‘True churchmen’? Anglican Evangelicals and history,c .1770–1850

In about 1800, Henry Budd, chaplain to the Bridewell Hospital in London, began to think seriously about his theological education. ‘I never once, even before my ordination, sat down to read the Bible as a whole’, he recalled with shame. ‘Having my religious knowledge to obtain, and none to advise me,’ he first wrestled with the works of modern divines, but found that they held few attractions: ‘their vague statements and non-descript divinity gave me no insight into my Bible’. Delving further back, however, Budd was surprised and delighted to find more congenial company in an earlier generation of writers. It was here – in the writings of seventeenth-century divines like Hopkins, Ussher, Hall, Burnet and Hooker – that he ‘found the pure waters of the sanctuary’. Aside from their faithfulness to Scripture, what Budd found most striking was the consonance of these works with the formularies of his Church. ‘An observation was forced upon me,’ he confessed, ‘that as men receded from this tone, so they seemed to differ from the articles, homilies, and liturgy of our Church, their statements of religious truth were loose and unscriptural, and their Gospel savoured less of “the Gospel of the kingdom”.’ ¹

Budd’s bookish epiphany amid the dusty shelves of the Chaplain’s Library at the Bridewell reflected the experiences of many other establishment Evangelicals who were surprised to find ‘the great and fundamental doctrines of the Gospel’ spelt out by their Anglican ancestors. Stung by accusations that their churchmanship was suspect, they scrutinized the Prayer Book, along with the Articles and Homilies that accompanied it, and were overjoyed to find much that they recognized and approved. ‘Who would believe our Church had been founded on this important article of justification by faith alone,’ Charles Wesley had written in 1738. ‘I am astonished I should ever think this a new doctrine.’ ² ‘The more I read them, the more I find in them to approve and admire’, marvelled the Leeds surgeon William Hey. ³ Looking further, they soon discovered other writers who were to their taste. ‘My divinity is unfashionable enough at present’, remarked John Newton in 1775, ‘but it was not so always; you will find few books, written from the era of the Reformation till a little before Laud’s time, that set forth any other’. ⁴ Growing familiarity with this mouldering corpus of literature led Evangelicals ineluctably towards the conclusion that it was in fact their detractors, not they, who were betraying what the reformers really thought.

The thirty years or so each side of 1800 were an exciting time to be an Anglican. The loss of America, the French Revolution, urban growth and the explosion of evangelical dissent posed immense intellectual, political and pastoral challenges to the Church–State compact, challenges that came to a head in 1828–32 and in the decades after. ⁵ Such developments were highly unsettling; and while some ecclesiastical progressives welcomed the stimulation thus provided, many more churchmen looked to the past for guidance. ⁶ Probably the best-known reflex of this conservative shift is the Oxford Movement, whose fixation with finding a direct apostolic lineage led them back to the Church Fathers via medieval Catholicism, and did much to influence the revival of ritual and architecture in the 1840s and 50s. Less well known, however, is the Anglican Evangelical search for ancestors, which was in some ways a parallel development. It would be easy to assume that they thought more about the invisible communion of all believers, and there is some truth in this. Joseph Milner’s hugely influential History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809), for example, ranged across time and space, plucking out unlikely figures like Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory the Great and painting them as ‘vital believers’ avant la lettre. ⁷ Nevertheless, as recent scholarship makes clear, it would be anachronistic to view Evangelicals as ‘low’ in their churchmanship. Like the majority of Anglicans, they were deeply attached to their own national Church. They revered its Articles, Liturgy and Homilies, both as witnesses to scriptural principles – original sin, new birth, salvation by faith alone – and as embodiments of the sixteenth-century struggle for those principles. ‘[They] come to you signed and sealed with England’s best blood,’ declaimed one preacher. ⁸ Like those of the Oxford Movement and its high church predecessors, Evangelical efforts to revive the present Church were rooted in its past. In that sense they had much in common. What that past signified, however, was highly contentious. It gave rise to strenuous and prolonged controversy as contending churchmen sought to put their own spin on Anglican history. This article examines how, and why.

Ever since the earliest days of the movement in the 1730s and 40s, Evangelicals had sought to cull quotations from the formularies in defence of their beliefs. ⁹ From the 1760s onwards, however, they began to articulate their theological pedigree with more confidence. Thomas Bowman’s Review of the Doctrines of the Reformation (1768), Augustus Montague Toplady’s Historic Proof of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England (1774) and John Overton’s True Churchmen Ascertained (1801) argued in increasingly sophisticated ways that the ‘reformers’ – which term encompassed not just the generation of Cranmer but also the Elizabethan primates Parker, Whitgift and Grindal, the ‘judicious Mr. Hooker’ and even the Jacobean Church – had been committed predestinarians. Had such luminaries been alive today, Evangelicals reminded, they too would have been stigmatized as ‘Calvinists’ and enthusiasts. In Aylesbury in 1791, for example, one visitation sermon contained so many anti-predestinarian barbs that it prompted the publication of counter-sermons by two offended clerical hearers in order to reassert Anglican doctrines ‘as they were taught by our first reformers’. Such ignorance, one of them pointed out darkly, was hardly surprising when the Homilies were frequently to be found ‘thrown by in some garret’. ¹⁰ The idea that the Articles and Homilies were being wilfully detached from the Prayer Book whose doctrine they were designed to safeguard became a perpetual Evangelical bugbear. They deplored the dishonesty of their clerical brethren who subscribed ex animo to the Articles without any real awareness of their contents, and who dismissed the bracing reformed theology of the Homilies. ‘We then are the TRUE CHURCHMEN … they are Schismatics,’ concluded Overton triumphantly. ¹¹ (Overton’s case was bolstered when he discovered that his most redoubtable opponent, Charles Daubeny, had omitted a crucial ‘not’ when he quoted the Homily on Faith.) ¹²

Yet this was not simply posturing. Another reason feelings ran so high was that Evangelicals had experienced the potency of historical-theological study for themselves. Budd was by no means alone in taking to his study to wrestle with antique volumes. The struggles of the preacher Thomas Scott to accept the implications of the Articles was only resolved through a stiff course of ‘old divinity’, a process that he described vividly in his celebrated spiritual autobiography, The Force of Truth (1779).

It is much to be wished that their lives and discourses, living and dying, and their remaining writings, were more generally known amongst us, and did not remain locked up from the world in large folios, in the learned languages, or in books out of print, or exceedingly scarce: the effect of which is, that the members of our national church are in general utterly ignorant of its standard doctrines, and ignorantly brand those as Methodists and enthusiasts, who preach zealously the very doctrines of the first reformers. ¹³

That Scott underwent this process during a period of intense debate over the Thirty-Nine Articles is no coincidence. While some churchmen went along with Francis Blackburne and the Feathers Tavern petitioners in calling for relaxation of the terms of subscription, for many others this prompted closer examination of formularies to which they had hitherto paid only casual attention. The ensuing reaction set the tone for half a century of revived conservatism within the Church, a phenomenon that encompassed not just the ‘Orthodox’ majority but Evangelicals as well. ¹⁴ This raises an important point, in that although historical conflict would become increasingly bad-tempered from the 1790s on, party boundaries in the pre-Tractarian Church remained permeable. Even though they differed as to the details, Orthodox attachment to the sacraments, to patristic tradition, and to the English Reformation as a rediscovery of that inheritance, was generally compatible with the Evangelical stress on Scripture and personal conversion, an emphasis which they too traced back to the early Church via the reformers. ¹⁵ Pronounced differences over ritual and apostolicity developed only later.

In part, then, Evangelical opinion was driven by tactical concerns. In the febrile atmosphere of the revolutionary 1790s it was imperative that they broadcast their loyalty to the establishment, especially with starchy Orthodox clergymen like Daubeny, Richard Laurence and George Pretyman-Tomline accusing them of being traitors within it. ‘Regularity’ (i.e., adherence to ecclesiastical norms) became the order of the day; and no pious biography was complete without assurances of its subject’s impeccable churchmanship. ¹⁶ Such concerns were reflected in what Evangelicals published. In the first decade of the new century the presses groaned under the weight of tomes expounding the doctrines of the ‘best visible Church on earth’. Thomas Biddulph of Bristol led off with Practical Essays on Select Parts of the Liturgy (four volumes, 1799–1805), which was later joined by Practical Essays on the Collects in the Liturgy of the Church of England (four volumes, 1805) and Practical Essays on the Morning and Evening Services of the Church of England (three volumes, 1809). James Bean’s influential Zeal Without Innovation emerged in the same year. Charles Simeon, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, contributed a set of four University sermons, published as The Excellency of the Liturgy (1812). Others followed suit.

Although urbane and studiedly uncontroversial, such works were not uncritical. Rejecting the idea that the dissenting boom could be ascribed to a malign ‘enthusiastic’ spirit, they insisted instead that dry, moralistic nominalism was the root cause. Until the gospel preached by the reformers was heard again from Anglican pulpits, their flocks would continue to roam elsewhere in search of spiritual nourishment. Evangelical clergymen accustomed to scriptural comparisons saw themselves as a ‘faithful remnant’ in the British Israel: that the Church had retained any purchase at all was due to the heartfelt preaching of Reformation doctrine by a faithful few. ¹⁷ Eagerness to remind their brethren of what the reformers had thought impelled and informed their reading. They devoured Jewell’s Apology and Nowell’s Catechism, discerning an ascending curve of scriptural truth through the successive Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552. Against Orthodox suspicions that the latter book represented the interference of foreign hyper-Protestants like Calvin, they stressed the agency of the English bishops Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley in its composition, maintaining that they, like their self-appointed latter-day successors, had been not ‘system Christians’ but ‘Bible Christians’. Unlike Calvin, whose ‘odious’ Institutes were a byword for doctrinaire rigidity, the English reformers had been unconcerned with ‘abstruse and inessential questions’ like predestined election: their theology was, above all, ‘practical’ and ‘experimental’. ¹⁸ ‘Moderate Calvinism’, as its exponents called it, was certainly the result of an unwillingness to systematize beyond what Scripture said, but it also seemed to be sanctioned in the carefully weighted balances and compromises of the Anglican formularies. As we have seen, earlier generations had worn the badge with honour, but few now were prepared to use the word ‘Calvinism’ at all: it called to mind Cromwellian rule and regicide republicanism. William Goode’s biographer was at pains to point out that his subject owned just one volume, adding that this was only a commentary on the book of Job given by a well-meaning friend. ¹⁹

If Evangelicals expected to show that they were beyond reproach they were to be disappointed. Controversies flared up throughout the 1800s and early 1810s, most notoriously over their ‘promiscuous’ association with dissenters in the multi-denominational British and Foreign Bible Society. ²⁰ While paying lip-service to the establishment ideal, critics averred, Evangelical voluntarism in fact subverted it through structures that lay outside episcopal control. ²¹ These tensions were particularly evident during the formation of a Bible Society auxiliary in Cambridge in late 1811, which prompted the pugnacious Lady Margaret Professor, Herbert Marsh, to fire off a set of pamphlets arguing that if ‘Gospel clergymen’ were as Anglican as they claimed, they would distribute prayerbooks alongside Bibles to ensure their correct interpretation. ²² Cranmer and Ridley, he claimed, would have agreed. ²³ Evangelicals found this a bit rich, especially given the publications policy of the Orthodox-dominated SPCK, which seemed bent on ignoring what the reformers had really said. Richard Mant’s Appeal to the Gospel, for instance, published in 1812, asserted that works were ‘a necessary condition of salvation’, maintaining that salvation came through the sacrament of baptism and not (as Evangelicals claimed) some enthusiastic ‘new birth’. ‘The language’ of the prayerbook, he concluded, ‘cannot be plainer’. ²⁴ The ensuing spat set the tone for decades of dispute. ²⁵ If one considered the baptismal service in isolation, Evangelicals conceded, it might appear that Mant had a point: they regarded its phraseology (‘seeing this child is now regenerate’) as misleading, and had long earmarked it as ripe for amendment. They saw this as a perfect illustration of why the Homilies and Articles ought to dictate the interpretation of the Liturgy, and not vice versa.

Dismayed by Mant’s disingenuousness, and frustrated by their inability to affect SPCK policy, Budd and several other leading ‘Gospel clergymen’ took matters into their own hands. The result was the Prayer Book and Homily Society (PBHS), whose inception was announced in May 1812. This was a landmark event, and it is surprising that so little has been written about it: although always a smaller concern the PBHS quickly took its place alongside other large-scale philanthropic endeavours in the May anniversary meetings, and remained active until the mid-1870s. ²⁶ It attracted considerable lay support, including six peers (Earl Ferrers, Viscount Valentia, and Lords Calthorpe, Headley, Teignmouth and Gambier), and five MPs (Sir Thomas Baring, Thomas Babington, Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and Henry Thornton). Among the clergy interest was also strong. ‘The design’, stated the preamble to the first anniversary report, ‘seems calculated to exclude all just difference of opinion.’ ²⁷ Notwithstanding the involvement of several prominent Orthodox clergymen, this remark was not entirely innocent. The Prayer Book was relatively uncontentious, but by printing the Homilies and Articles both in full and as cheap individual tracts, the PBHS made them available to a much broader readership than ever before. Here too, then, theological conservatism went hand-in-hand with a more subversive methodology: by undercutting the more expensive full editions printed by the Clarendon Press and for the SPCK, the founders of the PBHS aimed to demonstrate that the gospel peddled by Mant and his ilk was incomplete, imperfect and, above all, unanglican. ‘Know thou the God of thy father’ was the text of J.W. Cunningham’s first anniversary sermon in 1813, and it was a theme that successive preachers returned to with regularity and relish: ‘Stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught’; ‘Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me’; ‘Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines’ and so on. ²⁸

The truest Anglicans were also supposedly the truest patriots. The formularies, Cunningham reminded, were ‘identified with your liberties and conquests, with your independence at home and your renown abroad – with your escape from popery – with your possession of that sacred Book whose leaves the Lamb died to unseal’. ²⁹ Granted, the idea that intellectual enlightenment, industry and political freedom all had their roots in the sixteenth century was not a new idea, but Evangelicals set it forth with renewed vigour and continued to do so in unashamedly providential language well into the late nineteenth century, long after everyone else had come to think of it in more political terms. Another, subtler way of linking the formularies with national character concerned the idea that they acted as a linguistic repository. Numerous preachers referred to their purity and austerity of style, few more glowingly than Budd, whose introductory PBHS manifesto went into considerable detail on how the homilies had helped to preserve the ‘original nerve and purity’ of the English style. ³⁰ Even the English language could be turned into a Reformation production to be preserved in aspic.

Past and present seemed closest when spokesmen talked about the reformers themselves. The veil between the dead and the living could become very transparent indeed: like Catholic saints, Protestant heroes too could be envisaged as an enveloping cloud of witnesses, an idea that filled preachers with elation but also trepidation lest they prove unworthy successors. ‘Let us consider the Reformers of our Church as now looking down upon us, and filled with anxiety for the success of their labours,’ exhorted Simeon. ³¹ It was in their writings that the reformers spoke most clearly, and this was why Evangelicals were so keen to revisit not just the formularies but other works too. One of the first scholarly collections was by another PBHS leading light, Legh Richmond, whose eight-volume Fathers of the English Church was published between 1807 and 1812. It was initially meant to be a four-volume collection, but, ‘trusting too implicitly to the reputation and merits of the reformers,’ as his biographer put it, he got carried away and ended up owing the publisher £2,000, before being rescued by like-minded friends. ³² Such works acted both as fitting monuments to those who had extolled the merits of the preached and written word, and as continuations of their work.

Indeed, despite the more well-known controversy over the Oxford Martyrs’ Memorial, by the 1830s textual commemorations had come to rival bricks-and-mortar. ³³ First the Religious Tract Society (1830–1) then the SPCK (1834–5) brought out series on the reformers; the Evangelical author and spokesman Edward Bickersteth edited two collections, Testimony of the Reformers (1836) and Book of Private Devotions (1839); and in 1837 S. R. Cattley and George Townsend brought out the first part of a multi-volume ‘new and complete edition’ of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. In 1835 a pamphlet by the theologian and scholar Thomas Hartwell Horne on the tercentenary of Coverdale’s English Bible prompted anniversary celebrations in London and elsewhere. ³⁴ Buoyed, perhaps, by all this, Evangelicals agitated within the SPCK for greater clarity on what they called ‘Reformation principles’. ³⁵ One effect of this publishing deluge was to place history within reach of much wider readerships. Whereas in 1829, as Bickersteth reported, older divinity books were ‘much more sought after than they used to be’, and consequently more expensive, in the 1830s and 40s cheap reprints became a publishing staple. ³⁶ Partisan societies for the republication of theological works made them even more affordable: the fifty-five volumes of the Parker Society, for example, founded in 1840 ‘for the Publication of the Works of the Fathers and Early Writers of the Reformed English Church’, and wound up in 1855, set subscribers back only one pound per year. ³⁷ The Parker Society was soon joined by the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, which focused on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century high church and nonjuring divines, and the dissenting and low church Wycliffe Society. These endeavours prompted the Unitarian James Martineau to wryly proclaim a ‘new Alexandrine period of critics and commentators’ in which ‘the editor supersedes the author’. ³⁸

Not everyone felt that this advanced the cause of scholarship. ‘The self-styled Religious Press is unwearied in the publication of Church Histories, falsely so called,’ railed William Brudenell Barter in 1836, ‘and the biography of learned and pious men is now frequently used as a means only of conveying and recommending the devotional opinion of their respective annalists.’ ³⁹ Barter was an Orthodox churchman writing against perceived Evangelical excesses, but from the late 1830s onwards he and others of his stamp come to regard the growing rejection of the reformers by the Oxford Tract writers as, if anything, the greater threat. Froude’s Remains (1838–9), Tract XC (1841) and Newman’s secession in 1845 seemed to confirm their fears. The publications policy of Oxford University Press, for instance, evinced the determination of its delegates to hold a middle way between undesirable extremes. New editions of the works of William Chillingworth (1838), Thomas Bilson (1841), George Bull (1846), Robert Sanderson (1854), Simon Patrick (1858) and Joseph Hall (1863) suggest that the delegates favoured moderate defenders of episcopacy who were both staunchly anti-Roman and opposed – albeit more charitably – towards Protestant dissenters. The collected writings of standard divines – Van Mildert’s edition of Waterland and Samuel Halifax’s of Joseph Butler – were reissued at frequent intervals. ⁴⁰ The late 1830s and 1840s were punctuated with calls for unity, as Orthodox spokesmen like W. F. Hook and Edward Churton exhorted churchmen to rally round ‘Reformation principles’. ⁴¹ Yet any agreement as to what this meant looked increasingly far-fetched. While Evangelicals tracked the rise and fall of the Reformation from its heyday under Cranmer, Parker and Whitgift to its Laudian decline and eighteenth-century somnolence, the Orthodox pushed a different perspective, of malign foreign influence under Edward and Elizabeth, Laudian revival, puritan backlash during the Civil War and Commonwealth, and Restoration triumph in the 1660s. ⁴² Tractarian scholars, meanwhile, encouraged their allies to decry the Reformation, to see it not as the revival of primitive Christianity, but as a departure from it.

The period we have focused on was formative for the modern Church of England, not just in terms of constitutional and political change but because these drove and were driven by developments in how its history was seen and handled. First Evangelicals, and then Tractarians too, used the past to claim that they were the authentic Anglican voice, and to shift the centre ground accordingly. Instead of shaping consensus, however, these debates were part of a process of internal sectarianization. By the middle of the nineteenth century several distinct Anglican brands were on offer, each with different theological and ecclesiological priorities and each with its own version of the past to fall back on. The effects are still being felt today. Perhaps paradoxically, though, this process of fragmentation ultimately helped rather than hindered the Church’s understanding of its past. It was no longer enough to refer to ‘the Reformation’ and to assume that it was a single moment at which Anglican truth had been established forever. In the 1850s and 60s Liberal churchmen like Charles Kingsley and A. P. Stanley would begin to advance narratives that sidestepped tired debates between entrenched parties, stressing instead the progressive evolution of religious truth through the clash of opposing principles. For their predecessors the past had been something to be lived and breathed, but late nineteenth-century commentators were coming to realize that it was best enjoyed, and understood, at a safe distance.