Caroline the Illustrious, vol. 2 (of 2)

by W. H. Wilkins

From a Painting by Mrs. Hoadly in the National Portrait Gallery.

At no period of her history has the Church of England been in greater danger than she was from her own bishops and clergy in the reign of George the Second. On the one hand was a party embittered by defeat, shut out from all hope of preferment, and inflamed by a spirit of intolerance in things political and ecclesiastical; on the other was a party just as intolerant in reality, but hiding its intolerance under the cloak of broad and liberal views, and with leaders using the intellect and learning they undoubtedly possessed, to subvert, or at least to set aside, the doctrines of the Church they had sworn to believe. Indifference in practice quickly succeeded indifference in belief, and herefrom may be traced most of the ills which afflicted the Church of England during the eighteenth century. It was no wonder, when the established Church was spiritually dead, that earnest-minded men, disgusted at this condition of things, and hopeless of remedying it, set up religious bodies of their own. The growth of Methodism in the eighteenth century was directly due to the shortcomings of the Church, which had lost its hold on the masses of the people. The year after Queen Caroline’s death, in 1738, John Wesley returned from Georgia, and, aided by his brother Charles, began the mission which was attended with such marvellous results. True, the Wesleys, in words at least, never wavered in their adherence to the Church of England, but the discouragement they met with from the bishops and the often ill-directed zeal of their followers led in time to the inevitable separation, which was followed later by schisms among the Methodists themselves.

One of the most typical of the Georgian bishops was Hoadley, who became successively Bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury and Winchester, “cringing from bishopric to bishopric”. Hoadley’s career was a striking illustration of the superiority of mind over body. When he was an undergraduate at Cambridge he had an illness which crippled him for life; he was obliged to walk with a crutch, and had to preach in a kneeling posture. His appearance was exceedingly unprepossessing, but he completely overcame these natural disadvantages by the sheer force of his will. He had taken up the Church as a profession, and from the professional point of view he certainly succeeded in it; but he does not seem to have believed in the teaching of the Church whose principles he had nominally accepted. He was a conformist simply because it paid him to conform. Even a favourable biographer writes: “So far indeed was Hoadley from adhering strictly to the doctrines of the Church that it is a little to be wondered at on what principles he continued throughout life to profess conformity”.

Hoadley early threw in his lot with the Whig party, and in Queen Anne’s reign was looked upon as the leader of the Low Church divines, and a staunch upholder of Whig principles. He did not obtain any considerable preferment until George the First came to the throne, when he was made a royal chaplain, and soon after advanced to the bishopric of Bangor. He did not once visit his bishopric during the whole of his six years tenure of the see, but remained in London, as the leader of the extreme latitudinarian party, which, since the Princess of Wales’s patronage, had become the fashionable one, and offered the best prospects of promotion. He therefore broke with the orthodox section of the Low Church party, who came to regard him with little less dislike than High Churchmen. Hoadley’s love of polemics soon brought him into conflict with Convocation, and led to what was known as the “Bangorian controversy”. The bishop had preached a sermon before King George the First on “The nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ,” in which he denied that there was any such thing as a visible Church of Christ, or Church authority. Convocation censured the sermon, and would have proceeded to further measures against the recalcitrant bishop had not the Government, by an arbitrary exercise of power, suspended it altogether. Convocation thus prorogued was not summoned again until the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria. It would weary and not edify to enter into the details of this dreary Bangorian controversy; the tracts and pamphlets written upon it numbered nearly two hundred, and the heat and bitterness were such as only a religious dispute could engender.

Hoadley did not heed his ecclesiastical enemies, for he had staunch friends at court; he enjoyed not only the favour of the King and the Princess of Wales, but had the ear of Mrs. Clayton, soon to become a dispenser of patronage. His letters to her are some of the most fulsome preserved in her correspondence. “I compare you in my thoughts,” he writes, “with others of the same kind, and I see with pleasure, so great a superiority to the many, that I think I can hardly express my sense of it strongly enough. Compared with them therefore, I may justly speak of you as one of the superior species, and you will supply the comparison if I do not always express it, and not think me capable of offering incense, which I know you are not capable of receiving.”[102]

In 1721 Hoadley was translated from Bangor to the richer see of Hereford, and two years later to Salisbury, which was wealthier still. At Salisbury he so far remembered his episcopal duties as to deliver a primary charge to his clergy, a poor composition. He was not content with Salisbury, and cast envious eyes upon the rich see of Durham, which then maintained a prince-bishop. Walpole, who disliked him as being a protégé of Mrs. Clayton’s, passed him over in favour of Dr. Talbot, Bishop of Oxford.

Hoadley owed much of his influence with the Whig party to the fact that he had always shown himself very friendly to Dissenters, and was in favour of abolishing the iniquitous Test and Corporation Acts and other disabilities under which they laboured; the animosity of his enemies arose quite as much from this fact as from their dislike of his opinions. The Protestant Nonconformists were the backbone of the Whig party, and the staunchest supporters of the House of Hanover; they therefore, not unnaturally, expected, in return for their great political services, that the disabilities which pressed upon them should be removed. From time to time they gained certain points, and the Acts were rendered practically innocuous by annual indemnities; but still they disfigured the Statute Book, and to this the Dissenters rightly objected. In 1730 a determined attempt was made by the Dissenters throughout England to secure the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, and they resolved to present a monster petition to Parliament praying that the matter should be proceeded with forthwith. This action put the Government into a position of considerable difficulty, and it was entirely opposed to Walpole’s policy of letting sleeping dogs lie. Though both he and the Queen (we will leave the King out of the question, as he does not count) had the fullest sympathy with the aspirations of Dissenters; yet they saw that to raise this question at the present time would be to fan the smouldering embers of religious controversy, and would put new heart and strength into the Opposition. The clergy of the established Church, almost to a man, would be against them, and, with a general election impending, that would mean that the Government would have an active enemy in every parish and hamlet in the kingdom. Such a reform, though just and reasonable in itself, would have the effect of alienating a number of the Government’s lukewarm supporters, and would give an opportunity for the Roman Catholics to assert themselves and claim relief also, for they were far more cruelly oppressed than the Protestant Dissenters.

Walpole knew that Hoadley had influence with the Dissenters, and he and the Queen talked it over, and resolved to ask Hoadley to see the heads of the dissenting party and endeavour to persuade them not to bring forward their petition. As Walpole had given offence to Hoadley by refusing him Durham, the Queen undertook this delicate mission. She sent for the bishop, and used all her eloquence to bring him round to her way of thinking. She dwelt on her admiration of his principles and writings; she said it was in his power to be of great use to the Government, and to place her, the Queen, under a personal debt of gratitude, which she would be slow to forget. She pointed out the danger that would arise from the religious question being raised at the present time, and she therefore desired him to ask the Dissenters to postpone their request. Hoadley demurred a good deal, possibly because the hint of promotion was not definite enough, and pointed out that as he had always urged the repeal of the offending Acts, he could hardly turn round now and eat his words. But he said he would feel the popular pulse, and if it appeared that the present was an inopportune moment for raising the question, he would endeavour to persuade the Dissenters to postpone it to a more convenient season.

Soon after this interview a report was promulgated by Walpole to the effect that “the Queen had sent for the Bishop of Salisbury and convinced him that this request of the Dissenters was so unreasonable that he had promised her not to support it”. This report had the very opposite effect to what was intended. It caused the Dissenters to be suspicious of their friend, and consequently tended to nullify any advice he might give them. The bishop went to Walpole in a rage and said he could be of no service in the matter whatever, and that so far from persuading the Dissenters from bringing forward their petition, he should now encourage them to do so. Walpole tried to soothe Hoadley by fair words, but finding him not amenable to them, he gave him a strong hint that if he persisted in his intention, he would ruin any chances of promotion he might have from the Government or the Queen. This brought the bishop to his bearings; he had more conferences with the Queen on the subject, and was ultimately bought over to complaisance by the promise of the next reversion of the see of Winchester. The Dissenters fell into a trap. From all over England they sent delegates to London, who on their part entrusted the negotiations with the Government to a committee of London Nonconformists. As this committee was composed of tradesmen in the City, or lawyers eager for promotion, Walpole was able to buy them over singly and collectively, and so, betrayed by the bishop and their delegates, the Dissenters went to the wall.

Hoadley had the misfortune to please neither the Government nor the Dissenters, for neither trusted him; but he probably did not mind, as he received what he worked for—the see of Winchester. Soon after his translation to Winchester he proceeded, after the approved fashion of Mrs. Clayton’s favourites, to show his independence and disburden his soul, by publishing a pamphlet called A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. This set the clergy by the ears, and they promptly started a heresy hunt, to the great discomfiture of the Government responsible for Hoadley’s promotion.