At this time, Wilkes, not satisfied with the alderman’s gown, aspired to be sheriff. In this he was supported by Farringdon ward, and by other parts of the city, and the court taking alarm at the circumstance made use of all its influence to prevent his election. Their efforts were encouraged by dissensions among the city patriots, and by reports that Wilkes had offended, the lord mayor and several of the aldermen, and had involved himself in a quarrel with the Rev. John Home, one of the principal leaders of the people. Aldermen Plumbe and Kirkman, were opposed by the government party to Wilkes and Alderman Bull, and every thing was done to secure their election. An awkward mistake, however, frustrated all their endeavours. A letter was written by the celebrated ministerial manager, Mr. John Robinson, to Mr. Benjamin Smith of Cannon-street, informing him that Mr. Harley was to meet his ward in the course of the day, to urge them to support Plumbe and Kirkman, and entreating him to second the efforts of government by active exertions. This letter was sent by a messenger, but by a mistake he carried it to Mr. B. Smith, of Budge-row, who was friendly to the cause of Wilkes, and he instantly published it, together with an affidavit as to its authenticity: this had such an effect on the poll, that Wilkes and Bull were elected. Alderman Oliver had been induced to offer himself, and he was supported by the Rev. John Home. This led to a correspondence between the Rev. orator and Junius, in the course of which the frailties of Wilkes were laid before the public eye in all their deformity. Home accused him of having commissioned Sir Thomas Walpole to procure a pension of £1000 upon the Irish establishment; of having accepted a clandestine pension from the Rockingham administration; of not having commenced patriot until his wife’s fortune was consumed; and of various other delinquencies committed both in England and France, which were very derogatory to his moral character. These accusations, however, came too late, and were, moreover, made in too bad a spirit to have any immediate effect on his popularity:—this he had now the means in his hands of increasing, and he turned his power to good account in this particular. Together with his colleague, he declared that as long as they were sheriffs, the military, which had been the custom, should not be allowed to attend the execution of criminals; and they gratified the people at the beginning of the session, by throwing open the doors and galleries of the Old Bailey, and forbidding the doorkeepers to receive money.
A.D. 1772
MEETING OF PARLIAMENT.
Parliament, contrary to usual custom did not meet till after the Christmas holidays. It met on the 21st of January, when the king opened it with a speech which afforded no subject for debate. Addresses were passed in both houses without a division. On the same day Sir John Mawbey obtained leave to bring in a bill for preventing “clandestine outlawries,” of which nothing more is known. On the next day Alderman Sawbridge gave notice of moving for leave during the session to bring in a bill for shortening the duration of parliaments; and on the day following there was a debate about the prevailing scarcity, and the necessity of continuing the prohibition against the exportation of corn. Sir William Meredith moved on the same day, that no bill or clause of any bill should be permitted to pass the house, whereby capital punishments were decreed, unless the same should previously be referred to a committee of the whole house: a motion which passed unanimously, and was made a standing order. The first debate of consequence in the house took place on the 29th of January, when Mr. Buller informed the house, in a committee of supply, that his majesty expected they would vote a considerable augmentation to our naval force, as additional ships were required in the Levant, where Russia was carrying on a maritime war against Turkey; in the East Indies, where France began to manifest hostility; and in Jamaica and the West Indies. He moved that 25,000 men including 6664 marines should be maintained, and the motion was seconded by Captain Harvey. The augmentation was opposed by several members as too small if war was expected, and too large to be kept up in peace, and hints were thrown out by the opposition that ministers or the lords of the admiralty, either wanted more patronage at their disposal, or that something was concealed that made this great armament necessary. Mr. Buller’s motion, however, was carried without a division.
DEBATES ON SUBSCRIPTION TO THE THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES.
The important subject of subscription to the thirty-nine articles of religion had long been discussed at public meetings, in the newspapers, and in pamphlets and other works, and during this session, on the 6th of February, a petition from about 240 of the clergy and many professors of civil law and physic, was presented to parliament, praying relief from subscription to these articles The document was thus worded:—“Your petitioners apprehend themselves to have certain rights and privileges which they hold of God alone, and of this kind is the exercise of their own reason and judgment. They conceive they are also warranted by those original principles of reformation from popery on which the church of England is constituted, to judge, in searching the scriptures, each man for himself, what may or may not be proved thereby. They find themselves, however, in a great measure precluded the enjoyment of this invaluable privilege, by the laws relative to subscription, whereby your petitioners are required to acknowledge certain articles and confessions of faith and doctrine, drawn up by fallible men, to be all and every one of them agreeable to the said scriptures. Your petitioners therefore pray that they may be relieved from such an imposition upon their judgment, and be restored to their undoubted right as Protestants, of interpreting scripture for themselves, without being bound by any human explanations thereof—holy scripture alone being acknowledged certain and sufficient for salvation.” This petition was presented by Sir William Meredith, who said that he considered it as meriting the most serious attention of the house, as the grievance which affects the minds and consciences of men was more burtdensome than that which affects their property. It was inconsistent, he observed; with the liberality of the present age to oblige men to subscribe to the truth of articles which they could not believe; and he urged that such injunctions tended to establish, under religious authority, habits of prevarication and irreligion; were productive of great licentiousness in the church; and operated to the destruction of Christian charity. He affirmed that the removal of these shackles would give a strength to the established church which nothing could shake, and that no danger could arise from such a reformation while the hierarchy existed. He concluded with remarking that the oaths of allegiance and supremacy were quite enough for the security of the church and state.
The champion of the church on this occasion was Sir Robert Newdigate, member for the University of Oxford. Sir Robert considered the petition as praying to overturn the church of England, which he argued was only to be found in the thirty-nine articles and the Book of Common Prayer. He accused those clergymen who had signed it with possessing accomodating consciences; such consciences as had subverted the church in the last century. As for the house of commons, he maintained that it had no power to dispense with oaths, or to relieve those who had subscribed. Nay, it could not, he said, even receive the petition, since to comply with it would be a breach of the articles of union between England and Scotland, and since the king is bound by oath never to admit any alteration either in the liturgy or the articles. Mr. Hans Stanley, Mr. Fitzmorris, and Mr. Jenkinson were all of opinion that the house ought to show no countenance to such a petition, and other members were either facetious at the expense of the tender consciences of the dissenters, or furious against every section of that body. Mr. Charles Fox spoke for the church as by law established, and said that he considered that all the laws and statutes by which it had been guarded were very necessary for its preservation: at the same time he deprecated the practice of exacting subscription to the articles from mere boys. Soame Jenyns said that at Cambridge no subscription was required except upon taking a degree, when the parties might be supposed to have arrived at an age when they might think for themselves. Other members opposed the petition, on the ground that it would give a mortal wound to the church, and through the church to the state, since they were so closely united that if one perished the other must share its fate. It was also argued that the church had long been and was still in danger; that the parliament could not grant relief to the petitioners, it having no power to release from oaths once taken; and that even the king could not afford relief, he being bound by oath to preserve the church as by law established. Burke, who opposed the opposition, took a more comprehensive and enlightened view of the subject than most of the preceding speakers. He remarked, “If the dissenters, as an honourable gentleman has described them, have formerly risen from a ‘whining, canting, snarling generation,’ to be a body dreadful and ruinous to our establishments, let him call to mind the follies, the violences, the outrages, and persecutions that conjured up, very blamably, but very naturally, that same spirit ol retaliation. Let him recollect, along with the injuries, the services which dissenters have done to our church and to our state. If they have once destroyed, more than once they have saved them.” Burke next observed that the church of England might alter her laws without changing her identity. He said that she professed no infallibility, and had always exercised the right of reforming her doctrine, discipline, and ceremonies, instancing as examples the change which she had made in the liturgy in the reign of Edward VI. and the reduction of her articles from forty-two to thirty-nine. The act of union, he maintained, had not rendered any further change possible. At the same time he contended that there was no great occasion for the change sought by the petitioners. “I will not enter,” he said, “into the abstract merits of our articles and liturgy; perhaps there are some things in them which one would wish had not been there; and they are not without the marks and character of human frailty. But,” he added, “it is not human frailty and imperfection, or even a considerable degree of them, that becomes a ground for alteration; for by no alteration will you get rid of those errors, however you may vary them.” He then adverted to the inexpediency of these alterations, and the temper of the times. “If,” said he, “you make this a season of religious alterations, depend upon it you will soon find it a season of religious tumults and wars.... These gentlemen complain of hardships. No considerable number shows discontent; but in order to give satisfaction to any considerable number of men, who come in so decent and constitutional a mode before us, let us examine a little what that hardship is. They want to be preferred clergymen of the church of England as by law established, but their consciences will not suffer them to conform to the doctrines and practices of that church; that is, they want to be teachers in a church to which they do not belong; it is an odd sort of hardship. They want to receive the emoluments appropriated for teaching one set of doctrines, whilst they are teaching another. A church in any legal sense is only a certain system of religious doctrines and practices, fixed and ascertained by some law; by the difference of which laws different churches, as different commonwealths, are made in various parts of the world; and the establishment is a tax laid by the same sovereign authority for payment of those who so teach and practise, For no legislature was ever so absurd as to tax its people to support men, but by some prescribed rule.” Burke then warned the house against making a new door into the church for such gentlemen, as ten times their number might be driven out of it, and as it would be inexpedient to displease the clergy of England as a body, for the chance of obliging a few who were, or wanted to be, beneficed clergymen, and who probably were not agreed among themselves as to what required alteration. He concluded by showing, from the different opinions of churches on the canon of scripture itself, that men are as little likely to be unanimous on that point as on any other. He remarked, “The Bible is a vast collection of different treatises: a man who holds the divine authority of one may consider the other as merely human. What is his canon? The Jewish? St. Jerome’s? that of the thirty-nine articles? Luther’s? There are some who reject the Canticles; others six of the Epistles; the Apocalypse has even been suspected as heretical, and was doubted of for many ages, and by many great men. As these narrow the canon, others have enlarged it, by admitting St. Barnabas’s Epistles, the Apostolic Constitutions, to say nothing of many other Gospels. Therefore to ascertain scripture you must have one article more; and you must define what that scripture is which you mean to teach. There are, I believe, very few who, when scripture is to be ascertained, do not see the absolute necessity of knowing what general doctrine a man draws from it, before he is sent down authorised by the state to teach it as pure doctrine, and receive a tenth of the produce of our lands. The scripture is not one summary of doctrine regularly digested, in which a man cannot mistake his way; it is a most venerable but multivarious collection of the records of divine economy; a collection of an infinite variety of cosmogony, theology, history, prophecy, psalmody, morality, apologue, allegory, legislation, ethics, carried through different books by different authors at different ages, for different ends and purposes. It is necessary to sort out what is intended for example, what only as narrative, what to be understood literally, what figuratively—where one precept is to be controlled and modified by another—what is used directly and what only as an argument ad hominem—what is temporary and what of perpetual obligation—what appropriated to our state, and to one set of men, and what the general duty of all Christians. If we do not get some security for this, we not only permit, but we actually pay for, all the dangerous fanaticism which can be produced to corrupt our people and to derange the public worship of the country.” Lord North said that he hoped to have seen nothing in the petition to prevent him from recommending that it should be laid on the table. He, however, saw that it was repugnant to the act of union, and that if such indulgences were allowed, there would then be nothing to exclude a man from the church of England but popery. Any innovations in the forms prescribed, he added, would occasion such contentions in the nation, that neither poppy nor mandragora could restore it to its former repose. Mr. Dunning replied, and he argued that every good subject ought to be entitled to a chance of obtaining posts of profit and honour. It was by no means a principle of sound policy, he said, to narrow the means of access to emoluments. As to the quiet of the nation being disturbed by innovation, he could not see such could be the result from granting the prayer of the petition. He added, if the repose of the nation partook at all of the torpid state of insensibility which Lord North’s mandragora had diffused through the house, the sooner it was broken the better; it was an alarming symptom, which, instead of betokening health, was the forerunner of destruction. The house divided at midnight, when the petition was rejected by a large majority.
GEORGE III. 1771-1773