In his August 1709 visitation charge, Bishop Charles Trimnell cautioned the clergy of the diocese of Norwich against the temptations of clericalism. He urged the assembled clergymen not to succumb to the ‘desire to be greater than the plain Institution and design of our Office’. Amidst the intellectual climate of the early English Enlightenment, efforts to ‘traduce the whole Order of the Clergy’ abounded – recently epitomised in the freethinker Matthew Tindal’s The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, which Trimnell condemned with ‘utmost Abhorence’. But such outrages in no way justified what the bishop darkly referred to as ‘other Methods… to secure the Honour of the Clergy’, by which he meant articulations of clerical authority and autonomy far beyond what the doctrine of the Church of England, and perhaps Protestantism itself, allowed. Trimnell singled out for censure three notions in particular: first, the independence of the Church from the state; second, the conception of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as a proper, material sacrifice; and third, the necessity of priestly absolution for remission of sins. These doctrines were emblematic of a wider theological and ecclesiological turn toward what we might call Anglican catholicity in the later years of the reign of Queen Anne, a movement to cultivate more primitive elements in the polity, sacramental theology and liturgy of the English Church at the expense of what was perceived as the solafideism and cramping Erastian Protestantism of the Reformation. In decrying these props of a resurgent sacerdotalism among the Anglican clergy, Trimnell effectively set the agenda for the campaign against Anglican catholicity that dominated ecclesiastical politics throughout the ensuing decade.

The backlash against Anglican catholicity proceeded amidst a backdrop of genuine ideological realignment in English ecclesiastical politics. Church Whiggery was in the process of concluding its long migration from dissidence to establishmentarianism. Having long abandoned the posture of opposition it had assumed in the decade before the Glorious Revolution, Church Whiggery was now, in the main, an ideology of the Court. With its dominance of the post- Revolutionary episcopate and its outsized commitment to Protestant monarchy, Whig churchmanship had virtually assumed the mantle of Anglican royalism that was once synonymous with Toryism.