Republican politics after 1714 6 . Sapere aude: ‘commonwealth’ politics under George I, 1714–22 n the night of 1 March 1710, London was convulsed by rioting crowds. ODuring the course of the evening dissenting meeting-houses were attacked and destroyed, lords, earls and bishops were insulted and affronted in the streets, and many citizens were beaten, assaulted and even killed. Any who refused to join in with the chant of ‘High Church and Sacheverell’ were ‘knocked down’ by armed and increasingly violent men.1 Abigail Harley writing to Edward Harley in Oxford the day after the tumult, commented that ‘now we hear nothing but drums’.2 The cause of all this disorder was a conflict over whether Christian culture was determined by men of reason and toleration, or men of God and authority. The Whig prosecution defended the Erastian principle, ‘by which all ecclesiastical jurisdiction … is made subject to the civil power’, and reinforced its commitment to Protestant civil liberties by prose- cuting the High Church clergyman Henry Sacheverell.3 Toland was intimate with many of the leading actors in the public trial. Despite Sacheverell’s conviction, his reputation as a defender of ‘the church in danger’ set the scene for the triumph of the Tory party that was swept to power in the following General Election. Clerical politics was civil politics under another name. Toland saw the trial as a critical moment in the republican war against priestcraft. In a number of works published between 1710 and 1714 he struggled to establish the dangers of such clericalism to public virtue, addressing much of the argument to the Hanoverian court. His account of the trial itself, ‘Fit to be kept in all Families as a storehouse of arguments in defence of the Consti- tution’ warned the Protestant population at large against the deceit and danger of the High Church. Again by skilful editorial labour, he accented the extremism of Sacheverell’s hostility towards ‘revolution principles’.4 Pruning much of Sacheverell’s defence, and indeed, censoring some of the defence material which cast aspersions on the religious integrity of his own work, Toland established that the High Church was dangerous to the constitution of Britain.5 141 141 Justin Champion - 9781526137630 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 11:30:13AM via free access MUP/Champion_07_Ch6 141 27/2/03, 10:23 am The war against tyranny and prejudice This clarion call against the incipient threat of dangerous priests, was reiterated in a number of other pamphlets which were shrill and unbridled in their critique of the Church. ‘Busie and seditious clergymen’ needed restraint.6 ‘High Church drummers’ used their pulpits to broadcast sedition and encourage Jacobite restoration. Pulpits were ‘wooden Engines’ for the advance of passive obedience and other ‘slavish notions’. They had been the ‘armed instruments of Tyranny … in most countries’. To allow oneself to be ‘prated out’ of liberty and property was foolish: ‘will not the world think that we do not value as we ought our happy constitution if they see its greatest enemies permitted twice a week to banter, ridicule, libel and insult it?’7 One implication of the Sacheverell trial was, as Toland pointed out, ‘that Clergymen shou’d not (under penalty of incapacity during life) meddle with the civil government in their pulpits, nor pretend to decide questions in Politicks’. This ‘protestant popery’ was concerned only with ‘advancing the pride and power of priests’. Sacheverell, like ‘the Dunstans, the Anselms, the Becketts, the Huberts, or the Langtons’, was in a long line of wicked priests who had challenged the authority of the civil state. Not only were the clergy immoral and drunk, haunting taverns and coffee-houses, but had become riotous and seditious, unhinging all ‘wholesome order and Government’.8 This battle of ideas against the priests, manifest in the public trial of Sacheverell, was fundamental to Toland’s lifetime commitment as a public writer. After the disastrous electoral defeats of 1710, Toland focused his energies on defending the succession and remaining vigilant against popish tyranny. It was his firm conviction that the enemy within, the false clergy, were the most dangerous threat to liberty. Most of this writing was defensive, establish- ing the legitimacy of the Hanoverians and exposing the menace of the priests. With the successful accession of George I, all of the years of writing for, and socialising with, the Whig political elite came to fruition. Now Toland had the opportunity to campaign for reforms that would have the possibility of real political effect. Between 1716 and 1719 there was a radical attempt to trans- form the confessional foundations of the constitution. Measures limiting the exercise of liberty of conscience were repealed, the Convocation of the Church of England was suspended, and a project to fundamentally remodel the constitutional balance between the three estates was attempted.9 Toland, briefly, was right at the heart of these projects. Republican ambitions had come home. That Toland saw radical opportunity can be seen in one of the first works he published under the new monarchy –The reasons for naturalising the Jews (1714) – which advanced one of the most radical defences of social toleration in the eighteenth century.10 A deliberately provocative work, it was dismissed by contemporaries as the work of a violent ‘Republican Atheist’.11 Traditionally 142 Justin Champion - 9781526137630 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 11:30:13AM via free access MUP/Champion_07_Ch6 142 27/2/03, 10:23 am Republican politics after 1714 this text has been regarded as a key contribution to the evolution of ‘Enlightened’ attitudes towards Judaism.12 At root Toland’s arguments were political rather than religious. He wished to establish that there were ‘common principles’ in favour of a ‘General Naturalisation’. These ‘common reasons for a General Naturalisation, are as strong in behalf of the Jews, as of any other people whatsoever’. The point was not simply to tolerate Jews, but to break the confessional foundations of politics. All individuals (Jewish, Christian, what- ever) should have rights of full citizenship as long as they ‘wou’d not only be good subjects, but who wou’d also be as useful and advantageous to the public weal, as any of those Protestant Churches’. Aware that his proposal would not be popular he counter-argued that ‘I may propose to serve my country … [and] the most effectual way to do so, is the promoting of humanity, and the doing good to all mankind’.13 Religious confession was irrelevant to civic identity. Hostility to the Jewish community was one of the ‘prejudices’ that Toland aimed to dispel. Such attitudes were ‘silly … exciting at once laughter, scorn and pity’. For Toland, naturalisation was good policy because Jews were simply like other people: some were ‘sordid wretches, sharpers, extortioners, villains of all sorts and degrees’ but others were ‘men of probity and worth, persons of courage and conduct, of liberal and generous spirits’. Jews as humans, deserved to be regarded ‘under the common circumstances of human nature’ and as ‘creatures of the same species’. The diversity of manners ‘and especially contrary rites or doctrines in religion’ led to hatred, cruel perse- cution and murder.14 The experience of dissenting Protestants under the lash of ‘popery’ was similar.15 Typically, for Toland, the sad experience of the Jews was not the result of accident but the design of corrupt priests who acted like ‘ravenous wolves’. ‘Their most inveterate enemies were the Priests’ who conspired with rapacious princes to plunder Jewish property, ‘but also to acquire the reputation of zeal and sanctity among the credulous vulgar’. Driven by priestly prejudice, kings had turned the sword of state against them such ‘that their condition under Christian princes was farr worse than that of their forefathers under Pharao’. The tragedy of Jewish suffering was an exemplar of how ‘dangerous and destructive a monster is superstition, when rid by the Mob, and driven by the Priests’.16 The promotion of ‘common humanity and genuine religion’ was now a possibility which would benefit both ‘private and public interest’.17 Aware that many critics would claim that he was blind to the dangers of Jewish religion, he had taken ‘no inconsiderable pains’ to investigate their rites and ceremonies. His research suggested that Judaism was a tolerable and natural religion. Contrary to commonplace Christian accounts Toland, echoing Spinoza, insisted that the rites and ceremonies of that religion were ‘solely calculated for their own Nation and Republic’. Jews did not wish to convert Christians but simply ‘are every where enjoin’d to magnify to all the world the divine goodness, 143 Justin Champion - 9781526137630 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 11:30:13AM via free access MUP/Champion_07_Ch6 143 27/2/03, 10:23 am The war against tyranny and prejudice wisdom, and power, with those duties of men, and other attributes of God, which constitute Natural Religion’.18 As humans, like other religious dis- senters, Jews were ‘safe and sociable’.19 Religious ceremony, as long as it did not prompt execrable persecution (like priestly Christianity) was immaterial to the status of individuals in a civic sense. Toland’s defence of toleration was premised not upon the theological credibility of the Jewish religion but upon the nature of civil society. All individuals were equal regardless of religious confession. Human society was structured by ‘ties of kindred, acquaintance, friendship, or confederacy’. Because human beings took longer to rear than other species they were ‘absolutely incapable to subsist afterwards without the company of other men’. The web of dependent relations was intimate and social. Building on relations formed in the family, humanity developed ‘notions of acquaintance, neighbourhood, friendship, affinity, association, confederacy, subjection and superiority’.