‘Noticing some fair-haired children in the slave market one morning, Pope Gregory, the memorable Pope, said (in Latin), “What are those?” and on being told that they were Angels, made the memorable joke – “Non Angli, sed Angeli” (“not Angels, but Anglicans”), and commanded one of his Saints called St Augustine to go and convert the rest.’ Thus the English became ‘C of E’. As usual, Sellar and Yeatman's mischievous misremembering in 1066 and all that (1930) gestures at a significant subtext. James Kirby demonstrates in this rich and utterly convincing monograph that the self-confidence of the Victorian and Edwardian Church in the present was founded on its ownership of the past. The sculpture and stained glass with which old and new churches were clad did not rehearse merely mythical origins; it drew on an ‘Anglican ascendancy in historical scholarship’ (p. 2). That ascendancy placed the Church of the English – founded in the sixth century, not the sixteenth – at the centre of narratives of nationhood, constitutional development and social change. To the figures with whom this book is chiefly concerned – Edward Augustus Freeman, William Stubbs, Mandell Creighton and a wide supporting cast – it was the Church that had made England, not the other way around (p. 80). They bestrode the historical profession that they created, bequeathing preoccupations whose ecclesiastical origins secularising historians of scholarship have often overlooked.

Kirby's thesis revolves around the ‘Learned Church’: at once an intellectual aspiration and an institutional reality. Inspired in part by Coleridge's national clerisy, but formed largely in Tractarian Oxford in the decades after Newman's departure, its quasi-monastic ethos appealed to serious-minded young men seeking scholarly careers. Rich parish livings as yet undiminished by agricultural depression, Fellowships at Oxbridge colleges that elected churchmen even though they no longer had to, and berths at new institutions such as Manchester and King's College, London, gave time for study and conferred institutional prestige. If the turf-war between clerics and their challengers explored by Frank Turner made for sharply drawn institutional lines in the sciences, this was less true in the humanities, where clerics moved effortlessly between clerical and academic spheres, hoovering up professorships and bishoprics as they did so. Like the ‘Cambridge triumvirate’ J. B. Lightfoot, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort in biblical studies, Kirby's Anglican historians espoused a dynamic conservatism that was anything but reactionary. They defended religious authority by engaging with the latest ideas through debates in learned journals, jousting for academic preferment and competing for a popular readership, all with considerable success.

History was attractive to erudite Anglicans because it was uniquely important and therefore authoritative: what could matter more than ‘the study of God's workings in the world’? Providence was not, however, a straightforward book to read. Since God was inscrutable, generalising about any ‘rules’, let alone rewards and punishments, was presumptuous. Scientific ‘philosophies’ of history and society, as espoused by Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, and popularised by Henry Thomas Buckle, were bunk. The materialism of such writers made them Frenchified outliers in a scholarly world that leaned towards German idealism. Ranke's pantheistic but pious conception of the Geist or divine spirit behind human affairs bore more than a passing resemblance to Stubbs's providence: a ‘mysterious force which constantly drew good out of evil, straightening out the contingencies of the world and the evil acts of man into gradual progress for the better’ (p. 195). This qualified teleology acted as a spur to the flexible, ostensibly empirical study of actual events. It also harmonised with sedimentary gradualism and allowed for the incorporation of a Christianised version of natural selection. Because humanity ‘ha[d] been hallowed by the Incarnation of our Lord’ (p. 204), all human activities were of intense interest. While figures like F. D. Maurice and T. H. Green represent the affinities between this and the Liberal Anglican view of history examined so influentially by Duncan Forbes, Kirby is at pains to point out that High Churchmen generally saw truth not as gradually evolving but as preserved and perpetually revealed through the Church: the Body of Christ. By the later nineteenth century it was this view, not Broad Church liberalism, nor ‘scientific’ history, that dominated the English historical scene.

The content of that history is set out in chapters on the nation, the constitution, social and economic history and the Reformation settlement. Given the nuance and sophistication with which Kirby elucidates it, it is impossible to do more than hint at its main contours. Perhaps surprisingly, given the dominance of Classics, Anglican historians dismissed Greece and Rome as corrupt and decaying. Liberty was the gift of Christianity to the world, for the New Testament had universalised God's relationship with the Israelites to all of mankind. England provided a field of enquiry, but it was not uniquely ‘chosen’; nor was empire very significant. Instead, Kirby's protagonists focused on the medieval development of Teutonic liberties, a process nurtured by statesman-saints like Dunstan, Anselm, Grosseteste and Becket (pp. 117–18). It was even possible to reclaim 1688 from Macaulayan Whiggism by painting it as deriving from medieval conciliarist thought (p. 130). As churchmen who remained Catholic but not Roman, Anglican historians had to tread carefully when it came to the Reformation settlement: they emphasised continuity, downplayed continental influences, deplored Protestant persecutors, lionised learned humanists such as Erasmus, and cheered on monarchical moderation while eschewing erastian readings of events. Socially and economically, however, they were decidedly negative about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In tones that smacked of Marx and prefigured Weber, they portrayed it as an Age of Iron that punished poverty and ushered in Puritanism, ‘usury’ and the rise of capital.

This is a very fine book. Just occasionally the reader might wonder about what is left out: academic achievements overshadow the popular appreciation for history, while those who opposed High Church history appear two-dimensional. Evangelicals, for instance, Kirby hoarily but perhaps not entirely unfairly writes off as ‘less committed to scholarship as such’ (p. 39). The decline of the Anglican historians occupies only a few pages and feels impressionistic. Nevertheless, Kirby accomplishes precisely what he seeks to do, and for that he deserves high praise.