Wesley, Sacheverell, and Convocation

2021 ◽  
pp. 140-165
Author(s):  
William Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
High Point ◽  
Committee Work ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
High Church

Chapter 6 explains the role that Wesley played in the events in Church and State between 1709 and 1714, the high point of Tory High Church ambition in Church and State. It suggests that Wesley probably did contribute to the defence of Henry Sacheverell, who was on trial in the House of Lords on the political charge of preaching a seditious sermon. Sacheverell and Wesley have so much in common that Wesley’s claim that he contributed to the defence seems entirely plausible. As a member of Convocation, between 1710 and 1713, Wesley emerged as an important figure in the period. In addition to much committee work and supporting the High Church Tory agenda, he also drafted a key report in 1713 which advanced the High Church clergy’s case against the Bishops and argued that the failure to pursue Church reform was the responsibility of the Latitudinarian Bishops. Also considered is Wesley’s response to the Peace of Utrecht, a major Tory victory against continuing a Whig war.

John Redmond and federalism in 1910

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (127) ◽  
pp. 343-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Wheatley
Keyword(s):  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Court Proceedings ◽  
Weekly Journal ◽  
Political Radicalism

In early August 1910 readers of Reynolds’s Newspaper, a radical weekly journal noted as much for its detailed coverage of divorce court proceedings as for its political radicalism (and in 1911 one of the ‘immoral’ English Sunday papers targeted by Irish ‘vigilance committees’), may have perused the weekly political column written by T.P. O’Connor. ‘T.P.’, the M.P. for Liverpool Scotland, was anything but a disinterested columnist, and with John Redmond, John Dillon and Joseph Devlin formed the inner leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party and Ireland’s nationalist movement.Throughout the political crisis of early 1910 O’Connor had been the main London-based conduit for communications between the Irish Party and Asquith’s cabinet, and in particular Lloyd George and the Liberal chief whip, the Master of Elibank. The outcome of the January 1910 general election, which had given the balance of power in the House of Commons to the Irish nationalists, and John Redmond’s use of that power to force Asquith to act to end the veto powers of the House of Lords over parliamentary legislation, had enhanced both Redmond’s status in Ireland and the importance of home rule as an issue that had to be resolved.

Brytyjska Izba Lordów na przełomie XIX i XX wieku... Ewolucja pozycji w systemie politycznym

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (324) ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Andrzej Jaeschke
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Political Position ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Political Rivalry ◽  
Electoral Reforms

The paper concerns the evolution of the political position of the House of Lords until the end of the 19thcentury. The author presents the time of stabilisation of the relations of the two parliamentary chambers andidentifies its causes. He also discusses the increasing disruption of relations between the two chambers ofthe British Parliament following from electoral reforms and, consequently, the decomposition of the hithertounified conservative political environment and the emergence of liberal forces. This resulted in increasinglystrong ideological and political rivalry between the conservative House of Lords and the largely liberal Houseof Commons.

scholarly journals Shaftesbury, Locke, and Their Revolutionary Letter? [Corrigendum]

Locke Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
D. N. DeLuna
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Public ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Church

A correction of an article originally published in vol 17 (2017). In 1675, the anonymous Letter to a Person of Quality was condemned in the House of Lords and ordered to be burned by the public hangman.  A propagandistic work that has long been attributed to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, and less certainly to his secretary John Locke, it traduced hard-line Anglican legislation considered in Parliament that year—namely the Test Bill, proposing that office-holders and MPs swear off political militancy and indeed any efforts to reform the Church and State.  Careful examination of the text of the Letter, and that of one of its sources in the Reasons against the Bill for the Test, also circulated in 1675, reveals the presence of highly seditious passages of covert historical allegory.  Hitherto un-noted by modern scholars, this allegory compared King Charles II to the weak and intermittently mad Henry VI, while agitating for armed revolt against a government made prey to popish and French captors.  The discovery compels modification, through chronological revision and also re-assessment of the probability of Locke’s authorship of the Letter, of Richard Ashcraft’s picture of Shaftesbury and Locke as first-time revolutionaries for the cause of religious tolerance in the early 1680s.  Even more significantly, it lends support to Ashcraft’s view of the nature and intent of duplicitous published writings from the Shaftesbury circle, whose members included Robert Ferguson, ‘the Plotter’ and pamphleteer at home in the world of skilled biblical hermeneutics.  Cultivated for stealthy revolutionary purposes, these writings came with designs of engaging discrete reading networks within England’s culture of Protestant dissent.

The High Point (II): Jewish Society (1650–1713)

1997 ◽  
pp. 119-150
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
The Political ◽  
High Point ◽  
The Third ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Czech Lands

This chapter addresses how the climax of the European debate over Jewish readmission came during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. For a quarter of a century, conferences, commissions, and petitions published and unpublished over whether or not to tolerate Jews, and if so on what terms, abounded from Poland to Portugal and from Hungary to Ireland. Why did the political and intellectual process of readmission culminate at this particular time? Several factors converged to intensify previous trends but what was the most crucial was the widespread backlash in Germany, following the evacuation of the Swedish, French, and other foreign garrisons at the end of the Thirty Years War. The substantial gains made by the Jews of central Europe during the conflict, of Austria and the Czech lands as well as Germany, had aroused intense opposition and controversy, so that the coming of peace was almost bound to be accompanied by a formidable reaction. The chapter then considers the Jewish population and Jewish economy during this period.

English Politics and the Blasphemy Act of 1698*

2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (575) ◽  
pp. 804-835
Author(s):  
Eloise Davies
Keyword(s):  
Moral Leadership ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
High Church ◽  
Standing Army ◽  
English Politics

Abstract In 1698, less than a decade after the Toleration Act, a blasphemy law was passed in England. No convictions were ever brought under the Act, and it has been largely neglected by historians. Yet, for all its apparent insignificance, the Blasphemy Act is an instructive episode in post-1688 politics, which sheds light on the political realignments of the post-revolutionary decade. The language of the blasphemy debates was theologically sophisticated, rooted in Calvin’s understanding of blasphemy as distinctively malicious, and it is clear that the contours of the extra-parliamentary Trinitarian controversy were a source of division in Westminster too. The Blasphemy Act was one means by which the Williamite bishops, under pressure from both the dissenter-dominated moral reform movement and High Church advocates of Convocation, tried to reassert the court’s moral leadership. But the significance of the dispute was not limited to ecclesiastical politics; the story of the Blasphemy Act was also closely entwined with that of the more famous ‘standing army’ controversy. William’s Court Whig ministers—often portrayed as areligious pragmatists—exploited the theological fault-lines among Country MPs to legitimise fiscal-military reform.

Pietro Giannone and the Nonjuring Contribution to the Separation of Church and State

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 713-736
Author(s):  
Paul Monod
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Impact

AbstractWhy did the English Nonjuror Richard Rawlinson promote the 1729–30 English translation of Pietro Giannone's Civil History of Naples? The Nonjurors in England espoused ecclesiastical independency from the state, which they derived from the thought of Restoration High Churchmen and from the French Gallican Louis Ellies Du Pin. Giannone, a Neapolitan lawyer, proposed a similar “two powers” model of strict autonomy for both church and state. Giannone's concept was later rejected by enlightened writers like Viscount Bolingbroke and Edward Gibbon, who associated it with high church prejudices. It was defended by the Dissenter Joseph Priestley, who combined it with his own theory of religious sociability. The impact of Giannone on the Nonjurors and on Priestley illuminates the complex religious background to what is often seen as a fundamentally secular doctrine: the separation of church and state.

Georgian Churchmanship Reconsidered: Some Variations in Anglican Public Worship 1714–1830

1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. C. Mather
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Good Works ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Public Worship

Current evaluation of the Church of England under the first four Georges follows in the main the assessment made by Norman Sykes in his monumental Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1934. According to that view the Church, which was lastingly cleared of the universal slackness previously imputed to it, exhibited a pervasive Latitudinarianism sympathetically portrayed by Sykes as ‘practical Christianity’, an emphasis on cdnduct and good works to the neglect of ‘organised churchmanship’ and the ‘mystical element’ in religion. R. W. Greaves detected similar features in the concept of ‘moderation’: suspicion of popery and friendship towards dissenters, a cult of plainness in theological explanation and a very general contempt of whatever was medieval. Historians have been willing to acknowledge as exceptions to this ‘mild’ quality of Anglican churchmanship the early Methodists and ‘small Evangelical and High Church minorities’, but only the two former have been taken seriously. Piety of a more traditional kind - rubrical, sacramental, Catholic - has been identified, only to be discounted. The Establishment has been seen in the light of the judgement recently summarised by Dr Anthony Russell: ‘Certainly the temper of the eighteenth century which favoured reason above all else, and was deeply suspicious of mysticism and the emotions, was against any form of sacramentalism.’

Church and State in Stanley Fish's Antiliberalism

1999 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 911-924 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Judd Owen
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Neutrality ◽  
Stanley Fish

Even though they contain one of the most forceful critiques of liberalism in contemporary political thought, the political writings of Stanley Fish have been neglected by political theorists. Fish's critique of liberal claims of moral and religious neutrality points to the conclusion that the liberal separation of church and state lacks a coherent justification. I offer a qualified defense of liberalism by arguing that while Fish's critique of liberal neutrality is sound, he fails to do justice to liberalism's substantive basis. Moreover, by simply negating liberalism, Fish's thinking remains within the liberal horizon in a way he fails to recognize.

The politics of the enabling act (1919)

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 383-392
Author(s):  
David M. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Single Person ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Continuous Stream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Political Success ◽  
A Current

I doubt whether any event in the constitutional history of Church and State (wrote Randall Davidson in February 1921) has ever been wrought out with so little friction, and on so smooth a current as this great change ... I think it is indisputable that if we had failed in December 1919 to get through Parliament what is popularly known as the Enabling Bill, we might have waited for it for many a long year with increasing and most harmful loss of enthusiasm, and growth of irritation among the progressive groups. Instead of this we have had a continuous stream of praise and thankful gratulation at the way in which the new system has begun to work.These words are a useful reminder that contemporaries were surprised at the easy passage of the enabling act, and that its success therefore requires explanation. The ‘rightness of the cause’ has tended to obscure the fact that right causes often fail. Moreover subsequent criticisms of the act, and particularly the disappointment of the life and liberty movement with what followed, have tended to minimise the significance of the changes it made. Nevertheless the charisma of William Temple and Dick Sheppard seems to have led even the critics to attribute the act’s success to the life and liberty movement; viscount Wolmer’s church self-government association has been relegated to the sidelines; and the verdict of bishop Bell (who in 1919 was Davidson’s chaplain) that ‘Its achievement was due to Randall Davidson more than to any other single person’ has been forgotten. In this paper I shall argue that the political success of the enabling act requires a political explanation, that parliamentary tactics in both the house of commons and the house of lords are therefore of prime importance, and that the significance of the success is enhanced by a fact which has never been discussed before - the initial opposition of the government of the day.

THE OCCASIONAL CONFORMITY CONTROVERSY, MODERATION, AND THE ANGLICAN CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY, 1700–1714

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRENT S. SIROTA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Unique Characteristic ◽  
Short Term ◽  
English Society ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
High Church ◽  
Early English ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Revolution

ABSTRACTThe occasional conformity controversy during the reign of Queen Anne has traditionally been understood as a straightforward symptom of the early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’. For all the pious rhetoric concerning toleration and the church in danger, the controversy is considered a partisan squabble for short-term political gain. This traditional interpretation has, however, never been able to account for two features of the controversy: first, the focus on ‘moderation’ as a unique characteristic of post-Revolutionary English society; and second, the prominence of the Anglican nonjurors in the debate. This article revisits the occasional conformity controversy with an eye toward explaining these two related features. In doing so, it will argue that the occasional conformity controversy comprised a referendum on the Revolution settlement in church and state. Nonjurors lit upon the practice of occasional conformity as emblematic of the broader malady of moderation afflicting post-Revolutionary England. From their opposition to occasional conformity, the nonjurors, and soon the broader Anglican high-church movement, developed a comprehensive critique of religious modernity that would inform the entire framework of debate in the early English Enlightenment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document