ROBERT HARLEY'S 'MIDDLE WAY': THE PURITAN HERITAGE IN AUGUSTAN POLITICS

DAVID HAYTON

THE character of Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, was a puzzle to contemporaries and has contmued to vex historians ever since. Harley's motives, objectives, principles (if mdeed he had any) are of a piece with his notoriously difficult handwriting: often obscure and sometimes quite indecipherable. Of course, for a successful politician, and Harley was by any standards very successful, opacity could well be a deliberate ploy: a little obfuscation might be just what was needed to disarm an aggrieved petitioner, or to fudge a delicate issue in Parliament. Except that in Harley's case the obscuring process became second nature. Some contemporaries considered it to be pathological. Lord Cowper referred to ' that humour of his, which was, never to deal clearly or openly, but always with reserve, if not dissimulation, or rather simulation; and to love tricks even where not necessary'. In common with other hostile observers, Cowper regarded the 'humour' as malignant: it grew 'from an inward satisfaction he took in applauding his own cunning'.^ A more favourable interpretation, advanced by friends like Swift, was that Harley was by nature compulsively secretive, even when secrecy defeated rather than promoted his intentions; that his fondness for stratagem, too, was an unfortunate, but essentially innocent, weakness; and that behind, or above, the persona of'Robin the Trickster' which was Harley's character in the popular imagination of his day, stood an altogether nobler figure: honest, public-spirited, and patriotic. On the whole, this is what Harley's modern biographers have preferred to believe about him. They have recognized the ambiguities and paradoxes of his career, but have depicted the 'real' Harley as a man of honour and probity; a patriot with feet of clay, admittedly, but a patriot none the less. The key to this reading of Harley's character has often been an appreciation of the influence upon him of his family's traditional 'Puritanism ', the self-conscious 'godliness' nurtured by his father and grandfather, which seems to have dominated his early life and to have cast its spell over him again during his enforced retirement from politics after the Hanoverian succession.^ So pervasive is the language and imagery of Puritanism in the voluminous correspondence of the Harleys that it is easy to see why so many scholars working in the great Portland collection have been struck with the same thought. Angus Mclnnes, for example, probably the most successful ofthe biographers, wrote that Harley's whole background and upbringing was blood-red Puritan, and, not surprisingly, it left an indelible impression upon his personality. Indeed, his character was...closely shaped by the 158 Puritan tradition ... His Puritanism laid him low in 1708 and 1714- But it helped too to make him, for all his faults and failings, a figure of real stature, perhaps the greatest politician of his day.^ And according to a more recent writer, Brian W. Hill, Robert was brought up in an atmosphere highly charged with ... religious fervour... Many echoes of the young boy's piety were to sound in his later life, for though he became a successful politician well able to practise the compromises with truth needed for that occupation, he retained the habit of religious observance and also, if more arguably, a basic probity which he drew from it.* The intensity of religious belief and practical devotion among the various Harley households is undeniable, and the conclusion that the young Robert must have been profoundly affected by this intellectual and emotional environment inescapable. But the precise nature of that influence still needs some elucidation. In the first place, we must be careful of assuming too readily that the child of a pious family would necessarily imbibe to the full his parents' principles. As the history of such an individual as the first Marquess of Wharton so amply demonstrates, a strictly 'Puritan' upbringing in the later seventeenth century could produce spectacular impiety. In Harley's case the traces were scarcely kicked over to anything like the same degree. A gradually increasing addiction to the bottle, and an extravagance which occasionally alarmed his more parsimonious brother, are indications of some backsliding from almost impossibly high standards, and while a whiff of a morally more reprehensible scandal did arise from his relationship with Anne Oglethorpe, nothing improper was in fact ever proved against him. In any case, the balance would seem to be outweighed by a mass of first-hand evidence of Harley's personal interest in religion and commitment to the beliefs held in his family circle. Possibly, in the hands of a determined cynic, even some of this evidence might be discounted. It falls into two categories: correspondence with members of his immediate family, father, brother, sisters and wives; and notes on the scriptures taken for his own benefit. Harley's letters are striking in their directness and the intensity of feeling they seem to express. To his father, for example, he described himself as a willing servant of divine providence, whose eyes were always fixed on the 'pure and unmixed joys' of Heaven; to his first wife, the former Elizabeth Foley, he wrote of himself, in typical Puritan phraseology, as a 'poor worm', whose small earthly triumphs were entirely owing to God's grace.'* But all this could mean no more than that he had learned to use the language of Puritan providentialism, that he spoke to his family in words they could understand and of things they wished to hear. More specifically one may suspect the heavy presence of his father's formidable personality, requiring to be appeased. Harley reserved this mode of expression for his family and a few like-minded intimates; he was also prone to adopt a Puritan voice more frequently while his father was still active, in the first half of the 1690s, than he did when Sir Edward had retired from Parliament; and after his father's death in 1700 the sound of Harley the Puritan becomes a rarer occurrence in his letters. Perhaps he outgrew his upbringing; or perhaps the excessively religious tone of much of his early correspondence was a pandering to 159 paternal prejudice in the days when he depended on his father's connexions to smooth his path at Westminster. Interestingly it made something of a comeback after 1714, when Harley's years of power were over and his back was to the wall. Religion gave him strength in adversity, under impeachment and a prisoner in the Tower. There it was that his notes on biblical texts were prepared, as a kind of therapeutic exercise. ** After his release, in an internal exile away from politics, religion provided him with one source of consolation. This would be a means to explain, or rather to explain away, Harley's religiosity, as necessary camouflage assumed to avoid his father's disapproval while that disapproval still mattered to him, discarded when time had emancipated him from his father's grip, and hastily recovered to help him in a different way in the difficult years after 1714. It has something to recommend it. Certain facts fit. But on a second examination it does not really convince. The emotion of some of Harley's letters, especially at the outset of his political career and at such crises as the death of his first wife, Elizabeth, in 1691, is simply too real to be explained away as hypocrisy. Then there are the glimpses of Harley the Puritan in his heyday as a political operator in Queen Anne's reign, phrases recalled out of habit perhaps, but certainly not as a calculated gambit: thanks given to God for the prompt completion of some secular business in time for a journey back to the country.' And there is the testimony of his children, who knew their father as well as anyone, and to whom he had no need to dissemble for political purposes. His son Edward, refiecting on the courage Harley senior had displayed at the time of Guiscard's attempt to assassinate him in 1711, wrote: 'if you had but seen the tranquillity, the easiness of his mind after this villainous action, and in what he trusted plainly appeared '.^ The very fact that both his wives were ladies from strongly Puritan families, and that his children were brought up in the same tradition, speaks for itself.^ There can be no doubting the reality of Harley's religious convictions, even though they may not represent the whole man. Devout Christianity was only one side of his character; love of the public stage and the company of wits and men of fashion was another, and sometimes, as his first wife poignantly complained, the attractions of such society made him forget the joys of family.^** And lurking too, there is the form of Harley the sharp- toothed politician, generally detectable only by his tracks but on occasion, in some particularly revealing letter or observation, silhouetted like a fox against snow. The temptation is to regard these more worldly aspects of Harley's personality as being somehow a truer reflection of the man because they seem to issue naturally and without premeditation, in contrast to the self-conscious religiosity that sometimes smacks of attitudinizing. Such an approach, however, would not be helpful. Even if one were prepared to ignore the evidence of genuine Christian commitment and disagree with Swift that Harley had 'a true sense of religion', in order to cast the politician as no more than a godly poseur, his choice of this posture and the pains taken to practise it would still be highly significant.^^ The more reasonable response, to accept the reality, or at least the importance, of Harley's 'Puritanism', is to answer the first question raised, and the simplest. To go 160 further involves grappling with the meaning of the term 'Puritan' in the late seventeenth-century context. This requires rather more analysis than commentators on Harley's 'Puritanism' usually expend upon it. What we know, or think we know, of 'Puritan' attitudes is drawn, by and large, from the history of an earlier and more heroic age for the 'godly people'. The period after the Restoration, dubbed by a recent student of Puritanism as 'the twilight of godliness', has been much less closely investigated.^^ In consequence, discussion of Harley's 'Puritan' heritage has often been reduced to generalities, not to say banalities. Thus from Hill we hear that Harley's residual Puritanism showed itself in 'a strong adherence to religious morality which served to distinguish him from many less scrupulous political colleagues'.^^ Now, although a high conception of public duty and a powerful conscience were indeed two of the features ingrained by Harley's Puritan forbears, they were scarcely peculiar to the Puritan mentality. No one would dream of suggesting that High Church Anglicanism inculcated any less scrupulous an approach to the discharge of a public trust. If that is all late seventeenth-century 'Puritanism' amounted to it would offer little by way of a distinctive influence on Harley's political life. On the other hand, to treat the 'Puritanism' ofthe 1690s and 1700s as if it were the same as the 'Puritanism' ofthe 1640S, say, makes for difficulties. One ofthe most glaring was pinpointed by W. A. Speck in a review of Mclnnes's biography of Harley, subtitled 'Puritan Politician'. How, he inquired, could the picture drawn by Mclnnes of a 'Puritan' country gentleman be squared with what we know of Harley the would-be aristocrat and leader of the Church party in Parliament.^ 'Would a "Puritan" have sent his son to Christ Church, Oxford, then a bastion of High Church Anglicanism, or have married him to one of the richest heiresses in Europe, or identified himself with one of the oldest families in Europe by reviving the defunct Vere title of Earl of Oxford when he was promoted to the peerage.^'^* The reference to Harley's 'dynastic ambitions' seems a red herring, but Harley's lasting embrace of the High Church cause exposes more serious doubts, which have to be resolved. The solution to Speck's riddle, and a clearer picture in general of the effects of Harley's 'Puritanism' upon his political ideas and behaviour may be obtained if we examine that 'Puritanism' much more closely. Rather than using such a vague and poorly defined concept as 'Puritanism' we should focus on the tradition of conservative Presbyterianism into which Harley was born. What might have appeared peculiar to Harley's situation or that of his family now takes shape as the common experience of a well-defined group: those former Presbyterians who in the period circa 1680-1720 were making the transition from Nonconformity to conformity and who brought with them a powerful sense of religion and its personal and social implications. Harley was not the only 'Puritan' to transmute into a High Church Tory. His brother Edward, 'the Auditor' as he was commonly called (after the Exchequer office which Robert found for him), was in many ways a closer disciple of their father and in his early days was no more than an occasional conformist, but ended up a pillar of the Church of England and as active a patron of Anglican charities as he had once been a benefactor to the Dissenters. 161 Besides the Harleys, two other leading lights in the Tory ministry of 1710-14, Secretary Bolingbroke (Henry St John) and Lord Chancellor Harcourt (Sir Simon) were the oflspring of once Presbyterian families and the products of a Dissenting academy. Even a back-bench Tory firebrand like Sir Humphrey Mackworth, a bitter critic of occasional conformity, proves to be descended from solid Presbyterian stock. And perhaps closest to Harley were his first wife's kinsmen, the Foleys of Witley in Worcestershire, who followed the same road from devout Presbyterianism to devout Anglicanism in roughly the same time-span. If the baroque chapel built for Harley's son at Wimpole may be taken as a symbol of the family's final assumption of High Churchmanship, there is an architectural-cum-theological parallel in the erection of Witley parish church for the first and second Lords Foley a decade or so later. Several elements in the ideology of these conservative or conforming Presbyterians can be traced, in varying degrees, in Harley's own thinking, and more particularly in his thinking- about politics. Some were derived from traditional Puritanism: a belief in the power of providence in daily life, both as an instrument of deliverance for the saints and of punishment for sin; and an awareness ofthe Puritans' own special role as a godly elite, the 'elect' in politics, set apart from what one preacher stigmatized as 'the ungodly rabble'. In combination these produced a direct concern for the achievement of political and social reformation, in which struggle, one might almost say mission, the Puritan had a vital part to play. Other elements were more characteristic of the Presbyterian experience after 1660, when godly zeal had been tempered into sober moderation: a yearning to rejoin the establishment from which they had been so brutally excluded, though not a reunion on any terms; a hope of finding a consensus between Protestants which would be supported by men of goodwill on both sides, Presbyterian and Anglican -a 'middle way' between the extremists. This was the policy of' comprehension' most closely associated with the Presbyterian minister Richard Baxter, who coined the phrase 'middle way'. In Baxter's view, Protestant unity was imperative, to counter the threat from popery. He stressed the virtue of'forbearance' and denounced a society divided by faction as 'a sick society'.''^ Thus the typical Presbyterian, or Presbyterian offshoot like Harley, would in the 1690s have inherited a high sense of public duty; an acute, sometimes desperate, zeal to reform abuses in society and purge corruption; an orientation towards government provided that this meant no sacrifice of moral principle; a fondness for 'moderation'; a preference for consensus, and an aversion to faction. It is of course true that just as administrative probity was a virtue cherished by non- ' Puritans', much of what has been identified as the Presbyterians' political creed was the common currency of political discourse: idealization of disinterested public service, hatred of corruption, suspicion of parties, and so on. What is important, in the case of someone like Harley, is the emphasis placed by Presbyterians on these beliefs. Although still not the whole explanation of his character, they do enable us to understand more of the nature of his political outlook; why, beyond reasons of personal advantage, he attacked administration in the 1690s with such vehemence only to become in due course a pillar of the court; why he resisted one-party government; and also in part how a

162 'Puritan' by temperament and education could happily sit at the head ofthe Church party. It was above all from his father that Harley took his exalted sense of public duty, though not with the full missionary zeal of the traditional Puritan, who saw politics as a war between good and evil, between the godly and the ungodly. He echoed his father's conventional expressions of gratitude to God for the family's political achievements, as if the Harleys were themselves the political instruments ofthe divine wilV^ but he did not share Sir Edward's old-fashioned view that the prime function of the 'godly magistrate' was to 'preserve from dissolution the continuance ofthe religious state'. Nor did he believe with Sir Edward and many other Members of Parliament in the 1690s that England was beset by a moral crisis of apocalyptic proportions and that in the war against vice the same godly magistrate had a special role. His brother Edward did, and his two sisters Abigail and Martha, but Robert seems to have been spared. Thus, while Edward mourned the defeat of the 1699 Immorality Bill, which would have made adultery a misdemeanour, as a disgrace upon Parliament, Robert dismissed it sharply as a bad bill that deserved to fail.^^ His own concept of public duty belonged to the sober, industrious side of the Puritan nature, and was rooted in the doctrine of 'public usefulness' set forth by various Presbyterian preachers. The classic text here was that urging the listener to be 'useful in his own generation', an injunction covering many aspects of human endeavour, in commerce and industry, charity and the promotion of true religion, but with a particular application to the magistrate or public official. The Baxterian divine Daniel Williams preached a funeral sermon in 1697 on 'the excellency of a public spirit', in which he condemned 'unusefulness' as a 'betrayal of trust' and 'a breach of your vows made to the living God' and identified the opposite virtue,' the great duty of public usefulness' as 'service... to the public weal'. Naturally, the civil magistrate was in a privileged position to perform this service, and Williams underlined the obligations of such ' stewardship '.^^ Once more it must be pointed out that these were not uniquely Presbyterian values, chiming in with ideas of public spirit and civic virtue derived from the literature of classical republicanism, but it is the importance of Presbyterianism in Harley's background which makes them worthy of note. Certainly they were familiar in the correspondence of the Harleys, Sir Edward, for example, declaring that the civil magistrate was 'by the ordinance of God called and authorized to glorify God in serving his own generation by the will of God'.^" More to the point. Sir Edward endorsed the principle of'public usefulness' by embodying it in his own person, or so at least his children believed. It was by establishing himself and to a lesser extent his father as role models for a high- minded patriotism that Sir Edward Harley exerted the strongest and most enduring influence over the public careers of his descendants. The development of a Harley mystique was a quite deliberate process, and each successive Harley carried it further forward, idealizing his predecessors and proceeding in turn to his own fjmilv beatification. First Sir Robert Harley, the Master ofthe Mint, 'a man of fixed principle' and 'a pillar of religion'; then Sir Edward, a peerless friend 'to commonwealth and to 163 Ftg. I. Sir Edward Harley. Engraving by George Vertue, after S. Cooper. By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum 164 religion'; and then Robert himself: each generation enshrined another plaster saint in the tabernacle.^^ Lives were recorded; tributes kept; significant anniversaries observed, such as the sufferings of Sir Robert and Sir Edward at Pride's Purge, and Robert's deliverance from the threat of impeachment.^^ The process appears to have been initiated by Sir Edward, who venerated his father's memory and whose impact on his own children was certainly comparable. The Auditor's memoir of Robert took as its starting point their 'excellent parents, who from our infancy instructed... us in all the principles of sincere piety and virtue'. Sir Edward, he went on, 'may be truly said to have had all the accomplishments of a gentleman... his passion he kept under a strict restraint, and had in a manner totally subdued, but his generosity and tender compassion to all objects of charity continued to the last'.^^ His death was marked by a spate of panegyrics, carefully preserved in the family archive, and, significantly by 'a brief ...account ofthe pious lives of Sir Robert Harley and Sir Edward Harley', in which the two biographies were seen to follow parallel courses."^^ Among his many qualities Sir Edward was declared to be 'a man of great conduct, bravery and unspotted integrity', who discharged his public appointments honourably, in particular as governor of Dunkirk in 1660-1. There he had made savings on expenditure which were duly returned into the Exchequer, a singular achievement.^^ Similar care with public money had been the hallmark of Sir Robert's earlier stewardship ofthe Mint, and it was this scrupulousness and concern for the public as against his own private interest that Sir Edward so admired in him: 'in the Parliament-house he was more zealous for the public good than to obtain recompense for his private losses, which he never had in this world'.^^ Not surprisingly, this was the theme to which Robert returned when contemplating in retrospect his own official career. In an autobiographical account prepared for his son, he set out in detail how he had lost rather than gained by public service: ' I cannot accuse myself of any addition I have made to my fortune out ofthe public, so perhaps some may blame me on the other hand for being a good steward for the public and a bad manager for myself. I own it, and I came into the public service with that view.' He was especially proud of having refused bribes (and there are surviving letters which show how forcibly he did so, almost with relish), including offers of'great posts' in William's reign, when, presumably the intention was to buy off his opposition rather than enlist his talents for the public good.^"^ This distinction was largely in the mind of the recipient, and one can see how Harley might have made it.

The example and guidance of Sir Edward Harley may also have been crucial in influencing Robert towards the political ideals of' moderation' and consensus which are in some respects the secular counterpart ofthe 'middle way' towards a comprehensive church settlement advocated by Richard Baxter and his followers. The qualification 'in some respects' does need to be made, for it would be a little simple-minded to re^^ard the Harleian formula for administration, a coalition of'moderate' and honest men of different persuasions, whose first loyalty was to the Crown and not to a party, as being no more than a working out in the political sphere of the Baxterian formula for church government. Harley took his political ideas from various sources. Denunciations of 165 faction, for instance, were a feature ofthe writings ofthe so-called ' neo-Harringtonian' theorists who drew inspiration from classical and Renaissance texts; while a striving after consensus had been one of the traditional themes of English politics, and though something of an archaism by 1700 still retained a totemic attraction. However, the associations between Baxter's 'middle way' and the Harleys' are too many and too strong to be ignored. The first historian to make the connexion, Angus Mclnnes, pointed out that the 'translation of ideas from the sphere of theology to the sphere of politics was eased by the fact that many ofthe most celebrated parliamentary battles of Harley's day had distinct religious overtones', and also that Harley's father and grandfather had 'been in the habit of behaving politically in the same manner as they had behaved theologically'. Furthermore, there were strong personal links with Baxter. Sir Edward was a long standing and close friend of his; the family attended Baxter's chapel when they came up to London; and Edward the Auditor was named as one of the executors of Baxter's will."'^ From the Restoration onwards, and even after the Revolution, Sir Edward had attempted 'the healing of breaches among the sons of Zion'.^^ In 1681 he had authored a pro-comprehension tract. An Humble Essay toward the Settlement of Peace ami Truth tn the Churchy as a Certain Foitndation of Lasting Union. An account in one of the family memoirs shows how this campaign for reconciliation worked in practice, and to an observer of Robert Harley's subsequent negotiations with the politicians of Queen Anne's reign, the resonances are striking. Sir Edward's 'moderation was extensive', the writer recalled:

he was none of those that made his judgment and conscience a standard and rule for others either to think, speak or act by, provided their opinions were not atheistical, blasphemous and fundamentally destructive to faith in Christ and obedience to His commands...His heart as well as his house were a receptacle of all good men and good Protestants of all denomination. By his example and under his influence to see the gown and the cloak converse long together free from envy and malice of strife... was amiable.^"^ The failure of the scheme for comprehension in 1689 and Baxter's death two years later took some ofthe steam out ofthe 'middle way' movement, but did not scupper it entirely. Daniel Williams and other divines ofthe same kidney, such as Vincent Alsop, William Bates, John Howe and John Humfrey - survivors from the struggle for comprehension - continued to write and preach a gospel of reconciliation, and against what Williams called 'the narrow spirit of a party'. In a line that his sometime dining companion Robert Harley could have used as a political motto, Williams wrote: 'never make your abilities or activeness serve a faction as distinguished from, much less opposed to, a public interest'.^^ Humfrey published in 1695 a second edition of his Medwcria, which explicitly argued for 'a middle way between Protestant and Papist' and began with a denunciation of those polemical theologians who were 'governed by prejudice and party': 'it is a hard thing', he went on, 'and a man must be very witty, and strain himself to pick a fault in his adversary, for matter of contention, when a little pains only to understand him, and the least candour, or but a bare equality, in the 166 interpretation, would bring him, whether he would or no, to reconciliation'. The relevance ofthe 'middle way' had not in fact perished with the Toleration Act, and the abandonment of hopes that Presbyterians and some Independents might be able to return to the Church of England. For in the new intellectual climate of post-Revolution England, and in particular in the new intellectual climate which prevailed among English Nonconformists, moderation seemed more important than ever. With some Presbyterian ministers reacting against Baxter's drift towards an Arminian theology by reasserting the traditional principles of orthodox Calvinism, and the more radical challenge of Socinianism also gaining apace, the Presbyterian community came under considerable strain and faced a serious danger of fragmentation.'^^ Some ministers reacted to this prospect with a determined, almost desperate attempt to hold on to the 'middle' ground. A younger generation, centred around Edmund Calamy, redefined Baxter's 'middle way' as 'Moderate Nonconformity'. Calamy's followers were a smaller minority than Baxter's had been, and their numbers lessened progressively over the years. Nor was Calamy a figure of anywhere near the same stature as Baxter. But by updating Baxterianism he was able to maintain the influence ofthe 'middle way' over secular political theory for a little while longer.^* The word 'moderation' struck a chord with the political nation in the early 1700s; it was a virtue earnestly to be sought after and cultivated in a world apparently running mad into parties. Most paid lip service to it, and some, including Harley, made it an object of real devotion. As well as a slogan, the 'moderate Nonconformists' had an issue: occasional conformity. It was one of their tenets that occasional conformity should be encouraged, as a positive gesture, a means of keeping up a 'charitable communion' with the Anglicans. In the years 1702-5, when high Tories brought forward a succession of bills to outlaw the practice, culminating in the so-called 'tack' of an occasional conformity bill to a money bill in 1704 to try to force the Lords to accede to it, this was the most bitter controversy in English politics. It was also a litmus test of'moderation' among Tories. The 'hot men' pressed for legislation; 'moderates' resisted it as socially divisive and a distraction from the war effort. With the defeat ofthe tack the Tory party split. Leading the 'moderate' group sympathetic to occasional conformists, and adhering to the Court when the 'factious' High Churchmen left it, was of course Robert Harley.

Ironically, Harley was, by this stage, beginning to move away from his and his father's old Nonconformist allies. He had never been as actively involved in Dissenting causes as his father or brother, both of whom had helped to protect conventicles from persecution and had subscribed to the Common Fund for Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers. While the Auditor was a regular attender at Nonconformist meetings in the 1690s, and indeed at one point confided to his father that he had received a vocation to go and preach the gospel in the dark corners of the land, a notion that was rapidly disposed of, Robert maintained cordial relations with his father's many Presbyterian connexions, but displayed no great sectarian loyalty. He made other, and quite different friends, including Anglican clergymen. Low Church and High. And the Nonconformists were not especially distinguished by the warmth of his feelings towards 167 them. He welcomed some Quakers, Scottish and Irish Presbyterians, and individual English Dissenters like Defoe, but did not show any partiality towards Nonconformists as such except when, as in 1710-11, he was seeking to enlist their support for his own political ends. The influence which 'middle way' men and 'moderate Nonconformists' in turn might have exercised over his political thinking was not personal or direct, but was a part of the legacy left by his upbringing and education, more specifically his paternal inheritance. It was strongest at the outset of his political career, and gradually drained away with the passage of time, especially after the death of his father in 1700, though without ever disappearing completely. The first thing to go was the conviction that he and his family were in some way the parliamentary instruments of divine providence. There must be some doubt as to whether he had at any time fully shared his father's and brother's crusading spirit. If he had, the view that politics was essentially a religious quest had ceased to manifest itself in his correspondence by about 1701. As for the preference for consensus, in Queen Anne's reign his abhorrence of party faction had been modified into a reluctant acceptance that parties were an unavoidable fact of political life. The hope for a 'middle way' between the parties had changed subtly into a belief in 'moderation': party sentiment could not be destroyed but its worst effects could be prevented. What was left intact ofthe old Puritanism was the ideal of'public duty', beyond corruption or private interest. This Harley clung to in his latter years, when in other respects he seemed to become alienated from his Presbyterian heritage. After 1710, and even more after the Hanoverian succession, the Harleys seemed not only to turn away from, but even to turn against. Nonconformity. This should not surprise us, for it was part of a general movement of what we have called 'conservative' Presbyterians towards conformity with, and eventually an active identification with, the established Church. Presbyterians of Baxter's persuasion had always considered the Church of England to be their rightful spiritual home, and had detested and derided sects and schisms. Once a comprehensive church settlement had been rendered impossible it was natural that they should drift towards conformity. To begin with they retained contacts among Dissenters, and some sympathy for attempts to build bridges across the Anglican/Nonconformist divide. Thus Harley's opposition to the occasional conformity bills, which were viewed as unnecessarily factious and, in their own way, sectarian. But gradually it was the Nonconformists who came to be seen as the promoters of schism. Post-Revolution Nonconformity was becoming uncongenial to old-fashioned Presbyterians like the Harleys. Radical and heterodox ideas were gaining ground among Dissenters, and Sir Edward Harley had inculcated in his sons a deep distaste for theological innovation. The Auditor in particular was an inveterate opponent of Socinianism, Arianism and other such 'blasphemies' and was always to the fore in any attempt in Parliament to strengthen the blasphemy laws.^^ Worse still, from Robert's viewpoint, was the tendency of the Dissenters to identify themselves with the political interests of the Whigs, a development he regarded as a betrayal of the philosophy of moderation and a retreat to factionalism. It was almost unbelievable to him that sober Presbyterians should enlist themselves under the political leadership of men like

168 ;^. 2. Edward Harley, Auditor ofthe Imprest. Engraving by George Vertue, after J. Richardson. By courtesy of the Trustees ofthe British Museum 169 Wharton, Somers, Halifax and Sunderland, whose morals and attitudes to religion were alike reprehensible. The Whigs were freethinkers themselves, and patronized blasphemous authors (so did Harley himself, incidentally, but that was beside the point). They were merely using the Nonconformists for their own purposes, to be sure of votes in parliamentary boroughs where Dissent was strong. Such were the arguments Harley put to Daniel Williams in a scathing letter in 1711.^'' Nor did the situation improve thereafter. His son Edward was bitterly critical ofthe Dissenters' opposition to Harley's peace policy in 1712, and even the Auditor found himself eventually at odds with Nonconformist interests in his parliamentary borough of Leominster. In the 1722 election Robert recorded that the 'fanatics', as he now called them, were aligned against his brother, possibly a reference to Baptists rather than Presbyterians or Congre- gationalists but an indication of how far the family had moved since 1691 and Edward's lamentations for the death of Baxter; or, as they would have interpreted it, an indication ot how far Nonconformity had shifted away from them.'*^ When so devout a Presbyterian as the Auditor, a man 'whose whole life has been one preparation for futurity', found himself the butt of Nonconformist hostility it is obvious that we are dealing with a wider phenomenon than Robert Harley's personal disenchantment with erstwhile Presbyterian friends.^^ The example ofthe Auditor is, in fact, an instructive one, for his biography shows that the conforming Presbyterians did not merely become like other Anglicans; they did not just conform, but brought something of their old Puritanism along with them. Strongly devout, with a personal religiosity that set them apart from many of their fellow Anglicans, they recognized the social obligations of their faith: to further the reformation and to improve the morals and manners of society. Thus the Auditor and many of those like him were active in the Church of England voluntary societies, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and so on, and in the movement to establish charity schools and workhouses to educate the poor in true religion. It would not be fanciful to regard this as the theological equivalent of what we have observed to be the development of Robert Harley's political outlook. Just as Robert, under the pressure of circumstances, came to identify himself, even against his wishes, with the Tory party, thus modifying if not abandoning one ofthe principal tenets of his father's political philosophy, the aversion to party faction, so did the conservative Presbyterians gradually leave the 'middle way' to identify themselves more whole- heartedly with the ecclesiastical establishment. At the same time, just as Robert retained from his early political creed the ideal of 'public usefulness', so did the conservative Presbyterians retain their sense of mission and social purpose. The emphasis laid in this paper on those members of Harley's immediate family, his father and brother, mother and sisters, whose characters appear to have been relatively uncomplicated and whose religious convictions were more intense than his, serves to remind us that Harley's personality was contrastingly complex. 'Puritanism', as we have defined it, was one strand among several in his character. While brother Edward accepted unquestioningly their father's principles, sometimes too enthusiastically even for Sir 170 Edward's taste, for Robert there were other considerations, other 'temptations', to use the terminology of religion. One interpretation would be that in Harley's personality the Puritan and the politician were in constant conflict, that political ambition offered an alternative to Puritan ideals which sometimes succeeded in overpowering them. Another would be, as Richard Steele argued in a pamphlet in 1714, that although Harley ceased to believe in the faith of his boyhood he could not rid himself of all his old Presbyterian habits. Steele saw this as manifested in externals - in dress and carriage, and other such superficialities.^^ With the benefit of access to Harley's personal writings and family letters we can see it reflected too in the use of language and in patterns of thought. Harley's Puritan heritage, or more properly his Presbyterian heritage, gave him a set of political ideals (some of them reinforced by other salient influences) and a mode of political discourse. As his career developed he found other modes of discourse but his ideals and principles remained much the same. Puritanism, whether vaguely or specifically defined, does not provide the key that will unlock all the compartments in Harley's character. Nor is it reasonable to expect any such outcome. Human psychology is reputedly a tricky business, and Harley's psychology was surely trickier than most. But by understanding what his 'Puritanism' consisted of, the means by which he acquired it and the ways in which it was adapted over time, we may get a little nearer to answering some of the more important questions about him.

Inevitably, what follows is heavily dependent upon K.G., preserved at Welbeck Abbey [Portland] the Harley papers in the British Library. I welcome (London, 1892-1931), vol. v, p. 654. the opportunity to acknowledge tbe many kindnesses 9 Mclnnes, Harley, pp. 179, 192. of the staff of the Department of Manuscripts in 10 Loan 29/144, Elizabeth to Robert Harley, 22 facilitating prolonged research in this collection. May [1691]. 1 [E. C. Hawtrey (ed.)]. The Private Diary of 11 Harold Williams (ed.). The Correspondence of William, First Earl Cowper..., {Eton, 1833), p. Jonathan Swift (Oxford, 1963-5), vol. i, p. 249. 33, quoted in Sheila Biddle, Bolingbroke and 12 J. T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict (London, 1988), Harley (London, 1975), pp. 33-4. ch. 14. 2 A. Mclnnes, Robert Harley, Puritan Politician 13 Hill, Harley, p. 239. (London, 1970), esp. ch. 8; Biddle, Bolingbroke 14 History, lvi (1971), p. 271. and Harley, ch. 1; B. W. Hill, Robert Harley: 15 See esp. ' The True and Only Way of Concord of Speaker, Secretary of State and Premier Minister all the Christian Churches' (1679), in The (London, 1988), esp. pp. 236-40. Practical Works ofthe Late Reverend and Pious 3 Mclnnes, Harley, pp. 183, 193. Richard Baxter... (London, 1707), vol. iv, pp. 4 Hill, Harley, p. 5. 625-56. The quotations are taken from pp. 629, 5 BL, Loan 28/79, Robert to Sir Edward Harley, 638. 31 Dec. i69r; Loan 29/164, Robert to Elizabeth 16 See, for example. Loan 29/185, ff. 222, 238; Harley, 8 Nov. r69O, 5 Mar. 1690/1. Loan 29/187, ff. 20, 22; Loan 29/189, tf. 5, 19^ 6 Loan 29/27; Loan 29/38. 166, 170; Loan 29/142, Sir Edward to Robert 7 Loan 29/67, Robert to Abigail Harley, 2 Mar. Harley, 2 Dec. 1692, 11 Feb. 1692 [/^]; Loan 1702/3, 9 Aug. 1709. 29/86, Sir Edward Harley to [.?], 10 Jap. 1692 8 Loan 29/66, Edward, ^r., to Abigail Harley, lo [/3]; H.M.C. Portland, vol. iii, pp. 513, 547-9. Mar. 1710/11. Cf. Royal Commission on His- 17 Loan 29/70, Sir Edward to Edward Harley, 2 torical Manuscripts [H.M.C], Report on the Jan. 1691/2. Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, 18 Loan 29/184, f. 310; Loan 29/185, ff. 16, 254, 171 271, 274; Loan 29/86, Sir Edward to Robert 28 Mclnnes, Harley, p. 190. Harley, 2 Sept. 1691; Loan 29/186, ff. 7, 20, 29 Loan 29/70, Sir Edward to Edward Harley, 217, 225; Loan 29/70, Sir Edward to Edward 1694, quoted in Mclnnes, Harley, p. 190. Harley, 10 Dec. 1692, 28 Aug. 1694; Loan 30 Loan 29/189, f 320. 29/187, f. 197; Loan 29/189, ff. 21, 24, 158; 31 J. T. Spivey, 'Middle Way Men: Edmund Cal- Loan 29/78, Edward to Sir Edward Harley, 30 amy and the Crisis of Moderate Nonconformity, Dec. 1691, Martha Harley to same, 11 Feb. 1695 1688-1732' (University of Oxford D.Phil. The- [/6]; Loan 29/77, Abigail Harley to same, 30 sis, 1986), pp. 52-4, 71-2; H.M.C. Portland, vol. Apr. 1695; Loan 29/368, Robert Harley to same, iii, p. 586; Williams, Excellency of a Public Spirit, 17 Jan. 1698/9; H.M.C. Portland, vol. iii, pp. pp. 121-2. 442, 485, 487, 586, 602, 612. 32 John Humfrey, Mediocria: Or the Middle Way 19 Daniel Williams, The Excellency of a Public between Protestant and Papist (London, 1695), p. Spirit: Set Forth in a Sermon Preach'd...at the I. See also [idem], A Seasonable Caution to the Funeral of... Dr Samuel Annesley (London, Members of This New Parliament... (London, 1697), esp. pp. 4^7, io-ii, 15, 19-20,23,25,29, 1703), p. 26. 48-9, 54, 83, 85. Cf Loan 29/48, Richard 33 C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short and Stretton to Edward Harley, 2 Oct. 1697. Roger Thomas, The English Presbyterians (Lon- 20 Loan ^^j-jQ, Sir Edward to Edward Harley, 2 don, 1968), pp. 103-74. Jan. 1691/2. 34 Edmund Calamy, y'i Defence of Moderate Non- 21 Thomas Froysell, The Beloved Disciple. A conformity, in Answer to the Reflections of Air Sermon Preached at the Fiinerall ofthe Honourable Olyjfe and Mr Hoadley... (London, 1703-5); Sir Robert Harley... (London, 1658), pp. 100, Spivey, 'Middle Way Men'. 108; Loan 29/54, '''^n Elegy made on the death 35 Sir Edward Harley, A Scriptural and Rational of... Sir Edward Harley'. Account of the Christian Religion... (London, 22 Loan 29/142, Sir Edward to Robert Harley, 6 1695); Loan 29/66, Edward to Abigail Harley, Dec. 1692; Loan 29/70, second Earl of Oxford n.d.' to Edward Harley, i July 1733; Loan 29/96, 36 Loan 29/160, Robert Harley to Daniel Williams, Edward Harley to second Earl of Oxford, 3 July 21 Dec. 1711. See also Loan 29/27, copy, in 1733. I owe the two latter references to Clyve Harley's hand, of a political squib, [1705]; Loan Jones. 29/36, notes by Harley [aft. 1711]. 27, H.M.C. Portland, vol. v, pp. 641, 645. 37 Mclnnes, Harley, p. 181; Loan 29/97, Robert to 24 Loan 29/54; I-oan 29/189, ff. 314-23. Edward Harley, y>., 9, 18 Mar. 1722. 25 H.M.C. Portland, vol. v, p. 642. 38 C. L. S. Linnell (ed.). The Diaries of Thomas 26 Loan 29/88, Sir Edward's notes on his father's Wilson, D.D. 1731-37 and 1750... (London, life. 1964), p. 126. 27 Loan 29/267, autobiographical fragment, 11 39 Rae Blanchard (ed.), Richard SteeWs Periodical Sept. 1723; Loan 2g/i2-j, Robert Harley to W. Journalism 1714-16 (Oxford, 1959), p. 52. Brenand, 28 June 1707; Loan 29/70, same to Edward Harley, 25 July 1713.

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