Durham E-Theses The high Church tradition in Ireland 1800-1870 with particular reference to John Jebb and Alexander Knox Thompson, Michael James How to cite: Thompson, Michael James (1992) The high Church tradition in Ireland 1800-1870 with particular reference to John Jebb and Alexander Knox, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5713/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 M.J. Thompson: The High Church Tradition in Ireland, 1800-1870, with particular reference to John Jebb and Alexander Knox. (Thesis for the M.A. Degree, 1992) ABSTRACT This is a critical enquiry into the widely held belief that the doctrines of pre-Tractarian High Church Anglicanism have exercised a specially tena• cious hold on the Church of Ireland. Chapter 1 surveys the tradition as developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, but also examines the peculiarity of a Church established by law in a land the majority of whose people adhered to other Christian bodies. Chapter 2 outlines the careers of Knox as the forerunner and Jebb as the principal embodiment of 'Old High Church' feeling, pointing to their relations with Methodism and Roman Catholicism, and their dependence on the legal status of the Church. Chapter 3 contrasts diverse attempts to confront the problems that arose from decreasing support for that legal status on the part of the British Government, culminating in the Irish Church Temporalities Act of 1833: the trigger of the Oxford Movement. The lineaments of High Church thought at that moment, notably its patristic emphasis, are traced in Chapter 4, and its limitations exposed in an account of a contemporary ecumenical venture. It becomes clear that the Tractarians owed a debt to Irish old High Church thinking, but developed their theology well beyond even Knox and Jebb. Chapter 5 depicts Irish hostility towards Tractarian- ism, exemplified in the career of J.H. Todd, and various endeavours to maintain the High Church tradition such as the foundation of S. Columba's College. At the same time, the cornerstone of traditional Irish High Church thought is removed by the Irish Church Disestablishment Act of 1869. Chapter 6, in recounting the speed and ferocity with which Low Church Evangelicals, chiefly amongst the laity, captured the commanding heights of the disestablished Church, seeks to throw retrospective Ught on the inherent weakness of the old High Church tradition. Indeed, as Chap• ter 7 also aims to show, it was only through imported Anglo-Catholicism that any elements of the earlier tradition were to survive. The conclusion reached in these two final chapters is that the historical situation of the Church of Ireland was never favourable to an indigenous traditionalist High Church movement capable of widespread lay support. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. THE HIGH CHURCH TRADITION IN IRELAND 1800 - 1870 WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO JOHN JEBB AND ALEXANDER KNOX BY MICHAEL JAMES THOMPSON THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM DEPARTMENT OF THEOLOGY 1992 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Declaration 3 Acknowledgements 4 I. Introduction 5 II. 'A Socrates and a Plato' 15 III. Three Primary Charges 38 IV. A Search for Apostolicity 58 V. Apostolicals in Oxford and Dublin 80 VI. Disestablishment and Defeat 104 VII. The Aftermath 127 Bibliography 141 DECLARATION In accordance with the Regulations for Theses, I declare that none of the material contained in this thesis has previously been submitted by me for a degree in this or any other University, nor is this work based upon joint research. I also certify that my thesis does not exceed the limit of 50,000 words. M. J. T. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This survey would not have been embarked upon but for the encouragement of many friends, most especially Professor Desmond Bowen, Mr William Fuge, The Revd Peter Barrett, and the Dean of Raphoe, all of whom have guided me with their advice and fired (sometimes re-kindled) my enthusiasm. To Dr Sheridan Gilley, my tutor when I was an undergraduate at S. Andrews and a generous and patient supervisor in this enterprise, I owe a par• ticular debt. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster and the Fathers of the London Oratory have kindly supported me in many ways throughout the course of this work, and I am grateful to them. It is, however, to the unfailing kindness and rigorous professionalism of my typist that I shall remain most indebted. The errors alone are entirely my own. CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION The period with which this enquiry is principally concerned opens in an Ireland overcast with the storm clouds of the impending Act of Union of 1800 with the consequent extinction of the Irish Parliament and the amalgamation of the English and Irish Churches. These were the two most significant Protestant institutions in Ireland at a time when Protestantism and political power were inseparable. The period ends with the abandormient of the ecclesiastical establishment and her disendowment in 1870 by the Irish Church Disestabhshment Act. History is a seamless robe. With hindsight we can see what only the acute observers of the time recognized: that disestabUshment was the first major indication of the death of the old order in Ireland. The historical conditions which had shaped that old order sustained an atmosphere in which the Irish High Church tradition could subsist, and even occasionally flourish. The wreck of the old order spelt the doom of that tradition. J.C. Beckett has written that disestablishment was 'the first clear and unmistakable step towards the British government's abandoimient of the Anglo-Irish'.i The story of the Church of Ireland both in relation to the majority Catholic population of Ireland and to wider Anglicanism, especially that of the sister island, is the story of the Anglo-Irish and the planters; and the story of the Irish Church reflects the ambiguous position of the bulk of her membership vis-a-vis the rest of the nation. When Olivia Manning referred to her childhood years in Ireland before the second world war, she wrote of acquiring the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere. Again, another twentieth-century Anglo-Irish novelist, EUzabeth Bowen, remarks that 'the existences of Anglo-Irish people ... like those of only children, are singular. 1. J.C. Beckett, The Anglo-Irish Tradition (Belfast, 1982), p. 110. In the interests of conci• sion, the names of publishers of printed books are given in the Bibliography only. CHAPTER I 6 independent, and secretive'.^ Members of the Irish Church share this sense of being 'other', estranged from the world around them and misunderstood by it, with a haunting sense of being viewed as rude cousins by their supposed co• religionists of England. The very term 'Irish Anglicanism' has a faintly awkward ring to many Irish ears. That awkwardness points to an age-old dilemma. Ireland is a place where 'Protestant' could within living memory be applied in its older usage to mean only the adherents to the formerly estabhshed National Church (where 'Church of Ireland' has become the norm); a place where 'Anghcan' can sound too English and by implication, perhaps, too dangerously close to 'Anglo-Cathohc' and therefore to betrayal, both legislative and doctrinal. For to be Protestant in Ireland has a negative sense which precedes any positive one: to be Protestant is above all to be not Roman Catholic; and, although no longer necessarily a badge of Britishness as formerly, it still means being dif• ferent. The memory of disestablishment has faded, and in the South there seems no articulated nostalgia for the comfort of British rule; but perhaps there, as church life slowly weakens, the sense of betrayal lingers in the un• conscious of the Protestant people, 'sacrificed to the conservative party'^ abandoned by the English Church. F.R. Bolton has shown that no Irish writer before Edmund Burke appears to have used the term 'Anghcan'.* However, Irish divines from before the Act of Union and right up to disestablishment almost invariably used the term 'Church of England' to denominate the ecclesiastical establish• ment on either side of the Irish Sea, a usage shot through with ambiguity. Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), whilst zealous for the independence 2. Quoted by Hermione Lee in her introduction to Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen's Court and Seven Winters, Memories of a Dublin Childhood (London, 1984), p. Lx. 3. William Connor Magee, quoted in R.B. McDowell, The Church of Ireland, 1869-1969 (London, 1975), p. 48. 4. F.R. Bolton, The Caroline Tradition in the Church of Ireland with particular reference to Bishop Jeremy Taylor (London, 1958), p. 54. CHAPTER I 7 of the Irish Church as expressed in her own Articles of 1615 and Canons of 1634, used 'Church of England' and 'Church of Ireland' interchangeably.