Nepotism, Family, and Merit: The Church of England in the Eighteenth Century

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
William T. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Function ◽  
Moral Legitimacy ◽  
The Law ◽  
Hereditary Nature ◽  
The Church

The debate on nepotism in the eighteenth century has developed more fully in the last five than in the preceding fifty years. Within the emergent professions nepotism was difficult to distinguish from the hereditary nature of recruitment into the Church, the law, and the army. The debate on nepotism in the Church has produced contrasting views, one regarding nepotism as a feature of the corruption and abuse that dogged the Church after 1714, the other suggesting that nepotism not only served a specific function, as it did among the laity, but was accorded moral legitimacy by contemporaries. The article suggests that nepotism took its place within the structure of patronage which included the recommendation of deserving clergy to the purveyors of patronage and the nomination of men of talent from the universities to the households of bishops.

Murmurings

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-35
Author(s):  
Ian Ward
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Law School ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church

This chapter focusses on David Hare’s Murmuring Judges; part of his critically acclaimed ‘State of the Nation’ trilogy, produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In each of these plays, Hare focussed his attention on the seeming dysfunctionality of particular public institutions. The other two plays in the set examined the Church of England and the Labour Party. Murmuring Judges, as the title suggests, focusses its attention on the legal profession; more closely still the Bar and the police. Hare’s critique of legal practice, and education, chimed with contemporary movements in ‘critical legal studies’ or CLS, as it became known. The CLS movement sought to uncover the ‘politics of the law’, and its consequence, arguing that its roots could be located in the modern law school. This chapter brings this claim and Hare’s play into alignment.

The Case of the Reverend James Shore

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 478-504
Author(s):  
Grayson Carter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Law ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Church

The two hundred or so evangelical clergymen who seceded from the Church of England into Protestant Dissent during the first half of the nineteenth century often paid a considerable price for their action. By crossing the subtle social boundary between Anglican priesthood and Nonconformist ministry they forfeited status and often, no doubt, income. A number vanished into comparative obscurity as pastors of small chapels, whether as ministers of a major denomination, Strict and Particular Baptists, Christian Brethren, or preachers in some unlabelled and impoverished chapel. If not so severely penalised for their secession as many of their colleagues who went to Rome, particularly those with wives for whom entry into the Roman priesthood was closed, they usually came off the worse in temporal terms for following the dictates of conscience. This, no doubt, they fully anticipated. What was not anticipated, however, was the imposition of a legal penalty for their act of secession. Though Anglican secessions to Rome or Dissent were not infrequent, their legality was apparently seldom if ever questioned. Liberal Churchmen like Theophilus Lindsey, who had abandoned the establishment for Unitarianism during the eighteenth century, had set up their chapels with impunity. In 1831 the evangelical William Tiptaft received a threat from Thomas Burgess, the bishop of Salisbury, upon seceding from the parish of Sutton Courtney, Berkshire, but nothing came of it. Those who left the via media for Rome were assumed to be acting within the framework of the law when they took up a new ministry as priests of another apostolic confession.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, Baron Blackett, of Chelsea, 18 November 1897 - 13 July 1974

1975 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-115 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Large Family ◽  
The Other ◽  
Future Career ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Future ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Indian Mutiny ◽  
The Church ◽  
Deep Interest

Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett was born in Kensington, London, on 18 November 1897. His father, Arthur Stuart Blackett, was a stockbroker, although apparently not by inclination since his great interests were in literature and nature. Patrick was the only boy but had an elder and younger sister; one trained and practised as an architect in the 1920s, until she married, and the other became an industrial psychologist and then a psychoanalyst. For the previous two generations the family had been associated with the Church of England. Patrick’s grandfather had been Vicar of the church in Woburn Square (now demolished), and was the Vicar of St Andrew’s, Croydon, at the time of his death. He had twice married and Arthur Stuart was one of a large family, two of whom went into the Church, whilst another became a missionary in India. Patrick’s great-grandfather came from Hamsterley in Co. Durham of a farming family. He moved to London and his children were baptised in St Saviour’s Church, Southwark (now Southwark Cathedral). The future career and interests of Patrick seem to have more association with his maternal descent. His mother, Caroline Frances Maynard, was the daughter of Major Charles Maynard, R.A., who served in India at the time of the Indian Mutiny. William Maynard, a brother of Charles, was also associated with India as a tea planter. The source of Patrick’s deep interest in Indian affairs has this association; so does his early naval career and his continued absorption in military affairs—in addition to the army career of his grandfather there was an earlier tradition of naval service in the Maynard family.

Edmund Burke, Dissent and Church and State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church ◽  
At Home

This chapter examines Edmund Burke’s attitude towards Protestant dissenters, particularly the more radical or rational ones who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards the Church of England and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke’s attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. The catalyst for Burke’s emergence as leader of those who feared that revolution abroad might become a distemper at home was Richard Price’s Discourse on Love of Our Country. The chapter analyses how Burke moved from advocating toleration for Dissenters to become a staunch defender of establishment as to have ‘un-Whigged’ himself. It also considers the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as well as Burke’s attitude towards Church–state relations.

Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

This chapter examines the interactions between politics inside and outside of the British Parliament as well as the issue of Church reform. Attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century. During the intervening period, Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches along with various acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The chapter establishes the complex route by which challenges to and changes within the Church of England translated into a concern to act among parliamentary elites.

Pietism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen C. Guelzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
State University ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Evangelicalism ◽  
The Church

‘Pietism’ refers to a Protestant reform movement, arising in the late 1600s in Lutheran Germany, which turned away from contests over theological and dogmatic identity in Protestant confessionalism and urged renewed attention to questions of personal piety and devotion. As such, it has only the most tenuous historical connections to the Christocentric piety of the devotio moderna or the northern humanist piety of Erasmus or Zwingli. It found its first major voice in P.J. Spener and A.H. Francke, and established its principal centres of influence at the state university at Halle in 1691 and the Moravian community at Herrnhut in 1722. Pietism found followers and allies in the European Reformed churches, in the Church of England (especially through the example of John and Charles Wesley and through the Moravian exile community in England), and in Britain’s English-speaking colonies. In the colonies, pietism not only found Lutheran and Reformed colonial hosts, but also saw in New England Puritanism a movement of similar aspirations. Pietism’s impact on the spirituality of western Europe and America was clearly felt in the eighteenth-century Protestant Awakenings, and continues to have an influence in the shape of Anglo-American evangelicalism.

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