5HUM0271: Politics and Culture in
Eighteenth-Century Britain
Lecture 9: Religion in an Age
of Dissent
Structure of the lecture
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Church-state relationship
Key crises
Anti-Catholicism
J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832
Persistence of millenarianism
Religion as cultural piety rather than
theological practice
• Evangelicalism
William III: Protestant conqueror?
Structure of the churches in Britain and their
relationship to the state:
England: 1688;
1701 Act of Settlement;
1689 Toleration Act;
1828 repeal of Test and Corporation
acts; 1829 Catholic emancipation
Scotland: 1690 Presbyterian
settlement
Ireland: early 18thC penal laws; 1801
union but not emancipation
Dr Henry Sacheverell (1674-1724)
18thC religion not entirely ‘rational’ or
benign – legacies of the upheavals of
the 17thC :
Demonstrations of
anti-Catholicism:
Gordon Riots in
London,
June 1780
18thC religion not entirely ‘rational’ or benign
– legacies of the upheavals of the 17thC :
persistence of a
millenarian
religious fervour
Joanna Southcott
(1750-1814)
Key theme
‘Popular Anglicanism was not primarily
theological…it is more helpful to
define religion culturally, as a form of
identity linking rich and poor in a
common world-view.’
Walsh, Haydon and Taylor, The Church of England, p. 27.
3. Alternative ways of practising and
organising religion:
John Wesley (1703-1791)
Evangelicalism against the slave trade:
‘The Sorrows of Yamba’, c. 1795
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/
Evangelicalism:
Hannah More (1745-1833) and a
Cheap Repository Tract
Unitarianism and ‘Rational Dissent’:
Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and
Richard Price (1723-1791)