Church, Parties, and Politics

Abstract

Was the Church of England, between the Restoration and the Oxford movement, divided into parties? W. J. Conybeare, in a famous article of 1853, claimed that High and Low Church faded away, leaving a complacent worldliness. This chapter traces the emergence and track record of the identities ‘High Church’, ‘Latitudinarian’, and ‘Low Church’, shows their origin in polemic, traces their trajectories in political and religious conflict, and concludes that Conybeare’s reifications of identities were partly retrojections. Both the assertion and the denial of party labels were tactically motivated, but party identities nevertheless had both theological and parliamentary party-political purposes. The Broad Church cause that Conybeare sought to promote is revealed, and the seriousness of principled conflicts in earlier decades reasserted. The chapter centrally contends that since Conybeare’s account was inadequate, Norman Sykes’s model of the Hanoverian Church as consensual, unified, and moderate cannot now be sustained.