The struggle for the 1832 reform act was one of the most serious political crises of modern British history. Over an eighteen-month period, it convulsed the two Houses of Parliament, electrified public debate, and mobilized popular protest on an unprecedented scale. Nottingham Castle was destroyed by rioters. The Bishop's Palace at Bristol was burned to the ground, and words like “revolution” and “civil war” entered the common currency of political rhetoric. When an antireform administration seemed possible, during the “Days of May” in 1832, the political temperature became positively volcanic. The radical agitator Francis Place thought that Britain was “within a moment of general rebellion,” while the Whig clergyman Sidney Smith wrote of “a hand-shaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear.”Footnote 1
Reform stirred emotions that few other questions could match, though it can be difficult, in retrospect, to understand why. As Philip Salmon has shown, the enfranchisement carried through by reform was barely larger than the natural growth of the 1820s. Pocket boroughs continued to thrive, corruption remained endemic, and the working-class share of the electorate probably decreased.Footnote 2 Against such meager consequences, the intensity of public feeling becomes hard to comprehend. In J. C. D. Clark's words, such criteria as “the extent of the franchise and the distribution of seats” are simply inadequate to explain “the scale of the crisis,” the “bitterness and tenacity” with which it was contested, or “the despair and triumph” at its passage.Footnote 3
The solution, of course, lies not in downgrading the reform act but in enlarging our frames of reference. Reform engaged some of the most powerful issues in British public life, from the future of the empire to the survival of the monarchy.Footnote 4 It brought into collision competing visions of patriotism and woke deep local and historical allegiances. Above all, it was charged with religious significance, tapping that strain of evangelical Protestantism that ran like an electric current through British politics. For opponents of the measure, such as the young William Gladstone, the reform bill was not just bad legislation or the disorganization of a constitutional mechanism; it was a Satanic proceeding, driven by a diabolical agency. Gladstone later acknowledged that he had seen “an element of the Anti-Christ” in the reform bill, and he fought it with the fury of a holy war. The forces of hell, he believed, had launched “their last and fiercest effort against the God of heaven.” All who promoted the bill, and all who aided it by silence, were “banded with the enemies of God.”Footnote 5
This article seeks to reestablish reform as a religious controversy. It focuses in particular on Anglican critics of reform: those, like Gladstone, for whom it was morally, as well as politically, dangerous. Particular attention is paid to the religious press and to the hundreds of sermons preached and published by the Anglican clergy. The sermon remains a neglected source in the study of nineteenth-century political history, yet it constituted one of the most pervasive forms of oratory and a crucial point of contact between “high” and “low” political culture. Published sermons were reviewed in religious periodicals and used by other clergy for their own addresses, and the quantity offered for sale suggests a significant market for these productions.Footnote 6 Sermons mobilized against reform the social, intellectual, and spiritual authority of the established church, and offered a crucial medium through which antireforming arguments were communicated.
Locating political controversies within a religious framework is by no means a novel approach. Studies of the unreformed Parliament have shown how far political alignment was inflected by religion, and the period from 1828 to 1835 is well established as a watershed in the church-state relationship.Footnote 7 The politics of the reformed era were pockmarked with religious controversy, as issues such as church rates, Maynooth, the appropriation of church revenues, and the control of patronage convulsed the religious and political establishment. Nonetheless, little attention has been paid to the reform struggle as a religious crisis. Religion is neglected in political histories of 1832, and such attention as it has received elsewhere centers on the interests of the church as an unreformed corporation.Footnote 8 Focusing chiefly on the Bishops' Bench—a body of political appointees operating in a political arena—such accounts overstate the secular forces shaping opposition to the bill. In consequence, the role of the church is held to have been largely “a silent one” in which the clergy “had nothing theological or philosophical to say.”Footnote 9
Yet this belies both the scale and the volume of Anglican protest, while narrowing the principles on which it was founded. In pulpits across the country, Anglicans deployed a powerful theological case against reform. They mobilized against their opponents an array of scriptural authorities, pitting the principles of the reform movement against the moral law of God. Preachers and religious writers engaged across the country in public controversy, contributing directly to the rising temperature of debate. The Church of England possessed both an intellectual authority and a capacity to speak directly to the public that few other institutions could match. Restoring it to the center of political debate helps us to understand not only what the supporters and opponents of reform thought to be at stake in the bill but also why they fought so hard over its passage and how they responded once it had passed into law.
Material of this kind is inherently difficult to quantify. Of the thousands of sermons preached each week across the country, only a tiny percentage survives; the proportion dedicated to reform is of course lower still. In most cases, little is known about the preacher or about the response of his congregation. Nonetheless, the volume of commentary is unusual for a political controversy, with contributions from all parts of the country and every level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Preachers ranged from the episcopate to the country clergy, and they spoke in venues from the Mariners' Chapel at Liverpool to the cathedral churches of Salisbury and Lincoln. Few sermons have been found in favor of reform: while it was clearly possible to be an Anglican and a reformer, the case for change was rarely framed in expressly Anglican terms.
The ideas outlined in these sermons were rarely articulated at Westminster, and they had no discernable effect upon the fortunes of the reform bill within Parliament. But politics is not only the preserve of politicians; it has a cultural history as well as an institutional one. The distinguishing feature of the reform crisis was the strength of feeling it inspired across the country—not just in the political unions but in all forms of associational life. We still lack analyses of the reform controversy beyond the realm of high politics, and we know little about popular opposition to the bill.Footnote 10 The effect is to limit our understanding of the reform debate and to narrow the grounds on which it was contested. Reform carried politics out of Westminster and into a larger public realm, opening a debate to which the actions of legislators were often peripheral. Our focus must shift accordingly if we are to understand the passions the subject aroused or the new politics of which it formed a part.
I
This day is a day of trouble, and of rebuke, and blasphemy. 2 Kings 19:3.Footnote 11
The constitution on which the reform bill would operate was not merely a secular institution. It was a “Constitution in Church and State”: a “Protestant Constitution” upheld in a “Glorious Revolution” against a Catholic monarch.Footnote 12 The parliamentary oath bound members of Parliament to uphold both “the Protestant religion” and “Protestant government,” and Parliament began each day with prayers. Bishoprics were in the gift of the Crown, and the episcopate sat as of right in the House of Lords. Since the suppression of Convocation in 1717, Parliament had served as the legislative assembly of the Church of England, and the Privy Council retained judicial oversight of all preferment.Footnote 13
The imbrication of church and state was still more vivid outside Westminster. The Anglican clergy were political actors, as well as spiritual authorities.Footnote 14 They chaired the parish vestries, held powers of appointment over schools and charitable bodies, and supplied more than a quarter of the county magistracy in 1831. Clergy sat on turnpike trusts, health boards, and justices' accounts committees, and were disproportionately represented on the Quarter Sessions. They were also active in county elections, where they nominated candidates, preached at the hustings, and canvassed parishioners.Footnote 15 Like Parliament, the church recruited heavily from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, creating a network of personal relationships between the clergy and the Houses of Parliament.Footnote 16 Preaching at county elections and the Quarter Sessions gave a religious sanction to the law and the constitution, while sermons for the coronation, the assizes, and the feast of Charles the Martyr invited spiritual reflection on public affairs.
Such reflection was encouraged by the reemergence of official days of prayer. The issuing of state prayers experienced a remarkable revival in this period, occasioned by agricultural violence (December 1830), a cholera epidemic (November 1831 and June 1832), and an abundant harvest (November 1832). There was also a national day of fasting and humiliation in March 1832, again with regard to the cholera. These were explicitly nonpartisan occasions, sponsored by Whig and Tory ministries alike; but in treating worldly crises as punishments for national sin, they authorized the clergy to speak not only on personal morality but also on the corporate failings of the body politic.Footnote 17
For High Anglicans in particular, the relationship between church and state ran deeper still. As Peter Nockles has shown, the revolutions of the eighteenth century had produced a theological, as well as political, reaction against secular theories of government. In their place, High Anglicans reasserted the religious foundations of the state.Footnote 18 Influenced by the sixteenth-century divine Richard Hooker, they insisted on the moral personality of the state: “the great doctrine,” as Gladstone later put it, “that the state is a person, having a conscience, cognisant of matter of religion,” and liable to judgment for its moral character.Footnote 19 On this reading, church and state formed an “organic union” of “two interrelated [and] divinely-ordained powers,” or in Warburton's critical formulation, “the same thing called by two names.” The church, in Edmund Burke's words, was “an oblation of the State,” while the state stood in a position of reverent guardianship toward its religious establishments.Footnote 20
Evangelicals gave a less elevated role to the “visible” church, but they were no less inclined to a religious conception of politics. For radical evangelicals in particular, the British were to be understood as a “covenant people,” marked out by God with providential purpose. As one pamphleteer observed, Britain's Protestant institutions were both the mark and the condition of divine favor, rendering it a special duty to “guard well the ark of the Constitution.” If the British betrayed that covenant, as the first Israel had done, “foreigners” would “visit England to ruminate over the shadows of her departed greatness.”Footnote 21 This was augmented by a peculiar sensitivity to corporate sin, exacerbated by a series of controversies that blurred the line between politics and religion. The abolitionist movement drew much of its energy from a conviction that the nation was complicit in immorality, and that perception was exacerbated, for some Anglicans, by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829. Though evangelical opinion was divided on both measures, the ensuing debate established the constitution as a site of peculiar moral controversy in a manner that called forth the prophetic functions of the church.
There were, of course, some constraints upon the politics of the pulpit. Preaching, like all forms of rhetoric, was subject to certain rules and expectations, placing limits on the form and content of public expression. Sermons that trenched too closely upon government were viewed as an abuse of the pulpit that would erode its spiritual authority. As an estate of the realm with its own institutional representation, the clergy's right to comment directly on debates in the Commons was also suspect. This was a convention to which almost all ministers paid lip service, reinforcing the trope that “political allusions . . . fall not within the province of the preacher.”Footnote 22
Yet clergy had a range of codes and signals at their disposal that allowed them to evade that prohibition even while seeming to endorse it. Preaching at Beverley, in September 1831, the Reverend John Scott took as his text Proverbs 24:21—“fear thou the Lord and the King; and meddle not with them that are given to change.” As a coronation sermon, preached before the municipal corporation, this was clearly a political occasion, and the text had obvious political resonance. However, Scott insisted that he had no intention of trespassing “upon that great measure of change” currently before Parliament: “that is not within my department; and I would introduce into this sacred place . . . nothing purely or strictly political.” That disclaimer, of course, set reform as the context for what followed: a none too subtle assault on the moral hazards of innovation. Without mentioning reform explicitly, Scott bemoaned the lust for change, castigated those “who are captivated by what is new and plausible, though untried,” and urged his countrymen to “beware lest, in grasping at the shadow of imagined improvement, you lose the substance of what is good.” Richard Cattermole, likewise, preached at Brixton on “The Moral Causes . . . of the Public Distress.” It was not his province, he acknowledged, “to trace [their] political development”; nor was the pulpit a “fit place” for such remarks. Yet this did not preclude an indictment of the “rage for political innovation” as a commentary upon the moral temper of the times.Footnote 23
All this encouraged an expressive view of politics, which looked beyond the formal content of legislation to the moral principles underpinning it. Preachers were not expected to comment on the detail of legislation, but they claimed a prophetic function in calling rulers to repentance. This was especially true of constitutional questions, for reform was not a discrete controversy, to be assessed upon its technical merits; it took meaning from, and was understood within, a context of apparent spiritual crisis. As the evangelical journal the Record told its readers, the implications of the bill for the Commons were of little significance; they might, in any case, be “less than is generally imagined.” The peril lay in what reform represented, as “one of a series of creations which the spirit of the times is bringing into being.”Footnote 24
This owed something to a larger mood of crisis that linked radical movements in Britain to revolutionary outbreaks overseas. The revolutions of 1830 had stirred apocalyptic memories, fueled by the agricultural violence associated with the mythical “Captain Swing.” Convulsed by the struggles over Catholic emancipation and the redress of dissenting grievances, the church itself was undergoing severe internal conflict. New ideas were taking hold in the universities, the first stirrings of what would become the Oxford Movement. Evangelical offshoots were experimenting with new forms of worship, opening up bitter controversies over the Second Coming and the reemergence of prophecy. This was accompanied by a growing historicist tendency in biblical scholarship, matching the prophecies of the book of Revelation to events in contemporary Europe. All this raised the temperature of religious debate and encouraged the tendency to set political affairs within a religious narrative.Footnote 25
The apocalyptic sense so prevalent in evangelicalism was heightened by the arrival of cholera in October 1831. As so often happened, clergy found themselves operating across two worlds: as spiritual authorities, struggling to interpret the outbreak, and as public health officers, tasked with controlling it. The slow approach of the disease and the failure of medical science adequately to explain its transmission heightened both the terror associated with the condition and the conviction of its supernatural origin. As an invisible plague, the cholera was treated almost without exception as a divine visitation: “the smiting of the Lord's angel”; a “pestilence” sent by God “to execute his fierce anger upon a rebellious people”; the “scourge of the Almighty” upon “a guilty Country.”Footnote 26 Commentators disagreed on the cause of that visitation, but few doubted that God had “a settled controversy” with his people or that it was intended as “a solemn call to humiliation.”Footnote 27
Such fears nourished and were nourished by a tide of millenarianism, a sense of living in the “latter days” when judgment was at hand.Footnote 28 Preaching on the Fast Day in 1832, the fierce anti-Catholic John Moultrie warned that the “legions of Christ and . . . of Anti-Christ” were “advancing towards their last and decisive collision. God is ‘sealing the foreheads’ of his elect.” Gladstone, too, recorded an opinion—supported by “all the expositors of prophecy”—that “the crisis of the human race is rapidly approaching.”Footnote 29 Adventist groups mushroomed around a new generation of prophets, and congregations began to report cases of glossolalia or “speaking in tongues.” Whether as prophetic gifts or dangerous heresies, such manifestations seemed “pregnant with perilous signs.”Footnote 30 The Record concluded that a new spirit was moving across the waters. “The kingdoms of the world are convulsed even to their centre; the stability of thrones is shaken; the sacredness of ancient and approved institutions is trampled in the dust.” The “enemy of God and man” was “mustering his hosts to battle,” and all Christians should buckle on their armor.Footnote 31
The Record itself was both a cause and a consequence of this febrile religious mood. Founded in 1828, it spoke for a new generation of radical evangelicals who rejected the moderate, ecumenical sympathies of the Claphamite Christian Observer. Influenced by premillenarian Scots, such as Robert and Alexander Haldane, James Edward Gordon, Henry Drummond, and Edward Irving, the “Recordites” were defined not only by a visceral anti-Catholicism—sharpened, in many cases, by missionary activity in Ireland—but also by a determination to make war on all who had endorsed the national apostasy of 1829. Where the Claphamites had built strong cross-denominational alliances, radical evangelicals fought to purge institutions such as the Bible Society of “the supporters of Antichrist,” whose petitions had opened Parliament to “the slaves of Babylon.” Throughout 1831 and 1832, a struggle was raging within Anglican evangelicalism over its relationship with nonconformity and its willingness to compromise theological purity for pandenominational Christian politics. The perceived betrayal of 1829 confirmed the Recordites in their suspicion of dissent, while reinforcing the place of constitutional change as a proofing ground for religious orthodoxy.Footnote 32
In this context, to view reform in religious terms was not so much a choice as a reflex, not least as the rhetoric of popular reformism was steeped in Christian imagery. Banners proclaimed a “HOLY LEAGUE” to purify government, while the anthem of the Birmingham Political Union declared that “God is our Guide” in the reforming crusade.Footnote 33 Birmingham Political Union artists represented the struggle as a last judgment scene, with reformers drawn heavenward as their opponents were cast into hell, while Benjamin Haydon's famous painting of “The Meeting of the Unions on Newhall Hill” took as its central figure the Unitarian minister Hugh Hutton, preaching to a vast congregation of reformers.Footnote 34 The Rules of the National Political Union, published in October 1831, appealed explicitly to the “Friends of religion” against an electoral system productive of “almost every kind of vice.”Footnote 35 For the Unitarian Monthly Repository, the reform struggle was “but the type and index of a wider, deeper, and mightier conflict,” which began “in the garden of Eden, and shall continue . . . till the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God.” The principle of reform was “none other than the Christian doctrine of universal brotherhood.”Footnote 36
Like their opponents, reformers invoked a potent blend of history and theology. Reformers at Bridgwater likened themselves to “the Israelites of old in the desert, when the trumpet sounded and the walls of Jericho fell down,” while Scottish radicals identified themselves with the great Protestant reformers John Knox and Andrew Melville.Footnote 37 Attending a protest in Birmingham, a writer for the Monthly Repository was struck by the “religious character” of the meeting. How like “the multitudinous choruses which were heard by the exile of Patmos, during the visions of the Apocalypse, must have been the deep murmured response of that immense assemblage!”Footnote 38
Such rhetoric was most common among dissenters, but Anglican support for reform was hardly unknown. Parliament remained an overwhelmingly Anglican institution, and it was predominantly Anglicans who voted the bill into law. Even the Bishops' Bench was not inveterately hostile. Edward Maltby, bishop of Chichester, and the octogenarian Henry Bathurst, bishop of Norwich, were long-standing reformers, and they were joined during the parliamentary struggle by Charles Blomfield, bishop of London.Footnote 39 Most of these, however, were Anglicans and reformers, rather than supporters of change on Anglican principles. Blomfield, for example, urged reform on wholly secular grounds and denied that the bishops should “be urged by motives distinct from those of any other Member of that house.”Footnote 40
Nonetheless, some Anglicans did attempt a religious case for change. The Christian Observer, which had built close links with Whig abolitionists, hoped reform would empower “the middle classes of society,” among whom was to be found “most of the piety and . . . morality of the country.” A reformed Parliament, it predicted, would promote “Church reform, law reform, [and] the abolition of West-Indian slavery.”Footnote 41 Even the Record was initially supportive, in the hope that enfranchisement would reconnect Parliament with Christian opinion.Footnote 42 Famously, the ultra-Protestant Marquess of Blandford moved for reform in 1830, in the belief that a reformed Parliament would never have passed Catholic emancipation.Footnote 43Fraser's Magazine, a High Tory journal, likewise concluded from the Catholic Act “that reform was not only necessary but inevitable.”Footnote 44
Such voices, however, were quickly muted. Having promised an article in support of reform, the Christian Observer withdrew it on the plea that Christians should “allay” rather than “foment” excitement.Footnote 45 The Record welcomed the bill's defeat in the House of Lords in October and promised a war “to the utmost” against “those whose object is to bury the Church, the Throne, the Aristocracy, and the Constitution.”Footnote 46 Clergy who endorsed reform came under considerable social pressure. When the Reverend John Courtney attended reform meetings in Surrey, fellow clergy expressed astonishment that “a pious, orthodox, clergyman” should mingle with “sceptics and infidels.” Courtney published a pamphlet justifying his actions, in which he repudiated attacks upon the episcopate. Yet he failed to reassure local clergy and was refused permission to dedicate his pamphlet to the bishop.Footnote 47
Like the Record, Courtney's critics focused, not on the bill as such, but on the “sceptics and infidels” who promoted it. The £10 franchise was expected to add up to 250,000 nonconformist voters, while creating a torrent of Irish electors who were “slaves to priests and demagogues.”Footnote 48 A pamphlet on the “Anti-Protestant” tendency of the reform bill claimed that it would deliver the Irish seats “bound hand and foot, into the power of the Papists,” adding fifty to seventy Catholic Members. Their strength would be augmented, first, by the reduction of seats in Protestant England—the point on which ministers were first defeated, in April 1831—and, second, by an unholy alliance with radicals hostile to the established church.Footnote 49Blackwood's warned of a fatal combination between the “Whig and the Radical, the foe of the Church and the reviler of the Aristocracy,” while the bishop of Gloucester, James Monk, accused reformers of courting “all those who were inimical to the Protestant Church as by law established.” “The Roman Catholics,” he noted grimly, “and the whole class of Dissenters were most clamorous for [the bill].”Footnote 50
The connection between reform and dissent was not wholly fanciful, though it was more complex than such critics allowed. Contrary to the image presented by some Anglicans, “dissent” was not a homogeneous bloc. Wesleyanism, in particular, had its own traditions of political conservatism, and while the Baptist Magazine hailed “the operation of a Divine hand” in reform, the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine urged moral rather than political regeneration.Footnote 51 Nor were dissenters wholly at ease with political agitation. The critique of the confessional state could be read as an injunction against all political activism by religious bodies, limiting the potential to mobilize institutional nonconformity for political ends. At the same time, however, nonconformists commonly espoused an ethic of “practical Christianity,” a religious vocation that was to infuse every area of conduct. In this sense, nonconformity occupied an ambivalent position in public life, combining a suspicion of ecclesiastical politics with an activist social conscience.
The dilemma was fought out in the pages of the religious press. Writing in the Congregational Magazine in 1831, “Alpha” condemned dissenting ministers for speaking at reform meetings. Insisting “that Christ's ‘kingdom is not of this world,’” he urged dissenters to beware “lest a political spirit should canker the vitality of Christian ministration,” for there was no “more deadly bane . . . than an investiture of the sacred office with the garb of a political reformer.” This drew a spirited response from “Beta,” who insisted that “the old system” of “venality, bribery, perjury, and debauchery” had “awfully increased the amount of our national sins.”Footnote 52 Two Quakers, who had been rebuked for joining a political union, published a defense of their actions in the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian journal edited by W. J. Fox. In the same journal, Fox himself drew an analogy with the ministry of Christ:
Jesus began his patriotic exertions . . . [in] a time of unprecedented depravity. Corruptions prevailed alike in the church and in the state. . . . There are periods when the fortune of a country is at stake, when its destinies undergo a new creation, when events take place of a magnitude sufficient to influence unborn ages. Then, as did Jesus, every man is bound to exercise the more active duties of a Patriot.
“The period at which we of this day find ourselves,” he concluded, “is one of this character.”Footnote 53
Such writers distinguished between the individual believer and the church as an institution. While the latter was to stand clear of political affiliation, every believer was called to a life of conscience in matters temporal and spiritual. Hence, while the Free Church organizations held back from the reform movement, the political unions recruited heavily from the ranks of dissent. The Todmorden Political Union was run by a pair of Unitarians, while the union at Brighton was led by a Baptist lay-minister. Leading unionists at Oldham included Samuel Bamford and the Methodist lay-preacher William Knott, both of whom favored abolition of tithes and the redress of dissenting grievances. In their programs, the unions commonly paired reform with disestablishment and the election and payment of clergy by their congregations. Manifestos dwelt at length on the “spurious Christianity” of the Anglican church and the “ruby-nosed Bishops and dignitaries of our state-religion.”Footnote 54
Such rhetoric gave the reform campaign an anticlerical flavor that was pregnant with menace to the established church. The Record urged its readers to study closely “the speeches of Mr. Attwood, Mr. Edmonds, and Mr. Haynes” and to judge for themselves “whether we are not on the brink of a precipice.”Footnote 55 Henry Phillpotts, the pugnacious bishop of Exeter, accused ministers of “a mere huckstering of pure religion” for “the worthless support of men whom no concessions can win”—men who would use their votes as “a picklock” with which to “open to themselves . . . the temple of our Sion.”Footnote 56 The archbishop of Armagh, John Beresford, predicted as the “consequence of this Reform” the “downfall of Protestantism—the elevation of the Roman Catholic faith—the dismemberment of the empire—or the dreadful option of civil war.”Footnote 57
The temperature rose further in October, when the bill was rejected by the Lords. With the bishops voting twenty-two to two against the bill, the division unleashed a storm of anticlericalism. Bishops were hanged in effigy, threats were made against the clergy, and radicals redoubled their assault upon the establishment. Blomfield, who had merely abstained, was forced to cancel a sermon after warnings of disruption. Archbishop Howley's carriage was chased from Canterbury, while the rector of St Martin's, Birmingham, was attacked in the street.Footnote 58 Herbert Marsh, bishop of Peterborough, told the Lords that there had been no period since the 1640s “when the clergy were assailed with so much calumny and so much violence.”Footnote 59 Matters came to a head when the Bishop's Palace at Bristol was torched by a mob. Preaching at Melcombe Regis, Joseph Addison described how the bishop had been forced to flee “from the murderous designs of his infuriated enemies; who, having plundered his Episcopal Palace, with unappeasable malice committed it to the flames, for no other reason than the unpardonable crime of his being a Bishop of the Church of England!!”Footnote 60 Ecclesiastical paranoia reached extraordinary levels. When Lord Grey urged the bishops to “set their house in order,” clergy were reminded of Isaiah's warning to Hezekiah: “Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die, and not live.” Was this, critics wondered, a veiled threat of assassination?Footnote 61
From this perspective, the technical adjustments embodied in the reform bill were less important than the principles upon which it appeared to be founded. This recast the protests as part of a larger moral fever and shifted attention from the bill itself to the popular movement in the country. At the same time, the fury directed against the bishops crystallized debate around a larger philosophical question: the right of Parliament—or, indeed, the church—to resist a measure backed by popular protest. This was an issue with more democratic implications than the bill itself, raising concerns about the nature of government, the origins of authority, and the relationship between law and will. These were ethical as well as political questions, and they drew a vigorous clerical response.
II
Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. Romans 13:2.Footnote 62
It was not only critics of reform who located it within a larger intellectual movement. Whig reformers, professing a doctrine of progressive adaptation, urged their opponents to “take counsel . . . of the signs of this most portentous time” and to abandon their “hopeless struggle against the spirit of the age.”Footnote 63 For the philosophic radicals, too, reform seemed emblematic of a new era in human thought. In an essay on “The Spirit of the Age,” John Stuart Mill proclaimed that mankind was waking “as from a dream” and would insist “upon being governed in a new way.” “Even the religious world,” he noted, “teems with new interpretations of the Prophecies, foreboding mighty changes near at hand.”Footnote 64
For an institution founded upon eternal verities, which saw itself as acting upon its times from without, appeals to “the spirit of the age” were inherently suspect. As the conservative theologian and bishop of Durham, William Van Mildert, told the Lords in 1832,
He had watched the signs of the times; he had attended to what was called the march of intellect, and he found abroad a restless disposition—a love of innovation—a wish to destroy institutions because they were ancient,—a desire to set the subject over the ruler, and to trample the ruler under the subject. He saw these restless desires, and he saw also that this Bill would increase the circumstances which engendered them. . . . The effect of such a change would be most prejudicial to the moral and religious interests of the people.Footnote 65
Van Mildert was a High Churchman who was active in the Hackney Phalanx, but similar views were expressed by evangelicals, ever alert to the sinful impulses in human nature.Footnote 66 The Record insisted that the “principles of the nation . . . are false. They are not the principles given in the Gospel for our guidance: but principles in diametrical opposition to them.” Far from adapting itself to the times, the church should resist “the spirit which is now abroad” and “the ends after which it so ardently aspires.”Footnote 67
To the evangelical mind, sin was not simply a passive state into which believers might fall. It was an active agent in the world, feeding on that “deep-seated antipathy,” “fixed in the natural mind of man . . . to the pure law of God.”Footnote 68 As Dominic Erdozain has noted, the conviction that “sin had its home in the pride of moral autonomy was one of the integrating ideas of the [evangelical] revival,” and this made preachers particularly sensitive to “the demon of insubordination.”Footnote 69 Such ideas furnished a point of contact with High Anglican thinking on the moral purpose of the state. Anglican political thought drew on a Christianized Aristotelianism, which viewed the state not as a human creation, set up under certain rules and contractual obligations, but as a providential dispensation against “the headstrong passions and appetites of man's fallen nature.”Footnote 70 As a fallen creation, capable of the most bestial sin, “the will of man need[ed] to be constantly acted upon by a power from without, to correct and check its wayward impulses.” Government was both a providential restraint and a school of moral discipline, part of that “great system of subjection, which not only keeps society together, but has its higher and ultimate object in the training of our spirits.” “Take away authority—let a man . . . have nothing to stand in awe of, and there is no degree of wretchedness, as there is no limit to the errors, into which he must not be betrayed.”Footnote 71
On this reading, as Joseph Feilden told his congregation, reformers were “mischief-making demagogues, whose only God is self-interest, and who would willingly sacrifice on that altar, the peace, the property, the lives, nay, the very souls of their fellow-subjects.”Footnote 72 Instead of constraining man's sinful impulses, they sought to enthrone them at the heart of the state. This was a rebellion against God, as well as man; as Edward Berens warned in Salisbury Cathedral, to “find fault with the constitution of society, by which some are rich and some are poor” was to “find fault with the order of nature, and the common dispensations of God's providence.”Footnote 73 In a sermon on “The Dignity and Use of the Priesthood,” George Preston warned of a growing “impatience of authority,” a “rash and presumptuous spirit which disdains controul [sic], and looks upon all subjection as disgrace.” Such a mood was “fatal to the moral well-being of those individuals by whom it is entertained,” for it misconceived both the nature of government and its place in the moral order.Footnote 74
Such arguments did not impose a ban on constitutional amendment, but they identified the reform demand with a dangerous moral distemper.Footnote 75 For Preston, the reform campaign was expressive of a blasphemous spirit, “impiously ascribing to itself” those powers “which are of God alone.” This was “the evil of secret rebellion against all obedience to a superior power; and therefore against God, from whom all power is derived.”Footnote 76 A battery of scriptural references was assembled behind this position, vesting the state with an authority that no earthly power could challenge.Footnote 77 Had not Christ Himself “wrought a miracle, in order to comply with the Institutions of the Country in which he spent his marvellous life”?Footnote 78
Against what they took to be the populist principles of the reform movement, Anglicans reasserted the spiritual foundations of government. Systems professing “the sovereignty of the people” were “false in theory” and “dangerous in practice,” for government derived “its powers and sanctions directly from God.” As for “the absurd doctrine, that the people are the source of all legitimate power . . . this assumption cannot be made without impiety or arrogance by any mere creature; [for] this high authority is exclusively lodged in His hands who is ‘the Prince of the Kings of the Earth.’ . . . It is thus we are taught that ‘there is no power but of God.’” Contractual theories or notions of popular sovereignty had “no foundation in fact, and are opposed to Scripture.”Footnote 79 As Gladstone insisted, government was received by man as a gift, not created by him as an act of will; and “if the will of man did not found government,” it had “no moral right to direct it in its progress.” Popular institutions were not a source of legitimacy but a constraint upon the sinful impulses of rulers. As a derogation from the ideal, “rendered necessary by human depravity,” a “minimum of representation” seemed “the object to be desired.”Footnote 80
Whether any significant reformers actually held such radical notions is a moot point. Whiggism was an aristocratic creed, and notions of “popular sovereignty” were no more fashionable at Holland House than in Lambeth Palace. Members of Parliament were not, as a rule, much given to political philosophy, and their reform bill, with its complex system of franchises and qualifications, suggested a less capacious view of popular representation. Nonetheless, antireformers persistently conflated reformed politics in Britain with the revolutionary impulse on the Continent. Russell's attacks upon the Lords, contrasting “the whisper of a faction” with “the voice of a nation,” provided useful ammunition, while the Whigs' governing practice suggested a secular view of government that invited critical comparison with France.Footnote 81 The Whigs had already roused criticism by insisting on Sunday sittings of Parliament, and it was widely noted that the revised bill passed its second reading in the early hours of the Sabbath.Footnote 82 Ministers were routinely accused of following the path trodden by France after 1789, where infidelity and political apostasy had culminated in “open rebellion against God.”Footnote 83 Like Gladstone, the evangelical Member of Parliament Spencer Perceval linked reform to the new royal title approved by King Louis Philippe of France, which no longer acknowledged “the grace of God” as the basis of kingship. This, thought Perceval, was “the very essence of liberalism,” founding authority not on the will of God but on the sinful will of man.Footnote 84
All this was set within a larger historical narrative in which man's instinct for rebellion warred with his duty of obedience to God. As John James asked his congregation at Oundle, “What was man's original offence? Was it not the proud wish to be wise above that which was revealed?”Footnote 85 When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they were seduced by “that malignant spirit, which first disturbed the peace of man, and brought him . . . to question [God's] power to restrict the will of his creature.” It was the same spirit “with which Satan instigated Cain to murder and destroy his brother Abel,” that built the tower of Babel, and that fired the rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram.Footnote 86
The last of these references was a favorite with preachers. Recorded in Numbers 16:1–50, the story told of Korah the Levite, who came before Moses with 250 “men of renown” and challenged his right to leadership. Against the divine appointment held by Moses, Korah proclaimed the principle of equality: “[A]ll the congregation are holy, every one of them . . . wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the LORD?” Stirring discontent with false grievances and murmurings, he asked:
Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us? Moreover thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk and honey, or given us inheritance of fields and vineyards.
Comparing this story with his own times, the Reverend William Ainger, principal of the clerical college at St. Bees, found “many and too striking circumstances of resemblance.” There was the same lust for equality, the same “groundless complaint of tyranny and oppression,” and the same
pretence of standing up for the rights of the whole community. To this pretence was added an unjust charge of arbitrary designs, and of misgovernment which had brought hardship and distress upon the people. . . . I need scarcely remark how similar, both in their objects and in [their] artifices . . . are the disturbers and agitators of our own day, to those whose proceedings are here recounted.
Korah's rebellion brought down a collective punishment, in which almost 15,000 were killed by plague. For Ainger, preaching on the fast day for the cholera, the likeness was obvious. If there was a resemblance “in the causes of God's indignation, may . . . it be not seen in the consequences of it!”Footnote 87 Preaching at Langley, in Buckinghamshire, Charles Champnes likened reformers to modern “Korahs, Dathans and Abirams.” Did they not know “that God is the supreme disposer of the affairs of men?”Footnote 88
Such analogies were the more potent because of the evangelical tendency to view Britain as a “new Israel.” This was an idea particularly associated at this time with the “Recordites,” whose Scottish antecedents made them especially susceptible to the notion of the “Covenant people.”Footnote 89 With its wealth, stability, and imperial possessions, Britain seemed a nation peculiarly blessed by Providence, encouraging the tendency noted by John Wolffe “to look at the experience of contemporary Britain through the lens of paradigms constructed from [the] Old Testament.”Footnote 90 Such analogies carried a terrible warning, for if the British, “as a Christian people, are professedly the Israel of God,” the scriptures stood as a reminder of how that status might be lost. The first Israel had fallen “by worshipping the idols of their own hearts—their own will.” Might not the new Israel stand in similar peril?Footnote 91
While evangelicals mined the Old Testament, High Churchmen invoked a secular history of revolution in church and state. Preaching in Lincoln Cathedral on the Feast of Charles the Martyr, Richard Pretyman drew an extended comparison between the crisis surrounding the reform bill and the events of the 1640s. Then, as now, there was “a disposition to resist lawful authority, and to overthrow the powers that be,” a “restless discontent with that disposition of life to which it has pleased God to call the . . . population.” W. B. Whitehead recalled the mood “just before that great rebellion, which murdered an upright King, and laid the temple of God . . . in ruins.”Footnote 92 The most potent exemplar was 1789, when attempts to found government on reason were “outstripped by the march of atheism and irreligion.”Footnote 93 As the High Anglican journal the British Critic warned, “The principles . . . of the French Revolution, are again stalking abroad among us under other names; and it is the same Devil, who is still seeking what he can devour.”Footnote 94
In such a context, the violence associated with reform took on disturbing connotations. Francis Hutton accused the rioters in Bristol of “doing the work of Satan on a broad and systematic scale.”Footnote 95 Preaching at Wrington, in Somerset, the future Tractarian Henry Thompson warned that “no riotous, bawling, disorderly, or unquiet man can be a Christian, or entitled to a hope of heaven.” “Remember, if God should cut you off amid scenes of riot and bloodshed . . . the Bible offers you not one glimpse of hope. Is it not just that they who do the devil's work, should receive the devil's wages, and share the devil's kingdom?”Footnote 96
For those who feared a Satanic agency in reform, there was something apocalyptic in the spectacle of a bishop driven by fire from his palace, while flames beat against the walls of the Cathedral.Footnote 97Blackwood's Magazine, which printed letters allegedly sent by the devil to the Whigs, published a poem called “Satan—Reformer,” in which reform became a diabolical instrument to demoralize Christian Britain.Footnote 98 The poem culminated on a hilltop outside Bristol, as the city burned below:
Addressing his flock after the Bristol riots, Thompson reminded them of St. Paul's injunction to “Study to be quiet, and do your own business”:
Christians have their own business to do, and where this is left undone, it will not avail them to say they were too much busied in the concerns of the State . . . to pay any attention to it. . . . [T]his business is THE SAVING OF OUR SOULS . . . and without our best attention, we shall never successfully complete it.Footnote 100
Here, too, many preachers identified a diabolical agency. Hutton condemned reform as “the very delusion of Satan to hoodwink the eyes of our people against . . . reform of their spiritual condition.” Whatever their grievances, thought Cattermole, Christians should look to “religion and morality alone for relief.”Footnote 101 Feilden agreed: there was more occasion for reform in their “religious opinions and moral practice, than for that sweeping political alteration, which the vicious spirit of discontent so ardently desires, and which . . . panders to the depraved appetite of the multitude.”Footnote 102
III
Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein. Jeremiah 6:16.Footnote 103
The passage of the reform act on 7 June 1832 was widely viewed as an epoch in the history of both church and state. Even the Duke of Wellington set reform instinctively within an ecclesiastical framework. “The revolution,” he noted sombrely, “is made”: “power is transferred from one class in society, the gentlemen of England professing the faith of the Church of England, to another class of society, the shopkeepers being dissenters from the Church, many of them being Socinians, others atheists.”Footnote 104
Anglicans now had to decide not only how to explain what had happened but also how to respond to it. The reform struggle had invoked two of the great animating principles of national identity: the Protestant religion and the English Constitution. In so doing, it had transformed an adjustment to the machinery of representation into a national and spiritual crisis. Traumatized by the convulsions over Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the church confronted reform at a time of revolution abroad and unrest at home. Divided within and assailed from without, it perceived itself as a church under siege—a sacred institution “fallen upon evil days” when “the spirit of ungodliness is abroad.”Footnote 105 For many Anglicans, the wave of popular protest and the anticlericalism by which it was nourished identified the reform movement with a new and dangerous spirit, at war not only with the church as an institution but also with the moral values it represented. That elevated the struggle to a new level of importance, with consequences that would endure long after 1832.
In this respect, the first legacy of the reform act was a renewed conviction of the “Church in Danger.” Robert Benton Seeley, the popular evangelical writer, warned in 1834 that “[t]he Church of England is assailed . . . in a manner quite unprecedented,” its enemies engorged by the “vast political change produced by the Reform Bill.”Footnote 106 Even journals previously sympathetic to reform, like the Christian Observer, had concluded by December 1831 that “a mischievous spirit is abroad,” “at war with all social order and every established institution.” Every Christian, it proclaimed, should “be vigilantly on his guard” lest “our popular institutions . . . prove our ruin.”Footnote 107 Another reforming paper, the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, warned that reform would prove a curse unless the “ministers and members of our churches” organized in the constituencies.Footnote 108 The British Critic, too, warned of “a great social Revolution, of which the Reform Bill has been the womb” and urged the formation of a Christian party in defense of the church.Footnote 109
Such anxieties generated a new determination to organize in the constituencies. Some hoped for a pandenominational alliance: the Evangelical Magazine, for example, was run by Congregationalists with the express purpose of drawing together Anglican and dissenting religious networks. But one of the legacies of the reform crisis within Anglicanism had been a deepening suspicion of dissenting politics, ensuring that the political activism of the following decade was more sectarian in character. By such means, reform laid the foundations for the politics of the 1830s, in which party alignment was redrawn around the reform of the tithe, the defense of church endowments, and the rights of the church in Ireland.
Anglicanism could present a more united front in that struggle than had been possible during the reform crisis itself. Whatever their view of the ten-pound householder, Anglicans could reunite in opposition to anticlericalism and the liberal spirit; for Anglicans who had previously endorsed reform, taking a vigorous part in that struggle was a way of reestablishing their claims to orthodoxy. The fruits of that reunion were reaped in the reemergence of the Conservative Party as the dominant force in Parliament, an achievement that owed as much to the politics of “Church in Danger” as to the accommodationist Conservatism of the Tamworth manifesto. Yet the alliance between Peel and the politics of Protestant defense would always be uneasy, and it was an issue of church politics—the funding of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth—that would rupture that alliance in 1845.Footnote 110
As their critics had warned, the constitutional changes of 1828 to 1832 had lasting consequences for the establishment. In reshaping the secular arm of the “Protestant Constitution,” reform changed the character, if not the institutional forms, of the church-state relationship. After 1832 it was harder to speak, as Burke had done, of the Church of England as an “oblation of the state,” a “national homage to the institutor, and author and protector of civil society.”Footnote 111 The establishment was now more obviously Erastian in character, at a time when the composition of Parliament made this less attractive to many Anglicans.Footnote 112 The result was a remarkable efflorescence of preaching and writing on the church-state relationship, from Thomas Arnold and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to John Keble and John Henry Newman. From the Coleridgean ideal of a reformed church in a reformed state, to the Oxford Movement, with its call to arms against “national apostasy,” reform opened up new and powerful currents of political theology. That paved the way for the rise of Tractarianism, the “Great Disruption” in Scotland, and the emergence of a newly emboldened dissenting movement, fighting explicitly for disestablishment.
Reform was particularly significant for the Oxford Movement. As Peter Nockles has shown, the intellectual currents from which Tractarianism emerged were flowing long before 1832, yet the combination of franchise reform with the dismantling of religious tests meant that, for many Anglicans, Parliament could no longer be considered a safe guardian for the interests of the church.Footnote 113 As Hurrell Froude put it, “[O]ur civic legislature is no longer qualified, as it formerly was, to be our ecclesiastical legislature.”Footnote 114 At the same time, the reform debates entrenched a perception that “liberalism”—a mode of thought that straddled the worlds of politics and theology—was now a formidable menace to both church and state. That antiliberal spirit opened up common ground between Tractarianism and certain forms of evangelicalism before disputes over ritual and redemptive theology drove the two apart after 1837.Footnote 115
All this supports two contentions advanced by Jonathan Clark: that the core of controversy in 1832 was the “Protestant Constitution and its negation, not democracy,” and that the reform struggle must be located within a larger intellectual revolution, involving the dissolution of that nexus of political and religious ideas associated with the “Protestant Constitution.” Yet the argument that “parliamentary reform played a subordinate part” in that process, or that it should be seen as less cause than “consequence of the shattering of the old order by Emancipation,” seems less secure.Footnote 116 As this article has demonstrated, the idea of the Anglican state remained prominent in commentary upon reform even after the events of 1828–29. That ideal had been dealt a blow by the reform of religious tests, and the consequences of the new franchise—particularly within Ireland—were explicitly debated within that context. Yet if repeal and emancipation had eroded the intellectual integrity of the Anglican state, contemporaries were conscious that it was a change in the franchise—through the increased admission of Catholics and Dissenters—that would transform its substance. In this respect, 1832 stands alongside 1829 as a milestone in the dissolution of an old intellectual order.
Though Chartism would again inspire strong, clerical opposition, no subsequent enfranchisement elicited the powerful theological critique directed against the Whigs in 1831–32.Footnote 117 The case against the second and third reform acts was broadly utilitarian, founded on the character and conduct of the proposed electors. Enfranchisement might still be assessed on moral criteria—as either elevating or deteriorating in its influence upon the individual voter—but no special role was asserted for government itself as a religious agent. This marked an important intellectual shift for which the events of 1831 and 1832 must take some responsibility, for they had undermined the reverence for Britain's constitutional arrangements among the very people who had been most inclined to a sacral view of the state. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, 1832 had established the principle that government was a human construct, to be remodelled at the will of its creators. It was here, perhaps, that the reform act was most transformative. It is in this sense, not in the number of voters it created, that it marks an important moment in Britain's democratic history.
