The interregnum period in England saw the polarisation of thought concerning the nature of the ministry and its relevance to salvation. Almost twenty years ago James Fulton Maclear classified the anti-clericalism which matured during these years in three ways: anti-clericalism based on mounting class consciousness and bitter resentment against the pretensions of the clergy; anti-clericalism rooted in political antagonism; and the anti-clericalism to be discerned in the thought of men such as William Walwyn, which was moralistic, anti-theological and indifferent to ecclesiastical problems. Most historians have discussed the issue of a settled ministry with reference to the writings of the leading controversialists—Milton, Walwyn, Lilburn, Winstanley, Fox, and Jubbes. The position assumed by the Presbyterian ministers themselves has received rather less attention—theirs was essentially a defensive standpoint and consequendy less colourful. Yet, for many reasons, there is a real need for an examination of the development of clerical professional exclusiveness prior to the Civil War and for an analysis of the reaction of the settled ministry to subsequent attacks upon their position.

Edward Gee, rector at Eccleston, near Chorley in Lancashire, from 1643 until 1660, was born in 1612 or 1613, at Banbury (Oxon.). During the years following the reorganisation of the Church in Lancashire along Presbyterian lines in 1646, he achieved recognition as a leading member of the clergy in that county. In 1650 he was said to possess the parsonage-house and glebe at Eccleston, with tithes and a water cornmill. Although he had agreed with the parliamentary cause in the Civil War, he opposed the more revolutionary changes carried out in 1648 and 1649, years in which the House of Commons was purged by the army, king Charles I executed, and the monarchy and the House of Lords abolished. The decision of the new republican Commonwealth regime to exact a promise of allegiance, known as the Engagement (first, in 1649 from a number of important Englishmen, and then in 1650 from all adult males in England) provoked a major pamphlet debate. This Engagement Controversy was the occasion of a lengdiy and detailed exchange of opinions and interpretations concerning the whole problem of how the subject should in conscience behave with respect to a drastic change of government, or, as many would have it, a usurpation of civil authority.

Historians of the eighteenth century have written of William Whiston, if at all, with an ill-concealed smile. ‘The engaging Whiston’, that ‘most amiable of heretics’, is duly noted in every account of the development of Arianism in England, but his lunatic vagaries are kept well to the fore. Yet Whiston has some claims to serious historical attention. His heresies were considered dangerous enough to provoke the champions of both high and low-church to counter attack, and to unite the warring factions in the turbulent Convocation of 1710/11 in a concerted attempt to silence ‘this corrupter of our common Christianity’, this ‘fallen star of our church’. To Whiston, rather than to Samuel Clarke, belongs the dubious credit of having revived the Arian heresy in England, and although Clarke's less flamboyant teaching was ultimately more influential, Whiston, in converting the dissenters Joseph Hallett and James Peirce to Arian views, was indirectly responsible for the conflagration at Salter's Hall in 1719, and the spread of Unitarianism in English dissent. The story of the discovery of ‘Primitive Christianity’ and the prolonged persecution which Whiston's attempts to propagate his new gospel provoked is not widiout elements of farce, but there is a serious side to the episode. The abortive attempt to cite Whiston before the ‘court of Convocation’ in 1711, and his subsequent prosecution in the Court of Delegates, were seen by churchmen as yet another demonstration of the impotence of the Church of England in the face of her enemies, and by latitudinarians and unbelievers as a dangerous attempt on the liberties of protestant Englishmen. Like the Sacheverell trial, to which it forms a pendant, the Whiston affair was, while it lasted, a cause célèbre, and casts further light on the eighteenth-century debate on the place and function of the Church in Society.

Discussions of the ‘Catholic Question’ of the early nineteenth century have concentrated almost exclusively upon developments in Ireland, where demagogues, priests, and peasants cleverly contrived to extort Emancipation from a protestant parliament. The historian's choice of focus scarcely requires explanation, what with the purport of Irish events and the relentless logic with which the O'Connellites had organised their following. And yet, despite the emphases of scholarship, the concessions of 1829 actually represented a triumph on both sides of St. George's Channel. The Catholic Saxon as well as the Catholic Celt, each in his own way, had contributed to the joyous outcome, and quite possibly neither would have succeeded without the other.