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 CXIX

Gerald Valerian Wellesley,
canon of Durham Cathedral
and avid reader of the Times
of London 

Well, I have promised a number of faithful readers that I will get back to our series on the history of the Anglican Church—and so here we are, back in the last decade of the 17^th century with a deposed King and a deposed Archbishop of Canterbury and a Church facing a crisis, a crisis which it will not navigate without banging itself on a few rocks that will leave it battered and weakened and with lifeboats setting out on the seas of evangelicalism. 

In 1688 a coup d’etat replaced the Catholic King James II with his Protestant daughter Mary and even more Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.  Nine bishops, including Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, were deposed for refusing to wear allegiance to the new monarchs—they saw their support of the “Glorious Revolution” and the new co-monarchs (an oxymoron if there ever was one) William and Mary as being contrary to the oaths they took at their episcopal consecrations to be loyal to the King (in this case, James).  It was a bitter irony as they were being deprived of their sees for loyalty to a Catholic King when to a man the bishops were rabidly anti-Roman.  Anti-Roman, but not anti-Catholic in as that they were all High Churchmen who saw the Church of England as being a branch of that catholic (i.e.) universal Church along with the Greek and Roman Churches.  But deprived and deposed they were.  They are referred to as non-jurors as they would not swear (Latin: jurare) the oath of allegiance. 

Now Mary was very devout, but while Protestant, wasn’t much interested herself in matters of doctrine, but her husband, William, was a passionate Calvinist.  While Mary was the one with title to the Crown, William’s head was not graced with a “Crown Matrimonial,” i.e. he was no mere consort.  He was, by the grace and invitation of Parliament, co-regent.  In fact, given his domination of Mary and her willingness to leave politics to the husband whom God had set over her in authority (they were Protestants after all and thus unblinking subjects to the Word of God), William was the power figure in this equation.  William was no fan of the High Church movement (which he considered too close to the Catholic theology) represented by the Caroline Divines and consistently appointed Latitudinarians to the episcopal bench. 

High Churchmen represented a somewhat Catholic (though not Roman Catholic) school of thought that stressed the Prayer Book liturgy and sound patristic theology.  They encouraged—and practiced—a devout personal life with a piety rooted in the Prayer Book offices and many showed an interest in the continental mystics.  (The continental mystics tended, of course, to be Roman Catholics such as Francis de Sales, Archbishop Fenelon, Dom Augustine Baker, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection and others, especially French and Spanish spiritual writers.)

The Church of England had been drained of most of its Low Churchmen at the Restoration when they tended to go with the various dissenters: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and others.  Low Churchmen tended to look only to the Biblical text for theological guidance and were liturgical minimalists.  Their piety was more rooted in evangelical preaching than the Prayer Book offices and they looked askance on the mystical tradition as being among the worst abuses of superstitious Romanism.  But, as I said, their influence in the Church of England had been minimized with the definitive break of the Dissenters with the official Church in 1660. 

The Latitudinarians or Broad Churchmen were somewhere in the undefined middle of these two extremes.  The old couplet tells it all:

High and Crazy

Low and Lazy

Broad and Hazy

It is hard to pin down exactly what a Latitudinarian believes—or if they believe at all.  They usually are inclined to ignore the sort of details of dogmatic theology in which High Church advocates of the time found their entertainment, but they also differed from low Church people in tending to like the various forms of biblical criticism that stretch the text to make it mean whatever you wish it to.  When it comes to liturgy they follow the Prayer Book but without much enthusiasm, much less an imagination.  I always think of the Reverend and Honorable Gerald Valerian Wellesley, brother of the Duke of Wellington and a canon of Durham Cathedral who was said to take the Times into choir with him tucked under his surplice and read it while the choristers sang Morning Prayer.  Though coming towards the end of the period we are looking at, Wellesley’s morning reading is that sort of cavalier abandon that typifies the Latitudinarians.  It wasn’t rooted in an indifference to matters religious as much as it was symptomatic of a religious liberalism that downplayed personal faith for intellectual abstractions. 

After leaving off the series on the Church of England about eight weeks or so ago, I did a series on the Enlightenment because if we are to understand the malaise of the Church of England in this period we need to understand that intellectual environment that pervaded European society at the end of the 17^th century and throughout most of the 18^th.  The Enlightenment’s contempt for the medieval period, a time which Enlightenment thinkers referred to as “The Dark Ages” (as if the sun had taken a thousand year hiatus), pushed philosophers and historians and even theologians into an intellectual corner where, if they wished to be thought at all critical in their scholarship, they distanced themselves from the sort of faith and piety characteristic of pre-Enlightenment societies.  It is not unlike the supercilious phony liberal intellectualism of today when people think they have to dismiss millennia of wisdom in favor of abstract and cerebral theories they can parrot without comprehending. 

This Enlightenment spirit infected the Church of England as its bishops and higher clergy were invariably members of the same clubs and traveled in the same social and intellectual circles as the various scientists and philosophers who were advancing the secularist thought of the time.  (This intellectual contamination affected Scandinavian Lutheranism and Continental Catholicism as well, particularly in France, but also to some extent in the Austria and its possessions, as well as Spain and Portugal, but nowhere nearly as much as it did in England.) It was typical of many clergy and not a few bishops to belong to a Masonic Lodge and thus inevitable for some of the theological freethinking of the Lodges to find their way into the Church.  Archbishop Tillotson, William’s nominee to succeed the deposed Sancroft at Canterbury, had to dispel rumors that he was a Unitarian, a not uncommon theological position among Enlightenment thinkers. 

While they were soft on doctrine and often somewhat broad minded on personal (i.e. sexual) morality, the Latitudinarians were inclined to an excessive emphasis on social mores.  They tended to espouse economic liberalism and Adam Smith ideas on Free Market Capitalism, but they regularly used the pulpit to call for reform of the Poor Law, educational reforms, and prison reform as well as hammering away at such social evils as slavery, alcoholism, prostitution, and child employment.  By and large, the 18^th century Church of England was a rather limpid thing whose appeal was primarily among the fashionable well-to-do’s and Whig part politicians.  It would produce two important reactions: one in the eighteenth century and the other—and at the other extreme of the ecclesial spectrum—in the nineteenth.  

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.