Witchcraft and Whigs: The Life of Bishop Francis Hutchinson 1660–1739 (review)

Francis Hutchinson, the curate of Bury St Edmonds and royal chaplain from 1715, who was elevated in 1720 to the bishopric of Down and Connor, appears in the historical record as an eccentric. A prime example of Colin Kidd’s axiom that the Church of Ireland was used as a dumping ground for those who could not be relied upon to maintain probity and sanctity at the center of power, Hutchinson’s reputation rests on his 1718 Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft. A late and apparently moribund contribution to the early-modern decline of magic, his skepticism has not saved him from being condemned for fighting with specters—an eighteenth-century Don Quixote.

It is the achievement of Andrew Sneddon’s carefully constructed set of interlocking interpretive essays that Hutchinson’s book becomes explicable. As Sneddon shows, the Historical Essay was a piece of a wider cultural and religious agenda to which the churchman devoted himself. As presented here, this focused on the inculcation of “safe principles” (p. 118), Hutchinson being wary of all forms of enthusiastic exuberance. Thus, he denounced the French Prophets—a Huguenot sect convinced that miracles still occurred in the 1700s—and espoused a cautious program of improvement in the face of economic distress in 1730s Ireland. The South Sea Company was to be condemned for “imprudence and greed,” even as he bemoaned how “its very name, like a gorgon’s head, benums [sic] people’s brains” (p. 185; citation 185). Given these commitments, witchcraft and demonology could be constructed as illogical, irrational, and infantile. Hutchinson was therefore intent on dissuading two audiences concerning witchery’s apparent existence—the people who brought charges against neighbors and the legal establishment who pronounced on the validity of the phenomenon.

In Sneddon’s hands Hutchinson becomes the very epitome of a court Whig and low-church party man. His politics were grounded in a defense of the Hanoverian settlement, and his religion was rational and scriptural in content. He subscribed to a cultural life informed by notions of sociability and politeness, and a natural philosophy that acknowledged Newton as revealing the divine order. An empirical bent of mind saw Hutchinson actively engage in the Dublin Society, become an expert on bog reclamation, and improve his estate near Portglenone, County Antrim. It saw him react to the sustenance crisis of the late 1720s with humanity and practical proposals concerning fishery, as well as respond to the bloody history of witch trials in Sussex with his Historical Essay.

Yet, if the Historical Essay now makes sense, another idiosyncrasy emerges. The rather foolhardy commitment Hutchinson made to the conversion of the Roman Catholic population in Ireland in the 1720s and 1730s does not sit easily with the Latitudinarian portrayal we find here. If Latitude was committed to a low-church platform that Hutchinson found comforting, its sympathies were with the stark certainties of Presbyterian dissent and not with the ceremonial traditionalism of the Catholic confession. Sneddon thus emphasizes how Hutchinson’s conversion schemes—he published a remarkable Church Catechism in Irish (1721) with its own orthography, and An Irish English Alamanack (1724), as well as founding a charter school on Rathlin Island to effect a reformation of the people—was driven by fear and not love. Yet, if Sneddon is correct—and there is no reason to think otherwise— Hutchinson’s response to the threat posed by Catholicism to Anglican Ireland was dramatically different from the coercive agenda laid out by other Irish Latitudinarians. While Hutchinson espoused engagement with Catholics, Edward Synge the younger, for instance, favored their expulsion from the polity (in his ironically titled Sermon on Toleration of 1725). Low-church latitude was an uneasy stance to take in Ireland, and Sneddon has helped unpick how ideas planted in England found Irish soil hardy terrain in which to propagate. In that, Sneddon’s study sits alongside Christopher Fauske’s study of Jonathan...