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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 May 2020
Since the 1950s, historians of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Church of England have generally maintained that the Sacramental Test Act (1828), the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829) and the Reform Act (1832) amounted to a ‘constitutional revolution’, in which Anglican political hegemony was decisively displaced. This theory remains the dominant framework for understanding the effect of legislation on the relationship between church and state in pre-Victorian England. This article probes the validity of the theory. It is argued that the legislative reforms of 1828–32 did not drastically alter the religious composition of parliament, which was already multi-denominational, and that they incorporated clauses which preserved the political dominance of the Church of England. Additionally, it is suggested that Anglican apprehensions concerning the reforming measures of those years were derived from an unfounded belief that these reforms would ultimately result in changes to the Church of England's formularies or in disestablishment, rather than from the actual laws enacted. Accordingly, the post-1832 British parliamentary system did not in the short term militate against Anglican interests. In light of this reappraisal, these legislative reforms may be better understood as an exercise in ‘constitutional adjustment’ as opposed to a ‘constitutional revolution’.
The research upon which this article is based was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership studentship, grant no. 1653413, supported by Pembroke College, Cambridge. I am most grateful to Andrew Thompson for his comments and suggestions.
1 Jennings, Louis J., ed., The Correspondence and Diaries of the late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830, 3 vols (London, 1884), 2: 205–6Google Scholar, Duke of Wellington to John Wilson Croker, 6 March 1833.
2 Froude, Richard Hurrell, Remains of the late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude: Part the Second, 2 vols (Derby, 1839), 1: 185, 192Google Scholar. On Froude's theory and Anglican opposition to it, see Nockles, Peter, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), 80–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 See, for example, Biber, George Edward, Bishop Blomfield and his Times: An Historical Sketch (London, 1857), 219–23Google Scholar; Denison, George Anthony, Notes of my Life, 1805–1878, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1878), 59–60Google Scholar; Church, R. W., The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years 1833–1845 (London, 1891), 1–2, 41, 43Google Scholar; Ollard, S. L., The Anglo-Catholic Revival: Some Persons and Principles (London, 1925), 19Google Scholar. On the place of 1828–32 in W. E. Gladstone's early thought, see Perry Butler, Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism. A Study of his Religious Ideas and Attitudes (Oxford, 1982), 79–82.
4 James Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford, 2016), 129.
5 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Works, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols (London, 1866), 2: 397.
6 Trevelyan, G. M., British History in the Nineteenth Century (1782–1901) (London, 1922), 220Google Scholar, 225; see Gordon Pentland, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, in David Brown, Gordon Pentland and Robert Crowcroft, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History (Oxford, 2018), 383–99, at 385–6.
7 G. F. A. Best, ‘The Constitutional Revolution, 1828–32, and its Consequences for the Established Church’, Theology 62 (1959), 226–34, at 226, 228, 230–1; see also idem, Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne's Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and the Church of England (Cambridge, 1964), 7, 270–1. As Best acknowledged, his arguments were to a certain extent anticipated by Olive Brose, but she did not describe the reforms of 1828–32 as a ‘revolution’: Olive J. Brose, Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England, 1828–1860 (Stanford, CA, 1959), 7–21.
8 Norman Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics 1832–1852: The Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford in the Hilary Term 1964 (Oxford, 1965), 61–2; Bennett, Scott, ‘Catholic Emancipation, the “Quarterly Review”, and Britain's Constitutional Revolution’, VS 12 (1969), 283–304Google Scholar, at 285; Machin, G. I. T., Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832 to 1868 (Oxford, 1977), 21–2Google Scholar, 26–7; Webb, R. K., Modern England: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, 2nd edn (London, 1980), 186–203Google Scholar.
9 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2000), 555.
10 Ibid. 527, 563; cf. W. H. Conser, Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England, and America, 1815–1866 (Macon, GA, 1984), 99–111; Richard Brown, Church and State in Modern Britain 1700–1850 (London, 1991), 203–29; Nockles, Oxford Movement, 44; David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge, 1996), 1, 22.
11 E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England 1770–1970: A Historical Study (Oxford, 1976), 71, 77; Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1989), 229, 269; Arthur Burns, ‘“Standing in the Old Ways”: Historical Legitimation of Church Reform in the Church of England, c.1825–65’, in R. N. Swanson, ed., The Church Retrospective, SCH 33 (Woodbridge, 1997), 407–23, at 407; Arthur Burns, ‘The Authority of the Church’, in Peter Mandler, ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2006), 179–202, at 186; M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2008), 144.
12 J. P. Parry and Stephen Taylor, ‘Introduction: Parliament and the Church of England from the Reformation to the Twentieth Century’, in eidem, eds, Parliament and the Church, 1529–1960 (Edinburgh, 2000), 1–13, at 7.
13 William Gibson, The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and Accord (London, 2001), 18; see also Penelope Corfield's critique of Clark's related notion of England as a ‘confessional state’: ‘Georgian England: One State, Many Faiths’, History Today 45 (1995), 14–21.
14 Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland 1801–46 (Oxford, 2001), 168; cf. Richard W. Davis, A Political History of the House of Lords, 1811–1846 (Stanford, CA, 2008), 141.
15 Rowan Strong, ‘Introduction’, to idem, ed., OHA, 3: Partisan Anglicanism and its Global Expansion 1829–c.1914 (Oxford, 2017), 1–23, at 1; see also idem, ‘Anglicanism and the State in the Nineteenth Century’, ibid. 92–115, at 93–4, 105, 111.
16 Stewart J. Brown, ‘Anglicanism in the British Empire, 1829–1910’, ibid. 45–68, at 46.
17 Robert M. Andrews, ‘High Church Anglicanism in the Nineteenth Century’, ibid. 141–64, at 145–6, and see also 153, 158, 162; cf. Stewart J. Brown, Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom 1815–1914 (Harlow, 2008), 178; Frances Knight, The Church in the Nineteenth Century, I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church (London, 2008), 14–15.
18 Froude, Remains, 1: 196–207.
19 Gerald Bray, ed., Records of Convocation, 20 vols, CERS (Woodbridge, 2006), vols 11–12, 15.
20 Froude was aware of his theory's shortcomings and, according to Peter Nockles, his ‘appeal to Hooker had been an essentially rhetorical, tactical device to disarm the “Zs” [non-Tractarian high churchmen]’: Nockles, Oxford Movement, 80. He even admitted to Newman that the ‘facts’ employed in support of his case were ‘less satisfactory than I could wish – I find that the Test and Corporation Acts applied only indirectly to Members of Parliament’: The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 4: The Oxford Movement, July 1833 to December 1834, ed. Ian T. Ker and Thomas Gornall (Oxford, 1980), 38, Richard Hurrell Froude to John Henry Newman, [August 1833].
21 Basil Duke Henning, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1660–1690, 3 vols (London, 1983), 1: 12. Quakers were effectively excluded from parliament because of the requirement for MPs to take an oath of office, which was repealed in 1833: 3 & 4 Will. IV c.49.
22 13 Cha. II c.1.
23 25 Cha. II c.2.
24 30 Cha. II c.1.
25 1 Will. & Mary c.18; James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-century Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990), 51–2.
26 10 Anne c.6; Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism, 52–3.
27 5 Geo. I c.4; K. R. M. Short, ‘The English Indemnity Acts 1726–1867’, ChH 42 (1973), 366–76; Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism, 69–84. Also crucial to the equation was the ‘Act for Quieting and Establishing Corporations’ (1719), which gave members of corporations who held office for six months immunity from prosecution under the Corporation Act: 5 Geo. 1 c.6. Additionally, from 1722 to 1851, Dissenting churches received Treasury funding: K. R. M. Short, ‘The English Regum Donum’, EHR 84 (1969), 59–78.
28 6 Anne c.11; 1707 c.7.
29 D. W. Hayton, E. Cruickshanks and S. Handley, eds, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1690–1715, 5 vols (Woodbridge, 2002), 1: 311; Romney Sedgwick, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–1754, 2 vols (London, 1970), 1: 139; L. B. Namier and J. Brooke, eds, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, 3 vols (London, 1964, repr. 1985), 1: 115.
30 R. G. Thorne, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1790–1820, 5 vols (London, 1986), 1: 294.
31 39 & 40 Geo. III c.67; 40 Geo. III c.38. By an act of the Irish parliament that was passed in 1780, Dissenters, although not Catholics, could hold civil office in Ireland: 20 Geo. III c.6.
32 Alexander Lock, Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810 (Woodbridge, 2016), 97.
33 Ibid. 98–101.
34 Nathaniel Wraxall, Posthumous Memoirs of his own Time, 3 vols (London, 1836), 1: 32.
35 Lock, Thomas Gascoigne, 109.
36 Ibid.; Namier and Brooke, House of Commons 1754–1790, 3: 219, 222.
37 Kallistos Ware, ‘The Fifth Earl of Guilford and his Secret Conversion to the Orthodox Church’, in Peter M. Doll, ed., Anglicanism and Orthodoxy 300 Years after the ‘Greek College’ in Oxford (Oxford, 2006), 290–326.
38 9 Geo. IV c.17.
39 London, BL, Add. MS 40343, fol. 189v, Charles Lloyd to Robert Peel, 2 March 1828; fol. 247v, Lloyd to Peel, 23 March 1828.
40 Ibid., fol. 190v, Lloyd to Peel, 2 March 1828.
41 Ibid., fol. 203r, William Van Mildert to Lloyd, 3 March 1828.
42 Ibid., fol. 205, Peel to Lloyd, 4 March 1828; fol. 212r, Peel to Lloyd, 15 March 1828.
43 9 Geo. IV c.17.
44 BL, Add. MS 40343, fol. 252, Peel to Lloyd, 25 March 1828.
45 A. Blomfield, ed., A Memoir of Charles James Blomfield, D.D., Bishop of London, with Selections from his Correspondence, 2 vols (London, 1863), 1: 138, Charles Blomfield to James Henry Monk, 22 April 1828. On the bishops’ role in securing the act and declaration, see R. A. Gaunt, ‘Peel's other Repeal: The Test and Corporation Acts, 1828’, PH 33 (2014), 243–62, at 253–7.
46 Short, ‘English Indemnity Acts’, 376.
47 HL Deb (2nd series), 21 April 1828 (vol. 18, col. 1576).
48 Davis, House of Lords, 141.
49 G. I. T. Machin, ‘Resistance to Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts’, HistJ 22 (1979), 115–39, at 126–32.
50 On the events which led to the passage of Catholic emancipation, see G. I. T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820 to 1830 (Oxford, 1964); Wendy Hinde, Catholic Emancipation: A Shake to Men's Minds (Oxford, 1992).
51 10 Geo. IV c.7.
52 Ibid., c.8. On this disenfranchisement, see David A. Bateman, Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (Cambridge, 2018), 246–9.
53 T. Thistlethwayte, Memoirs and Correspondence of Dr H. Bathurst, Lord Bishop of Norwich (London, 1853), 352, Henry Bathurst to Thomas William Coke, 16 April 1829.
54 HL Deb (3rd series), 8 May 1838 (vol. 42, cols 967–8); Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part I: 1829–1859, 3rd edn (London, 1971), 22.
55 Chadwick, Victorian Church, 22–3; John A. Stack, ‘Catholic Members of Parliament who represented British Constituencies, 1829–1885: A Prosopographical Analysis’, RH 24 (1999), 335–63, at 348.
56 2 & 3 Will. IV c.45. On the Reform Act, see M. G. Brock, The Great Reform Act (London, 1973); Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1993), 72–89.
57 James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1993), 152–5; Clark, English Society, 536–7.
58 HC Deb (2nd series), 18 February 1830 (vol. 22, cols 692–3).
59 Arthur Aspinall, ed., Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries (London, 1952), 144, diary of Lord Ellenborough, 8 October 1831.
60 G. C. B. Davies, Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, 1778–1869 (London, 1954), 113, Henry Phillpotts to Ralph Barnes, 8 October 1831. Phillpotts did not, however, offer concrete proposals.
61 Ibid. 109–10, 114, 139; Chadwick, Victorian Church, 26–32; Elizabeth Varley, The Last of the Prince Bishops: William Van Mildert and the High Church Movement of the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992), 145–8; J. R. Garrard, Archbishop Howley, 1828–1848 (Farnham, 2015), 47–8.
62 HL Deb (3rd series), 13 April 1832 (vol. 12, cols 455–6). On the bishops’ attitudes to the Reform Bills, see Davies, Phillpotts, 102–4, 109–14, 130–40; Norman, Church and Society, 83–9; Varley, Van Mildert, 145–7; Garrard, Howley, 44–8.
63 Oxford, Bodl., MS. Eng. lett. c.789, fol. 203v, Thomas Rennell to Henry Handley Norris, 15 December 1829.
64 Bodl., MS. Eng. lett. c.136, fol. 107r, George Isaac Huntingford to Thomas Burgess, 6 May 1829.
65 London, LPL, MS 2185, fol. 95, Norris to William Howley, 25 October 1832.
66 Robert Saunders, ‘God and the Great Reform Act: Preaching Against Reform, 1831–32’, JBS 53 (2014), 378–99, at 390–6.
67 Quoted in Michael Austin, ‘A Time of Unhappy Commotion’: The Church of England and the People in Central Nottinghamshire 1820–1870 (Chesterfield, 2010), 12.
68 John Skinner, Journal of a Somerset Rector, 1803–1834, ed. Howard Coombs and Peter Coombs (Bath, 1971), 354.
69 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), 405.
70 Norwich, Norfolk RO, DCN 154/2/117, Henry Bathurst to James Bathurst, 18 June 1832. This was a modification of Bathurst's opinion, expressed the previous year, that ‘[w]e are told incessantly by the High Church party, that our Ecclesiastical Establishment is in danger, and so it certainly is; but this danger arises from a want of temper and moderation in too many of the clergy, and also from their selfish opposition to a Commutation of Tithes’: Bathurst to Coke, 10 September 1831, in Thistlethwayte, Memoirs, 384.
71 S. F. Woolley, ‘The Personnel of the Parliament of 1833’, EHR 53 (1938), 240–62, at 244; Roger Anstey, ‘Parliamentary Reform, Methodism and Anti-Slavery Politics, 1829–1833’, Slavery and Abolition 2 (1981), 209–26, at 220–2.
72 Simon Skinner, ‘Religion’, in David Craig and James Thompson, eds, Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2013), 93–117, at 110.
73 Stack, ‘Catholic Members of Parliament’, 348.
74 Dennis Grube, At the Margins of Victorian Britain: Politics, Immorality and Britishness in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2013), 82–3.
75 Kimberly Cowell-Meyers, Religion and Politics in the Nineteenth Century: The Party Faithful in Ireland and Germany (Westport, CT, 2002), 80.
76 Tom Gallagher, Glasgow, the Uneasy Peace: Religious Tension in Modern Scotland, 1819–1914 (Manchester, 1987), 23.
77 3 & 4 Will. IV c.37; 5 & 6 Will. IV c.76; 6 & 7 Will. IV c.71; 6 & 7 Will. IV c.185; 1 & 2 Vict. c.109.
78 HL Deb (3rd Series), 1 August 1834 (vol. 25, col. 886); J. P. Ellens, ‘Lord John Russell and the Church Rate Conflict: The Struggle for a Broad Church, 1834–1868’, JBS 26 (1987), 232–57, at 238–42; Ian D. C. Newbould, ‘The Whigs, the Church, and Education, 1839’, JBS 26 (1987), 332–46. Before the 1850s, subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England was required for matriculation and graduation at the University of Oxford; the University of Cambridge did not require subscription for matriculation, but like Oxford enforced it for graduation: Gibson, Unity and Accord, 137–8.
79 Brose, Church and Parliament, 120–56; Best, Temporal Pillars, 296–347.
80 Salmon, Philip, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties 1832–1841 (Woodbridge, 2002), 69–72Google Scholar, 99–101.
81 See, for example, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire Archives, R89/82/90, ‘John Bull’, ‘Summons to Conservatives’, 5 January 1835; Essex Standard, 16 January 1835, 2; Warwick, Warwickshire RO, DR362/133, Evelyn Shirley, ‘To the Electors of the Southern Division of the County of Warwick’, 17 June 1836; Bolton, Bolton Archives, ZZ/130/3/12, Samuel Scowcroft, ‘To the Worthy Electors of the Borough of Bolton’, 19 July 1837.
82 17 & 18 Vict. c.81; 19 & 20 Vict. c.88; 21 & 22 Vict. c.48; 29 & 30 Vict. c.22; London Gazette, 18 January 1859, 161; 31 & 32 Vict. c.109; 32 & 33 Vict. c.42; 34 & 35 Vict. c.26.
83 BL, Add. MS 40343, fol. 330, Peel to Lloyd, 15 January 1829; cf. Add. MS 40415, fol. 137v, Peel to Van Mildert, 23 February 1835.
84 Machin calls Wellington's statement ‘wildly exaggerated’, but there is reason to think that the statement was not so much an exaggeration as a misrepresentation of the Reform Act's effects: Politics and the Churches, 26.