Conclusion: Partisan Loyalties

Summary

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. 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. He was well aware of the difficult 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.