R.A. Soloway - Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783-1852

STUDIES IN SOCIAL HISTORY

PRELATES AND PEOPLE

First published in 1969

This edition published in 2007 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2010

1969 R. A. Soloway

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A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Prelates and People

ISBN 10: 0-415-41298-6 (volume)

ISBN10: 0-415-40266-2 (set)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-41298-8 (volume)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-40266-8 (set)

Routledge Library Editions: Studies in Social History

For George L. Mosse

With gratitude and affection

Contents

I am deeply indebted to the staffs of numerous libraries and archives visited in both England and the United States. In particular I owe special thanks to the librarians and archivists at Lambeth Palace, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library and the National Register of Archives. In addition I am grateful for the assistance received in the Public and County Record Offices and the cathedral libraries and diocesan registries mentioned in the Bibliographical Note. Many other diocesan archivists and cathedral librarians carefully answered my written enquiries and were, as a result, most helpful. In this country the staffs of the Widener and Houghton Libraries at Harvard University and of the Newberry Library in Chicago were especially co-operative. I also wish to thank the Earl of Harrowby for his kindness while allowing me access to the Harrowby Manuscripts at Sandon Hall.

Professor Thomas Tentler of the University of Michigan patiently read and re-read most of the manuscript. His criticism was invaluable, and I believe he knows how grateful I am. Elizabeth Sumner was very helpful in preparing the final draft of the book, as was my wife, Maxine, whose interest in Church history, never very keen, has probably been destroyed forever. Professor Peter T. Marsh of Syracuse University in numerous discussions helped me to clarify many ideas, corrected many misconceptions, and taught me much about the nineteenth-century Church. If not enough, he is in no way responsible.

Several faculty research grants from the Horace H. Rackham Fund of the University of Michigan helped offset the expenses of research and manuscript preparation. I am most appreciative.

Richard A. Soloway

Chapel Hill, N.C.

August, 1968

T he reform of the Church of England in the first half of the nineteenth century was moulded considerably by the same pressures of industrialization, urbanization, and population growth that rapidly altered English society and its institutions as a whole. As one of those institutions, legally established, whose bishops sat in Parliament, and whose clergy were expected to support the State in their parochial ministrations, the Anglican Church and its episcopal leadership were particularly sensitive to the transformation of the country that took place from the later eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Already troubled by a spiritual revival that called attention to the secularity and neglect of their clergy, churchmen in the 1790s were staggered by the upheaval of European-wide revolution that seemed to threaten the very existence of Christian civilization. Even before recovering from that alarming experience, they were compelled to recognize very real institutional as well as clerical weaknesses in the Establishment. These weaknesses became increasingly obvious, and even dangerous, as decade after decade, English society rapidly expanded in ways that made the national Church often appear hopelessly archaic and irrelevant to the needs of an industrial, urban civilization.

This book examines the responses of the episcopal leadership of the Church in England and Wales to the transformation of the society to which they ministered. It considers primarily their social ideas and policies from the decade preceding the French Revolution to the middle of the nineteenth century; from that period when a few bishops began to worry about the effectiveness of their abuse-ridden Church to the time when the Establishment, ecclesiastically reformed and spiritually revitalized, looked forward to evangelizing the diverse multitudes who peopled the new age. By then the Church of England was more episcopal than at any time since the early eighteenth century. Convocation was being revived after 135 years; bishops were resident administrators of their dioceses, overseeing an extensive network of social and religious projects; ecclesiastical discipline was more vigorously enforced, and in Parliament, the Churchs interests were promoted regularly with skill and determination by prelates themselves.

Although much of the reform impetus within the Establishment was generated by the laity, especially in the earlier stages, men like William Wilberforce, Joshua Watson, Robert Peel, and Lord Liverpool were not simply riding roughshod over the objections of reactionary prelates.1 On the contrary, episcopal consultation and co-operation in Church reform was increasingly the rule, not the exception. This does not mean that the bench was usually in the vanguard of reform; many of its members shuddered at the mention of the word. But in each episcopal generation there were important individual bishops who, though deeply conservative, were also realistic men who recognized that the Church was in a new age, faced with challenges demanding unprecedented adjustments on the part of its clergy. Recognition and accommodation to these realities were hardly uniform; but; then few things were in the nineteenth-century Establishment. Parliamentary domination, the lack of a centralized ecclesiastical policy-making body, and the extraordinary independence of the Anglican clergy make it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss collective Church positions. Rarely was there a single Church position; there were usually party positions, or, more commonly, individual positions assumed by individual churchmen.