Robert G Ingram

Reformation without end radically reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during 'the Enlightenment'. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways that the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions and the thing which they thought had caused them, the Reformation. Reformation without end draws on a wide array of manuscript sources to show how authors crafted and pitched their works.

We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today’s culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it—for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. This book brings together recent scholarship with a series of pioneering new essays by distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but throve within it. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. Its primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, it could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheist, individualist, or libertarian.

Between Sovereignty and Anarchy considers the conceptual and political problem of violence in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic, charting an innovative approach to the history of the American Revolution. Its editors and contributors contend that existing scholarship on the Revolution largely ignores questions of power and downplays the Revolution as a contest over sovereignty. Contributors employ a variety of methodologies to examine diverse themes, ranging from how Atlantic perspectives can redefine our understanding of revolutionary origins, to the ways in which political culture, mobilization, and civil-war-like violence were part of the revolutionary process, to the fundamental importance of state formation for the history of the early republic.

Contributors: Chris Beneke, Bentley University · Andrew Cayton, Miami University · Matthew Rainbow Hale, Goucher College · David C. Hendrickson, Colorado College · John C. Kotruch, University of New Hampshire · Peter C. Messer, Mississippi State University · Kenneth Owen, University of Illinois at Springfield · Jeffrey L. Pasley, University of Missouri, Columbia · Jessica Choppin Roney, Temple University · Peter Thompson, University of Oxford

The eighteenth century has long divided critical opinion. Some contend that it witnessed the birth of the modern world, while others counter that England remained an ancien regime confessional state. This book takes issue with both positions, arguing that the former overstate the newness of the age and largely misdiagnose the causes of change, while the latter rightly point to the persistence of more traditional modes of thought and behaviour, but downplay the era's fundamental uncertainty and misplace the reasons for and the timeline of its passage. The overwhelming catalyst for change is here seen to be war, rather than long-term social and economic changes.

Archbishop Thomas Secker [1693-1768], the Cranmer or Laud of his age, and the hitherto neglected church reforms he spearheaded, form the particular focus of the book; this is the first full archivally-based study of a crucial but frequently ignored figure.

Through a series of studies focusing on individuals, this volume highlights the continued importance of religion and religious identity on British life throughout the long eighteenth century. From the Puritan divine and scholar Roger Morrice, active at the beginning of the period, to Dean Shipley who died in the reign of George IV, the individuals chosen chart a shifting world of enlightenment and revolution whilst simultaneously reaffirming the tremendous influence that religion continued to bring to bear. For, whilst religion has long enjoyed a central role in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British history, scholars of religion in the eighteenth century have often felt compelled to prove their subject's worth. Sitting uneasily at the juncture between the early modern and modern worlds, the eighteenth century has perhaps provided historians with an all-too-convenient peg on which to hang the origins of a secular society, in which religion takes a back-seat to politics, science and economics. Yet, as this study makes clear, in spite of the undoubted innovations and developments of this period, religion continued to be a prime factor in shaping society and culture. By exploring important connections between religion, politics and identity, and asking broad questions about the character of religion in Britain, the contributions put into context many of the big issues of the day. From the beliefs of the Jacobite rebels, to the notions of liberty and toleration, to the attitudes to the French Wars, the book makes an unambiguous and forceful statement about the centrality of religion to any proper understanding of British public life between the Restoration and the Reform Bill.

This essay explores the relationship between the individual, the state and the church. In particular, it considers he ways that a par- ticularly influential group of early twentieth-century state-critics – the English pluralist – grappled with the tension between state authority and individual liberty through a careful engagement with the thought of John Henry Newman. But while English pluralists like J. N. Figgis and Harold Laski admired Newman’s critiques of ultramontanism, they could not accept some of Newman’s prem- ises, particularly those regarding the conscience, which underlay his rejection of ultramontanism. English pluralism, this essay suggests, was beset by a kind of conceptual confusion which its proponents recognized but could not – or would not – resolve.

This introductory chapter contextualises the book’s content and spells out its argument. The book is about the people’s power. The first section surveys the scholarly literature on topics related to the power of the people, including the notions of the people, sovereignty, democracy, liberalism, republicanism, popular sovereignty and populism. It illustrates that while scholars are uneasy about the notion of popular sovereignty and much related to it, it nonetheless remains the case that political legitimacy is conferred only by the people, not by God, birth, might or fiat. In the modern Western world, rule of the people, by the people, for the people seems morally unquestionable. This introductory chapter’s second section provides in-depth summaries of the book’s chapters. In the process it shows the several through-lines, mutually entangled and not always separable, that connect people power to the site of sovereignty. These include the role played by formal institutions, manners, the role of civil society, and perhaps especially the legitimising and delegitimising role played by religion. The chapter’s final section turns to a signal contemporary moment of people power, the eighteen days in Tahrir Square, 2011. It suggests that asking non-Western polities to embrace popular sovereignty requires confronting the theological foundations of popular sovereignty, both in terms of the centrifugal forces of cultural pluralism and the centripetal forces of shared belief.

This chapter examines the role which theological considerations have played in conceiving of popular sovereignty. It does so by way of an examination of J.N. Figgis and the influence his historical narrative has had on Quentin Skinner’s enormously influential take on the origins of the modern state and on the conceptions of authorisation, representation and popular sovereignty which undergird it. Both Figgis and Skinner trace sovereignty’s roots to ancient Roman notions of imperium and popular sovereignty’s roots to late medieval conciliarism. The normative lessons each drew from their histories differed, though. For Figgis it led him to develop a theory of authorisation of rulers which yielded a state that was a communitas communitatum, a community of communities, a society of social unions. For Skinner, this history led him to embrace the Hobbesian modern unitary state and an understanding of popular sovereignty consonant with it. This chapter shows that these normative differences stem from theological differences, not differences of historical interpretation, and invites readers to question the coherency of a chronological, conceptual history of popular sovereignty.

This article examines the origins and implications of the Irish Toleration Act of 1719. It makes three related arguments. Firstly, it highlights what Britons during the early eighteenth-century thought religious toleration was meant to achieve and to whom and under what circumstances religious toleration might be extended. Secondly, it demonstrates the steady desacralization of post-revolutionary British politics, even in a country like Ireland so obviously riven along confessional lines. Finally, it contends that both the arguments for and against the Irish Toleration Act illustrate that the established churches in the composite post-revolutionary British state were functionally civil religions.

Amid considerable debate within modern societies about whether or not there ought to be limits to freedom of speech, this introductory essay argues that  historical perspectives have been all too lacking, and all too simplistic. This essay sets the book in its modern context - in terms of the challenges that have emerged to Western liberalism as a result of religious pluralism and the challenge of hate speech - and highlights the rather simplistic ways in which freedom of speech has conventionally been anchored in ideas and developments that emerged in early modern Britain. It surveys the historiographical debates that have seen this 'Whiggish' narrative subjected to critical scrutiny, and sets up the volume by demonstrating both continuity and change across the early modern world. This means recognising the centrality of religious issues as well as secular concerns, and the complex ways in which contemporaries grappled with the theory and practice of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It means acknowledging the complex relationship that existed between regulation, restraint and liberty, and the dynamic interplay that can be observed between rights and duties, truth and error, genre and audience.

This chapter uses the anti-blasphemy legislation of the late 1690s and early 1720s to consider how early Georgian England differed from late Williamite England regarding freedom of speech in general and freedom of religious speech more particularly. So, what had changed between the passage of the Blasphemy Act of 1698 and the failure of the Blasphemy Bill in 1721? Parliament’s resolute determination to maintain the civil peace had not. What had changed, instead, was what most in Parliament thought constituted civil peace; what most in Parliament thought threatened civil peace; and what most in Parliament thought should be done to deal with perceived threats to civil peace. Moreover, what had changed in the two decades after the Blasphemy Act’s passage in 1698 was that the established Church itself was riven even more deeply not simply about how to deal with public expressions of untruth but about what even constituted truth and untruth. Indeed, one of the striking things about the 1721 Blasphemy Bill was that some of its chief opponents were clerics; were clerics who believed that heresy and blasphemy were real; were clerics who believed that early eighteenth-century England abounded with heretics and blasphemers; and were clerics who would later prove willing to act on that belief. And yet they voted down a piece of legislation that promised to punish heretics and blasphemers. Put another way, they voted against the Blasphemy Bill not because they thought heretics and blasphemers did not need to be restrained but because they thought they should be restrained only under certain conditions. Principled support of free speech did not drive clerical opposition to the bill; reasons of state did.

This chapter surveys the history of the Church of England between the Hanoverian succession and the American Revolution. The religio-political questions that bedevilled the English nation during the 1530s remained live ones during the eighteenth century. What sort of Church should the Church of England be? What should the relation of Church to state be? What should constitute the Church’s doctrinal orthodoxy? Whom should the Church comprehend? What were the bounds of toleration? These questions had not been solved at the Glorious Revolution, so that the story of the eighteenth-century Church of England is the concluding chapter in the story of England’s long Reformation. What ultimately brought that particular story to a close was not Enlightenment secularism but the changes catalysed by war and the fear of relapse into seventeenth-century-like religious violence.

An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.

This article examines the sacred histories were the focus of the nearly one hundred anniversary sermons preached before the Incorporated Society for Promoting Protestant Working Schools in Ireland (1735–1783) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1702–1783). These sermons were classified as charity sermons, and contained all of that genre’s tropes. They also articulated a rationale for England’s empire and argued for the established Church of England’s participation in that imperial project by way of a particular sacred history.

History supplanted nature as the most important apologetical language among English polemical divines during the mid-eighteenth century, but not for the reasons usually adduced. The triumph of history over nature owed everything to the power of orthodox patronage and to nature’s demonstrable apologetical efficacy, and nothing to natural theology’s supposed failure sufficiently to prove God’s existence. Put another way, by the late 1720s orthodox apologists had come to believe that the popular argument from design in nature applied equally to history. Moreover, the argument from design in history appears to have been an apologetical strategy which accorded more closely with the disposition of an increasingly orthodox episcopate during the mid-century period. Little evidences the mid-century historical turn — a shift either missed or ignored by most historians — more clearly than the second generation (1730–1785) of the Boyle lectures, a series of public sermons founded by Robert Boyle in order to defend Christianity from the attacks of unbelievers. For whereas the first generation of lecturers founded their defences of Christianity on natural theology, the second built on Christianity’s historical record.

Plumb contrasted the political societies of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England. In the former, 'men killed, tortured, and executed each other for political beliefs; they sacked towns and brutalized the countryside. They were subjected to conspiracy, plot and invasion'. 1715 marked a watershed, though. Afterwards, the seventeenthcentury political structure 'began rapidly to vanish', giving way to one which had, instead, 'adamantine strength and profound inertia'. What had emerged in England, after a century of religious wars, was political stability. If Plumb's readers have not always taken all of his book's lessons-the political stability he anatomised was neither foreordained nor unchallenged; it owed most to Robert Walpole's long run in power; and it did not characterise political life in Scotland, Ireland or the American colonies-there nonetheless remains the sense in eighteenth-century historiography that the accession of George I to the British throne in late 1714 marked the advent of an ontologically different era in British politics. This volume, edited by Brent Sirota and Allan Macinnes, challenges that consensus. Insisting that the tensions which animated post-revolutionary British politics remained unresolved by the Hanoverian Succession, it argues that there were deep continuities before and after the succession. Moreover, it aims to demonstrate that 'what was perceived to be at stake in the Protestant Succession was the entirety of civic life: a constitutional polity and confederacy among multiple kingdoms; a religious and intellectual culture; an expansive commercial empire; and the geopolitical order of Europe-a set of arrangements, novel, experimental, in the early eighteenth century but now taken as absolutely foundational to modern British history'. The book's first part stresses the unpredictability and ideological stakes of early eighteenth-century English politics. Daniel Szechi, Jacobitism's foremost historian, details how George I alienated so many of his new subjects and insists that '[i]n terms of setting Britain on track towards civil conflict the political consequences of the Hanoverian Succession were of overwhelming importance'. On Szechi's reading, the succession catalysed, rather than resolved, political conflict. Through a careful analysis of surviving pollbooks for the 1710, 1713 and 1715 elections, Christopher Dudley explains why the 1715 election could have gone either way and demonstrates that Whig gains at the margins tilted the election in their favour. The party made those gains, Dudley argues, not by abandoning revolution principles but, instead, by claiming for itself the exclusive mantle of the Glorious Revolution. Thus, the 1688-89 revolution which both parties professed to support before the Hanoverian Succession became, after 1714, commonly understood as 'a Whig Revolution' with the Whig party as its 'rightful custodian'. In the book's standout chapter, Brent Sirota uses the phenomena of what he calls 'Anglican

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, mo...