Archbishop Tait, The Huguenots and the French Church at Canterbury

Abstract

Archibald Campbell Tait was enthroned as archbishop of Canterbury in February 1869. It was an inauspicious time to assume the primacy of the Church of England, which was riven by internal conflicts and religious differences. Furthermore, Gladstone had recently swept to power with the support of the Nonconformists. The new prime minister had a mandate to disestablish the Irish church and his political supporters sought to challenge the privileges and status of the Church of England. As primate, Tait attempted to defend the Church of England as the established church and restrict those parties that held particularly narrow and dogmatic beliefs, regardless of whether they were Evangelicals or Ritualists. The archbishop strove to straddle these religious differences and to achieve his aims through a policy of compromise and tolerance, but some of his actions served to cause further divisions within the Anglican church. Tait’s efforts to restrict elaborate ceremonial and services through the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) alienated the Ritualists, for example. Many more clergy were opposed to his concessions to Nonconformists in the Burials Bill (1877), which would have allowed them to be interred in parish churchyards. Amidst the wider religious tensions and political conflicts that marked his primacy, the archbishop also took a close interest in the French Protestant Church at Canterbury, whose history he regarded as reflecting some important attributes of the Church of England, its past, and its current status in the world.