Chapter 1 Introduction (continued)
Jeremy Gregory
1. Introduction
Matthew Henry was born on 18 October 1662 and died on 22 June 1714, and thus his life almost exactly coincided with the period historians label ‘Later Stuart England’, from the Restoration of Charles II on 29 May 1660 to the death of Queen Anne on 1 August 1714. On 24 August 1662, St Bartholomew’s Day, a couple of months before Henry was born, the Act of Uniformity came into force, in accordance with which Church of England clergy had to be episcopally ordained and agree to use the revised Book of Common Prayer.1 It has recently been claimed that the Act of Uniformity and its consequences ‘comprise perhaps the single most significant episode in post-Reformation English religious history’.2 The date was remembered in nonconformist circles as ‘Black Bartholomew’, the final ‘ejection’ of nearly two thousand ‘nonconformist’ ministers echoing the ‘St Bartholomew’s Day massacre’ in France of 1572 when French Protestants had been killed.3 Clergy who were deemed to be ‘intruders’, usurping the pulpits of ‘rightful’ clergy who had been deprived during the 1650s, or who were considered unorthodox, had in fact been ejected throughout the previous two years.4 Matthew Henry’s father Philip (who had been curate of the chapel of Worthenbury in the parish of Bangor-on-Dee from 1657, and who had been a supporter of the Restoration), had actually been ousted in October 1661 by Henry Bridgeman, the reinstituted rector of Bangor.5 But looking back on ‘Black Bartholomew’, Philip Henry later recalled, ‘I dyed, that fatal day to ye Godly painful faithful Ministrs of England’, regarding the Act as the decisive event in defining the difference between ‘the Church’ and ‘Dissent’, giving firm criteria for what it was to be a Church of England minister and what it meant to be a Nonconformist, and in his eyes causing a disastrous divide between true ‘godly’ ministry and ‘the Church’.6 Henry also emphasized the ‘pain’ this caused to those who were forced into nonconformity, many of whom, like him, would have preferred to have remained within a national state church were it not for what they regarded as unnecessary and even ‘popish’ impositions, such as having to be re-ordained and being forced to read the Prayer Book in services. A little over a month after Matthew Henry died in 1714, the death of Queen Anne led to the Hanoverian succession, where the accession of the Lutheran elector of Hanover to the British throne as George I was widely welcomed by Nonconformists as safeguarding ‘the Protestant interest’.7 The Hanoverian succession was viewed with high hopes for the friendly treatment of Protestant Nonconformists within a pan-Protestant polity and the new king was heralded as the potential saviour of global Protestantism, which was feared to be under threat in Europe and North America from a resurgent Catholicism.8
Matthew Henry’s lifetime was thus book-ended by key pieces of legislation and events which were crucial for the ways in which the religious situation developed in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Any understanding of Henry’s career clearly needs to appreciate the broader context in which he lived, wrote, and ministered. His biography and ministry were to a large extent shaped by the issues which were involved in defining nonconformity, and the religious, political, and social consequences of being a Nonconformist in Later Stuart England. But Henry was not just a passive figure in this. Through his work and writings, Henry in turn helped to shape and influence what it was to be a Nonconformist, and in particular what it meant to be ‘godly’.9 Calling this chapter ‘The wider world of Matthew Henry’, signals the fact that not only was Henry’s own experience shaped by that wider world but that his life and writings give us an interesting entry into understanding ‘Later Stuart England’.
In this essay I will look at some of the broad national issues involved in discussing the relationship between the Church and nonconformity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in order to provide a context for the more focused deliberations on Matthew Henry himself found in the rest of this volume. But Henry’s ‘wider world’ should also be expanded to include not only the synchronic world in which he lived, but the diachronic world of people before (and perhaps after) him who grappled with some of the same issues of biblical interpretation and exegesis. In discussing ‘the Church’ and ‘nonconformity’ I will explore the relationships between the Church of England and dissenting groups, but of course for Henry ‘the Church’ did not necessarily (or ever) mean ‘the Church of England’ but ‘the true church’ or ‘the body of Christ’.10 Although my focus is far narrower, Henry’s wider world encompassed the whole of Christian time and space, as did that of his contemporaries, and perhaps what really mattered for him (and the men and women of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) was how his own life, and the Later Stuart period more generally, fitted into the broader patterns of Christian history11 and to theological understandings of church, heresy, and schism.12 The wider world, not only of Matthew Henry but of his Later Stuart contemporaries, was acutely charged with the largest questions about the Christian soul. Too often, perhaps, scholars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have been pre-occupied by understanding context synchronically, but Matthew Henry’s own writings remind us of the broader Christian context in which he located both himself and his age.
2. Church Legislation
In the period, there were major pieces of legislation which had an immediate bearing on the theme of the Church and nonconformity. These had direct consequences for Henry’s own parents and family, and thus shaped the world in which he grew up (even to the extent of affecting where the Henrys lived). The upshots for Henry bring out neatly the impact of national legislation on a particular family and individual. Apart from the 1662 Act of Uniformity, as a result of which Henry’s father felt that the door had been forever closed on him being a parish minister, there was the so-called ‘Clarendon Code’ of the 1660s:13 the Corporation Act of 1661, requiring all members of municipal corporations to affirm they had taken Holy Communion within the year according to the rites of the Prayer Book; the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, which declared illegal all meetings in private houses of more than five persons (other than the household) for worship not according to that prescribed in the Prayer Book; and the Five Mile Act of 1665, which prohibited nonconformist minsters from preaching, teaching, or coming within five miles of a town or parish where they had previously officiated unless they had taken the non-resistance oath.14 In response to this, Philip Henry, who was living in Broad Oak where his wife’s family home was situated, measured the distance between that and Worthenbury, where he ministered, and found it was barely five miles away. He thus moved his family to Whitchurch, Shropshire in 1667, where for the first time he started to administer the Lord’s Supper as an ejected minister.15
The royal declarations of indulgence of 1672, 1687, and 1688 gave some freedom in religious matters and these can be regarded as Charles II and James II giving a personal lead on religious toleration (although there were always those who felt that the Catholic James’ declarations of religious freedom were really just a way to promote Roman Catholicism).16 Philip Henry had initially been against Charles’ declaration of March 1672, since he felt it encouraged separatism, but he was licensed as a Presbyterian in April to preach at his house at Broad Oak. As an indication of the ways that even moderate Presbyterians such as Philip Henry, despite their initial reluctance to separate from the Church, began to accept separation as a desirable (or at least an inevitable) goal, he welcomed James II’s Indulgence of April 1687 as a relief after the harsher treatment experienced by Dissenters during the 1680s.17 Indeed as a direct result of the renewal of hostility towards Dissent at this time, Matthew Henry (who had moved to London to study at Thomas Doolittle’s dissenting academy in Islington) for a while abandoned his hopes of training for the ministry and had taken up studying Law.18 But during James II’s Indulgence of 1687, he was ordained by his father and five other ejected ministers. Not surprisingly, both Henrys were very supportive of the so-called ‘Toleration Act’ of 1689.
Other pieces of legislation which had a bearing on the relationship between the Church and nonconformity were the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678, which decreed that office holders and MPs had to be communicant members of the Church of England, and for J.C.D. Clark these underpinned the fact that during the long eighteenth century, England was a ‘confessional state’.19 As might be expected, Philip Henry opposed these since they denied Dissenters full political participation, making them second-class citizens.20 During the high church and Tory revival under Queen Anne, the Occasional Conformity Act of 1711 was an attempt to stop Dissenters from taking the sacrament to qualify for office (there had been various unsuccessful efforts to enact this during the previous decade), and the Schism Act of 1714 forbade Dissenters from teaching or running schools. The latter was seen as a particularly bold move for the gradual emasculation and de-energising of Dissent, for it outlawed the academies which were seen as so crucial for nurturing nonconformity and where Matthew Henry had received the equivalent of a university education. Both these acts were repealed in 1719 as part of George I’s concessions to Protestant Nonconformists.
What is immediately apparent, even from this bare recital of the major pieces of legislation which aimed to define and regulate the relations between the Church and nonconformity, and how they affected Matthew Henry and his family, is the complex pattern of legislation which shows the differing and competing pulls in the period. The shifts and moves between more hard-line attitudes towards Nonconformists on the one hand and ‘indulgence’ on the other also reflected debates about: how far nonconformity should be eradicated and exterminated altogether; how far it should be ‘comprehended’ within the Church by giving some concessions to Nonconformist reservations about, for example, the content of the Act of Uniformity or the revised Prayer Book; or how far certain Nonconformist groups could and should be ‘tolerated’ as a legitimate alternative to the Church.
These pieces of legislation were of course primarily ‘parliamentary’, with the exception of the ‘royal declarations’ which articulated the wishes of the monarch concerned (perhaps with the backing, or even encouragement, of his closest advisors). There was, of course, sometimes intense debate within Parliament over the passing of much of this legislation, and Philip Henry was networked to several MPs, such as Henry Ashurst, who gave support to Nonconformists and argued in Parliament on their behalf.21 What is also clear is that what was enacted in Parliament could be received differently in the localities, and there might be varying responses to how far the legislation was in fact implemented, either in spirit or letter (and here we find much regional, local, and even parochial variation).22
In addition, we might ask how far these pieces of legislation reflected the views of ‘the Church’. Of course ‘the Church’ itself rarely spoke with a single voice and clergy could be found who supported and opposed all the pieces of legislation mentioned above. Neither ‘the Church’ nor ‘nonconformity’ were monolithic entities. ‘The Church’ could be represented by a range of bodies, including monarchs (as supreme governors),23 convocation, Parliament, bishops, clergy, and the laity.24 These could (and often did) differ both with each other and within themselves over what were the best interests for ‘the Church’ in dealing with its perceived enemies, and they even disagreed over who those enemies were, and whether the greater threat came from Protestant Dissenters or from Roman Catholics. Although for rhetorical reasons the Church often used labels such as ‘Dissenter’, ‘Nonconformist’, and ‘sectary’ as blanket terms of condemnation to cover all those who dissented from the Church, in reality there was often a wide range of differences in the way Church authorities and their representatives treated groups such as Presbyterians (to whom they were often sympathetic) and the ways in which they treated Independents/Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers (where a more hard-line approach was taken, since these were often more likely perceived as wanting a break-down of the established order and a return to the polity of the Interregnum). What is also worth noting are the ways in which hostility to one rival religious grouping could be transferred to another group. This was particularly so in the post-Civil War era when Protestant Nonconformists were often accused of virtually identical misdemeanours, and when it was widely rumoured that Catholics had indeed engineered the Civil War.25 In practical terms this can be seen in the ways in which Elizabethan and early Stuart statutes originally designed to be used against Catholics were, in the years after 1660, used against Protestant Nonconformists.26
There has been much historical controversy over who were the prime instigators of persecution on the one hand and of toleration on the other. Many years ago, Robert S. Bosher argued that the intolerance of the Church during the 1660s represented the triumph of the Laudian clergy.27 In contrast, I.M. Green argued that the clergy were initially moderate and irenic towards Dissenters before being overtaken by a cavalier and backwoods gentry.28 Paul Seaward emphasized the particular role of a group of metropolitan MPs egged on by the then bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon, who steered much of the more hard-line legislation through Parliament.29 There are merits in all these studies but ultimately no generalizations can cover the range of regional and chronological variation.
3. Conformist and Nonconformist Relations
What needs to be stressed is that there was often very little to divide those clergy who did and who did not conform during 1660–62, and ties of friendship remained long afterward. Samuel Thomas’ study of Oliver Heywood’s ministry in Halifax (where he had served as curate of Coley’s chapel of ease from 1650) shows how, even after his ejection in 1662, Heywood continued to minister to his former parishioners and attend the parish church.30 For at least ten years after his ejection, Heywood carried on giving pastoral care to those members of his erstwhile congregation who had conformed, providing both preaching and pastoral ministry where he felt that the established church did not. Like some other ejected ministers he occasionally even attended Anglican services led by his successor, helping to create connections between the various religious communities in the parish (although not everyone, including the vicar of Halifax, agreed with this stance, wanting to keep different religious groups firmly apart, and indeed aiming to eradicate Dissent).
Some of the same points could be said of Philip Henry, whose life was almost exactly co-terminus with Heywood’s and both were advocates of a moderate Presbyterianism.31 Henry also attended parish church services in the early 1660s (and beyond), although he did not take communion since he was against kneeling as a remnant of popery. Nevertheless, he wanted ‘sober’ Nonconformists to be allowed to continue to preach in parish churches. And ties of friendship with those who were at the heart of the establishment could work in unexpected ways. The 1680s saw a period of renewed persecution of Dissent, but ‘Hanging’ Judge Jeffreys, who was born in Wrexham (and whom Henry, a friend of Jeffreys’ mother, had examined when a school boy in the 1650s), showed no interest in wanting to prosecute him when he was Chief Justice of Chester, even though Henry had been convicted by local magistrates in 1681 of holding a conventicle.32 In September 1681, Henry, along with two other Nonconformist ministers, engaged in a public five-hour debate with William Lloyd, bishop of Bangor, over the rights and wrongs of non-episcopal ordination. Lloyd and Henry remained on friendly terms, and the bishop even asked Henry to discuss a plan he had for improving discipline in his diocese, which must have seemed extraordinary to contemporaries if they knew about it. Henry wrote to the bishop in 1682 asking for leniency for Nonconformists in what seemed to be an increasingly persecutory climate.33
Terms such as ‘persecution’ and ‘toleration’, which historians have habitually used to characterize relations between the Church and nonconformity in the later Stuart period, need to be handled with care. Many denominational historians, and indeed contemporary Nonconformists, have described the Church during this time as an essentially persecutory body. Evidence of persecution, of course, abounds in the years between 1662 and 1689 (a period which Gerald R. Cragg labelled ‘The Great Persecution’),34 when Nonconformists were imprisoned, fined, had their belongings taken away, and when they might be excommunicated from the Church (although excommunication may indeed have only served to reinforce the views of the more hard-line to remain as Dissenters). Even after the ‘Toleration Act’ of 1689, there is evidence of mobbing, stoning, harrying, the pulling down of meeting-houses, intimidation, and social ostracism. For example, in 1692 Matthew Henry’s meeting-house was nearly burned down, and during the high church revival of Queen Anne’s reign he received more harassment.35 Yet persecution, and the reasons for it, might be more complex than at first sight appears. Mark Goldie, in an important article published over 20 years ago, highlighted the theological imperatives which forced churchmen to suppress those perceived to be heretics.36 He convincingly demonstrated the importance of the church fathers, especially St Augustine, in fuelling such a mentality, and in seeing religious dissent as ‘schism’ which clergy had a duty to quash. Goldie suggested that it was these theological arguments, and not merely political or social imperatives, which sustained the defence of religious intolerance in the years before 1689. He showed how, against accusations of persecution, Anglicans could maintain that coercion provided an opportunity for a reconsideration of religious views on the part of the persecuted. He also pointed to the more positive aspects of Anglican policy, such as education and instruction, which in tandem with persecution were intended to help educate people out of their errors. ‘Persecution’ was not the only tactic or strategy used by Church of England clergy to try to win Nonconformists back to the Church; there were also the softer tools of persuasion and pastoral care. James Haydock, the curate of Nockholt in Kent, explained to Archbishop Sancroft in 1680:
I have done his Majesty and the Church of England more service than most clergy in my capacity. I have discoursed with Anabaptists, and so far convinced them that I have baptised seven children and persuaded the whole company to take oaths of supremacy. I have persuaded with many dissenters not only to hear, but I trust, to approve the common prayers of the Church.37
This is a reminder that some clergy, at least, thought that persuasion, discussion and dialogue, rather than persecution were better ways forward.
There is also the seeming contradiction that nonconformity could actually thrive on persecution. Some contemporaries indeed blamed the decline of ‘Old Dissent’, which was apparent by the 1730s, on the effects of toleration. Barry R. White has argued that the effects of the Toleration Act could produce mixed results for dissenting groups, and that periods of persecution had forced dissenting groups to stick together whereas in the years after 1689 they quickly developed internal divisions.38
4. The ‘Toleration Act’ and After
Usual interpretations have seen the period (at least within England) as moving quite straightforwardly from ‘persecution’ to ‘toleration’; a shift from the punitive legislation of the 1660s (which saw state-sponsored persecution of non-Anglicans following the 1662 Act of Uniformity, and attempts by some sections of the Church to exterminate its rivals) to some form of toleration of religious diversity (at least within Protestantism) after the 1689 ‘Toleration Act’ and an acceptance of relatively easy religious co-existence. But this view of a neat – and in some interpretations almost inevitable – linear trajectory from ‘persecution’ to ‘toleration’ is highly misleading. Even during the period of ‘the Great Persecution’, other models of co-existence operated. For example, some research has suggested that even Quakers, usually regarded as the most feared and despised religious group by Anglicans, were at some levels socially integrated. As Adrian Davies has observed from his study of Essex Quakerism, by as early as the 1670s (and alongside bouts of persecution) there were signs of co-operation at a local social level, especially between what he calls ‘ordinary members’ and the wider world (the Quaker cobbler, for example, needed to integrate with the local community).39 This observation might have broader applicability for our general theme (as well as suggesting important regional differences – how far did the model for Essex Quakerism translate into north-west England; the evidence we have suggests real regional divides).40 Furthermore, there were no doubt many instances when the religious professionals and elite were more for co-operation with other religious denominations than the rank and file, but the reverse was also true. So it is not just a question of how religious groups related to one another, but also how various sections of a religious grouping co-existed with members of other religious groups, and on this issue there were sometimes tensions within religious groups as much as between them.
Moreover, the 1689 Act did not advocate toleration in anything like a twenty-first-century understanding of the term, but only, as the title of the Act announced, ‘exempt[ed] their majesties’ Protestant subjects, dissenting from the Church of England, from the penalties of certain laws’. The Act did not envisage any form of toleration for Catholics or Unitarians, let alone non-Christian religions, and freedom of worship was only granted to Protestant Dissenters who, furthermore, could legally only worship in registered meeting-houses with the door open. Rather than seeing the ‘Toleration Act’ in a Whiggish light, we should note that its impact was less straightforward than ushering in a period of religious freedom. Not only did certain high churchmen bemoan the impact of the Act over their control of the religious life of their parishioners and seek to repeal or modify it, there was also considerable discussion of what it actually implied. Ralph Stevens has shown how Anglican clergy were actually deeply divided about its meaning and argues that it ‘settled next to nothing about the relationship between the Church and Dissent’, observing that some Anglicans believed that ‘Toleration had never been intended to allow Dissent to establish itself as a permanent feature’.41 He emphasizes the sheer vagueness and ambiguity of the 1689 legislation and the ways in which the ‘new religious dispensation was a drawn out process of experimentation, debate and contest rather than a transformative constitutional moment’.42 In the period leading up to the Act it is noteworthy that ‘toleration’ was often seen as second best to ‘comprehension’. A comprehension, it was argued by its supporters in the 1670s and ’80s, would take away most of the conditions to which the clergy were supposed to subscribe, and thereby bring over the majority of moderate dissenting ministers (and their lay supporters) to the Church. In this case, ‘toleration’ would be given to those hard-line groups who continued outside the bounds of the Church. Thus, rather than being a basic human right, ‘toleration’ in the late seventeenth century was designed for those who could not be accommodated within the comprehensive Church of England.43
It is a moot point how far the ‘Toleration Act’ encouraged different religious communities to tolerate one another but keep distinctly apart, how far it encouraged competition between different religious groups, or how far it encouraged an overarching sense of religious community which transcended the denominational divide. From the laity’s perspective, apart from the existence of ‘occasional conformists’ and ‘occasional dissenters’ who, to varying degrees, attended both parish church and rival places of worship, there is evidence (particularly after 1689) of parishioners who attended a variety of worshipping places on a regular basis, which makes it difficult to speak of clear-cut differences between religious groupings. Examples of the ways in which clergy from a range of denominations (embracing both the Church of England and Nonconformists) interacted include the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (founded 1698) and Societies for the Reformation of Manners. In 1712, Matthew Henry was invited to give one of the annual sermons to the latter group.44
One reason to try to find a common purpose was alarm at the apparently growing sector of the population who did not attend any form of religious worship, which made it increasingly necessary for different religious denominations to work together. It was sometimes argued that the ‘Toleration Act’, by not demanding that people attended a specific place of worship, allowed some to attend no place at all. In large measure, the impetus to find a common purpose was a reaction to the religious upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, which were widely blamed on misdirected spirituality and wrong-headed wranglings over theology. The most obvious way in which rival Protestant denominations could sink their differences was anti-popery. This is an example of how co-existing by joining forces with one group of potential religious rivals depended on exploiting common hostility to another. In her influential Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, Linda Colley argued that it was a common Protestantism which bound the people of Britain together,45 and this was dependent on a virulent anti-Catholicism. It is instructive to see how this theme permeates Henry’s works, most notably in his sermon for 5 November 1712, Popery a Spiritual Tyranny.46 Having surveyed several instances from the Reformation onwards where the nation had been saved from Popery, Henry asked rhetorically, ‘Now what is it that is the Ground of our Rejoicing in these great deliverances?’, and gave as an answer:
It is the Preservation of our Religion, the Protestant Religion, own’d and profess’d among us; tis the keeping out of Popery, which at the Reformation was driven out, and which our Popish Enemies both at Home and Abroad have been very industrious to bring in, and to re-establish among us by Force and Violence.47
What might have been distinctive about the period especially after 1689 was a move towards competition between religious groups, so that instead of seeing each other as enemies, religious denominations saw each other more in terms of competitors and rivals. Certainly one of the effects of the 1689 Toleration Act was to encourage members of the laity to shop around, ensuring that the churches had entered the marketplace, and this encouraged religious groups to develop strategies both to win people over and to retain their own members. In this, efforts were aimed at persuasion rather than true persecution or true toleration. Deprived of the advantages of working within a totally confessional state, the Church could not rely on active and exclusive state support to maintain its position in society and had to find other ways in which to build up and sustain its place. Clergy could no longer depend on the combined efforts of the spiritual and secular courts to impose Anglicanism in the parish and it was only through pastoral directives, through the powers of persuasion rather than legal coercion, that the Church could hope to win over its rivals.
5. Changing Worlds of Church and Nonconformity
As a way of concluding this overview of religious developments in the later Stuart period, and the relations between the Church and nonconformity, it is worth noting the contrasting educational experiences of Philip and Matthew Henry, which indicates something about religious change during the course of the seventeenth century. Philip’s father, and Matthew’s grandfather, John Henry, was keeper of the orchard at Whitehall, and Philip played as a child with the young princes Charles and James. This no doubt accounts for Philip’s royalism. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church Oxford, one of the royalist of colleges,48 where in 1648 he had been admitted by that high churchman and celebrated defender of an elevated view of episcopacy, Henry Hammond.49 As a royalist, Philip was dismayed by Charles I’s execution. He had also been taken to visit Archbishop Laud when Laud was in the Tower in 1643. Given the way that Laud would later be portrayed in ‘puritan’ and Nonconformist circles, these pieces of biographical evidence are a reminder that the religious and political world of the seventeenth century was more messy and complicated than some interpretations which like to place polarities and rigid divides on people and ideas. It shows how the first generation of Dissenters could be intimately connected to the political and Anglican establishment. Philip Henry’s world, at least until 1662, was not necessarily any different from that of the most highly placed and, as the erstwhile playmate of princes, his connections remained.
In contrast, Matthew’s world could, on the face of it, be said to be rather narrower. The son of an ejected minister, whose childhood was marked by legislation which sought to marginalize and discriminate against Dissenters, his own world looks rather more inward and less well-connected. His own circle was, at first sight, much more firmly confined to the world of Dissent, albeit he had a renowned place within it. But, while a certain restriction of horizons and a circumscribing of social connections might indicate that the worlds of Dissent and the Church were occupying increasingly different, and to some extent separate, spheres, that is not the whole story and we should certainly not impose the stereotype of the mid-nineteenth-century Church/chapel divide back onto the Later Stuart period.50 Those worlds and divides were not fixed.51 Matthew’s son from his second wife took his mother’s name to inherit her estate of Helperstone Grange as Philip Henry Warburton, and became MP for Chester in 1742. To do so he must have nominally subscribed to the Church of England, although we know little about him. However, it is clear that he inherited some of his forbears’ ‘dissenting’ and ‘oppositional’ stance, since he voted against the government on every bill.52
We should then pay attention not only to the ways that Nonconformists and members of the established church were increasingly inhabiting different worlds, but also to the ways in which they continued to inhabit the same world. It might, therefore, be worth ending this chapter by emphasizing some overarching texts and tools which were central to the period and which shaped Henry’s mental furniture, connecting him to the wider world as well as shedding light on the broad theme of ‘The Bible, Prayer, and Piety’.
To take them in reverse order. Clergy and others from across the religious divides in early modern Europe and beyond wrote and preached a great deal about piety and how one could demonstrate godliness in the world. It is true that churchmen and Nonconformists often ridiculed each other – Dissenters often accusing the Church of a ‘formulaic’ and ‘cold’ piety, while churchmen critiqued Nonconformists of a self-centred, self-regarding, or even overly ostentatious religiosity. Nevertheless, the quest for ‘godliness’ and ‘godly living’ was something which went across the religious spectrum, nourished for example by Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651).53 Matthew Henry shared in this endeavour and some of his writings became staple texts on pious behaviour. His popular sermon, A Church in the House, noted that ‘the best Families are those in which Piety and Love Prevails most’,54 and in other writings Henry wrote about ‘how to begin, how to spend, and how to close every day with God’.55
As far as the topic of ‘prayer’ is concerned, the revised Book of Common Prayer was the liturgical manual of the Church of England after 1662 and was arguably the single greatest divide between Anglicans and Nonconformists in Later Stuart England, with Nonconformists seeing it at worst as one of the remnants of popery within the Church. The new preface (written by Robert Sanderson, the bishop of Lincoln), having extolled the Church’s position as a via media ‘between the two extremes of too much stiffness in refusing and of too much easiness in admitting any variation’, reminded the reader ‘of the late unhappy confusions’, and ‘the vain attempts and impetuous assaults made against it, by such men as are given to change’, who were more concerned with their ‘own private fancies than the public good’.56 The mind-set articulated by the revised Prayer Book was dominated by the memory of the Civil War and the ways in which it was considered that religious diversity and experimentation had led to political and social anarchy, which in itself became a justification for having a set liturgy. Following the 1559 Prayer Book (on which it was largely based), the 1662 Prayer Book laid down rules for the order of reading the Bible and the Psalter, and contained tables of proper lessons and psalms, and of feasts and fasts. It included the collects, epistles, and gospels to be read on a particular day, and detailed the structure and content of the services for morning and evening prayer, the celebration of Holy Communion, services for baptism, matrimony, burial, and confirmation, and updated the 1559 book by requiring all readings from the Bible to use the 1611 translation (the ‘King James Version’). Even when, as often happened, Dissenters still wanted to attend the parish church, the element they increasingly most disliked was the use of the Prayer Book. Henry’s most focused discussion of ‘prayer’ can be found in his A Method for Prayer (1710).57 Although not, of course, prescribing set forms of prayer, it was nevertheless a guide on how to pray, and Henry acknowledged the work of John Wilkins (later bishop of Chester, 1668–1672), whose own A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer (1651) had covered similar ground.58
Henry’s Bible was, of course, also the King James Version. By the late seventeenth century this was the translation used by all denominations and could thus be seen as a unifying force across Protestant confessional divides.59 Moreover Henry’s Exposition of the King James Version was recognized as required reading across the religious spectrum and was valued as highly by Anglicans as by Dissenters. In the introduction to his Exposition, Henry spoke approvingly of:
the excellent and most valuable labours of that great and good man bishop Patrick, whom, for vast reading, solid judgment, and a most happy application to these best of studies, even in his advanced years and honours, succeeding ages no doubt will rank among the first three of commentators, and bless God for him.60
Patrick’s own biography reveals that he had had connections with Nonconformists and he was increasingly regarded as someone who wanted to find a way of ‘comprehending’ Dissenters within the Church, as well as famously refusing to back James II’s policy of leniency towards Catholics in 1688.61 Henry’s warm mention of Patrick is a useful reminder of the affinities and connections which could still be seen between the Church and nonconformity in Later Stuart England.
1 ‘An Act for the uniformity of public prayers and administration of sacraments and other rites and ceremonies’ (14 Car. II, c. 4; Act of Uniformity, 1662), in J.P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 353–56.
2 N.H. Keeble, ed., ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), back cover.
3 David J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Arlette Jouanna, The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: The Mysteries of a Crime of State (24 August 1572), trans Joseph Bergin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
4 See I.M. Green, The Re-Establishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 37–60; A.G. Matthews, Walker Revised: Being a Revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion, 1642–60 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948).
5 Richard L. Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip (1631–1696)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12976.
6 Matthew Henry Lee, ed., Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882), 145.
7 Andrew Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006).
8 Jeremy Gregory, ‘The Hanoverians and the Colonial Churches’, in The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture, ed. Andreas Gestricht and Michael Schaich (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 107–25.
9 Scott Mandelbrote, ‘A Family Bible? The Henrys and Dissenting Readings of the Bible, 1650–1750’, in Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c.1650–1950, ed. Scott Mandelbrote and Michael Ledger-Lomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 38–56; Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18; Andrew Cambers and Michelle Wolfe, ‘Reading, Family Religion, and Evangelical Identity in Late Stuart England’, The Historical Journal 47 (2004): 875–96 (886–87). For Philip’s role in shaping nonconformity, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘The Nurture of Nonconformity: Philip Henry’s Diaries’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 4 (1998): 5–27.
10 For rival understandings of ‘the church’, see Margo Todd, ‘The Godly and the Church: New Views of Protestantism’, Journal of British Studies 28 (1989): 418–27.
11 Anglicans shared in this view: Tony Claydon, ‘Latitudinarianism and Apocalyptic History in the Worldview of Gilbert Burnet, 1643–1715’, The Historical Journal 58 (2008): 577–97.
12 Henry himself published A Brief Enquiry into the True Nature of Schism; or A Persuasive to Christian Love and Charity (London: n.p., 1690), which attempted to defend Dissenters from the charge of schism.
13 For a review of Clarendon’s position, see Paul Seaward, ‘Circumstantial Temporary Concessions: Clarendon, Comprehension and Uniformity’, in Keeble, ‘Settling the Peace’, 57–84.
14 For an overview, see Grant Tapsell, ‘The Church of England, 1662–1714’, in Establishment and Empire, 1662–1829, ed. Jeremy Gregory, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of Anglicanism, ed. Rowan Strong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 25–48. See also, Grant Tapsell, ed., The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
15 Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’. For Henry’s family, see Patricia Crawford, ‘Katharine and Philip Henry and their Children: A Case Study in Family Ideology’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 134 (1984): 39–73.
16 Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
17 Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’.
18 David L. Wykes, ‘Henry, Matthew (1662–1714)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12975.
19 J.C.D. Clark, ‘England’s Ancien Regime as a Confessional State’, Albion 21 (1989): 450–74; J.C.D. Clark, ‘Great Britain and Ireland’, in Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660–1815, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett, vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 54–71. For the full statement, see J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
20 Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’.
21 Perry Gauci, ‘Ashurst, Henry (1616?–1680)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/782.
22 Anthony Fletcher, ‘The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts 1664–1679’, in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W.J. Sheils, SCH 21 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 235–46.
23 Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kinship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
24 John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); John Spurr, ‘The Lay Church of England’, in Tapsell, Later Stuart Church, 101–24. For competing ‘clerical’ and ‘lay’ views of the Church, see Brent Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
25 John Miller, After the Civil Wars: English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 120–21.
26 Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 1660–1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 201.
27 Robert S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians, 1649–1662 (London: Dacre Press, 1951).
28 Green, Re-Establishment of the Church.
29 Paul Seaward, ‘Gilbert Sheldon, the London Vestries, and the Defence of the Church’, in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 49–73.
30 Samuel S. Thomas, Creating Communities in Restoration England: Parish and Community in Oliver Heywood’s Halifax (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
31 For the importance of the moderate Presbyterian position, see N.H. Keeble, ‘The Nonconformist Narrative of the Bartholomeans’, in Keeble, ‘Settling the Peace’, 209–32.
32 Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’. On Jeffreys, see Paul D. Halliday, ‘Jeffreys, George, first Baron Jeffreys (1645–1689)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14702.
33 Greaves, ‘Henry, Philip’.
34 Gerald R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).
35 Wykes, ‘Henry, Matthew’.
36 Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 331–68.
37 Cited in Gregory, Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 202.
38 Barry R. White, ‘The Twilight of Puritanism in the Years Before and After 1688’, in Grell, Israel, and Tyacke, From Persecution to Toleration, 307–30.
39 Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
40 Nicholas Morgan, Lancashire Quakers and the Establishment, 1660–1730 (Krumlin, Halifax: Ryburn Academic Publishing, 1993).
41 Ralph Stevens, ‘Anglican Responses to the Toleration Act, 1689–1714’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2015), 25, 157. This has since been published as Ralph Stevens, Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018).
42 Stevens, ‘Anglican Responses’, 4. Stevens discusses Henry at various points.
43 John Spurr, ‘The Church of England, Comprehension, and the Toleration Act of 1689’, English Historical Review 413 (1989): 927–46.
44 Matthew Henry, A Sermon Preach’d at the Societies for the Reformation of Manners at Salter’s Hall, on Monday, June 30, 1712 (London: n.p., 1712).
45 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
46 Matthew Henry, Popery, a Spiritual Tyranny, shew’d in a Sermon preach’d on the Fifth of November, 1712 (London: n.p., 1712).
47 Henry, Popery, a Spiritual Tyranny, 10.
48 Ian Roy and Dietrich Reinhart, ‘Oxford and the Civil Wars’, in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, vol. 4 of The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 687–732.
49 Hugh de Quehen, ‘Hammond, Henry (1605–1660)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12157.
50 For the classic Church/chapel divide of the nineteenth century, see Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London: Longman, 1976).
51 See Bill Stevenson, ‘The Social Integration of Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660–1725’, in The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725, ed. Margaret Spufford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 360–87.
52 Eveline Cruickshanks, ‘Henry Warburton, Philip (1700–60), of Hefferstone Grange, Cheshire’, in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715–1754, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 2 vols. (London: HMSO, 1970), 2:128.
53 Jeremy Taylor, The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living (London: n.p., 1650); Jeremy Taylor, The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying (London: n.p., 1651).
54 Matthew Henry, A Church in the House: A Sermon concerning Family Religion (London: n.p., 1704), 34.
55 Matthew Henry, Directions for Daily Communion with God; in Three Discourses, showing how to begin, how to spend, and how to close every Day with God, 3rd ed. (London: n.p., 1715).
56 See Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209.
57 Matthew Henry, A Method for Prayer, with Scripture Expressions Proper to be Us’d under each Head (London: n.p., 1710).
58 Henry, Method for Prayer, 5.
59 Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, eds., The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Scott Mandelbrote, ‘The English Bible and its Readers in the Eighteenth Century’, in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (London: Continuum, 2001), 35–78.
60 Henry, preface to Exposition vol. 1 (1707). He was referring to Simon Patrick, A Commentary Upon the Historical Books of the Old Testament (London: n.p., 1695–1700).
61 Jon Parkin, ‘Patrick, Simon (1626–1707)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/21568.