SOURCE: Greaves, R. W. “The Working of the Alliance: A Comment on Warburton.” In Essays in Modern English Church History: In Memory of Norman Sykes, edited by G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh, pp. 163-80. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966.

That rumbustious ecclesiastical and literary controversialist, William Warburton, while yet an obscure country priest residing upon his cure, and but thirty-eight years of age, produced in 1736 one of the most remarkable and influential books of the century; closely, subtly and plausibly argued, and in language which was economical, yet at times forceful and vivid. His fundamental theme he expressed, after an excellent eighteenth century fashion, in his title, The Alliance of Church and State, and the Necessity and Equity of an Established Religion and a Test Law demonstrated, from the Essence and End of Civil Society, upon the Fundamental Principles of the Law of Nature and Nations.¹ He believed that in this work he had set forth the only possible theory of the subject, and had for ever refuted those who cavilled at established churches, or who denounced the test and corporation acts, at a time when moves were being made for their repeal, and the privileges of the established clergy were under fire from various sorts of opponents, not only protestant dissenters but anti-clericals also. For reasons quite easy to discern, his arguments were condemned as paradoxical.

In the first place, Warburton turned the notion of the church as an independent body,² with inherent authority, ‘sovereign’ in matters appertaining to men's souls, in some sense a kingdom, with officers and discipline—a high churchman's notion—to serve Erastian and low church ends. He was able to do this, in part because he professed to be writing, as his title says, not theologically or historically, nor in terms of positive law; not specifically about the Church of England nor even about Christianity, but about religion in general, and according to the law of nature and nations. Pagan antiquity, no less than the Christian world, had had established religions and test laws, which had excluded nonconformists from public office. Men as men, not as Christians, were members of two societies, the one civil, the other religious: the religious dealing with their souls and their eternal destiny; and the civil with their bodies, their material interests, and their lives, liberties, and estates. It was essential to Warburton's thesis that the state as such, whether Christian or not, had nothing to do with religion, except only as concerned those few truths of natural religion about God, providence, and judgment, which (it was almost universally agreed) were necessary to be upheld if peace and security were to be kept.

Between these two societies Warburton postulated a necessary alliance or convention (a not original idea) by which the state protects the church, and the church serves the state.³ Under the terms of the alliance, the church receives certain benefits from the state: namely, a legal provision out of the public property for the payment of religious ministers, the right to hold courts for the reformation of manners, representation by some of its officers in the legislature, and the protection of a test law, should that be necessary. In return, the church gives up its natural independency, surrendering to the civil magistrate all ‘supremacy in matters ecclesiastical’. This means that the church does nothing without the civil magistrate's leave or approbation, not even those things which it would be impertinent for the civil magistrate to attempt to do, such as the conferring of the ministerial character. To the state, the church surrenders also the appointment of its ministers. Thus Warburton took over an idea which Nonjurors had used to secure ecclesiastical independence, and made it the starting-point of a practically Hobbist Erastianism. On this basis, Submission, rather than Alliance, might well be a better word for Warburton's title: the submission certainly of the clergy in an apparently even less qualified form than had been secured by the Reformation. On the other hand, the very form of Warburton's argument helped to keep alive the very idea, hotly controverted in the early years of the Hanoverian régime, of there being any ecclesiastical authority at all, which was ‘inherent’ in the church as such, or necessary to its being, or not derived from the secular power.⁴ This was one reason why the Old Whig, or Consistent Protestant, denounced Warburton for priestcraft.⁵

Secondly, Warburton's treatment of religious dissenters produced results hardly less surprising. Where there are more religions than one to choose from, the state, said Warburton, must ally with that which is numerically the greatest. Only so long as it is the largest, is the alliance with it to be continued, because the motives of the state in the alliance have nothing to do with religious truth (in the first instance), but only with public peace and utility: with the mobilising of religion to strengthen morality and order; with the preventing of profitable superstitions which corrupt the purity of religion and make the clergy rich and powerful; and with the restraining of that priestly power which left to itself brings faction and disorder, and very likely may even swallow up the civil power, as in Rome.⁶ The religion which the state adopts is protected from the insidious animosities of envious smaller bodies by a test law, which excludes their members from those public offices which, did they have them, they must in conscience use to undermine the established religion.

This test law was, in Warburton's argument, the necessary concomitant of toleration. No test, no toleration: no toleration, therefore persecution. This is Warburton's contention. Thus the test and corporation acts, so far from being an affront to religious liberty, are supports of it. Because of them religious dissenters can peaceably enjoy the natural right of worshipping God as their consciences direct. Thus those exclusions from office which the English dissenters could only regard as inspired by the persecuting spirit of a barbarous age were ingeniously transformed by Warburton into instruments of an enlightened liberty.⁷ He had at least this justification, that in France, for example, where there was no test law, there was persecution of both protestants and Jansenists. The translator of Warburton's Alliance into French hoped, unavailingly, that its arguments might entice Cardinal Fleury out of what an Englishman called ‘the plain popish dogtrot of persecution’.⁸

More than anyone else, much more than the free thinkers, the English dissenters made Warburton's book necessary. Had the English nation substantially remained what Hooker believed it to be, ‘personally identical’ with the church, Warburton would hardly have been called upon to write a book, of which one chief object was to justify the test and corporation acts. Yet he was careful to insist that even where church and state were the same people, there were still two societies, and still an alliance between them. For not only are the civil and religious societies in principle distinct (as Hooker makes quite clear), but also men by coming into any society for any purpose create thereby a distinct corporate will. They bring into being a ‘factitious moral person’.⁹ It is as a ‘factitious moral person’, and in no other way, that Warburton considers the church. Here was another strange turn of thought. For the Nonjurors, also for the high churchmen, the church as an independent society was a theological notion (with no doubt political consequences), which was found in Scripture and justified from the Fathers. Warburton turned it into a principle of political science, with the church in this respect homogeneous with the state.¹⁰

Warburton was well satisfied with the English arrangements, as conformable with the rational pattern of an established religion—though there seems to have been uncertainty in his own mind, whether England gave him the picture of nature, or nature justified what he saw in England. In the book itself he claimed quite boldly that in England the terms of the alliance as deduced by reason were kept so exactly, that his ‘Account of the Alliance between Church and State seems rather copied from the Church and State of England, than a Theory as indeed it was, formed solely from the Contemplation of Nature and the invariable Reason of things’.¹¹ Nearly thirty years later, in 1765, complaining of the totally divergent criticisms which were made of his book, he treated the alliance as merely expounding what he saw around him, in the Church and State of England. As ‘I made the Church neither a SLAVE nor a TYRANT (and under one or the other of these ideas of it, almost all men had now taken party), The Alliance between Church and State, though framed upon a Model before our Eyes, was considered as an Utopian Refinement’.¹²

The Church of England in its relations with secular authority was far from exhibiting the beautiful rationality of Warburton's elegant analysis. It was in the form it was, less by rational design than as the result of conflicts and accommodations from the Reformation till Warburton's own time. Church revenues, church courts, the church defences in the test laws were full of irregularities, which were hardly consistent with Warburton's Augustan blueprint.

So far from the ministers of the church being maintained by a provision supplied by the state ‘out of the national property’, all they had was, rather, what was left after the secularisations of the sixteenth century and some subsequent depredations, supplemented by more recent benevolence.¹³ Even the terms on which lessees held tithe and other ecclesiastical property had to be carefully watched, in order that the rights of those who actually served the cures, for whom these revenues were originally designed, might be decently maintained. In 1760 Archbishop Secker offered to reduce the fine payable by Lord Chesterfield on renewing the lease from him of St. Gregory's Priory, if he would pay the land tax on the pensions stipulated by the lease to be paid to the vicars and curates. This Lord Chesterfield declined to do, on the ground, probably not unreasonable, that it would be wrong for him in this way to reduce the value of this estate. ‘I have ever since’, wrote Secker, ‘paid the Land Tax about 31£ a Year for these Clergymen.’¹⁴ He took pains too to remind clergymen of their right to have the tax paid, where they had it.¹⁵

Impropriations of tithe were recognised—they could hardly not be—as a cause of non-residence, because they reduced the net value of benefices, which had in consequence to be held in plurality. Thus, when towards the end of Secker's primacy an earnest lawyer of reforming disposition proposed to stir up the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to prosecute absentee clergymen on the ground of their oaths of residence, Secker in dissuading him urged upon him this cause of non-residence and plurality, with the consequent low standard of pastoral oversight. He reminded him also that in the most unpromising circumstances, clergymen gave good pastoral care. ‘Prayers are in many country parish churches on Wednesdays Fridays and Holy Days, and would be in many more, if so many as two or three would constantly attend.’¹⁶

To some extent, the evils of non-residence were lessened by the general observance of Archbishop Tenison's rules, based on the canons of 1603, against granting dispensations for holding any two benefices more than thirty miles apart.¹⁷ Lord Derby was greatly disappointed by Lord Hardwicke's failure to gratify him, when he asked for his brother a Yorkshire living sixty miles away from Liverpool, where his brother had a moiety of the rectory. This, with the Yorkshire benefice, would make, as he was sure Hardwicke would agree, a ‘provision not too large for a Gentleman, that has had a liberal Education’.¹⁸ ‘Seeing nothing in the Acts of Parliament relating to Dispensations that confines to any distance, and having no great opinion of Canons not established by the Legislature … I will not doubt but that the Remonstrance of Archbishop Tenison was well designed, and can't help wishing for the sake of the inferior Clergy that the same warmth against all Pluralities had always prevail'd in the hearts of his Mitred Brethren: it would then not be possible to see four or five different preferments in the possession of their Relations and Friends, consistent perhaps with the letter of their Laws, but as incompatible with the design and intention of them as with the reason of things.’¹⁹ The earl would not on the other hand have agreed with those Tory pamphleteers who ascribe this episcopal greed to the Protestant Succession and Whig dominance, bringing in as a ‘new maxim’ the holding of ‘all good prebends’ by bishops in commendam.²⁰ Nor in fact was this a true accusation.

Even less conformable to the neat proposals of the Alliance were the ecclesiastical courts, as Warburton recognised and emphasised. For one thing, they were not limited to the reformation of manners, as he thought they should be, but dealt in mixed matters involving property, such as marriage causes and wills. He was sorry that the Edwardine Reformatio of ecclesiastical laws which had restored these causes to the civil authority had been allowed to lapse.²¹ Further, these courts still followed old ecclesiastical modes of procedure, not, as would be more proper, forms of process derived from the secular courts. ‘How absurd it must be for Ecclesiastical Courts to administer their Power, and regulate their Proceedings upon Foreign Forms, Rules and Maxims … whereby their Original and Dependency is in fact denied.’²² Yet these courts, even as they were, were firmly circumscribed by the secular courts. Canon Law came but low in the hierarchy of laws to which even archbishops had to have recourse. The great Lord Hardwicke, friend as he was on more than one occasion to church and clergy, firmly upheld the supremacy of the secular law, and definitely ruled, contrariwise to the opinion of the learned Bishop Gibson, that canon law did not apply to laymen except as ratified by Parliament.²³ Even in disputes purely ecclesiastical the status of canon law could be matter for argument. In 1766, when the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury disputed the right of the archbishop of Canterbury to institute in that diocese during the vacancy of the see, in what Secker described to the dean as ‘our amicable Controversy’,²⁴ the Vicar General's advice was that ‘it is certain that the canon law as such, unless it has been received, is not law in England, and it is incumbent on any person who would avail himself of it to show that in that particular it has been received’.²⁵

Everywhere, indeed, there was a vast reverence for the law of the land, so that where there was any doubt, the first resort was not to what the parties concerned might think reasonable, but to the law, to find what it directed. Bishop Hoadly was more of the common mind than he often was, when in his charge to his clergy at Winchester in 1736 he promised that ‘in the Execution of my Office among you, I shall strictly govern myself by those Laws which have entrusted me with such an Administration. In Matters plainly determined by Authority, I shall expect from All under my Inspection the most exact Conformity to the Rubrics and Rules They have solemnly promised to observe. As I can truly say, That I punctually, without Addition or Diminution, practis'd them myself in former Stations of Life: so, I shall faithfully and impartially require the same from others. In Points left by the same Authority, and Law, to Prudence, and a Discretionary Power, I shall always act with an Impartiality never varying from one equal Rule for all, nor ever turned aside by the low Considerations of Differences in Opinion, or Party Distinctions.’²⁶

The presence of bishops in the Lords gave no encouragement to ecclesiastical pretension. Warburton was emphatic that they sat there, not in their own right, as did the lay barons, but simply to protect the interest of the church. They were there especially to see that ‘that Protection which the State affords it by a Test-Law be not violated’. Nor did they sit there as an estate of the realm; for that would be to turn the alliance into an incorporation, the state into a theocracy on the Jewish model, and the church into one ‘of the essential Parts of which the State is composed’. They were in the Lords merely ‘ne quid Ecclesia detrimenti capiat’.²⁷ Here again, even when emphasising how little churchmen have to do in the legislature, Warburton asserts a theoretical intrinsic independence of the church, apart from that alliance by which he takes it away.

Ne quid Ecclesia detrimenti capiat. This very formula expressed the eighteenth century dislike of political clergymen. Wolsey and Laud were examples to be avoided, not followed. Hardwicke was angry to learn that John Grove had compared him with the cardinal his predecessor. Grove said of Hardwicke that ‘his Character bears so striking a resemblance to that great injured Man's’.²⁸ That great injured man had been no great lover of parliaments, nor had he been so dexterous in his treatment of them, as Hardwicke was in the Lords, where on more than one occasion he was grateful for help from bishops. Secker spoke most ably in 1753 on Hardwicke's marriage bill, defending the role allotted in his proposals to the secular authority,²⁹ and again, with noticeable irony on the repeal of the Jews' naturalisation bill in 1754.³⁰ Generally, except upon such bills as affected the church, bishops were not active. Indeed their main concern was to agree with the lay managers of government to keep contentious measures out of parliament, especially bills about tithe or other forms of church property.³¹ Even when unanimous, they could not be sure of preventing measures of an ecclesiastical kind, which they opposed, from passing into law. Although Hardwicke and Herring agreed that, if at all possible, ‘the indelible’ must be kept out of parliament,³² the bill disabling Scots episcopal ministers from acting in England unless they had their Orders from either England or Ireland was first defeated by their united opposition in the Lords, and then, by a manœuvre, brought in again, when few bishops were present, and passed.³³

Opposition politicians commonly asserted that bishops in the Lords were creatures of the court. In fact, their behaviour was by no means uniform. For one thing, different bishops owed their promotions to different political interests. Some of them valued ‘independence’, as the eighteenth century parliament men understood that term. During the rule of Walpole, Secker as bishop of Oxford with his friend Benson of Gloucester voted often for place and pension bills, and sometimes against the court on other issues. Yet there were other times when, as Secker later recalled, he and Benson were with the ministers, while ‘other Bishops as Litchfield, Hereford, and Lincoln voted against the Court’.³⁴

The proposal to repeal the stamp act in 1766, for which the duke of Newcastle tried to mobilise the strongest episcopal support, met with coldness from Richard Terrick, formerly bishop of Peterborough, but now safely landed in the bishopric of London, a friend of the duke of Grafton rather than of the duke of Newcastle, and with flat opposition from Thomas Newton, bishop of Bristol. Terrick, on being approached, declared himself ‘absolutely unattached to any Man or Party of Men, but determined to act by his own Judgment on hearing the Debate’.³⁵ Thomas Newton, ‘always a friend to government’, seldom opposed the measures of the ministry, and never carried his opposition so far as to become a ‘protester’, except upon this one great occasion, considering as he did, the repeal as ‘involving the sacrifice of the honour and authority of Great Britain, and all the consequent troubles in America’.³⁶ This was the more remarkable for the king's having allowed Lord Rockingham to say that he was for the repeal.³⁷

Sometimes such decent independence, with the bishops as with other gentlemen in both houses, was not easy to reconcile with the claims of political friendship. Archbishop Secker found this in the last years of his life, after the duke of Newcastle's resignation from office for the last time in 1766. The suffocating heat of the House, the wearisome length of the debates, and the archbishop's frequent excruciating gout were all reasons why the archbishop should stay away. Besides all this, he was ‘unwilling to vote against either my old Friend the Duke of Newcastle, or the Kings Ministers, with whom I must have business to transact’.³⁸

Warburton like most other bishops spoke rarely in the Lords—by no means fulfilling the expectation of some that he would be a second Atterbury. Thomas Newton had an explanation, not an unlikely one, for the reticence of bishops in the Lords. Since there had been no Convocations sitting to do business, bishops did not have that early training in the cut and thrust of public debate that Atterbury had had. Most of them, Newton said, came into the House of Lords ‘at a time of life too late to begin such exercises’.³⁹ Warburton may be suspected of some sympathy with Newton's explanation. In the Alliance he observed that the bishops in the Lords ‘are too few to deliver the sense of so large a Society’ as that whose representatives they are, ‘when particular Cases of Importance are under Deliberation’. He suggests that, under proper restraints, clerical synods ‘could not be harmful’.⁴⁰

Under the terms of Warburton's alliance, the civil magistrate has the ministry of the church ‘wholly in his Power’. None may exercise their ministry without giving beforehand security for their allegiance. ‘By which means all that Power and Influence which the Ministers and Leaders had over it before the Alliance, as Protectors of Religion is now drawn off from them, and placed solely in the Civil Magistrate.’⁴¹ ‘All Presentations to Benefices are naturally in the Hands of the State.’⁴² It is difficult to believe that Warburton would have been pleased, if in fact they had been.

Squires in their villages, burgesses in a few towns, colleges, bishops, deans, and chapters all had livings in their gift, even though the weight of Government in the disposition of ecclesiastical offices seemed to grow greater. ‘By degrees’, complained Thomas Newton, ‘the Ministers of State have ingrossed all this power into their hands, and Bishops are regarded as little better than Cyphers in their own Churches, unless the Preferments happen to be in their own Gifts, and there perhaps the Ministers are troublesome by the Sollicitations.’⁴³ Newton no doubt exaggerated, but even so ministers no doubt grew more greedy, as the demands on them were more insistent. Neither Walpole, nor Newcastle, nor anyone else could satisfy them all. There were clergymen who seemed to do little but press themselves forward for livings and dignities. Thomas Wilson, son of the austere bishop of Sodor and Man, went from patron to patron, with the persistence of the importunate widow, and in the end was not unsatisfied.⁴⁴ There were moreover severe political pressures on ministers of state. Gentlemen important in local parliamentary politics did not scruple to make political calculation the ground for ecclesiastical nomination. ‘The very unsettled state of the Chapter, as well as the political interest of the County seems to require that a steady Whigg be sent down to us’, as a new canon at Worcester.⁴⁵ So long as party distinctions, however variously understood, cut deep in the countryside, between the minority who were Whigs and the majority who were not, arguments of this sort were bound to have weight. It was not surprising that archbishop Secker had often to reprove the duke of Newcastle for ‘his Regard to Recommendations of great Men and Members of Parliament’,⁴⁶ for the duke laboured under great necessity. Naturally, the clerical clients, whose claims their patrons urged for political reasons, were sometimes none too good as pastors. In 1761 the duke, urged by the ‘Principal Gentlemen of Chichester and the Neighbourhood’, with the support of the dean, persuaded archbishop Secker to appoint to the Vicarage of Bersted, a Canterbury peculiar in Sussex, a certain Dugard, whom they represented as excellent and laborious in the heavy pastoral charge of Gosport.⁴⁷ Unfortunately at Bersted he made but poor provision for his flock, so that the archbishop in 1766 expressed forcefully his desire that ‘better may be had for the future’.⁴⁸

It is difficult to assess at all exactly what weight ecclesiastical influences had in church appointments. It was certainly not negligible—but laymen loved to have the credit. Archbishops of Canterbury seem generally to have been very careful not to seem pushing. Archbishop Herring, who could be forceful when he wanted, told the duke that ‘as to any Circumstances of Decorum in the Communication of things to me, when Essentials are attended to, they are of little moment, & yet I think they are of less moment still, when Essentials are neglected—so that in all Events they are nothing worth’.⁴⁹ Secker on the other hand was prone to complain how much was done without consulting him. Even when George III gave instructions at the beginning of the first Rockingham ministry that all ecclesiastical recommendations were to go to him through the duke, acting in co-operation with the archbishop, and told the archbishop to look after Oxford as the duke would certainly look after Cambridge,⁵⁰ the duke very largely went his own way in spite of long consultations at Lambeth. No bishop, the archbishop thought, was ever made on his recommendation except possibly Robert Lowth,⁵¹ who had, though the archbishop does not mention it (and perhaps did not know it), some good lay support.⁵² Perhaps, therefore, there was a touch of that irony for which Secker was well known, when he thanked the duke for all the terrible trouble over ecclesiastical recommendations that the duke had spared him.⁵³ If Secker did not make any bishop except as a consecrator, he prevented one of the duke's friends from reaching the episcopal bench during his primacy. ‘There is one Difficulty’, wrote the duke, ‘in honest Dr. Law's Case. … My Coadjutor the Archbishop of Canterbury has some Difficulty with Regard to Dr. Law on Account of some Notions in a Book’, of which Law had been imprudent enough recently to put out a new edition.⁵⁴ Edmund Law, Master of Peterhouse and otherwise comfortably beneficed, was nominated to Carlisle only six months after Secker's death.

Warburton was especially anxious in his book to show the reasonableness of the English test laws, by which by means of various oaths Roman Catholics were prevented from sitting in parliament, and by a sacramental test both they and the protestant dissenters were excluded from public offices and municipal corporations, this latter because of the corporations' influence in the election of members of the House of Commons. By no act were protestant dissenters ever excluded by means of a sacramental test from parliament. From their different points of view both Thomas Sherlock and Benjamin Hoadly thought it odd that men could take part in the making of laws who were by statute excluded from taking part in their execution.⁵⁵ There were from the Restoration onwards, at all times, dissenters as members of parliament.⁵⁶ Lord Hardwicke expressed great dislike of a sacramental test for sitting in parliament, which, he said, ‘hath never been attempted and I think never will’.⁵⁷ Dissenters served in commissions of the peace. The objection to Mr. Joseph Beldam of Royston being in the commission for his county was not that he was a dissenter but that his election would make too many men of trade into justices, and to have three of them in Royston would be quite unheard of.⁵⁸ Moreover, once the Tory statute of Queen Anne's reign against occasional conformity for the purpose of holding office had been repealed, and once the act of 1718 for quieting corporations had been passed, which made elections of persons who were not qualified by the sacramental test voidable only within six months, there was nothing to stop the self-recruiting municipal oligarchies from bringing in dissenters if they wished. No statute was needed to keep them out, if they thought otherwise. The real repeal of the corporation act was not its technical repeal in 1828, but the reform of the municipal corporations in 1835-6. Adding to all these the almost annual indemnity acts, the test laws of which Warburton made so much seem to give only the most theoretical sort of protection, a protection moreover against dissenters, who were generally, at this time (in spite of some firebrands), not ill-disposed towards the church. On the other hand, Warburton's argument must have strengthened those who later, over the turn of the century, came, from fear of left-wing dissenters in sympathy with radical and revolutionary ideas from America and France, to see in the test laws a corner-stone of the constitution.

The alliance of church and state in England was in fact not one but many. An immensely variegated mosaic of customary accommodations between squire and parson, between cleric and patron, between bishops and ministers of state, between all of these and the Crown, sometimes in harmony with one another, sometimes quarrelling—these were the realities which Warburton attempted to generalise in his idea of one alliance. He wrote in terms which suggested a sharper distinction between clerical and lay modes of life than was general, perhaps because at the time he wrote some laymen seemed to be mounting dangerous attacks on the clergy, and on their property and position.⁵⁹ For better and for worse, lay and clerical modes of life in England were at that time much alike. The duke of Newcastle could quite casually express the hope that he might see some of his friends amongst the clergy of Sussex at the races.

Finally, a sharp ear for news of an approaching death which would make empty a comely benefice, and an apparently undue concern for the church's loaves and fishes, went often along with a perfectly sincere, and quite often a well-instructed, devotion to the Christian religion and to the Church of England. Archbishop Herring knew that in Lord Hardwicke he had to deal with a man, orthodox as well as learned, who would give no countenance to alarming schemes of reformation.⁶⁰ He would lend no support to projects to modify the liturgy in order to accommodate either dissenters or Arians, as was suggested in 1748, or to the ideas of the Free and Candid Disquisitions, put forward not with hope of success but to test the ground.⁶¹ He was one who showed no disposition to disturb the temporal position of the church.

There does not seem to have been in the Church of England a clerical piety markedly distinct from lay. The Book of Common Prayer had a remarkable hold on the affection of parsons and people alike. Zachary Pearce recalled that William Pulteney, earl of Bath, an earnest solicitor at the sources of patronage for his friends, regularly attended the public services of the church, and when he could not be there, read the morning service for himself in his bedroom before coming down. Thomas Newton wrote of George Grenville as ‘a good religious man’ who was regular in his attendance at church on Sunday mornings, ‘even while he held the highest offices’.⁶² The duke of Newcastle was earnestly if too anxiously pious.⁶³ There were others more cynical and indifferent. The earl of Chatham and Sir Robert Walpole leave no impression of great religious devotion. Even so, this common piety was sufficiently diffused, on both sides of the alliance, to be an important element in its working, assumed rather than much discussed.

Warburton wrote considering himself a good Whig but in his Alliance adopted some attitudes which passed easily from the classical Whiggery of the Pelhams' era to the Toryism of Lord Liverpool's. His firm adherence to the Protestant establishment, his dislike of the Great Rebellion and preference for the Restoration⁶⁴ (very unlike the modified rapture of Hoadly for whom the Restoration was made a blessing by the Revolution),⁶⁵ and above all the temper of his defence of the test acts, resting on the assumption that dissenters must necessarily be exceedingly ill-disposed to the Church of England—this general view of things made the Alliance of Church and State a congenial work for the church-and-state Tory gentlemen of early nineteenth century parliaments.

Notes

1. For an interesting discussion of him, see N. Sykes, Church and State in England in the 18th Century (1934), pp. 316-26.

2. Rejecting, that is, what seemed to be Hoadly's contentions in his sermon on My Kingdom is not of this World, Sykes, op. cit., pp. 292-3.

3. George Hickes, The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Nature and Consequence of Schism (1716), cites Du Pin for the notion of the two societies, pp. 113-15. He uses the term alliance, as well as union, which Warburton avoids.

4. Warburton was very indignant with Rousseau for attributing to him in the Contrat social the doctrine that civil polity and religion have one common origin. Works (ed. 1811, notes to Alliance, B), vii, 76.

5. The Old Whig, or Consistent Protestant (1739), Preface.

6. Alliance, ed. 1736, pp. 55-7. It was a common idea in intellectual circles in the eighteenth century that the laity were somehow by nature less superstitious than the clergy.

7. For a comment on some nonconformist criticism see G. R. Cragg, Reason and Authority in the Eighteenth Century (1964), pp. 205-13.

8. British Museum, Additional MSS. 35, 404, f. 50: Charles Yorke to Warburton, 11 August 1747.

9. Alliance, p. 107, note.

10. It would be interesting to know what Hooker would have said to this argument in view of the passages cited from his Ecclesiastical Polity by E. L. Mascall in Christ, the Christian and the Church (1946).

11. Alliance, pp. 91-2.

12. Divine Legation of Moses, Dedication to Lord Mansfield before Books IV, V, VI, ed. 1765.

13. For a masterly discussion see G. F. A. Best, Temporal Pillars (1964), Chapter II, ‘The Church, the Law and the Laity in the Eighteenth Century’.

14. Lambeth Palace Library, MS. Autobiography (cited hereafter as Autob.), f. 55.

15. Ibid., Arch. P/A Secker 1/4/5: Secker to Clutton, vicar of Portslade, Sussex, 6 Oct. 1749, where although this was stipulated to be paid by the impropriator, the vicar had been paying the tax.

16. Lambeth, Arch. P/A Secker 1/4/19: comments of Secker on MS. Proposals of George Wegg, Feb. 1768: Autob. f. 93.

17. E. F. Carpenter, Thomas Tenison (1948), pp. 150-66.

18. B.M. Add. MSS. 35, 586, f. 98: earl of Derby to Hardwicke, 22 September 1738.

19. Ibid., f. 117, Derby to Hardwicke, 8 October 1738.

20. A Second and Last English Advice to the Freeholders of England (1722), p. 33.

21. Alliance, p. 80.

22. Ibid., pp. 81-3.

23. N. Sykes, Edmund Gibson (1926), p. 162; From Sheldon to Secker (1959), pp. 203-4.

24. Lambeth, Arch. P/A Secker 1/2/3: Secker to Dean Greene, 5 November 1766.

25. Ibid., 1/2/2: Peter Calvert to Secker, 4 November 1766. Calvert owed this post largely to the duke of Newcastle's wish to oblige the Calvert family, who were a strong parliamentary interest.

26. Works of Benjamin Hoadly (ed. J. Hoadly, 1773), iii. 490.

27. Alliance, pp. 74-5.

28. B.M. Add. MSS. 35, 597, f. 263: John Grove to Hardwicke, n.d.

29. B.M. Add. MSS. 35, 877, f. 121 (Hardwicke's notes).

30. T. J. Perry, Public Opinion, Propaganda, & Politics in Eighteenth Century England (Harvard, 1962).

31. One of Secker's first acts as archbishop was to persuade Hardwicke to make a speech discouraging such bills as that introduced in 1758 about the tithe of madder; Autob., f. 50.

32. B.M. Add. MSS. 35, 598, f. 325; Herring to Hardwicke, 7 May 1748.

33. Autob. ff. 38-9; P. Yorke, Life of Lord Hardwicke, i (1913), 597-600.

34. Autob. f. 26: Secker's phraseology is vague here: the three bishops are Richard Reynolds (Lincoln, 1723-44, Gibson's successor), Richard Smalbroke (Lichfield, 1731-49), and Henry Egerton (Hereford, 1727-46). Secker and Benson could have been influenced by the discontents of Lord Chancellor Talbot and Lord Sandys with the administration; but this does not seem to be, on the evidence, a necessary explanation. Secker's journal of the House of Lords (B.M. Add. MSS. 6043) in the years 1735-42 (with startling omissions), seems to have as one purpose to note the bishops' variations in voting.

35. B.M. Add. MSS. 32,973: John Hume, bishop of Oxford to the duke of Newcastle, 3 February 1766.

36. Lives of Dr. Richard Pococke … by Dr. Leonard Twells, of Dr. Zachary Pearce, Bishop of Rochester and Dr. Thomas Newton Bishop of Bristol by themselves (1816), ii, 157.

37. B.M. Add. MSS. 32,974, ff. 6-7: duke of Newcastle to Secker, 15 February 1766.

38. Autob. f. 76: almost the same words in B.M. Add. MSS. 32,982, f. 138: Secker to duke of Newcastle, 26 May 1767, from a copy of which he probably took them into his autobiography. He says the duke approved his conduct, but this is not so clear from the duke's reply, ibid., f. 262, 9 June 1767.

39. Lives, ii, 186.

40. Alliance, p. 87.

41. Alliance, pp. 61-2.

42. Ibid., p. 70.

43. Lives, ii, 161-2.

44. See The Diaries of Thomas Wilson, 1731-7 & 1750 (ed. C. L. S. Linnell, 1964).

45. B.M. Add. MSS. 32,725, f. 253: earl of Conventry to duke of Newcastle, 9 October 1751.

46. Autob., f. 63.

47. B.M. Add. MSS. 32,930, f. 376: duke of Newcastle to Secker, 9 November 1761; Autob., f. 56. The same year the duke secured for Dr. George Secker, the archbishop's nephew, a prebend at Canterbury, Autob., f. 56.

48. Lambeth, Arch. P/A Secker 1/4/15: Secker to Dugard, 20 February. See also ibid./16, 27 February 1766.

49. B.M. Add. MSS. 35,599, f. 3: Herring to Hardwicke, 6 March 1749.

50. Autob., f. 63.

51. Ibid.

52. B.M. Add. MSS. 32,975, f. 134: Lord Winchilsea to the duke, 8 May 1766.

53. Ibid., Add. MSS. 32,976, f. 295: Archbishop Secker to duke of Newcastle, 21 July 1766.

54. B.M. Add. MSS. 32,970, f. 125: duke to 2nd Lord Hardwicke, 1 October 1765.

55. See B. Hoadly, Works, ii, 786-7 (‘The Common Rights of Subjects defended’).

56. Dr. Douglas Lacey of the Naval Academy, Annapolis, has investigated the dissenting interest in parliament between 1660 and 1714, and is soon to publish a full treatment of this subject.

57. B.M. Add. MSS. 35,592, f. 95: Hardwicke to Secker, 3 July 1753. This had been attempted by resolution of the House of Commons for general Communion of the members, beginning in 1614 as a Puritan exercise and resumed in the opposite interest by Charles II's Cavalier Parliament in 1660.

58. B.M. Add. MSS. 35,351, f. 281: Hardwicke to Royston, 27 July 1754.

59. Cf. the very interesting comments cited in G. F. A. Best, op. cit., p. 72.

60. Campbell's comment in his Life of Hardwicke that he treated church patronage merely as a political asset to himself seems unfair to him. See Lives of the Chancellors, v. (1846), 166.

61. F. Blackburne, The Confessional (1776), p. xxxviii. B.M. Add. MSS. 32,716: Herring to the duke of Newcastle, 12 September 1748. Add MSS. 35,398, f. 342: Herring to Hardwicke, 13 September 1748: ‘What I am determined to stick to is, the support of these two in conjunction’, that is ‘our Establishment, of which in some sense the Toleration is a part’.

62. Lives, i, 403; ii, 157-8.

63. Sykes, Church and State, pp. 437-9.

64. See his very interesting sermon preached on 30 January 1760 to the House of Lords, Works (ed. 1811), x, 17 ff.

65. Works, iii, 633 ff.