[95] Lord Hervey to Mrs. Clayton, Hampton Court, 31st July, 1733. Sundon Correspondence.
[96] The Countess of Pomfret to Mrs. Clayton, Hampton Court. Sundon Correspondence.
CHAPTER X.
CAROLINE AND THE CHURCH.
In no sphere was Caroline’s influence more marked than in Church affairs; she held the reins of ecclesiastical patronage in her hands, and during her ten years’ reign as Queen Consort or Queen-Regent no important appointment was made in the Church without her consent and approval. George the Second was a Protestant of the Lutheran type, not so much from conviction, for he never troubled to inquire into religious matters, as from education and environment. He had no liking for the Church of England, but as his office compelled him to conform to it, he did so without difficulty. The established Church was to him merely a department of the civil service of which he was the head. He always accepted the Queen’s recommendations, and was as a rule indifferent about ecclesiastical appointments.
Walpole was quite as Erastian as the King and even less orthodox. He had no religious convictions, and did not make pretence to any; provided the bishops were his political supporters, he cared nothing for their Church views; they might disbelieve in the Trinity, but they must believe in him; they might reject the Athanasian Creed (or the Apostles’ Creed too for that matter), but they must profess the articles of the Whig faith. In those days the High Church clergy were Tory, and the Low Church were Whig; therefore Walpole appointed Low Church bishops, but he had as little liking for the one school of thought as the other. A thorough-going sceptic himself, he had a contempt for the latitudinarian clergy, regarding them as men who sought to reconcile the irreconcilable. But he cared nothing about their views; all he asked was that they should keep their heterodox opinions to themselves and not write pamphlets or preach sermons which stirred up strife in the Church, and made trouble for the Government. Early in his political career the Sacheverel disturbance had given him a wholesome dread of arousing the odium theologicum, and he determined never to repeat the mistake he made then, but to let the Church severely alone. In his ecclesiastical patronage he was guided chiefly by Dr. Gibson, Bishop of London, and he preferred to appoint safe men, not particularly distinguished in any way, except when he deferred to the wishes of the Queen, who kept an eye on all Church appointments.
Caroline might be described as an unorthodox Protestant. Theology interested her greatly, but her inquiries carried her into the shadowy regions of universalism, and the refined Arianism of her favourite chaplain, Dr. Samuel Clarke. She no more believed in an infallible Bible than in an infallible Pope. The Protestant Dissenters, whom she favoured with her patronage, would have recoiled in horror from her broad views had they known them, and would have denounced her with little less fervour than they denounced popery and prelacy. But Caroline took care that they should not know her views, and however freely she might express herself to Dr. Clarke and Mrs. Clayton, and at her metaphysical discussions, she kept a seal upon her lips in public. By law it was necessary that she should be a member of the established Church, and she was careful always to scrupulously conform to its worship. She had prayers read to her every morning by her chaplains; on Sundays and holy days she regularly attended the services in one of the Chapels Royal. So particular was she that, one Sunday when the King and Queen were too ill to go to church and had to keep their beds, the chaplain came and read the service to them in their bedroom. The Queen made a point of receiving the Holy Communion on the great festivals of the Church’s year, such as Easter and Christmas; and Lady Cowper comments on the devoutness of her behaviour on these occasions. Paragraphs like the following figured at regular intervals in the Gazette: “On Christmas Day the King and Queen, the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal, the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, with several of the nobility and other persons of distinction, received the sacrament in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s”.[97]
Nor were the lesser festivals of the Church overlooked: “On the Feast of the Epiphany their Majesties, the King and Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the three eldest Princesses, went to the Chapel Royal, preceded by the King’s Heralds and Pursuivants-at-Arms, and heard divine service. His Grace the Duke of Manchester carried the sword of state to and from chapel for their Majesties, and his Majesty and the Prince of Wales made their offerings at the altar, of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, according to annual custom.” The ending of the day was of a more secular nature. “At night their Majesties played at hazard with the nobility for the benefit of the groom porter; and ’twas said the King won six hundred guineas, the Queen three hundred and sixty, Princess Amelia twenty, Princess Caroline ten, the Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Portmore several thousand.” Even King Charles the Martyr, the latest addition to the prayer-book kalendar, was not forgotten by the family who were keeping his grandson from the throne, for we read: “Yesterday being the anniversary of the martyrdom of King Charles the First, their Majesties and the Royal Family attended divine service, and appeared in mourning, as is usual on that day”.[98]
Thus it will be seen that in the matter of outward conformity to the rites of the established Church the Queen gave no occasion for cavil. She gave large sums to Church charities, such as £500 at a time to the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy; she endowed livings and restored churches, such as Richmond, Greenwich and Kensington, presenting to Greenwich a fine peal of bells, and to Kensington a new steeple. She even feigned an interest in missionary work, and listened patiently to Berkeley when he expounded to her his scheme for establishing a missionary college in Bermuda in connection with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. She did little to forward it, and he somewhat ungratefully declared that his visits to her had been so much waste of time, and called her discussions “useless debates”. Yet, though the Queen did little to convert his heathens, she remembered Berkeley later, and obtained for him the deanery of Down.
But, with all her outward conformity, Caroline never understood the peculiar position of the Church of England, nor did she trouble to understand it. Once, soon after she came to England, Dr. Robinson, then Bishop of London, who was opposed to Dr. Samuel Clarke’s views, waited upon her to endeavour to explain the Church’s teaching, but he met with a repulse. Lady Cowper says: “This day the Bishop of London waited on my mistress, and desired Mrs. Howard to go into the Princess and say that he thought it was his duty to wait upon her, as he was Dean of the Chapel, to satisfy her on any doubts and scruples she might have in regard to our religion, and explain anything to her which she did not comprehend. She was a little nettled when Mrs. Howard delivered this message, and said: ‘Send him away civilly; though he is very impertinent to suppose that I, who refused to be Empress for the sake of the Protestant religion, do not understand it fully’.” Caroline’s words show how little she realised, or sympathised with, the position of the Church of England; it was to her a Protestant sect—that and nothing more. The Church of Laud, Juxon, Andrewes, Sancroft and Ken, the via media between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, did not appeal to her; in fact she viewed it with dislike. She made no pretence to impartiality in her patronage, or to holding the balance even between the different parties in the Church; all her bishops were more or less of her way of thinking. She would have made Dr. Samuel Clarke Archbishop of Canterbury when Archbishop Wake died, had it not been for Bishop Gibson’s temperate remonstrance. He told her that though Clarke was “the most learned and honest man in her dominions, yet he had one difficulty—he was not a Christian”. To do Clarke justice, he never desired a bishopric, and he had doubts about the propriety of accepting one. Moreover, he preferred his unique position at the court, where he was, unofficially, the keeper of the Queen’s conscience.
It must be admitted that the Queen in her distribution of ecclesiastical patronage always recognised the claims of scholarship and learning, and she took infinite pains to discover the most deserving men. Among the divines to whom she gave high preferment, besides Berkeley, were the learned Butler and the judicious Secker, many years later Archbishop of Canterbury. Secker, when he was Queen’s chaplain, mentioned to Caroline one day the name of Butler, the famous author of The Analogy between Natural and Revealed Religion. The Queen said she had thought that he was dead; Secker said: “No, madam, not dead but buried”. The Queen took the hint, and soon after appointed Butler Clerk of the Closet. He was thus brought into contact with her, and she delighted exceedingly in his psychological bent, and would command him to come to her, on her free evenings, from seven to nine, to talk philosophy and metaphysics. She caused his name to be put down for the next vacant bishopric, and on her death-bed she commended Butler particularly to the King, who carried out his wife’s wishes and made him Bishop of Durham.