That the thirty or forty years following the French Revolution represented a significant turning-point in the history of English religion in general and of English Evangelicalism in particular is well established. The period was, in some respects, a high water mark in Evangelical influence on the life of the nation – encompassing the tenure of an Evangelical prime minister, and the emergence of a significant block of Evangelical members in the House of Commons. It also witnessed the successful adoption of a range of sophisticated and sometimes controversial campaigning techniques in the service of Evangelical agitation for the abolition of the slave trade and the Reformation of Manners. In the rapidly growing world of nonconformity, which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, was to account for half of English Christianity, Evangelicals were sweeping the board, capturing previously resistant bodies like the Particular Baptists and even exercising a growing influence in the Society of Friends.

The period between 1790 and 1830 was not merely a high water mark, however. It was also a period of transition – especially for those Evangelicals who found their most natural home in the Established Church. During these years the remaining leaders of the first generation of English Evangelicalism went to their reward. The most notable of these was John Wesley, whose death in 1791 was followed by the initiation of what was to be a prolonged and uneven process of disengagement between his Methodist movement and parish Anglicanism. But the list of departing characters was a long one and also included Selina, countess of Huntingdon, again in 1791; John Berridge in 1793; and John Newton in 1807. The torch therefore was necessarily passed to a new generation, most famously to William Wilberforce and Charles Simeon but also to the first Evangelicals to climb to the upper rungs of the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment: Thomas Gisborne, J. H. Browne, Isaac Milner and the highest flyer of them all, Henry Ryder, the first Evangelical on the bench. In several respects this development both reinforced and reflected a rapprochement between the Evangelicals and the Establishment. The wild men of the early phase of the revival had given way to the socially respectable men of Clapham and their allies.

Wilberforce's Practical view, though controversial in some circles, was only the most prominent in a series of published works that added cultural prestige to that respectability.Footnote ¹ Just as important in the turn to respectability was a significant shift in the methods and focus of Evangelical ministry. The first phase of Evangelicalism within the Church had been characterised by ‘irregular’ ministries that effectively bypassed established territorial structures in a missionary effort propelled and legitimated by gospel imperatives. ‘In plain terms’, said John Wesley,

This famous defence of his itinerancy would probably have been echoed by the majority of the early Anglican Evangelical clergy, who (like Venn at Huddersfield, Newton at Olney, or Grimshaw at Haworth) supplemented their regular parish ministry by engaging in what they disarmingly termed ‘Gospel rambles’.Footnote ³ To the new generation, committed to constructive engagement with the Establishment and sensitised to the dangers of overthrowing established forms by the revolutions in America and France, such uncanonical activity was no longer acceptable. Here, Charles Simeon's commentary on John Berridge's semi-regular ministry at Everton is entirely characteristic:

For the new generation, regular parish ministry was not only the dominant but the perhaps the only legitimate mode of Evangelical pastoral practice. A desire to rally to the Establishment in the face of revolution, a concern that ‘Gospel rambles’ promoted separatism, gradually increasing numbers and greater access to patronage all played a part in promoting this move towards regular parish ministry and (as Gareth Atkins has recently argued) so did a conviction that the Church was providentially ordained as the ‘lynchpin of national spirituality’.Footnote ⁵ Under such circumstances, relationships between the burgeoning Evangelical school and their High Church colleagues might have been expected to begin to settle down. Instead, the period was, if anything, characterised by an increase in noisy conflict between the two groups. In order to elucidate the reasons for this renewal of controversy, it is necessary to explore the relationship between two major grounds of conflict – doctrine and practice.

However firm and indeed public the Evangelicals' support for the Establishment might be, their welcome from their High Church brethren was still far from secure. Indeed, to the latter, regular and respectable Evangelicalism laying claim to the title deeds of the Church was potentially even more threatening than the irregular version, not least because of the alarming nature of its theology. Theological controversy between Evangelicals and their opponents had been a perennial feature of the movement since the mid-eighteenth century. In the early decades of the nineteenth century it remained acute and produced a variety of debates over matters ranging from the proper understanding of the liturgies for baptism and burial to the nature of the Church and the function of religious establishment. However, most of these debates derived ultimately from a single point of difference – soteriology. To its historians Evangelical theology often appears complex and variegated; it did not always seem so to contemporaries. For determined High Church objectors like Charles Daubeny, the pugnacious archdeacon of Sarum, there were only two kinds of Evangelicals – the Calvinists, and the Calvinists in disguise. In many respects the former were to be preferred. Avowed Calvinists like Thomas Scott, the biblical commentator, or John Overton, Daubeny's perennial controversial opponent, were obviously wrong-headed; but at least their errors were out in the open and could be countered fairly.Footnote ⁶ The Calvinists in disguise were much more dangerous – perhaps especially when they numbered among their ranks influential lay people like William Wilberforce and Hannah More, or urbane and well-connected clergymen like Thomas Gisborne, G. S. Faber and Henry Ryder. These were people ideally equipped to infiltrate the upper echelons of the Establishment, to lull its guardians into a false sense of security and thus to spread their subversive theology throughout the Church.

The concern about Calvinism ran deep. As John Walsh has noted, ‘Calvinism had acquired deep psychological associations with the Civil War and Commonwealth, the antinomianism of sectaries, the dismemberment of the Church, the killing of the King. These folk memories dogged it like a kind of political original sin.’Footnote ⁷

But what of the avowed Evangelical Arminians? Wilberforce, for example, was no doctrinal Calvinist, and so at first sight Daubeny's identification of men like him as Calvinists in disguise seems simply perverse. It was, however, common currency among churchmen of his stamp. Both Daubeny and his close friend and correspondent Jonathan Boucher applied the same epithet to Hannah More. Similarly, William Van Mildert, the bishop of Durham, described the notably Arminian G. S. Faber's sermons on regeneration as ‘as strong a dose of Calvinistical and Fanatical declamation as I have met with for some time past’.Footnote ⁸ The answer to the puzzle can be found in the definition of Calvinism being employed in such circles. As Daubeny made clear in his controversy with J. H. Browne, the archdeacon of Ely, his definition of Calvinism did not relate to a particular understanding of the doctrine of election nor of a limited atonement – both of which Browne disavowed. Instead, for Daubeny, Calvinism consisted primarily in this: the preaching of a doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone – a doctrine that, he insisted was to be found among the five articles of Calvinism.Footnote ⁹

For such Hanoverian High Churchmen, justification by faith alone was no part of the English Reformation, or of the true doctrine of the Church of England (though it may have been intruded under the influence of returning continental exiles especially during the reign of Elizabeth).Footnote ¹⁰ For them, authentic Anglican soteriology was best expressed by the seventeenth-century bishop George Bull, who propagated a doctrine of double justification; a first justification by grace, mediated through baptism, and a final justification conditional on the development of the holiness and the performance of good works that cooperation with that divine grace made possible. This was no mere abstract theological difference. Bull's soteriology underlay an intense tradition of High Church spirituality – the holy living tradition represented by William Law's Serious call to a devout and holy life and the creation of religious societies for mutual encouragement in holiness and good works.Footnote ¹¹ It provided the background to the moralistic preaching so characteristic of the Hanoverian Church – a clear theological justification for the enforcement of duties that seemed all the more urgent in the face of French Revolution abroad and French principles at home. In this context Evangelical experiences of conversion and assurance smacked of ‘enthusiasm’ while the preaching of justification by faith alone – especially to the poor and unlearned who so desperately needed to be taught their duty – was appallingly dangerous and would inevitably lead to antinomian excess. As Daubeny complained to Browne,

In the face of such wholesale objections to their soteriology and associations with regicide made more pointed by recent events in France, careful explanations by Evangelical Arminians like Ryder of their rejection of Calvinist constructions of election or the scope of the atonement were unlikely to convince their opponents.

However, it should not be assumed from such controversy that there were simple battle lines to be drawn between emergent church parties clearly defined by their respective theologies. High Churchmen could be found who took a more generous view of Calvinists in the Church. Samuel Horsley, for example, perhaps the most influential High Church bishop at the turn of the century, and himself a devotee of Bishop Bull, told his clergy in Rochester in 1800 that

It was, therefore, entirely possible for leading High Churchmen to combine a firm espousal of their inherited soteriology with an admission of the legitimacy of alternative views within the Church. Moreover, even High Churchmen who differed sharply with Evangelicals on theological matters did not always find this an insuperable barrier to friendship and co-operation. Isaac Milner, the moderately Calvinist dean of Carlisle, for example, attributed his appointment to the support of his friend George Pretyman Tomline, bishop of Lincoln and author of A refutation of Calvinism. Tomline was also prepared to lend his support to Hannah More when she was assailed by her High Church critics during the Blagdon Controversy – even if she was not always sure of his motives.Footnote ¹⁴ Other examples could also be found among the bishops. Bielby Porteus, successively bishop of Chester and London, was sufficiently determined to eliminate the possibility of Calvinist influence in the Church to sponsor a move to revise the Thirty-Nine Articles in an Arminian direction.Footnote ¹⁵ His younger friend bishop Thomas Burgess was theologically as High a churchman as you might find in later Hanoverian England. He was often to be found operating in tandem with Daubeny in controversy with dissenters and Evangelicals and was even willing to defend (though with considerable difficulty) some of the latter's more extraordinary claims – including the notion that justification by faith alone was one of the five points of Calvinism.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, both these prelates were, in effect, supporters of the Evangelical movement. They had close friendships with Hannah More and the men of the Clapham sect, they were willing to ordain and prefer Evangelicals within their dioceses and they could be found as supporters of Evangelical initiatives including the Bible Society and the Prayer Book and Homilies Society.Footnote ¹⁷

Arguably then the most fundamental divide between later Hanoverian Churchmen (and the point of difference between those High Churchmen who tended to support or admit the legitimacy of Evangelical perspectives and those who did not) was not the perennial question of difference over doctrine by itself. It was rather a combination of that issue with a concern about Evangelical practice that became particularly acute in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Certainly, there was much in the conduct even of the most respectable and regular Evangelicals to worry nervous High Churchmen. Their co-operation with dissenters in the Bible Society diminished the dignity and weakened the boundaries of the Established Church; their pastoral innovations, like the sponsorship of religious activity in unconsecrated premises, tended to undermine traditional church order; and their educational schemes (like Hannah More's Mendip schools which sparked a major controversy between 1799 and 1802) threatened to disturb the precarious social balance of the nation.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1817 such concerns came briefly to focus on the rather unlikely figure of the recently consecrated bishop of Gloucester, Henry Ryder.

Ryder was, in some respects, the epitome of the new and dangerous kind of Evangelical especially since he was the best connected of any Evangelical clergyman in the second decade of the nineteenth century. The grandson of a bishop, the son of Lord Harrowby and younger brother of two ministers in the cabinet of Spencer Perceval (Dudley Ryder, first earl of Harrowby, and Richard Ryder) Henry, according to the usual rules of the later Hanoverian Church, was on the fast track to preferment. Indeed, by 1808, only seven years after entering into his first incumbency at Lutterworth, he became a canon of Windsor and was preaching before the king. Thereafter, his adoption of Evangelical views, causes and methods may have put a brake on his progress but he was, nevertheless, promoted to the deanery of Wells in 1812 and (by Lord Liverpool in whose administration his eldest brother served as Lord President of the Council) to the see of Gloucester in 1815. As the first avowed Evangelical on the bench, Ryder was inevitably suspect to the High Church clergy of his new diocese; and though a moderate anti-Calvinist in his theology, his track record of preaching for Evangelical causes like the Bible Society and the Church Missionary Society and his pastoral innovations – lectures in a factory at Lutterworth and evening services in the parish church of Wells – were hardly reassuring.Footnote ¹⁹ William Smyth, the professor of modern history at Cambridge, suspected that Henry Ryder's appointment to Gloucester would horrify the more implacable High Churchmen because he was ‘a professed Saint, who had even ordered a Hymn to be sung in a Cathedral when he was Dean’.Footnote ²⁰ Certainly a welcome could not be guaranteed and it was rumoured that in at least one deanery the clergy proposed to signal their disapproval of his appointment by boycotting the customary visitation dinner.Footnote ²¹ John Keble, ensconced in his first pastoral charge at Eastleach in the Gloucester diocese, described Ryder as ‘that horrid monstrous patron of heresy & schism’.Footnote ²² Ryder, however, had the advantage of a kindly temperament and considerable personal charm. His friendly manner and carefully constructed primary charge, which combined a firm statement of his Evangelical position with evident moderation and desire for the good of his Church, seems to have won many of the clergy round and disarmed much suspicion. Keble was impressed in spite of himself, noting

It would seem to have been largely unsuspecting, therefore, that Ryder found himself suddenly plunged into one of the greatest rows of his career on Monday 1 December 1817 – less than eighteen months after completing his reassuring visitation tour. He had arrived in Bath the day before to preach at the Octagon chapel in support of the Church Missionary Society and took the chair on the Monday evening at a gathering in the Guildhall to inaugurate a local auxiliary organisation for the society. Immediately upon opening the meeting Ryder discovered that he had walked into an ambush. Before business was allowed to begin, Josiah Thomas, the archdeacon of Bath, rose from his seat and delivered from a prepared script a furious protest against the formation of the society, the object for which it was being formed and the people who were proposing it. The protest was a lengthy one and as the audience began to realise what was happening they gave it an unfriendly reception, despite Ryder's call for the archdeacon to be given a fair hearing. The archdeacon, however, had no intention of extending the same courtesy to the bishop. He concluded his statement with the words ‘I PROTEST against the formation of such a Society in this City. Whether, or in what manner, the Hon. and Right Rev. Vice-Patron and his friends will condescend to notice this PROTEST, – I shall not stay to see.’

He then left the meeting as suddenly as he had appeared.Footnote ²⁴ The sight of an archdeacon haranguing a bishop of his own Church and to his face was, to say the least, an unusual one in early nineteenth-century England and the affair became something of a sensation. The news was placarded all over London and noticed in the metropolitan press. From there it was picked up by the provincial newspapers which from Norwich to Chester carried reports of the protest, counter statements from the promoters of the Bath CMS and an often lively local correspondence on both sides of the dispute.Footnote ²⁵ It also produced a flurry of pamphleteering, with the archdeacon's protest going into at least seven editions and a reply penned by Daniel WilsonFootnote ²⁶ going into at least fifteen. The debate was continued over the next few months in more than twenty further pamphlets as well as reviews and articles in leading journals like The British Critic and the British Review, which (much to the fury of the Critic) amused its readers by turning the archdeacon's protest into rhyming couplets. Footnote ²⁷ Together this material provides a clear window into the more practical grounds of controversy between Evangelicals and conservative High Churchmen in the late Hanoverian period.

The terms of the archdeacon's protest were, in some respects familiar. He claimed to be a friend of the missionary principle but that the CMS was an unnecessary intrusion on the Establishment because the Church already had its own properly constituted Missionary Society – the SPG; and he encouraged all true churchmen to support the latter body. To this Wilson provided the stock response that the remit of the SPG was limited to British colonies and the CMS had other objects in view. He was also able to produce a small coup in revealing that while Ryder was already a subscribing member of the SPG, the archdeacon was not.Footnote ²⁸ Thomas also protested at the arrogation of the title Evangelical to a particular grouping within the Church when it should be the common property of all churchmen. This too was a familiar objection, though perhaps a little incongruous coming from a representative of a group which commonly referred to its members as the Orthodox. The terminological discomfort, however, represented wider fears about the subversive nature of Evangelical theology and the rise of what appeared to be a new sect within the Church; and all the standard tropes of anti-Calvinist polemic were repeated with explicit linkage of modern Evangelicals to seventeenth-century Puritans.Footnote ²⁹

More controversial was Thomas's personal attack on Ryder who, he protested, had no right to take the chair at such a meeting:

Here are all the old anxieties about the tendency of Evangelical ministry to play fast and loose with the territorial structures of the Church being re-played at an episcopal level. In fact Ryder, who as dean of Wells was no stranger to the diocese, had sought the permission of the bishop of Bath and Wells to preach the sermon on the Sunday and had also informed him of his intention of chairing the meeting. The bishop had neither objected to nor positively approved the meeting and had himself earlier declined an invitation to act as patron of the society, so just about enough doubt remained about the legitimacy of Ryder's position to allow the controversy to proceed. Equally, however, it was far from clear that the intervention of the archdeacon had been commissioned by the bishop of Bath and Wells in whose name he claimed to speak. Indeed, early in the controversy Thomas appears to have feared that he might be publicly disavowed by his diocesan.Footnote ³¹ Some defenders of the CMS probed this aspect of the dispute,Footnote ³² but the majority sought to challenge the authority of the archdeacon at a much more fundamental level. Thomas had founded his right to invade the meeting and make what he represented as an official protest on the fact that the CMS claimed to be a Church of England society and was therefore plainly subject to ecclesiastical discipline.Footnote ³³ At this point Wilson took the offensive:

It was, therefore, not Bishop Ryder but the archdeacon who had exceeded his authority and behaved uncanonically. According to Wilson, he ‘had no more right to assume any jurisdiction over this peaceable and lawful Meeting of benevolent individuals for a simple and legitimate object of charity, than he would have had to interrupt an assembly convened for planning a bridge or projecting a hospital’.Footnote ³⁵

This claim went to the heart of the matter, for it was precisely the introduction of the autonomous voluntary society into the fabric of the Church of England that was to some High Churchmen the most dangerous and objectionable feature of contemporary Evangelicalism. Voluntary societies themselves were, of course, not new and members of the Established Church had participated fully in what Peter Clark has described as ‘a landslide of associational activity’ in the eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁶ Many of these societies were religious in nature, but they were carefully linked to the existing hierarchies of authority in the Church. At a local level, religious societies for devotional and charitable purposes were under the supervision of the parish clergy – Wesleyan Methodism had all too clearly exemplified the dangers of anything else. At a national level the great Church voluntary bodies the SPCK and the SPG were firmly linked to the episcopate and dominated by the metropolitan High Church elite – the ‘board of safe, sound sensible men’ that attracted the scorn of the young John Henry Newman.Footnote ³⁷ Stimulated into action by the perceived threat of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the SPCK had begun to experiment with local organisations in 1810. A network of diocesan committees was established ‘under the sanction and by the direction’ of the relevant bishop and smaller district organisations were envisaged for archdeaconries and major towns at the discretion of the bishop. Such a committee had been established in Bath in 1812. This new network was thus clearly and with deliberation firmly embedded within the territorial and hierarchical structures of the Church, and indeed from the point of view of Herbert Marsh one of the key advantages of the plan was that ‘it invigorates the principle of diocesan government’.Footnote ³⁸

The new Evangelical bodies were different. On the one hand they claimed, as in the case of the CMS, to be Church of England societies, but on the other they could operate without respect to the territorial structures which were fundamental to all other aspects of church life. Worse still, they could claim, as Wilson had indeed pointed out, to be effectively exempt from all forms of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Having inserted themselves into the fabric of the Church they thus opened up a space for autonomous activity on the part of a particular section of the clergy – the Evangelicals – and, what was potentially even more dangerous, for autonomous activity on the part of the laity too. They were thus both divisive and subversive at the same time. The bishop of Carlisle certainly had no doubts about their likely effects, writing to Henry Hanley Norris, ‘How these new fangled societies divide and in sure consequence, lower the dignity of the Church!’Footnote ³⁹ This was more than the irruption of elements of a masculine bourgeois public sphere into the ancien régime of the Church, however, for the Evangelical societies fostered a whole range of disturbing innovation. In the first place, they magnified the role and public prominence of women. ‘Is it delicate and proper’, asked one of Thomas's supporters, Richard Lloyd, ‘that ladies should associate, as they do, in large assemblies, form committees, and collect in their own persons, subscriptions, donations, and even pence from the lowest classes of the community?’Footnote ⁴⁰ Thomas himself elaborated the point in a sermon preached in the following year:

If their threat to the integrity of the female character was a particularly monstrous feature of the new Evangelical voluntary bodies, the democratic form of their organisation was positively dangerous. In the first place they were necessarily run by committees rather than the hierarchy, placing ordained clergymen under the authority of the laity, an inversion of the normal structures of ecclesiastical authority. Thomas, commenting on CMS's operations in the field, noted ‘of this I am certain, viz. – That “the concerns of the Society in the North of India” are … under no other authority or controul, than “the management of A CORRESPONDING COMMITTEE.” A Church of England Missionary Society, under the MANAGEMENT (that is the word) of A CORRESPONDING COMMITTEE!!!’Footnote ⁴² Here the printed version of the protest is intended to give an accurate representation of the way in which it was delivered. Clearly the dangers of such an innovation required no further explanation but even worse was to appear when Thomas turned to the question of the society's membership:

Not only was the CMS democratic in the form of its management but its membership was extended to poor collectors of subscriptions who were even to be given voting rights. Surely any sensible churchman could see that this disorderly way of proceeding could only threaten the integrity of the Church. Indeed, for the anonymous author of A reply to Mr Wilson's defence of the Church Missionary Society the very act of domiciliary visiting by the society's lay collectors, unapproved other than by the society itself, tended to undermine the economy of the parish system, alienating, in particular, the poor from their authorised pastors.Footnote ⁴⁴ But the mobilisation of the poor could be construed in yet more sinister terms: perhaps even as a danger to the state. ‘We all know’, noted one of Thomas' supporters

William Baily Whitehead, the vicar of Twiverton near Bath, was even more forthright: membership of a missionary society was ‘neither fitted to the means nor the intelligence of the poor’; the Church could never allow ‘the elevation of ignorant persons … to a deliberative voice in the administration of her charitable institutions’. It was ‘dangerous folly’ to court the ‘ruin, that would attend the general prevalence of this equalizing, universal suffrage giving, member making system’.Footnote ⁴⁶ To Whitehead the sort of case made by Wilson and the CMS was tantamount to nothing less than the ‘visionary equality’ ‘of the Anabaptists of Munster’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even less heated imaginations seem to have found it difficult to draw the line in such a case between a corresponding committee and a corresponding society. Was the whole CMS project, after all, not a clear instance of what Thomas Sikes, the intimate of the Hackney Phalanx, called ‘Jacobinism lurking behind the cross’?Footnote ⁴⁸

Such High Church critics might sometimes be tempted to admire Ryder and his friends for their energy and purpose. But if such zeal could be had only at the expense of church structures – by accepting the validity of their new model of autonomous voluntary Anglicanism – then the price was too high to pay. Richard Churton, another High Churchman closely linked to the Hackney Phalanx, summed up their view of the issue in responding to a suggestion from Bishop Thomas Burgess that urgent action should be taken to establish a society of friends of the Church to counteract the Dissenters:

All too accurately, critics like Josiah Thomas, Richard Churton and their colleagues in the High Church Hackney Phalanx pointed to the tendency of Evangelical voluntary autonomous Anglicanism to subvert the ancien régime in the Established Church. Indeed, for some, almost any activity at all beyond the established norms of parochial and diocesan duty tended to weaken the Church by bringing into disrepute that majority of the clergy which did not engage in such superogatory activity.Footnote ⁵⁰ Almost twenty years before John Randolph, future bishop of London, had pointed to

Opposition on such grounds, however accurate its diagnosis of the dangers to established forms, was, in common with other conservative defences of the ancien régime in this period, ultimately to prove unsuccessful. Briefly the scare created by the controversy at Bath certainly caused some disquiet among the leadership of the CMS and its supporters as is witnessed by the vigour of their response.Footnote ⁵² In at least one locality the Protest even appears to have sparked an episode of persecution, when some poor subscribers to the CMS were threatened with denial of work and parish relief together with eviction from their cottages, while others were deprived of customary Christmas doles by the clergyman.Footnote ⁵³ However, within a few weeks of the publication of the archdeacon's protest the CMS began to feel the value of the publicity given to the society by the controversy. The secretariat was bombarded with letters arguing that Thomas would prove the best friend that the society had ever had.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1818 the new Bath auxiliary, established in the teeth of opposition, was able to remit a total of £443 1s. 3d. to the parent society compared to only £15 5s. from local subscriptions in 1815.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thirteen years after penning his Defence Daniel Wilson would be rewarded by appointment as the fourth bishop of Calcutta.

Three conclusions are suggested by this review of the grounds of conflict between Evangelicals and High Churchmen in the later Hanoverian Church. The first is the importance of taking seriously the value of the mass of High Church controversial literature as a source for key developments in the ecclesiastical history of the period. When critically read, giving due allowance for the usual characteristics of polemic in the form of exaggeration, hyperbole and on occasion pure ignorance, critics like Daubeny and Thomas are an excellent guide to the pressure points of the time, especially the impact of Evangelical soteriology and innovations in Anglican practice. This material also provides a vivid picture of the insecurity felt by many Anglican clergy in the face of such developments. The second conclusion qualifies the first, pointing to the complexity of controversy and the danger of a simple reading in terms of the rage of party in the pre-Tractarian Church of England. When investigated closely, it is very difficult to represent the controversies of the early nineteenth century as yielding any case of a clear clash between two theologically-bounded church parties. Whenever Evangelicals came into conflict with some High Churchmen in this period, other High Churchmen, like Burgess and Porteus and sometimes even Horsley or Pretyman Tomline, could be found rallying to their defence. In the case of the Bath CMS controversy, Shute Barrington, the bishop of Durham, reaffirmed his friendliness towards the society's cause, while the pamphlet dispute between Thomas and Wilson moved Thomas Burgess decisively towards support for the latter. Even the archbishop of York was reported to be so pleased with Wilson's defence that he had read it over twice to his family.Footnote ⁵⁶ This kind of support was to become rather rarer in the Tractarian era; but in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, it is worth considering whether the difference between those High Churchmen who tended to support the Evangelicals and those who opposed them may not have lain precisely at the point exposed in the Bath controversy. It was not in doctrine that such High Churchmen differed among themselves but in their relative willingness or unwillingness to accept Evangelical voluntary forms as a mode of strengthening the Church in the threatening world of emergent modernity.

Third and finally, the Bath CMS controversy illuminates what was arguably a highly significant but rarely noticed phenomenon within the later Hanoverian Church – nothing less than the birth of a new model of Anglicanism. The early nineteenth century was characterised by a renewal of traditional territorial and hierarchical structures in both parish and diocese which has been highlighted in a number of recent studies – most notably those of Arthur Burns.Footnote ⁵⁷ But alongside this development, the Evangelicals of the CMS introduced, perhaps for the first time, a model of voluntary, autonomous and yet simultaneously exclusively Anglican activity. Free from inherited territorial restraints, it could imprint itself directly on the new demographic, social and economic contours of English society with all the facility of the most freewheeling nonconformist denomination.Footnote ⁵⁸ Emancipated from traditional hierarchical and disciplinary controls it allowed both clergy and laity to develop new spheres of activity, fuelled and directed by their own imperatives and representing by their very existence a challenge to the established norms of the Church. This model of voluntary, autonomous and associational Anglicanism proved readily adaptable for service in a myriad of causes in the succeeding century and its success was so complete that now to conceive of the Church without it requires a considerable stretch of the historical imagination. That it did not prove a more powerful solvent of the inherited hierarchical and territorial structures of the Church owed much to the conservatism of so many of its proponents and thus to the Evangelical turn to regularity within the Establishment. It worked a revolution in both the concept and the practice of the Church of England none the less.