The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy 1716–1721 by Andrew Starkie (review)

90 color plates, this is possibly the most unattractive book I have read. The footnoting and bibliography are deplorable, and due to the inadequate Index, the important results of much of Ms. Vivian’s archival research are as good as lost to scholars. Poor Fred, that he has been so illserved by what could have been a timely and valuable book. Thomas McGeary Champaign-Urbana, Illinios ANDREW STARKIE. The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy 1716–1721. Woodbridge, Suffolk UK, and Rochester: Boydell, 2007. Pp. 261. $85. Mr. Starkie provides us with the first in-depth and thoroughly documented account of the Bangorian controversy, a five-year dispute about church-state relations that led to the publication of more than 400 pamphlets, with eight bishops participating. Marshaled on one side were high churchmen, Jacobites, and moderate Whigs, while on the other side stood Erastian Whig churchmen, anti-clerical Whig ministers, and deists. The pamphlets were much in demand, Andrew Snape’s Letter to the Bishop of Bangor reaching a sixteenth edition in four months. Some contributions remained unpublished—as when, on March 25, 1720, Sacheverell from the pulpit ‘‘damn’d the B—p of B—r . . . to the very Pit of H—ll.’’ This vehement controversy started when Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor , published his Preservative against nonjurors in 1716 and then a Lenten sermon entitled, The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church of Christ, in 1717. Hoadly justified the deprivation of nonjuring bishops after 1688 on the ground that their authority was ‘‘derived from the civil power alone,’’ and he also denied the apostolic succession of priestly powers in the Church of England, for he saw the church as an invisible society where sincerity alone mattered. What Hoadly wanted for England was a civil religion that included all sects regardless of doctrinal differences, and in this he was supported by both the Whig ministry (Stanhope and Sunderland) and a network of Cambridge low churchmen, the most zealous being at Corpus Christi College. Opponents of Hoadly included not only high churchmen, but also moderate Whigs like William Wake and Robert Walpole. At this point Walpole ‘‘made no attempt to disguise his new alliance with reputed Jacobites,’’ an alliance that would last three years and result in the release of Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, from the Tower. Hoadly’s sermon of 1717 was explosive , Mr. Starkie shows, because it claimed that any exercise of ‘‘doctrinal discipline in the church was a usurpation of the prerogative of Christ’’ and that a Christian needed only the ‘‘scriptures and his conscience.’’ Soon the Report of Convocation gave Hoadly a big ‘‘rebuff,’’ and the Bangorian controversy immediately became ‘‘a major national ecclesiastical and political crisis.’’ As a result, Convocation (which high churchmen regarded ‘‘almost as an Anglican magisterium’’), would be silenced for the next 130 years. It did not escape notice that Hoadly’s sermon resembled the deist Toland’s State-Anatomy of Great Britain (1717), published the same year and also arguing for a ‘‘National Religion’’ in which doctrine was unimportant. These two works appeared just when the ministry was attempting to repeal the Occasional 91 Conformity Act and Test Acts—a repeal favored by Hoadly, Tindal, and Toland. In response, the Whig bishop of Oxford John Potter expressed alarm at a scheme intended to unite all sects into one ‘‘Communion of Hereticks.’’ High churchmen and church Whigs joined together out of fear that Hoadleians would create ‘‘a comprehensive, minimally dogmatic state-church in which the only heresy was anti-Erastianism.’’ As the dispute progressed, each side branded the other with ‘‘popery’’ and claimed to represent the English Reformation : Hoadly’s supporters charged high churchmen with ‘‘Protestant Popery ,’’ while anti-Hoadleians accused their foes of ‘‘Regal Popery,’’ dubbing Hoadly ‘‘POPE Benjamin’’ for trying to impose a liberty for all opinions in religion . Each side presented a different view of the Reformation: Hoadly and the deist Tindal (in Rights of the Christian Church) claimed it had been carried out by the civil power to liberate the people from ‘‘the yoke of clericalism,’’ whereas their opponents asserted that the bishops themselves had reformed the Church of England against the papacy , depicting Hoadly as the...