In January 1736 an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title, The Alliance between Church and State, or the Necessity of an Established Religion, and a Test Law demonstrated.¹ Its author was William Warburton, a well-to-do but still comparatively obscure country clergyman.² Although this was only his second publication in the field of divinity, he was already revealing the taste for controversy which was to characterise his literary career.³ The Alliance appeared at the height of the campaign by the Protestant dissenters to repeal the Test Act of 1673, and only weeks before the defeat, on 12 March 1736, of a motion for its repeal in the House of Commons.⁴ Clearly intending his work as a contribution to this debate Warburton was concerned less with giving an account of the relationship between Church and State than with providing a coherent and forceful justification both of the establishment of the Church of England and of the defence of that establishment by the Test Act. In the preface he claimed to treat the subject ‘abstractedly’.⁵ In his eyes his achievement was to justify the status quo not by an historical argument, but by an argument from general principles. Perhaps for this reason the Alliance stands out from the many ephemeral pamphlets debating the necessity of the Test Act which appeared in the mid 1730s. Despite its immediate polemical purpose it was general in scope. As the controversy of which it was a part passed into memory, Warburton increasingly came to portray it as a descriptive treatise. In the third edition of 1748 he claimed that the Alliance was not in fact ‘speculative’, but had been written with the English constitution in mind.⁶ In 1765 he wrote that his theory of Church and State had been ‘formed upon a Model actually existing before our eyes’.⁷

The Alliance may, therefore, be regarded as an account of the relationship between Church and State in England in the mid-eighteenth century. Four editions of it were published in Warburton's lifetime and on each occasion it underwent considerable expansion and revision.⁸ But the main outline of Warburton's theory remained clear throughout. At its heart lay his argument that the relationship between Church and State was ‘a politic league and alliance for mutual support and defence’, formed upon an agreement that ‘the church shall apply its utmost influence in the service of the state; and the state shall support and protect the church’.⁹ By the terms of this alliance the Church received a settled maintenance for its ministers, an ecclesiastical jurisdiction with coactive powers for the reformation of manners, and the right of churchmen to sit in the legislature. In return the state secured the dependence of the clergy and the recognition by the Church of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the civil magistrate. The Church thereby obtained protection against all external violence. The magistrate, on the other hand, ensured that the state would receive the aid of religion in enforcing those duties, so necessary to civil society, which human laws could neither reach nor enforce. Through the alliance he also prevented the ‘mischiefs’ which the Church, as an independent society, could do to the state.¹⁰

Warburton thus emphasised the mutual benefits of the alliance. He was, none the less, equally insistent that Church and State were separate and independent societies. He confined the province of the civil magistrate to the ‘bodies’ of men, to the preservation of their ‘temporal liberties and property’. Morals were within his jurisdiction in so far as they affected civil society, but matters of doctrine and opinion, with one exception, lay outside it. That exception was what Warburton called ‘the fundamental principles of Natural Religion’—the being of a God, his providence over human affairs, and the natural difference between good and evil. But the magistrate's jurisdiction only extended to those who denied these principles because they were ‘the very foundation of civil policy’.¹¹ The salvation of souls was, therefore, no concern of the magistrate, but was the province of the Church. ‘Christ's Kingdom’, argued Warburton, was formed into a society ‘by divine appointment’, and ‘declared sovereign, and independent of civil government’. The Church had the power of excommunication, ‘of expelling refractory members from its body’, but it had no civil coercive power beyond that.¹²

It has been widely assumed by historians that Warburton enunciated the classic eighteenth-century doctrine of Church and State in the Alliance. Indeed, in the only recent study of the work R. W. Greaves has claimed that it was ‘one of the most … influential books of the century’.¹³ This readiness to portray the Alliance as representative of clerical opinion is understandable. Written by a future bishop, it was the only treatise of the period to emerge from within the Established Church which devoted itself to an examination of the relationship between Church and State. However, as this article will demonstrate, such an interpretation is misleading. The writings of Warburton's contemporaries, both clergymen and lawyers, reveal the Alliance to have been a personal and idiosyncratic defence of the establishment. Warburton himself suggested as much, admitting in 1765 that, although his book was widely read, very few people agreed with him.¹⁴

The Alliance was not only written as a polemical tract, it was also, like so many of Warburton's works, perverse in argument. It shared the perversity of his magnum opus, the Divine Legation of Moses, in that it adopted the premises of critics of the church establishment and the Test Act, such as the dissenting preacher, Samuel Chandler, and the radical latitudinarian bishop, Benjamin Hoadly, and then attempted to prove that, when rightly interpreted, such principles led to orthodox conclusions.¹⁵ Warburton shared the belief of the Church's assailants that sincerity, a man's personal spiritual relationship with God, was the most important factor in his salvation. The civil magistrate, therefore, had no concern in spiritual affairs and it was the natural right of every man to worship God according to his conscience.¹⁶ At this point, however, Warburton and Chandler parted company. Chandler argued that, because every man had a ‘natural right’ to worship God as he saw fit, it was ‘absolutely unlawful’ to encourage or support any religion, whether true or false, by temporal penalties. Indeed, ‘true Religion’, by which he meant ‘Faith, Devotion, Reverence, the Love of, and Submission to God’, was ‘incapable of being established’.¹⁷ Warburton, on the other hand, as has been shown, rested his defence of the alliance of Church and State, a ‘free convention’ between two independent societies, on the grounds of civil utility and the benefits it offered to both.¹⁸

Hoadly stopped short of questioning the utility of the church establishment, but, making use of arguments similar to those of Chandler, he joined with him in condemning the Test Act. Hoadly argued that since Christ alone could lead men ‘to the firm Assurance of another World’, it was impossible ‘to create that Inward sincere Belief’, which alone made actions truly religious, ‘by Worldly Motives’. The annexation of ‘worldly Sanctions’ to the profession of a particular religion brought no benefit to the Church since profession and practice, in as far as they were enforced by ‘the Considerations of this World, so far cease to be Religion’. The ‘Care of True Religion’, he asserted, was no part of the office of the civil magistrate, which was confined to the well-being of civil society. On the contrary, ‘True Religion’ was best maintained and propagated when the magistrate involved himself in the matter no further than ‘to restrain and punish All such Outward Actions, as are Violations of its practical Rules; and also injurious to the Members of Civil Society, consider'd as such, committed to his Care’.¹⁹ Warburton, however, would not concede that the principle that religion and politics were discrete spheres of activity led even to this conclusion. He claimed that the same arguments of civil utility which justified a church establishment also justified a Test Act. In a society composed of many Churches a Test Act was a necessary corollary of the terms of the alliance, to protect the Established Church from the violence of its rivals. It was also necessary for the security of the state, to prevent religious controversies from disrupting the public administration. Such a law, however, did not overturn the principle of toleration since exclusion from government was not a punishment. Places of honour and profit were not a trust, a right which the subject could claim. They were part of the magistrate's prerogative, ‘which he may dispose of at pleasure’.²⁰

In this manner Warburton believed that his treatise had demonstrated ‘the Necessity and Equity of an Established Religion and a Test-Law from the Essence and End of Civil Society, upon the fundamental Principles of the Law of Nature and Nations’. He also believed that he had succeeded in justifying the church establishment on principles which confuted the views of both papists and erastians, by whom he meant those who made ‘the state a creature of the church’ and those who made ‘the church a creature of the state’.²¹ But to many his doctrine appeared to have pronounced erastian tendencies. Warburton's assertion that spiritual affairs were no concern of the civil magistrate, and hence that utility rather than truth was the basis of a religious establishment, was viewed with particular suspicion. This premise led him to argue that, where there was more than one religious society in the state, the magistrate should ally himself with the largest. Such action was again justified by the appeal to utility—‘the larger the religious society is, where there is an equality in other parts, the better enabled it will be to answer the ends of an alliance’.²² The implications of this doctrine, though not as revolutionary as they were to appear a century or so later, were profound enough to cause concern to an eighteenth-century churchman convinced that the doctrines of the Church of England were true. Warburton made some attempt to extricate himself from the logic of his position by claiming that, of all religions, Christianity was best fitted to assist the civil magistrate and that ‘public utility and truth do coincide’. He developed the latter idea in his thanksgiving sermon for the defeat of the '45 Rebellion. There he argued that by the ‘natural influence of their respective powers’ true religion produced civil liberty and civil liberty encouraged the profession of true religion.²³

In the eyes of Warburton's critics, however, such reasoning could not disguise the fact that the Church gained little from the alliance. The state secured the influence of religion to strengthen the fabric of civil society. In return the Church gained protection from external violence. Yet the experience of the primitive Church suggested that such protection was of little importance in the task of assisting men in the salvation of their souls. The critics were perhaps right to be sceptical of the value of Warburton's arguments. A number of opponents of the establishment turned his theory into a weapon in their attack on the Church. They seized on the point that the Church, as a religious society, gained little from the alliance. It confirmed them in their belief that the only reason the Church could have for entering into an alliance with the state and allowing religion to be made the tool of politicians was to secure ‘Power and Riches’, ‘all that is valuable to our Clergy’.²⁴

Before moving on to examine how and why Warburton was unrepresentative of mid-century doctrines of Church and State, it is worth noting that in many respects he did accurately reflect contemporary views of that relationship. Warburton's treatise was written in defence of the status quo, an Established Church supported by a Test Act. It is unsurprising, therefore, that his conception of the role of the Church in society differed little from that of other clergymen. Like them he emphasised the importance of religion to civil society in supplying the deficiencies of human laws and promoting virtue among the people. Like them he portrayed the Church as, in part, an agent of the state, responsible for the distribution of charity, the provision of education, and the inculcation of the duty of obedience to lawful authority. Indeed, the emphasis placed not only by Warburton but by all eighteenth-century churchmen on what Richard Hooker described as the ‘politic use of religion’,²⁵ the reinforcement given to the positive laws of society by the fear of God, helps to explain why historians have been so ready to accept the Alliance as the embodiment of contemporary theory.

Most churchmen, however, differed from Warburton in their understanding of the basis of the relationship between Church and State. They were distrustful of the erastian implications of Warburton's arguments and, more importantly, they did not believe that the two societies were linked merely by a voluntary, ‘politic’ alliance. On the contrary, they emphasised the unity of Church and State. Their ideas owed much to the tradition of Hooker and other Reformation writers, notably to the development of the Protestant concept of the godly prince. In his exposition of the royal supremacy in book viii of the Ecclesiastical Polity Hooker denied that there was a ‘perpetual separation and independency between the Church and the commonwealth’. There was indeed a distinction between Church and State, temporal and spiritual, since certain powers—to administer the sacraments, to ordain, to judge as an ordinary, to excommunicate, and so on—were never granted to the civil magistrate. In pagan societies ‘the Church of Christ’ and the state were necessarily two separate societies. Thus ‘Church and commonwealth import things really different; but’, argued Hooker, ‘those things are accidents, and such accidents as may and should always lovingly dwell together in one subject’.²⁶ In this manner Hooker stressed the identity of Church and State in a Christian commonwealth. The remainder of this article will look first at the views on Church and State held by predominantly clerical supporters of the church establishment in the middle of the eighteenth century and the way in which they differed from those of the Alliance.²⁷ Then it will examine further the reasons why Warburton's theory was idiosyncratic.

Conceptions of the relationship between Church and State reminiscent of Hooker's were widely held in the first half of the eighteenth century. As Warburton himself acknowledged in the Alliance, it was a ‘common opinion’ that the office of the civil magistrate extended to the care of souls, to the propagation of true religion.²⁸ Edward Bentham, for example, Oxford's Regius Professor of Divinity from 1763 to 1776, claimed that magistrates were obliged both ‘to execute justice’ and ‘to maintain truth’. The government was responsible not only for ‘the safety, honour, and welfare of our Sovereign and his Kingdoms’, but also for ‘the advancement of God's glory’ and ‘the good of his church’. It was, moreover, the duty of the king himself to seek ‘God's honour and glory’ and to preserve the ‘godliness’ of his people, as well as their wealth and peace.²⁹ Bentham's assumption that the state had both secular and spiritual functions had implications for the relationship of Church and State, which were clearly laid out by William Freind in a sermon before the House of Commons. Friend, who was appointed to the deanery of Canterbury in 1760, described the ‘Union inseparable’ which existed ‘between a Free State, and a Church, mild in its Principles, pure in its Doctrines, simple in its Forms, decent in its Worship’.³⁰

It is not surprising that such opinions should have been expressed by men of Tory backgrounds educated at Oxford, a university more self-consciously a bulwark of the Church than Cambridge. Friend's father, Robert, like his son a graduate of Christ Church, had been headmaster of Westminster School and an intimate of Francis Atterbury, while Bentham, though a ministerial supporter by the late 1740s, had voted Tory in the university election of 1737.³¹ But similar views were also prevalent among Cambridge-educated clergymen with impeccable Whig credentials, such as Samuel Squire, for many years chaplain to the duke of Newcastle and his Cambridge secretary before obtaining the bishopric of St David's through the earl of Bute in 1761. Squire asserted that both the civil and the ecclesiastical powers were ‘ordained for edification’.³² A Cambridge contemporary, Philip Yonge, another of Newcastle's correspondents and a future bishop, commented similarly on the natural and necessary union of Church and State. Explaining that the two constitutions, civil and religious, ‘have been formed and have grown up as it were together’, he warned that any attempt to separate them would inevitably be attended with ‘confusion and disappointment’.³³

As has been said, Warburton's was the only treatise devoted exclusively to the relationship between Church and State. Statements such as those quoted above were commonplace in the sermon literature of the period, but only a few churchmen made more than passing references to the subject. One exception was Edmund Gibson, bishop of London between 1723 and 1748, who analysed the constitutional relationship between Church and State in the ‘Introductory Discourse’ to his Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani. The importance of this book should not be underestimated. First published in 1713 in two large folio volumes, it quickly established itself as the definitive work on English canon law and was reprinted in 1761. It was made more accessible by Richard Grey whose abridged edition, A System of English Ecclesiastical Law, first published in 1730, reached its fourth edition in 1743.³⁴ Gibson's main preoccupation was to demonstrate that the Church was an independent society. He asserted that the Church of England had a ‘Divine Right … to the Exercise of Spiritual Disciplin [sic]’, which was embodied in the constitution, recognised by parliament's confirmation of the office of consecration in the Book of Common Prayer. The Tudor laws relating to the royal supremacy, he claimed, were intended only to exclude the usurped power of the pope, not to deny the authority belonging to every bishop by the word of God.³⁵ However, it is clear from his account that Church and State, though separate societies, were none the less indissolubly linked. Gibson neither made the Church ‘a meer Creature of the State’, nor did he assert her complete independence of it. The prince, or civil magistrate, was also supreme head of the Church. The administration of both temporal and spiritual matters flowed from him, in temporal ‘as Supreme and Sovereign in the State’, in spiritual ‘as Supreme Head of the Church’.³⁶ Thus Church and State, while distinct, could not be separated. The ‘Supreme Legislative Powers’ were not excluded from ecclesiastical affairs. On the contrary, they had ‘a Right … to Establish and Encourage that Religion which they believe to be true’. A national Church was only justified ‘as the best Means of promoting Religion, and preserving Peace and Order in the State’.³⁷

A similar interpretation of the English constitution was put forward by Gloucester Ridley. Although never advanced beyond a prebend of Salisbury, Ridley was a well-known writer who collaborated with Archbishop Secker on Three Letters to the Author of The Confessional, a reply to Francis Blackburne's proposals for liberal reform of the Church's doctrine and liturgy.³⁸ He developed his ideas on Church and State in three sermons preached during the '45 Rebellion and published under the title Constitution in Church and State. The purpose of these sermons was to vindicate the Church of England and its members from the charge of schism made against them by the Church of Rome. Part of Ridley's defence was to deny the claim of the pope ‘to Supremacy in Temporals over Christian Princes and their Subjects’, asserting instead the supremacy of the civil magistrate. Like Gibson he emphasised the separateness of the Church. The prince was not supreme over the ‘Universal Church’ or ‘the Church Militant on Earth’, nor did his supremacy extend over the faith, Christian duties or the means of grace. But Ridley too believed also that the prince was charged with the promotion of religion, and in defence of his argument he expounded the distinction, preserved at the Reformation, between the ordo and the jurisdictio of the Church. Both prince and priest were ‘God's Ministers, appointed to preserve and continue his Church; yet with a Power not at all divided betwixt them, but totally distinct and independent’. To the priest were committed ‘the Word and Sacraments’, with the power, ‘from Christ by successive Delegation’, to ‘exhort, reprove, and reject from Communion, Prince as well as Subject’. But the priest was entrusted with no coercive power. That power, ‘the Sword’, was committed to the prince, ‘from God by the Ordinance of Man’. To it both clergy and laity ‘must be subject’, and ‘should it take Part with Error, They must patiently endure’, as the Marian martyrs had done.³⁹

A different approach to the question is illustrated by George Fothergill, the Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, who expounded a defence of the establishment based, like Warburton's, on general principles rather than on an exposition of the constitution. Fothergill's intention was to prove the importance of religion to civil society, and in so doing he demonstrated that the two could not be separated. He condemned the view of human nature which suggested that man had ‘a Love of Virtue from [sic] Virtue's Sake’, insisting that although he may have a disposition to the practice of virtue and morality, such a disposition was commonly ‘perverted’ by his ‘passions’. These passions were powerful enough to break through any purely human restraint, whether that of reason, or the power of the magistrate, or the principles of benevolence and honour. Therefore there was need of a higher sanction, which could only be provided by religion. ‘Reveal'd Religion’, by which Fothergill meant Christianity, was even more fitted for this task. On the one hand, by manifesting ‘the true Source … and the proper Cure, of our Degeneracy’, it defined the nature and purpose of reason, honour and benevolence. On the other, it explained the source of civil government and secured obedience to it, by teaching that it was the ordinance of God himself.⁴⁰ From these principles Fothergill drew two inferences to justify the civil establishment of religion in a manner very different from Warburton. The first was that the civil magistrate was concerned and obliged ‘to support and encourage’ both the internal principles and the outward expressions of religion. Moreover, as the ‘morals of a people may and must suffer from a corrupt Religion … or impure Worship of the Deity’, it was also the magistrate's duty to support the true religion, namely that of the Church of England. Secondly, the magistrate clearly had a duty to suppress vice, immorality and irreligion, because ‘all Attempts to remove the Influences of Religion’ were also ‘Attempts against Publick Order and Happiness’.⁴¹

Even William Paley, writing later in the century, shared many of these assumptions. He did not believe that religion or the Church were productions of the civil power. A church establishment, he argued moreover, was ‘no part of Christianity’, explaining in language reminiscent of Warburton that its justification and authority were therefore ‘founded in its utility’.⁴² His path to this conclusion, however, was an implicit rejection of the reasoning of Warburton's Alliance. Paley recognised that the civil magistrate had a role in religious affairs, since an establishment was ‘the means of inculcating’ Christianity. Indeed, a properly ordered establishment united ‘the several perfections which a religious constitution ought to aim at:—liberty of conscience, with means of instruction; the progress of truth, with the peace of society; the right of private judgment, with the care of public safety’.⁴³ For Paley, as for Gibson, Ridley, Fothergill and so many other churchmen in this period, the church establishment was justified not merely on grounds of public utility, but as a means of propagating truth and helping men towards salvation. The Church could exist, indeed it had existed, without the support of the state, but the union of Church and State was a necessary part of a Christian commonwealth.

Views such as these were not confined to the clergy. They were shared by many of the laity, including prominent lawyers, despite the vested interest of their profession in limiting the jurisdictional autonomy of the ecclesiastical courts. Two of the most influential legal treatises of the century—Wood's Institute and Blackstone's Commentaries—both advanced an interpretation of the constitutional relationship between Church and State which emphasised that each was a separate society, while, at the same time, denying that the Church was completely independent and that the civil magistrate was excluded from spiritual affairs. Thomas Wood saw no incompatibility between the two ideas. On the contrary the constitutional recognition of the interdependence of Church and State, in the reception and acceptance of ‘the Law of Nature’ and ‘the Revealed Law of God’ as part of the laws of England, assumed a separate ‘Spiritual Jurisdiction and Authority in the Church’. He stressed, however, that that jurisdiction was exercised within England ‘by the King's Authority as Supreme Governor of the Church’.⁴⁴ In the late 1760s Wood's Institute was superseded by Blackstone's Commentaries as the standard text on English law. Blackstone was concerned to emphasise the civil utility of a national religion, the propagation of which ‘is, abstracted from it's own intrinsic truth, of the utmost consequence to the civil state’. He too believed, however, that Church and State were incorporated together, not merely linked in a politic alliance, for ‘christianity is part of the laws of England’. In a Christian commonwealth such as England the civil magistrate had a responsibility for the maintenance and propagation of religion. Thus, he was competent to punish sins against God, such as blasphemy and profane swearing and cursing. Such offences, argued Blackstone, were cognisable by both spiritual and temporal courts. The spiritual courts punished them, as they punished all offences, ‘for the sake of reforming the private sinner’. The temporal courts, on the other hand, ‘resent the public affront to religion and morality … and correct more for the sake of example than private amendment’. Apostacy likewise, corrected by the ecclesiastical courts ‘pro salute animae’, was deserving of punishment by the civil magistrate when publicly avowed with the intention of subverting religion. The ecclesiastical courts also had the power to censure heretics, ‘but not to exterminate or destroy them’. However, Blackstone significantly excluded this crime from the purview of the civil magistrate. It was not a proper subject of his concern because it did not tend ‘to overturn christianity itself, or to sap the foundations of morality’, and Blackstone praised the statute of Charles II's reign abolishing the writ de haeretico comburendo as the demolition of the ‘last badge of persecution in the English law’.⁴⁵

Writing at the end of the sixteenth century Richard Hooker was describing a society in which all the members professed, or were assumed to profess, the same faith. He went further than any of the writers discussed above in claiming that ‘within this realm of England … one society is both the Church and the commonwealth’, that a member of the one is necessarily a member of the other.⁴⁶ Contrary to what is often suggested, however, eighteenth-century writers had little difficulty in reconciling the Toleration Act of 1689 with a theory which stressed the unity of Church and State. The conclusions of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration were widely accepted, although, as has been stressed, his premise, that the business of civil government and of religion were wholly separate, was not.⁴⁷ Thus Blackstone, for example, justified toleration within a church-state. He discussed the position of Nonconformists in the context of the sin of schism, which was no concern of the civil magistrate, ‘unless their tenets and practice are such as threaten ruin or disturbance to the state’. Severe laws against Roman Catholics were justified, since their principles were ‘undoubtedly calculated for the introduction of all slavery, both civil and religious’. But Nonconformity in itself was ‘a matter of private conscience’, and any persecution or oppression on grounds of conscience in religion was ‘highly unjustifiable upon every principle of natural reason, civil liberty, or sound religion’.⁴⁸ Protestant dissenters, whose principles did not threaten the security of the state, were therefore relieved by the Toleration Act from the penalties of all penal laws relating to religion.⁴⁹ Blackstone was emphatic that this ‘very just and christian indulgence’ did not undermine the foundations of the national Church, and he stressed the difference between ‘toleration’ and ‘establishment’. It was the magistrate's duty to protect the Church ‘by admitting none but it's genuine members to offices of trust and emolument’.⁵⁰ When the Commentaries were first published Blackstone was accused by some dissenters of regarding nonconformity as still ‘a crime’, the penalties of which had merely been ‘suspended’, contrary to the opinion of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.⁵¹ He was undoubtedly unsympathetic towards Protestant dissenters, believing that many of them had separated from the Church of England ‘upon matters of indifference, or, in other words, upon no reason at all’.⁵² However, in later editions of the Commentaries he clarified his position, admitting that, ‘though the crime of Nonconformity is by no means universally abrogated, it is suspended and ceases to exist with regard to’ Protestant dissenters who conform to the provisions of the Toleration Act.⁵³

In general it was widely held to be beneficial and charitable—to be Christian—to tolerate the adherents of other faiths, however misguided they might be. Even among the Tories hostility to the Toleration Act had all but disappeared by the 1730s.⁵⁴ It was recognised not only that consciences could not be coerced, but also that such action was undesirable. The importance of ‘sincerity’ in the economy of salvation was emphasised by clergymen throughout the eighteenth-century Church, not merely by Hoadly and his circle. John Rogers, the royal chaplain whose writings provoked Samuel Chandler's attack on the establishment in the History of Persecution, was as emphatic as his critic about this point. He warned his readers that, however awful the sin of schism was, it was equally a sin for a person to comply with terms of communion, though lawful, if he ‘is persuaded in his Mind that they are unlawful … for to him who thinks them Sin, to him they are Sin: and he who can do what he is persuaded is a Sin, his Will is equally criminal, and he would as certainly have done it if it had been really one’.⁵⁵ Thus, the clergy of the Church of England did not wish the resentment of the magistrate to be directed against ‘the Case of a Quiet Separation (out of a real Principle of Conscience)’.⁵⁶ On the contrary, they exalted the virtues and advantages of ‘Temper and Moderation towards such as differ from [us] in Point of religious Opinion’, toleration bringing a security to the Church which it had never enjoyed during the previous century of ‘Religious Heats and Animosities’.⁵⁷ The Toleration Act became for many one of the glories of the Church of England, and the perfection of the English constitution was that it guaranteed ‘Liberty of Conscience, and the free Exercise of Religion, consistently with the Authority and Establishment of a Christian Church’.⁵⁸

It should by now be clear that Warburton's theory of Church-State relations as a ‘politic alliance’ was not representative of opinion within the Church of England in the mid-eighteenth century. His singularity can be explained, and the idiosyncrasies of his position better understood, by his views on two other issues. In the first place, the Alliance was based upon the application of Lockean contractarianism to Church-State relations. Warburton claimed that the ‘treaty of convention’ between the two societies was to be found ‘in the same archive with the famous original compact between magistrate and people’. His Lockeanism went further. He adopted Locke's analysis of the origins of civil society and shared his belief in the essential distinctiveness of Church and State.⁵⁹ This explicit debt to Locke was enough in itself to make many clergymen suspicious of the ideas advanced in the Alliance. A few of them did share Warburton's regard for the author of the Two Treatises, notably Benjamin Hoadly and Edmund Law. On the whole, however, Locke's political theory was not widely accepted in eighteenth-century England, especially by clerical opinion.⁶⁰ Attitudes towards the Essay on Human Understanding were different—it was even quoted approvingly by Edmund Gibson on the subject of faith. But Daniel Waterland, possibly the most prominent of the Church's theologians in the early part of the century, saw this work as an exception. When recommending it to undergraduates in their second year as ‘a book so much (and I add so justly) valued’, he added the caution, ‘however faulty the author may have been in other writings’.⁶¹

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly for the formulation of his theory, Warburton denied that the civil magistrate had any concern with the truth of a religion. As has been shown, this point lay at the heart of the difference between Warburton and most churchmen and it is worth exploring the grounds of this difference in a little more detail. Warburton was able to make such a clear separation between the spheres of religion and politics because he differed from most of his clerical contemporaries over the nature of God's providential government. He rejected the widely held notion that ‘the ways of Providence are unalterable’ and that therefore the history of the Jews as recorded in the Old Testament was directly applicable to modern England. Instead he argued that ‘the Christian oeconomy had revealed unto us a different way of punishing the sins of particulars’.⁶² The Jewish state was a theocracy, in which God himself was the supreme magistrate. Government was administered by the exertion of an extraordinary providence. Religion and society were ‘thoroughly incorporated’, so the subject of religion was ‘the State collectively’ as well as individuals separately, the sanctions for both being temporal rewards and punishments. But now, Warburton asserted, mankind was only under a common providence, and, the Christian religion having ‘no public part’, having ‘individuals only, for its subject’, impiety was only a private crime; punishment was under the gospel dispensation, the sanctions of which were ‘future rewards and punishments’. Warburton did not deny God's providential government. Temporal punishments, he admitted, did still occur, but only individuals were punished for their sins. God's ‘visible interpositions in the revolutions of States and Empires’ were reserved for the crimes of states, for the ‘neglect of good faith, justice, and equity in the transactions of one of these communities towards all others’.⁶³

This argument, however, was highly controversial and Warburton was attacked by a number of clergymen for his advocacy of it.⁶⁴ John Egerton even made a veiled criticism of his episcopal colleague in a sermon before the House of Lords. Egerton acknowledged that the Jewish state was a special case, since it was ‘literally a Theocracy’, the civil government being continued ‘under the known and confessed direction of the Deity’. Nevertheless the coming of Christ had not abrogated God's ‘moral government of the world’, as was demonstrated by the punishments that had been visited on peoples other than the Jews: ‘Nineveh, Babylon, and other cities were destroyed on account of their sins; and it was for transgression, that the old world was overwhelmed by the deluge’. Consequently, it was evident that civil government ‘requires the hand of the Almighty to maintain and support it’.⁶⁵ This dispute was of central importance in the debate about Church-State relations: if God did indeed punish states for the private sins of their citizens, then the civil magistrate, whose care was the public good, was necessarily interested in his subjects' spiritual condition. Indeed, it was his duty to promote piety and virtue.⁶⁶ The case was neatly summed up by John Wilcox, the Master of Clare College, Cambridge. He reiterated the assumption of many of his contemporaries when he claimed that the stability of government could only be guaranteed by religion, ‘as it procures the Favour and Protection of God, who presides, with a peculiar Providence, over Societies and Communities of Men’. God's government, moreover, was administered ‘with regard to Men's Actions’, and he warned that ‘it is not to be doubted, he dispenses his Favour to Nations and Kingdoms, or withdraws it from them, as Virtue or Vice, Religion or Impiety, respectively prevail among them’.⁶⁷

The necessity of an Established Church was widely accepted in eighteenth-century England. Only a small minority on the periphery of political life, though admittedly often a vocal minority, rejected the idea of the establishment. A larger minority, including some members of the Established Church itself, denied that the Test and Corporation Acts were essential for its maintenance. The majority of the political elite, both clerical and (if legal opinion is any guide) lay, believed that the Established Church was necessary and beneficial, accepting the need for the Test and Corporation Acts to protect it from its assailants and for a toleration guaranteeing freedom of worship to those who could not in conscience conform. William Warburton's doctrine of a ‘politic alliance’ founded on considerations of civil utility was not, however, widely shared as an exposition of this relationship between Church and State. What has been said of writers such as Gibson, Ridley and Fothergill may not convey the impression that they were advocating a coherent alternative to the Alliance. But it is not the intention of this article to suggest that Warburton should be replaced by, say, Gibson as the exponent of the classic eighteenth-century theory of Church-State relations. There was no single theory that commanded general assent. Warburton was atypical, not because he rejected the orthodox theory, but because he did not share a set of widely-held assumptions about Church and State: that the civil magistrate had a duty to support the propagation of the true religion; that religion was necessary for the security of the state, not only on grounds of civil utility, but also because of the nature of God's providential government; in short, that in a Christian commonwealth Church and State, though independent societies, were necessarily incorporated. By abandoning these assumptions Warburton was also abandoning a tradition in Anglican thought on Church and State which stretched back to Hooker and other defenders of the Reformation Church. Moreover, the implications of the Alliance were too erastian for most; contrary to the author's own belief it was the state which appeared to be the major beneficiary. In consequence its adoption by historians as the representative eighteenth-century text on the relationship of Church and State has created the impression that contemporary theory subordinated the Church to the state to an extent that is not justified by a detailed study of contemporary writings.⁶⁸

Notes

1. Gentleman's Magazine vi (1736), 44.

2. At this time he was rector of Brant Broughton, worth £560 per annum, and rector of Frisby, Lincolnshire, worth about £250 per annum: Sarah Brewer, ‘The early letters of Richard Hurd from 1739 to 1762’, unpublished PhD diss., Birmingham 1987, i. p. lxxvi.

3. The best account of Warburton's literary career is still A. W. Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians: a study of some eighteenth-century controversies, London 1932.

4. For the background to the dissenters' campaign see N. C. Hunt, Two Early Political Associations: the Quakers and the dissenting deputies in the age of Sir Robert Walpole, Oxford 1961, 130-53.

5. The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, D.D. Lord Bishop of Gloucester, new edn, London 1811, vii. p. iii. All references to the Alliance are taken from the edition of 1766 reprinted in vol. vii of The Works. Warburton sometimes used capital letters for emphasis. Where this has occurred in quotations used in this article, words printed in upper-case have been silently amended into lower-case italics.

6. Warburton, Works, vii. p. viii.

7. Warburton, ‘Dedication to the edition of Books IV. V. VI. of the Divine Legation of Moses; 1765’, in Works, iv. 6.

8. In 1736, 1741, 1748 and 1766. Most of the revisions took the form of often lengthy editorial notes in which Warburton developed points tangential to his main argument or took issue with critics.

9. Warburton, Works, vii. 88, 106.

10. Ibid. 100-7, 27-40, 90-100.

11. Ibid. 42-3, 45.

12. Ibid. 174, 62, 65-9.

13. R. W. Greaves, ‘The working of the alliance: a comment on Warburton’, in G. V. Bennett and J. D. Walsh (eds), Essays in Modern English Church History, London 1966, 163-80, at p. 163; E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England 1770-1970, Oxford 1976, 16.

14. Warburton, ‘Dedication to the Divine Legation’, in Works, iv. 6.

15. Chandler, Hoadly and other critics of the church establishment are dealt with more fully in Stephen Taylor, ‘Church and State in England in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: the Newcastle Years 1742-1762’, unpublished PhD diss., Cambridge 1987, 42-9. For a brief outline of the argument of the Divine Legation see Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians, 52-67.

16. Warburton, Works, vii. 42-3, 55.

17. Samuel Chandler, The History of Persecution … With a Preface, containing Remarks on Dr Rogers's Vindication of the Civil Establishment of Religion, London 1736, pp. iii, v.

18. Warburton, Works, vii. 87-9, 100-1.

19. Benjamin Hoadly, An Answer to the Representation drawn up by the Committee of the Lower-House of Convocation concerning Several Dangerous Positions and Doctrines Contain'd in the Bishop of Bangor's Preservative and Sermon, London 1718, 152-63, 220-2, 174.

20. Warburton, Works, vii. 246 ff., 252.

21. Ibid. 22, 41.

22. Ibid. 282-3, 242-3.

23. Ibid. 169-75, 273; Warburton, ‘Sermon preached on the thanksgiving day for the suppression of the late unnatural Rebellion in 1746’, in Works, ix. 330.

24. The Old Whig; or, the Consistent Protestant, 62, 13 May 1736, 64, 27 May 1736; A Comment on the Rev'd Mr Warburton's Alliance between Church and State, London 1748, 44.

25. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: an abridged edition, ed. A. S. McGrade and Brian Vickers, London 1975, 225.

26. Ibid. 343, 352, 342, 339.

27. This part of the article will also touch on the writings of some lawyers, not because they were necessarily representative of educated lay opinion, but rather because they provide some discussion of the theory of Church-State relations.

28. Warburton, Works, vii. 63.

29. Edward Bentham, A Sermon Preached Before the Honourable House of Commons on Tuesday, January 30, 1749-50, Oxford 1750, 29-30.

30. William Freind, A Sermon Preached Before the Honourable House of Commons on Thursday, January 30, 1755, London 1755, 17.

31. G. V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688-1730: the career of Francis Atterbury bishop of Rochester, Oxford 1975, 41, 120, 204; Edward Bentham, A Letter to a Young Gentleman of Oxford, Oxford 1748; idem, A Letter to a Fellow of a College. Being the sequel of a letter to a young gentleman of Oxford, London 1749; R. Greaves, ‘Religion in the University’, in L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (eds), The History of Oxford University, V: The Eighteenth Century, Oxford 1986, 407 n. 4.

32. Samuel Squire, A Sermon Preached Before the Lords Spiritual and Temporal on Saturday, January 30, 1762, London 1762, 16; D. A. Winstanley, The University of Cambridge in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge 1922, 146; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. i (1849), 66: G. Cruch to William Robinson, 12 Oct. 1761.

33. Philip Yonge, A Sermon Preached Before the Honourable House of Commons on Friday, January 30, 1756, London 1756, 17-18.

34. Edmund Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani. With a Commentary, Historical and Judicial, London 1713, 2nd edn, London 1761; Richard Grey, A System of English Ecclesiastical Law. Extracted from the Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, London 1730, 4th edn, London 1743.

35. Gibson, Codex, i. pp. xviii, xvii.

36. Ibid. p. xviii.

37. ‘Positions touching the Rights of ye Civil Power in matters of Religion’, Gibson Papers, Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 237, fos. 42-3; [Edmund Gibson], The Dispute Adjusted, about the Proper Time of Applying for a Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts; by Shewing, that No Time is Proper, London 1732, 12-13 [my emphasis].

38. Gloucester Ridley, Three Letters to the Author of The Confessional, London 1768. Each letter had been previously published separately.

39. Gloucester Ridley, Constitution in Church and State, London 1746, 1-3, 54, 67-74, 78-9.

40. George Fothergill, The Importance of Religion to Civil Societies. A sermon preached … at the Assizes … on Thursday, March 6th. 1734-5, 3rd edn, Oxford 1745, 7-10, 10-21, 23, 25-6.

41. Ibid. 28-30, 30-2.

42. William Paley, ‘Principles of moral and political economy’, in The Works of William Paley, D.D. With Extracts from his Correspondence: and a Life of the Author, by the Rev. Robert Lynam, A.M., new edn London 1825, ii. 23, 24-5.

43. Ibid. 23, 50. I do not, therefore, agree with Sykes that Paley's work was no more than a refinement of Warburton's. Paley, in contrast to Warburton, did not confine his definition of ‘utility’ to civil utility: Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the XVIIIth Century, Cambridge 1934, 326.

44. Thomas Wood, An Institute of the Laws of England, London 1720, i. 6, ii. 859. Cf. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who stated that ‘The external principles of natural religion are part of the common law: the essential principles of revealed religion are part of the common law; so that any person reviling, subverting, or ridiculing them, may be prosecuted at common law’: The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, London 1806-20, xvi. 319.

45. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Oxford 1765-9, iv. 43, 58-9, 43-4, 45-9.

46. Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, 342, 336.

47. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully, Indianapolis 1983.

48. Blackstone, Commentaries, iv. 52-3, 51.

49. Ibid. 53-4.

50. Ibid. 51-3.

51. Philip Furneaux, Letters to the Honourable Mr Justice Blackstone, 2nd edn, London 1771, 11, v. Mansfield's opinion was delivered in the House of Lords in the case of the Chamberlain of London versus Evans on 4 February 1767. Mansfield argued that the Toleration Act ‘renders that which was illegal before, now legal’. Since its enactment ‘it is now no crime for a man who is within the description of the act to say that he is a dissenter; nor is it any crime for him not to take the sacrament according to the rites of the church of England’: Parl. Hist., xvi. 320, 319.

52. Blackstone, Commentaries, iv. 52.

53. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 14th edn, Oxford 1803, iv. 53 [my emphasis]. By the provisions of the Act Protestant dissenters had to ‘take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and subscribe to the declaration against popery, and repair to some congregation registered in the bishop's court or at the sessions, the doors whereof must be always open: and dissenting teachers are also to subscribe the thirty nine articles, except those relating to church government and infant baptism’: Blackstone, Commentaries 1st edn, iv. 53.

54. See, e.g. Sir John St Aubyn's speech on the Quakers Tithe Bill of 1736: Gentleman's Magazine vi (1736), 365.

55. John Rogers, Seventeen Sermons on Several Occasions … To Which are Added Two Tracts viz. I. Reasons Against Conversion to the Church of Rome. II. A Persuasive to Conformity, Address'd to the Dissenters, 2nd edn, London 1740, 443-4.

56. Fothergill, The Importance of Religion to Civil Societies, 31.

57. Richard Trevor, A Sermon Preached Before the House of Lords on Friday, Jan. 30, 1746-7, London 1747, 17. By mid-century it had become common to use 30 January, the commemoration of the execution of Charles I, as an occasion to deprecate lack of charity and toleration, as manifested in the disputes of the previous century. See also Squire, Sermon Before the Lords on January 30, 1762, 16.

58. George Harvest, Protestant and Jewish Blessings Compared, London 1746, 17-18; Paley, Works, ii. 50 p. 280 n. 43 above.

59. Warburton, Works, vii. 164-5, 25-6.

60. J. P. Kenyon, ‘The Revolution of 1688: resistance and contract’, in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: studies in English thought and society, London 1974, 43-69; John Dunn, ‘The politics of Locke in England and America in the eighteenth century’, in J. W. Yolton (ed.), John Locke: problems and perspectives, Cambridge 1969, 45-80. For a more extreme restatement of this position see J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832: ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien regime, Cambridge 1985, 45-50.

61. Edmund Gibson, The Bishop of London's Second Pastoral Letter to the People of his Diocese, London 1730, 5; Daniel Waterland, ‘Advice to a young student. With a method of study for the first four years’, in William van Mildert (ed.), The Works of the Rev. Daniel Waterland, D.D., 2nd edn, Oxford 1843, iv. 409.

62. Thomas Sherlock, A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of Salisbury, October 6, 1745, London 1745, 6; Warburton, ‘Three sermons preached on the occasion of the late Rebellion in 1745’, in Works, ix. 305.

63. Warburton, Works, ix. 293-4, 308, 298-300; idem, ‘Sermon preached before the right honourable the House of Lords, January 30, 1760’, in Works, x. 19. Warburton did concede that peoples (as distinct from states) were punished for the sins of particulars ‘by, what may be called, the national judgments of famine, pestilence, or any other way that hurts not the Constitution’: Works, ix. 309.

64. E.g. Henry Stebbing, The History of Abraham, London 1746, 100.

65. John Egerton, A Sermon Preached Before the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal on Friday, January 30, 1761, London 1761, 6-7, 11-12.

66. Thomas Fothergill, The Reasonableness and Uses of Commemorating King Charles's Martyrdom. A sermon preached on Tuesday, January 30, 1753, London 1753, 14.

67. John Wilcox, A Sermon Preached Before the House of Commons on Monday, Jan. 30. 1737, London 1738, 13.

68. Cf. Sykes, Church and State, ch. vii.