Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T18:40:02.789Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

An Ecclesiastical Descent: Religion and History in the Work of William Stubbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2013

J. E. KIRBY
J. E. KIRBY*
Affiliation:
Balliol College, Oxford, OX1 3BJ; E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between religion and historiography in the work of the historian and bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901). Previous studies of Stubbs have neglected the High-Church influences which demonstrably pervaded his thought, and shaped his ideas of the English past, of the Christian purposes of history, and of the historical process itself. Recovering the confessional bent of Stubbs's approach to the past challenges assumptions about not only academic professionalisation, but also the prevalence through the Victorian period of a ‘Whig interpretation’ of history.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 84 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Letters of William Stubbs, ed. W. H. Hutton, London 1904, 3.

2 Ibid. 402.

3 Maitland, F. W., ‘William Stubbs, bishop of Oxford’, EHR xvi (1901), 417–26Google Scholar at p. 417.

4 J. Campbell, ‘Stubbs, Maitland, and constitutional history’, in B. Stuchtey and P. Wende (eds), British and German historiography, 1750–1950: traditions, perceptions and transfers, Oxford 2000, 99–122 at p. 104.

5 Blaas, P. B. M., Continuity and anachronism: parliamentary and constitutional development in Whig historiography and in the anti-Whig reaction between 1890 and 1930, The Hague 1978, 161–86Google Scholar.

6 Burrow, J. W., A liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past, Cambridge 1981, 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar and pt ii passim.

7 Parker, C., The English historical tradition since 1850, Edinburgh 1990, 31–2Google Scholar; Bentley, M., Modernizing England's past: English historiography in the age of modernism, 1870–1970, Cambridge 2005, 46–8Google Scholar; Brundage, A. and Cosgrove, R. A., The great tradition: constitutional history and national identity in Britain and the United States, 1870–1960, Stanford 2007, 56–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For Stubbs's labours on the Rolls Series see Maitland, ‘William Stubbs’, 419–21.

9 For Stubbs's antiquarian publications see Letters of William Stubbs, 411–12. For antiquaries see Levine, P., The amateur and the professional: antiquarians, historians and archaeologists in Victorian England, Cambridge 1986Google Scholar, esp. pp. 22–3, and Sweet, R., Antiquaries: the discovery of the past in eighteenth-century Britain, London 2004Google Scholar.

10 For this tradition see Smith, R. J., The Gothic bequest: medieval institutions in British thought, 1688–1857, Cambridge 1987Google Scholar, 28–37, and Pocock, J. G. A., The ancient constitution and the feudal law: a study of English historical thought in the seventeenth century, Cambridge 1957Google Scholar.

11 Stubbs, W., Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects, 3rd edn, Oxford 1900Google Scholar, 6 (emphasis added), 9.

12 Burrow, Liberal descent, 2, 131. For Burke's ancient-constitutionalism see Pocock, J. G. A., ‘Burke and the ancient constitution: a problem in the history of ideas’, HJ iii (1960), 125–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 This de-emphasis of German origins concurs with the broader argument of Slee, P., Learning and a liberal education: the study of modern history in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1800–1914, Manchester 1986, 131–2Google Scholar; for an opposing view see D. Goldstein, ‘History at Oxford and Cambridge: professionalisation and the influence of Ranke’, in G. Iggers and J. Powell (eds), Leopold von Ranke and the shaping of the historical discipline, Syracuse, NY 1990, 141–53.

14 Maitland, F. W., The collected papers of Frederic William Maitland, Cambridge 1911Google Scholar, iii. 469.

15 Engel, A. J., From clergyman to don: the rise of the academic profession in nineteenth-century Oxford, Oxford 1983, 1–2Google Scholar; Heyck, T. W., The transformation of intellectual life in Victorian England, London 1982, 149–50Google Scholar.

16 Goldstein, D., ‘The origins and early years of the English Historical Review’, EHR ci (1986), 6–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar at pp. 8–9.

17 Letters of William Stubbs, 127, 172; Williams, N. J., ‘Stubbs's appointment as regius professor’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research xxxiii (1960), 121–5Google Scholar at p. 125; J. R. Green to E. A. Freeman, 11 Nov. 1875, in Letters of John Richard Green, ed. L. Stephen, London 1901, 423.

18 Letters of William Stubbs, 130–1.

19 Stubbs, W., Ordination addresses, London 1901, 183–93Google Scholar, and Visitation charges delivered to the clergy and churchwardens of the dioceses of Chester and Oxford, London 1904, 347; Shannon, R. T., Gladstone and the Bulgarian agitation, London 1963, 174Google Scholar, 223–4.

20 Letters of William Stubbs, 21, 30, 196.

21 de Turrecremata, J., Tractatus de veritate conceptionis beatissimae Virginis, ed. E. B. Pusey, Oxford 1869Google Scholar; Liddon, H. P., Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, London 1893–7Google Scholar, iv. 181–2; Letters of William Stubbs, 123–4; Chapman, M., ‘Pusey, Newman, and the end of a “healthful Reunion”: the second and third volumes of Pusey's Eirenicon’, Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte xv (2008), 208–31Google Scholar.

22 Burrow, Liberal descent, 150.

23 Butterfield, H., The Englishman and his history, Cambridge 1944Google Scholar. There is an abundance of recent literature including Brundage and Cosgrove, The great tradition; J. Garnett, ‘Protestant histories: James Anthony Froude, partisanship and national identity’, in P. Ghosh and L. Goldman (eds), Politics and culture in Victorian Britain, Oxford 2006, 171–91; and P. Mandler, ‘“In the olden time”: romantic history and English national identity, 1820–1850’, in L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (eds), A union of multiple identities: the British Isles, c. 1750–c.1850, Manchester 1997, 78–92.

24 Any definition of the term is problematic: that given here draws particularly on Butterfield, The Englishman and his history, pp. i–vii, 1–5, and Burrow, Liberal descent, 2–3 and passim.

25 Butterfield, H., The Whig interpretation of history, London 1931, 3Google Scholar, and The Englishman and his history, 4–5; Burrow, Liberal descent, 30–4, 243–4.

26 Holland House's centrality to Whig historiography has been emphasised by J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: a history of ideology and discourse’, in his Virtue, commerce, and history, Cambridge 1985, 215–310 at p. 300; cf. Smith, Gothic bequest, 140–6.

27 Stubbs, W., On convocation, London 1917, 44Google Scholar; Historical introductions to the Rolls Series, London 1902, 25, 31–2; Seventeen lectures, 124–5; and Visitation charges, 193.

28 Idem, The constitutional history of England in its origin and development, Oxford 1880 (‘Library Edition’), i. 172; Allen, J., Inquiry into the rise and growth of the royal prerogative in England, London 1830Google Scholar.

29 Stubbs, W., A sermon: St George's, Windsor. February 3, 1901, Oxford n.d. (privately printed), 5–6Google Scholar.

30 Idem, Clericalism: a sermon preached in the cathedral church of St Paul, London, London 1881, passim.

31 Idem, Visitation charges, 341–2. James Vernon's notion that Stubbs sought to ‘construct an ethnically cleansed empire of Teutonic Protestantism’ is thus absurd: Stubbs would have been the victim rather than the perpetrator of such a cleansing: J. Vernon, ‘Narrating the constitution: the discourse of “the real” and the fantasies of nineteenth-century constitutional history’, in J. Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the constitution: new narratives in the political history of England's long nineteenth century, Cambridge 1996, 204–38 at p. 225.

32 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 18.

33 Idem, Lectures on early English history, London 1906, 197.

34 Ibid. 207.

35 Idem, The early Plantagenets, London 1886, 5.

36 Idem, Constitutional history, i. 280–1.

37 Ibid. i. 281, 707–8.

38 Skinner, S. A., Tractarians and the ‘condition of England’: the social and political thought of the Oxford Movement, Oxford 2004, 198–210Google Scholar.

39 Stubbs, Constitutional history, iii. 396–400, 646–56.

40 Green, J. R., A short history of the English people, London 1874, 284–5Google Scholar.

41 Brundage, A., ‘John Richard Green and the Church: the making of a social historian’, The Historian xxxv (1972), 32–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Stubbs, Constitutional history, i. 279–81.

43 Idem, Select charters and other illustrations of English constitutional history, 8th edn, Oxford 1895, 10; cf. Early Plantagenets, 57. This conviction of the Church's anteriority to the state was a pronounced feature of Tractarian as opposed to older High-Church attitudes: Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘condition of England.’, 118.

44 Stubbs, Select charters, 8.

45 Idem, Lectures on early English history, 91–2.

46 Ibid.

47 Idem, Constitutional history, iii. 542.

48 Idem, Historical introductions to the Rolls Series, 370–1; Constitutional history, iii. 344; cf. The foundation of Waltham Abbey, Oxford 1861, p. vii.

49 R. J. Smith, ‘Cobbett, Catholic history, and the Middle Ages’, in L. J. Workman (ed.), Medievalism in England, Cambridge 1992, 113–42 at pp. 117–19.

50 Stubbs to Freeman, 3 Nov. 1859, Letters of William Stubbs, 75. Stubbs's remark was provoked by a book by the Congregationalist Robert Vaughan, for whom see also p. 95 below.

51 For Tractarian views of the Reformation see Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘condition of England.’, 203–13.

52 Stubbs, Constitutional history, iii. 323.

53 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 277. Stubbs began a fourth volume of the Constitutional history, on the Reformation period, but failed to complete it on becoming a bishop: Seventeen lectures, 435, and anon., ‘William Stubbs, churchman and historian’, Quarterly Review ccii (1905), 1–34 at p. 14.

54 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 298–300.

55 Idem, Constitutional history, iii. 357–8.

56 Ibid. iii. 667.

57 For the attitudes of Vaughan and Macaulay to Puritans see Lang, T., The Victorians and the Stuart heritage: interpretations of a discordant past, Cambridge 1995Google Scholar, 61–2, 76–8, 112–15; cf. Macaulay, T. B., ‘Milton’, in Lord Macaulay's essays and lays of ancient Rome, London 1888, 1–27Google Scholar at p. 23.

58 Stubbs, W., Lectures on European history, London 1904, 62Google Scholar.

59 Idem, Lectures on early English history, 246–7, and Lectures on European history, 65. For the Jerusalem bishopric see Nockles, P., The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857, Cambridge 1994, 157–60Google Scholar.

60 Letters of William Stubbs 126.

61 Stubbs, Lectures on European history, 61.

62 Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘condition of England.’, 191–2, 198–212; cf. Smith, ‘Cobbett, Catholic history, and the Middle Ages’, passim.

63 Faber, R., Young England, London 1987, 182–8Google Scholar.

64 Disraeli, B., Coningsby; or, the new generation, London 1844Google Scholar, bk ii, ch. i, and Sybil; or, the two nations, London 1845, bk i, ch. iii; cf. Faber, Young England, 188–97.

65 Burrow, Liberal descent, 241.

66 Stubbs, W., Evil days: a sermon preached before the University of Oxford at St Mary's Church, Oxford 1867, 27Google Scholar.

67 Stubbs, preface to Mosheim, J. L., Institutes of ecclesiastical history, ancient and modern, ed. and cont. W. Stubbs, London 1863Google Scholar, i, pp. vii–x.

68 B. Young, ‘Gibbon, Newman and the religious accuracy of the historian’, in D. Womersley (ed.), Edward Gibbon: bicentenary essays, Oxford 1997, 309–30 at p. 314.

69 Stubbs, as continuator to Mosheim, Institutes, iii. 589–97. The suspicion of German thought is typical of a follower of Pusey, well-known for his criticism of that country's ‘rationalist’ theology.

70 Soffer, R. N., Discipline and power: the university, history, and the making of an English elite, 1870–1930, Stanford 1994Google Scholar, 87.

71 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 32–3.

72 Idem, IV Sermons, Oxford 1896 (privately printed), 9.

73 Letters of William Stubbs, 205, 237 n.

74 W. Gladstone to Stubbs, 2 Feb. 1883, ibid. 231. For contemporary criticism of Stubbs's closeness to Gladstone see Tomlinson, J. T., The ‘legal history’ of Canon Stubbs, London 1884, 6Google Scholar.

75 For Tractarian views on Church and State see Gloyn, C. K., The Church in the social order: a study of Anglican social theory from Coleridge to Maurice, Forest Grove, Or 1942, 58–70Google Scholar; P. Nockles, ‘Pusey and the question of Church and State’, in P. Butler (ed.), Pusey rediscovered, London 1983, 255–97 at pp. 273–5, 285–8; and Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘condition of England.’, 87–138.

76 Stubbs to Freeman, 21 Mar. 1883, Letters of William Stubbs, 193; Stubbs, W., In the ecclesiastical courts commission, Oxford 1883, 1Google Scholar.

77 Stubbs, W., Remarks & proposals made by Dr. Stubbs before the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, Oxford 1882, 1Google Scholar, and Church and state principles, London 1900, 4.

78 Idem, Visitation charges, 3–9, and ‘Historical appendix i’, Report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the constitution and working of the ecclesiastical courts, London 1883, i. 21–51 at pp. 22, 48, 51.

79 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 35; cf. his correspondence with Lord Salisbury, quoted in Bentley, J., Ritualism and politics in Victorian Britain: the attempt to legislate for belief, Oxford 1978, 127–8Google Scholar.

80 Stubbs, Visitation charges, 82; Hints for teachers of church history (privately printed, Church Defence Institution, pamphlet no. cxxix, n.d.), 2; and Clericalism, 12.

81 Idem, Visitation charges, 83, 186, and Lectures on early English history, 2.

82 Peck, A. L., Anglicanism and episcopacy: a re-examination of evidence, London 1958, 57Google Scholar; Stubbs, Visitation charges, 130.

83 Stubbs, W., Registrum sacrum Anglicanum: an attempt to exhibit the course of the episcopal succession in England from the records and chronicles of the Church, Oxford 1858Google Scholar.

84 Idem, Registrum sacrum Anglicanum, Lambeth Palace Library, ms 1714, p. 1. This preface remained unpublished at the behest not of Stubbs, but of the delegates of the press: Stubbs to Freeman, 18 Aug. 1858, Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng misc e 148, fos 13–14.

85 Stubbs, Registrum sacrum Anglicanum (manuscript), 1. For Tractarians and the apostolic succession see Gloyn, The Church in the social order, 51–2.

86 Stubbs, Registrum sacrum Anglicanum (manuscript), 2–3.

87 See especially [J. H. Newman], Thoughts on the ministerial commission, respectfully addressed to the clergy [Tract 1], London 1834, and [W. Palmer and J. H. Newman], On the apostolical succession in the English Church [Tract 15], London 1834.

88 Stubbs, Registrum sacrum Anglicanum (manuscript), 314–17.

89 Benson, A. C., The life of Edward White Benson, London 1899Google Scholar, ii. 50; Hinchliff, P., Frederick Temple, archbishop of Canterbury: a life, Oxford 1998, 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stubbs, Visitation charges, 189–92, and The apostolical succession in the Church of England: a letter to a Russian friend, London 1865.

90 Stubbs to Gladstone, June 1888, Gladstone papers, BL, ms Add. 44504, fos 12, 19, 24; Letters of William Stubbs, 276–7.

91 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, pp. vii, 58–62; Visitation charges, 160; and Evil days, 20.

92 George Macmillan to Stubbs, 22 Nov. 1894, archbishops’ papers, Lambeth Palace Library, Benson ms 129, fos 140–1.

93 Stubbs, Hints for teachers of church history, passim.

94 Idem, Visitation charges, 27.

95 Idem, Hints for teachers of church history, 1.

96 Idem, Visitation charges, 82.

97 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 130.

98 Ibid. 454–5.

99 Ibid.

100 For the ideal of the clerisy see Gloyn, The Church in the social order, 22–3, 33–7; for the Victorian Church's capabilities in the parish see Burns, A., The diocesan revival in the Church of England, Oxford 1999Google Scholar.

101 Stubbs, Evil days, 13–4.

102 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 10.

103 Such suspicions were voiced by William Gladstone in correspondence with Stubbs: Gladstone to Stubbs, 4 Mar. 1876, Letters of William Stubbs,148; cf. M. G. Brock, ‘A “plastic structure”’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The history of the University of Oxford, VII: Nineteenth-century Oxford: part 2, Oxford 2000, 3–66 at pp. 25–6.

104 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 26.

105 Slee, Learning and a liberal education, 60.

106 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 27–8. Similar themes recur in his 1894 sermon before the more scientific audience of the British Association: IV sermons, 9.

107 Green to Freeman, Feb. 1867, Letters of John Richard Green, 176.

108 Freeman, E. A., The office of the historical professor: an inaugural lecture, London 1884, 60Google Scholar.

109 Ward, W. R., Victorian Oxford, London 1965, 217Google Scholar.

110 Gladstone to Stubbs, 27 Dec. 1875, Letters of William Stubbs, 147–8. Stubbs concurred in another letter: Stubbs to Gladstone, 8 Mar. [1876], Gladstone papers, ms Add. 44490, fo. 25.

111 Letters of William Stubbs, 123.

112 Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone: 1875–1898, Oxford 1995, 238Google Scholar; Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 27.

113 Goldstein, D. S., ‘Confronting time: the Oxford school of history and the non-Darwinian revolution’, Storia della storiografia xxxxv (2004), 3–27Google Scholar at p. 11.

114 Stubbs, Visitation charges, 144.

115 Maitland, F. W., Roman canon law in the Church of England: six essays, London 1898, 52–3Google Scholar.

116 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 335–6.

117 Ibid.

118 Idem, as continuator to Mosheim, Institutes, iii. 596, 622; Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 433.

119 Stubbs, Visitation charges, 93–6.

120 Prestige, G. L., The life of Charles Gore: a great Englishman, London 1935, 114Google Scholar.

121 Chapman, M., ‘Charles Gore, kenosis and the crisis of power’, Journal of Anglican Studies iii (2005), 197–218Google Scholar at p. 203.

122 Letters of William Stubbs, 336–7; Prestige, Life of Charles Gore, 114.

123 Prestige, Life of Charles Gore, 151.

124 Stubbs, Visitation charges, 138–52; M. Burrows, preface to Stubbs, W., Biblical criticism, London 1905Google Scholar.

125 Mrs Ward, H., Robert Elsmere, 23rd edn, London 1889, 277–8Google Scholar, 316–21; Chadwick, O., The secularization of the European mind in the nineteenth century, Cambridge 1985, 197–219Google Scholar.

126 M. Bentley, ‘Victorian historians and the larger hope’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Public and private doctrine: essays in British history presented to Maurice Cowling, Cambridge 1993, 127–48 at p. 146.

127 Stubbs, Evil days, 9.

128 Idem, Visitation charges, 61.

129 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 477.

130 Burrow, Liberal descent, 3, 288.

131 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 475.

132 Idem, Constitutional history, iii. 663.

133 Ibid. 546–7.

134 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 301.

135 Idem, Lectures on early English history, 194–5.

136 Stubbs to Freeman, 8 Nov. 1857, Letters of William Stubbs, 41–2.

137 Stubbs, preface to Royal letters addressed to Oxford, ed. O. Ogle, Oxford 1892, p. v.

138 Stubbs, Constitutional history, ii. 1–3.

139 Ibid. iii. 668.

140 Arnold, M., The poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. K. Allott, London 1965, 239–43Google Scholar. Allusions to Epipolae were not uncommon in Victorian literature: Culler, A. D., The Victorian mirror of history, New Haven 1985, 3Google Scholar.

141 Stubbs, Constitutional history, ii. 677.

142 Ibid. iii. 661; the allusion is biblical, to Joel ii. 2.

143 Stubbs, W., A sermon preached on the occasion of the restoration of the parish church of Knaresborough, Oxford 1872Google Scholar (privately printed), 1–2; cf. IV sermons, 50.

144 Idem, IV sermons, 32–4, and Seventeen lectures, 446–8.

145 Idem, Ordination addresses, 118.

146 Hinchliff, P., God and history: aspects of British theology, 1875–1914, Oxford 1992, 8Google Scholar.

147 Stubbs, Seventeen lectures, 300.

148 Idem, as continuator to Mosheim, Institutes, iii. 627.

149 Idem, Seventeen lectures, 133.