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An Ecclesiastical Descent: Religion and History in the Work of William Stubbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2013

J. E. KIRBY
J. E. KIRBY*
Affiliation:
Balliol College, Oxford, OX1 3BJ; E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the relationship between religion and historiography in the work of the historian and bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901). Previous studies of Stubbs have neglected the High-Church influences which demonstrably pervaded his thought, and shaped his ideas of the English past, of the Christian purposes of history, and of the historical process itself. Recovering the confessional bent of Stubbs's approach to the past challenges assumptions about not only academic professionalisation, but also the prevalence through the Victorian period of a ‘Whig interpretation’ of history.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 84 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Letters of William Stubbs, ed. W. H. Hutton, London 1904, 3.

2 Ibid. 402.

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32 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 18.

33 Idem, Lectures on early English history, London 1906, 197.

34 Ibid. 207.

35 Idem, The early Plantagenets, London 1886, 5.

36 Idem, Constitutional history, i. 280–1.

37 Ibid. i. 281, 707–8.

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44 Stubbs, Select charters, 8.

45 Idem, Lectures on early English history, 91–2.

46 Ibid.

47 Idem, Constitutional history, iii. 542.

48 Idem, Historical introductions to the Rolls Series, 370–1; Constitutional history, iii. 344; cf. The foundation of Waltham Abbey, Oxford 1861, p. vii.

49 R. J. Smith, ‘Cobbett, Catholic history, and the Middle Ages’, in L. J. Workman (ed.), Medievalism in England, Cambridge 1992, 113–42 at pp. 117–19.

50 Stubbs to Freeman, 3 Nov. 1859, Letters of William Stubbs, 75. Stubbs's remark was provoked by a book by the Congregationalist Robert Vaughan, for whom see also p. 95 below.

51 For Tractarian views of the Reformation see Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘condition of England.’, 203–13.

52 Stubbs, Constitutional history, iii. 323.

53 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 277. Stubbs began a fourth volume of the Constitutional history, on the Reformation period, but failed to complete it on becoming a bishop: Seventeen lectures, 435, and anon., ‘William Stubbs, churchman and historian’, Quarterly Review ccii (1905), 1–34 at p. 14.

54 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 298–300.

55 Idem, Constitutional history, iii. 357–8.

56 Ibid. iii. 667.

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58 Stubbs, W., Lectures on European history, London 1904, 62Google Scholar.

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68 B. Young, ‘Gibbon, Newman and the religious accuracy of the historian’, in D. Womersley (ed.), Edward Gibbon: bicentenary essays, Oxford 1997, 309–30 at p. 314.

69 Stubbs, as continuator to Mosheim, Institutes, iii. 589–97. The suspicion of German thought is typical of a follower of Pusey, well-known for his criticism of that country's ‘rationalist’ theology.

70 Soffer, R. N., Discipline and power: the university, history, and the making of an English elite, 1870–1930, Stanford 1994Google Scholar, 87.

71 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 32–3.

72 Idem, IV Sermons, Oxford 1896 (privately printed), 9.

73 Letters of William Stubbs, 205, 237 n.

74 W. Gladstone to Stubbs, 2 Feb. 1883, ibid. 231. For contemporary criticism of Stubbs's closeness to Gladstone see Tomlinson, J. T., The ‘legal history’ of Canon Stubbs, London 1884, 6Google Scholar.

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79 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 35; cf. his correspondence with Lord Salisbury, quoted in Bentley, J., Ritualism and politics in Victorian Britain: the attempt to legislate for belief, Oxford 1978, 127–8Google Scholar.

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85 Stubbs, Registrum sacrum Anglicanum (manuscript), 1. For Tractarians and the apostolic succession see Gloyn, The Church in the social order, 51–2.

86 Stubbs, Registrum sacrum Anglicanum (manuscript), 2–3.

87 See especially [J. H. Newman], Thoughts on the ministerial commission, respectfully addressed to the clergy [Tract 1], London 1834, and [W. Palmer and J. H. Newman], On the apostolical succession in the English Church [Tract 15], London 1834.

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91 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, pp. vii, 58–62; Visitation charges, 160; and Evil days, 20.

92 George Macmillan to Stubbs, 22 Nov. 1894, archbishops’ papers, Lambeth Palace Library, Benson ms 129, fos 140–1.

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94 Idem, Visitation charges, 27.

95 Idem, Hints for teachers of church history, 1.

96 Idem, Visitation charges, 82.

97 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 130.

98 Ibid. 454–5.

99 Ibid.

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102 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 10.

103 Such suspicions were voiced by William Gladstone in correspondence with Stubbs: Gladstone to Stubbs, 4 Mar. 1876, Letters of William Stubbs,148; cf. M. G. Brock, ‘A “plastic structure”’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The history of the University of Oxford, VII: Nineteenth-century Oxford: part 2, Oxford 2000, 3–66 at pp. 25–6.

104 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 26.

105 Slee, Learning and a liberal education, 60.

106 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 27–8. Similar themes recur in his 1894 sermon before the more scientific audience of the British Association: IV sermons, 9.

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114 Stubbs, Visitation charges, 144.

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117 Ibid.

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128 Idem, Visitation charges, 61.

129 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 477.

130 Burrow, Liberal descent, 3, 288.

131 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 475.

132 Idem, Constitutional history, iii. 663.

133 Ibid. 546–7.

134 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 301.

135 Idem, Lectures on early English history, 194–5.

136 Stubbs to Freeman, 8 Nov. 1857, Letters of William Stubbs, 41–2.

137 Stubbs, preface to Royal letters addressed to Oxford, ed. O. Ogle, Oxford 1892, p. v.

138 Stubbs, Constitutional history, ii. 1–3.

139 Ibid. iii. 668.

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141 Stubbs, Constitutional history, ii. 677.

142 Ibid. iii. 661; the allusion is biblical, to Joel ii. 2.

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144 Idem, IV sermons, 32–4, and Seventeen lectures, 446–8.

145 Idem, Ordination addresses, 118.

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148 Idem, as continuator to Mosheim, Institutes, iii. 627.

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