Nigel Yates - Eighteenth Century Britain: Religion and Politics 1714-1815

Religion, Politics and Society in Britain
Series editor: Keith Robbins

The Conversion of Britain: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, c.600800
Barbara Yorke

The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 16031714
John Spurr

Eighteenth-Century Britain: Religion and Politics, 17141815
Nigel Yates

Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 18151914
Stewart Brown

Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain
Callum G. Brown

First published 2008 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2014 by Routledge
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4058-0161-4 (pbk)

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Typeset in 10/13.5pt Sabon by 35

No understanding of British history is possible without grappling with the relationship between religion, politics and society. How that should be done, however, is another matter. Historians of religion, who have frequently thought of themselves as ecclesiastical historians, have had one set of preoccupations. Political historians have had another. They have acknowledged, however, that both religion and politics can only be understood, in any given period, in a social context. This series makes the interplay between religion, politics and society its preoccupation. Even so, it does not assume that what is entailed by religion and politics remains the same throughout, to be considered as a constant in separate volumes merely because of the passage of time.

In its completed form the series will have probed the nature of these links from c .600 to the present day and offered a perspective, over such a long period, that has not before been attempted in a systematic fashion. There is, however, no straitjacket that requires individual authors to adhere to a common understanding of what such an undertaking involves. Even if there could be a general agreement about concepts, that is to say about what religion is or how politics can be identified, the social context of such categorisations is not static. The spheres notionally allocated to the one or to the other alter with circumstances. Sometimes it might appear that they cannot be separated. Sometimes it might appear that they sharply conflict. Each period under review will have its defining characteristics in this regard.

It is the Christian religion, in its manifold institutional manifestations, with which authors are overwhelmingly concerned since it is with conversion that the series begins. It ends, however, with a volume in which Christianity exists alongside other world religions but in a society frequently perceived to be secular. Yet, what de-Christianisation is taken to be depends upon what Christianisation has been taken to be. There is, therefore, a relationship between topics that are tackled in the first volume, and those considered in the last, which might at first sight seem unlikely. In between, of course are the Christian Centuries which, despite their label, are no less full of boundary disputes, both before and after the Reformation. The perspective of the series, additionally, is broadly pan-insular. The Britain of 600 is plainly not the Britain of the early twenty-first century. However, the current political structures of Britain-Ireland have arguably owed as much to religion as to politics. Christendom has been inherently ambiguous.

It would be surprising if readers, not to mention authors, understood the totality of the picture that is presented in the same way. What is common, however, is a realisation that the narrative of religion, politics and society in Britain is not a simple tale that points in a single direction but rather one of enduring and by no means exhausted complexity.

Keith Robbins, November 2005

It was a great honour to be invited by Professor Keith Robbins to contribute to this series and to find myself in such excellent company. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to three people: to my son David, who both word-processed the final text and provided useful comment on it from the perspective of the intelligent general reader; and to my colleague Professor Peter Borsay and to one of my research students, Laura Jarvis, both of whom also read and commented on the text. They have all certainly helped to improve the book, but I must equally absolve all of them from any complicity in any defects or inaccuracies that remain.

I am dedicating this book to two former colleagues in what used to be the Kent Archives Office, and is now the Centre for Kentish Studies, who, sadly, are no longer with us. Kathleen Topping was my deputy and major support during my 12 years as County Archivist and Head of Heritage Services, and she eventually succeeded me in that post. It was an enormous shock to me, and an enormous loss to the cause of historical studies in Kent, when she died, at the obscenely early age of 50, in 2002. Our colleague, Donald Gibson, was somewhat senior to us in age, and he died later that same year though still within a relatively short period from his retirement. He was a genuine eccentric and a true scholar who tried to live the life of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Though his opinions were outrageously, and I suspect determinedly, reactionary in the twenty-first century, there was little doubt that he would have been a low church Whig in the century in which he would have preferred to have lived, whereas moderate liberals such as myself would undoubtedly have been high church Tories.

Nigel Yates
University of Wales, Lampeter
November 2005

For those with a general interest in, or understanding of, the broad outline of British history, the period between 1714 and 1815 is usually one that they have least knowledge of. It tends not to form part of the school history syllabus, nor is it particularly popular with history undergraduates at university. Films or television programmes, adapted from the literature of this period or based on the few well-known events during it, such as the madness of George III, tend to portray a society of great formality and rigid social structures which was, nevertheless, capable of a crudity and licentiousness calculated to shock all but the most unshockable. There is currently a major debate among the relatively small number of academic historians looking at this period about the true nature of British society, and the developments within it, between 1714 and 1815. At one end of the spectrum, Jonathan Clark has portrayed the period between 1688 and 1832 in the British Isles as one in which the essential characteristics of an ancien rgime mostly remained intact and, despite a degree of religious freedom unusual in most parts of Continental Europe before 1789, a confessional religious state existed.an early modern and a later modern state, and the tension that this created was to be one of the main features of its economic, political, religious and social history.