. Higgins’s Sermon, 3. 79 Luttrell, Brief Historical Relations, vi, 200. 77

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pulpit. Higgins, he insisted, ‘greedily affected popular applause’ and sought ‘noise and dust’ rather than earnestness and passion.80 The disrespectful behaviour of Higgins in the pulpit was equally manifested in the reply to the archbishop. The recently published and false dialogue between Higgins and Tenison demonstrated insolence and ill manners, and it showed disrespect to the archiepiscopal dignity.81 In an attempt at damage control, the author also suggested that Higgins had reneged on the deal offered by Sunderland and Tenison. The Irish preacher had been taken into the ‘custody of a messenger, by virtue of a Warrant from the principal Secretary of State’, only to be released because of mediation from his friends and by his own promise of good behaviour.82 While the monarch had been ‘graciously pleased to forgive him and put a Stop to all further Proceedings’, Higgins had reneged on the deal. ‘No sooner were his heels at liberty, and his neck secured from the danger of a wooden ruff, but out comes his seditious sermon in print.’83 The campaign against Higgins continued. Tenison instructed Richard Kingston, previously chaplain-in-ordinary to Charles II and a paid government spy, to inform the public that the errant preacher was an ‘avowed enemy of the government’ and had constructed ‘imaginary dangers that were falling upon the church’.84 Employing his tract as a lobby document, Kingston asserted that Higgins was a man ‘notoriously Disaffected to her Majesty’s Government’ and that his sermon sowed the seeds of ‘scandal, Sedition and Discord’.85 In an attempt to send a warning to future preachers, Kingston noted that Higgins’s sermon had transgressed the ‘express Words of Her Majesty’s Royal Proclamation’, and was an obvious continuation of ‘Dr. Drake, the supposed Author of the Memorial’.86 The bungled prosecution of Higgins caused a change in ministerial approaches to High Churchmen and their employment of the pulpit to promote, in the eyes of Whig politicians at least, the politics of questioning the legality of the revolution settlement. Although Sunderland had been made secretary of state in 1706, it was not until early January 1708 that he took sole responsibility for the press.87 By autumn of that year, Sunderland’s private papers suggest his attitude hardened towards the clergy and their preaching. He wrote to James Stewart complaining that the ministry was constantly assaulted from the pulpit. Even those Boanerges: Or, Mr. Higgins’s History; with a Reply to his Infamous Dialogue (1707), 2. Ibid., 7. 82 Ibid., 5. 83 Ibid., 5. 84 Richard Kingston, The Church of England not in Danger (1707), 4; ; HMC, Finch MSS, iv, 437, Dr Richard Kingston to Nottingham, Aug. 1692. 85 Kingston, The Church of England not in Danger, 1. 86 Ibid., 5–7. 87 Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, 199; Downie, Robert Harley and the Press, 98. 80

81

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clergymen who had been deposed for disorderly behaviour still preached from their pulpits and endeavoured ‘to seduce the people from their allegiance’ to the Crown. It was now the appropriate time, he suggested, for an example to be made of a number of the ‘disaffected Clergy’. Any case that could be ‘properly made’ should now be pursued and the trials should be given maximum publicity.88 The prosecution and trial of Henry Sacheverell in 1710 looms large over these discussions. The internal machinations of the decision to indict him have been superbly evaluated.89 There were undoubtedly points of convergence between the ‘Court Lords’, Godolphin and Marlborough, and the junto Whigs, Wharton and Sunderland, that both the Communication of Sin and the Perils of False Brethren were illegal. Nevertheless, it is also clear that it was Sunderland who pushed Godolphin towards the explosive political decision of impeachment.90 But Sunderland had to weigh the tension between two central factors that had emerged in the last ten years.91 First, a prosecution would inevitably provide Sacheverell with even more publicity. William Stratford, on hearing the news, commented that the trial would ‘make the Doctor and his performance much more considerable than either of them could have been on any other account’.92 These outcomes were undoubtedly considered within the ministry. On being asked what they should do by Lord Marlborough, Wharton responded that he was continually subject to solicitations from the church party and the inferior of clergy all of whom espoused the interest of Sacheverell. Despite worries that the prosecution would inflame further the sentiments of High Churchmen as a persecuted minority by an uncaring – and potentially irreligious – ministry, Wharton was firm in his view. ‘Do with him my Lord’, he commented to Marlborough, ‘quash him and damn him’.93 On the other hand, however, there was a feeling amongst Whig MPs, ministers and courtiers that Sacheverell was goading them beyond reasonable limits and had to be stopped. James Brydges, client of Marlborough and paymaster of the queen’s forces, was driven to comment that neither the queen nor the constitution would be safe until a ‘stop was put to the liberty some gentlemen of his coat take in their pulpits’.94 88

BL Add. MS 61652, f.86: Sunderland to the Lord Advocate, 16 Sept. 1708; f.101: Sunderland to the Lord Advocate, 18 Nov. 1708; E. Calvin Beisner, ‘Stewart, Sir James of Goodtrees (1635–1713)’, in ODNB. 89 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 76–102. 90 Ibid., 84–5. 91 Ibid., 84. 92 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 530, Dr Stratford to Robert Harley, 21 Dec. 1709; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 96. 93 Bl Add. MS 72,494, f.150v, Ralph Bridges to Sir William Trumbull, 8 Jan. 1710. 94 Lansdowne MSS 1024, Kennett’s diary, f.198; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 86; Joan Johnson, ‘Brydges, James, First Duke of Chandos (1674–1744)’, in ODNB.

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These problems also had to be weighed against another consideration. Sacheverell’s allies, in the Church, parliament and the wider political nation, immediately accused the ministry and their Whig allies of persecuting a godly preacher. Both Luke Milbourne and Nathaniel Whaley took services in which they inserted a prayer, ‘for the deliverance of a brother under persecution’.95 Sacheverell was to take up the same theme in his defence, insisting that his prosecution was the beginning of a campaign to silence High Church criticism of Junto policies. Should it be successful, he suggested, his enemies would ‘have the Clergy directed what doctrines they are to preach and what not’.96 Thus, the trial, in Sacheverell’s words, was a straight fight not just for the soul of the Church and the nation, but also for the condition and status of the clergy. ‘What a condition are we in’, he told the Lords, if we are ‘commanded to cry aloud and spare not, to exhort, rebuke, in season and out of season, on the one hand; and prosecuted, imprisoned and ruined on the other’.97 Prosecuting Henry Sacheverell

The decision to prosecute Sacheverell was also motivated by the reaction of the public to his sermons. William Bisset (1669–1747) was in the audience when Sacheverell delivered the Perils of False Brethren in autumn 1709.98 For over an hour, Sacheverell regaled the congregation with invective that Bisset considered inappropriate for the pulpit. Far from seeking to inspire religiosity in his listeners, Sacheverell employed foul language and rallied the mob.99 Bisset objected to both the delivery and the content of the sermon. It railed against the Glorious Revolution, suggesting that William’s invasion was illegal, and condemned the revolution settlement for its effect on the Church. According to Bisset, Sacheverell dismissed toleration, comprehension and moderation, and assailed bishops and politicians for facilitating the current weakness of the Church; in his words, they were the ‘False Brethren’. As Bisset pointed out, Sacheverell made the case that a faithful churchman must reject the revolution settlement and the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, for both had contributed to fatally undermining the Church and the nation.100 Luke Milbourne, The Measures of Resistance to the Higher Powers, so far as becomes a Christian (1710), 7; White Kennett, The Wisdom of Looking Backward, to Judge the Better of one Side and the Other (1715), 8; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 119. 96 Henry Sacheverell, The Speech of Henry Sacheverell, D.D. Upon his Impeachment at the Bar of the House of Lords (1710), 1. 97 Ibid., 16. 98 William Hunt, revised by William Gibson, ‘Bisset, William (1669/70–1747), in ODNB. 99 William Bisset, Remarks on Dr Sacheverell’s Sermon at the Cathedral of St Paul (1709), 3. 100 Ibid., 3. 95

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Bound into Bisset’s rejection of Sacheverell’s polemic on the condition of the Church and the legality of the revolution was an understanding that the sermon might potentially be subject to restraint. Bisset considered it unlikely that the Court of Alderman would assent to the spoken text being printed, for they had no desire to set ‘the town and kingdom in a flame’.101 Even if it was published, Bisset was sure Sacheverell would make use of a well-worn technique. Even if it was published, Bisset was sure Sacheverell would make use of a well-worn technique, altering the sermon and ensuring ‘many passages will be left out, or put in a new dress from which they were delivered in’.102 Bisset’s understanding of the relationship between the ideological content of Sacheverell’s sermon and the potential for it to be restrained was borne out of experience. A clergyman since the early 1690s, he had preached before the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (SRM) in 1705. Despite his support for the revolution and an acceptance of the right of Dissenters to worship within his parish, Bisset did not just simply praise the SRM. Instead, he repeated some aspects of Sacheverell’s criticism and questioned how often poor sinners were prosecuted whilst more affluent offenders walked free.103 At the same time, however, Bisset also questioned the motivation of churchmen who had promoted the ‘Tack’ and opposed occasional conformity. Far from being genuinely concerned for the doctrinal purity of the Church, High Churchmen were remade Laudians; inspired by ecclesiastical policy of the 1630s, particularly the drive for conformity, they were seeking political power and wanted to reverse toleration.104 Bisset was assailed from all sides. Attempting to regain ground for the SRM, Isaac Sharpe accused his sermon of containing ‘base reflections against morality and goodness’.105 Bisset had also mounted the steps of the Church so he might ‘rave and scold like a butter-whore, at his own shadow’. According to Sharpe, Bisset should be whipped and degraded and the government should regulate the pulpit, for, unless such scandals were stopped, people would come to regard organised religion as indifferent to their salvation.106 Bisset responded with a familiar refrain. He had only printed his sermon because so many people had misunderstood his intention. His work had been taken up by the ‘lips of the talkers’, and he insisted that the pulpit was the most proper place for truth to be spoken.107 Despite Bisset questioning his courage, Sacheverell published the Perils of False Brethren, and he employed the same justification used by Bisset. 101 Ibid.,

4. 4; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 72–3. 103 William Bisset, Plain English, a Sermon Preached at St Mary Le Bow (1704), 48. 104 Ibid., 48; Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688–1715’, 154. 105 Isaac Sharpe, Plain English made Plainer. Being Remarks on Mr Bisset’s Scurrilous Sermon (1704), preface; B-ss-t B-sh-t. Or; the Foulness of more Plain English (1704). 106 Sharpe, Plain English made Plainer, 6–7; Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688, 60–1. 107 Bisset, Plain English, preface. 102 Ibid.,

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Publication was necessary, he maintained, to rebut the malicious adversaries of the Church who had misrepresented the sermon and traduced it.108 Sacheverell was keen to associate recent attempts to control High Churchmen with the false brethren that he so detested. Godolphin and his allies had told High Churchmen to shut their eyes and mouths, in effect to ignore the Church’s steady destruction. Faced by effective preaching, instead of changing policies, Whigs had insisted that the pulpit was no place for politics; the business of a clergyman was to preach peace, and not sound a trumpet in Sion.109 Nor was that campaign restricted to elite preaching. Pastors could no longer serve their parishioners and do their duty without being menaced and slandered by the mob.110 Alongside politicians from the junto, Kennett was named by Sacheverell as one of the False Brethren. Kennett’s authorship of The Compleat History was used by Sacheverell to support his claim that William had disclaimed resistance to James II when he landed in 1688.111 Accused of being the epitome of a Whig Low Churchman and betraying the Church, Kennett penned a reply within weeks. A True Answer stood as the Church’s answer to Sacheverell’s political positioning. The current queen owed her throne to the revolution and the administration governed with her confidence: to impugn the events of 1688 was to question the virtue of the current administration and the constitutional settlement.112 Whilst defending the legality of the revolution, Kennett articulated a familiar attack on Sacheverell’s behaviour in the pulpit. It was an obligation on the clergy that their words in the pulpit reflect ‘charity and temper’ to inculcate in the listener ‘patience and attention’.113 Far from caring for his congregation, leading them to truth, Sacheverell had resorted to politics, ‘arraigning Princes, and Ministers of State’, using spite and bitter satires to attack his own brethren.114 Sacheverell was an example of the excesses of High Church preaching. Undeterred by the Church in danger proclamation, alongside Atterbury and others, Sacheverell sowed division and schism, prepared to say anything that was ‘ludicrous, equivocal and seditious’, despoiling the sacred oratory where they were obligated to deliver only what is ‘conformable to the Oracles of God’.115 The prosecution and trial of Henry Sacheverell was an attempt to settle once and for all the legality of the Glorious Revolution, and to create a fixed The Perils of False Brethren, A2. A3. 110 Ibid., A4. 111 Bennett, White Kennett, 104; Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, 104. 112 White Kennett, A Visit to St. Saviour’s Southwark, with Advice to Dr. Sacheverell’s Preachers There (1710), 3. 113 Ibid., 3. 114 Ibid., 11. 115 Ibid., 4. 108 Sacheverell, 109 Ibid.,

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point, settled in parliament, defining how resistance and passive obedience might be understood in the future. Articles I and III of the Impeachment were concerned with Sacheverell’s accusation that the happy revolution was ‘odious and unjustifiable’.116 Indeed, in his defence, Sacheverell suggested that his opponents had portrayed him as a mere tool of party, indicted to ‘procure an eternal and indelible brand of infamy to be fixed in a parliamentary way on all those who maintain the doctrine of Non-Resistance’.117 But, the prosecution of Sacheverell was more than a story of political thinking. Understood correctly, it elucidates further the wider understanding of how contemporaries across the political spectrum considered public debates should be conducted and the nature of religious controversy in the early eighteenth century. The trial was, in its very essence, an attempt to confirm the cry of ‘Church in Danger’ illegal and to settle the contested limits of religious orthodoxy. Again, no one objected to Sacheverell’s comment that it was an attempt to have the ‘clergy directed what doctrines they are to preach, and what not’.118 Articles of Impeachment

Whilst the Articles of Impeachment defended the Glorious Revolution ‘for delivering this kingdom from Popery and arbitrary power’, they also sought to preserve the Whig interpretation of the post-revolution settlement. According to the prosecution, both of Sacheverell’s sermons were published with a wicked, malicious and seditious intention to subvert the monarch, to traduce and condemn the late revolution, and to create ‘jealousies and divisions amongst her Majesty’s subjects, and to incite them to sedition and rebellion’.119 In short, far from being a loyal member of the Church of England, preaching and tending to tender consciences, Sacheverell was nothing more than a public incendiary, wickedly perverting ‘diverse texts and passages of Holy Scripture’.120 Beyond reinforcing the Whig interpretation of the constitution, the articles confirmed the continuing and intimate relationship between politics 116 Articles

of Impeachment, 3–4; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 84–5, 131. The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 197. 118 Ibid., 197. 119 Ibid., 12. 120 Ibid., 13. Although it was not a dominant theme, it is clear many MPs and politicians objected to clergymen preaching politics from the pulpit. In the preamble to the prosecution, Harley condemned the liberty used by the clergy in their discourses and Nottingham accused Sacheverell of abusing his Holy Function: Alexander Cunningham, The History of Great Britain from the Revolution in 1688 to the Accession of George I (1787), vol. II, 285; Leicestershire Record Office, Nottingham’s speech notes, Finch MSS, DG7, Ecc. 5, f.1r. 117 Holmes,

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and religion. The vital connection between the revolution, the enactment of toleration and the safety of the Church was consistently reasserted throughout the four specific accusations against Sacheverell: he had suggested toleration was unreasonable and unwarrantable, he had accused Grindal of being a perfidious prelate, and he had inspired his fellow churchmen to deny the benefits of toleration.121 The Articles of Impeachment made it clear that Sacheverell’s sermons were illegal, because they had claimed the Church was in danger. The junto pointed carefully to the queen’s proclamation of 1705, confirmed by votes in the House of Lords, that to insinuate that the Church was in danger was illegal, and provided for punishing any author or spreader of such seditious and scandalous reports. In fact, during the debates, members of parliament pointed out that the press and the pulpit were out of control and required restraint. Thomas, first earl of Coningsby (1657–1729), a leading treasury Whig and supporter of Godolphin, complained during the trial that the licentiousness of the pulpit was ‘the greatest danger to incite the people’.122 In his view, Sacheverell’s St Paul’s sermon had falsely asserted that the Church was in great peril. Despite the vote of both houses of parliament and the queen’s affirmation, Sacheverell had wickedly suggested there was a campaign to ruin the Church of England.123 In this interpretation, the events of 1710 pivoted on 1705, not just 1689.124 The attempt to calm political debate by the junto and to restrict how preachers might talk about the condition of the Church was a significant failure. John Toland also understood how effective the High Church campaign of the last decade had been. Calling Sacheverell a ‘common incendiary’ in a letter to the earl of Shaftesbury, he revealed that he had written his own response to the trial and urged that his opponent should be restrained: ‘I thought it a service due to my country to give this account of the matter here abroad; especially after I understood that Sacheverell’s sermon was printing here in two languages, and that otherwise 121 Sacheverell’s

impugning of Grindal as a perfidious prelate, duped into tolerating Calvinist discipline, was first pointed out by White Kennett in True answer to Dr Sacheverell’s sermon before the Lord Mayor, Nov 5 1709 (1709), 8, 16–17. Grindal’s standing within the Church was defended during the trial by Sir Peter King, Yale University Beinecke Library, Account of the Trial of Dr Sacheverell, Osborn MS S 13043, f.6v. 122 Camden Miscellany xxiii (1969), Anonymous parliamentary diary 1705–6, 38. Clyve Jones, ‘Debates in the House of Lords on the “Church in Danger”, 1705 and Dr Sacheverell’s Impeachment, 1710’, Historical Journal, 19 (1976), 759–71; Sirota, The Christian Monitors, 149–86. 123 The Articles of Impeachment Exhibited, 3. 124 It is noticeable how little attention Holmes gave to the context of the ‘Church in Danger’ debates to 1710. He fitted it in to the broader concerns of churchmen with toleration and the pre-eminence of dissenters but he did not concern himself with complaints from High Churchmen with the licentiousness of the press. Holmes, Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 47, 198. The issue does form a central component in Lucaites, Constitutional argument in a national theatre, 36–40.

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neither the general drift nor the particular allusions of that infamous libel could possibly be understood by foreigners.’125 Such considerations were discussed within the Church during the trial, and across different ecclesiastical registers. Where Toland considered Sacheverell had to be answered, Maurice Wheeler considered the trial a disastrous miscalculation. By turning the pulpit into a ‘pot gun’, Sacheverell had shaken all the pulpits in England; equally, parliament’s prosecution, designed to challenge High Church doctrine, had set the all the people agog, ‘not so much to be instructed by his sermons, as to find out the matter for censure and reflection’.126 In fact, as the trial continued, Wheeler increasingly turned away from the Whigs and supported a central position taken by the defence. He still opposed Sacheverell, because he had weakened the authority of the pulpit ‘by exposing it to be pelted by scurrilous pamphlets; and the dignity of a clergy man to be blemished by such a noisy prosecution’.127 Although Sacheverell deserved blame, the trial was motivated only by political spite, it was not an attempt to promote the doctrinal purity of the Church. The Whigs were not just testing the legality of the revolution; they were attempting to put all the pulpits in England under ‘padlocks to please a party, who are no friends to the Church, nor perhaps to the Crown’.128 In 1710, therefore, the limits of correct expression were at the heart of the trial of Henry Sacheverell. The draft of Robert Walpole’s speech to the Lords during the prosecution, for example, reveals just how contemporaries understood the trial as an attempt, albeit heavy-handed, to find some way to delimit political and theological latitude across all sections of society: The great licentiousnesnesse of the presse in censuring & reflecting upon all parts of the government, has of late given the just cause of offence, but when only pamphlets & common libells are matters of complaint, when none but mercenary scribblers & the hackney pens of party are employed to vent their malice, ’tis fitt to leave them to the common course of the law, & to the ordinary proceedings of the courts below. But my L[or]d when the trumpett is sounded in Sion, when the pulpitt takes up the cudgels, when the cause of the enemies of our government is call’d the cause of God, & of the Church, when this bitter and poysonous Pill is gilded over with the specious name of loyalty, & the people are taught for their soul’s and conscience’s sake to swallow these pernicious doctrines, when instead of sound religion, divinity & morality, factious & seditious discourses are become the constant entertainments of some congregations, the Commons cannot but think it high time to put a stop to this growing evill, & for

RO 9M73/G258/7, 1710, John Toland to the earl of Shaftesbury; Mr Toland’s Reflections on Dr Sacheverell’s Sermon Preached at St Paul’s, Nov 5. 1709 (1710). 126 Christ Church Wake Letters, 23, 201, Maurice Wheeler to William Wake, 23 Jan. 1710. 127 Christ Church Wake Letters, 23, 202 Maurice Wheeler to William Wake, 23 Jan. 1710. 128 Christ Church Wake Letters, 23, 202 Maurice Wheeler to William Wake, 23 Jan. 1710. 125 Hampshire

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the aut[h]ority of a Parliament to interpose & exert itself in defence of the Revolution, the present government & the Protestant succession.129

On the face of it, Walpole’s anxiety about the licentiousness of the press was uncontroversial. He reflected the general concern across the political spectrum with the potentially disastrous consequences of allowing seditious discourses to flow unchecked.130 Yet the initial broad lines, his concern with the danger caused by common pamphlets, soon collapsed into specific religious ideological concerns. That the ‘trumpetts sounded in Sion’ was an explicit recognition that in the last decade High Churchmen’s relentless attacks on the revolution settlement, both in the press and in the pulpit, and their campaign that the Church was in danger, had significantly destabilised the state. Collections of Passages

If both Whig parliamentarians and the Impeachment managers recognised that the trial offered the chance to control High Church campaigns against the revolution settlement by finally ruling the cry of ‘Church in Danger’ to be illegal, then Sacheverell and his defence team made complaints with the licentiousness of the press a key component of their strategy. Whilst they spent the first few days of their rebuttal contesting accusations that their client had condemned resistance, and in consequence the legality of the revolution and the Protestant Succession, on 6 March they turned to the charge of Church in Danger.131 Initially, Sacheverell denied that he ever said that the Church was in peril under the care of Anne. But he freely admitted he had argued that, when the national sins are ripened to a full maturity, it would ‘call down vengeance from providence on a church and kingdom debauched in principles, and corrupt in manners’.132 Justifying his 129 Cambridge

UL, MSS Ch(H) 67/4/1 f.1r. Various sections of Walpole’s draft speeches are reproduced in Brian Cowan (ed.), The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012), 205–31. 130 As we have seen, the connection between heresy, licentious public and the dangerous consequences for the condition of the country had been pointed out by Sacheverell some years earlier: Henry Sacheverell, The nature and mischief of prejudice and partiality stated in a sermon preached at St Mary’s in Oxford (Oxford, 1704), 24–6. But concern with licentiousness coursed through debate in 1710, see The loyal catechism; wherein, every English subject may be truly instructed in their duty to their prince (1710), 3; John England, Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. A sermon preach’d at Sherborne in the County of Dorset (1710), 13; George Smalridge, The thoughts of a country gentleman upon reading Dr Sacheverell’s trial in a letter to a friend (1710), 75. The Sacheverell trial itself crystallised concerns about where the correct limits of public and private discussion lay, Bod. MS Rawl. 38 f.259, Thomas Hearne to Thomas Smith, 25 Jan. 1710. 131 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 179–95. 132 Collections of Passages Referr’d to by Dr Henry Sacheverell in his Answer to the Articles of

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sermon, Sacheverell’s defence team insisted that the true faith, discipline and worship of the Church had given way to licentiousness in both opinion and practice, to the detriment of all members of the Church and kingdom. It was at this point that Sacheverell’s defence team attacked the very foundation of the Church in Danger proclamation. Far from undermining the Church and the monarch, Sacheverell was defending it from the ‘atheistical and irreligious principles, which are daily from the press propagated amongst us’.133 Not only had the blasphemy legislation failed to prevent ungodly publications, the Whig junto and their allies in the Church had allowed an age in which: there never were such outrageous blasphemies against God, and all religion, natural, as well as revealed, vented publicly with impunity in any Christian Church, or kingdom, in the whole world, as at present in our own.134

The published version of Sacheverell’s defence supplied the reader with an extensive list of the most outrageous books published in the last thirty years. In much the same way as the Oxford Decree and Atterbury’s Axe Laid to Christianity, Sacheverell’s defence listed books under three different headings: blasphemy, irreligion and heresy; the Church and clergy abused; the queen, state and ministry reflected upon. In the next eight pages, previous ministries were excoriated for their inability to control the press, whilst authors were accused of damaging the Church and destabilising the state. The publication revealed just how much High Churchmen resented the failure to control John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious and Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church, and added in further publications by Whig authors.135 In the first instance, of course, the Collections of Passages, as Sacheverell’s defence team entitled the publication, revealed the depth and Impeachment (1710), 15. 133 Ibid., 15. For contemporary accounts of Dodd’s speech see, BL Add. MS 70421, Dyer newsletters, 7 March 1710; Yale University Beinecke Library, Account of the Trial of Dr Sacheverell, Osborn MS S 13043, f.14v; Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn MS C171, 25. The general quality of the speeches are discussed in Bod. MS Ballard 34 f.79, Cr. Dodd to Edward Thwaites, 11 Mar. 1710; Norfolk RO LEST/P 20, 239, Thomas L’Estrange to Sir Nicholas L’Estrange, 16 Mar. 1710. 134 Collections of Passages, 15. 135 The full list of books attached are as follows: Edmund Hickeringill, Essays concerning (1706); Charles Blount, The oracles of reason (1693); Thomas Burnet, Archæoloqiæ philosophicæ: sive doctrina antiqua de rerum originibus (1692); The principle of the Protestant Reformation explain’d (1704); Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, A letter concerning enthusiasm (1707); William Freke, A dialogue by way of question and answer, concerning the deity (1693); Brief notes on the creed of St Athanasius. And a vindication of the doctrine of the Holy and ever Blessed Trinity (1690); William Stephens, An account of the growth of Deism (1696); John Asgill, An argument proving, that according to the covenant of eternal life revealed in the Scriptures (1700); John Clendon, Tractatus philosophico-theologicus

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ferocity of partisan religious division, but they also demonstrated just why blasphemy legislation had failed. The orthodoxy of the Church, at least in the view of High Churchmen, could not be reduced to the Trinity and the revealed nature of the Bible. Instead, it encompassed the authority of the clergy and their right to interpret the Bible, to instruct their parishioners and to resist attacks on the Church from non-communicants. Historians have suggested that reading out and printing material from so many offensive books was nothing more than an ideological trick, designed to sensationalise the defence and tar the Whigs with the taint of irreligion.136 Indeed, the Impeachment managers adjourned the Lords to prevent the extracts of offensive tracts and newspapers from being read aloud. Sir William Thompson (1678–1739), Whig MP for Orford, who was responsible for prosecuting the third article of impeachment, tried to block the material as irrelevant.137 Indeed, Thompson was left to lament that the extracts read out by Sacheverell’s defence team ‘could not bear such a construction, that it was in danger from the wickedness of the age, and the blasphemous tenets, that were daily published, for if so, why did not the Dr prosecute such infamous libel and blasphemy’.138 Thompson’s speech also reflected the difficulties faced by recent ministries. Many of the books listed by Sacheverell had been ‘stolen into the world’, printed and imported from abroad or the identity of the author concealed.139 Nor, Thompson maintained, was it fair to accuse the government of inactivity – as the author of one of the books mentioned and a publisher of another had been prosecuted.140 Thompson also stressed the unorthodox publications of Sacheverell and his supporters. There had been blasphemous sermons by Binckes, and Henry Dodwell had encouraged schism, whilst Charles Leslie had praised Catholicism.141 Thompson’s defence was, of course, a double-edged sword. It had the benefit of accusing Sacheverell of playing partisan politics, but it also admitted that the press was degrading English society. Even Defoe, normally such an effective opponent of Sacheverell, was reduced to complaining that his own writings concerned with revolution and resistance were taken out of

(1710); William Whiston, Sermons and essays upon several subjects (1709); The unreasonableness of making and imposing creeds (1706). 136 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 195. 137 Yale University Beinecke Library, Account of the Trial of Dr Sacheverell, Osborn MS S 13043, f.15r; Yale University, Beinecke Library, Osborn MS C171, 25; Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 195. 138 Beinecke Library, Account of the Trial of Dr Sacheverell, Osborn MS S 13043, f.7r. 139 The Tryal of Dr Henry Sacheverell, before the House of Peers, for High Crimes and Misdemeanours (1710), 422; A Letter out of the Country, to the Author of the Managers Pro and Con (1710), 29–32. 140 The Tryal of Dr Henry Sacheverell, before the House of Peers, for High Crimes and Misdemeanours (1710). 141 Ibid., 422–3.

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context.142 Despite Whig protestations, the defence was effective precisely because it reflected widespread concerns both that the press was licentious, and that the spread of irreligious ideas was endangering the godliness of the country. Abigail Harley noted that the passages read out by Sacheverell’s counsel, Samuel Dodd, were some of the most horrid blasphemy ever vented by so called Christians, alongside base reflections on the queen. ‘None of common understanding’, she continued, ‘must think the Church and State too in danger from such christened heathens if suffered to go on without notice taken of them’.143 Sacheverell’s speech, delivered before the Lords on 7 March, articulated a similar combination of the dangers threatening the Church and society by an unrestrained press. The speech commented briefly on each article of impeachment and asserted his loyalty to the queen.144 It was apparent that Sacheverell did consider the Church to be in danger, because the whole of Christianity was in peril, but he now denied it was the fault of either the queen or the administration. It was suffering not only from the deluge of prophaneness and immorality, but also from heterodox and damnable opinions that were published daily.145 Once again, Sacheverell emphasised that the definition of orthodoxy could not just be confined to the Trinity. The press was licentious, drenching the country in sin, because ministers of Christ were abused and vilified and the divine authority of the Scriptures arraigned and ridiculed: ‘never were infidelity and atheism itself, so impudent and barefaced; never were such horrid blasphemies printed in any Christian state, from the foundation of Christianity to this present day’.146 Sacheverell’s position was now a fine balancing act. He contended that that press had endangered society, spreading sin into men’s minds and making a mockery of any claim that England was a godly country. At the same time, however, he recognised that the ministry had struggled in the face of determined opponents. No laws or proclamations, however well designed in the past, had been able to put a stop to the country being overrun by ungodliness and blasphemy.147 The problems raised by Sacheverell’s speech, and particularly his attack on the licentious nature of the press, was noted outside of parliament. Writing on 18 March 1710 to Thomas Jervois, Edward Chute considered Sacheverell’s behaviour ridiculous. Naming various blasphemies, immoralities and profanities in the Commons was both inconsiderate to the audience and a preposterous defence. More seriously, however, Chute suggested that Sacheverell was misrepresenting how debate was being conducted. Review, 5 Mar. 1710. Portland MSS, iv, 534–5, Abigail Harley to Edward Harley, 7 Mar. 1710. 144 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 197–200. 145 Henry Sacheverell, The Speech of Henry Sacheverell, made in Westminster-Hall (1710), 7. 146 Ibid., 7. 147 Ibid., 7. 142 The

143 HMC,

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The books at which Sacheverell railed were detested and opposed by all churchmen; there were no ‘designs or desires to see them pass with impunity’.148 This attack on Sacheverell undoubtedly questioned his care for the Church. But it also masked the problem being raised. It might well have been true that no one thought the books mentioned by Chute should go unpunished. Indeed, he was later to condemn Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church as ‘riff raff, rubbish’ and full of ‘irregularities, impieties, unpardonable liberties with sacred things’.149 But, as we have seen, in the view of many High Churchmen, the books that they abhorred did strut in public, unrestrained, and spreading poison. In fact, Chute proposed a solution to the problem posed by the press, which had been previously raised by at least one of Sacheverell’s supporters. Accepting that High Churchmen were not just offended by the legalisation of toleration but regaled Dissenters’ seemingly unrestrained ability to attack the status of the Church as an intolerable grievance, Chute suggested that they should be guided by a scriptural quotation. Would it not be a sensible rule for Dissenters to follow Rom. 14:22, ‘hast thou faith? Have it to thy self before God’.150 Chute’s response to the Sacheverell controversy attempted to balance the competing visions that had been laid out at the trial. On the one hand, he suggested that Sacheverell was distorting the realities of public debate. Whilst it was true that blasphemous and impious books were being published, he denied, indeed derided, the suggestion that they were encouraged by anyone of importance in early eighteenth-century England. On the other hand, however, he conceded that High Churchmen had been increasingly distressed not just at the legalisation of toleration but also the seeming unchecked ability of Dissenters to attack the Church in print. Much like Tenison and Harley almost a decade earlier, Chute acknowledged that the way the press was currently configured was endangering the stability of the country. Indeed, his solution to take the ‘heat’ out of public debate by insisting Dissenters keep their faith private was one that had been proposed previously by High Churchmen. Writing in 1705, Charles Leslie maintained that differences in opinions could not extend to liberty of opinion or judgement, for they were injurious to God and ‘destructive to the Souls of Men’.151 Leslie was writing in the aftermath of the occasional conformity controversy and the failure of the Tack. Faced by the realisation that toleration would not be reversed, he instead insisted that Dissenters had no right to propagate their opinions. Like Chute, he pointed to Rom. 14:22.152 For Leslie, whilst Dissenters might retain their private opinion, a 148 Hampshire

RO 44M69/F6/8/22 n.f., E. Chute to Thomas Jervoise, 28 Mar. 1710. RO 44M69/F6/8/22 n.f., E. Chute to Thomas Jervoise, 28 Mar. 1710. 150 Hampshire RO 44M69/F6/8/22 n.f., E. Chute to Thomas Jervoise, 28 Mar. 1710. 151 Charles Leslie, The Principles of the Dissenters, Concerning Toleration and Occasional Conformity (1705), 26. 152 Ibid., 27. 149 Hampshire

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problem occurred when they published those opinions and entangled ‘the consciences of others’.153 This, in Leslie’s view, was not to be tolerated. Dissenters ought to live quietly and not publish, for they would disturb the peace of the Church and state.154 Controlling the Press during the Sacheverell Trial

There is little doubt that the trial of Henry Sacheverell gave new urgency to the desire to ascertain what constituted the limits of public debate. At the start of trial, parliament reasserted one of their central regulations. As the prosecution of Sacheverell took place under the auspices of the Lords it was ordered, ‘that nothing, that shall be said by any Member of this House, or by any person, that shall be produced as a witness in behalf of the Commons of Great Britain, in the Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell, be printed, or published, without the Leave of this House’.155 Despite this order, both MPs and Lords distributed privileged information and appealed to the public in unprecedented amounts.156 Nevertheless, parliament still insisted on enforcing their rules of information. When on 24 March they discovered that Henry Clements – Sacheverell’s friend and publisher – had released the Collections of Passages, Whig members reacted with fury. Arthur Maynwaring (1668–1712), Whig member for Preston, commented that it was ‘with unheard of Insolence Printed and Dispers’d, even as soon produc’d; to Asperse the proceedings of the Commons, and to inflame the people’.157 Offended by such a blatant attempt to influence the wider public, the Commons debated whether the book should be publicly burnt, an action that was approved by a vote of sixty-nine to Thirty-two. Whilst the identity of tellers does not reveal the exact nature of the debate, they suggest that the house divided along party lines, with the Whigs voting for the Collections

153 Ibid., 154 Ibid.

28.

155 CJ,

xvi, 337. For analysis of the reluctance of parliament to have an open relationship with its constituents through the medium of print, see The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690–1715, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D.W. Hayton, 5 vols (Cambridge, 2002), i, 25–8. 156 For example: An alphabetical list of the Right Honourable the Lords, and also of those members of the Honourable House of Commons, in England and Wales, that were for Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1710); The proceedings of the House of Peers from Tuesday, March 14, to Tuesday the twenty first (1710); The answer of Henry Sacheverell, D.D. to the articles of impeachment exhibited against him by the honourable House of Commons (1710); The Bishop of Salisbury’s and the Bishop of Oxford’s speeches in the House of Lords (1710); The Lord H___’s speech in the House of Lords (1710). 157 [Arthur Mainwaring], Four letters to a friend in North Britain (1710) 8; Henry L. Snyder, ‘Arthur Maynwaring (1668–1712)’, in ODNB.

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Figure 1. Jack Ketch’s New and Fashionable Auction (1710), broadside, Miscellaneous broadsides 981. Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

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and the Tories voting against.158 Within a day the Whigs had their revenge, with the Commons voting to burn Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church.159 The seeming curiosity of parliament simultaneously burning books by Sacheverell and Tindal has been taken to be the face of how understandings of the press were now configured in 1710, and how those understandings had developed since the Glorious Revolution and the lapse of licensing. The trial of Sacheverell is said to reveal the paradoxes, ironies and inconsistencies in contemporary attitudes to the press. In effect, it has been suggested that it is impossible to understand how political and religious actors across the political spectrum could print, burn and censor books at the same time, unless they were acting out of political self-interest.160 Indeed, according to historians, nothing better illustrates the perceived contradictions inherent in press restraint than a satirical broadside published in early April 1710. Jack Ketch’s New and Fashionable Auction painted an amusing picture of book burning in the middle of the Sacheverell trial.161 Providing details of a fictional auction, Ketch was portrayed exhorting his rapt audience to bid as high as possible for the right to throw a series of books onto the fire. While Henry Sacheverell looked on from his coach, Ketch worked methodically through his list until the audience bid an exorbitant £500 to burn the recently convicted churchman’s St Paul’s sermon. On the surface, this broadsheet reinforces the dominant understanding of the trajectory of contemporary attitudes to government censorship in the early eighteenth century. It seems clear, for instance, that political authority – the junto, Commons and Lords – were being lampooned mercilessly for their inability to cooperate and decide which books should be restrained.162 Here we are apparently presented with the comical image of publications from across the political spectrum being burnt together whilst at the same time wildly variant religious sects – from Muggletonians to High Churchmen – competed to attack the books they hated. The simultaneous condemnation of Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church and Henry Sacheverell’s sermons stood as a symbol for the pointlessness of book burning and censorship more generally. It asked the reader to consider whether censorship could possibly continue when the policy was so obviously incoherent. Was control of books not dependent on consistent approaches through which errant books could 158 The

book was burnt by 69 votes to 32. Tellers for the yeas were Charles Cox and John Norris whilst the neas were John Sharp and Leonard Bilson. Both Cox and Norris were Whigs whilst Sharp and Bilson were High Tories; Eveline Cruickshanks, David Hayton, Stuart Handley (eds), The House of Commons 1690–1715 (Cambridge, 2002) vol. III Members A–F, 215–16, 771–4: vol. IV members G–N, 1040; vol. V members O–Z, 457–9. 159 CJ, xiv, 383–4. 160 Knights, The Devil in Disguise, 183. 161 Jack Ketch’s new and fashionable auction of choice and valuable books (1710). 162 Knights, The Devil in Disguise, 181–6, citation at 183; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 268.

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be identified and dealt with? Indeed, in its satirical representation of book burning, the broadsheet made perfectly clear that political power was now impotent in the face of an expensive and empowered print trade. Ketch’s auction was supposedly designed to point out the irony of acts of censorship, which provided authors of forbidden books with extensive publicity. The broadsheet rang with amusement that a trial to censor a minor clergyman had ensured his fame and spread his sermon far and wide. Alongside revealing the seeming paradoxes and inconsistencies in censorship, the Ketch print has been used to suggest that, by 1710, new attitudes to the rules of public debate had emerged and been established. It is commonplace to suggest that the modern concept of the freedom of the press drew strength from figures in the early eighteenth century who insisted that ideas should be answered not controlled. Whilst certainly novel, this is another story of cultural supersession, of public debate in which ‘censureship’ defeated ‘censorship’, and in which religious passions were tamed by modern, secular and democratic ideals. Despite claims that there was no ‘clear triumph of liberal values’, the intellectual ground notes of the triumph of answering books instead of controlling them is precisely how modern liberals understand the freedom of the press to be constructed.163 Even by 1710, contemporaries did not think or act in such dichotomous ways: answering and controlling books were part of the way public religious-politics was standardly conducted. For example, just before Sacheverell’s trial commenced, the Commons appointed Richard West to preach the 30 January sermon.164 West had already tangled in print with Henry Sacheverell in 1702 and relished confrontation. Taking as his text Jer. 31:29, he considered how people were punished for the sins of their fathers. Acknowledging that the execution of Charles I and the disestablishment of the Church in the 1640s were heinous crimes, he, nevertheless suggested Sacheverell’s obsession with the doctrinal purity of the Church in the seventeenth century was the direct cause of contemporary ‘heats and divisions’.165 High Churchmen, West continued, constantly venerated the memory of Charles’s execution. Far too much energy was expended on remembering the ‘disputes and divisions’ of the mid-century, which in turn supplied materials for modern ‘hatred and variance’.166 In particular, High Church obsession with passive obedience, a Jesuit doctrine talked up by far too many preachers in opposition to English ‘laws and liberties’, was destabilising the country.167 West’s sermon caused consternation amongst Tories and High Churchmen. John Dyer informed his readers that West was trying to ‘lessen the guilt of those concerned in the martyrdom of K Charles the 163 Ibid.,

185. Add. MS 70421, John Dyer Newsletters, 31 Jan. 1710. 165 Richard West, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons (1710), 4. 166 Ibid., 15. 167 Ibid., 13. 164 BL

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1st’ and to lessen the guilt of those men blackened ‘with the odium of 41 principles’.168 Two anonymous authors joined Dyer in his condemnation of West. Both suggested that, in questioning the memory of Charles I, he was also attacking the foundation of kingship and the status of the current queen. In one response, West was portrayed as a political Whig, perverting his calling and the Scriptures to the ‘vilest of purposes’ of supporting his political masters.169 Just as Whigs often accused Tories of subverting the true purpose of the pulpit, so West was accused of the same offence. He had advanced ‘wild notions’ from the pulpit and was preaching sedition to gratify ‘Papists, Atheists, and Deists’ in their campaign to subvert the status of the Church.170 West, of course, was protected from prosecution by his political patrons. The more urgent question was whether the sermon might be printed. John Dyer was well informed enough of parliamentary information to know that a vote had taken place in the Commons to ‘obtain the thanks of the house’. But he also revealed how divisive the debate on the sermon was. It was a ‘warm’ discussion and publication was only approved by 124 ‘yes’ against 105 ‘no’.171 Despite the closeness of the division, West’s sermon displayed the thanks of the house and the endorsement of important political figures, ‘Lord William Powlett, Mr George Rodney Bridges, the Lord Conningsby and Mr Coventry’.172 This approval, as one author commented, not only inured West from prosecution, but it also disguised the division in the house, where only a ‘very small Majority’ had ordered the printing of the sermon.173 West was exempted from any censure for such a controversial sermon. But, on the day of publication, members of the Corporation of the City of London made clear their feelings, for they ‘burnt Mr Hoadly in effigie and his books, and also Dr West’s sermon’.174 Indeed, so disillusioned was Lady Marlow by partisan politics that she commented of West and Sacheverell that she would put them ‘in a room together and fight it out’.175

168 BL

Add. MS 70421, John Dyer Newsletters, 31 Jan. 1710. Basileus, Remarks on Dr. West’s Sermon before the Honourable House of Commons (1710), 8. 170 Arthur Ashley Sykes, Some Modest Animadversions and reflections upon a Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons (1710), 6. 171 BL Add. MS 70421, John Dyer Newsletters, 11 Feb. 1710. 172 West, A Sermon Preached, frontispiece. 173 Philo Basileus, Remarks on Dr. West’s Sermon, 2. 174 BL Add. MS 70421, John Dyer Newsletters, 30 March 1710. 175 HMC, Dartmouth, III, 148. 169 Philo

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The Aftermath of the Trial

Even before it had started, William Stratford suggested the prosecution of Henry Sacheverell was likely a political miscalculation. ‘So solemn a prosecution for such a scribble’, he commented to Robert Harley, ‘will make the Doctor and his performance much more considerable than either of them could have been on any other account.’176 ‘It is said abroad we are all mad, may justly add fools too’, mused Abigail Harley in a letter to her brother Edward.177 Writing from London on 25 March 1710 and witnessing the trial of Henry Sacheverell first hand, Abigail Harley expressed despair at the botched prosecution of a minor Anglican cleric. Whilst she was certain Sacheverell’s two sermons delivered in the previous year accurately described the parlous condition of the Church and reflected the despair felt by many clerics at the incessant marginalisation of the national church from daily life, she also worried that the Whig ministry’s overreaction to two sermons, both of which had been initially delivered some years earlier and had been widely commented on, had the potential to imperil and bring down the state.178 Indeed, her concern was stimulated, at least in part, by the Sacheverell riots some twenty days previously, a night in which a mob had sacked Dissenting meeting houses, attacked the Bank of England and threatened to overrun the city.179 The reassertion of government control of the City of London did not spell the end of Harley’s concern.180 Brought up in a prominent English Civil War family, which had gone on to raise troops during the Glorious Revolution, the memory and prospect of political instability haunted both her family and the wider nation too.181 At one level, just invoking the events of the previous century was enough to provoke horror. It was a period in which there was ‘so much blood-shed, rapine and contempt of all things sacred and human; and all was completed

Portland MSS, iv, 530, Dr William Stratford to Robert Harley, 21 Dec. 1709. Portland MSS, iv, 539, Abigail Harley to Edward Harley, 25 Mar. 1710. 178 For comments on the first version of the Communication of Sin, see Bod. MS Rawl. 37 f.12, Thomas Hearne to Thomas Smith, 22 March 1710; Bod. MS Smith 127 f.36, Thomas Smith to Thomas Hearne, 23 March 1704. 179 For Harley’s comments on the riot see, HMC, Portland MSS, iv. 532, Abigail Harley to Edward Harley, 2 March 1710. The best contemporary accounts are BL Add. MS 70421, Dyer newsletters, 2 March 1710. Subsequent news reports were largely based on Dyer’s account and were very quickly layered with political comment: Review of the state of the British Nation, 4 March 1710, Observator, 4 March 1710. For an in-depth discussion of the political context and social make-up of the riots, see Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (1973), 156–79; Geoffrey Holmes, ‘The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, Past and Present, 72, 1 August 1976, 55–85. 180 The Observator, 4 March 1710. 181 HMC, Portland MSS, iii, 420–1, A. Pye to Abigail Harley, 13 Dec. 1688. 176 HMC, 177 HMC,

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in this crime, beyond which wickedness could go no further’.182 Harley worried that she lived in a period of widening partisan divisions much like the 1640s. ‘The High-Church faction’, one anonymous author commented, had tested the liberties of the nation to such an extent, that a new civil war was distinctly likely.183 Equally, William Bisset, in his direct confutation of Sacheverell’s sermon, concluded that, ‘we have had now a year of extreme violence and confusion, such as cannot be matched without a Civil War’.184 Henry Sacheverell was convicted. The lenient sentence, of three years’ suspension from the pulpit and the burning of his sermon, was the final piece of evidence that the trial was an abject failure for the Whigs.185 As Abigail Harley commented, ‘Monday the sermon is to be burnt’, and ‘this might have been done without putting the nation to 60 000l. charge, besides the terrible animosities that are raised throughout the kingdom, of which I pray God avert the fatal consequences’.186 Indeed, John Morrice commented privately of Sacheverell’s sentence, ‘I’m not a little glad to hear ye quotations are burnt. This too plainly shews where ye stroke is levell’d. Let them purge & purify ye Doctrine by flames as long as they please, some new Phoenix will still rise out of ye Ashes.’187 If, as at least some Whigs had claimed, the trial was supposed to end in exemplary punishment, so that High Churchmen could never again claim that the revolution was illegal or the Church was in danger, the sentence was an abject failure, inspiring churchmen to celebrate in various towns.188 Not only was Sacheverell now the ‘idol of the country’, his ideological positions became the main selling point of the Tories at the 1710 general election.189 In a letter to Sir John Newton, Gervase Scroop revealed that Tory candidates now ‘send their circular letters to all the clergy men to make their interest for him, it is impossible to imagine what an influence the Church is in danger has among the vulgar in this country’.190 The Church in Danger cry, far from being outlawed, now became the rallying force of the Tory election campaign. In turn, High Churchmen and their political allies completed their association of Dissent with Civil War radicalism, which had been burgeoning since the late seventeenth century.

Burnet, The royal martyr and the dutiful subject (1710), 5, 9. appeal from the city to the country, for the preservation of Her Majesty’s person, liberty, property and the Protestant religion (1710), 22, 32. 184 William Bisset, The Modern Fanatick. With a Large and True Account of the Life, Actions, Endowments, &.c of the Famous Dr Sacheverell (1710), preface. 185 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 228–9. 186 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 539: Harley to Edward Harley, 25 Mar. 1710. 187 Bod. MS Rawl. d. 1145, John Morrice to Thomas Rawlinson, 27 Mar 1710. 188 TNA SP34/12, f.59, Sir Joseph Jekyll to Lord Sunderland, 4 Apr. 1710. 189 Lincolnshire Archives, MON 7/13/123, Gervase Scroop to Sir John Newton, 26 June 1710. 190 Lincolnshire Archives, MON 7/13/124, G.S. to Sir John Newton, 1 July 1710. 182 Gilbert 183 An

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For many Whigs it became treason to speak against Sacheverell, if they did they were reckoned to be a ‘rank Presbyterian’.191 In turn, Whig churchmen fought a desperate rearguard action against the accusation that they had persecuted a godly preacher in an attempt to silence reasonable criticism of government policy. Kennett, for example, was an assiduous administrative archdeacon.192 In 1710, the draft of his visitation charge reveals a marked concern with the whole Sacheverell affair. Echoing many of his public concerns, he informed his clergy they should not be influenced by recent sermons. Those for which Sacheverell was impeached were lacking in style and spirit. Instead, the office of a clergyman was better fulfilled by preaching in a Christian manner, with ‘plainness, sincerity and sound doctrine, and solemn zeal’.193 Kennett spent some time refuting Sacheverell’s doctrinal positions. It is impossible for a Church of England clergyman to believe, he informed his diocese, that the Church was in danger, for the Church and the clergy had been encouraged by the queen. Nor had Sacheverell been impeached for preaching the doctrines of the Church but for raising rebellion against the state.194 In the short term, the Whigs paid for their prosecution. They lost the subsequent election and were cast from power.195 Indeed, even before they had lost the election, they were forced to prosecute another preacher. On 25 March 1710 Lord Sunderland received a report that a Mr Cornwall thrust himself into the pulpit and preached a sermon in support of Sacheverell. His text, ‘who will rise up for me against the evil-doers’, went on to claim that the Church was in danger and that Sacheverell had been persecuted by an ungodly ministry.196 Alarmed by the loss of control, Sunderland instructed the magistrates that it was the queen’s pleasure that Cornwall be brought to condign punishment to preserve the ‘canons and constitution of the Church’. It was a sign of the loss of power of the Whigs and the inadequacy of their policy to restrain High Church preachers that a prosecution was refused. Sunderland was lamely left to insist that Cornwall might be brought under the control of the ecclesiastical authorities.197 The fundamental objective of Sacheverell’s prosecution was to fix both the legality of the revolution and to prevent the cry of ‘Church in Danger’. Despite all the prevailing scholarship, the meaning of the prosecution of Sacheverell and, indeed, the later years of the Stuart regime cannot 191 BL

Add. MS 78, 478, f.45v, Samuel Thomson to Sir John Evelyn, 12 Dec. 1710. White Kennett, 1660–1728, 195–7. 193 BL Lansdowne MS 996, f.87r, White Kennett draft visitation charge, 16 May 1710. 194 BL Lansdowne MS 996, f.89r, White Kennett draft visitation charge, 16 May 1710. 195 Geoffrey Holmes, The Great Ministry, unpublished typescript. 196 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 539: Richard Knight to Robert Harley, 4 April 1710; BL Blenheim MSS 61610 f.30, bishop of St Asaph to Lord Sunderland, 2 April 1710, TNA, SP 34/12 ff.1–2, Sir Joseph Jekyll to Lord Sunderland, 25 Mar. 1710. 197 Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 237–8. 192 Bennett,

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be wholly understood by recourse to political thought or institutional, ideological politics. Nor can it be salvaged by adding in the dimension of public politics, in which restraint and freedom of the press are either described as opposites or the relationship between the two as becoming increasingly ambiguous, until censureship triumphs.198 Instead, all sides of the religious and political spectrum continued to debate how public politics should be conducted. The queen was persuaded to call an election in 1710, precisely because she sensed the stability of her nation was threatened.199 At least one component of that instability was that the providential status of her policies could not be maintained when the press was licentious. A humble address from Lancaster implored the queen to form a new ministry, which must put a stop to the growth of atheism, blasphemy and prophaneness. Only by controlling several wicked and blasphemous books might the Church and state be preserved.200

The Devil in Disguise, 185. The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 238. 200 A Collection of the Addresses which have been Presented to the Queen, since the Impeachment of the Revered Dr Sacheverell (1710), 22. 198 Knights, 199 Holmes,

274

Conclusion: Partisan Loyalties Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury was vilified in his own lifetime. James II considered him a ‘dull man’ and Swift derided him as good for nothing.1 In some senses, his reputation was well deserved. In the eyes of his critics, he was a churchman who had too often concerned himself with administrative duties. He emphasised the administrative efficiency and pastoral duties of the Church, concerning himself with improving the education of the clergy and urging them to set a moral example to their parishioners. Tenison’s contemporary reputation, however, was derived from his failures, not his successes. Far from recovering the spiritual authority of the clergy and restoring the disciplinary authority of the Church, Tenison presided over one of the most fractious periods of religious disputation in the history of the Church of England. By the end of the Sacheverell trial, the Church was riven by factional politics not seen since the English Civil War. No doubt the dissension in the Church was linked to issues that historians have discussed at some length: the legal enactment of toleration, the revealed status of the Bible and the sacerdotal status of the clergy. As I have shown, however, clerics – and politicians – were consistently and sincerely concerned with how public religious politics had gone wrong. Nor were concerns with the press focused solely on the damage that licentiousness inflicted on political stability. Instead, clerics articulated how writing, publishing, distributing and reading unorthodox books had soteriological consequences. Interestingly, men like Francis Atterbury and Benjamin Hoadly did not conceive of the press as free or controlled in the way modern historians have theorised. Instead, they teased out the connections between the creation of public knowledge and salvation. Tenison did more than anyone during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to try to convince the Church of England’s clergy to forego their own differences and unite against the common enemy of Catholicism. Romanists, after all, were, in his words, a ‘mighty body of men’ who were favoured in many places.2 He was well aware of the difficult 1

Marshall, Tenison, Thomas. Thomas Tenison, An Argument for Union, Taken from the True Interest of those Dissenters in England (1683), 19; Idem., The Present State of the Controversy Between the Church of England and the Church of Rome (1687); Carpenter, Thomas Tenison, 68–78; Colin Haydon, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Anti-Catholicism: Contexts, Continuity, and Diminution’, in J. Wolffe (ed.), Protestant–Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century (2013), 46–70. 2

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times he had lived through and his failures and successes. As he was dying and too frail to undertake a visitation, he wrote a humble assessment of his tenure as archbishop.3 He defended his own contribution as very hearty in the ‘suppressing of false doctrine and immorality, and the promoting of the truth and holiness’ and in his virulent opposition to popery, which had proved to be the mother ‘of a numerous offspring of evils of a high nature’.4 Even though he highlighted the problems caused by false doctrine from various factions in the Church, Tenison pinpointed High Churchmen as the real cause of turmoil in the post-revolutionary years. He despaired of their cry that they would rather be ‘Papists than Presbyterians’, when there was no necessity to be either.5 Certainly Tenison considered High Churchmen to have corrupted the doctrines and the creeds of the Church of England. They had maintained many popish tenets as if they were the practices of the Primitive Church, insisting on the necessity of auricular confession, unction in baptism, prayers for the dead and additions touching the Holy Sacrament.6 But he reserved his real ire for their public behaviour, their use of printing to dispute with others and to create followers. Time and again, Tenison complained, their ‘books are still written and dispersed plentifully’ and they had been influenced by professed papists. The books just kept coming forth, creating multitudes of proseltyes like vainglorious soldiers. There were also many books written by pretended Protestants, which had seduced many into the wrong path, because they had come from the pens of clergymen who had ‘gained some reputation for their learning’.7 Tenison’s reflections mirror one stream of the argument made in this book. By 1696, a set of High Churchmen was emerging who considered the Church to be in danger. Their initial anger was exacerbated by the accession of Anne. At first excited by her claims to defend the Church, High Churchmen were rapidly disillusioned by her failure to pass press legislation and suppress doctrinal laxity, or to empower convocation to control books. At the same time, however, they continued to exploit the press and the pulpit skilfully, persuading audiences of their positions. Indeed, so skilful and successful were they, that the Whig junto and Low Churchmen issued a proclamation to control the press. They declared that to print or preach that the Church was endangered was illegal. Despite Tenison’s reputation for moderation and for trying to bring different wings of the Church together, he failed. But his failure was tinged with resentment. High Churchmen had rejected his advances and turned to Catholicism for their inspiration. If Tenison’s anger reflects one interpretation of the period traced in this book, then a letter from Thomas Brett (1667–1744) to John Walker, written 3

Lambeth Lambeth 5 Lambeth 6 Lambeth 7 Lambeth 4

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276

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CONCLUSION

in 1726, reflects another.8 Brett was initially a supporter of the Glorious Revolution and the character of the church settlement in the 1690s.9 The trial of Henry Sacheverell induced in Brett a change of ecclesiastical position. In 1712 he preached a sermon concerned with sacerdotal absolution, which was attacked in convocation, he refused to take the oaths to George I in 1715, and he was consecrated as a nonjuring bishop by Jeremy Collier a year later.10 Much like Tenison, Brett considered that the Church was broken, riven by faction. But Brett located those problems in very specific events. The pamphlet war concerned with comprehension in 1689 began the ‘distinction of High Church and Low Church, according as men were for or against comprehension, and though the comprehension came to nothing … yet the distinguishing names of High and Low Church continued long after, and I know not if they are yet quite laid aside’.11 According to Brett, these divisions were exacerbated further by the publication of Spinoza and Locke, books that were liked and received with ‘a multitude of other books and pamphlets tending to promote Socinianism, Deism and Atheism’.12 Thus, by the early 1690s, an indisputably out-ofcontrol press had, in Brett’s view, been firmly allowed to spread unorthodox ideas. Even more damning, Brett insisted that the government’s and the Church’s response was not only wholly inadequate, it was designed to promote their own ideological position. Faced by problematic books, acts of parliament and proclamations were passed for the suppression of immorality and profaneness, and Latitudinarians had empowered societies to control vice. These societies were notoriously vicious, promoted by members who were themselves ‘loose and scandalous’.13 But Brett really reserved his ire for how the attack on vice had distorted the Church and endangered the providential status of the country. Churchmen and politicians had used the press and pulpit to exhort the country to moderation, to disregard parties and to encourage Dissenters. In doing so, they had promoted a sense that, ‘if men lead good moral lives it mattered not much what they believed’.14 Perhaps worse, bishops in the Church had suggested that any man living a good life would still ascend to heaven and that the divine right of Episcopacy was irrelevant to the status of the Church. Since the revolution, England had become a country in which ‘it matters not whether men were 8

Bod. MS Eng. Th. 41, ff.94–7, Thomas Brett to Dr Walker, 25 Apr. 1726 (draft). Robert D. Cornwall, ‘Brett, Thomas (1667–1744)’, in ODNB. 10 Ibid.; Thomas Brett, A Sermon on Remission of Sins, According to the Scriptures and the Doctrine of the Church of England (1712); Idem., The Doctrine of Remission of Sins, and the Power of Absolution (1712); White Kennett, A Letter About a Motion in Convocation, to the Reverend Dr Thomas Brett (1712). 11 Bod. MS Eng. Th. 41, ff.94–7, Thomas Brett to Dr Walker, 25 Apr. 1726 (draft). 12 Bod. MS Eng. Th. 41, f.95, Thomas Brett to Dr Walker, 25 Apr. 1726 (draft). 13 Bod. MS Eng. Th. 41, f.95, Thomas Brett to Dr Walker, 25 Apr. 1726 (draft). 14 Bod. MS Eng. Th. 41, f.95, Thomas Brett to Dr Walker, 25 Apr. 1726 (draft). 9

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of any Christian communion or not, they might be Atheists, Deists, Jews, or Mahometans, those are as good as Protestants and that was sufficient’.15 Whilst they were both in the Church – until Brett left in 1715 – Tenison’s and Brett’s recollections reflected the fissures the country had experienced over the previous thirty years. But, where Tenison had blamed High Churchmen, Brett blamed senior leaders of the Church. Not only had unorthodox doctrine been printed and preached in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, it had been a deliberate policy of the Williamite bishops and their political masters to allow Socinianism, atheism and deism to spread. Privileging the need for political stability above doctrinal truth, the bishops had insisted morality and sincerity would lead to heaven. In doing so, they had stripped the Church of its salvic function and denigrated its societal authority. A broadly analogous awareness of the tensions between Tenison and Brett has structured this book’s attempts to trace the complex relationship between the press and the Church and state, and from the Williamite revolutionary moment to the prosecution of Henry Sacheverell in 1710. In doing so, it has argued for thinking about the freedom of the press not as an absolute, nor for censorship as a form of tyrannous oppression, but instead as a crucial component of religious and political public partisan politics in later Stuart England. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were an era in which the English were still grappling with the consequences of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. Precisely because those events had unleashed wider discussion of political and religious issues, the press assumed crucial importance. Whilst many churchmen repeatedly evoked the licentiousness of the press, that did not mean there was a free press. It is not enough to suggest that more and more print being published simply overwhelmed complaints against the press and convinced political and religious participants that they should believe in a free press. Such thinking is the product of a broadly liberal interpretation, which insists the free press is a good thing and censorship is not. So, why have the arguments discussed in this book been largely forgotten by historians of the press? Why, to put it slightly differently, has our own understanding of the press evolved into a secular and liberal story, which can then be cast back and located in history? The answer can be found, I think, in how historians have discussed the press in the later eighteenth century. In the words of John Brewer, pre-eminent historian of cultural politics of the later period, by 1760 almost all English people understood the press to be the crucial bolster of a free constitution.16 Almost all subsequent historians have agreed with this assessment. The rise of England as a consumer society, one that enjoyed unprecedented leisure and wealth, 15

Bod. MS Eng. Th. 41, f.95, Thomas Brett to Dr Walker, 25 Apr. 1726 (draft). Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III, 139.

16 Brewer,

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CONCLUSION

ensured that English people consumed news in unprecedented amounts. In turn, convinced of the desirability of news, the people transformed free speech into an indivisible constituent and guarantor of the constitution.17 Whilst this idealist interpretation does not deny the importance of religion to public politics, it is a noticeably secularising story – one that, as post-modernist critics point out, cannot hope to cope with the religious pluralism that now represents modern Britain.18 A better version of the story of the press and eighteenth-century Britain might build on recent excellent work concerned with the religious identity of the early English Enlightenment.19 In that version of the Enlightenment, there is no narrative of ever-emerging liberal freedom. Instead, it is a narrative of churchmen maintaining religious shibboleths whilst simultaneously accepting the needs of civil peace. If we consider Enlightenment in this way, not as an age of emancipation but as concerned with finding different ways of responding to demands for secularity, whether it be democracy or civil religion, then the history of the press can become one that helps us to serve modern needs. At the very least, the early eighteenth-century story of the press – in which people were motivated by the twin concerns of civil peace and religious plurality – might help us reconcile modern-day calls for the protection of minority rights in public discourse, whilst maintaining the need to ascertain public truths. Either way, neither historians of the eighteenth century nor modern thinkers can hope to understand the nature of public debate by privileging the free press and dismissing censorship.

Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), 2–4; H.T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in EighteenthCentury Britain (Basingstoke, 1995), 204–5; Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989), 286–9; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 37; Linda Colley, Britons Forging the Nation 1707–1827 (New Haven and London, 1992), 40–1. 18 Mondal, Islam and Controversy, 185–211; Kay Goodall, ‘Incitement to Religious Hatred: All Talk and No Substance’, Modern Law Review, 70 (2007), 89–113. 19 Compare Bulman, ‘Introduction: Enlightenment for the Culture Wars’, 1–41 – with Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 265–70. 17

279

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325

Index Abbot, George  57 Aldrich, Henry  45, 241 Anabaptists  88, 122 Anderton, William  156 Anne, queen  139, 145, 169, 173, 207, 218, 221, 237, 274 Church of England, attitude to 146–7 press, attitude to  146–9 anonymity  150–4, 159, 164, 208–16, 230 anticlericalism  39, 61, 70–1, 89, 94–6, 99, 108–9, 125, 163, 224 Apology for the Parliament (1697) 83 Arminianism  15, 106 Arianism  97, 131 Asgill, John  153, 191, 246 Ashurst, William  63 Assheton, William  37–9 atheism and atheists  7, 39, 52, 68, 88, 99, 135, 153, 167, 180, 186, 202, 264, 274, 277 Atterbury, Francis, dean of Carlisle and Christ Church, later bishop of Rochester (1713)  2, 78, 89, 91, 97–115, 135, 138, 144, 159–61, 173, 175–9, 184, 191–5, 225, 228, 234, 235, 244, 262, 275 Publications Axe laid to Christianity (1706) 191–5 Letter to a Convocation Man (1697) 98–115 Baldwin, Abigail  122, 162, 212, 232 Baldwin, Richard  122 Baron, John 8,  124 Bayley, Thomas  88 Beconsall, Thomas  74–6 Bell, Andrew  121 Bennet, Thomas  192–3 Bernard, Edward  58 Bethel, Slingsby  123

Beverly, Thomas  76 Bible  xiii, 12, 15, 17, 181 as aid to disputation  44, 70–1, 93–4, 110–11, 119, 126, 127, 128, 129, 157, 182 authority attacked  39, 61–85 authority defended  39, 61–85 defines orthodoxy  48, 158–9 interpretation and truth  43 Biblical citations  130–3 II Chronicles 16:34  243–4 I Corinthians 15:19  193–4 Ezekiel 12  35 Hebrews 3:13  132 Hebrews 13:17  77–8 Jeremiah 31:29  269 I John 5:7  119 Leviticus 19:17  132 Revelation 3:2  245–6 Romans 14:22  265 Thessalonians 5:11  133 Thessalonians 5:14  132 Thessalonians 5:21  110 Timothy 3  50 Timothy 5:22  32–4, 197–202 Biddle, John  42 Binckes, William  177, 218, 225, 234, 263 Bingham, Joseph  59 Birch, Peter  50 Bisset, William  255–6, 272 blasphemy  18, 26, 28–39, 59, 73, 79, 80, 83, 88, 114, 130, 148–9, 161, 168, 186, 192, 202, 207, 228–9, 232, 246, 262–4 Blasphemy Act (1698)  26, 29, 117–21, 138, 151, 229, 262 Blount, Charles  8, 12, 54–8, 124, 135, 139, 154, 162, 191, 198 Blount, Thomas  237, 239 Bohun, Edmund  12, 53, 55 book burning  43–4, 55, 77, 78, 79–80, 83, 130, 212, 266–8, 272

INDEX

Boyer, Abel  207–8 Bradford, Samuel  90, 94–6 Bradock, John  47 Bragg, Benjamin  212, 223, 252 Bravat, Dr  50 Brett, Thomas  276–8 Brewer, John  278 Bridges, George Rodney  270 Bridges, Ralph  6 Bromley, William  209 Browne, Peter  83–4 Brydges, James  254 Bugg, Francis  145, 158–9 Burnet, Gilbert, bishop of Salisbury (1689–1715)  2, 25, 31–2, 33, 40, 54, 66, 76, 89, 90, 91, 169, 175–7, 192, 218, 222, 226–7 Burnet, Thomas  153 Bury, Arthur  27, 41–52, 101 Butler, James, duke of Ormond  37 Calves-Head circle  116 Calvinism  15, 80, 163 Carstares, William  226 Catholicism  3, 43–4, 64, 81–2, 110, 214, 219, 275, 276 Charles I, king  60, 63, 127, 138, 195, 237, 269–70 Charles II, king  10, 26, 41, 127, 138, 148, 181, 253 Charlett, Arthur  59, 60, 164 ‘Church in danger’  19–20, 217–22, 237–55 Church of England  xiii, 1–2, 28–40, 146–7, 192–5, 207–16 Chute, Edward  264–5 Claggett, William  33 Clare, Robert  211 Clarke, Edward  87 Clarke, Mary  171 Clements, Henry  223, 266 Collections of Passages (1710) 261–4 Collier, Jeremy  29, 234, 235, 277 Collins, Anthony  12, 124, 223 Commonwealthmen 117–18 comprehension  40, 46 failure of  40, 174

Compton, Henry, bishop of London (1675–1713)  49, 97, 217, 238 Congreve, William  187 Coningsby, Thomas 1st lord (Ireland) 259,270 convocation  3, 40, 98–115, 160, 170–9, 184–5, 190–1 Cornwall, Rev.  273 Cotton, Rowland  226 Coventry, Gilbert, 4th earl of  270 Coward, William  153 Cowper, William  152 Curteis, Thomas  162 Daily Courant  162, 222 Dangerous Positions, or Blasphemous, Profane, Immoral and Jesuitical Assertions (1708) 227–8 Darby, John, jnr.  116, 121, 232 Darby, John, snr.  121–2 Davenant, Charles  151, 176 Defoe, Daniel  123, 128, 143–6, 153–7, 159–61, 166–9, 211–12, 230, 238–9, 263 deism and deists  83, 39, 49, 59, 62–7, 103–4, 113, 119, 171, 187–8, 277–8 Delaune, Thomas  156 Dennis, John, 187 dissenters  8, 20, 26, 44, 49, 88–9, 93, 119–21, 132, 136–7, 144, 157–9, 171, 182, 185–90, 210, 215, 219–20, 265–6 depicted as libelling the Church  181, 210–16 Dodwell, Henry  59, 235, 263 Doolittle, Thomas  38 Drake, James  212, 253 Dryden, John  187 Dunton, John  122 Dyer, John  269–70 Edward I, king  148 Edwards, David  211–12 Edwards, Jonathan  45–7, 52 Elys, Edmund  77 Emlyn, Thomas  246

328

INDEX

English Civil War  16, 53, 172, 218–20, 271–2 enlightenment  62, 73, 172, 223, 279 Erastianism  108–9, 128–9 Fanaticism 52 Finch, Daniel, second earl of Nottingham  40, 54, 152, 174 Firmin, Thomas  51 Fowler, Edward, bishop of Gloucester 51 Fraser, James  53 Freke, John  89 freethinkers and freethinking  12, 18, 54 Friendly Discourse Against Swearing (1697) 38 Gailhard, Jean  80–3 Gastrell, Francis  78 Gellibrand, John  211 General Election (1705)  165–9 General Election (1710)  272 Gibson, Edmund  178–9 Glorious Revolution  xii–xiii, 108–9, 235–6, 254–74 Godolphin, Sidney Godolphin, 1st earl of  120, 146, 151, 167, 173–4, 212, 217, 239–40, 248, 250,252, 254, 259 Gough, Susanah  212 Green Ribbon Club  237 Gregory, Francis  117, 127–39 Habermas, Jürgen  9 Halifax, Charles Montague, Ist lord 217 Harcourt, Simon  200 Harley, Abigail  271–2 Harley, Robert later earl of Oxford, Lord Treasurer (1711–14)  2, 20, 31, 87, 120, 143–6, 150–4, 163, 166–9,172–4, 207–17, 225, 239–42, 245, 250 Harrington, James  44–5 Hawes, Matthew  7 Hayley, William, dean of Chichester Cathedral  66, 90, 91–3

Heald, Peter  100 Hearne, Thomas  223, 230–1 Hedges, Sir Charles, Secretary of State (1702–6) 152–3 Hell  39, 77, 89, 126, 181, 193 heresy and heretics  41–52, 55, 73, 99, 101, 103, 131–3, 148–9, 157–8, 175–6, 199–200, 246–7 Heywood, Richard  211 Hickeringill, Edmund  17, 191, 217 Hickes, George  164, 223, 229, 232–4, 235 Higgins, Francis  225, 235, 243–54 prosecution of  248–55 high churchmanship  4, 14–15, 64, 67, 91, 102, 125, 158, 159–60, 162, 165, 180–203, 190, 207–16, 222, 237–73 link dissenters and deism  171 pulpit, use of  237–73 press, use of  144, 166, 225 Hill, Samuel  135, 225 Hilliard, Samuel  225, 228–34 Hoadly, Benjamin  164, 191–5, 196, 217, 243, 270, 275 Hobbes, Thomas  54, 64, 198 Hodges, James  90 Holmes, Geoffrey  xii Holt, Sir John, Lord Chief Justice  230 Jacobitism  25, 58, 117, 150, 183 James II, king  10, 12, 26, 54, 154, 181 Jane, William  45, 175 Jenks, Benjamin  38 Jersey, Edward Villiers, Ist earl of, Lord Chamberlain (1702–4)  152 Jervoise, Thomas  88, 226, 264 Judgment of the Whole Kingdoms and Nations (1710) 235 ‘Junto’, the Whig  3, 166, 215, 225, 246, 248, 252 Ken, Thomas, Nonjuring bishop of Bath and Wells  86–7 Kennett, White  50, 178, 221–2, 228, 229, 242, 257, 272 Ketch, Jack  268–9 King, Peter  230

329

INDEX

King, William  54 Kingston, Richard  249, 253 Lambe, Charles  225 Latitudinarianism  17, 135, 165 associated with deism  175–6, 181, 187, 225, 244, 246 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, (1633–45)  57, 65, 106, 256 Le Clerc, Jean  232 Leslie, Charles  211, 214–15, 218, 223, 229, 234, 235, 263, 265–6 L’Estrange, Roger  57, 122 Lewis, Thomas  228 Letter to a Member of Parliament, Shewing the Necessity of Regulating the Press 1699) 128–37 Letter to J.C. (1697) 77 licensing  125–6, 151–2 lapse in 1695 (Printing Act)  xii, 8–9, 11, 54, 87 party politics and  153–61 representation of  53–8, 134–8, 153–4 Lloyd, William  59, 62, 88, 183, 226 Locke, John  x, 12, 51, 61–2, 75, 89, 100, 103, 105, 108, 277 low churchmanship  91, 94, 172, 174, 186, 191, 215, 226 Lucas, Richard  90 Ludlow, Edmund  116, 138 Luther, Martin  57, 112, 126–7, 130, 163 Luttrell, Narcissus  251 Macaulay, T.B.  8–9, 11, 12 Mackworth, Humphrey  212, 220 Marlborough, John Churchill Ist duke of  146, 151, 167, 254 Marlow, Lady  270 Marsh, Francis  84 Mary I, queen  143 Mary II, queen  36, 86 Maynwaring, Arthur  266 McCormick, Joseph  226 Meiklejohn, Alexander  ix

Memorial of the Church of England (1705)  207–16, 230, 247, 251 Milbourne, Luke  194, 225, 228, 235, 244, 254 Mill, John Stuart  xi Milton, John  x, 12, 55, 68, 116–17, 124 138, 194 moderation  4, 153–4, 159, 165–8, 207–10 Morgan, William  61 Morrice, John  272 Newton, John  272 Nine Years War  118 Nonjurors  98, 109, 150 Norris, John  73–4 Northey, Sir Edward, Attorney-General (1701–7) 230 Nye, Stephen  40, 42, 45 Brief Notes upon the Creed of St. Athanasius 40 Observator  161, 166, 202, 213, 239, 242 Occasional Conformity  165, 207, 209, 216, 238, 256 Occasional Paper (1696)  89–96 Oxford Decree (1683)  43, 49, 83, 107, 138, 153, 158, 262 Oxford, University of  42–4 Pakington, John  183, 218–20 parish  31, 101 as a means of controlling debate  31–3, 101 Parkinson, James  41–4 Payne, William  50–1, 76 Penn, William  120 Philipps, John  118 Poley, Edmund  165–6 Post-Man  69, 231 Potter, Edward  164 Potter, John  231 Poulett, John, first earl, 239 Powlett, lord William  270 preaching 235–74 calls for restraint of  167–8, 217, 224–5, 249, 254

330

INDEX

endangers political stability  167–8, 249 politicization of  236–7, 249 restrained  50, 95–6, 252 pulpit, see preaching press, attempted legislation for  88–9, 121, 152–3 press, freedom of  civil religion and  12 concerns with truth  16, 42, 57, 68–72, 75, 93–4, 113, 132, 184, 221 emancipatory narrative  9 established by free enquiry  113–14 Glorious Revolution and  11, 13, 53, 58 ideas of  11, 14, 112–21, 125–39, 214–15 in 1705 General Election  165–8 not established by disputation  13, 48, 61, 91–2, 227–34, 260, 269 not established by toleration  88, 219, 243 political stability and  42, 46, 51, 57, 63–8, 92, 112–14, 135, 153, 163–4 sincerity and  44, 83, 172, 191, 192–5, 244 underpinned by liberalism  ix–xi, 14, 80 Whigs and  12, 43–4, 106–7 press, licentiousness of  2, 8, 73, 82, 118, 154, 168, 170–2, 176, 178–9, 197–203, 216, 217, 218–20, 245, 252, 261–6 encourages immorality  118, 130, 186, 244–6, 264 encourages sin  6–7, 15, 16, 99–100, 113, 131, 169 exacerbated by party politics  165–9, 207 trope of infection  47, 52–3, 69, 75, 78, 81–2, 83, 84, 91–2, 130–1, 133, 154, 177, 188, 191, 197–202, 217–18, 265 press, restraint of  40, 69–70, 127–39 civility and  67, 74, 78, 94, 103, 172

lack of undermines the church  98–103, 149, 180–1 lack of undermines the state  80–3, 100, 149, 220, 274 practised by the Catholic Church  55–8, 153–4, 214 proclamations for  147–50 provides political stability  153 Prideaux, Humphrey, dean of Norwich  (1702–24) 40, 51, 62, 88 Quakers  120, 157–9 Reformation  16, 56–7, 70, 111–12, 126–7, 128, 129, 130, 163, 225 Reformation of Manners, societies for (SRM)  16, 28–39, 51, 91, 256 Rehearsal  213, 242 Review  166, 213, 239, 242 Richard II, king  148 Ridpath, George  6, 202–3, 235 Rochester, Laurence Hyde, 1st earl of  144, 170, 217 Rogers, Thomas  63–4 Russell, William, Lord  122 Ryswick, treaty of  118 Sacheverell, George  180 Sacheverell, Henry  3,5, 14, 144, 159–60, 168, 171, 183–203, 218, 224, 228, 234, 235, 242, 254 attacks Dissenters  26–7, 171, 181–2, 186, 188, 190 basic biographical information 179–80 prosecution and trial  3–4, 6, 19, 20, 237, 254–74 publications Character of a Low-church-man (1702) 185–6 Communication of Sin (1709)  5–6, 171, 197–203, 254–74 Nature and Mischief of Prejudice and Partiality (1704) 187 Perils of False Brethren (1709) 5–6, 171, 197–203, 254–74 Political Union (1702) 180–2

331

INDEX

salvation 170–203 endangered by errant doctrine  100, 196, 243–4, 247 endangered by public disputation 83 guaranteed by enquiry  113 Sare, Richard  229–30 Sarpi, Paolo  55 Satanic Verses (1988) ix Scroop, Gervase  272 seditious libel  155, 207–16, 249, 253 Sermons  7, 188 note taking  7–8, 249 Seymour, Sir Edward  152 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of  164, 259 Sharpe, Isaac  Sherlock, William, dean of St Paul’s  (1691–1707) 17, 45–6, 47, 50, 100, 105, 106–7 Shower, Bartholomew  98 Sidney, Algernon  123, 156 sin  6–7, 14–15, 33–6, 196–203, 261 created by unorthodox books  80–1, 83 not finite  50 moral reform, and  31–9 Smalridge, George, bishop of Bristol (1714), 200–1 Smith, John  130, 217 Smith, Thomas  58 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)  26, 28, 66, 91, 118, 238 Socinians and Socinianism  42, 46–51, 80–1, 88, 97, 99, 103–4, 130, 131 Some Considerations Humbly Offered by the People called the Quakers (1704) 157–8 Some Considerations Upon the Bill for the More Effectual Suppressing and Prophaneness (1698) 119 Some Considerations Upon the Bill for the More Effectual Suppressing of Blasphemy and Prophaneness, Animadverted (1698) 119–20 Somers, Lord  144 Southwell, Robert  54

Sprat, Thomas, bishop of Rochester  (1684–1713) 51 Spinoza, Benedict  54, 64, 198, 277 Stephens, Robert  211, 230 Stephens, William  63–7, 191 Stewart, James  253 Stillingfleet, Edward, bishop of Worcester  (1689–1699) 84 Stratford, William  240–1, 254, 271 Stubbs, Philip  238 Sunderland, earl of, Secretary of State (1706–10)  120, 211, 223, 245, 250–4, 272 Swan-Tripe Club  243 Swift, Jonathan  275 ‘Tack’, the (1704)  165, 209, 238, 256 ‘Tackers’, the  165 Talbot, Charles, earl of Shrewsbury  31, 46–8, 54, 78, 101, 143–4 Talbot, William  183 Tenison, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury (1694–1715)  2, 20, 47, 485–1, 59–60, 78, 86–8, 91, 101, 103, 145, 150–4, 172–3, 225–6, 231, 251–3, 275–6 theology  15–16, 126 admonition 95–6 edification  92, 96, 133 justification by faith alone  15, 243–4 redemption  96, 193 sanctification 253–4 Thirty-Nine Articles  40 Thompson, William  263 Tillotson, John, archbishop of Canterbury (1691–4)  41, 51, 69, 72, 98 Tilly, William  225, 235, 240–1, 242, 244 Tindal, Matthew  1–2, 12, 18, 20, 117, 121–39, 145, 151, 153–4, 156, 162–5, 176, 198, 242 basic biographical information 107–8 prosecution of  227–34 publications

332

INDEX

Essay Concerning the Laws of Nations (1694) 124 Essay Concerning the Powers of the Magistrate (1697)  106–15, 123 Four Discourses (1709) 124 Letter to a Friend (1708) 231 Letter to a Member of Parliament (1698)  68–9, 121–39 New High-Church Turn’d Old Presbyterian (1709) 234 Reasons against Restraining the Press (1704)  124, 162–4 Rights of the Christian Church (1706)  1, 164, 222–34, 262, 268 Second Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church (1708) 232–3 Toland, John  1–2, 12, 19, 20, 59–60, 98, 102, 105, 110, 116–17, 119, 123, 129, 156, 164, 175, 191, 213, 222, 246, 259 prosecution of  78–85 publications Christianity not Mysterious (1696)  20, 59–60, 61–85, 93–4, 99–100, 164, 175, 186, 217, 262 Letters to Serena (1704) 1 Toleration  48, 72, 157–8, 186, 243 as aid to political stability  5 resented by High Churchmen  4, 186 Toleration Act (1689)  40, 44, 82, 88 Tories  43, 121, 122 hardening identity of  143–4, 165–6, 236 trade publishers  156 treason  25, 157 Treason Act (1708)  229 Trelawny, Jonathan, bishop of Exeter (1707) 102 Trenchard, John  x–xi Trimnell, Charles, bishop of Norwich  (1708–21) 90, 91

trinitarian disputes  16, 17, 20, 97, 107 freedom of the press and  40–52, 58–9 leads to deism  63–73 Tutchin, John  145, 149–50, 162, 166, 169, 181, 202, 213–14, 230, 237–8, 239, 248 Tyrell, James  123 University 45 as correct place for theological disputation  28, 43, 45, 49 Vernon, James  143–4 Wake, William, bishop of Lincoln (1705–16)  2–4, 33–7, 102–5, 164, 173–4, 184, 226, 231, 233 Walker, John  276 Walpole, Robert  260–1 West, Richard  183–5, 269–70 Wetenhall, Edward  46 Whaley, Nathanael  195–6, 225, 235, 255 Wharton, Thomas, 1st earl of  218, 254 Wheeler, Maurice  173–4, 233, 260 Whig churchmanship  15, 209, 215, 217, 272 Whigs  117, 121, 165–6, 215, 221 Whipping Post 213 Whitehead, George  159 William III, king  11, 25, 37, 63, 86, 118, 127, 147, 170, 173, 221 promotion of moral reformation  26, 118 Willis, Richard  66–7, 90, 93–4, 139 Wright, William  106–7 Woodward, Josiah  28 Worth, Edward  243 Wotton, William  1–5, 226 Wycherley, William  187

333

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Details of volumes I–XXIV can be found on the Boydell & Brewer website.

XXV ‎Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 ‎Craig Spence XXVI ‎Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland Essays in Honour of John Walter ‎Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington XXVII ‎Commerce and Politics in Hume’s History of England ‎Jia Wei XXVIII ‎Bristol from Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City ‎Steve Poole and Nicholas Rogers XXIX ‎Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England ‎Caroline Boswell XXX ‎ romwell’s House of Lords C ‎Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642–1660 ‎Jonathan Fitzgibbons XXXI ‎Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: ‎Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 ‎Edited by Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson XXXII ‎National Identity and the Anglo–Scottish Borderlands, 1552–1652 ‎Jenna M. Schultz XXXIII ‎Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London ‎Lena Liapi

XXXIV ‎Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain ‎Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie ‎Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall XXXV ‎The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire ‎Edited by Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes XXXVI ‎Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England ‎Barbara Crosbie XXXVII ‎The National Covenant in Scotland, 1638–1689 ‎Chris R. Langley XXXVIII ‎Visualising Protestant Monarchy: Ceremony, Art and Politics after the Glorious Revolution (1689–1714) ‎Julie Farguson XXXIX ‎Blood Waters: War, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean ‎Nicholas Rogers XL ‎The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England ‎Edited by Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby XLI ‎Africans in East Anglia, 1467–1833 ‎Richard C. Maguire XLII ‎Royalism, Religion and Revolution: Wales, 1640–1688 ‎Sarah Ward Clavier XLIII Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England ‎Robert Tittler

XLIV Scotland and the Wider World: Essays in Honour of Allan I. Macinnes Edited by Alison Cathcart and Neil McIntyre XLV Urban Government and the Early Stuart State: Provincial Towns, Corporate Liberties, and Royal Authority in England, 1603–1640 Catherine F. Patterson XLVI The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1660–1696 James Walters