III.English Sermons 1660-1720
Traditionally,accounts of Restoration preaching have placed little emphasis on its political dimensions.Most narratives,with some variations,have tended to focus on the form and style of Anglican preaching in the period.The early twentieth-century account of E.C.Dargan is paradigmatic in this respect.Dargan depicts Restoration preaching as a welcome stage in the reform of a baroque seventeenth-century prose style:‘Toward the end of the[seventeenth]century a group of divines marks the transition from the quaint beauties of Adams,Donne,Hall,and Taylor,and the elaborate and ponderous stateliness of Owen,Howe,and Barrow,to a simpler and more direct and popular method of preaching’.[51]The late seventeenth-century‘group of divines’referred to here comprises a familiar roll-call of the three‘great’Restoration preachers:Robert South,Isaac Barrow,and John Tillotson.(Other Anglicans,such as Edward Stillingfleet,William Beveridge,Thomas Ken,and William Sherlock,are sometimes considered by scholars in passing.)The same roll-call is reproduced by W.Fraser Mitchell in 1932 in his teleological version of this‘change from the bizarre and pedantic preachers of the early part of the seventeenth century to the genuinely‘modern’note which we find struck at its close’.[52]Reasons given by commentators for this‘change’are various.They include the‘plain and functional style of Puritan preaching’,the‘influence of the preachers at the French court,such as Masillon,Bossuet,and Bourdaloue’,the Royal Society's need for‘exact,clear,and denotative language’,and the new theology of the Latitudinarian movement in the English Church,in which the‘chief duty of men was to imitate divine charity by good works’.[53]In each of these commentaries,Restoration sermons are regarded chiefly as specimens in the evolution of English prose style.[54]
More recent accounts have sought to change the frame of reference.The focus has shifted to preaching beyond the pale of the established church,and away from prose style to politics.Such commentaries have built upon Dargan's twofold division of the dissenting preaching tradition:(1)low church Episcopalians(e.g.Thomas Adams,Thomas Goodwin,Richard Baxter);and(2)Presbyterians,Independents,and Baptists(e.g.Presbyterians:Edmund Calamy;Independents:John Owen,John Howe;Baptists:John Bunyan,Vavasor Powell,Benjamin Keach).[55]Recent scholarship has qualified and added considerable detail to this depiction.Important developments include placing Restoration nonconformist ministers and their writing in a broader religious and political culture of dissent,drawing valuable contrasts between varieties of nonconformity in the period,and reconstructing the polemical print context of Restoration nonconformity.[56]The scholarly attention paid to Restoration preaching,however,remains minimal when compared to the wealth of studies on the so-called‘golden age’of Jacobean pulpit oratory.Preoccupation with prose style has also meant the neglect of crucial aspects of Restoration pulpit oratory:modes of exegesis,textual transmission,publication,and the role of sermons in reflecting and shaping local and national religious politics in the period.
One area of Restoration preaching has received more sustained scholarly attention:sermons preached during the reign of Charles II(1660-85).Approximately one hundred court sermons were published in this period.The majority of the printed sermons were published by royal command.To receive the royal command for the publication of four or five of one's separate court sermons was rare,and this honour went to just five preachers:Benjamin Laney,Edward Stillingfleet,John Tillotson,Francis Turner,and Seth Ward.That printed Restoration court sermons were read is illustrated firstly by the number of editions to which some ran,secondly by the large number of readers’responses,and thirdly by the response that some provoked in the press.Thomas Pierce satisfied all of the above criteria when his fiercely anti-Catholic Primitive Rule of Reformation,delivered at court in February 1663,ran to at least eight editions.This would have meant the circulation of up to,although probably fewer than,sixteen thousand copies.[57]The sermon also led to an outcry in the Catholic press.[58]
The attention afforded Thomas Pierce's Primitive Rule can be understood in the context of the fear of Roman Catholics which pervaded the reign of Charles II.This fear was stoked by memories of Marian persecution,the Spanish Armada,and the Gunpowder Plot.The anti-Catholic flames were fanned by a wide range of factors:the influence on the king of Catholic royal mistresses;the immediate threats posed by Louis XIV's military ambitions;the allegation that it was Catholic arsonists who set fire to London in 1666;the king's attempted indulgence of non-Anglicans in 1672;and the alleged Popish Plot of the late 1670s.At the opposite pole of the ecclesiological spectrum,the Restoration court and church was also haunted by the constant spectre of Protestant nonconformity.At their most extreme,the regicidal ambitions of nonconformists posed a threat to the stability,or even to the existence,of the Restoration polity.This threat seemed all too real in the early 1680s.For example,the‘Protestant Joiner’Stephen College,a Whig propagandist for the exclusion from the succession of the Catholic Duke of York,was executed for treason in August 1681.The Tory press capitalized on College's dying-speech admission of Presbyterianism in order to associate religious dissent with an assault on episcopacy,Anglicanism,and the crown itself.Tories identified Protestant nonconformists with the sectarian(and innovative,cruel,fanatical,ambitious,impious)Jesuits who taught them Bellarminian doctrines of rebellion against,deposition,and/or murder of their monarch.It was convenient for such Tory propagandists that their Whig enemies,who were closely associated with Protestant nonconformists,borrowed directly from Catholic texts.So,for example,the Whig John Somers's A Brief History of the Succession(1682)utilised the Jesuit Robert Parsons’A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England(1594).[59]
The proceedings of the Restoration chapel royal were thus punctuated by lively responses to contemporary political developments and national crises.Hundreds of court sermons were enjoyed,endured,or slept through by a king renowned neither for his religiosity nor for his enjoyment of the company of clergymen.Yet Charles II was willing to have almost one hundred court sermons printed by royal command,demonstrating publicly that he was being counselled in the godly life.He was also willing to be seen to be counselled in the correct form of faith and worship,visibly patronising anti-Catholic exhortations when many commentators viewed with suspicion the open or crypto-Catholicism of the royal family,royal mistresses,and courtiers.The printing press acted as a prism,refracting royal counsel,altering its direction towards the‘public’,and presenting the religious life of Charles,his courtiers,and courtesans.
It is easy to assume that the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 coincided with,or even caused,the death of British sermon culture.Most dramatically,the forced removal of James II compromised notions of divine monarchy,and so weakened providential interpretations of politics which had found a home in the pulpit.The deposition also produced one of the series of mass polemical disputes(ranked alongside the Exclusion Crisis,or the‘Rage of Party’under Queen Anne)in which secular pamphlets,broadsides and newspapers began to displace preaching at the centre of public debate.[60]The Revolution set in train events which ended pre-publication censorship in 1695,and so freed press writers to compete with the clergy as commentators on current events.[61]Most obviously,the 1689 settlement included the‘Toleration Act’.This not only allowed people to avoid the preaching of the established church by going to dissenting meeting houses on Sundays,but permitted many to escape any kind of preaching at all by hobbling the mechanisms which had policed church attendance.One might therefore argue that the events of 1688-9 marginalised sermons in national life.Their blow to the medium may not have been instantly fatal,but they surely shortened its reign as a dominant feature of English life.[62]
Yet if the Revolution did this damage,there were ironies.The advance of William and Mary,prince and princess of Orange,to the English throne was one of the most intensively preached events of British and Irish history.It was marked by an elaborate tuning of pulpits,in which Williamite sermons became the centrepiece of Orange propaganda and careful steps were taken to silence clerical oratory supporting the displaced ruler.Stranger still,it was the Revolution's opponents who did most to question sermon culture.Jacobitism was marked by its hostility to preaching.Suffering ejection from the pulpit,James's supporters criticised,mocked and subverted sermons till the very authority of the genre was questioned.
Forced to react to their antagonists'heavy use of preaching,and unable to respond in kind,supporters of the exiled monarch reacted with denunciation and mockery of their enemies'polemical efforts.As has been hinted,this gave a distinctly anti-sermon character to Jacobite politics,and may have done more to undermine the genre than any of the more direct effects of 1689.This feature of Jacobitism emerged remarkably early.One example merits further examination.Listed among the holdings of the Bodleian,Yale,and Lambeth Palace libraries,and several other repositories of seventeenth-century material,is a work entitled Dr Burnet's sermon before…the prince of Orange,at the cathedral at Exon.[1688].Its pages contain a vigorous defence of non-resistance to monarchs which it would have been impossible for Gilbert Burnet to preach at a time when he was chaplain to a force challenging James's authority.The chosen text was 2 Samuel 1.14.Here,Israel's King David expresses his horror that his predecessor Saul,a divinely anointed ruler,had been killed by a non-royal stranger(albeit at Saul's own request)after losing a battle with the Philistines.Expanding on this,the sermon stresses the sanctity of monarchs.It emphasises that this could not be dimmed however much they misbehaved;and then comes closer and closer to direct reflection on the sin of William's actions.It calls any attempt to invade a king's dominions‘the most fearful and horrid crime’,and goes on to launch a standard rehearsal of the doctrine of passive obedience.[63]If any reader had not realised by this point that this address was a fake,the final sentence was explicit.Having expounded a position directly contrary to that of William's chaplain,the writer pulled off his mask.The discourse he had just provided,he complained,‘ought to have been insisted on by the Doctor[Burnet],rather than the seditious sermon he preached at Exon’.[64]
This counterfeit sermon is important because it was one of the first pieces we might label‘Jacobite’,in the sense of a movement opposed to Williamite power in England.Although undated,it was very probably produced in the winter of 1688-9;its author would want to respond whilst Burnet's real oratory was still fresh,and it contains no reflections on slightly later works by Burnet(such as the coronation sermon)which James's supporters would have found even more offensive.If this is right,the fake sermon was predated in the Jacobite opus only by a few pamphlets written in the actual course of William's invasion to counter his widely circulated manifesto.[65]Thus one of Jacobitism's earliest productions was a piece which bitterly satirised preaching.
During the first two decades of the eighteenth century,the sermon retained its role as a medium through which not only theological but also political messages could effectively be delivered to large audiences.It also remained a genre within which the supposedly shared values of politicoreligious groups or entire national communities could be defined and those of adversaries disputed.Sermons can even be seen as the key genre in the popularisation and polemicisation of ongoing debates on theology and political theory.Printed political sermons,published in large numbers and at reasonable prices,continued to provide a forum for political propaganda and discourse in several Western European countries,including England,the Dutch Republic,France,Prussia,Austria,and Sweden.[66]
Political preaching and controversies about sermons were thus not a specifically English phenomenon in this period.Yet,English political preaching had some peculiar features,which arose from three factors.The first was the unique division of English society in the period 1700-1720 owing to party conflicts in political life and within the established church.Sermons not only reflected the continuing politico-religious strife,they also helped to create it.Second,English preachers enjoyed a high degree of freedom of publication.It was easy for them to make use of publicity for political purposes,while their mainland European colleagues struggled under the burden of pre-publication censorship.Third,Anglican preaching was already undergoing changes in the form,style,and content of sermons.The transformation had begun during the latter half of the seventeenth century,and it was this very model of‘Latitudinarian’preaching that later inspired clerics in continental Europe to adopt new strategies of preaching.Some English preachers were already replacing the heated dogmatic disputes of the Reformation and the religious wars with subjects that their contemporaries could regard as relevant.
Two notorious sermons in this period warrant further attention:both contributed to the political‘rage of party’,fought between the rival factions of Whig and Tory.The first instance is that of Henry Sacheverell(1674-1724),a fervent high churchman and Tory,who presented his unusually provocative,anti-dissenting,and anti-republican ideas of proper ecclesiology and political theory in a sermon The Perils of False Brethren,given before the Lord Mayor of London and the local political elite in 1709 on the double anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot and the Glorious Revolution.This particular sermon brought the ideological disagreements of all parties to light in a unique manner,particularly as it was disseminated effectively in pamphlet form,its author prosecuted by the Whig administration,and its content consequently widely debated in public.It was followed by rioting,a decline in the popularity of the government,a change of administration,and a Tory victory in the ensuing general election.Sacheverell's case,if any,demonstrates how political acts could still be carried out by means of preaching.
The second,equally controversial sermon,was given by a low-church bishop,Benjamin Hoadly(1676-1761).Preaching before George I in court on 31 March 1717 in a sermon entitled The Nature of the Kingdom,or Church,of Christ,Hoadly took up the sensitive constitutional issue of the relationship between ecclesiastical and secular government.He argued in favour of the separate characters of religion and politics and criticised what he saw as the‘popish’government of the Church of England.Such views provoked fierce reactions at a time when a change in the religious policy of a new Whig administration was expected.This happened soon after the accession of George I(formerly a Lutheran)and the crushing of a Jacobite rising in 1715-16.The arguments of Hoadly's sermon were politicised to the highest degree by high churchmen and by some low-church polemists as well.The controversy led to the suspension of the activities of the lower house of Convocation,which the lower clergy of the high church had used as a political forum.In that sense,at least,the political impact of the sermon was remarkable.Other developments have also been explained by referring to the controversy.
The character of the political debate would change quite decisively after 1720.Religious concepts were no longer so frequently or violently used in political texts,and alternative secular vocabularies came into wider use in political debates.A gradual separation between religious and political discourses began.[67]This meant that political sermons were no longer quite so influential in setting the tone of public discourse.Throughout the eighteenth century,however,the secular authorities in various European countries would continue to impose a duty on leading clergymen to popularise what they regarded as common values,and some of these preachers would use the occasions to put forward points that were political as well as religious.[68]