In 1996, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper published an article on the reception in Great Britain of the English translation of the Neapolitan jurist Pietro Giannone's Dell'Istoria Civile del Regno di Napoli, first published in 1723.Footnote 1 Trevor-Roper was particularly fascinated by the origins of this translation, undertaken by a mysterious military man, Captain James Ogilvie, with the encouragement of an English Nonjuror, Richard Rawlinson.Footnote 2 For Trevor-Roper, the two men's involvement in promoting Giannone's work exemplified the role of Jacobites in spreading the Enlightenment, a process he thought to have been especially notable in Scotland.Footnote 3
It is not my intention here to criticize Trevor-Roper's interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, which has found strong challengers.Footnote 4 This essay turns back to an aspect of The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, the English edition of Giannone's work, noted by eighteenth-century commentators but largely ignored since among British historians: its insistence on the separation of religious from civil authority. The importance of this theme helps to explain the interest in Giannone on the part of Rawlinson, who, like other English and Scottish Nonjurors, advocated ecclesiastical independency. The reception of the Civil History in England, however, also affected a later proponent of separation, Joseph Priestley. A materialist and Unitarian, he held very different religious and political views from the Nonjurors. Despite Priestley's differences with them, the Nonjurors can be regarded as intermediaries, although not as protagonists, in a process of intellectual appropriation that furthered the development of a pan-European and transatlantic Enlightenment.
The first three sections of this essay trace the reasons for English Nonjuring interest in Giannone, while the final section assesses later English reactions to Giannone's work. Giannone's argument about church and state was widely recognized but seldom defended by English writers. Priestley, however, strongly embraced it, in part because his radical Dissenting principles placed him in a similar relationship to state authority as the Nonjurors. The intellectual journey of the Civil History in Britain, and later in America, involved a series of transitions, appropriations, and even misinterpretations, through which the book was set to purposes its author had not intended. These episodes suggest that separation of church and state was an idea promoted by minority voices within European religious subcultures throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the devout perspective of protecting an autonomous church.
Rawlinson and Giannone
Richard Rawlinson, the man who introduced British audiences to Giannone, was not a typical Nonjuror. His father was a wealthy vintner and Tory politician who became lord mayor of London. Educated at St. Paul's School, Eton, and St. John's College, Cambridge, Richard turned away from trade and threw himself into antiquarian studies. In 1716, he was secretly ordained by the Nonjuring bishop Jeremy Collier, making him one of the few Nonjurors who had not entered holy orders through the established Church of England. Backed by family money, he needed no benefice and no patrons.Footnote 5 Three years later, he began a long academic tour of western and southern Europe. His obsession with the foundations of the English national church inspired him to determine what set it apart from Catholicism. He learned Italian, collected medieval seal matrices, and hung around the fringes of the Stuart court in Rome. This Grand Tour, which lasted until 1725, was far more serious and extended than the youthful jaunts of other English gentlemen.Footnote 6
Rawlinson kept a diary during his European sojourn that filled ten small volumes, two of them now missing. Although he spent time at Naples in 1721, and was a skeptical witness to the liquefaction of the dried blood of San Gennaro, his diaries mention no contacts with Pietro Giannone or any other Neapolitan writer. His Italian was by then proficient, but he tended to spend his time with other British tourists. His principal pleasure was quietly to record the antiquities he saw in Roman Catholic churches. This was precisely what he was doing in the Conventual Church of St. John the Baptist in Valetta, Malta, on 8 January (New Style) 1724. His diary entry of that date is brief: “This day went the whole day in S. Giovanni, in the evening came the Great Master [António Manoel de Vilhena] attended by all his pages and in the Chappell of the Madonna said the Rosary and Litanie before the Virgins picture exposed.”Footnote 7 Rawlinson gave no indication in his diary that he had secretly removed a handwritten paper, which he later called a “Bull,” from the door of the church.Footnote 8 It was in fact a decree or “solemn prohibition” by the Congregation of the Holy Office—the Roman Inquisition—condemning Pietro Giannone's Istoria Civile as containing “very many false, rash, scandalous, seditious doctrines and propositions, in sum calumnies injurious to all orders of the Church, and all the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, especially the Holy Apostolic See.”Footnote 9 Rawlinson's daring act in removing the decree established a vicarious attachment to the Neapolitan historian that eventually made him Giannone's chief British promoter.
Once back in England, Rawlinson made much of the document. To impress his friends, he attached to the original bull a handwritten note that emphasized the danger he had been in: “This I took from the door of the Church of St. John Baptist (belonging to the Order of Knights) in the City of Valletta [sic] in the Island of Malta on January 8, 1724/5. And to discern the person a reward was offered the next day by the Grand Master and the Popes Nuntio.” He had copies of the bull printed on vellum and on paper.Footnote 10 As if to show the breadth of his intellectual connections, he solicited attestations of the genuineness of his copies from John Locker, translator of the works of Voltaire, and from the high church antiquarian Samuel Drake.Footnote 11 Rawlinson then printed the bull in a popular London newspaper, the Daily Courant.Footnote 12 Clearly, he considered this an important piece of paper—evidence of his resistance to clerical oppression as well as of his Anglican churchmanship.
Rawlinson gave further evidence of his admiration for Giannone in his translation of a massive reference work, A New Method of Studying History by the French abbé Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy.Footnote 13 The abbé was no fan of Giannone. The French and Italian editions of the New Method contained hostile comments on the Istoria Civile: “There are good things, but mixed with many blunders, and with a continuous contempt for Ecclesiastical things.”Footnote 14 By contrast, Rawlinson's 1728 translation of Lenglet substituted an admiring reference to Giannone's work, which was “much valued by all who have any Regard to the publick Liberty against the Papal Encroachments, which this Author very justly, and with equal Warmth opposes.”Footnote 15 Rawlinson implied that Giannone might be a model for the English Country opposition, which saw itself as fighting for “publick Liberty” against ministerial despotism.
Rawlinson added, “A Proposal has been lately publish'd for a Translation by Captain Ogilvie.”Footnote 16 The English edition of the Istoria Civile appeared the following year. The London press loudly announced its coming. The first subscription proposal, touting the work's “Impartiality and Freedom,” appeared in the Daily Journal in October 1727.Footnote 17 Subscriptions were taken at coffeehouses throughout London, and by booksellers in London and Edinburgh. Early in 1729, the publication of the first volume was announced in the Daily Journal as well as the Caledonian Mercury of Edinburgh. Among its printers was the future novelist Samuel Richardson, whose participation indicated that this was a high-quality production—in fact, each volume cost £1.11.0 to subscribers.Footnote 18 The Craftsman, leading journal of the Country opposition, carried advertisements for the first volume in April 1729 and the second in January 1730. The two-volume set was advertised in the Jacobite Fog's Weekly Journal in 1732.Footnote 19 Rawlinson, an avid reader of newspapers, was doubtless behind this flurry of publicity.
A different English translation of the Istoria Civile had already been serialized in the literary magazine Historia Litteraria, which provided an English reader's guide to recent European writings.Footnote 20 Its compiler, Archibald Bower, was a convert from Catholicism who had lived in Italy, but he moved in Whig circles in England and did not know Rawlinson. His magazine described the Istoria Civile enthusiastically as “this Book, that has made such a noise in the World, and is thought by the Learned to be one of the best Histories ever written.”Footnote 21 Bower's English version highlighted Giannone's quarrels with Catholic apologists and did not include the chapters of the Istoria Civile that dealt with separation of church and state.Footnote 22 Rawlinson took advantage of this publicity in seeking subscribers for the 1729 edition, but his interest in Giannone went beyond anti-Catholicism.
Rawlinson underlined his role in the English edition by including in a postscript a brief account of his Malta adventure.Footnote 23 However, the translation itself was not his but was the work of a certain Captain James Ogilvie of Warwick-Court, Suffolk Street, behind the Haymarket Theatre.Footnote 24 Who was Captain Ogilvie? Certainly, he was not a sea captain who happened to read the Istoria Civile on a voyage to Novaya Zemlya, as an early biographer of Giannone suggested.Footnote 25 Nor was he, as has sometimes been claimed, an officer in the North British Fusiliers, who fought at Blenheim.Footnote 26 His connection with Lucius Henry Cary, 6th Viscount Falkland, to whom he dedicated the second volume of his translation, gives Ogilvie's identity away. During the War of the Spanish Succession, Falkland served as a captain with the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Third Scots Regiment of Foot Guards. In May 1711, James Ogilvie was appointed lieutenant to Falkland, with the rank and pay of captain—in effect, an aide-de-camp. His commission was renewed in 1715, and he left the regiment in 1727.Footnote 27
By this time, his former commander, Falkland, had become an ardent Jacobite. The viscount's existing letters to the Stuart court begin in April 1721. He received an earldom from James III in December 1722, a few months after contributing £500 to support a conspiracy to restore the Stuart claimant.Footnote 28 James Ogilvie traveled with Falkland to Italy and the two are referred to in the Stuart Papers under the code names “Roberts” and “Stepney.”Footnote 29 They were noticed together in Rome by the British spy Baron Stosch in October 1723; they left for Naples that month and visited the city again a year later.Footnote 30 Rawlinson's diaries do not mention either man. Falkland later converted to Catholicism and married a daughter of the Earl of Dillon, commander of an Irish regiment in the French army, before dying in 1730. His friend Captain Ogilvie seems to have expired in October 1760 at Charing Cross, “after languishing an Invalid the last 20 years of his life.”Footnote 31 A “grand funeral-procession” accompanied him to his grave at St. Martin's in the Fields.Footnote 32
The captain was evidently well connected. The list of 344 subscribers to the Civil History has dazzled many readers, among them Giannone himself. It contains the names of the archbishops of Canterbury and York, thirty-eight peers, and twenty baronets, including the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. No fewer than fifty Scottish army officers subscribed.Footnote 33 As Trevor-Roper pointed out, the list is top-heavy with Episcopalian Scots from the Northeast Lowlands. Although they included many Jacobites, the subscribers were not politically one-sided, and leading Whig politicians are found among them.Footnote 34 Booksellers sought “prestige” subscribers of both parties in order to boost sales of remaining copies. The broad appeal of the book suggests that its main selling point was anti-Catholicism, a prejudice in which the British elite was more or less united. This emphasis may have enhanced the success of the translation, but it reflected neither the intentions of the author nor those of Rawlinson. I turn to the work itself in order to explain how its publicity in Britain was based from the first on a measure of misreading.
The Civil History of Naples
Pietro Giannone was born in 1676 at Ischitella, in the northeast part of the Kingdom of Naples, the son of a speziale, or apothecary. Educated at the University of Naples in both civil and canon law, Giannone became a successful jurist with connections to the viceregal administration.Footnote 35 Like his mentor Gaetano Argento, he defended state authority against the secular claims of the church. From the late seventeenth century, Neapolitan civil lawyers sought to restrict ecclesiastical privilege to the spiritual domain, effectively recognizing two spheres of jurisdiction.Footnote 36 Giannone also attended meetings of the Accademia Medina Coeli, a society of intellectuals that included Giambattista Vico and Paolo Mattia Doria, although his views differed widely from theirs. Doria, for example, published in 1709 a treatise on “civil life” that equated religious and civic virtue: “It is not simply that religion is ordered by politics, but indeed that politics is that which is ordered by religion.”Footnote 37 This position was diametrically opposed to the opinions put forward by Giannone.
The young jurist's early legal studies concentrated on the period of Constantine the Great, who “wanted to take charge of the exterior polity and governance of the Church” and treated canon law in the same way as the pontifical edicts of the pagan empire.Footnote 38 Giannone saw this period as a crucial time of change for the church, subordinating it to a civil power that it would later imitate. Realizing that his views on religious authority would cause offense, he sought the protection of the viceregal administration for his Istoria Civile, which he dedicated to Emperor Charles VI. The work was nevertheless condemned at once by monks and priests, who spread the false rumor that its author had mocked the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro.Footnote 39 Excommunicated by the archdiocese, despised by the “vile Neapolitan populace” who thought him to be “a horrible and frightful demon,” Giannone fled from Naples in May 1723, three months before the condemnation of the Istoria Civile by the Inquisition. The Holy Office was not recognized in Naples, however, meaning that the prohibition, in Giannone's words, “could not have any effect.”Footnote 40
The church's furious reaction to the Istoria Civile was provoked largely by Giannone's sustained assault on the temporal privileges of the pope and the clergy. Equally alarming to the church, however, was the author's painstaking legal and historical approach. Unlike so many previous critics, Giannone seemed neither a heretic nor an unbeliever, and at this point he did not openly question fundamental Catholic doctrines of salvation. He showed no sympathy for the “Folly” and “Poison” of Lutheranism, defending the proscription of heretics as a matter of public order, although he was opposed to the remedy put forward by a sixteenth-century Spanish viceroy, namely the establishment of the Inquisition.Footnote 41 Giannone may have been more sympathetic to aspects of contemporary French philosophy. His emphasis on “clear and distinct ideas” indicated the influence of René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche, while his “genealogical” method of tracing an issue from its origin through a range of different historical responses may register a debt to Pierre Gassendi.Footnote 42
Nevertheless, Giannone's attitude toward church and state was rooted in Neapolitan jurisprudence. He summed it up in chapter 2 of book 1 of the Istoria Civile, dealing with the first three centuries of ecclesiastical polity, down to Constantine.Footnote 43 Pagan societies, he argued, did not acknowledge spiritual and temporal power as separate, “because they made Religion only serve for the Preservation of the State, and did not direct it, as we do, to another more sublime End.” Christianity “made known unto us two Powers in this World, by whom it was necessary it should be govern'd: the Spiritual and the Temporal . . . each of them having its different Objects.”Footnote 44 The object of the state was worldly power, the object of the church eternal life in the world hereafter. To be sure, the two powers must have “a Harmony and Agreement compos'd of different Materials,” by which the state may assist the church, and the church “may bind and unite the Affection of the People to the Obedience of the Prince.” Yet the two powers remained distinct in their goals, and too much interference of one with the other would lead to an imbalance within the earthly polity as well as in the otherworldly aims of religion. Giannone stated the point succinctly: “It is God, who hath put these two Powers in different hands, and hath made them both Sovereign in their Kind, that the one might serve as a Counterpoise to the other, for fear that their unbounded Sovereignty might degenerate into Irregularity and Tyranny. As it happens when the Temporal Sovereignty infringeth the Laws of God, the Spiritual opposeth it immediately; and in like Manner, the Temporal withstandeth the Spiritual, which is most acceptable to God when ’tis done in a lawful Way.”Footnote 45 Giannone did not deny the sovereignty of the church, but he gave it a nontemporal realm of influence. The church could not inflict earthly punishments, possess wealth, or meddle with politics.
It followed that those who exercised the spiritual power should not be men of wealth or property. Giannone argued that spiritual power “ought to be esteem'd much more worthy than that of the Princes of the Earth,” because temporal power originated “by way of Office or Administration.” Before these offices existed, “the Sovereignty, or to speak more properly, the perfect Liberty belonged to the State as a collective Body” (“appartenendo la sovranità, o per meglio dire, la libertà perfetta allo Stato in corpo”). Since then, princes had “gained and obtain'd” what Giannone called “the publick Dominion,” and in some cases the private as well, “reducing their People to Slavery.”Footnote 46 The people, however, could reclaim their power over temporal sovereignty, as the Israelites did when they replaced their judges with a king. By contrast, ecclesiastical power “cannot be held by direct Dominion, nor convey'd by Succession, nor possess'd Hereditarily as Temporal Dominions,” which is why it was “so repugnant to common sense for the Kings and Queens of England to have assum'd to themselves the Supremacy of the Church of England, in the same manner as they assum'd the Secular Power of their Realm, as if the one depended on the other.” The “Solecism” (Ogilvie's word; Giannone uses “errore”) of Henry VIII's assumed lordship in temporal as well as spiritual matters was illustrated when his daughter Elizabeth became head of the church and “the Spiritual Sovereignty [was] fallen to the Distaff” (“caduta nella connochia”).Footnote 47 While temporal power could be exercised by a woman, spiritual authority was reserved for men. The chapter ended with a stirring evocation of its main theme: “Behold these two Powers met in Sovereignties independent the one on the other, and acknowledging only one Source, which is God; distinct, by well-fixed Limits from the Mouth of our Saviour, in such a Manner, that the one hath no occasion to interfere with the other.”Footnote 48
The origins of Giannone's argument about the separation of church and state might be sought in Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, and the fourteenth-century struggles between the pope and the emperor.Footnote 49 Unlike his medieval forerunners, however, Giannone did not argue for the worldly dominion of temporal over spiritual power. On the contrary, in accordance with other Neapolitan jurists, he depicted them as fundamentally distinct. Neither could legitimately exercise ultimate authority over the other. Giannone called this ultimate authority “sovereignty,” a term derived from Jean Bodin that was in wide circulation by the early eighteenth century.Footnote 50 His concept of a separate ecclesiastical sovereignty contrasted with Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, where the temporal sovereign holds sway over spiritual matters—but at this point in his career, Giannone was not deeply engaged with Hobbes.Footnote 51 Giannone also recognized a “private Dominion” resembling Locke's sphere of individual conscience, although he wrote little about it in the Istoria Civile and had probably not yet read Locke.Footnote 52
The separationist framework of the Istoria Civile was ignored by the Jesuit Giuseppe Sanfelice, who in 1728 attacked it for its criticism of the clergy, which he equated with heresy.Footnote 53 Giannone responded with a blistering satirical counterattack, the Professione di Fede or “Profession of Faith.” In it, he mockingly declared his conversion to the view that the pope was “lord of all the world, not less of the spiritual than of the temporal,” with such “high, unrestricted, sovereign and unlimited power” that he should be called a “Vice God.” Having created this monstrosity of absolute dominion, Giannone then demolished it piece by piece, as injurious to earthly princes, insulting to God, and historically false to boot.Footnote 54 Rawlinson obtained a handwritten copy of the unpublished Professione, which he must have relished.Footnote 55 He may not have been aware that Giannone's influence in Vienna and on the Consiglio Collaterale, the Neapolitan viceroy's supreme court, was sufficient to obtain a condemnation of Sanfelice's book as an “infamous libel, foolish, impudent and injurious to the regal power.” It was banned throughout the kingdom of Naples.Footnote 56 The incident underlines Giannone's prominent role in the recurring political struggles between the papacy and the Habsburgs. By 1729, although still in exile, it seemed that he had triumphed over his clerical enemies.
By then he was becoming an international figure, and more sensitive about his reputation. He was particularly incensed by false statements in the French and Italian editions of Lenglet's A New Method of Studying History, writing an angry letter to Lenglet himself after reading the “ignorant” references to the alleged burning of his book by the Inquisition.Footnote 57 If Giannone had any contact with Rawlinson over this issue, it has not come to light. He only learned of Ogilvie's translation in the spring of 1730 through the Leipzig historian Johann Burchard Mencke, who sent him a copy. Although he could not understand English, Giannone was delighted to find even controversial passages to be “intact, almost as they were in the manuscript version.” Ogilvie's subscription list astonished him, as it was “not lacking in milords, archbishops, bishops, and other illustrious and lettered persons.”Footnote 58 To his brother he marveled at how English publishers “do things quickly, because they have buckets of money” (“hanno denari colla pala”).Footnote 59 Soon after, he received a request from the English bookseller Samuel Buckley, who was preparing a Latin edition of the Historiarum sui Temporis by Jacques-Auguste de Thou, an account of the French Civil Wars that matched the Istoria Civile in its criticism of the church. Giannone contributed a hard-hitting note on Neapolitan coinage bearing the motto “PERDAM BABILONIS NOMEN” (the name of Babylon will be destroyed), referring to the Roman pontiff. Again, he was apparently unaware that the compiler and editor of the edition, Thomas Carte, was a Nonjuror and friend of Rawlinson.Footnote 60
In the early 1730s, Giannone was no victim. He was at the height of his fame, a writer known throughout Europe and a pensioner of the Viennese court. Alas, the fall of Naples in 1734 to a Spanish army was followed by the loss of Giannone's Habsburg pension and a failed attempt to establish himself at Venice. After wandering through northern Italy, he settled in Protestant Geneva, where he worked on Il Triregno, in which he represented the immortality of the soul as an invention of the church designed to increase its control.Footnote 61 Here he was venturing into outright doctrinal heresy—but the treatise was never finished. Lured into Piedmontese territory at Easter 1736 by a desire to attend Catholic mass, he was kidnapped by the authorities and imprisoned. Under examination by the Inquisition, he abjured his past opinions.Footnote 62 In 1745, the Franciscan Giovanni Antonio Bianchi published a sustained attack on the Istoria Civile, bluntly asserting that God approved civil laws through the sanction of the church. Temporal and sacred power, therefore, were entirely dependent.Footnote 63
Giannone remained incarcerated within the citadel of Turin until his death in May 1748. Considered a martyr by many intellectuals, he became a figure of political significance, the prophet of “enlightened absolutism,” which placed the temporal interests of the state over those of the church.Footnote 64 According to Bernardo Tanucci, the advisor of Charles III, Giannone was “the evangelist of the ministero togato [reforming ministry].”Footnote 65 Yet Giannone had argued for a balance between the sovereignties of church and state, not for state control of religion. The focus of his thinking, moreover, had always been Roman Catholicism. He had little interest in the churches of England or Scotland and never wrote a word about the Revolution of 1688. Nevertheless, his initial impact on the British Isles was due in part to the resemblance of his ideas to those of the Nonjurors, the “faithful and orthodox remnant” of the churches of England and Scotland that stayed loyal to the exiled Stuarts.Footnote 66 Unwittingly, the unorthodox Catholic Giannone became an important voice in a debate over the destiny of two Protestant churches for whose theology he had little sympathy.
The Nonjurors and Ecclesiastical Independency
To understand the appeal of the Istoria Civile to Richard Rawlinson means going back to the writings of the early Protestant reformers. For Martin Luther, Christians were members of “two kingdoms,” spiritual and temporal, each of them entirely distinct. Jean Calvin strove to harmonize the “two kingdoms” in terms of the role of the civil magistrate, but he still kept them apart, arguing, for example, that a king was not suited for the headship of an ecclesiastical polity.Footnote 67 In England, however, the Protestant Reformation elevated the monarch to governor of the church, kept bishops in the House of Lords, placed the judgment of religious offenses like recusancy in the hands of secular courts, and generally obscured the dividing line between ecclesiastical and civil authority.Footnote 68 Richard Hooker, the most influential English theologian of the late 1500s, explicitly denied the independency of church and state, in response to Calvinists who imagined “walls of separation” between them. In a Christian society, Hooker wrote, the church and the commonwealth were “one society.”Footnote 69
Despite Hooker's strenuous denial, the rise of sacerdotal and Arminian theology in the early 1600s, followed by the trauma of the civil wars and the tolerationist stance of Charles II, helped to convince some prominent Anglican clergymen—among them Henry Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, and Peter Heylyn—that ecclesiastical and civil authority should be separated. They advocated the “divine right of bishops,” meaning leaders of the church owed their positions to God rather than to the king.Footnote 70 They were vague as to what ecclesiastical powers this left the monarch, if any. Their approach attracted some Restoration bishops but never commanded enough support among the clergy to put the royal supremacy in danger.Footnote 71 While the reign of the Catholic King James II shook the confidence of many Anglicans in royal authority, the accession of William and Mary strengthened the dependency of ecclesiastical on civil power. It also brought the issue of the “two kingdoms” into public debate, through the imposition of new oaths of allegiance in 1689. About four hundred clergymen of the Church of England, including seven bishops, refused the oaths, becoming Nonjurors. They saw themselves as continuing to hold their dignities and titles, although they had officially been deprived of them by the temporal authority of the new monarchs.Footnote 72
Some Nonjurors publicly objected to their ousting as a violation of ecclesiastical rights. The dean of Worcester, George Hickes, who regarded his office as a personal freehold, posted an angry protest on the choir door of the cathedral.Footnote 73 His colleague Jeremy Collier fumed that “even the Inferior Clergy are, with reference to their Spiritual Authority, independent of Princes.”Footnote 74 Less dramatically, the learned Nonjuror Henry Dodwell complained that the secular magistrate, meaning the monarch, “cannot, by the Constitutions of the Gospel, pretend to any Right, whether direct, or indirect, for depriving our Bishops of their Spiritual Power.”Footnote 75 He praised the early bishop Cyprian as a paragon of the God-given rights of bishops. Dodwell was reluctant, however, to renounce the royal supremacy altogether. Nonjurors tended to disparage the “usurping” power of the new monarchs while upholding the “legitimate” authority of James II. They even negotiated with the exiled king in 1694 to obtain approval for the secret episcopal consecrations of Hickes and Thomas Wagstaffe. The consecrations were made public decades later, when Hickes's admirer Richard Rawlinson issued an account of them.Footnote 76
Nonetheless, after the death of James II in 1701, the English Nonjuring schism moved decisively toward a doctrine of separation. The shift may have been accelerated by the Convocation controversy. Convocation, the assembly of the Church of England, had been hastily dissolved in 1689, after the lower house of clergy discussed whether the deprived bishops should take their seats.Footnote 77 A trumpet-blast in favor of recalling it was issued in 1697 by Francis Atterbury, whose Letter to a Convocation-Man asserted that civil magistracy and ecclesiastical authority were distinct: “The One, relates to the Peace, Order, Health, and Prosperity of Man in this Life, as a sociable Creature; the other, concerns his eternal State.”Footnote 78 Yet the Letter stopped short of declaring ecclesiastical independence from the state. “The Liberties of the Church,” admitted Atterbury, “do, in great measure, run parallel to those of the State: and Both of them must, according to the Nature and Constitution of our English Government, stand or fall together.” Footnote 79 He would not give up the church establishment or the royal supremacy.Footnote 80
Atterbury's call was picked up by more zealous advocates of independency on both sides of the Atlantic. In South Carolina, a former Nonjuror who had taken the oaths, Edward Marston, led a 1705 campaign against attempts by the colonial governor to remove clergymen through lay commissions, claiming that they overstepped secular authority over the church.Footnote 81 Marston was unsuccessful, but his stubborn views were amplified by the Nonjurors in England. The provocative Jeremy Collier revived the “two kingdoms” argument in his influential Ecclesiastical History of 1714, writing, “by divine Appointment, the Church and State are Two Bodies entirely distinct.”Footnote 82 Collier scathingly condemned temporal encroachments on clerical authority, and went so far as to criticize Henry VIII's royal supremacy.
George Hickes was even more hard-hitting than Collier, although he did not allow his main salvo against state control to be fired until after his death. The appearance in 1716 of Hickes's Constitution of the Catholick Church set off a theological wildfire that burned for years. According to Hickes, the church was “a Spiritual Society or Incorporation, of which Christ is the Head”; it had existed independently for three centuries before any Christian secular authority appeared. As Cyprian had declared, bishops were “Successors to the Apostles” under Christ, “by Commission deriv'd from him, Spiritual Lords and Princes.”Footnote 83 Hickes admitted the “Coalescence or Union of the Church with the State,” but this consisted merely of the admission of temporal rulers into the Christian fold. When the state persecuted the church, the union was broken.Footnote 84 If the state had no right to invade the realm of the church, then conversely, no more did the church have a right “to Usurp it over the State or invade its Temporal Rights which it derives from God.”Footnote 85 Strikingly, Hickes also conceded the existence of “Civil Rights” that the church should not infringe. “In short, Sir,” Hickes concluded, “either the Church is independent of the State, or it is not.” If not, “then the Members of it are a part of the Civil Constitution, and by Consequence as precarious a Society as any other that is so; and . . . may be disfranchis'd or discorporated at Pleasure by the Sovereign Civil Power.”Footnote 86 A church established within the state meant a church in perpetual danger.
The language of separation in Hickes's Constitutions drew from Dodwell and other Restoration divines, but it also cited a non-Anglican source: a 1686 study of the early church, written by the French theologian Louis Ellies Du Pin, chair of classical philosophy at the Collège Royal de France.Footnote 87 Du Pin was a committed proponent of the Gallican liberties, by which the French church detached itself from the temporal authority of the pope. He toyed with Jansenism, which led to his being deprived of his chair, a situation that can only have appealed to Hickes. Du Pin's writings gained him a wide body of admirers, including Jeremy Collier, who praised him as “learned” and “impartial.”Footnote 88 Even Atterbury's antagonist William Wake, by then archbishop of Canterbury, corresponded with Du Pin in 1718–19 about the possible reunion of the Gallican and Anglican churches.Footnote 89
Hickes's Constitutions quoted at length from book 7 of Du Pin's De antiqua Ecclesiae Disciplina, in which the French author identified church and state as “two societies” and insisted on their complete independence. “There are two great and excellent Societies among men, Civil and Ecclesiastical,” Du Pin wrote, “which . . . tend by different means to different ends, and clearly uphold powers of a different kind; evidently, the end of Ecclesiastical Society is eternal life, and the end of Civil Society is certainly the Peace and Tranquility of the Republic.”Footnote 90 Hickes heartily endorsed this opinion—as did Giannone, although he used the more legalistic “two powers” (“due potenze”) rather than “two societies.”Footnote 91 The writings of “the incomparable Du Pin” were among the texts most consulted by the Neapolitan jurist. He cited book 7 of De antiqua Ecclesiae Disciplina in the chapter of the Istoria Civile on the separation of church and state, and he again drew heavily on Du Pin's history of religious thought in the Triregno.Footnote 92
Du Pin was not a typical Gallican. As summed up in the Four Articles of 1682, mainstream Gallicanism envisioned a national church within which the monarch held unquestioned rights.Footnote 93 Du Pin, however, minimized the king's influence over the church, insisting on a complete separation of powers. In a 1707 edition of the Four Articles, Du Pin boldly appended his own “two societies” argument, presenting it as a proof of the first Article concerning the independence of church and state, when in fact it went much further in separating them.Footnote 94 For Du Pin, the Gallican church was a realization of the “two societies” doctrine, based on a spiritual independence untainted by temporal sovereignty. That this was not the actual case was proven in 1719, when the heavy hand of the French state, brought to bear on a spiritual matter, forced Du Pin to break off his correspondence with William Wake.
Like Du Pin and Giannone, Hickes imagined a church whose power lay solely in the spiritual realm. This had alarming implications for a national religious body. Could it impose uniformity on those who chose to stand outside it, or would this infringe on “Civil Rights”? Although he did not admit it, Hickes's separate church resembled a voluntary society—which was what the Nonjurors had become—rather than a national religion. To be sure, this aspect of Hickes's Constitutions was not recognized by its critics, who were instead outraged by the book's exaltation of episcopacy. Foremost among them was the Whig bishop of Bangor, Benjamin Hoadly, who answered Hickes by vindicating individual conscience as a guide to religious truth, while justifying the power of civil magistrates over the church.Footnote 95 Nonjurors and High Churchmen immediately shot back at Hoadly in what became known as the Bangorian Controversy. The Nonjuror Thomas Brett used the phrase “Independency of the Church” as the title of an anti-Hoadly pamphlet. Brett openly mocked the royal supremacy, ridiculing “this strange and before unheard-of Title,” supreme head of the church, claimed by Henry VIII.Footnote 96 Another critic of Hoadly, the high church clergyman Matthias Earbery, maintained that “Christian Society is an Institution which does not interfere with the State,” a sentence that could have been culled directly from Du Pin. Jure divino bishops were consequently no threat to those who differed from them. “Civil Society,” according to Earbery, should be no more affected by bishops “than the Affairs of our Earth are affected by the Transactions in the Moon.”Footnote 97 While this remark may have seemed incredible to those who recalled the last half-century of high church involvement in state affairs, it typified Hoadly's opponents—among them, the young Richard Rawlinson—for whom Christian and civil society were two different things.Footnote 98
The Bangorian Controversy highlighted the Nonjuring case against the alliance between church and state, but the Nonjurors could not win the debate. No matter how strong their appeal to sympathetic High Churchmen, they represented a segregated communion that could not claim to represent the national religion. Besides, they had already begun to tear themselves apart over the Usages, in a dispute that pitted adherents of pre-Reformation prayers and practices (the Usages) not found in the Anglican Prayer Book against those who did not wish to move the Nonjuring “remnant” away from the accepted liturgy. For Nonjurors like Collier, the Usages were the ultimate declaration of doctrinal separation from the state-run church. Rawlinson, on the other hand, rejected the Usages and feared alienation from other Anglicans, for which he was branded an Erastian by Thomas Brett.Footnote 99 By 1729, the bitterly divided English Nonjurors were in danger of becoming irrelevant. The publication of Giannone's Civil History did nothing to rescue them from disunity or deepening obscurity. When in 1742 Rawlinson and others wrote to James III, informing him of recent Nonjuring consecrations, the exiled king did not even know who these men were, let alone that they were bishops.Footnote 100
By then, William Warburton had published his triumphalist justification of the Hanoverian status quo, The Alliance between Church and State. In it, Warburton represented religion as a system of morality rather than spirituality, but one lacking the coercive power held by the state. Initially independent, church and state had been driven into an alliance that gave the church financial security and political clout, while the state gained the backing of religion. A less edifying example of cold-blooded deal making could hardly be imagined, but at least Warburton had provided a practical rationale for the existing structure of the church.Footnote 101 While his confirmation of the supremacy of state over church went too far for many Anglican clergymen, it was difficult for them to deny that a mutually beneficial relationship existed between the “two societies.”Footnote 102
Warburton may have assumed that Nonjuring critics of the church-state alliance were mostly defunct, but he reckoned without the Scottish Nonjuring Church, which had a longer life than did its English counterpart. After bitter struggles over independency, the Scottish Episcopalians arrived at an agreement in 1732 that ended consultation with the exiled Stuart king over episcopal appointments and allowed presbyters to elect new bishops when given an episcopal mandate.Footnote 103 This upheld “the catholic principle” expressed in a 1726 statement by the presbyters of Edinburgh, asserting “the intrinsic powers of the church against secular invasion and lay-encroachment.”Footnote 104 Ecclesiastical independency was strongly supported by Episcopalians in the Northeast Lowlands, home of many subscribers to Giannone's Civil History.Footnote 105 It remained fundamental to Scottish Episcopalianism throughout the eighteenth century and was bequeathed to the American Episcopal Church in November 1784 when three Scottish bishops consecrated Samuel Seabury, the first bishop of the new United States. Seabury, however, had been an advocate for establishment before the American Revolution, and he accepted ecclesiastical independency with reluctance.Footnote 106 Giannone's idea of “two societies” would be defended in the United States not by Seabury but by an expatriate English writer who belonged to a far more radical confessional tradition: Joseph Priestley.
Priestley and the Separation of Church and State
In spite of its long list of English subscribers, Giannone's Civil History received a muted reception in England. Only after a quarter century had passed was its argument for a separate religious power fully examined in print, and roundly condemned. That negative assessment was made by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, chief polemicist of the Country opposition and a writer often associated with the Enlightenment. During his checkered career, Bolingbroke had been the darling of backbench Tories, the Pretender's secretary of state, an historian, and a friend of French philosophes. His diatribe against Giannone was included in his posthumous Philosophical Works, which appeared in 1754, to the horror of a public that now suddenly recognized the face of an outright deist.Footnote 107
Bolingbroke devoted one of his final essays to the issue of “authority in matters of religion,” including whether civil and ecclesiastical societies were separate.Footnote 108 His answer showed that he had read Hickes as well as Du Pin and the Civil History and thoroughly disapproved of them all. The gospels, he maintained, gave no authority to the church; to maintain otherwise was to “beg the question most absurdly, as our protestant writers, and the least papal of yours [the essay was addressed to Alexander Pope, a Catholic], such as DU PIN and GIANNONE, that I may quote a lawyer as well as a divine, have done. They supposed that CHRIST established a society distinct from the civil.” The self-governance of any social body, in Bolingbroke's view, depended on powers of coercion, which the church lacked. “I know that the trite distinction between temporal and spiritual is always at hand,” sniffed the viscount, “But I ask, is this power coercive or not?”Footnote 109 If not, then it was nonexistent.
Bolingbroke equated separation with “the divine institution” of episcopacy, culled from the writings of Cyprian, “first a magician, and afterwards a father of the Christian church, down to that learned bigot DODWELL, who wrote dissertations on him.” Giannone “carries these notions so far, that he lies open to ridicule in this particular, how respectable an author soever he be in general.” Bolingbroke particularly mocked Giannone for proposing that while priests might enjoy secular posts, no civil officer should be given a place in the church, because “a king cannot be raised up to the exercise of ecclesiastical [power], no, not to that of a country curate.” He professed to be scandalized that such bigoted views could be propagated in the eighteenth century.Footnote 110
Bolingbroke was unfair to Giannone, who never argued for putting civil government into the hands of clergymen. Yet the viscount was just as hostile to Warburton's “groundless and whimsical notion” of an alliance between church and state, which led to “a joint usurpation on the liberties of mankind.”Footnote 111 The early church had been distorted by this pseudo-alliance into a papal monarchy, which proceeded to usurp civil sovereignty. Bolingbroke proposed instead a Hobbesian level of ecclesiastical subordination: “To make government effectual to all the good purposes of it, there must be a religion; this religion must be national; and this national religion must be maintained in reputation and reverence; all other religions or sects must be kept too low to become the rivals of it.”Footnote 112 Bolingbroke endorsed a wholly dependent church whose existence was a matter of national security rather than spiritual truth.
Bolingbroke read Giannone in the context of high church arguments about ecclesiastical power, which he despised. Twenty-two years later, Edward Gibbon showed more sensitivity to Giannone's historical interpretations but was equally critical of the “two societies” theory, which he associated with religious fanaticism. Like Bolingbroke, Gibbon was eager to suppress a personal history tinged with Toryism and Jacobitism. Raised in a high church household, his youthful conversion to Catholicism convinced his father to send him for rehabilitation to Protestant Lausanne. His grandfather had subscribed to the English translation of Giannone, but the wayward grandson appears not to have noticed the work before his sojourn in Switzerland. There, he first read the Istoria Civile in the 1742 French translation.Footnote 113 He later asserted that its author “dreaded the power of the church” and was “a disciple of the Gallican school.”Footnote 114 The first observation was exaggerated, the second perceptive. In spite of these reservations, Gibbon referred to the Istoria Civile as one of the books that “may have remotely contributed to form the historian of the Roman Empire,” especially in its depiction of “the progress and abuse of sacerdotal power.”Footnote 115
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire frequently cited Giannone and occasionally pointed to his errors. It also pushed the Neapolitan historian's argument in a direction Giannone had not taken, toward a critique of religious sociability. In Gibbon's eyes, the separateness of Christian society was the main cause for the resentment and contempt of pagans: “The new converts seemed to renounce their family and country, that they might connect themselves in an indissoluble band of union with a peculiar society, which every where assumed a different character from the rest of mankind.” Gibbon hinted that the pagans were correct to see the church as antisocial.Footnote 116 He devoted extensive attention to that most obnoxious of Christian practices, martyrdom, depicting it as largely the fault of the martyrs themselves. He singled out “the zealous, the eloquent, the ambitious Cyprian” for courting “the honour of martyrdom.”Footnote 117 Gibbon was reacting to the glorification of the bishop of Carthage by Du Pin and Dodwell. He cited both authors in the notorious chapter 16 of the Decline and Fall and was subsequently accused by Henry Edwards Davis of having misrepresented the first while plagiarizing the second.Footnote 118
Like Bolingbroke, Gibbon regarded sociability as a civil rather than ecclesiastical virtue. A separate spiritual society was only imaginable as an aberration, a rejection of social values, which justified the pagan response to Christianity. After Constantine, however, the church became socialized through its alliance with the state, and while this may have brought riches, corruption and abuses of power, it also ended the “spiritual conspiracy” associated with the clergy. “When Constantine embraced the faith of the Christians,” wrote Gibbon, “he seemed to contract a perpetual alliance with a distinct and independent society; and the privileges granted or confirmed by that emperor, or by his successors, were accepted, not as the precarious favours of the court, but as the just and inalienable rights of the ecclesiastical order.”Footnote 119 Those temporal rights allowed the bishops to stand up to the authority of emperors, a stance Gibbon admired. To some extent, he had turned Giannone on his head: Constantine was no longer the wrecking-ball of ecclesiastical independency but the architect of a new social compact, the alliance of church and state.
If Bolingbroke and Gibbon represented an English Enlightenment, then it largely rejected Giannone's “two powers” argument. Yet enlightened thinking in England was more diverse than this. For Joseph Priestley, Christianity was not unsociable. Priestley wrote from a Christian viewpoint, albeit an unorthodox one. He was a man of science, a materialist, a passionate advocate of religious liberty, and a political radical. In religion, he mutated from Calvinism to Unitarianism and Socinianism, while retaining an overriding belief in the millennium, when humanity would reach perfection and Christ would return in material form.Footnote 120 Priestley's growing appreciation for Giannone's writings emerged after his own antiestablishment views had formed. He derived his defense of religious sociability in large part from Du Pin, and he gradually adopted Giannone as a guide to early ecclesiastical history, one who differed from his nemesis Gibbon. Priestley endorsed the terminology of “two societies” more readily than “two powers,” but he was aware of the high church background to ecclesiastical independency, which he awkwardly acknowledged.
Priestley had launched his first attack on ecclesiastical establishments in his 1768 Essay on the First Principles of Civil Government. He warned, “human establishments, by calling off men's attention from the commandments of God to those of men, tend to defeat the great ends of religion.” For a civil magistrate “to proscribe creeds and professions of faith, as is the case in England, what is it but to usurp a dominion over the faith of christians.”Footnote 121 At this point, Priestley's antiestablishment agenda carried no trace of Giannone; its strongest elements were Locke and religious Dissent. In the following year, Priestley republished these remarks in an overt attack on Warburton's “extravagant and sophistical” model of the alliance of church and state.Footnote 122 He added an odd comment: “The Bangorian Controversy, I believe, contains many excellent things on this subject; but the ground of the argument being changed since that time, the perusal of those pieces would be less to our purpose at present.”Footnote 123 Priestley shared a commitment to toleration with the Whig side in that debate, but the antiestablishment party consisted of Nonjurors and High Churchmen, which he did not mention. Still, regarding church councils like Convocation, Priestley confessed, “I cannot help thinking them more competent judges of articles of christian faith than any king of England, assisted, or not assisted, by an English parliament.”Footnote 124 This led him toward Du Pin's “two societies” argument, which he backed up with an ingenious example. If a civil magistrate joined a society for the promotion of natural philosophy, made laws for it, and enforced those laws with penalties, compelling the members to accept certain hypotheses, “should we not pronounce that the philosophical society was, to all intents and purposes, dissolved?”Footnote 125 In spite of Bolingbroke, a self-governing, voluntary religious society was no harder to imagine than a philosophical one, and in both cases, the imposition of state authority would ruin the basis of its sociability. “I want nothing that the state can give me,” Priestley declared, “(except to be unmolested by it).”Footnote 126
It was not until 1782 that Priestley acknowledged Giannone's Civil History as “a work of the highest authority,” in the notes to his provocatively titled History of the Corruptions of Christianity.Footnote 127 He chose to cite from the abridged French version of the Istoria Civile, edited by Giannone's Swiss friend, the Protestant minister Jacob Vernet, rather than from Ogilvie's English translation.Footnote 128 In Corruptions of Christianity, Priestley echoed Giannone's thesis that early Christian society had been undermined by contact with imperial Rome. He proposed that Christ was initially regarded as a man whose message was of physical immortality, not as a god whose death granted an afterlife to the non-existent souls of believers. Although Priestley probably did not know it, Giannone had been led in a similar direction in Il Triregno, where he presented the “religion of Noah” in materialist terms and rejected the soul's resurrection in favor of that of the body.Footnote 129 Priestley added a concluding chapter to the Corruptions of Christianity addressed to “Unbelievers, and especially to Mr. Gibbon,” accusing them of denying the rationality of Christianity.Footnote 130 This attack did not endear him to Gibbon, who replied rudely when Priestley sent him a copy of the book.Footnote 131
After the “Church and King” riots of 1791 that destroyed his Birmingham house, Priestley left Britain for the United States, where he met Thomas Jefferson.Footnote 132 The future president, in fact, later referred to the Corruptions of Christianity as “the basis of my own faith.”Footnote 133 Priestley was not, however, the originator of the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state,” which Jefferson picked up from another English Dissenting radical, James Burgh.Footnote 134 It appeared in Crito, a collection of texts Burgh published in 1767. “Build an impenetrable wall of separation between things sacred and civil,” Burgh exhorted his readers—but he said nothing more about it.Footnote 135 Echoing Locke and Hoadly, Crito opines that religion “necessarily individuates mankind; while civil power necessarily regards them as collected into societies.”Footnote 136 Priestley, by contrast, centered his faith on the defense of religious sociability rather than “individuation.”
Thomas Jefferson venerated Burgh, but he actually knew Priestley, and he could hardly ignore the dedication to him of the last major work by his friend, the General History of the Christian Church. The General History rested heavily on Giannone's Civil History, this time in Ogilvie's translation, then available in American libraries. The conflict between temporal and spiritual authority was at the center of Priestley's narrative. Priestley depicted religious society as self-governing, and even admitted to an admiration for those clerics who “really thought they were engaged in the defense of the just rights of the church, against the powers of this world.”Footnote 137 The massive General History was Priestley's final answer to “superficial thinkers” like Gibbon, and a justification of the separateness of ecclesiastical society.Footnote 138 It treated the Nonjurors gently, and stated of the Bangorian Controversy, with extraordinary even-handedness, that “the great number of publications, on both sides of the question, were the means of throwing much light on the different provinces of church and state; and the cause of religious liberty was a gainer by it.”Footnote 139 Priestley could afford to be magnanimous toward the high church party of earlier times, because its contemporary representatives, who demonized him, had moved so far away from the independency of their forebears.
In his rambling, hastily written General History, Priestley effusively described Thomas Jefferson as “the strenuous and uniform advocate of religious as well as of civil liberty.”Footnote 140 Of course, Jefferson's views on separation of church and state drew on many sources, from John Locke's Letter concerning Toleration to the writings of Roger Williams and the Baptist Isaac Backus.Footnote 141 Whether Priestley's work influenced Jefferson cannot be considered here. Certainly, Priestley did not imagine a “wall of separation” in James Burgh's terms, as a barrier dividing the collectivity of the state from individual religious views. Rather, he recognized religion as occupying a distinct, self-governing sphere of social life. The nineteenth-century American constitutional doctrine of separation, which developed out of Jeffersonian thought, challenged the interference of religion in politics but maintained the independency of churches and questioned assumptions about a “civic religion” promoted by the state.Footnote 142 In these respects, it was compatible with Priestley's reading of Giannone, although by then very few Americans would have known anything at all about the once-celebrated Neapolitan jurist.
Conclusion
The transmission of Giannone's Istoria Civile within the English-speaking world did not take the form of a smooth exchange of knowledge among the members of an international community of enlightened scholars. It consisted of a series of appropriations, distortions, and reinterpretations by intellectual actors who operated within changing political and religious situations. What they had in common was a concern with how to define an independent church. Those who initially espoused the “two societies” idea in England and Scotland were pious Episcopalians who resented the intrusions of civil authority into areas that, in their view, should have remained outside its dominion. They regarded the church as a religious society with the same status as civil society but wholly separate from it. For them, Giannone provided historical justification for concepts that High Churchmen had discussed since the Restoration. While the Nonjurors made no dent in the Church of England, they sustained an independent Episcopal church in Scotland that later had an impact in the United States. The “two societies” approach was rejected by some enlightened minds in Britain, like Bolingbroke and Gibbon, but was espoused by the radical Priestley, who recognized its powerful endorsement of religious sociability. Ultimately, Ogilvy's translation of Giannone's Civil History contributed to a debate over social organization that became an aspect of the transatlantic Enlightenment. However distantly they stood from enlightened scholarship, the Nonjurors helped to stir up uneasiness among the learned about the alliance of church and state, which even today shows no signs of coming to rest.
