Anthony Ashley-Cooper (1801–85), the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, was a Victorian religious colossus. ‘A complex and enigmatic figure who frequently defied initial impressions’ (p. 299), Shaftesbury was involved in a vast range of social, political and religious projects, including factory and mine reform, the establishment of an Anglican-Lutheran Bishopric in Jerusalem, and the foundation of the Ragged School Union for destitute children. His life has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with the multi-volume biography prepared by Edwin Hodder just five years after the earl’s death. David Furse-Roberts enriches this corpus by exploring how Shaftesbury’s political and religious outlook exemplified broader trends in nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelicalism. This is a useful approach because, when compared to the historiographical attention given both to the eighteenth-century evangelical revivals and to the Hanoverian Evangelicalism of Charles Simeon and William Wilberforce, developments in mid-nineteenth century Evangelicalism have received somewhat less scholarly attention.
Furse-Roberts reveals a complex story of continuity and disjunction between the eras of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. On the one hand, he argues that there were clear continuities in regard to an insistence on personal conversion and the authority of Scripture, as well as a burden for a ‘practical Christianity’ that issued in political and social action. On the other hand, he highlights the emergence of a more stridently anti-Catholic, anti-liberal, and premillennial strain among early Victorian Evangelicals. This development of a more radical, unyielding variant of Evangelical faith in the late 1820s is well known, having been discussed by Ian Bradley, Timothy Stunt, John Wolffe and David Bebbington among others. However, Furse-Roberts insists that there was no easy dividing line between the old evangelicalism and the new. He paints Shaftesbury as a bridging figure – both a ‘son of the Clapham Sect’ and a ‘brother of the Recordites’ (p. 72), the latter term referring to the Record (founded 1828), the newspaper of choice of the new Evangelical hardliners. Shaftesbury’s Evangelicalism was ‘elastic’ (p. 73). Furse-Roberts therefore insists that the case of Shaftesbury refutes the easy schematization of Victorian Evangelicals into ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ made by Boyd Hilton in Age of Atonement.
At the centre of Furse-Roberts’ work is an analysis of the Tory paternalist tradition in which Shaftesbury stood. Like many proponents of early nineteenth-century paternalism, Shaftesbury understood society to be ‘authoritarian, hierarchical, organic and pluralistic’ (p. 80). Furse-Roberts insists that Shaftesbury’s version of paternalism was also distinctly Evangelical, infused with a concern for how poverty incubated anti-Christian vice, and with a belief that unrestrained liberal capitalism bred ungodly avarice and selfishness. The ‘fatherhood of God’ was a key motif that united the broader paternalist tradition of Southey and the Evangelical tradition (p. 158). Furse-Roberts shows Shaftesbury to be a pragmatist who sometimes broke with the narrower political Tory paternalist tradition. He was amenable to working with the Whigs or liberal Conservatives when this looked like a more viable route to success. He even voted for the repeal of the Corn Laws, against the grain of the agrarian roots of the paternalist tradition in the hope that MPs from industrial areas might back his cherished factory reforms as a quid pro quo.
Furse-Roberts’ central thesis about the Evangelical paternalist tradition might be thought to confirm the argument of Boyd Hilton who sought to distinguish between ‘Malthusian’ Evangelicals like Thomas Chalmers, who were generally committed to laissez-faire political economy, and ‘paternalist’ Evangelicals, like Shaftesbury, who advocated for state intervention on behalf of the poor. Hilton argued that differing understandings of providence was the conceptual key that explained the distinct political attitudes of Evangelicals. Furse-Roberts offers a much more subtle and nuanced account of the roots of the Evangelical Tory Evangelical paternalist tradition which he argues was woven from disparate fibres of Protestant constitutionalism, Anglican establishmentarianism, and premillennial eschatology. Most of all, Shaftesbury ‘regarded the notion of a non-interventionist, laissez-faire state as morally untenable … for what he regarded as a Christian nation’ (p. 158). Indeed, it is Shaftesbury’s sense of responsibility for the sins and well-being of the nation – and the empire – that often comes to the fore most clearly in Furse-Roberts’ work. This was a clear inheritance from the desire in the Clapham era to ‘convert Britannia’, to adapt words from the title of Gareth Atkins’ recent study of early nineteenth-century Evangelicalism.
Despite Furse-Roberts’ insistence (here following David Bebbington) that Evangelicalism modulated according to its intellectual, political and cultural milieu, he does not do enough to position the Evangelical paternalist tradition within the broader context of mid-century Anglican social thought. Although briefly mentioned, a deeper comparison of the Evangelical paternalist tradition with Christian socialism and Anglo-Catholic social thought, by way of engagement with key works such as that by Jeremy Morris (on F.D. Maurice and Christian socialism) and Simon Skinner (on Tractarianism), would have been fruitful.
As for the long-term legacy of the Evangelical paternalist tradition, Furse-Roberts argues that Shaftesbury was a quintessentially Victorian figure whose death coincided with the eclipse of his brand of social-political thought (p. 305). However, this argument has the effect of somewhat undermining the broader point Furse-Roberts wishes to make both about the evolving character of Evangelicalism and its multi-faceted links to its surrounding cultural milieu. While his narrative shows the evolution from Clapham to the dawn of the Victorian age, the book does not continue to plot the developing strands of the Anglican Evangelical movement through the latter half of the century. This is perhaps somewhat inevitable given the biographical nature of the study because Shaftesbury was often irascibly hostile to many of the directions in which the church was moving in the late nineteenth century. Ritualism, rationalism, Romanism, Christian and the Salvation Army all failed to move him. Shaftesbury may have bridged the past and present, but he did not pivot to the future.
However, there is a hint that Furse-Roberts is discontent with this depiction. He briefly wonders whether Shaftesbury might actually be viewed as an idealist and ‘visionary’ – an individual ‘in front of’ his time (p. 298). Although this line of thought is not given much room to breathe, it is indeed worth pondering the extent to which twentieth-century Anglican social thought, while generally recognized to be the offspring of Victorian Christian socialism and Anglo-Catholicism, may actually also have continued to bear the hallmarks of the Evangelical Tory paternalist tradition long after its champions went to their eternal reward. In particular, it is noticeable from the study that Shaftesbury and the Evangelical paternalists allowed a greater role for the state than Christian socialists or Anglo-Catholics, who always saw the church as the locus of social fraternity and feared the displacement of the ecclesial and sacramental by the secular and bureaucratic. Thus while Maurice, Kingsley and Ludlow focused their aspiration on non-state workers’ cooperatives, it was Shaftesbury and friends – low church pragmatists – who lobbied for central government to moderate industrial capitalism, and who insisted that ‘the State has an interest and a right to watch over, and provide for, the moral and physical wellbeing of her people’ (p. 103). William Temple’s famous description of the Beveridge Report as ‘the first time anyone had set out to embody the whole spirit of the Christian ethic in an Act of Parliament’ may actually stand more authentically in the line of Shaftesbury and Sadler than of Maurice and Ludlow. It was the Evangelical Tory paternalists who most hankered after concrete, pragmatic national legislation that reflected their understanding of an organic, well-ordered, benevolent Christian society under the watchful care of a stern but ultimately humane government – the mirror image of their all-mighty yet compassionate God.
