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THE LIMITS OF THE CONFESSIONAL STATE: ELECTORAL RELIGION IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES II*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2008

WILLIAM GIBSON
WILLIAM GIBSON*
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University
*
Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX2 9ATwgibson@brookes.ac.uk
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Abstract

From 1670 there were sustained attempts to use excommunication as a tool to influence parliamentary elections. Excommunicants could not qualify for membership of municipal corporations under the Test and Corporation Acts. Towards the end of Charles II's reign, as fear of protestant dissent grew, excommunication was, however, used to deny voters the right to exercise their franchise. There was a concerted attempt, encouraged by the king, to ensure the election of a compliant tory parliament through the use of excommunication in elections in borough seats. The attempt, reliant on bishops and spiritual courts, represented the high water mark of the ‘confessional state’. Of questionable legality, the exclusion of excommunicants from the right to vote was short-lived. The accession of James II, and his Catholicizing policies, created new alliances between Anglicans and dissenters and eroded the willingness of bishops to use excommunication as an electoral instrument. In 1689, the Toleration Act removed the principal cause of the persecution of dissent. The use of excommunication, nevertheless, represented an important attempt to unite the church and state for electoral reasons.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 27 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

I am grateful to James Bradley, Robert Ingram, and Ruth Paley for their comments on a draft of this article.

References

1 J. Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘this masquerading age’ (Oxford, 2000); M. Watts, The dissenters, from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), p. 229; J. Miller, Popery and politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973); Lipson, E., ‘The elections to the exclusion parliament, 1679–1681’, English Historical Review, 28 (1913), pp. 59–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. D. George, ‘Elections and electioneering, 1679–1681’, English Historical Review, 45 (1930), pp. 552–78.

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5 J. Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture (Cambridge, 2006), p. 121. While identifying thirty-five excommunicated dissenters, Michael Watts does not discuss electoral consequences at all: Watts, The dissenters, p. 229. Moreover the most recent study of English church courts does not cover this issue: R. B. Outhwaite, The rise and fall of the English ecclesiastical courts, 1500–1860 (Cambridge, 2006).

6 G. S. de Krey, Restoration and revolution in Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), ch. 4.

7 D. R. Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics in England, 1661–1689: a study of the perpetuation and tempering of parliamentarianism (New Brunswick, NJ, 1969), p. 311.

8 W. Gibson, Religion and the Enlightenment, 1600–1800: conflict and the rise of civic humanism in Taunton (Oxford, 2006), ch. 3.

9 B. D. Henning, The History of parliament: House of Commons, 1660–1690 (3 vols., London, 1983), i, p. 13.

10 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, p. 119.

11 J. Miller, James II (London, 1978). In 1676, the Compton census was able to calculate that protestant dissent represented between 3 and 4 per cent of the population, though there was wide variation, with much higher proportions of dissenters in Bath and Wells, London, Winchester, and Canterbury dioceses. A. O. Whiteman, ed., The Compton census of 1676, British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, 10 (1986), pp. cxxiiiff.

12 J. Humphrey, A defence of the proposition for the safety and happiness of the king (London, 1668).

13 Watts, The dissenters, p. 251.

14 Mary K. Geiter, ‘William Penn, in Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford, 2004).

15 Miller, James II, pp. 94–113; R. Pickavance, ‘English boroughs and the king's government: a study of the tory reaction, 1681–1685’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1976).

16 M. A. E. Green, F. H. B. Daniell and F. Bickley, eds., Calendar of state papers domestic of the reign of Charles II (CSPD) (London, 1860–1929), passim. Among the towns and cities to which Charles issued injunctions to pursue Dissenters were Exeter, Plymouth, Canterbury, and London.

17 G. Lyon Turner, Original records of early nonconformity under persecution and indulgence (3 vols., London, 1911), iii, pp. 451–683.

18 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, pp. 105–6.

19 A potwalloper franchise was one in which the franchise was vested in households in which a pot could be boiled, and ‘scot and lot’ boroughs were those in which a household tax was paid; in effect both were household franchises.

20 Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, 9m73/G283/8, Malmesbury papers.

21 E. K. Timmins, ed., Calendar of state papers domestic of the reign of James II (London, 1960), p. 454.

22 The incumbent is unidentified. Henning, Commons, vol. 1, p. 233–4; vol. 2, p. 552.

23 Ibid., i, p. 51.

24 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, pp. 110–11.

25 For fear of the dissenters' electoral activity, see Tapsell, ‘Parliament and political divisions’, p. 251.

26 Articles of visitation and enquiry concerning matters ecclesiastical … within the diocese of Bath and Wells at the triennial visitation of the Rt. Revd. Father in God Peter, Lord Bishop of the Diocese (Oxford, 1676), passim. In 1673, Mews even asked whether clergy sought to bring sectaries back to the church.

27 A. M. Coleby, ‘Peter Mews’, in Oxford dictionary of national biography.

28 Longleat House, Coventry MS, 7, fo. 130, Mews letters, Mews to Jenkins, 19 Nov. 1677. I owe this reference to Ruth Paley.

29 R. Clifton, The last popular rebellion: the Western Rising of 1685 (London, 1984), p. 55.

30 Bodleian Library, Aubrey MSS 13/14, 4 May 1680, Mews letters.

31 Pickavance, ‘English boroughs and the king's government’, pp. 398–400, 402; M. Goldie, ‘Danby, the bishops and the whigs’, in T. Harris, P. Seaward and M. Goldie, eds., The politics of religion in restoration England (Oxford, 1990), p. 97.

32 Anon., Vox patriae: or the resentements and indignations of the free-born subjects of England against popery, arbitrary government and the duke of York or the Popish succession, etc. (London, 1681), p. 19.

33 CSPD, Charles II, 1677, pp. 423–6. By February 1680, the mayor of Bristol was reduced to asking the government ‘how to proceed and what I would be directed in and request you to inquire and advise what is to be done’ about the dissenters (CSPD, Charles II, 1680, p. 163). Bristol elections remained hard-fought; John Spurr has claimed that the 1681 election was ‘one of the most bitterly fought’ (Spurr, England in the 1670s, p. 296).

34 Henning, Commons, i, pp. 153, 167, 264, 500–1; The National Archives (TNA), return of Rye and Sandwich to the privy council, pc2/69/432. Moreover, in 1683, Benjamin Coombs the newly elected mayor of Sandwich was an undischarged excommunicant (Pickavance, ‘English boroughs and the king's government’, p. 226).

35 G. S. De Krey, London and the restoration (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 353–4.

36 Henning, Commons, i, pp. 139, 226.

37 Journal of the House of Commons (London, 1802), ix, 7 Dec. 1669.

38 A. Grey, Debates of the House of Commons: from the year 1667 to the year 1694: collected by the Hon. Anchitell Grey (10 vols., London, 1769), i, pp. 195–215.

39 TNA, clerk of the passage, Dover to Sir Joseph Williamson, pc2/63/99, 103.

40 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, p. 111.

41 Ibid., pp. 153, 331.

42 CSPD, Charles II, 1682, pp. 83, 571.

43 CSPD, Charles II, 1683, p. 198.

44 M. Goldie and J. Spurr, ‘Politics and the restoration: Edward Fowler and the struggle for St Giles Cripplegate’, English Historical Review, 109, 2 (1994), p. 582.

45 Anon., A discourse concerning excommunication (London, 1680), p. 2.

46 Ibid., p. 9.

47 Ibid., pp. 20–1.

48 British Library (BL), Stowe MS 744, vol. 2, fo. 107, Johnson legal opinion 1665.

49 Taunton was a ‘potwalloper’ franchise, which gave the vote to male householders.

50 Anon., Excommunication excommunicated: or, legal evidence that the ecclesiastical courts have no power to excommunicate any person whatsoever for not coming to his parish church in a dialogue between a doctor of both laws and a substantial burgher of Taunton-Dean (London, 1680), pp. 3–4.

51 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

52 Ibid., pp. 10–11. This was a view with which the canonist Edmund Gibson agreed. His monumental Codex Juris Anglicani (1713) made no mention of excommunication having a consequence for the excise of the franchise.

53 Anon., Excommunication excommunicated, p. 12.

54 Ibid., p. 23.

55 Anon., A discourse concerning excommunication, p. 1. The copy in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, is marked ‘written between 1678 and 1679 and now published’.

56 John Rushworth had been the author, though not a signatory, of the death warrant for Charles I and was eventually imprisoned by Charles II.

57 Henning, Commons, iii, p. 359.

58 Joad Raymond, ‘Rushworth, John (c. 1612–1690)’, in Oxford dictionary of national biography.

59 Quoted in Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, p. 111.

60 Quoted in ibid., pp. 311, 440.

61 CSPD, Charles II, 1679, pp. 58–9.

62 CSPD, Charles II, 1678, p. 560.

63 CSPD, Charles II, 1683, pp. 355, 437.

64 CSPD, Charles II, 1684, p. 254. The same prosecution of churchwardens for failure to pursue Dissent also occurred in Dorset in 1683 (Pickavance, ‘English boroughs and the king's government’ p. 401).

65 Henning, Commons, i, p. 345.

66 Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, vii, pp. 55–67.

67 BL, Loan, MS 29/182, fos. 312–13, Blathwayt letters.

68 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, p. 409.

69 Commons Journal, ix, 17 Apr. 1679.

70 John Wolveridge to Thomas Jervoise, 3 July 1679, Hampshire Record Office, 44m69/f5/3/36.

71 Henning, Commons, i, p. 709. The fact that Braman's house lay in an ecclesiastical peculiar and therefore outside the bishop's jurisdiction did not save him from excommunication.

72 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, p. 311.

73 Protestant Intelligencer, 15 Feb. 1681. The Protestant Intelligencer was published by Frank (‘Elephant’) Smith, a protégé of Shaftesbury and a bookseller, printer, whig propagandist, and Anabaptist preacher. In Gloucester diocese, the chancellor, Richard Parsons, was also a magistrate who facilitated co-ordination of prosecutions of dissenters in both civil and spiritual courts. O. Roberts, Some memoirs of the life of John Roberts, one of the early Friends, written by his son, Daniel Roberts in 1725 (London, 1859), p. 91.

74 Henning, Commons, i, p. 402.

75 BL, Add. MSS 34,730, fos. 4ff, Sir Richard Newdigate letters.

76 National Library of Wales (NLW), Aberystwyth, ‘Church in Wales: diocese of St David's episcopal, 5. Consistory court, archdeaconry of Brecon’.

77 West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, excommunication books, ep ii/7/1-3. Lewes was a town in which anti-dissent feeling was very strong and in 1682 many were thrown in prison: W. Figg, ‘Sufferings of the Quakers in Lewes’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 14 (1864), p. 16.

78 West Sussex Record Office, excommunication books, ep ii/7/1 fO. 2. While there were other causes of excommunication, drunkenness, adultery etc., the vast majority were for ‘being Dissenters’, ‘being anabaptists’, and for failure to attend church or failing to receive the eucharist. The Lewes excommunication books record, by parish and deanery, every excommunicant and the reason for the sentence.

79 Wiltshire and Swindon Records Office, Trowbridge, excommunication records, d1/41/1/22.

80 Ibid., d1/27/1/4/66 and d1/41/1/22.

81 CSPD, Charles II, 1682, pp. 24–5.

82 The bishop forwarded the letter to Secretary of State Jenkins and asked that the Lewes JPs should be turned out of the commission for the peace (CSPD, Charles II, 1683, pp. 362, 380). John Spurr claimed that it was common for local people not to exact prosecutions against their dissenter neighbours, neighbourliness exceeding doctrine as a call on loyalty (Spurr, England in the 1670s, p. 232).

83 Henning, Commons, I, p. 314.

84 CSPD, Charles II, 1682, p. 557. By March 1683 London dissenters resorted to writs of Habeas Corpus to relieve excommunicants from imprisonment (CSPD, Charles II, 1683, p. 100). De Krey, London and the restoration, p. 354.

85 Tapsell, ‘Parliament and political divisions’, p. 250.

86 In March 1683, however, Charles denied that he was ‘conniving’ against the dissenters (CSPD, Charles II, 1683, p. 131).

87 Ibid., p. 7.

88 CSPD, Charles II, 1682, pp. 453, 481.

89 D. Ogg, England in the reign of Charles II (2 vols., London, 1957), II, p. 624.

90 M. Mullett, ‘Recusants, dissenters and north-west politics between the restoration and the glorious revolution’, in J. C. Appleby and P. Dalton, eds., Government, religion and society in northern England, 1000–1700 (Stroud, 1997), p. 201.

91 A. Coleby, Central government and the localities, Hampshire, 1649–1689 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 200.

92 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, p. 164.

93 NLW, St. Asaph Diocesan Records, sa/misc/520-1.

94 Pickavance, ‘English boroughs and the king's government’, p. 397.

95 E. Hickeringill, The black nonconformist discovered in more naked truth (London, 1682), p. 17.

96 Domestic Intelligence, 19 Sept. 1679.

97 Henning, Commons, i, p. 326. As early as 1676 the Yarmouth election for bailiff produced a large number of dissenting voters and the church party called for the ‘Church Book’ to list those who had and had not received the sacrament and therefore ‘who were capable to be electors and elected’ (CSPD, Charles II, 1678, pp. 20–2).

98 Anon., Considerations offered to all the corporations of England well worth their observation containing seasonable advice to them in their future elections (London, 1681), passim.

99 Barry Till, ‘Stillingfleet, Edward (1635–1699), in Oxford dictionary of national biography.

100 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, p. 443.

101 Anon., The case and cure of persons excommunicated according to the present law of England, in two parts (London, 1682), pp. 29–30.

102 Anon., A letter concerning the matter of the present excommunications (London, 1683), p. 1. See also De Krey, London and the restoration, p. 390.

103 Jones had, moreover, previously been prosecuted for non-attendance at church in Surrey.

104 Anon., The admonisher admonished: in a modest and impartial narrative of the proceedings of the ecclesiastical court, against James Jones, citizen of London … being a true account of matter of fact, from his citation to Doctors Commons, to their taking out the writ of excommunicato capiendo against him (London, 1683), pp. 2, 3, 4, 7, 10–15.

105 W. Basset, A discourse on my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury's and my Lord Bishop of London's letters to the clergy touching catechising and the sacrament of the supper with what is required of churchwardens and ministers in reference to obstinate recusants. Also a defence of excommunication, as used by the Church of England against such (London, 1684), pp. 33–4.

106 W. T. Morgan, ‘Prosecution of nonconformists’, Journal of the Historical Society of the Church in Wales, 12 (1962), p. 38. I owe this reference to Ruth Paley.

107 M. Goldie, ‘The Hilton gang and the purge of London in the 1680s’, in H. Nenner, ed., Politics and the political imagination in later Stuart Britain (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 43–73; Gibson, Religion and the Enlightenment, 1600–1800, passim.

108 Goldie and Spurr, ‘Politics and the restoration’, p. 595.

109 W. Gibson, ‘Dissenters, Anglicans and the Glorious Revolution: The collection of cases, in Seventeenth Century, 22 (2007), passim.

110 The articles recommended by the arch-bishop of Canterbury to all the bishops within his metropolitan jurisdiction, the 16th of July, 1688 (London, 1688).

111 Lacey, Dissent and parliamentary politics, p. 119.

112 His majesties declaration to all his loving subjects touching the reasons that moved him to dissolve the last two parliaments (London, 1681).

113 Spurr, England in the 1670s, p. 237.