As the graph in Figure 3.1 shows, attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century, first tentatively, and then from 1800 in a more determined and focused way. During the intervening period – as Figures 3.2 and 3.3 demonstrate – Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches and also many acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The Hanoverian muting of Convocation discouraged such initiatives; it is not surprising that legislation then fell away. Why and how interest and activity revived at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are issues that have not received much attention. This essay seeks to illuminate these matters through a close study of the ways in which relevant legislative proposals came to Parliament and were dealt with there.

Some of the background circumstances which shaped interest in legislating have been well studied by historians, with particular emphasis on the effects of the French Revolution on the relation between Church and Dissent, and on the character of Dissent itself, as changing structures of authority and the chiliastic atmosphere of the later 1790s set the scene for the dramatic rise of evangelical itinerancy. Responses to these developments were shaped by a slowly unfolding movement for religious renewal within the Church (which still deserves more study than it has received) and by discussions associated with Pitt and his cousin Grenville's attempt to develop an ‘Ecclesiastical Plan’ – the lineaments of which only came clearly into view with the arrival of Grenville's papers at the British Library. Pitt's fall in 1801 sent this project up in smoke, though not, as we shall see, without leaving some residue.

The immediate stimulus to action following Pitt's fall was provided by a worried William Dickinson, MP for Somerset.