Overview

The coup which brought William and Mary to power in 1688-9 could, and probably should, have provided a final resolution to the problems of the English church inherited from the civil war and before. The government's plan was to broaden the establishment to include the more moderate dissenters and at the same time offer toleration to those protestants (mainly Baptists and Quakers) who would not accept any compromise solution. Unfortunately, these plans were wrecked by the intransigence of the convocation of Canterbury, which resisted any change to the church's liturgy or polity which might have appeased mainstream dissent. Such rigidity may seem strange, but it has to be seen against the fact that the church had just lost seven bishops and about four hundred clergy who were not prepared to swear allegiance to the new sovereigns, and remained loyal to James II, despite his manifest inadequacies. In that context, apparently ‘extreme’ clergy proctors in convocation could appear as relative moderates, since they accepted the revolution settlement in the state, although they were not prepared to see it extended to the church.

The result of this intransigence was that convocation was effectively silenced for most of the reign, for fear that it would be a reactionary, crypto-Jacobite force in the body politic. As long as Mary II, grand-daughter of the earl of Clarendon and a devout Anglican, was alive and influential in church affairs, the clergy endured this situation more or less peacefully. But her death at the end of 1694, followed by the effective abandonment of censorship on religious publications in the following year, produced a new crisis in church-state relations. The Church of England now found itself in a position where its enemies were free to attack it in print, and dissenters could organize more-or-less freely (thanks to the toleration enacted in 1689) but the bishops and clergy of the established church were deprived of any independent voice.

This was felt by many to be an injustice, and when Francis Atterbury wrote his extensive tract, Letter to a convocation man in 1697, in which he advocated the restoration of the convocation with essentially parliamentary privileges and powers over the church, he received a ready hearing.