Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (124 page)

Willem made it his life's work to humble French Catholic power across Europe. His success exacted dynastic revenge not simply for Willem the Silent but for the disaster suffered by his great-uncle by marriage, the Elector Palatine Friedrich, back in 1618-19 (see pp. 646- 7). As a by-blow in the course of his relentless campaigns against Louis, Willem gained the three thrones of Britain in 1688 - but what a by-blow this proved! It was the culmination of a decade of political turmoil in the Atlantic Isles, and was provoked by the extraordinary stupidity of King James II, a sincere but inept convert to Roman Catholicism. While James was still Duke of York and heir to the throne, his wily brother King Charles II had saved him between 1679 and 1681 from a real prospect of being excluded from the succession in favour of James's daughters, Mary and Anne, by his first wife, Anne Hyde; unlike their father, both ladies had remained firm in their loyalty to the Church of England.

The King's strategy to save James from exclusion had been to strangle opposition from the 'Whig' group, which was promoting exclusion, through a royal alliance across the whole Atlantic archipelago with a rival political grouping within the Protestant establishment. They were christened 'Tories' by the more radical Protestant enemies, an insulting reference to Irish Catholic bandits (similarly the Whigs were nicknamed after Protestant Scots cattle thieves). Tories were Protestants who championed government by bishops in the established Protestant Churches of the three kingdoms, and they trumpeted their belief in the divine right of kings as well as bishops, in return for royal support in oppressing rival Protestants and (in Ireland) riding out resentment from dispossessed Catholics. King Charles died in 1685, leaving his brother in the best possible position, but King James II failed to see that Charles had bought success by becoming prisoner to a political party.
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When James's antics in promoting the interests of his fellow Catholics made Tories snarl, he promptly abandoned the Tories and tried to outflank them, courting Protestant Dissenters by offering the same emancipation he was promoting for Catholics.
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Dissenters were torn between pleasure at the end of their persecution and a very real fear of international Catholicism. James might have got away with his plans if the succession had remained with his Protestant daughters, but he now had a second wife, the Catholic Italian Mary of Modena. Their fatal mistake was to provide a half-brother for the Princesses Mary and Anne, James Francis: 'Francis', with its multiple Catholic resonances, was not a clever name to give a prospective English king. From that moment in 1688, James II was doomed, because the boy was bound to be brought up a Catholic. Grimly observing was Mary's husband, Stadhouder Willem, whose wife stood to lose her future thrones through this new arrival.

It only needed an invitation from a few English notables for Willem to launch naval and military intervention against his father-in-law, who fled the country in a state of nervous collapse, and the throne was declared vacant. 'Dutch William' was as much a conqueror as his Norman namesake, though the fact that virtually no one in England lifted a finger to stop his invasion has mitigated the embarrassment for the English national myth of a scepter'd isle perpetually preserved from invasion since 1066 (a rhetoric often still employed by those hostile to the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union). At least the Dutch were Protestant, and good at gardening. Indeed, to minimize the impropriety of William's landing of his forces at Torbay in Devon, November 1688 gained its own mythological status, as a 'Glorious Revolution' which saved the Protestant state at the cost of very little English blood, though more in Scotland, and still more in Ireland.

In the very last days of 1688, William summoned members of the English House of Lords and House of Commons to what they slightly awkwardly termed a 'Convention'. Acting as if it were Parliament, the Convention contrived an ingenious if unorthodox replacement for its missing monarch by recognizing a team, William (III) and Mary (II) - but it was nervously aware that the kingdom of Scotland might make a different choice, while the Catholic Irish mostly rallied behind King James and suffered three years of bloody warfare before being forced to change their minds. A trio of national 'Revolutions' now produced a contrasting trio of religious settlements. The episcopally structured Church of England, which did represent the overwhelming majority of English people, grudgingly agreed henceforth to tolerate Protestant Dissenting groups, albeit on rather less generous terms than James had offered. The English bishops turned uncomfortably aside while in 1690 Presbyterian activists were sweeping away episcopal government in the Church of Scotland, against the wishes of many Scots.
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English bishops' compensation was to see the Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland confirmed in privilege and power, despite its ludicrously small proportion of adherents among a sea of Irish Catholics. In each kingdom, the deciding factor was who would best support the fragile new monarchy.

Tory High Churchpeople agonized about this untidy solution. Some left the Church of England, insistent that their duty to God meant that they could not break their oath to King James, however obnoxious he had proved. Among these 'Non-Jurors' was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft (times had changed; at least he was not beheaded like Laud). Altogether, the Non-Jurors were a distinguished and conscientious grouping who were now free to think new thoughts about why they were still Anglicans when not part of an established Church. The long-term consequences of those musings were considerable (see pp. 840-41), even though the Non-Juring Church itself eventually faded away along with the Stuarts' chances of retaking the throne. It was not surprising that the leadership of the Church now shifted to those whom their more partisan colleagues had already angrily christened 'Latitudinarians' (see p. 654): those willing to allow a wide latitude of religious belief within a broadly tolerant Church, and to accommodate their allegiance to the new political realities. The triumphant Whigs also needed to justify the change of regime which now brought them to power in the state alongside Latitudinarians in the Church. The most clear-sighted Whig spokesman, although not at the time the most popular precisely because of his clear-sightedness, was John Locke.

Locke had first plunged into political controversy in order to formulate a Whig case for James, Duke of York's exclusion from the succession in 1679-81, and his arguments could equally well justify the 1688 revolution. He appealed to the Bible to demolish the idea that it provided a case for the divine right of kings. If seventeenth-century divine-right theorists like the Englishman Sir Robert Filmer turned to Genesis and claimed a hereditary succession from Adam, granted by God, to justify the divine character of royal succession in their own day, Locke denied that the idea of hereditary succession could be found in Genesis, and he used its stories to construct a different myth. Although Adam's fall had brought about the punishment that humans would have to labour in order to survive, this burden had engendered a natural right in all people to labour and to possess the land for labour. This preceded any authority to govern, which resulted from contracts freely made by humans in order to live more easily with each other. So the Bible provided the basis of Locke's distinctive ideology of a social contract, and justified his scheme of rights and duties. Locke's programme was not immediately attractive to the new Whig establishment, which did not want to endanger its fragile alliance with Anglican Tories, and which was therefore inclined to prefer providentialist arguments to defend King William's rule: Whigs saw him as God's agent in defending the English Church.
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Nevertheless, over the next century, Locke's language of rights and contract fermented in the political arguments of the anglophone world and then spread into Europe generally, decisively undermining the concept of sacred monarchy.

After William III's death in 1702, English-led armies continued to fight the French under his British successor and sister-in-law, Queen Anne, decisively blocking Louis's seemingly inexorable advance. Before John Churchill's victory at Blenheim in 1704, English armies had not won a major victory since Flodden in 1513, or in mainland Europe since Agincourt a century before that. Churchill gained his title of Duke of Marlborough, and the money to build Blenheim Palace, one of Europe's most splendid houses, thanks to the gratitude of British monarch and Parliament; his brilliant command of the armies had, in four major battles, permanently halted the Catholic tide from washing away all surviving Protestant power. It was not surprising that the people of northern Europe were still virulently anti-Catholic in 1700. They continued to read their sixteenth-century martyrologies - especially for the English the luridly detailed and luridly illustrated folios of John Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
- but Protestants had no need merely to recycle passions from the days of Reformation sufferings: the Catholic menace was a living reality.
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So there was no possibility of England countenancing a Catholic Stuart succession when Queen Anne died with no surviving children in 1714. The thrones of Ireland and Great Britain (from 1707 there had been a United Kingdom of England and Scotland) went to another descendant of the Elector Palatine Friedrich, the Elector Georg of Hanover. Now he was King George I of Great Britain and Ireland. His new British subjects never felt much affection for him as a person - charm was not his strong suit - but overwhelming numbers of them in England deeply valued him as a saviour of the Protestant Glorious Revolution and a bulwark against the return of the Stuarts.

The outworkings of the Reformation thus pulled England back into an intimate territorial involvement in the affairs of mainland Europe, from which the French had previously expelled it when they captured the last medieval English mainland enclave of Calais in 1558. From 1688 to 1702, and again from 1714 until 1832, when different laws of succession severed the thrones of Britain and Hanover, the British Isles were part of a joint European and vigorously Protestant state enterprise spanning the North Sea, while the British also built up a seaborne empire, first in North America and then in India. Initial British interests in Asia, to begin with in fierce competition with their Protestant co-religionists the Dutch, were not to acquire territory but, like the Portuguese before them, to create small bases which would stabilize their trade in cottons and a swelling volume of other consumer goods.

The momentum of British prosperity sustained their enterprise where the penurious Portuguese had failed, and their markets seemed limitless; the Dutch proved unable to sustain the same momentum in political organization and financial resources, and so the United Provinces fell behind the United Kingdom in power and world reach. In the British Isles, the pace of manufacturing quickened until, with the aid of a new technology harnessing the power of steam for production, Britain developed Europe's first industrial revolution, resulting in huge wealth for some, and a great deal of modest prosperity and spending power for many - not to mention other equally profound changes, as we will see (see pp. 787-91). This was the basis for a British world empire, based improbably on a comparatively minor archipelago of Atlantic islands. Its self-image was based on a narrative of heroic struggle against popery and arbitrary tyranny (represented generally by the French), in which Protestant English and Protestant Scots had buried their differences in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, creating a common new home for their two peoples: Great Britain. A leading historian of this period has subtitled her study of it with an appropriate play on words, speaking of the process as 'forging' a nation. British adventures across the world became, for the next century and more, an overwhelmingly Protestant story.
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In the eighteenth century, European politicians and generals began to realize that the Mughal Empire in India, which had seemed so formidable to Catholic European powers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was beginning to fail. By contrast, their own governmental and military organizations were growing ever more efficient and effectively financed, tested by the century of European confessional wars from 1618 onwards. India was only the centrepiece: everywhere, Spanish and Portuguese power was looking far more vulnerable. In the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain and France contended for supremacy: a 'Seven Years War' drew in all the major European powers, the first war to be fought in continents circling the globe. American 'Indians' were enlisted on the borders of New France and the thirteen English American colonies; Africans were swept in; in armies of the Indian subcontinent, Muslims and Hindus found themselves fighting European quarrels, the beginning of two centuries during which the Christian West was to be the dominant force in world power struggles.

When the British fought the French to a standstill and concluded a peace treaty in Paris in 1763, they found themselves in charge of a land empire which needed defending across the world, and their armies were now carried by a navy with a near-universal range. Their victory was sealed in 1799, when British armies defeated Tipu Sultan, the last Indian ruler capable of seriously challenging them; in Tipu's defeat, they dashed the hopes of his French allies, now revolutionary Republicans spoiling to reverse the French monarchy's humiliation of 1763.
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The large British gains in India had been equalled in 1763 by Britain's acquisition of France's Northern American territories to the north and west of their own thirteen colonies. It was tempting to see Protestantism as the Christianity of the future.

PIETISM AND THE MORAVIANS

There was a force behind this expansion greater than British imperial power: the Protestant religious movements underpinning it were international. What is remarkable about these stories is their interconnection across Europe and the world, and the fact that they took both their immediate and their long-term origins from Protestant Germany.
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King George I came to England in 1714 from a Lutheran northern Europe very conscious of its own providential survival in the Thirty Years War, yet still not at ease. Battered by the armies of Louis XIV, it then suffered several further decades of calamities from the 1690s: a run of terrible weather producing famine, which nurtured epidemics, and from 1700 the Great Northern War, which, over twenty years, broke Swedish aspirations to great-power status in the Baltic and consolidated the imperial power of Peter the Great's Russia (see pp. 541-4). Such catastrophes placed a heavy pastoral burden on Lutheran clergy in Scandinavia and Germany, and made them look for Protestant spiritual resources beyond their own tradition. Although they would have not wished to admit it, they were also trying to find a substitute for something which the Reformation had destroyed: monastic life and spirituality. With certain formal exceptions in Germany, which owed a rather accidental survival to their convenience for the German nobility, all monasteries, nunneries and friaries had disappeared from Protestant Europe, and all devotional life devolved to the parishes. Even there, parish gilds and confraternities had largely been dissolved or had concentrated on commercial purposes to avoid any hint of popish superstition.
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With the religious houses and gilds there had disappeared a host of Christian ministries and activities, from charitable work to itinerant preaching to contemplation, which the Reformation had done its best to replace, but with incomplete success. Now in compensation came a renewal of German and Scandinavian Protestantism, which has come to be known as Pietism.