Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXI

Lancelot Blackburne, 

the Buccaneer Archbishop

An important item which I had overlooked posting on was the Declaration of Indulgence issued by James II before the Glorious Revolution and which was one of the causes of the overthrow of James and his replacement on the throne by William and Mary.   In 1687 James issued a royal proclamation—first for Scotland on February 12 and then two months later for England, suspending the penal laws and granting freedom of worship both to those dissenters (Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers) who had separated themselves from the Church of England when the Prayer Book Liturgy and the Episcopacy was restored in 1660 as well as to Catholics who had suffered under a series of laws restricting their rights every since the time of the English Reformation in the sixteenth century.  The Quaker, William Penn, was the one who initiated the appeal to James that resulted in the Declaration of Indulgence but its chief beneficaiars were the Kings co-religionists, the Catholics.

The High Church clergy, on the other hand, were opposed to relaxing the restrictions on non-Anglicans altogether but one of the curious elements of the Declaration of Indulgence is that many of the Anglican hierarchy and clergy of the Whig persuasion were very open to tolerance of the non-conformists (the Presbyterians and Congregationalists and, to a lesser extent, the Baptists), had reservations about the Quakers, and were dead set against relief to Catholics.  Their intellectual liberalism broke down when it came to rights for Catholics.  Part of this was the Enlightenment suspicion of Catholicism and its rejection of rationalism in favor of what was perceived to be medieval scholasticism, as well as Catholicism’s undemocratic form of Church governance, its mystical tradition, and its rather esoteric and arcane style of worship. 

With the collapse of the Caroline Divines and their rich theological and mystical heritage as well as their appreciation for the aesthetics of worship, Anglicanism was fast sinking into theological vapidity and lifeless and unimaginative worship. By the end of the seventeenth century Holy Communion was celebrated with increasing infrequency and Morning Prayer with a Sermon was becoming the standard Sunday fare.  And it wasn’t the sort of lovely Morning Prayer we see too rarely today with chant and choral anthems by a robed choir and maybe even a cope or two.  It was a rather banal service mostly—if not entirely—read, centered at the Reader’s desk beneath the pulpit while the Holy Table (as the altar was then generally called) stood neglected and forgotten beneath its baize dust-cover.  The sermon often lasted an hour or so and tended to be the reading of an overly-prepared text concentrating on a bland moral exhortation condemning the vices of the laboring classes (who generally did not come to church) and confirming the comfortable members of the establishment snuggled into their box-pews in their divine right to moral, political, and economic superiority.  I am sure it would have left Saint Paul, and probably even Jesus, scratching his head and wondering what it was all about.  This sort of dry-as-dust religion was not limited to England and its established Church however.  All over Europe Established Churches were in the business of ecclesial suicide as they identified with their patrons among the politically and economically empowered.  It was even true among the Court Lutheran Churches of the German princedoms but at least they had good music for their services. 

 One important Anglican divine of this period was John Sharp, Archbishop of York under William and Mary and later Queen Anne.  Like most clergy he had opposed the Declaration of Indulgence and was imprisoned for doing so.  He actually was chaplain to King James but as James was Catholic and Sharp Anglican, it was only a title and a salaried benefice.  He also was one of the rare preachers of that day who brought passion into the pulpit.  He was Lord High Almoner to Queen Anne and a close confidant of hers.  He preached the coronation sermon when she ascended the Throne.  He played a crucial role in the House of Lords in getting the Queen’s agenda through the Upper House, in some ways anticipating the role for Prime Minister that would evolve when Anne’s successors came to the Throne.  He was also the Queen’s chief advisor in the appointment of Bishops for the Church of England and so stamped the Episcopal Bench with his own political and theological views for a generation to come. 

One of the more interesting, in fact probably the most interesting, of the Anglican Bishops of this period is Lancelot Blackburne.  Blackburne graduated from Christ Church Oxford and was ordained in 1681 by the Bishop of Oxford.  He went off to the West Indies where he became the chaplain on a ship—a pirate ship.  One would not think of pirates having chaplains but technically the ship was a privateer: a privately owned vessel whose captain had been issued a Letter of Marque by the Crown authorizing him to attack enemy (in the case French and Spanish) shipping.  It seems that at this time Blackburne may actually have done espionage work for Charles II.  Blackburne returned to England after four years an began his ascendancy in the Church.   He was made Canon and later Dean of Exeter where he acquired the patronage of William Wake, later Archbishop of Canterbury.  When upon the death of Queen Anne, George of Hanover succeeded to the English Throne, Blackburne was appointed a chaplain to the new monarch and journeyed to Hanover to escort the new King to England.  In 1717 he was consecrated Bishop of Exeter.  In 1724 he was named Archbishop of York, a position which also made him a Privy Counselor. 

He was never much into the spiritual duties of being a Bishop, having no time for either confirmations or ordinations and ceasing to perform those functions completely a few years after succeeding to York.  He was infamous for at one confirmation service in Saint Mary’s Church in Nottingham sending his servant out to bring him his pipe, tobacco, and a mug of ale.  The rector threw Archbishop and servant both out of his church insisting that “no archbishop will make a tippling house of this church so long as I am the vicar.”   Blackburne resided mostly in a fashionable house in London rather than in his See city.  He reportedly married George to his long-time mistress, Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg, despite the fact that George had a wife still living in Germany.  (He was married to his cousin Sophia Dorothea of Celle but it was a loveless marriage—though producing two children—and both George and Sophia had taken lovers.  Sophia was imprisoned for the remained of her life at Schloss Ahlden in Saxony.)  Blackburne himself was not known for moral rectitude and one wit, referring to his time on a privateer wrote that his “behavior was seldom of  a standard to be expected for an archbishop.  In many respects his behavior was seldom of a standard to be expected of a pirate.”  His contemporary, Horace Walpole, wrote: “…the jolly old Archbishop of York, who had the manners of a man of quality though he had been a buccaneer, and was a clergyman; but he retained nothing of his first profession except his seraglio.”  (A seraglio is the part of a residence reserved for a harem.)   Walpole elaborated on this in a letter to a friend:

He was perfectly a fine gentleman to the last, to eighty-four; his favourite author was Waller, whom he frequently quoted… I often dined with him, his mistress, Mrs. Conwys, sat at the head of the table, and Hayter, his natural son by another woman, and very like him, at the bottom, as chaplain: he was afterwards Bishop of London. I have heard, but do not affirm it, that Mrs. Blackbourne, before she died, complained of Mrs. Conwys being brought under the same roof. To his clergy he was, I have heard, very imperious. One story I recollect, which showed how much he was a man of this world: and which the Queen herself repeated to my father. On the King's last journey to Hanover, before Lady Yarmouth came over, the Archbishop being With her Majesty, said to her, "Madam, I have been with your minister Walpole, and he tells me that you are a wise woman, and do not mind your husband's having a mistress.

As Walpole claims, Thomas Hayter (1702-1762), Bishop of Norwich and later of London, was rumored to be Blackburn’s son by an adulterous union.  He was buried not in his cathedral but in the Church of Saint Margaret, Westminster. 

All in all, the 18^th century was not a peak time for the Church of England.  The rationalism of the Enlightenment led to a spiritual mediocrity that left the Church of England little more than a spiritual corpse. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXVIII

The ceiling of the 

Chapter House at
York Cathedral

With nine bishops removed from their sees for refusing to take  the oath of allegiance to William and Mary who replaced James II as England’s Sovereign in 1688, the Church of England took on a very different character.  Of course there were thirteen bishops who took the oath and held on to their Sees (Salisbury was vacant at the time), including the Archbishop of York, and the Bishops of London, Winchester, Lincoln, and Durham—all important Sees.  Archbishop Lamplugh of York was no great shakes—initially supporting James but then changing loyalty as easily as his linen (a 18^th century euphemism for one’s underwear) when William’s victory over James for the Throne was established. Lamplugh assisted at the joint coronation of William and Mary on April 11, 1689 and was permitted to keep his See. 

The deposed bishops were the core of the High Church Party in the Church of England.  High Church in the late 17^th and in the 18^th century meant something different than it usually does today.  There was no question in that time of adopting Catholic vestments and ceremonial.  “High Church” meant that you were Tory (conservative and monarchial) in politics, heirs to the Caroline Divines and patristic in theology, pious in prayer, and rigidly prayer-book in liturgy.  “Low Church” generally associated you with the Whig party in politics, evangelical in theology and piety, and preferring more to sermonizing than liturgy.  “Latitudinarian,” sort of Middle or Broad Church, meant that you favored rationalism in theology (rather than the patristic approach of the High Church faction or the Biblial approach of the Low Church), saw religion in terms of moral improvement in which you had great belief in human reason, and were somewhat indifferent about worship forms—preferring a dry and intellectual form of public prayer rather than either the more formal prayer-book liturgy or evangelical enthusiasm.  Archbishop Sancroft and the deposed bishops were the core of the High Church party and their deposition left the English episcopacy in the control of the Latitudinarians with a scattering of Low Church/Evangelical Bishops. 

Sprat of Rochester, like Lamplugh of York, initially supported James but switched sides to William and so was allowed to keep his See.  Hall of Oxford was another supporter of James but switched to William and Mary in hopes of being able to take possession of his See to which the canons of his cathedral were barring him.   Compton of London was Latitudinarian but had been allied to William and Mary from the beginning—he had been one of the members of the House of Lords who had invited William to come to England and claim the throne from James.  Barlow of Lincoln was another Low Churchman.  Croft of Hereford had been born in the Church of England, a convert to Catholicism, reconverting to the Church of England and now being notoriously Low Church and anti-Catholic.  Trelawney of Exeter was also a Low Churchman.  He and Ironside of Bristol had resisted James’ efforts to advance the Catholic cause and so sided with the new Protestant monarchs.  Crew of Durham and Wood of Litchfield were pretty much non-entities as ecclesiastics, both owing their appointments to the positions of their families at Court rather than to any serious merits of their own. 

As for the new men appointed by William and Mary: Richard Cumberland replaced Thomas White as Bishop of Peterborough.  Cumberland was the archetypical Latitudinarian with ties to the Cambridge Platonists and the Royal Society.  He published De Legibus Naturae (Concerning the Laws of Nature) which helped lay the groundwork for the Utilitarian school of Philosophy and was a reaction to Thomas Hobbes and the perceived atheism of his quite radical philosophy. 

Nicholas Stratford replaced Thomas Cartwright as Bishop of Chester.  Stratford also was a member of the Latitudinarian party and was one of the founders of The Society for the Reformation of Manners, a movement to suppress the currently popular vices of blasphemy, prostitution, and vulgar speech.  It was a reaction to the somewhat loose social mores of Restoration England and helped stamp England with the caricature that makes No Sex Please, We’re British so funny.  Edward Stillingfleet, also Latitudinarian, replaced William Thomas as Bishop of Worcester.  Stillingfleet was also associated with the Society for the Reformation of Manners.  He was Latitudinarian and somewhat doctrinally sloppy with a particular openness to rapprochement with the Presbyterians.  He was friends with natural philosopher, Richard Bentley who served as his chaplain. 

 John Moore was a Low Churchman who replaced Francis Turner as Bishop of Ely.  Moore was also friends with Bentley and was a member of the Royal Society. 

Edward Fowler was named Bishop of Gloucester to replace Robert Frampton.  Fowler was suspiciously far from Christian orthodoxy, being accused (perhaps somewhat unfairly) of Pelagianism and Socinianism. (Socinianism is a heresy that undermines the Divinity of Christ and the Triune Nature of God.)  On the other hand, like Cumberland, Fowler was an antagonist of Hobbes.

 Sancroft was replaced as Archbishop of Canterbury by John Tillotson, Dean of Canterbury and a close friend of William and Mary. Tillotson, like Moore, was a member of the Royal Society and like Fowler was suspect of Unitarian views which he later refuted.  Tillotson was a poor choice—indeed the whole college of Bishops appointed or surviving under William and Mary represented poor choices—for a time in which the Church of England was in crisis.   There weren’t sufficient Low Churchmen for an evangelical revival—and even if there were, they Bishops of that party were too stuffy for anything so exciting.  The High Church party found themselves excluded from the Bench of Bishops and influence in government. They represented the best of the old Anglican tradition with the rich spirituality and sound patristic heritage.  The middle ground was just too secure in their establishment to have much life.  It would leave a gaping hole in England’s religious life. 

I think there is a lesson in this for the Church today—Catholic and Protestant.  I had a professor in graduate school who used to insist that “it is better to be wrong than to be boring.”  As Catholics we have a rich heritage.  We should also have an evangelical enthusiasm—all Christians should so have.  We can’t afford to be complacent today.  The Church has become just too tedious for many in our society.  We need to address that challenge.

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXVII

Archbishop Sancroft 

Sorry.  I have been off-line recently due to a tragedy in my neighborhood that has taken a fair amount of my time in which to be of help and frankly, while I am anxious to pick up and continue, don’t quite know where to go first with the blog.  So let’s go back to the Church of England series for an entry or two.  We are on the brink of a fairly difficult period in the Church of England to write about—it was a low point in the Church for one thing and for another, it is not the period on which my own knowledge is strongest, but let’s continue.

Ironically I was at an Episcopalian Service on Friday evening and in the rector’s house for tea and desserts later, a number of people were talking about the blog without any idea that the author was standing there playing dumb.  I kept by anonymity, even professed that “Anglican history has never really interested me…” which is, of course, a big, bold lie.  And again, the irony is that the parish where the service was held was established in the very period we will be talking about—the end of the 17^th and first decades of the 18^th century—though the church itself was not built until the reign of George II (which is still pretty old).  In this colonial church you knew you were in a Protestant church—there is none of the faux-catholicism of the Romantics and Oxford Movement—and that is important for us to remember.  We look today on the Episcopal and Anglican Churches and see them as a sort of “Catholic Lite”—all the ritual, half the guilt, but in fact there was no mistaking in the 17^th and 18^th centuries that you were dealing with a Reformed Church.  But enough about that, we will be talking plenty of the Protestant identity of the Anglican and Episcopal Churches in the 18^th century. 

When we left off, King James II (a Catholic, along with his Catholic wife Mary of Modena and his Catholic heir, aka “the Old Pretender” [yes, he is just an infant but he would grow up and into the “Old Pretender”]) had been driven into exile by his Protestant daughter (by his first wife) Mary and her Calvinist husband, William of Orange whom Parliament had invited to wear the Crown in place of the Catholic James.  This constitutionally established, once and for all, the ancient claim that while the Crown normally passed to the eldest son of the reigning monarch (or, be there no son, daughter), the Crown of England is indeed an elective crown.  We forget that today but the King is whomever Parliament chooses to be King.  Technically Parliament could bypass Charles for William (not a bad idea) or, for that matter, anybody else of its choice.  Not likely, of course, but within its prerogative. 

Well, not only was James out of a job, but Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft and eight other bishops were deprived of their sees for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary, declaring that it would violate the oath they had taken to James on his accession to the throne.  These bishops were not happy at having a Catholic king in England, but they did not see how they could go back on their oaths once taken.  This created a schism in the Church of England with the Established Church loyal to William and Mary and the “nonjuring” (non-swearing the oath) bishops who remained loyal to the Stuarts.  About 400 priests and several thousand laity also remained loyal to James and his heirs.  The nonjuring bishops chose and consecrated successors, keeping the schism alive.  As the Jacobite cause (the efforts to restore the son and then the grandson of James II) waned after the middle of the 18^th century, the nonjuring schism slowly waned.   In Scotland the situation played out a bit differently.  The Episcopal Church was disestablished and the Presbyterian Church established in its place.  The nonjuring bishops in Scotland maintained the Scottish Episcopal Church though it was no longer the Established Church.  The Scottish nonjuring bishops will be important in the history of the Episcopal Church in the United States as they consecrated the first American bishop, Samuel Seabury of Connecticut.   

Archbishop Sancroft was replaced as Archbishop of Canterbury by John Tillotson.  Tillotson came from a Puritan background and, though himself ordained by a bishop (Thomas Sydserf, Bishop of Orkney) had strong Presbyterian leanings.  Actually Sydserf was quite High Church—so much so he was suspect of being a secret Catholic—but Tillotson was of the Latitudinarian persuasion, the so called “Broad Church.”  He was no doctrinal rigorist—even suspect of Unitarian leanings—but saw the role of the Church more to advance a certain moral character upon the faithful.  He had a background in science and was a member of the Royal Society. 

In many ways Tillotson was typical of the leadership of the Church of England in the reign of William and Mary and afterward.  The days of the High-Church theologically and liturgically minded Caroline Divines was past.  The influence of the Enlightenment was on the Church.  Traditional Christianity with its doctrines and rituals was tempered by Reason and science.  Sacramental life faded more and more into the background in favor of sermons outlining how the human intellect can be rationally applied to the will in an effort to produce a morality rooted in the good ness of our nature rather than a product of Grace.   This same liberalism was pervading European intelligentsia and shaping societies from the Marquis de Pombal in Portugal to Frederick the Great in Prussia.  It would cross the Atlantic and find exponents in Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.  The Catholic Church, and especially the Jesuits, would for the greater part resist it.  The Church of England, for the greater part, would swallow it hook, line, and sinker.  The antidote would be found in the First Great Awakening.  But more on all that later.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXVI

 

James II, last Catholic
King of England 

With the death of Charles II on the sixth of February, 1685, England was plunged into a Constitutional Crisis—perhaps the most significant crisis in the development of the unwritten English Constitution.  Charles died without legitimate heir (he had more than enough children born “on the wrong side of the blanket” but no children of his marriage to the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza.)  The Benedictine monk, John Huddleston, chaplain to Queen Catherine, had received Charles into the Catholic Church on the King’s deathbed.  The new King, Charles’ brother James, the Duke of York, had been secretly received into the Catholic Church in about 1668.  His wife, Anne Hyde, had preceded him into the Catholic Church about the time of their return from France at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.  James and Anne had become familiar with Catholicism during their exile in France during the Cromwell years and found the new faith a comfort.  King Charles was not happy with the conversions in his family (despite his wife Catherine of Braganza being Catholic and his own eventual conversion) and insisted that the daughters of James and Anne—the princesses Mary and Anne—remain as Anglicans.  James was able to conceal his Catholicism until a Parliamentary act of 1673 required all military officers to take an oath against the doctrine of Transubstantiation and various other Catholic beliefs, and to take Holy Communion according to the Rites of the Church of England.  James’ refusal to take the oath or receive Holy Communion in the Anglican Church exposed his Catholicism and he had to resign his post as Lord High Admiral. 

James’ wife, Anne, died in 1670 and in 1673 James married the Italian Princess, Mary of Modena, who was, of course, Catholic.   A proxy ceremony had been held in Italy according to Catholic Rites and upon Mary’s arrival in England, they were married in an Anglican service—despite both bride and groom being Catholics.  Anti-Catholicism was rife in England at the time and Mary was highly distrusted as a suspect “agent of the Pope.”  Nevertheless, the inevitable crisis of a Catholic succession was pretty much ignored until Charles death.  Parliament three times proposed a bill to make the Crown bypass James for either Charles’ illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, or for his nieces (James’ Protestant daughters), Mary and Anne.  Each time the bill came near to passing, King Charles dissolved Parliament.  James’ daughter, Mary, had married the Dutch Protestant Prince, William of Orange, in 1677.  This split the English political establishment into parties with the Royalists (or Tories) supporting Charles and James; and the Whigs opposing the royal policy.  This split would outlast the religious conflict over James’s eligibility to the succession and create the basic political divide in England that would last into the reign of Victoria when the parties would morph into the Conservatives and the Liberals.  In 19^th century America, opposition to “King” Andrew Jackson would help create the Whig party that would be the seedbed of the later Republican Party. 

When Charles died, England was faced with the constitutional improbability that the Church of England had a Catholic head.  Only two months after Charles’ death, James and his Italian Queen were crowned in an Anglican service at Westminster Abbey.  Neither, of course, took Holy Communion.  Surprisingly, Protestant England seemed willing to give the Catholic King a shot at good governance.  Of course, the heirs to the throne, the princesses Mary and Anne, were Protestant so this would be, at most, a temporary inconvenience 

James wasted this trust, however, and did several things to provoke Protestant anger.  In Scotland he encouraged laws against the Presbyterians and in favor of Scottish Episcopalians.  Throughout his realms—England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, he relaxed the legal disabilities against Catholics and dispensed many prominent Catholics from the Test Act of 1673, permitting them military and governmental posts without conforming to the Established Church.  He received a papal ambassador, and indeed permitted the ambassador to be consecrated a (Catholic) Archbishop in the Chapel Royal in Saint James Palace with full Roman ceremonial (Cardinal Burke would have loved it) in 1687.  That same year, he issued the Declaration of Indulgence, lifting most disabilities for both Catholics and Protestant dissenters and required that that the Declaration be read from every Anglican pulpit.  This Declaration basically threatened the Establishment of the Anglican Church.  England began to seethe with religious tension. 

In April 1688 James imprisoned the Archbishop of Canterbury and seven other Anglican bishops who challenged his religious policies.  When Queen Mary of Modena gave birth to a son in June of that year, England was suddenly faced with a Catholic succession—a permanently Catholic monarchy.  A group of Protestant nobles petitioned James’ son-in-law, William of Orange, to come to England with an army and take the crown.  By the autumn William arrived; James was captured and imprisoned.  William, not wanting James to become a rallying point, permitted his escape to France where he was received at the court of Louis XIV. 

James tried to raise an army for his support in Ireland which had remained loyal to him, but his forces were defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 by the forces of William.  This battle, and day of its fighting (June 1), have since remained a symbol of the contention between Protestant and Catholic factions in Ireland. 

In April of 1689 William and Mary were crowned in Westminster Abbey.  The Bishop of London performed the ceremony as the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, refused to recognize the deposition of King James.  Eight other English bishops, the majority of the Scots Bishops, and over 400 Anglican priests refused to take the oath to the new monarchs.  They were known as non-jurors.  Deprived of their livings, nonetheless, they had their supporters and the bishops continued to consecrate successors, thus establishing an independent episcopacy in both England and Scotland.  This will be important later for the American Episcopal Church. 

William and Mary, for their part, issued the “Bill of Rights” which established certain limitations on royal power.  Parliament passed an act requiring all future monarchs to be of the Church of England and prohibiting their consorts from being Catholics.  Most significant, however, is that Parliament established the principle that it, Parliament, has the right to choose the monarch.  From Anglo-Saxon times, the English claimed that their monarchy was “elective,” but in actual practice it had become hereditary.  While it is still inconceivable that it would not pass through the established lines of succession, the monarch technically reigns at the invitation of Parliament.