It is high time I wrote about some of the themes that have been swilling about in my head this summer, mainly as a consequence of Gabriel’s paper in Liverpool, which gave the impression that all eighteenth century dissent in Britain, not just whimsical high Toryism, somehow crystallised around Jacobitism. This seemed to tie in with some of what I already know – the rather outlandish ideas of George Hickes, the notorious Bishop of Thetford; the eccentricities of the Non-Jurors and the opposition of Frederick, ‘Prince of Wales’ to the government of ‘George II’ and (bizarrely for the Hanoverian heir) the Prince’s suspected Jacobitism.
I have recently returned to a serious consideration of John Wesley’s importance for the 18th century church and I am struck by the extreme complexity of his theology, which combined such disparate elements as high churchmanship with regard to the sacraments and ‘free’ preaching. The influence of the Non-Jurors on Wesley in his years at Oxford is well documented. Oxford was awash with Jacobite sympathies at the time Wesley was a student there in the 1720s, and I wonder how many of his biographers have considered this dimension.
The ‘free’ Christianity with which we associate Wesley was imposed on the Non-Jurors rather than chosen; they were forced to worship (like Catholics) in garrets and rooms; and as a consequence of their separation from the state they developed notions of sacramentalism and order derived, not from Elizabethan legislation, but from ancient practice and a yearning for ‘primitive Christianity.’ Their high churchmanship in this area was, therefore, not a matter of being influenced by the Catholicism of their king, but rather a logical consequence of their being cut off from the establishment.
Archbishop William Sancroft’s refusal to swear an oath to William of Orange was the decisive moment in the later history of the Anglican church; insofar as the clergy swore the oath they perjured themselves and the entire church – and from that moment onward, their consciences sullied, one could argue that the fundamentals of Christianity itself ceased to matter, leading to the rise of the Latitudinarians who interested themselves in anything but theology. The Non-Jurors thus became not just a political but also a theological protest movement against Anglican apathy. Where the juring clergy were little more than glorified civil servants for whom theology was an encumbrance, Non-Juring clergy like the Bishop of Thetford George Hickes were determined controversialists and committed sacramentalists. At the instigation of Thomas Ken, the Non-Jurors drifted back to the 1549 Prayer Book in the belief that it better expressed the beliefs and practices of the primitive church. They were also great admirers of the Laudian reforms and of Jacobean divines such as Lancelot Andrewes.
Free of parochial structures and the chains of the establishment, the Non-Jurors achieved what Wesley desired to do within the established church – so different from the ecclesiologically-limited organisation created by Wesley’s inheritors. Before the arrival of Wesley on the scene, ‘serious’ Anglicans had only the Non-Jurors to whom to resort, and in that sense the Non-Jurors were the direct ancestors of the Wesleyan revival, despite Wesley’s rather different theological emphasis. The Non-Jurors showed that the dichotomy of church and dissent that had characterised the 17th century was a false one, insofar as they proved that a faithful Anglican sect could stand on its own two feet without the state’s support with its own distinctive Arminian and sacramentalist theology. Wesley shared that theology, and he would not have been able to do what he did if the Non-Jurors had not pointed the way.
It is interesting to note that Frederick, Prince of Wales, who is supposed to have sympathised with a Stuart restoration and certainly with the ‘Hanover Tories,’ was rumoured to have been close to a Wesleyan conversion on his deathbed, brought about largely by the influence of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. The Countess herself converted to Methodism from a pious background – and if it was not a Non-Juring background, it was at least an aristocratic Tory piety that set itself at odds with the prevailing Latitudinarian tendencies. It is perhaps true to say, therefore, that as the Non-Juring movement weakened through its own divisions, those in the Church of England whom Wesley described as ’serious persons’ sought other ways of expressing their dissatisfaction with the morally bankrupt Whig church.
