The Anglican Episcopate 1689-1800

By Nigel Aston and William Gibson

The eighteenth-century bishops of the Church of England and its sister communions had immense status and authority in both secular society and the Church. They fully merit fresh examination in the light of recent scholarship, and in this volume leading experts offer a comprehensive survey and assessment of all things episcopal between the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the early nineteenth-century. These were centuries when the Anglican Church enjoyed exclusive establishment privileges across the British Isles (apart from Scotland). The essays collected here consider the appointment and promotion of bishops, as well as their duties towards the monarch and in Parliament. All were expected to display administrative skills, some were scholarly, others were interested in the fine arts, most were married with families. All of these themes are discussed, and Wales, Ireland, Scotland and the American colonies receive specific examination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781786839787

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The Anglican Episcopate 1689–1800

The Anglican Episcopate 1689–1800

Edited by Nigel Aston

and William Gibson

© The Contributors, 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-976-3

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-978-7

The rights of authorship for this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Peter Tillemans, Queen Anne (1665–1714) in the House of Lords (detail), c.1708–14, oil on canvas © Royal Collection Trust

‘But you would be entreated, and say ‘Nolo, nolo,

nolo’ three times like any bishop when your mouth

waters at the diocese’

Limberham in John Dryden, The Kind Keeper or

Mr Limberham (1678), Act 3, Scene 1.

Contents

Preface

List of Contributors

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Nigel Aston and William Gibson

Part I The Politics of Church and State

1Securing the Mitre: the Promotion and Progress of a Bishop

Nigel Aston, University of Leicester & University of York

2Lord Bishops: the Episcopate in National Politics

Ruth Paley, Oxford Brookes University

3Bishops and the Monarchy

G. M. Ditchfield, University of Kent

Part II Performance

4Pastors of their Flock: Visitation, Ordination, Confirmation

Colin Haydon, University of Winchester and Oxford Brookes University

5Authority, Conflict and Consensus: Bishops, their Clergy and Diocesan Government

William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University

6Bishops and Patronage

Daniel Reed, Oxford Brookes University

Part III Cultures

7Mrs Proudie’s Predecessors: the Wives of Eighteenth-Century Prelates

Nigel Aston, University of Leicester, and William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University

8Priestcraft, Enthusiasm, Bishops and Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Life

Robert Ingram, University of Florida

9Bishops and the Reformation of the Arts: Disciplining the Errant Sentiments

Matthew Craske, Oxford Brookes University

Part IV Beyond England

10 Anglican Bishops in Wales

John Morgan-Guy, University of Wales Trinity Saint David

11 The Other Establishment: Bishops in the Church of Ireland

Toby Barnard, University of Oxford

12 Episcopacy in Scotland 1689–1792

Rowan Strong, Murdoch University

13 English Bishops, the Wider World and the other Christian Churches

Ted Campbell, Southern Methodist University

Appendix: Episcopal Incomes

Ruth Paley

Notes

Preface

This collection had its origins in a conviction that the time was ripe for a fresh overview of the late Stuart and Georgian episcopate in its many aspects that, collectively considered, would confirm and illustrate its contemporary importance in a range of settings. We are grateful to all the contributors for their work and regret only that Covid-19 and the restrictions on assembling that followed in 2020–2 thwarted our original hope of inviting them to a colloquium on the subject for an exchange of ideas in person. The editors certainly enjoyed the opportunity that the project offered for working amicably and congenially together and finding out once more that collaboration offers a viable template for historians to help and prompt each other along. We are heartened by the enthusiasm that these several hands have brought to the collection. In many ways, each has suggested that this volume can be seen as a contribution to the continuing revaluation of the eighteenth-century Church. We are grateful to the University of Wales Press for its support for the project and the care with which it has seen this book through to publication.

Nigel Aston and William Gibson, January 2022

Contributors

Nigel Aston was reader in history at the University of Leicester, where he is now a research fellow. He is also a research associate at the University of York. His latest book, Enlightened Oxford, will be published in 2023.

Toby Barnard is an emeritus fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. He edited (along with W. G. Neely) The Clergy of the Church of Ireland, 1000–2000: Messengers, Watchmen and Stewards (Dublin, 2006); his most recent book is Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680–1784 (Dublin, 2017).

Ted Campbell is Albert C. Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Southern Methodist University, Texas. He is currently editing John Wesley’s letters written from 1766–1775 for the bicentennial edition of the Works of John Wesley.

Matthew Craske is reader in history of art at Oxford Brookes University. His recent book Joseph Wright of Derby, Painter of Darkness (New Haven CT, 2020) won the prestigious William MB Berger Prize for 2021.

G. M. Ditchfield is emeritus professor of history at the University of Kent. He is editor of The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey, 1747–1808 (2 vols, 2007–12) and author of numerous works on religion and politics in eighteenth-century Britain.

William Gibson is professor of ecclesiastical history and director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History at Oxford Brookes University. He has written widely on religion in eighteenth-century England, most recently Samuel Wesley and the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685–1720 (Oxford, 2021).

Colin Haydon is emeritus reader in early modern history at the University of Winchester and a visiting research fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Historical Society. He has published widely on the history of religion in Britain and Ireland from c.1660 to c.1830, and edited, along with John Walsh and Stephen Taylor, The Church of England c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993).

Robert G. Ingram is professor of humanities and associate director of the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He is the author of Reformation without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary of England (Manchester, 2018) and co-editor of People Power: Popular Sovereignty from Machiavelli to Modernity (Manchester, 2022).

John Morgan-Guy is honorary professor of cultural history at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Society of Antiquaries. He has recently published History, Society and the Individual (Cardiff, 2021).

Ruth Paley was formerly a section editor at the History of Parliament researching the history of the House of Lords. She is currently a visiting fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

Daniel Reed is public engagement manager and research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University. His edition of the minute book of the Society for the Reformation of Manners in Hull (1698–1706) has been published as a special issue of the Journal of Religious History, Culture and Literature in 2022.

Rowan Strong is emeritus professor of church history at Murdoch University, professor of church history at Wollaston Theological College in the Anglican Diocese of Perth, and professor of church history at the University of Divinity, Melbourne. His research work on colonial Christianity in the nineteenth century is currently working towards a biography of John Coleridge Patteson, first Bishop of Melanesia.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: (Chapter 3) Archbishop Frederick Cornwallis, by Sir Nathaniel Dance Holland, oil on canvas, 1768; reproduced by kind permission of His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church Commissioners.

Figure 2: (Chapter 4) Zachary Pearce (1690–1774), Bishop of Bangor (1748–56) and Rochester (1756–74) by Edward Penny; reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Figure 3: (Chapter 6) Lancelot Blackburne, Archbishop of York. After unknown artist, mezzotint, sold by Thomas Bakewell, 1724 (or after); private collection of Daniel Reed.

Figure 4: (Chapter 8) Faction Displayed 1709 © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 5: (Chapter 9) John Raphael Smith, mezzotint, Spectators at a Print Shop in St Paul’s Churchyard (1774); courtesy of the British Museum. This print was published by Carington Bowles and is thought to represent his own print shop.

Figure 6: (Chapter 9) James Watson, mezzotint after an oil by Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Robert Hay Drummond, Archbishop of York (1764); courtesy of the British Museum.

Figure 7: (Chapter 9) Benjamin West, Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus (1768), oil on canvas; courtesy of Yale University Museum.

Figure 8: (Chapter 9) Valentine Green, mezzotint after an oil painting by Benjamin West, A Portrait of Robert and Thomas Drummond, the sons of the Bishop of York (1768); author’s own collection.

Figure 9: (Chapter 9) Simon Gribelin for John Bowles of Fleet Street, The Choice of Hercules (1713), engraving after an oil painting by de Matteis; author’s own collection.

Figure 10: (Chapter 9) Richard Earlom, mezzotint after Benjamin West, Portrait of Thomas Newton Bishop of Bristol (1767); courtesy of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Figure 11: (Chapter 9) Julius Caesar Ibbetson, The Blind Harper of Conway and the Penillion Singers, (1793), oil on canvas; courtesy of National Museum of Wales.

Figure 12: (Chapter 9) David Lucas, mezzotint after John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1837); author’s own collection.

Introduction

Nigel Aston and William Gibson

The Historiographical Framework of this Book

A comprehensive reassessment of the eighteenth-century Anglican episcopate is much overdue. Since Norman Sykes’s pioneering study of ‘the office and work of a bishop’ in 1934, the topic has not attracted serious scholarly treatment beyond individual biographies.¹ A number of these, of varying scope, quality and focus, have tended to treat each bishop in isolation, a comparative dimension is largely absent, and there is no assessment of behaviour, attitudes and trends among the bench of bishops as a whole.² Moreover, recent developments in cultural history (including the familial and private dimension of episcopal lives and the involvement of the bishops with finance and culture) have barely figured in the historiography. Some recent ecclesiastical histories of the eighteenth century have sought to achieve a national and comparative perspective, such as Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey Chamberlain’s The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800 and Jeremy Gregory’s Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660–1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and the Diocese, but these have been isolated examples, which address the Church as a whole rather than just the episcopate. This collection aims to be panoramic, rooted in biography but more than biographical, identifying the variety of episcopal roles and networks, rigorously assessing how duties were discharged, and considering the episcopate within wider society as much as its ecclesiastical milieu. Behind it all is the insistent question: what was the bishops’ impact on the Church and the world beyond?

The need for a thorough reassessment of the episcopate is more pressing and appropriate for several reasons. First, the continuing publication of wider studies in Anglican church history that grounds this volume in some distinguished contemporary scholarship (including several books on the history of individual cathedrals).³ Second, this volume includes chapters on Anglicanism beyond England and takes serious notice of the episcopate, both established (Ireland and Wales) and non-established (Scotland). Third, there has been a considerable advance in the publication of primary sources that can aid in the development of a more nuanced view of the Church as a whole, as well as the definitive case studies contained in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.⁴

The debate between the so-called ‘pessimist’ and ‘optimist’ schools on the eighteenth-century Church of England remains a feature of the wider discussion but it has yet to be resolved and the quality of the episcopate is a key element within it.⁵ Consequently, this collection of essays reflects dissonance as well as areas of consensus. Contributors address the optimist/ pessimist debate, but they go beyond this in opening up new areas for exploration. Taken together, the essays in this volume – by scholars who have written extensively on the Church, and specifically on its bishops in the period – offer an authoritative statement on the character and work of the episcopate. The essays also contribute to the ongoing reassessment of the Anglican Church worldwide in the long eighteenth century that shows no sign of slackening in the early twenty-first century. It is not a narrow ecclesiastical history, it is outward-looking and locates the episcopate within the widest possible range of social contexts and not only reflects the current state of our understanding but moves it on.

Why was the Episcopate Important in the Eighteenth Century?

First, politically, the episcopate played an important role in eighteenth-century society. The bishops in the House of Lords occupied twenty-six seats in a House that was much smaller in the eighteenth century and numbered in total around 100. Consequently, appointments to bishoprics were of crucial significance in the patronage stakes and in political arithmetic. At key moments in the period, the political actions of the bishops were critical. These occasions included the trial of the seven bishops in 1688 that began the concerted opposition to James II; the speeches of the bishops in the House of Lords on bills such as the Occasional Conformity Bills in 1703–5 and in 1711; the refusal of the bishops to countenance Quaker tithes relief in the 1730s; and the position of the bishops on the American crisis of the 1770s. Episcopal relationships with monarchs were often an important element in the religious life of the court. Bishops were a major presence in the provinces, especially important in regions of the country with a strong Catholic, Tory or Jacobite population. Bishops were at the forefront of theological and intellectual controversies. The Sacheverell, Bangorian, Subscription and other controversies were led by episcopal voices. The print output of bishops in the eighteenth century was remarkable and out-paced contributions to theological debate before and since.

Bishops were also social leaders whose opinions on issues of morality and social developments made contributions to wider changes in social attitudes in the eighteenth century. They were especially vocal on matters of sexual morality and on the role of the court and royal household in setting an example. As the supervisors of lower clergy, they were also in a position to influence the character of social leadership in parishes. Through their support of such ventures as the reformation of manners, the charity school movement, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, bishops were able to throw weight behind important social and religious initiatives. Charitable and philanthropic ventures were another aspect of the role that bishops played. Bishops were also social leaders who took a lead in connoisseurship, taste, art, architecture and other aspects of material culture. They appear as one of the major sources of book subscription and therefore influenced print culture. Their households and families were often a means of providing charity to clergy widows and orphans as well as supplying models for social emulation. Clearly, the importance of the episcopate within the Church is only one dimension of the social significance of bishops.

This collection is deliberately not seeking to be biographical in approach, but approaches the topic through themes that provide an opportunity for contributors to explore the role of bishops in the period according to their individual research expertise. The essays capture an understanding of the distinctiveness of the Anglican idea and practice of episcopacy and make contrasts and comparisons with other confessions clear. The collection consciously goes beyond England in considering the Anglican episcopate in other contexts, notably Wales, Scotland, Ireland and colonial North America; and it seeks to recognise that the episcopate had interests that stretched well beyond the Church of England, including relations with churches overseas.

The Changing Nature of the Episcopacy

The evolving nature of eighteenth-century episcopacy can be severally illustrated. One example of this is that bishops shed their military role. After 1689, no bishop took to the field of battle or military engagement as Richard Bancroft, Peter Mews, Henry Compton and others had in the seventeenth century. In this respect, bishops were part of the transition from England as a strife-ridden nation to one in which, broadly, tension was resolved through Parliament. This in turn brought new roles for bishops. Although the episcopate had a voice in politics in the House of Lords, from 1660 the lower clergy were taxed by Parliament rather than Convocation. This meant that clergy gained the franchise in elections; and clergy voted alongside their parishioners for the first time. For the episcopate, this meant that in each diocese hundreds of clerical votes might be influenced if the bishops sought to do so. In some respects, politicians expected bishops to lead their clergy at elections as well as at other times.

Another aspect of the changing position of bishops was the religious economy of the country. Whereas in the mid-seventeenth century the abolition of episcopacy had been central to the religious settlement of the Commonwealth, after 1660 episcopacy was subject to less objection. However, the episcopate faced two new threats: Protestant Dissent after the ejections of 1662; and Roman Catholicism until the Revolution of 1689. Both presented challenges to Anglican bishops. After 1689 the so-called Act of Toleration permitted lawful worship by Protestant Dissenters, which effectively ended the Anglican monopoly on public worship. It also led to divergent responses from bishops. Latitudinarians, such as Gilbert Burnet and Benjamin Hoadly, saw this as an opportunity to rise to the challenge of healthy competition and to win back Dissenters to the Church. High Churchmen regarded toleration as a danger to the Church that had to be resisted and, if possible, rolled back.⁶ Either way, the religious topography of the country was very different from the preceding period. While Convocation had been a forum for ecclesiastical debates, after 1689 it became increasingly fractious as Low and High Church factions sought to confront the issue of toleration. Divisions over Dissent, occasional conformity and related issues such as lay baptism, meant that by 1717 the discord was too great and George I prorogued Convocation.⁷ Thereafter bishops did not have to face disagreement and defiance from the lower clergy, not in that forum at least.

A further concern, for a relatively short period, was the presence of the non-jurors, the schismatics who left the Church in 1689 for their refusal to take oaths to William and Mary. By 1710, when Bishop William Lloyd of Norwich died, the principal schism was largely over. Nevertheless, the non-jurors exerted a theological pull greater than their numbers suggested and existed as a form of ecclesiastical Jacobitism. The return to the Church of some leading non-jurors such as Thomas Ken and Robert Nelson, drew the sting from their challenge. But in the first three decades of the century, Anglican bishops were always aware that there was a body of clergy who claimed to be the ‘true’ Church of England.⁸

Another aspect of bishops that has been neglected by scholars is their costume. During the latter part of the seventeenth century, bishops increasingly came to dress formally in episcopal ‘choir dress’ – the attire worn for public prayer and celebration of the sacrament. For bishops, this was a cassock, rochet (a form of surplice) and chimere (a sleeveless gown worn over the rochet). Bishops were almost without exception portrayed wearing this habit in formal portraits and sculptures. In York Minster, Archbishops Sterne, Dolben and Lamplugh were all depicted in stone wearing choir dress. Choir dress had all sorts of benefits. On the one hand it was clearly anti-Catholic in form, rejecting vestments and ‘popish’ garb; on the other hand, it was more elaborate and dignified than the plain black gowns favoured by Dissenting clergy. It had a historical integrity, having been worn by archbishops who spanned the theological divide, including Warham and Cranmer. It was also distinctively English, being unknown in Europe. Moreover, it was a form of dress that was uniquely episcopal (ordinary clerical choir dress comprising a cassock and surplice with hood and scarf) and so emphasised bishops’ status and authority. Mitres were not much worn, but could be worn or carried with choir dress.⁹

Episcopacy as a Form of Meritocracy: Some Professional Comparisons

Like other professional groups in the early modern period (the law, the armed forces and medicine), the Church was a means by which talented and educated men – they were all men – could come to social prominence. Upon their nomination, bishops became spiritual peers for life, and this introduced a meritocratic element into the heart of the establishment. The role of clerks of the closet, royal chaplains, deans of the chapel royal and almoners also brought bishops into proximity to the monarch and the court. A mitre might then be justly considered a symbol of achievement and ability. If Britain was an ‘open elite’, this was one of the instances in which that porosity was discernible.

There were bishops who came from the lowest ranks of society and ended their careers in the House of Lords. Even those from the ‘middling orders’ often came from artisan backgrounds: James Gardiner’s father was an ironmonger, Isaac Maddox was an orphan who was trained as a pastry cook, John Tillotson’s father was a clothier, Matthias Mawson’s was a brewer, John Thomas’s was a drayman, Richard Willis’s was a tanner and Elias Sydall’s was a glover. How far these undistinguished origins were perceived and acknowledged in wider society is not easily gauged. But it can be speculated that they played their part in inspiring others to sense that professional and social advancement through education, talent and effort was possible. Such permeable social membranes were an important element in society that diffused tensions and rendered social revolution much less likely.

Other professions also functioned, to varying degrees, as avenues for those who combined competence with capacity, ambition with the right politics. The judicial bench was a case in point. While outright social marginality was very unusual,¹⁰ of future Lord Chancellors, the great Whig lawyers, John, Lord Somers and Philip, Earl of Hardwicke, like so many aspirants at the bar, were the sons of well-established attorneys. Famously, the brothers Scott, John (1751–1838) (later Earl of Eldon and Lord Chancellor 1807–27) and William (1745–1836) (later Lord Stowell and Judge of the High Court of Admiralty 1798–1828) started life as the sons of a prosperous Newcastle coal-fitter.¹¹ All these men reached the House of Lords and sat in the same chamber with the bishops but the crucial difference between them was that, unlike the bishops, ennobled lawyers obtained a hereditary peerage.¹² A Lord Chancellor (and, very often, a Lord Chief Justice) was invariably the founder of a great family. Edward, Lord Chancellor Thurlow (in office under North and Pitt) decisively snubbed the 3rd Duke of Grafton’s sneer at his plebian origins by pointing to the number of peers who owed their coronets to the legal success of some initially obscure forbear.¹³ Future judges from non-elite backgrounds still needed a patron and kin support at the outset of their career.¹⁴ Unlike newly ordained deacons and priests, they had no early access to a stipend, and had to pay fees and support the costs of living and studying while reading for the bar at one of the Inns of Court and during their first years in chambers while they built up their practice and income was minimal.¹⁵ The Georgian bar, as one scholar has put it, ‘was too expensive an occupation for a poor man’,¹⁶ who might be more likely to make his way by taking holy orders.

The same issue applied to a commission in the army, where money and genteel origins were invaluable, certainly for the smartest regiments. About two-thirds of commissions in the eighteenth century were obtained by purchase, a major personal investment handled by regimental agents. Once the purchase of a commission was made (and their cost rose faster than prices generally), promotion took place mainly by seniority, a slow and uncertain process without any guarantee of an appointment.¹⁷ Major-Generals and above were promoted only on that basis, which became a matter of survival and keeping one’s name on the active service list.¹⁸ There were 518 generals in November 1812 but few of them were actually field commanders, the rough equivalent, perhaps, of a bishop.¹⁹ Senior army officers tended to secure the majority of limited knighthoods on offer in the Order of the Bath (reconstituted in 1725), though very few of them were granted a British peerage of the first creation. One exception was the relatively low born Sir Jeffrey Amherst (1717–97), the capturer of Montreal in 1761 and, unusually for a general, made a Privy Councillor in 1772. George III was happy for a barony to be conferred on Amherst four years later.²⁰ More generally, although still seldom given, the best that an army officer could hope for was an Irish title, but that would not take him into the House of Lords at Westminster.

There was arguably less social cohesion in the British eighteenth-century army than there was in the established Church, but the politics of a particular officer was as vital in calculating his promotion prospects as they were for any Anglican incumbent.²¹ That was also a consideration for naval officers. This profession required less by way of wealth and status (though those things helped) for its entrants and a capacity for requiring the technical competence expected of anyone on the road to commanding one of His Majesty’s ships, be it a humble cutter or a seventy-four-gun battleship.²² A patron was, of course, invaluable for any ambitious naval officer whatever his background,²³ and wartime offered scope not just for glory but also a British peerage, which were quite liberally bestowed on Admirals during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.²⁴ Even an unexceptionable individual near the top of the captains’ list might anticipate promotion to flag rank if he lived long enough, though making an officer an admiral did not oblige the Admiralty to employ him.²⁵

Those young men who could not draw on sufficient family finances were also unlikely to try and seek qualification as professional physicians and take the medical degrees of BM and MD. They might instead lower their sights and seek to become apothecaries or surgeons, perhaps after serving as an apprentice. To become a university-trained physician was a premium option and taken by some – such as the celebrated Dr Francis Willis – who were already in holy orders.²⁶ For the most capable and the most eminent among doctors who were laymen (many of them clergy sons), there were capacious fortunes to be made in a competitive business, as the career of John Radcliffe, Oxford University’s great benefactor, testified.²⁷ For medical men of Radcliffe’s standing, there was likely to be personal access to the monarch, and he had plenty to do ministering to Queen Anne as a patient. So did Sir David Hamilton (1663–1721), who received a knighthood for his pains.²⁸ But the social recognition that even the most prestigious physicians could attain in the eighteenth century never included entry to the House of Lords that all bishops and a few judges achieved. Baronies for medical men would not be awarded until the late nineteenth century, and the best that the top of the Georgian profession could hope for was a baronetcy, such as those awarded to George III’s physicians, Sir George Baker (1722–1809) in 1776, and Sir Lucas Pepys (1742–1830) in 1784, President of the Royal College of Physicians, 1804–10. Both these men attended the King during his period of acute mental instability in 1788–9, and both were old Etonians.²⁹

Episcopacy in Continental Europe

This collection attempts an up-to-date assessment of divergent aspects of eighteenth-century Anglican episcopacy. How far does it have its counterparts studying continental episcopacy? Uniquely among the churches severing ties with the papacy during the Reformation, the Church of England had preserved the historic order of the ordained ministry in its shape of bishops, priests and deacons. In line with its claim to be both Catholic and Reformed, it was a communion characterised above all by its episcopal character with the bishops at the apex of the hierarchy. While it caused tensions within the Church of England and with the wider Protestant world, this sacerdotal ordering allowed mainstream Anglican apologists to insist on the valid descent of the English Church from Primitive Christianity and therefore its legitimacy (indeed, its superior legitimacy) vis-à-vis the episcopacy retained across early modern Catholic Europe.

Wherever one looks, the eighteenth-century Roman Catholic Church partook of a national character much along Anglican lines and denoted by an episcopal order that looked primarily to the monarch rather than the papacy for appointment and support.³⁰ Nowhere was that more the case than with the Gallican Church, an institution with which many Anglican prelates felt a particular affinity as the interminable Jansenist wrangling of the first half of the century further loosened ties with Rome. A pioneering starting point for comparative studies of the two episcopates back in the 1960s was Norman Ravitch’s Sword and Mitre.³¹ It confirmed that if the English bench of bishops was made up predominantly of men of the ‘middling sort’, then the French bench was dominated by aristocrats. But Ravitch’s work was overlaid a decade later by the indispensable and exhaustive Michel Peronnet Les Evêques de l’ancienne France (1977). For the anglophone reader there is no better starting point than the three chapters dealing comprehensively with the pre-Revolutionary Gallican prelates in the writings of John McManners and Joseph Bergin.³²

Modern works in the English language devoted to the bishops of Bourbon Spain, do not yet exist (they have not attracted a great deal of detailed interest as a group even among native Spanish scholars). Most bishops were selected from noble families of modest means and, certainly from the mid-century, made conspicuous efforts to promote social welfare. King Carlos III (1759–88), who sought to give the Spanish Church a major role within a reforming monarchy, took trouble to identify candidates of calibre to fill bishoprics. Perhaps the best starting points to locate Spanish bishops within the wider Church are studies by William J. Callaghan and C. Hermann.³³ More recently, there is M. Barrio Gozalo, El Real Patronato y los obispos españoles del Antiguo Régimen (1556–1834) to be supplemented by the same writer’s article ‘Sociología del alto clero en la España del siglo ilustrado’, Manuscrits, 20 (2002) (useful inter alia on the process of appointment),³⁴ as well as A. L. Cortes Pena, ‘Rasgos del episcopado español del Antiguo Régimen’, which usefully includes an appendix of all the bishops at pp. 163–81.³⁵ A focus on the reign of Philip V (1700–46) appears a feature of twenty-first century scholarship. There is, for instance, O. Rey Castelao, ‘El episcopado gallego a la llegada de los Borbones 1700–1724’,³⁶ as well as the broader coverage of M. Barrio Gozalo, ‘El clero en la España de Felipe V. Cambios y continuidades’.³⁷ The dominant figure in Spanish Church and state during the 1710s is placed within his ecclesiastical context in M. Barrio Gozalo, ‘Cardenal Alberoni y Espana: politica religiosa y carrera eclesiastica’, Hispania Sacra, (2016). The nobility were in the ascendant in the Portuguese Church.

It was indicative that Gaspar de Braganza, the Archbishop of Braga between 1758 and 1789, a prelate noted for his grand manners and charity, was a bastard son of John V. The only recent conspectus of the state of the Italian episcopate is the work of Mario Rosa.³⁸ The number of dioceses within the peninsula varied from state to state. There were forty-nine in the Papal States (though this number does not count the eight dioceses in the immediate environs of Rome held by members of the Sacred College of Cardinals), thirty-two in the territories of Venice and its Adriatic maritime territories, but only eighteen within the borders of the grand duchy of Tuscany. Most Italian bishops (some 315 in all) were secular clergy, a significant proportion of whom had either previously served as cathedral canons or as assistants to their predecessor. However, between 15 per cent and 30 per cent of Italian dioceses, whose incumbents were mostly nominated by the papacy, were regular clergy, in particular mendicants. Strikingly, the Italian episcopate – Savoy and Sardinia excepted – remained consistently less aristocratic in its composition than either the French, Spanish or ‘German’ (i.e., Reichskirche) episcopate. It had this characteristic, at least, in common with the bishops of the Church of England.³⁹

In the German Empire, the imperial knights dominated bishoprics and held the two ecclesiastical electorates of Mainz and Trier; in Cologne the archbishop had to be at least an imperial count (the Wittelsbach family predominated). There is actually a striking absence of research on bishops of the Reichskirche in the eighteenth century. Michael Maurer’s book on Church, state and society remains indispensable,⁴⁰ to be complemented by the equally essential Die Bistümer des Heiligen Römischen Reiches von ihren Anfängen bis zur Säkularisation.⁴¹ The anglophone reader seeking a recent guide is best directed to Marc R. Forster’s Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (2007) and Michael Printy’s The Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (2009). Works in English also offer a flavour of some of the exciting research currently being undertaken on the Orthodox Church in Russia and the intriguing participation of some of its senior prelates in Enlightenment currents. For instance, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter examines the sermons and addresses of Catherine the Great’s favourite prelate, the Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) (1737–1812).⁴² Platon was an enlightened prelate, perhaps the most prominent of several such within eighteenth-century Orthodoxy, whose generous vision of the faith and its relationship to an emerging civic society had its counterparts among his Catholic and Anglican episcopal contemporaries. This study can be supplemented nicely by Andrey V. Ivanov, A Spiritual Revolution: the Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia (2020).

A Fresh Reassessment

The essays in this collection may be considered as an exercise in clarifying and assessing the current state of scholarship on the eighteenth-century Anglican episcopate, cleaning up some misunderstandings and misreadings, and pointing the way towards future research possibilities on the subject. The coverage is not intended to be exhaustive, though it is comprehensive; and is in no doubt regarding the importance of the episcopate given the centrality of religion in the Anglo-Hanoverian polity and the Anglo-Dutch one that preceded it (and the short interval between them).

Nigel Aston opens the volume by posing the primary question: how did an individual become a bishop in the eighteenth-century Church? He places the selection of bishops to serve in the established Church within the workings of the wider patronage state and investigates the various components of an individual cleric’s episcopal eligibility. As well as their selection, Aston looks at the translation of prelates, in effect their promotion. It also breaks new ground in considering the extensive ranks of the disappointed, those who thought they deserved a mitre, and the much tinier number of the nolo episcopari, those who refused to accept a bishopric offered to them, some more than once.

An important element in the appointment system was the monarch, and in his ‘Bishops and Monarchy’ essay, Grayson Ditchfield untangles the multiple threads that connected the episcopate to the Crown, the court, individual members of the royal family and the sovereign in person – a connection confirmed and symbolised when every bishop, upon their appointment, paid ceremonial homage to the monarch. Royal approval or disapproval of episcopal nominations and translations never ceased to carry weight: as late as 1805, George III, ever conscious of his status as Supreme Governor of the established Church, secured the elevation of Charles Manners Sutton to the see of Canterbury in defiance of his Prime Minister, William Pitt. Ditchfield emphasises that the alignment of most bishops with the post-1689 and post-1714 regimes played an important part in the survival and endurance of those regimes against the serious Jacobite threat. His essay also examines critiques of episcopacy and their implications for the monarchy and the importance of doctrinal orthodoxy in the selection of bishops.

The appointment of bishops and their links to the Crown necessarily engaged them in the politics of the century. Ruth Paley’s study of the episcopate in Parliament and politics raises the issue of the contrast between contemporary and twenty-first century values. As Paley shows, the expectation of society was that bishops were properly involved in politics. This was in part because politics and religion were inseparable. Paley’s study also shows that bishops were an important, if diminishing, presence in the House of Lords in the period; and on occasion had a significant impact on voting. Nevertheless, the claim that because of their political appointments they were a ministerial bloc of votes is demonstrably wrong, not least because of episcopal longevity and ministerial transience.

If parliamentary duties were primary to an episcopal life in the Church of England, then pastoral ones, particularly those of confirmation, ordination and visitation (the first two non-dominical sacraments) were foundational, and how these were discharged is the subject of Colin Haydon’s chapter. Ever alert to the sometimes very different diocesan settings and the bishops’ links with their regional/local élites, Haydon shows how they endeavoured to ensure that their clergy functioned effectively in the parishes by examining ordination processes and the various attempts to promote the clergy’s spiritual welfare. Haydon also details the bishops’ work concerning the laity and the strategies needed when endeavouring to inculcate a satisfactory understanding of the faith among them. Lastly, he investigates problems that bishops might experience from heterodox Anglicans and from religious minorities, plus the rise and growth of evangelicalism and Methodism. The chapter is bound together by an overarching theme: the bishops’ duty to strive for their flocks’ salvation. A shepherd who failed to do that, the consecration injunctions warned, would ‘certainly forfeit’ his own salvation’s prospects.

In contrast to the now discredited caricature of the lazy bishop, William Gibson’s exploration of politics and conflict demonstrates the nature of bishops’ involvement in contestation – both political and ecclesiastical. In this respect, Gibson’s essay underscores one of the key themes of this book: the vitality and energy of the bench of bishops in the period. Without such energy and activism, there would have been little conflict. In electoral terms, bishops carried considerable influence, but they were by no means always successful in their ambitions. In defence of the Church’s role in the state, and of Christian orthodoxy, the bishops were often more successful, but they played for high stakes. In conflicts with cathedrals and at law, bishops’ success often depended on their determination and stamina to pursue what they saw as their rights. In most