The Anglican tradition is an elusive concept, fought over by many competing interests. However, I would contend that the fact the very soul of Anglicanism can now be fought over is an inheritance of the weakness of the Church of England in the 1830s that allowed it to be overwhelmed first by the theology of the Oxford Movement and then by liberalism. Of course, that weakness was itself the outcome of 150 years of stagnation and fossilisation since the Revolution. Before the 1830s, Anglicans might not have been able to say what the faith of the Church of England was, but I doubt very much that any of them would have defined it in a way congenial to either Anglo-Catholics or liberals. The faith of the Church of England between 1688 and 1830 was an evangelical and reformed faith, intellectually and morally disembowelled by the Enlightenment. Until the appearance of the Wesleys in the 1750s (for whom the Church of England was in any case not ready), the only Anglicans who stood against the vacuity of the Established Church were the Non-Jurors. This is an important point missed by commentators on Anglican identity such as Richard Turnbull, who in his otherwise excellent book Anglican and Evangelical? fails to recognise the significance of the Non-Jurors.
The internal disputes that tormented the Non-Jurors – first the usage vs. non-usage debate over the use of the 1549 Prayer Book and then the Bangorian Controversy spilling over into the juring Church – have been seen by too many historians as evidence for the weakness of the Non-Jurors as a movement. In the long view of history, however, it is perhaps more accurate to see them as the only important doctrinal and canonical disputes within Anglicanism in the first three quarters of the 18th century, and as such an indication that theology still mattered to the Non-Jurors where it had ceased to matter to the Latitudinarians who occupied the bench of the Lords Spiritual. In other words, the Non-Jurors were not an eccentric strand of 18th century Anglicanism – they were 18th century Anglicanism at a time when other Anglicans had lost any sense of identity. Like Anglicans at any time of history, the Non-Jurors were divided – and this, too, is a point sometimes missed by historians, who are too ready to imbibe the myth perpetuated by Anglo-Catholics that the Non-Jurors were a proto-Anglo-Catholic movement. Anglo-Catholics are understandably anxious to establish a lineage pre-Pusey, but their ownership of the Non-Jurors, like their ownership of the Caroline divines, is on shaky ground.
Hickes, especially in his posthumous work, was certainly heading towards a strongly Catholic position on the ministerial priesthood. However, whilst he may have been the key figure in the movement, Hickes was not the only one. Nathaniel Spinckes opposed the ‘usages’ of the 1549 Prayer Book – which, most controversially, included prayer for the dead – on Protestant grounds. The Non-Jurors were no less Protestant as a body, and no more ‘Catholic’, than their brethren in the established church. However, the Non-Jurors did develop certain distinctive ideas and practices whose influence was lasting.
After the ordination of Hickes as Suffragan Bishop of Thetford and Thomas Wagstaffe as Bishop of Ipswich, the second generation of Non-Juring bishops did not take territorial titles. They were ‘bishops at large’ rather like the Catholic Vicars Apostolic of the period. Hickes’ maintenance of the sacredness of the episcopal order had, ironically, resulted in a significant innovation to the episcopacy; not since the days of Celtic Christianity had Britain seen bishops without sees. It was Hickes’ profound conviction that the episcopal order had the authority of Scripture behind it – and the Bangorian Controversy began when Benjamin Hoadly challenged Hickes in the most radical way by denying that Scripture licensed any form of church government. For very different reasons, Hoadly was taking up the view of earlier Puritans who had advocated the abolition of episcopacy in the Church of England on the grounds that it was unscriptural. The difference now was that Hoadly – a territorial bishop – was maintaining the unscriptural character of the episcopacy against Non-Jurors without territorial bishops. The old Puritan objection to ‘prelacy,’ that the cathedral foundations simply perpetuated Popish practice, lost its force against the Non-Jurors, who no longer enjoyed the privileges of the established church that had always tempted insincerity for the sake of advancement. The Non-Jurors maintained episcopacy for its own sake as the apostolic form of church government.
This, then, was a major heritage of the Non-Jurors – the maintenance of episcopacy not as a political but as a theological position, the separation of episcopal church governance from territorial jurisdiction and a rediscovery of the true role of a bishop.
The Non-Jurors have been seen as intolerant, insofar as their origin lay in Sancroft and the Seven Bishops’ rejection of James’ Declaration of Indulgence. However, the evidence suggests that the Bishops were in favour of tolerance as a principle but opposed to toleration as a method. In other words, Sancroft would rather have seen comprehension of dissenters (of the sort attempted under William in 1689) than open toleration. He was right, perhaps, in seeing James’ concept of toleration as one primarily focussed on Catholic emancipation; he was also right to see that the only way in which Catholics could take part in English political life was through universal toleration, since given the presuppositions of Catholic ecclesiology, the comprehension of Catholics was plainly impossible. In the case of the dissenters, it was obstacles such as the surplice and the sign of the cross in baptism that stood in the way of comprehension – not a fundamental questioning that the Church of England was the true church of Christ. The Prayer Book project of 1689 was, then, an enterprise in line with rather than anathema to the principles of the early Non-Jurors. Historians are right to see it as the last attempt to make the Church of England a truly national church. With the abandonment of Prayer Book revision came the implicit acknowledgement that a return to James’ policy of toleration was the only way in which to keep the nation together; thus we have the Toleration Act of 1689, albeit excluding Catholics.
The idea of England as a Christian nation united by faith was an aspiration shared, albeit in different ways, by Puritans and Catholics. For the Catholics, the aim was the re-conversion of England and her re-incorporation into Christendom. For the Puritans, it was the aim of creating a new Jerusalem, a godly nation. In 1689 the Church of England decisively abandoned the vision that had been cherished by so many of its first founders, and thus the insincere ‘conformity’ of the 18th century was initiated.
The Non-Jurors are a difficult body to pin down, in doctrine or practice; their influence spread beyond the confines of their own movement, as demonstrated by Wesley’s admiration for William Law. However, it is fair to say that as the Church of England entered one of its darkest periods, the Non-Jurors represented a vital, if polemical Anglicanism.
