Foundations of the Anglican Church CXX

King's Chapel, Boston MA

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 deposing James II and offering the Crown to his daughter and son-in-law, William and Mary, marks an immensely critical shift in the British Constitution, and co-incidentaly in the Church of England.  Going back to Anglo-Saxon days, the Crown of England had always been seen—in theory—as “elective,” but the consistent practice of male-primogeniture had obscured the elective element of English Kingship and the theories of “Divine Right of Kingship” advanced during the Tudor/Stuart dynasties created a real moral dilemma for the Bishops of the Church of England at Parliament’s deposing James and inviting William and Mary to take the throne.  There had been dynastic shifts before, of course, such as when Henry VII seized the Throne after defeating Richard III, but the process had not been as blatantly parliamentary as the 1688 coup.  Henry VIII’s having Parliament ratify the Act of Succession granting the Throne to his son, Edward, and then—should Edward die without issue—to his daughters who were seen as illegitimate (his marriages to their mothers having been annulled) rather than to the next legitimate heir is another trace of the Crown being constitutionally elective (remember, the British Constitution is unwritten and subsists in the tradition rather than in a document), but even though it was by act of Parliament, the Crown was passing from father to children and male primogeniture sequence.  So following the 1688 coup, the bishops, in having to make a choice as to whether or not swear allegiance to the new monarchs, were on some pretty untested ice.  The Archbishop of Canterbury and the other eight bishops who refused to take the oath all subscribed to the theory that the King ruled not at the invitation and consent of Parliament but by Divine Right.  A cynic would suppose—and there is probably some truth to it, that the remaining bishops who did take the oath did so for the sake of political convenience—so that they could keep their jobs. To give them some moral credit, however, they also were concerned about the survival of their Protestant faith and preferred the Protestant William and Mary to the Catholic James—who had shown himself somewhat antagonistic to the Established Church.  But they—and others who favored the new monarchy—also perceived a wider reality.  They recognized that the Crown is not personal, that is that there is a difference between the Crown—the institution of kingship—and the individual who wears it.   An oath of loyalty to the King is not a pledge to an individual but to the institution he—or even more precisely—his crown, represents: the rule of Law in the nation. 

I bring this up because I think we religious people are often literalists who cannot see beyond the literal face of our symbols to the realties they represent.  Religious people are inclined to imprison themselves in thinking inside the box rather than apprehending the broader and more profound perspectives.  I think we are seeing this sort of blindness today in those who struggle with Pope Francis and his new vision for the Church.  They can’t move from a Church of power, a religious institution, a “we have always done it this way” (even when we haven’t), into the sorts of possibilities that Francis is presenting for the Church to grow into to better serve the world and the spiritual needs of its people.  For some the Church subsists in its traditional liturgy—or even its pomp—and its canon law.  When a Pope comes with a vision of how to make the Church’s mission to proclaim the Kingdom of God in a post-modern world, they see this as a departure from Tradition rather than the preservation of what has always been at the heart of the Tradition. 

In any event, as the High Church party among the bishops represented this stuck-in-the-past model of Church and Crown and thus supported James and (what was perceived to be) traditional kingship, under William and Mary there was a favoring of Whig government both in Parliament and in the Church. The Whigs believed in a dynamic approach to the English Constitution, not a static and preservationist approach.  Whigs were optimists who saw change as a positive factor permitting institutions to evolve into ever better forms. Whig bishops were particularly important to the government as the bishops sat in the House of Lords, which in the 18^th century, was still the more powerful House of Parliament.  When Queen Anne came to the Throne, she favored the Tories but found that she too needed the Whigs to govern.  England was rapidly evolving from its old aristocratic/oligarchic monopoly on power to what was becoming a bourgeois democratic constitutional monarchy and there was no reversing the trend.  The economic vitality of the expanding British Empire was creating a new social class with the merchant and industrialist forces making their political power felt and the new rich were Whigs.  When upon Anne’s death the Hanoverians Georges (I, II, and III) reigned, the Whigs found themselves more often than not in power and the candidates put forward to the various episcopal sees tended to represent their social and political agenda.  Whigs tended to be Latitudinarian (Tories were High Church) in theology and Church polity.  This made for some pretty mediocre leadership in the Church of England in the 18^th century. 

Many of the Latitudinarian bishops of the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries sought to re-integrate the Dissenters (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists) into the Church of England and consequently were both soft on enforcing the official liturgy and did not see the importance of the doctrines that made the Church of England a via media between Protestantism and Catholicism.  Gone was the intellectual and spiritual vitality of the Caroline Divines.  The Church of England acquired the reputation for doctrinal vagueness that persists even today when there is no consistency of doctrine among Anglicans on such questions as the nature of the Eucharistic Presence, the nature of the ordained ministry, or even what constitutes the Church. In the 18^th century even Unitarianism was condoned in Anglican circles leaving closet Arians secreted among clergy and laity alike, our American George Washington apparently being one.  Another example is King’s Chapel in Boston, an Anglican church founded in 1686 and whose minister, James Freeman, and congregation adopted Unitarianism in 1785.   Although the historic creeds have continued to be used in the Anglican liturgy they are often more formulaic than actually reflecting the faith of the Church’s members.  This spills over too into moral issues where often precise theological methodology has been trumped by a rather superficial liberalism and feeling of good will that has not asked some of the hard questions that need to be part of the theological critique regarding issues such as abortion, human sexuality, and Christian marriage.  And much like the situation at the time of the Glorious Revolution, Anglicanism is threatening to come apart at the seams because of a theological latitude that is more an indifference or at least an unwillingness to face hard issues rather than to sit down and hammer out a consistent theological framework rooted in tradition but able to respond to the contemporary world.  Other than N.T. Wright and Rowan Williams (and with no disrespect to the late John Macquarrie and J.A.T. Robinson), these days Anglican theologians are rare birds and you have buffoons like John Shelby Spong being sported as the intellectual du jour. Well, my biases are showing and I had better get back to the 18^th century. 

One example of Whigish episcopal mediocrity in the Established Church was Thomas Tenison who, as Rector of the prominent London parish, Saint Martin in the Fields had preached the funeral sermon for Nell Gwynn in 1687.  Gwynn, an actress whose life had been marked by numerous sexual liaisons as she climbed her way up from the gutter (not just a figure of speech: her mother, drunk, had drowned in a gutter) to the palace, was the somewhat notorious mistress of Charles II by whom she bore two children.  Tenison pretended in his sermon that “pretty, witty Nell” (so termed by Samuel Pepys) had repented of her somewhat sordid life, a claim that was widely scoffed at by contemporaries.  Gwynn was a famously witty person and not one to take herself seriously.  Once, when her coachman attacked a man for calling Nell “a whore,” she broke up the fight insisting: “I am a whore; find something else to fight about.”  But courtesan though she was, she had been courtesan to a King and so Tenison was rewarded for his pastoral sensitivity to the King’s “Protestant whore” (to distinguish her from the King’s “Catholic whore,” the Duchess of Portsmouth), by being made Bishop of Lincoln and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury.  Today I think we would commend the generosity of a clergyman who conducted so public a funeral for a person of such shady repute: after all, prostitutes and tax collectors are entering the Kingdom of God before most of us more reputable Pharisees.  In the 18^th century though it would have been thought more proper for the duty to bury such a sinner to be delegated to a more obscure clergyman than the Rector of Saint Martin in the Fields.  

Foundation of the Anglican Church CXII

Coronation Portrait of
Charles II 

The Reign of Charles II marked not only the restoration of the monarchy but of the Anglican Church as bishops were restored to their sees and conformity to the Book of Common Prayer marked the worship of English churches.  Those clergy who had not been episcopally ordained and would not submit to reordination by a bishop and/or who would not conduct worship according to the liturgical norms of the Book of Common Prayer were deprived of their posts.  The meant that pretty much the entire Puritan wing of the Church of England went into a Non-Conformity from which the Congregational and (English) Presbyterian Churches emerged.  Baptists who had broken with the Puritans during the time of Cromwell and the Commonwealth also fell into the Non-Conformist category.  In 1661 Parliament had passed the Corporation Act which required all local government officials to take the Sacrament according to the Prayer Book Ritual and to formally foreswear the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant which had replaced the Anglican Prayer Book during the Puritan Commonwealth/English Civil War.   Furthermore, by this act, those who would not take the Sacrament according to the Rites of the Established Church could not hold office in the Army or the Navy, nor could they take a University Degree. This meant that Non-Conformists were ineligible for public office and many professions were closed to them.  In 1662 the Act of Uniformity, as mentioned above, required episcopal ordination for all clergy and adherence to the Prayer Book liturgy on pain of deprivation of office.  Parliament also passed a law that year demanding an oath of allegiance to the King.  Quakers could not take this oath as their beliefs proscribed the swearing of all oaths.  This act emarginated the Quakers from the larger English Society even more.  In 1664 Parliament passed the Conventicle Act which prohibited gatherings of more than 5 people for religious purposes unless they were under the auspices of the Church of England.  This law was meant to make Non-Conformist worship illegal.   In 1665 Parliament passed the Five Mile Act which prohibited Non-Conformist clergy from coming within five miles of towns or of the parishes they had held during the Commonwealth period.  They also were not allowed to be schoolteachers.  These acts, known collectively as the Clarendon Code, were attempts to make religious membership and worship outside the Established Church illegal and suppress religious dissent.  These laws were also grossly unsuccessful.  It is unknown just how many English followed their Non-Conformist clergy out of the Church of England as no census number were taken at the time, but later figures might indicate that at least a third of the population rejected the Established Church in favor of the Non-Conformist sects.  

The Jewish community in England was alarmed by the Conventicle Act as it technically proscribed Jewish Worship as well as Non-Conformist worship, but the King assured a delegation of English Jews who appealed to him not to worry, and the Privy Council granted them a explicit exemption so long as they obeyed the laws of the realm.  There was no such provision for Catholics, of course, but neither was there an aggressive campaign at this point to make life difficult for Catholics as Charles’ Queen, Catherine of Braganza, was a Catholic as was also Charles’ chief Mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland.  In 1672 Charles issued the Declaration of Indulgence which lifted the penal laws against both non-Conformists and Catholics, but the following year Parliament made him rescind the declaration in put in its place the Test Act which required one to swear an oath against the doctrine of Transubstantiation as well as take the Sacrament according to the Anglican Rite—this excluded both Catholics and non-Conformists from public life.

Charles was to die a Catholic, being received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed by Queen Catherine’s chaplain, the Benedictine monk John Huddleston.  Ironically Huddleston was among a group of Catholics who had saved Charles from the Parliamentarians after Charles’ defeat at the 1651 Battle of Worcester.  When Huddleston was ushered through a secret passage into the dying King’s bedchamber on February 5, 1685, the Duke of York, Charles’ brother, said: “Sire, this good man once saved your life.  He has now come to save your soul.”  The room had been cleared of all members of the Court except for the Protestant Earls of Bath and Feversham who were confidants of the King.   The presence of these two Protestant peers gave the Privy Council, expelled into an anteroom, a false confidence that the King was safe in his Protestant faith.  In the event, Charles’ conversion would be keep secret until well into the next reign.  Huddleston heard the King’s confession, anointed him, and gave him viaticum.   Some modern writers claim that he was not conscious, or at least not fully aware of what was happening, and that the conversion was foisted upon him by his Catholic Queen and his Catholic brother, James the Duke of York, who was to succeed him as King, but the contemporary accounts do not report any of this and the argument against his conversion to Catholicism seems to be more polemical than historical.  Charles was buried in the vault of Henry VII—the last Catholic King of England who had died in 1509—in Westminster Abbey without any public ceremony to mark his final religious affiliation.  The funeral was held late at night on February 14, eight days after the King’s death.  (This was a remarkably short interval between death and funeral for a prominent person in the 17^th century. Charles niece, Mary II, was not buried until almost ten weeks after her death.)  The (Anglican) Dean and Chapter met the coffin at the West Door as was customary and escorted it the length of the Abbey to the chapel in the retro-choir where lay the royal vault.  Peers—including the (Anglican) bishops—attended in an official capacity but none of the late King’s blood relatives did.  They were represented by Prince George of Denmark, the Protestant husband of the King’s niece, Anne (later Queen herself).  The Dean read the Anglican burial service for this all-Protestant congregation and the King was deposited into his grave.

With Charles’ death and the succession of his brother James to the Crown, England found itself in the constitutional conundrum that a Roman Catholic was head of the Church of England.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church, CX

William Juxon, Archbishop
of Canterbury from 1660
until his death in 1663.

All good things must come to an end—and so too the Cromwellian dictatorship over the Commonwealth. In this posting, we will look at the restoration of Crown and Bishops in England after the Civil War and the Commonwealth. 

Oliver Cromwell died on September 3, 1658 and was succeeded as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth by his son, Richard.  Richard lacked his father’s resolve and in the face of conflict between the Army and civilian government, resigned.  The majority of the English people had grown very disillusioned with Puritan government.  The draconian laws that restricted any games or pleasure on the Sabbath, the abolition of holydays—including and especially Christmas, the wordy and drab forms of worship in the churches, the excessive Calvinistic moralism all combined to wear down even the dour English.  With the resignation of Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector and the aimless policies of the Council of State—the group that had served as the “Privy Council” to Cromwell Senior and Cromwell Junior, the administration of government began to implode.  The office of Lord Protector was replaced by a seven (later eleven) member “Committee of Safety.” This arrangement lasted only two weeks.  Fighting broke out in England as the Royalists under George Booth began to push against Parliamentarian government.  General John Lambert defeated Booth’s army and tried to put down the rebellion but Cromwell’s governor of Scotland, George Monck, saw the inevitable end of the Commonwealth and led his forces to defeat Lambert.  Monck entered into secret communication with Charles II, son of the “martyred” Charles I, who issued the Declaration of Breda from his exile in the Spanish Netherlands.  This declaration promised a general pardon for all involved in the rebellion against the monarchy, assured all who had purchased or legally obtained property during the Cromwell years that they would retain ownership, and finally promised payment of back pay to the army and guaranteed all officers that they would continue to serve under the monarchy as they had under the Commonwealth.  Eight weeks later Charles was back in England and on the Throne. 

One of the first concerns was to restore the Church to its former status.  In 1662 Parliament passed an act of Uniformity imposing a new Prayer Book and requiring ordination by a bishop for all clergy.  Those who had been ordained according to Presbyterian polity during the Commonwealth were required to submit to re-ordination by a bishop.  Approximately 2000 clergy refused and lost their livings.  The Act of Uniformity also imposed a new Book of Common Prayer upon the English Church.  Anglicans and Presbyterians had met for the Savoy Conference in 1661 but in the end were unable to agree on a liturgy acceptable to both sides. The failure to agree on a liturgy and the disenfranchisement of those clergy who would not accept Episcopal Ordination (or re-ordination in the case of those already ordained during the period in which the episcopacy was abolished from 1646 until 1660) led to a final separation of the Presbyterian/Congregationalist faction in the Church of England from the Anglican/Episcopal faction.  Those who broke with the Established Church were referred to as non-Conformists (because they would not “conform” to the official rites) and included Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists.  (The Methodists, originally a 18^th century movement within the Church of England also joined the non-Conformists when it broke with the Anglican Church.  More will be written on that in later posts.)

The Episcopacy was restored in the Church of England in 1660 and William Juxon, who had been Bishop of London before the suppression of Episcopacy in 1646 was named Archbishop of Canterbury, thus guaranteeing continuity in lineage and Apostolic Succession (at least according to Anglican perspectives) with the pre-Civil War bishops.  Similarly Accepted Frewen (yes, his first name was ‘Accepted’—that is the sort of things evangelicals do to their children), one-time bishop of Litchfield and Coventry before the Civil War, was named to York guaranteeing the succession in the Northern Province as well. 

In doing some background for this entry I found out that George Montaigne who served briefly as Archbishop of York before the Civil War and previously held the sees of Lincoln, London, and Durham had, among his consecrators when consecrated as Bishop of Lincoln in 1617, one Marco Antonio de Dominis who himself had been the Catholic Archbishop of Split in Dalmatia.   De Dominis had apostatized when caught in a political dispute between Venice and the papacy.  He later returned to the Catholic Church, and he was still later tried for heresy.  Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that Catholic lineage was re-instated into the Anglican line as early as 1617. De Dominis also was co-consecrator for Nicholas Felton who served first as Bishop of Bristol and later as Bishop of Ely.  Montaigne had little chance to consecrate bishops himself when Archbishop of York—he only held the see a few months before his death, but as Bishop of Durham he probably would have been a co-consecrator for a number of bishops in the Northern Province and as Bishop of London for a number of bishops in the Canterbury province.