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Representing and Misrepresenting the History of Puritanism in Eighteenth-Century England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Robert G. Ingram
Robert G. Ingram*
Affiliation:
Ohio University
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Extract

An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.

Type
Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 205 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

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Footnotes

*

I thank Bill Gibson, Tony Claydon, Jeremy Gregory, Bill Bulman, Jason Peacey, Noah Millstone and Alex Barber for their advice. Unless otherwise noted, the place of publication is London.

References

1 Pocock, J. G. A., ‘Within the Margins: Definitions of Orthodoxy’, in Lund, Roger D., ed., The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), 33–53, at 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For a brief survey of Daniel Neal’s life and career, see ODNB, s.n. ‘Neal, Daniel (1678–1743)’.

3 Neal, Daniel, The History of the Puritans, or Protestant non-conformists, 4 vols (1732–8), 1: iii.Google Scholar

4 Seed, John, Dissenting Histories (Edinburgh, 2008), 41 Google Scholar; Okie, Laird, ‘Daniel Neal and the “Puritan Revolution”’, ChH 55 (1986), 456–67, at 456.Google Scholar

5 See, e.g., Knights, Mark, ‘Public politics in England c.1675-c.1715’, in Tyacke, Nicholas, ed., The English Revolution c. 1590–1720 (Manchester, 2007), 169–84 Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., ‘Historiography as a Form of Political Thought’, History of European Ideas 37 (2011), 1–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Edmund Gibson (c.1669–1748) served as bishop of London 1723–48, and was the clerical architect of the church-Whig alliance under Sir Robert Walpole’s administration. His aim was to promote to ecclesiastical office those who were both Walpolean loyalists and theologically orthodox: Taylor, Stephen, ‘Whigs, Tories and Anticlericalism: Ecclesiastical Courts Legislation in 1733’, PH 19 (2000), 329–55 Google Scholar; Sykes, Norman, Edmund Gibson (Oxford, 1926), 149–61.Google Scholar During the eighteenth century orthodoxy and orthodox were, at once, recognizable analytical categories and contested labels. On the one hand, both friend and foe reckoned that the orthodox accepted the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, the Church of England’s episcopal ecclesiology and the need for penal laws against religious Nonconformists. Where the orthodox and their opponents disagreed was over whether orthodoxy was true and promoted social and political order or whether it was crypto-popish and persecutory. On eighteenth-century orthodoxy, see Pocock, ‘Within the Margins’, 33–53; Robert G. Ingram, ‘“The Weight of Historical Evidence”: Conyers Middleton and the Eighteenth-Century Miracles Debate’, in Gibson, William and Cornwall, Robert, eds, Religion, Politics and Dissent, 1660–1832 (Aldershot, 2010), 85–109 Google Scholar; idem, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Seeker and the Church of England (Woodbridge, 2007), esp. 1–18, 71–113.

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14 Neal had originally intended to collaborate with John Evans (1679/80–1730) to write a comprehensive history of English Protestant Nonconformity, with Evans covering the period until 1640 and Neal picking up the story from there. Evans’s declining health during the late 1720s and his death in 1730 forced Neal to write the entire work himself.

15 Lake, Peter, ‘The Historiography of Puritanism’, in Coffey, John and Lim, Paul, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), 346–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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18 Neal, Daniel, The supremacy of St. Peter (1735), esp. 39–40.Google Scholar

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20 On Webster, see ODNB, s.n. ‘Webster, William (1689–1758)’; Sommerville, C. John, The News Revolution in England (Oxford, 1996), 142 Google Scholar; Harris, Michael, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole:: A Study of the Origins of the Modem English Press (Cranbury, NJ, 1987), 183–4.Google Scholar Webster’s pseudonym evoked the sixteenth-century English theorist of the Church of England’s purported via media between Rome and Geneva: cf. MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’, EHR 117 (2002), 773–812.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Taylor, Stephen, ‘“Dr. Codex” and the Whig “Pope”: Edmund Gibson, Bishop of Lincoln and London, 1716–1748’, in Davis, Richard W., ed., Lords of Parliament (Stanford, CA, 1995), 9–27, esp. 22–7.Google Scholar

22 For Williams’s possession of the Nalson collection, see London, BL, Add. MS 5841, fol. 4V.

23 Cambridge, St John’s College, shelfmarks Q.13.5, 7–9, 10. Gibson described the Grey materials that he forwarded from Grey via Webster to Maddox as ‘Observations upon Mr. Neal’s History, and lately, the Book relating to it’: London, LPL, MS 2029, fol. 24: Gibson to Grey, [September 1732].

24 Calamy, Edmund, Historical Account of my own life, ed. Rutt, John Towill, 2 vols (1830), 2: 503–5.Google Scholar

25 Weekly Miscellany, no. 24 (26 May 1733).

26 Maddox, Isaac, A vindication of the government, doctrine, and worship of the Church of England (1733), 4.Google Scholar

27 Ibid. 17.

28 Ibid. 32.

29 Ibid. 105.

30 Ibid. 140.

31 Ibid. 120, 124.

32 Ibid. 210.

33 Ibid. 12, 251.

34 Cambridge, St John’s College, shelfmarks Q.13.5, 7–9, 10.

35 BL, Add. MS 5831, fol. 208, Webster to Grey, October [1735/6]; cf. ibid., fols 207–8, Webster to Grey, [1736], in which Webster asked for Grey’s notes on the second volume of History of the Puritans, which had first appeared in mid-November 1735: London Evening Post, no. 1248 (15 November 1735).

36 BL, Add. MS 5831, fol. 157, Gibson to Grey, 24 March 1737. Maddox encouraged Grey to write a short synopsis of his three volumes in response to Neal: ibid., fols 165–6, Maddox to Grey, 15 April 1740.

37 Grey, Zachary, An impartial examination of the third volume (1737), 19.Google Scholar

38 Grey, Zachary, An impartial examination of the second volume (1736), 4, 404.Google Scholar

39 Nichols, John, ed., Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (1812), 1: 734 Google Scholar, Lindsay to Grey, 20 July 1738.

40 Nichols, John, ed., Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (1822), 4: 309–10 Google Scholar, Thomas Doughty to Grey, 28 August 1738; BL, Add. MS 5831, fol. 175, Daniel Waterland to Grey, 12 January 1739.

41 Ibid., fols 128–9, Lewis to Grey, 16 March 1739.

42 Ibid.

43 Neal, Daniel, A review of the principal facts (1734).Google Scholar