The English High Church

Mobilizing Historiography: The English High Church Historians, 1888-1906 By Nathan D. Wolfe A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology of Wycliffe College and the Historical Department of the Toronto School of Theology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theology awarded by the University of St. Michael's College. Nathan D. Wolfe Toronto, Ontario 2010 ? Nathan D. Wolfe 2010 Library and Archives Bibliothèque et ?F? 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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protège cette thèse. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la thèse ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent être imprimés ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformément à la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privée, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont été enlevés de thesis. cette thèse. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 14-1 Canada Mobilizing Historiography: The English High Church Historians, 1888-1906 PhD, 2010 Nathan D. Wolfe Toronto School of Theology, Historical Department, University of St. Michael's College ABSTRACT In this dissertation I will explore the contribution of High Church writers within the Church of England to the development of academic historical teaching and writing for about two decades around the turn of the twentieth century. It will be argued that historians with a High Church ecclesiastical background achieved a sophisticated historiographical methodology and held a virtual monopoly on historical discourse concerning the Church of England. I focus on two historiographical issues which interested High Church historians. First, I argue that after a period of disagreement about the place of the Tractarians within the Church of England, historians by the mid- 1890s saturated the publishing market with general histories on the Church of England in which nearly all agreed that the Tractarians were at the front of a great revival in the nineteenth century. Second, High Church historians focused on the continuity of the Church of England from the Middle Ages up to their own present. I argue that this issue became crucial to High Church historians writing in a highly charged polemical environment as self-ascribed Protestants called for greater state intervention in the government of the Church of England while Catholic polemicists 11 challenged the apostolicity of the Church of England by declaring that the Church of England was a creature created by the state and hence no true Church. Throughout this dissertation I examine the interplay between historians, publishers and ecclesiastical authorities. It will be shown that historians writing on the history of England or the Church of England were often obligated to write to the needs ofpublishers seeking to profit and to the needs of ecclesiastical authorities who did not wish to upset members of the Church of England who were not professional historians. I have tried to read all historical texts concerning the history of the Church of England from the 1850s up through the 1920s whether these are small pamphlets or large general histories. I have used a sample of newspapers and periodicals primarily from the 1890s through to the 1910s and consulted a number of archives containing the papers of the High Church historians. in ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In undertaking this project I have become indebted to a number of archivists, librarians, staff and other individuals who helped me with locating and acquiring materials or with biographical information related to my research: Patricia McGuire at the King's College Archive Centre, University of Cambridge; the Keeper of Archives Mr Christopher Webb, Dr Amanda Jones, Ms Danna Messer, Ms Megan Dunmall, Ms Victoria Hoyle and Ms Diane Hodgson at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York Library and Archives; the staff of Lambeth Palace Library; the Principal and Chapter of Pusey House; Norma Aubertin-Potter and Gaye Morgan at the Codrington Library, AU Souls College, University of Oxford; for help with the Gwatkin papers I would like to thank Dr Sarah Bendali, all extracts used by permission of the Master and Fellows of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge; the Hutton papers were used by permission of the President and Fellows of Saint John the Baptist College in the University of Oxford; the staff of the Special Collections Reading Room at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Guy Holborn at the Lincoln's Inn Library; the Reverend Kevin Davies, Team Rector, Checkendon, Oxfordshire; Robert Ebbutt at the Birmingham Central Library; Frances Pattman at Archives and Corporate Records Services at King's College, London. I am particularly grateful to my supervisor Alan Hayes for his guidance throughout the research and writing of this thesis. I would also like to thank the other committee members, Brian Clarke, CT. Mclntire, David Neelands and Frank Turner for reading my manuscript and providing incisive comments. I would like to thank my former comrade at the Engineering and Computer Science Library, John Noble, for listening to me drone on for years about High Church historians. iv Most importantly, I thank my family for their support over the years, in particular my wife Maria and son Anton for their love and encouragement. I couldn't have completed this without all of you. ? For Maria and Anton, I love you both more than anything Vl TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Modest Rise of Scientific History 16 Chapter 2: The High Church Genealogy 83 Chapter 3: Continuity Theory and the Independence of the Church of England 156 Conclusion 225 Appendix: High Church Historians 234 Bibliography 243 VIl INTRODUCTION In William Holden Hutton's biography of his mentor William Stubbs, first published in 1904, Hutton succinctly summarized the rise of the new historical-critical historiography in England during the nineteenth century as a synthesis of what later historians have generally seen as two incongruent movements, the German source-based narrative history and Tractarianism: Dr. Stubbs belonged - the letters and memories have shown how fully - to a school, the well-defined school of Oxford historians, which owed much of its original impulse in equal degrees to the great German scientific historians and to the Tractarian movement. But he was notably the most original, the greatest, of the workers of whom the world gradually recognized him to be the leader, Haddan, and Freeman, and Green, and Bright, each had characteristic powers, but he seemed to combine them all, accuracy, and a deep though often silent enthusiasm, indomitable perseverance, and a wide outlook.1 It has recently been demonstrated that High Church writers during the nineteenth century expressed complex attitudes towards new scientific theories, such as evolution, and historical-critical methodologies regarding the Bible imported from German universities.2 However, the High Church acceptance of the new historiography as proposed by Leopold von Ranke has been understood to have been limited and contested with Stubbs, E.A. Freeman and Mandell Creighton noted as exceptions. It is not surprising that in England the earliest attempt to adopt German educational models and professional standards of historiography for an English context was undertaken by members of the Church of England, given that the legal and statutory relationship between the historic universities and the Church of England was only just beginning to fracture in the later half of the nineteenth ' William Holden Hutton, Letters of William Stubbs Bishop ofOxford, 1825-1901 (London: Archibald Constable & CO. LTD, 1904), 403. 2 Peter Hinchliff, God and History: Aspects ofBritish neology, 1875-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 99-107; Gregory P. Elder, Chronic Vigour: Darwin, Anglicans, Catholics, and the Development ofa Doctrine ofProvidential Evolution (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1996) 1 century. Recent historians have tended to marginalize if not ignore the role that religious belief, and particularly the role that High Church writers within the Church of England, played in this development.3 The High Church wing of the Church of England was a diverse body in the nineteenth century but was characterized by several common ecclesiological and theological attributes. A primary feature was a belief in the divinely ordained and mandated threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons, in particular, where episcopacy was of the esse of the Church. Although some High Church writers were willing to make allowances for continental Churches which did not have bishops, none was willing to consider that the Church of England could adopt such a position and none accepted the Evangelical position that episcopacy was merely of the bene esse of the Church.

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