II. The Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions, 1681–84: An Instrument of Tory Reaction

‘Promotion’, says Holy Scripture, ‘cometh neither from the east, nor from the west: nor yet from the south’. Clerical aspirants knew better than the psalmist the strange geography of preferment in Restoration England, where the return in 1660 of the Stuarts did much to encourage in churchmen a greater sense of direction and purpose. Our present study is to elucidate one particular period in the history of preferment, that spanned by the short-lived and little-known Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions which sat at the height and at the helm of the Tory Reaction. To place the Commission in its proper perspective, however, something must be said of the Restoration Settlement itself. It was, of course, no accident that the hereditary monarchy and Anglican Church returned together. Sir Edward Hyde, foremost of the statesmen at the exiled Court and, from January 1658, lord chancellor to Charles II, had bent his energies to achieve this very end. Yet, for the Church, it was a re-establishment rather than an unqualified restoration, for the loyalist nobility and gentry-the real architects of Sion's delivery-were careful not to resurrect Laud's persecuting prelacy. To understand the changed circumstances in which the Church found herself, it is essential to take account of what was not, as well as what was restored. Neither the imperious Court of High Commission nor the self-incriminating ex officio oath was brought back. Shorn of the chief weapons with which she had formerly harried the more wayward of the political nation, the Church returned as part of the only workable constitution England had ever known, that is as a buttress of monarchy.