Historical understandings of the press after the Glorious Revolution are almost exclusively committed to an analysis of opposites. On the one hand, historians have characterised the king and his godly court as committed to promoting its own providential message. Precisely because of the problems with William's legitimacy as monarch, he promoted his invasion as favoured by God, proceeding to a divine plan and furthering the unfinished English Reformation. Whilst historians have been sceptical about the originality and influence that providence really had, with one historian dismissing it as ‘little more than the expression of a devotional platitude; it did not change men's minds’, most have accepted the basic premise behind it. William and his advisers, most importantly Gilbert Burnet, were convinced of the need for propaganda and readily engaged the public. On the other hand, where historians have considered how and why William and his advisers controlled public debate, they have focused on how supporters of Jacobitism were ruthlessly pursued and punished, so their message did not reach the wider public. To be sure, the Williamite government often presented the supporters of the previous king as their most dangerous opponents; the government executed a Jacobite printer in 1693 and sought new treason legislation in 1694.

Yet astute observers of late Stuart politics suggested that, to survive, all governments needed to place correct limits on debate and to engage the public. In that sense, then, early Williamite governments replicated the attitude to the press of the regimes of Charles II and James II but with one crucial difference. Whilst they continued to acknowledge that the Anglican Church was responsible for promoting moral virtue throughout the country, William's close advisers increasingly empowered various Anglican voluntary movements, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, to change behaviour, through restraint, coercion and exhortation. In fact, these movements for moral reformation promoted a vision of society in which sin was controlled precisely because it endangered the life of the individual, the community and the country in much the same way Sacheverell was to argue in 1709.

In 1707 Abel Boyer (1667–1729) declared that in the last year the government had controlled licentious writers. Several authors had stretched too far ‘the Liberty of English Men and presumed too much on the mildness of Her Majesty's Government’. Consequently, the ministry had thought fit to give ‘a seasonable check to their licentious pens’. Boyer proceeded to give the reader eight examples of writers who had been arrested and taken before the courts. Despite Boyer's claim that the ministry had controlled the press, alert readers will have noticed a rather more subtle narrative might be deduced from his comments. In fact, almost all of the cases named by Boyer arose from one publication, the Memorial of the Church of England, first published in the wake of the general election on or around 9 July in 1705. The Memorial excoriated both the queen and the ministry for failing to protect the Church. Despite Anne's claim at the start of her reign to love the Church, it now sat at a low ebb. Occasional conformity continued unabated, toleration allowed Dissenters political rights and the ministry, with Godolphin as a lord treasurer and leader, showed no love or understanding of the Church. Nor was the situation calmed by the presence of Robert Harley. By now entirely responsible for the press, Harley had been ridiculed during the recent election for his commitment to moderation. That all of Boyer's cases arose from the Memorial should alert us to another problem. None of the prosecuted authors had been accused of crimes normally associated with a licentious press. There were no charges of blasphemy or heresy, nor a discussion of religious unorthodoxy. Instead, they had been arraigned for scurrilously reflecting on senior politicians and bishops; they had abused men in authority and written scandalous and seditious libels.

Abel Boyer was always likely to present the prosecutions arising from the Memorial as a success. He had tried to gain Robert Harley's patronage for some time and tended to support Harleyite positions of moderation.Yet, there is a very different story to be told in this chapter. Far from being a success, the mere publication of the Memorial indicated just how disillusioned High Church clerics and writers had become by church policies by 1705.

William Wotton (1666–1727) first attacked the pernicious influence of freethought on English society in 1704. Responding to John Toland's recent publication of Letters to Serena, Wotton described the book as designed to drive Christianity out of the world. In Wotton's assessment, Toland's methods of enquiry into religious truth were pernicious not only to the individual believer but also to the English nation. Wotton identified Toland's anticlericalism as the key to understanding his wider project. Letters to Serena maintained that each man was born with prejudices that were then reinforced and propagated by the institutions of the Church. The clergy were politically motivated, grasping for power and not fulfilling their religious duty. Consequently, they taught superstition, denied men the ability to appeal to reason, which in turn barred them from locating religious truth, and condemned men to damnation. For Wotton, Toland's suggestion that reason alone would allow correct doctrine to be ascertained struck at the very heart of the Christian religion. ‘It was impossible’, he continued, ‘for any man that believes in the doctrines of the Old and New Testament, to vent such crude and wild assertions’. Both Scripture and Church history proved that the clergy were able to direct their flock towards truth, and salvation could be conferred by the sacrament of baptism and regular church attendance. Two years later, Wotton was equally scathing of Matthew Tindal's Rights of the Christian Church. Once again, he accused an anonymous author of jettisoning the Scriptures and the apostolic rights of the clergy as irrelevant to finding the truth. Instead, Tindal had declared every man ‘is under an indispensable obligation to worship God after the manner he thinks most agreeable to his will; and in all religious matters whatever, to follow the dictates of his own conscience’. Whilst he acknowledged various ways to ascertain doctrinal truth, exactly like his response to Toland two years earlier, Wotton insisted that attending the Church of England, partaking of sacraments and receiving clerical instruction were essential to maintaining the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England.

Historians have largely remembered John Toland and Matthew Tindal and forgotten William Wotton. When he is remembered, Wotton is known for his defence of the Royal Society and his account of the growth of scientific ideas.

In the midst of the trial of Henry Sacheverell, an anonymous author published the Judgment of the Whole Kingdoms and Nations. The tract repurposed material from Vox Populi, Vox Dei (1709), which had in turn used material from Robert Ferguson's Brief Justification for the Prince of Orange's Descent into England (1689). The multiple editions of the book freed it from direct association with Ferguson (d.1714), a notorious Whig plotter who had championed Monmouth's invasion in the 1680s. An extended and digressive account of the Glorious Revolution, the Judgment summed up the Whig understanding of politics in the previous twenty years, taking in the origins of government, the evidence for the ancient constitution and the right to popular resistance. But, applied to the trial of Sacheverell, the tract tells a different story from merely a repetition of Whig political thinking. On the frontispiece, the book issued a challenge to ‘Dr Hicks, Dr Atterbury, Dr Welton, Mr Milbourne, Mr Higgins, Mr Lesley, Mr Collier, Mr Whaley and Mr Tilly of Oxford and the great Champion Dr Sacheverell or any other person to answer this book’. In its challenge, the Judgment acknowledged a key factor of religious politics of the last few years. After their initial hopes for Anne's succession, High Churchmen – at least in the eyes of their Whig opponents – had formed a formidable coterie of preachers and pamphleteers, challenging ecclesiastical policy and promoting their positions from the press and the pulpit. Indeed, George Ridpath, author of The Observator after the death of John Tutchin, was keen to point out that Sacheverell could be included in the ‘unchristian Opinions of our Dodwell’s, Hick’s, Lesley’s, Higgins's and Sacheverell’s’.

The last two chapters have demonstrated the intellectual thrust of the High Church campaign against the press and why certain churchmen and politicians considered unfettered publication to be so dangerous. They also demonstrated that attitudes to the press were not ideological with political parties in post-revolutionary England dividing along simple lines of promoting freedom or censorship. This much is certainly suggested by the proclamation outlawing the cry of Church in Danger; which demonstrates Whig politicians’ commitment to controlling public expression when they considered the intellectual foundation of the Glorious Revolution was threatened.

Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury was vilified in his own lifetime. James II considered him a ‘dull man’ and Swift derided him as good for nothing. In some senses, his reputation was well deserved. In the eyes of his critics, he was a churchman who had too often concerned himself with administrative duties. He emphasised the administrative efficiency and pastoral duties of the Church, concerning himself with improving the education of the clergy and urging them to set a moral example to their parishioners. Tenison's contemporary reputation, however, was derived from his failures, not his successes. Far from recovering the spiritual authority of the clergy and restoring the disciplinary authority of the Church, Tenison presided over one of the most fractious periods of religious disputation in the history of the Church of England. By the end of the Sacheverell trial, the Church was riven by factional politics not seen since the English Civil War. No doubt the dissension in the Church was linked to issues that historians have discussed at some length: the legal enactment of toleration, the revealed status of the Bible and the sacerdotal status of the clergy. As I have shown, however, clerics – and politicians – were consistently and sincerely concerned with how public religious politics had gone wrong. Nor were concerns with the press focused solely on the damage that licentiousness inflicted on political stability. Instead, clerics articulated how writing, publishing, distributing and reading unorthodox books had soteriological consequences. Interestingly, men like Francis Atterbury and Benjamin Hoadly did not conceive of the press as free or controlled in the way modern historians have theorised. Instead, they teased out the connections between the creation of public knowledge and salvation.

Tenison did more than anyone during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to try to convince the Church of England's clergy to forego their own differences and unite against the common enemy of Catholicism. Romanists, after all, were, in his words, a ‘mighty body of men’ who were favoured in many places. He was well aware of the difficult times he had lived through and his failures and successes. As he was dying and too frail to undertake a visitation, he wrote a humble assessment of his tenure as archbishop.

William Morgan, an obscure army officer, agreed with the Williamite project to improve the morals of the country. Unlike those involved in Anglican renewal, however, he suggested that godly providence could only be delivered by clerical reform. For too long the country had been plagued with priestcraft, practised by a sect of men who had abandoned their reason and were addicted to controversy. Far from bringing men to salvation and peace, as they were ordained to do, too many English clerics engaged in disputes, writing books and pamphlets to the ‘disturbance and confusion of mankind’. In Morgan's view, priests were hypocrites, seeking power for self-interested ends, creating tumults and disturbing the civil peace. Their hypocrisy was most graphically exposed by their attitude to public disputation. It was impossible to say anything against them for they insisted they must not be meddled with, for the press would be broke and the ‘book burned’, and yet far from engaging in reasonable debate they promoted unnatural heats from the ‘pulpit and the press’ constantly disturbing the nation's peace. What good, he continued, had their canting, their ‘preaching and prating, their scribbling and printing’ done in the last sixteen hundred years?

Morgan's tract offered little solution to the canting priests of the age, insisting reform was the duty of politicians. But his tract points to an important development in the 1690s. Both John Locke and John Toland supplemented their anticlericalism with attacks on how clerics distorted public debate with tyrannous actions and their exclusive claims to mediating the truth. In this sense, then, both Locke's and Toland's anticlericalism might be considered as a continuation of Whig ideology, which has been traced back to the exclusion crisis. Anticlericalism can, of course, be made to wear many different guises, but the broad argument has remained much the same in the last decades. Attacking priests for their imposture, distorting power for their own tyrannous ends, helped to form the early English Enlightenment: it was anticlericalism that formed the backbone of Whig civil theology. Whilst Locke's attitude to the press has been extensively studied, it has never been particularly clear how John Toland conceptualised the relationship between anticlericalism and the freedom of the press. Chapter 2 will seek to complicate such claims by reconsidering Toland's understanding of the rules of public debate, which he proposed in Christianity not Mysterious.

The threat posed by a licentious press to the providential status of the country and to the soul of each individual might have been expected to favour the cause of Protestant reconciliation and Anglican unity. Yet the growing realisation that Anne's ministries, in conjunction with parliament, either would or could not successfully legislate against the press caused certain churchmen to call for other solutions to the spread of deism, infidelity and impiety. Before Anne had succeeded to the throne, however, William had made a policy decision that intensified religious division in the eighteenth century. By the end of 1700, King William's parliamentary affairs were in disorder and the junto administration was in disarray. To form a new government he turned to the earl of Rochester (1642–1711), the leading Tory of the day and an ally of Atterbury. As a price for his return, Rochester extracted a concession from the king that convocation would return. In accordance with his wishes, convocation was called and sat from spring 1701 until William's death and then from 1702 to 1705. Almost from the start of its meeting, the clergy in the lower house attempted to employ the jurisdictional authority of convocation to censure heretical and dangerous books that the bishops rejected on legal grounds. The insistence by the bishops that convocation lacked jurisdictional authority struck many clergy as a dishonest way to avoid restraining books and amplified their anger. As a result, the debate between the two houses spilled out from private discussions into public debate. In the first section of this chapter, both the private discussions and printed pamphlets of the houses of convocation are used to outline the increasing anger of the clergy at the refusal to restrain the press, and their increasing concern at the danger caused by the spread of impious books. It details the rearguard action fought by the bishops and their allies to refute the accusation that they approved of a free press and that they themselves were infected by heresy and unorthodox ideas.

These debates emphasised the jurisdictional authority of convocation to control books and paid little attention, aside from general assertions of impiety, to the reasons why they should be stopped, whether they endangered the souls of individuals or corrupted the status of the Church, for example. Alongside these debates Henry Sacheverell began to publish his sermons.

A letter written by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) to Robert Harley provides revealing insight into the changing religious and political atmosphere of the early eighteenth century. Pointing to the instability of the country, Defoe lamented to his patron and employer, not only that we are divided ‘into parties and factions’ but also that their members constantly seek to ‘supplant the other’. He traced England's afflictions back to the reign of Queen Mary in the sixteenth century, for ‘the Papist, the Church of England, and the Dissenter, have all had their turns in the public administration; and whenever any one of them endeavoured their own settlement by the ruin of the parties dissenting, the consequence was supplanting themselves’. According to Defoe, since the Reformation, all monarchs and governments had ruled by and been beholden to the machinations of party interest. And yet early eighteenth-century factional infighting marked a new stage in the history of division. Where previously parties had been primarily religious, sometimes having political effect, the Glorious Revolution had irreparably connected religion to politics and hardened party identity until it was solidified by 1702. It is hardly credible, Defoe told Harley, how opponents ignored their shared values and instead emphasised differences for polemical purposes.

Defoe's concerns were being shared in government before the rise to power of Robert Harley. On 1 September 1701, James Vernon wrote to the duke of Shrewsbury outlining the political situation in London. A largely undistinguished secretary of state, Vernon's sympathies for the court Whigs and diplomatic skills ensured he was well informed of political affairs. Situated within a discussion of the rights of the Commons and Harley's status as speaker, Vernon suggested that politics had not been so divisive since James II had attempted to introduce popery. ‘The partys are every day writing and printing against one another with great bitterness’, he commented, and the ‘chiefs seem to have a hand in it’. Vernon's concerns were not confined to politics. Scribblers from both sides seemed to take great delight in slurring the piety and religious positions of their opponents. Lord Somers had recently been libelled as a Socinian, whilst Lord Rochester, the great political hope of the High Church party, had been subject to false and scandalous reports.

John Toland was not just a religious radical. He was a skilled editor, adeptly repackaging the works of Edmund Ludlow, reshaping his image from regicidal republican of the mid-century to a Commonwealthman, who shared the anticorruption interests of the country politicians of the 1690s. With less editing, Toland also attempted to transform the reputation of John Milton. He provided a prefatory biography to a new edition of Milton's prose works, likely under the supervision of the printer John Darby, whilst other authors in the ‘Calves-Head’ circle completed the editing. Much like Ludlow, rather than a regicidal radical, Milton was transformed into a moderate man of letters, suited to combatting clerical claims to power in the 1690s and fighting religious and civil corruption. Milton's Areopagitica was central to the project. Again, with Toland's skilled intervention, the most famous text of the freedom of the press was made a republican critique of tyranny, in which censorship was dishonourable. In the new words of Toland, any attempt to reassert press control was ‘more dangerous even than a standing army to civil liberty’.

Many authors objected to Toland's new project. The rehabilitation of John Milton, a man with a reputation for being a traitorous regicide, elicited a number of replies. One author, the anonymous ‘R.E.’, looked beyond the anticlericalism and anti-Scriptural attacks of Toland's book and, instead, took it as axiomatic that the unhindered republication of John Milton was just another example of why the press must be further controlled. The recent publication of a number of virulent ill-natured pamphlets was a conspiracy amongst Catholics, Socinians and republicans, dedicated to retarding the advance of reformed religion and destabilising the peace of the nation. According to R.E. the conspiracy to maintain the divisive power of the press was proved by the opposition of Jacobites and Commonwealthmen to the passage of the Blasphemy Bill. Only further legislation against the press could possibly hope to bring the nation back to peace and advance further reformation. Another anonymous author was clear that the republication of Milton's works was an example of the resurgent revolutionary threat to the Williamite government. The Commonwealthmen were now supplemented by new incendiaries, ‘Libertines, Deists, and Socinians’, who had recently ‘vomited out odious heresies’.

With the death of Queen Mary on 28 December 1694, bishops and clerics committed to the goal of godly reform lost their most significant supporter at the Williamite court. Her death was marked by a series of sermons and elegies bearing testimony to her personal piety and support for her husband in establishing a new godly regime. Thomas Tenison's funeral sermon epitomises the Williamite court's veneration of the departed queen. Recently appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Tenison ministered to the queen on her deathbed, and counselled William in his grief. Whilst praising the queen's personal virtue, Tenison noted why her death was such a grievous loss to the country. Tracing the principles and establishment of infidelity back to the previous reign, Tenison noted that Mary had advanced piety in a most ‘atheistical and profane age’. That promotion of piety and virtue, both by her own godliness and the advancement of movements against vice, was essential to fulfil God's providence. The last king had lost his throne because he prevailed over a nation beset by sin and immorality. The nation was still wicked, Tenison acknowledged, but Her Majesty's Letters for Reformation had gone some way to satisfying God's plan for the country and averting its degradation.

This official funeral sermon was supplemented by prominent supporters of the queen, many of whom echoed Tenison's assertion that her sponsorship of the campaign against vice had saved the nation from ruin. Nevertheless, there were dissenting voices. Thomas Ken (1637–1711) fundamentally disagreed with Tenison. Previously bishop of Bath and Wells, Ken refused to swear the oath to the new king and queen in 1689. He suggested the new archbishop had failed the queen. Far from examining the truth of her repentance from sins, he had simply praised and accepted her godliness. For Ken, this was not just a personal failure on the part of Tenison; it was a deliberate decision so that he might praise and preserve the queen's legacy. It was designed to justify the revolution and to promote the Church's approach to vice. For Ken, far from society being preserved, the country was mired in an athesitical and prophane age precisely because of the prevarications of the clergy and their accommodation with the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution.