When the Non-Jurors declared their intention to uphold the doctrine of Divine Right and passive obedience by perpetuating a Church of England loyal to the Stuart succession they were making two ideological points, as was recognised at the time: the ‘State Point’ and the ‘Church Point.’ The State Point was the insistence that, by law, James II remained Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the same Supreme Governor to whom the clergy had made oaths of allegiance before God at the time of his accession. Of course, this position was not merely political as it was itself entangled with theology – most notably the doctrine that the King was answerable for his conduct to God alone, since God alone appointed him. From the first, the Non-Jurors wore the State Point lightly, and some were even somewhat embarassed by it. Few of the Non-Juring clergy took part in Jacobite plotting and many had nothing but contempt for active Jacobites. They were Jacobites per force, not Jacobites by choice, and many were out of sympathy with the political policies, and most certainly the religion of King James.
The Church Point, on the other hand, proved more lasting – partly because the Non-Jurors largely unwittingly tapped into a tendency that had long existed in the Church of England and would exist long after the Non-Jurors had faded into obscurity. Since its inception the Church of England had been held in tension between those who considered it an instrument of government and those who considered it above the authority of the state to command. This conflict first came to the fore in the clash between Queen Elizabeth and Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1577 when Grindal refused to suppress ‘prophesyings’ in the churches.
Whilst Grindal may have been motivated to resist the Queen by evangelical theology, the proposition that the Church of England was not a department of state was upheld in the next century by the Arminians, who in spite of the royal support they received from James I and Charles I were prepared to emphasise the power of the church over the King. They proved that the Church of England could endure without state support when the Prayer Book was suppressed during the Commonwealth. Indeed, it was at this time when Presbyterianism overran the Church of England as a worshipping body (the churchgoers of England, as it were) that ‘Anglicans’ first emerged – i.e. those who held to the theology and liturgy of the Prayer Book by conviction rather than by default. It is noteworthy that the founders of the Non-Juring movement had also been among the first who could reasonably be described as Anglicans, who had very often had to maintain their Anglicanism in exile on the Continent surrounded by Catholics during Cromwell’s tyranny.
It should be no surprise, then, that whilst the early Non-Jurors (particularly Sancroft) had great respect for the Canons, and even George Hickes and Thomas Wagstaffe were consecrated Bishops under an obscure statute of 1529, the later Non-Jurors did not consider themselves bound to the religious policy of a notional if non-existent Jacobite state. One of the first signs of this was Thomas Deacon’s 1718 revision of the Prayer Book and his inclusion of the Usages of the 1549 Prayer Book; this was followed by the consecration of non-territorial Bishops and Hickes’ resolute tracts on the dignity of the episcopal and sacerdotal orders; a clear attempt to separate the Non-Juring church from the state in theory as well as in practice.
It is possible that Hickes expected a restoration of James III and feared the imposition of Catholicism on the Church of England; consequently, he wanted to construct a watertight and distinctive Anglican theology that would withstand a repeat of James II’s policies. However, the nature of politics in England undoubtedly influenced the Non-Jurors too. With the death of James II in 1701 the monarch to whom the original oaths had been made was no more, and the accession of Queen Anne in 1702 dampened the force of the Non-Juring movement as many Tories flocked to show their loyalty to the Queen. Those who remained Non-Jurors and continued to worship outside of the state-sanctioned church needed a better reason than the legitimacy of James III, although this played its part. Therefore, they began to condemn the theology of the state church and by doing so located themselves within the anti-Erastian tradition and begat an entirely new strand to it.
It is a well known fact of 18th century ecclesiastical history (so far as 18th century ecclesiastical history is well known to anybody) that many clergy who were not Non-Jurors subscribed to the theological positions that Non-Juring authors put forward. This was partly because a band of ‘Laudians’ remained within the state church when the Non-Jurors began their dissent and partly because there was no necessary connection between High Church politics and High Church theology in the minds of many. The doctrine of Divine Right was so powerful in the reigns of James I and Charles I because those monarchs were Supreme Governors of a single state church that (in theory) comprehended all except Papists. The Christians of England and the Church of England were one. As soon as dissent was accepted even in principle (and whether it ought to be was the great battle of Charles II’s reign), the King became the Supreme Governor of a church, rather than the church, and thus the doctrine was doomed to wane.
If the doctrine waned, the sentiments that went with it did not. Samuel Wesley, the Rector of Epworth, took the oaths to William of Orange but retained his High Church principles, which were in turn transmitted to his famous sons. The record of John Wesley’s beliefs and practices at Oxford and at his disastrous mission in Savannah bears witness to the fact that he was mainly and almost solely influenced by Non-Juring and some Catholic literature – to the extent that the inhabitants of Savannah accused him of being a Catholic. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that Wesley ever discerned any political implications in his beliefs.
It is arguable that the latent High Church anti-Erastianism of Samuel Wesley (or perhaps Susanna Wesley) was what freed Wesley from the mediocrity of the state church to pursue his evangelical mission; and it is in Wesley that we may see the fruition both of Grindal’s evangelicalism and Hickes’ catholicism. In spite of the apolitical nature of the Methodist movement he founded (or perhaps because of it) Wesley was able to be the apparently self-contradictory product of both strands of English anti-Erastianism.
That John Wesley did exist and that he kept the evangelical and the High Church strands in creative tension proves, in my view, that the real tension in 18th century ecclesiastical politics and beyond was not between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ churchmen. These tended to coincide in many of their ecclesio-political convictions. Instead, I would argue that the real conflict within the Church of England since the Reformation has been between Erastians and anti-Erastians. The theological identity of those parties has been less important.
What this interpretation might have to teach us about contemporary issues in the relationship between church and state I shall have to leave for a later post.
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December 31, 2008 at 3:39 pm
First in seventeenth-century England then in the eighteenth-century France that looked to that precedent (and after which, the rest really is history), gentry-cum-mercantile republican absolutism was simply an inversion of princely absolutism, an Early Modern aberration originating with Jean Bodin.
But what of the creation of a gentry-cum-mercantile republic in the former American Colonies? Did it, too, ultimately derive from reaction against the Stuarts in these islands, inverting their newfangled ideology against them? Or did it, perhaps, derive from loyalty to them, which regarded the Hanoverian monarchy as illegitimate? The latter strikes me as perfectly possible.
Pretty much anyone who can tick either White British or White Irish has Huguenot ancestry. Yet consider that far more Jacobites went into exile from these islands than Huguenots sought refuge here. The Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They maintained a network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their banking dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They introduced much new science and technology to their host-countries. They dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the French in India. And very many of them ended up either in the West Indies or, crucially for the present purpose, in North America. Might those last have been at least a background influence on the eventual repudiation of George III?
At first sight, New York seems the most obvious place to look for them, being named after its initial proprietor as a colony, the future James VII and II. The Highlanders in North Carolina spoke Gaelic into the 1890s, but it must be said that in vain had the rebellious legislature there issued a Manifesto in that language a century earlier: like many people of directly Scots rather than of Scots-Irish origin or descent, they remained resolutely loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War.
However, there are at least three other distinct possibilities. First, there were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688. Secondly, there was of course that Catholic enclave, the Maryland colony. And thirdly, there was Pennsylvania: the Quakers were almost (if almost) all at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691.
Whether any of these factors played any part in the emergence of anti-Hanoverian ideology, sentiment and ultimately action in America, I do not know, although I should love to find out. And I must say that I should find it very difficult to believe otherwise.
Modern Americans might further consider that many Baptists were also Jacobites, that early Methodists were regularly accused of Jacobitism, and that the name, episcopal succession and several other features of their own Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop (Samuel Seabury) in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.
Add in that John Wesley himself had been a High Church missionary in America (and Methodism was initially an outgrowth of pre-Tractarian, often at least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship rather than of Evangelicalism, hence the above allegations), and all sorts of, so to speak, connections start to spring to mind.
Not least, it almost impossible to overstate the impact of Catholicism, of the Anglo-Catholicism that High Churchmanship almost entirely became at least to some extent, of the Baptist and Reformed (including Congregational) traditions, and, above all, of Methodism, to the emergence and development of our own Labour Movement, with its successful righting of numerous socio-economic wrongs and its consequent successful prevention of a Communist revolution in this, one of the two countries that Marx himself held most likely to have one. Its conquest and subjugation by unrepentant Marxists who have pulled up those roots has more than coincided with its abandonment of any struggle against those wrongs, to put it no more strongly than that.
Quakerism and Methodism (especially the Primitive and Independent varieties) were in the forefront of opposition to the First World War, which also produced the Guild of the Pope’s Peace, and had a following among Anglo-Catholics of either of what were then the more extreme kinds, “English Use” and “Western Use”, each of which included Jacobites among, admittedly, its many eccentrics. Above all in Wales (where Catholic sentiment was still widely expressed in the old tongue well into the eighteenth century), Quakers and Methodists had very recently stood shoulder to shoulder with Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists against the Boer War. Those Baptists had included one David Lloyd George.
Could it be that behind these great movements for social justice and for peace was still a sense that the present British State (not any, but the one then in existence) was itself still somehow less than fully legitimate? In other words, and without in any way suggesting that the young Lloyd George, or Keir Hardie, or whoever, had any specific desire to restore the Stuarts, could the view that there was ultimately something profoundly wrong about this country and her policies, both domestic and foreign, have been distant echoes of an ancestral Jacobitism? After all, a section of Carlism, an intellectually related loyalty to a biologically related House, became, and remains, a mainstay of the Spanish Left.
Once again, I do not know, although I should love to find out.
And once again, I must say that I should find it very difficult to believe otherwise.
January 5, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Throughout its history Jacobitism has been associated with both radicalism and conservatism, and I think it is fair to say that in the era before the revolutionary philosophy of Thomas Paine took hold, Jacobitism served as a catch-all for opposition to the Hanoverian monarchy and all it stood for. However, whilst there may well have been anti-Hanoverianism at work in America, I’m not sure that one can claim that any republican can be Jacobite in a meaningful sense. By analogy, the legitimist Carlists opposed Franco’s Nationalists (in spite of their alliance with them in the Civil War) but could never bring themselves to support the Republicans.
I think it is true, though, that in recent history as well as in the 17th century, Nonconformists, High Churchmen and Catholics have found themselves making common cause; but this may be simply because anyone who believes in the independence of the Church from the state (whatever their theological stance) will inevitably find themselves standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other anti-Erastians.