Ducklings
John Kenyon
The Dissenters: from the Reformation to the French Revolution Michael R. Wafts (Oxford £15.00) Considering the imporance of the pis: senting tradition in English intellectual On social life, it has not been well served by his' torians. There are many studies of inch, vidual sects and denominations, some 0' them of the highest quality, like Braithwaite's history of early Quakerism but for a general panorama of Dissent We have to turn back to H. W. dark's History of English Nonconformity, published on the eve of the first World war. And Clark s book was in fact only a slight improvement on the work of Skeats and Miall, which vi9,5 begun in 1868 and not completed until 1891. They all had the defects to be expected of projects undertaken by men of cony mitted religious sensibilities raised and edu: cated in the reign of Queen Victoria,. moreover, nearly seventy years of vigorous research have passed since Clark wrote, anu . in certain sectors, notably that of the Civil Wars, activity has been intense. Michael Watts has now undertaken a thorough reassessment of Dissenting history, of which this is the first part. It is scholarly, exact and (as they say) 'as interesting as the subject matter permits'. It is open to a few objections in detail; it would be positivelY uncanny if a survey covering this amount of ground were not; but it will inevitably take its place as the standard work on this sub' ject. It is tempting to date he'history of English Dissent from the Church Settlement of 1662, while taking account, of course, of the emergence of Baptists and Quakers during the Interregnum, and this is a temptation lc' which several historians have succumbed' In fact, it is possible to trace separatist or c.ctarian activity, and even a sectarian tradition in England, from the reign of Henry VIII • right through to the opening of the Civil Wars in 1642, when it erupted with startling froce. (The role of the separatist Churches in London from 1616 to 1649 has recently been re-assessed by Murray Toltine, in The Triumph of the Saints,' too recently to have been any use to Watt's.) As Archbishop Laud realised in the 1630s, the Separatists had survived nearly fifty years of Persecution much better than the Presbyterian reformers working from inside the Church.
This early history of Dissent in necessarily 'bitty'; there are awkward gaps, and the information we have tends to be clustered round a few individuals, like Henry Jacob, Robert Browne, Barrow and Greenwood. But the bitterness is accentuated by Watts's device of splitting his chapters into brief, often self-contained sections, With headings which are clever and aptly Chosen but not always as enlightening as they might be to the casual reader in search 0f information. For the period from 1640 to 1660 he can rest his narrative and anlysis on
simply enormous body of published work; "ere he makes some useful corrections of Perspective, but he does not seem able to achieve a new systhesis. I would have liked
(.,0 see much more detail on the attempts of John Owen in the 1650s to found a non ceonformist state church; if this book has a 'atilt it is its pre-occupation with the destructive rather than the constructive side of tIlssent, with the centrifugal rather than the centripetal.
His short section on Charles II and James 11 is disappointing. There is too much emphasis on persecution, too little on the Passivity and quietism it induced in Dissenters, which threatened the future of their congregations; too little on the divisions hetween those who advocated direct pout 1 action in association with the radical vi,"higs and those who counselled complete Withdrawal from politics, to the extent of declining the public toleration offered by the Crown in 1672 and 1687. But Mr Watts comes into his own with a thorough and enlightening account of Dissent from the Passing of the Toleration Act in 1689 until the dawn of the Evangelical Revival about 1730. He explores the organisation, the numbers and the wealth of the Dissenting community, and offers a useful and helpful analysis of their theological differences; differences between Arminianism and Antin°111lanism, between justification by faith and justification by works, and on the nature, the extent and the availability of grace —which went back to the very dawn of ,the Reformation. My only criticism is that ,atts does not make it clear that the decline bissent over this period reflects to a great extent a contemporaneous decline in all .‘vItristian churches and communities in the ,est; the Dissenters were not the victims of p'llte peculiar sickness. It is true that the 'evival, when it came, came through clergy
men of the Established Church, but this was largely for legal reasons; Dissenting ministers could not undertake the peripatetic evangelism practised by Whitefield and the Wesleys without a licence from a bishop, which would not have been forthcoming. Ironically, the ministers were much more closely confined to their 'parishes' than beneficed clergy.
But the ghost at this particular feast, from the first course to the last, is Presbyterianism. The failure of English Presbyterianism at every stage removed an organising force which might have unified Dissent into a body capable of bringing crucial pressure to bear on the Establishment. Watts mentions the success of Elizabethan and Jacobean governments in uprooting Presbyterianism, and makes the well known point that when it revived in the 1640s it was compromised by its association first with the hated Scots then with the dis-. credited Long Parliament. But he is disruptive disputes between `Dons' and 'Ducklings' which paralysed the movement under Charles H. It is now apparent that the flirtation of certain sections of the Church of England with `comprehension' encouraged the Presbyterians to regard themselves as members of the 'establishment' if not the Establishment, and this continued to set them apart from other Nonconformists when even the dream of comprehension had faded. As Watts points out, they refused to restrict church membership, they continued to insist on high educational qual ifications for their ministers, and above all they rejected and even despised that pre occupation with public confession and selfexamination which was a hallmark of all other Dissenting sects. In other words, they refused to act like Dissenters, and it would have been worth discussing whether they really regarded themselves as such.
These are some of the questions provoked by a study of Mr Watt's book, and they demonstrate its fruitfulness. It is certainly very welcome, indeed long overdue, and I look forward to the sequel, which will presumably take the history of English Dissent up to somewhere near the present day.
Previous page
