Civil religion in Britain, 1707 – c. 1800 Ashley James Walsh Downing College July 2017 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Preface This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. All dates have been presented in the New Style. 1 Acknowledgements My greatest debt is to my supervisor, Mark Goldie. He encouraged me to study civil religion; I hope my performance vindicates his decision. I thank Sylvana Tomaselli for acting as my adviser. I am also grateful to John Robertson and Brian Young for serving as my examiners. My partner, Richard Johnson, and my parents, Maria Higgins and Anthony Walsh, deserve my deepest gratitude. My dear friend, George Owers, shared his appreciation of eighteenth- century history over many, many pints. He also read the entire manuscript. For their proof- reading skills, I thank Mary Nathan and Bill Thompson and, for checking my French translations, I thank Peter Sarris. Members of Petersfield Branch Labour Party might not realise the ways in which I am grateful to them. I thank the Master and Fellows of Downing College, especially David Pratt, Natalia Mora-Sitja, Paul Millett, Ian James, and Michael Bravo, for providing me with such a happy environment in which to study since I began my undergraduate studies in October 2009. I must single out Kay Martin and Susan Lintott for their saint-like forbearance. I also thank the staff of the College for making it such a warm and special place. Finally, I am grateful for a series of research grants awarded for this dissertation by the Sir John Plumb Charitable Trust. 2 Contents Chapter 1: Hanoverian civil religion and its intellectual resources ........................................... 4 Chapter 2: Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury ................................................ 46 Chapter 3: John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon ..................................................................... 72 Chapter 4: Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke ................................................................... 96 Chapter 5: David Hume ......................................................................................................... 124 Chapter 6: Edward Gibbon .................................................................................................... 156 Chapter 7: Subscription, reform, and Enlightened Dissent.................................................... 186 Chapter 8: Conclusion............................................................................................................ 213 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 228 3 Chapter 1 Hanoverian civil religion and its intellectual resources The twentieth century which has its own hairs to split may have little patience with Arius and Athanasius who burdened the world with a quarrel about a diphthong, but the historian has not achieved historical understanding, has not reached that kind of understanding in which the mind can find rest, until he has seen that that diphthong was bound to be the most urgent matter in the universe for those people.1 The problem of Jean-Jacques Rousseau It was Rousseau who most famously posed the problem. In The social contract (1762), he argued that it was impossible for Christianity to become a civil religion. Christians could never espouse the public faith of the secular patrie. Among the ancient pagans, argued Rousseau, ‘every Religion was tied exclusively to the laws of the State which prescribed it’ and no citizen distinguished between ‘its Gods and its laws’.2 The church was subjected to the state and virtuous citizenship was compatible with religious piety. However, Christianity introduced a ‘Spiritual Kingdom’ that separated ‘the theological from the political system’. The prospect of posthumous rewards and punishments in the ‘Kingdom of the other world’ became the occasion for civil disorder as Christians fought over its nature.3 Rousseau endorsed the claim of Niccolò Machiavelli in the Discourses on Livy (c. 1517) that Christianity was an otherworldly religion with no interest in the civil life of the mortal world. Machiavelli had upbraided Christianity as a religion that made ‘us place a lower value on worldly honour’, glorified ‘humble and contemplative men rather than active ones’, and rendered ‘the world weak’. It left sincere believers the pawns of priestly ‘wicked men’ who pursued temporal ambitions under sacerdotal guises. Christian revelation had no civic worth because it made slaves of men and set the church above the political order. Conversely, Roman paganism had harnessed popular piety for patriotic grandezza.4 Aside from subverting citizenship, Rousseau believed Christianity’s second great offence was its attitude to the church-state relationship. In the mood of the intense anticlericalism of the Enlightenment in France, to which contributed the roving Genevan, Rousseau argued that Christian priests intrinsically sought to dominate the state. Christian 1 Herbert Butterfield, The whig interpretation of history (New York and London, [1931] 1965), p. 17. 2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The social contract and other later political writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 144, 143. 3 Ibid., p. 144. 4 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford and New York, 1997), pp. 158-9. 4 ecclesiology had created a ‘dual power’ and ‘a perpetual conflict of jurisdiction which has made any good polity impossible in Christian States’. Although some societies had attempted to subject the church to the civil power, nobody ‘succeeded in settling the question of which of the two, the master or the priest, one is obliged to obey’. In England, for instance, monarchs ‘established themselves as heads of the Church’ since the Protestant Reformation. But they failed to generate a civil religion as Anglican priests still perceived the Church of England as a distinct society independent from the state. Monarchs ‘have made themselves not so much its masters as its Ministers; they have acquired not so much the right to change it as the power to preserve it; they are not its lawgivers, they are merely its Princes’.5 Rousseau argued that a truly reformed religion was necessary to reconcile the interests of church and state. The only other thinker whom Rousseau believed had attempted to construct a civil religion was Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), the subtitle of which was The matter, forme, & power of a common-wealth ecclesiasticall and civill. Hobbes ‘dared to propose reuniting the two heads of the eagle, and to return everything to political unity’. But Hobbes came to understand that ‘the domineering spirit of Christianity was inconsistent with his system, and that the interest of the Priest would always be stronger than that of the State’.6 Even Hobbes had realised that a Christian civil religion was an oxymoron. For Rousseau, a civil religion must persuade all citizens to subjugate their private interests for the public good. The social contract conferred power to the sovereign within the bounds of ‘public utility’, and ‘it certainly matters to the State that each Citizen have a religion which makes him love his duties’. The sovereign must fix the articles of ‘a purely civil profession of faith’, enforcing it on pain of banishment or death.7 The dogmas of the civil religion should be neither complicated nor numerous. They should propound ‘the powerful, intelligent, beneficent, prescient, and provident Deity, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, [and] the sanctity of the social Contract and the Laws’. They should also guard against intolerance, ‘a feature of the cult we have just rejected’, for, in an intolerant society, ‘Priests are the true masters’ and ‘Kings are but their officers’.8 However, Rousseau’s argument would not have proven persuasive in Hanoverian Britain, where many intellectuals, lay and clerical, hoped to construct a civil religion within a Christian commonwealth. The hypothesis of this study is that Hanoverian intellectuals 5 Rousseau, Social contract, p. 145. 6 Ibid., p. 146. 7 Ibid., p. 149. 8 Ibid., pp. 150-1. 5 believed that the Church of England could be transformed into a civil religion. In so doing, they were engaging in a series of debates that connected ancient paganism with Italian humanism and the Enlightenment. They believed that the civil state could secure its ascendancy over the priests and prevent the domination of the priestly order. They claimed that the public faith of the Church of England could be one to which all English people should subscribe. They argued that Christians