Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (review)

Claydon’s Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 is a revisionist study of English national identity from the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the ascension of George III in 1760. Claydon seeks to demonstrate the continuing importance of religious commitment in an era that was once seen as a period of increasing secularization, partnered with a growing indifference to religion. Other revisionists, such as Clark, have made the same point.¹ But Claydon’s book also challenges the widely accepted view of the English in the early eighteenth century as proudly inward-looking Protestants who had little to do with the alien, predominantly Catholic, cultures of the continent. Thus, Claydon challenges the powerful sway that Linda Colley’s, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1994), has had over the profession. Claydon argues that far from being insular and xenophobic, the English were deeply concerned with the fate of Protestants in Europe. They also looked beyond what Claydon terms “the Protestant international,” seeing themselves as united with all followers of Jesus Christ, all of Christendom.

In order to understand how the English understood Europe, Claydon begins by examining travel guides to the continent. English travelogues were keenly sensitive to confessional divisions within Europe. Guide authors were not uncritical of Protestant lands, but they consistently saw Catholic regions as strange and alien, their people impoverished by the avarice of the Church and bedazzled by the trickery of priests. Whereas descriptions of Catholic Europe could all be set within a master narrative of priestly greed and blind superstition, accounts of Protestant nations were far more diverse, as a result of the Reformed religion’s own splintered nature. Nor were these descriptions always positive; the Dutch were just as often seen as greedy and cruel as they were thrifty and industrious. Nonetheless, England was part of a common Protestant world that crossed national borders. The English also recognized that even if Catholic lands were “alien,” they were not nearly as strange and exotic as non-Christian realms. “The key division of the world was into its different faiths. Protestants and Catholics were huddled together in one corner: the differences between them were petty set against the bizarre beliefs which prevailed elsewhere” (65). In this sense, the English saw themselves as part of a larger Christian community.

The English also saw their confessional history as a part of European history, infiuenced by continental movements and ideas. Protestant dissenters and moderate Established Churchmen set the English Reformation within the broader context of Protestant Reformations in Germany, France, the Low Countries, and Scotland. The more conservative Laudians and Non-jurors stressed the Church of England’s heritage from the medieval Church. Either way, the Established Church was indebted to European traditions. Efforts to rewrite the history of the medieval church in England as completely independent of Roman authority were seen as “lame and incoherent,” as Brady, the constitutional historian, put it (113).²

The wars with the Dutch, followed by those with France, during this period also pulled England into the European orbit. Examining the various pro-war discourses in Anglican and Dissenting polemic, Claydon concludes that religious rhetoric, particularly arguments in the defense of Christendom, informed foreign-policy debates far more than any perceived threat of universal monarchy. Only when the English became increasingly war-weary did more secular “balance of power” arguments begin to appear. Claydon’s final chapter examines how the concepts of Christendom and the Protestant international were deployed in partisan polemic between 1660 and 1760. Although Protestant Europe has long been seen as important to Whig ideology, Claydon shows how the survival of Christianity abroad was equally vital to Tory polemic.

Not everyone will agree with everything that Claydon writes in this dense study of religious rhetoric during the first half of the long eighteenth century. But Claydon is certainly right to point out the important role that Protestantism abroad and Christianity in Western Europe played in...