Religion in Georgian Britain
Does it matter?
• Protestantism was a key to national identity [Colley]
• Religious identity could unify different British nations
• Religion infused many important movements, habits and
attitudes: political parties, Jacobitism, Ireland, slavery,
women, luxury and commerce, empire, the
Enlightenment, the press, class, riots
• The question was also asked in the C18th – in the face
of new ideas (deism, atheism) and perceptions of
growing irreligion and indifference
• Relations between church and state are back on the
political agenda – how far should we tolerate nonmajority beliefs? how far should one branch of
Christianity be protected by law? how far should religion
dictate education? How far should clerics be involved in
politics? How far should morality be a public concern?
The Church of England: vibrant or
not?
• J.C.D. Clark: GB was an ‘ancien regime’ in
which religion and law were the basis of the
state, intertwined props of each other until the
repeal of the Test and Corporation Act in 1828.
Clark sees the endurance of a confessional type
of politics, and a continuing loyalty to the Church
of England. There was a long-lasting popular
Anglicanism: ‘church and king’.
• The turning point in politics of religion in GB is
thus early C19th
The Whig view of religion in Georgian Britain
• The Glorious Revolution of 1688 ushered in a
period of religious toleration, after which people
accepted religious differences and ceased to
think of politics in religious terms, instead
stressing the separation of church and state, and
the preservation of liberty by civil institutions.
C18th was an age of reason, in which religious
conflict was subsumed by more secular politics.
• The turning point is thus 1689
Challenges facing the Church of
England
• Inequality – 1812 inquiry found that over 1000
parishes (out of c.10,000) had no resident
minister; 1833 report found 47% of clergy had
incomes of less than £200 pa.
• Urbanisation and rising populations: Manchester
had one parish church for 20,000 in 1750.
Parish structure not responsive to social change.
• Splits within the church: low-church vs highchurch; non-jurors; evangelicalism [waves in
1740s and 1780s].
• From Catholicism and Dissenting Protestant
denominations
Anti-popery
• Long tradition – part of the self-understanding of
Protestants since Luther in 1520s
• Rationale for the Glorious Revolution: get rid of J2 to
overcome ‘popery and arbitrary government’. RCs
excluded from toleration.
• Association with Jacobitism—foreign threat. Penal
measures introduced after plots. Catholic priests banned
1700. 1714 and 1717 compulsory registration of
property; barred from practising as barristers; excluded
from office by Test acts of 1673 and 1678.
• Protestant monarch part of the Revolution settlement
(and hence why the Georgians even came to the throne)
Anti-popery as part of British national identity.
Hogarth’s The Gates of Calais
Anti-popery resurgent?
• Problem of what to do with Catholics in Quebec
– 1774 (Quebec Act) given toleration.
• Association with Irish Catholicism. Irish
immigration consolidated trend of increasing
Catholic numbers c.1770: 750,000 by 1850
(60,000 in 1720)
• 1778 act to relieve Catholics: to repeal act vs
priests and to allow Catholics to buy and sell
property.
• 1779 Protestant Association headed by Lord
Geoge Gordon. Large crowds and petitioning—
popular anti-popery.
Lord George Gordon
Gordon Riots
• 2 June 1780 60,000 gathered in London to
present petition. Mob decided to destroy
Catholic property. Some rioters imprisoned
in Newgate so it was attacked. 7 June
other prisons were attacked and Bank of
England. 210 killed; 75 died in hospital.
450 arrests.
The Attack on Newgate 1780
No Popery or Newgate Reformer, 1780
The road to Catholic
Emancipation
• 1791 act gave legal existence to Catholic places of
worship. 1793 allowed to vote.
• Pressure for Catholic emancipation but highly divisive
issue for Church of England in 1820s.
• 1828 repeal of Test and Corporation Acts.
• 1828 Daniel O’Connell won election in County Clare but
as a Catholic was barred from taking his seat. 1829
passage of the act split the Tory party. Extreme hostility
of the king. Gave right to sit in parliament and hold office.
• Crisis for the Church: seen as the destruction of old
political-religious order in place since the Restoration
‘Old’ Dissent
• Protestant denominations that originated in the
C17th: Presbyterians, Independents
(Congregationalists), Quakers, Baptists.
• Evans list, compiled between 1715 and 1718
gives a total of almost 356,000 (7% of
population); shows urban strength of dissent.
• 1689 Toleration Act gave freedom of worship for
Dissenters in licensed meeting houses (if doors
left unlocked!). Anti-trinitarians excluded (and
atheists)
Lingering Hostility to Dissent after
Toleration
• Occasional conformity bills 1702-5, act 1711 –
anyone who attended a conventicle after taking
office was to be fined £40. Repealed 1719
• 1710 height of anti-Dissenting feeling, because
of trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell who had
preached vs them. Riots in London, destroying 6
meeting houses.
• 1714 Schism act (repealed 1719) – no one to
teach without license from bishop and conformist
Unitarians and radical politics
• Unitarians – evolved from Presbyterians,
anti-trinitarian, believed in the primacy of
reason, natural rights and therefore often
associated with radical politics and reform.
• Joseph Priestley, 1791 riots vs his house
in Birmingham.
Joseph Priestley calling for the head of George III. His House was
destroyed by a mob.
Meeting of Dissenters Religious and Political 1790
Radical Religion
• Deism
• Atheism
• Cult of reason. John Toland, Christianity
not Mysterious (1696); Thomas Paine, The
Age of Reason (1794)
• Not terribly influential but perceived to be
threat to orthodox (correct) religion
‘New Dissent’
• 1740s revitalisation of non-conforming Protestantism.
Independents and Baptists doubled in number 17501800.
• Methodism: 1738 John Wesley had conversion
experience. George Whitfield had similar conversion
experience and began popular preaching style. 1739
15,000 flocked to hear Wesley preach on Kennington
Common. Charles Wesley’s hymns—singing draw
people into religious experience. In 50 years of
evangelism Wesley travelled 250,000m and preached
40,000 sermons.
• Methodism was not initially a movement outside the
established Church
John Wesley (death mask 1791)
Growth of Methodism
Movements for Moral Reform:
the civic consequences of faith?
• Social ills: Urbanisation, crime, gin, immorality,
prostitution
• Moral reform movements attempt to address
social problems
– 1689-c.1720 (75,000 prosecutions; Society for
Promoting of Christian Knowledge 1699; Society for
the Propagation of the Gospel Overseas 1702)
– and 1780s (wake of defeat in America; Sunday
School Society 1785; 1787 proclamation against vice
and Proclamation Society
– 1802 Society for the Suppression of Vice
The end of Christian Britain?
The1851 census
• Church of England could only claim to be
a national church in some areas – in north
and Wales chapel-goers were in the
majority.
• But also a society that no longer
overwhelmingly attended public worship
• But, does non-attendance equal
secularisation?
1851 Census