CCHA Study Sessions, 40(1973), 41-51

    Historians who trace the nineteenth-century origins of improved relationships which Anglicans now enjoy with Roman Catholics and Nonconformists too often confine their attention to theological or theoretical developments, such as the Oxford movement and the Evangelical movement. This approach, unless it is combined with additional lines of research, fails to answer too many questions.

    Despite their deep and often bitter theological and ecclesiastical differences with other Christians, Victorian Anglicans often co-operated with Nonconformists and sometimes with Roman Catholics to confront common social problems. Increasingly throughout the Victorian period, intemperance, especially of the working classes, was regarded as one of the problems demanding the attention of all Christians. ⁽¹⁾

    Many Anglican teetotal and prohibitionist ministers seemed particularly unsuited to practical ecumenism. Anglican clergymen who supported anti-drink movements were often Evangelicals who held the vigorous anti-Roman Catholic belief usually associated with their group. Anti-Roman Catholic feeling, which had been associated with the Anglican teetotal movement from its earliest days, was not confined to Evangelicals. The liberal Bishop Edward Stanley of Norwich, the only Anglican prelate who regularly supported teetotalism in the 'forties, openly admitted his hostility to Roman Catholics. ⁽²⁾

    Many Anglican ministers who supported anti-drink movements were on friendlier terms with Nonconformists with whom they shared common beliefs and prejudices. Their friendships, however, were not always unqualified. Henry Ellison, until 1875 the Vicar of Windsor and from 1862 to 1891 Chairman of Church temperance organizations, did not become a teetotaler until the end of 1860 because most of the teetotalers he met in his early ministry were Nonconformists whom he dismissed for their "sundry extravagances." ⁽³⁾

    From the beginning of the teetotal movement, Anglican clergymen who constituted perhaps no more than 5% of teetotal ministers in the 'thirties and 'forties had to overcome their prejudices against cooperating with other Christians. Abstaining Anglican ministers often found from Nonconformists the support for their teetotal activities which during the early days was denied them by their own co-religionists. The "ten hours parson," G. S. Bull, worked with Nonconformists in the teetotal movement in the 'forties even after he had otherwise completely severed relations with them for political reasons. ⁽⁴⁾ In 1843 Anglican as well as Nonconformist temperance reformers had to suspend their strong bias against Roman Catholics to welcome to England Father Mathew, the Capuchin Apostle of Temperance, who had just completed a successful five-year teetotal campaign in Ireland. Anglican and Nonconformist temperance enthusiasts, who had invited Father Mathew to bring his teetotal message to the Irish and other residents of England, helped shield the priest from the hoots, missiles and placards of hostile crowds organized by publicans and Protestants. ⁽⁵⁾

    Beginning in the 'fifties, an increased number of Anglican teetotal clergymen began to establish more contacts with one another. They still, however, often chose to maintain in anti-drink circles the good relationships with Nonconformists and other non-Anglicans to which they had become accustomed.

    Before they organized their own Church teetotal Society in 1862, Anglican teetotal clergymen were most likely to meet at one of the mainly Nonconformist national anti-drink organizations, especially the London-based National Temperance League, which promoted teetotalism, and the United Kingdom Alliance of Manchester, which sought prohibition. ⁽⁶⁾

    The National Temperance League was especially active in the organizational steps taken towards initiation of the Church teetotal society. The League began in 1859 its organized effort to attract the Anglican Church to teetotalism when Stopford Ram, an Anglican clergyman, and Joseph Tucker ⁽⁷⁾ placed advertisements in national newspapers asking Anglican abstaining clergymen to identify themselves. The 1859 advertisements, financed by Tucker and signed by Ram, gave League officials the names of over 160 teetotal clergymen. ⁽⁸⁾

    The National Temperance League then attempted to increase the number of Anglican clerical abstainers by addressing ministerial conferences, by sponsoring popular lecturers and by extensive distribution of teetotal literature. One of the most effective books distributed by the League was Haste to the Rescue published in 1860, in which Julia Wightman, wife of a Shrewsbury vicar, described her parish teetotal activities.

    In May, 1862, the National Temperance League also helped organize a conference of over fifty Anglican abstaining clergymen at the London Coffee House, which resulted in the formation of the Church teetotal society the following October. ⁽⁹⁾ The three Anglican teetotal clergymen who took the most active part in organizing and conducting the London Coffee House Conference, Francis Close, Stopford Ram and Robert Maguire, were all League members and, according to one account, a Wesleyan League member, T.B. Smithies, editor of the British Workman, paid the Conference's expenses. ⁽¹⁰⁾

    When the Church teetotal society was introduced the following October, its organizers promised to retain "the most friendly relations" with Nonconformists in the National Temperance League and the United Kingdom Alliance. They determined "to contribute another contingent to the common battlefield." ⁽¹¹⁾

    Relations with the National Temperance League were considered especially beneficial to the Church teetotal society. Both organizations were often represented at the other's meetings and they exchanged promotional notices in their publications. ⁽¹²⁾

    Members of the Church teetotal society were especially close to three Nonconformist officials of the National Temperance League: T. B. Smithies who provided the Society with free office space during its first six years and for a time subsidized the Church of England Temperance Magazine; Joseph Tucker who was the Society's treasurer from 1863 to 1871; and another Quaker, Samuel Bowly, the League's president, who contributed articles to the Society's Magazine. ⁽¹³⁾

    Officially, the Church teetotal society's executive sometimes kept at a greater distance from the United Kingdom Alliance. The reason most often given for their reluctance to endorse the Alliance directly was that, as members of a Church organization, they were engaged in a movement of temperance reformation whose object was ultimately religious while Alliance promoters were involved for secular motives in a purely political movement. ⁽¹⁴⁾ But the Church teetotal society also admitted that, although some of its members were ardent prohibitionists, others favoured restrictive liquor licensing and still others, moral suasionists, preferred a completely voluntary approach to the drink problem. By 1865, the Society had officially decided to "leave it to each man's judgment and option as to how he can best promote the movement in his own parish or neighborhood." ⁽¹⁵⁾

    Anglican teetotal parsons realized that many of the Nonconformists with whom they co-operated to advance teetotalism or prohibition were actively engaged in anti-Anglican movements. Brian Harrison has found that among the goals of Nonconformist prohibitionists, disestablishment of the Anglican Church was only less important than disendowment of drink. ⁽¹⁶⁾ The history of the Church teetotal society, from its foundation in 1862 until its reorganization in 1873, paralleled a period when the force of Nonconformist attacks and the reform policies of the first Gladstone ministry made Anglican teetotal clerics fear complete disestablishment. English readers of the Church of England Temperance Magazine were warned in September, 1868, that they too were threatened by current attempts to disestablish the Church in Ireland.

Efforts are now being made in every county and city, and town, and parish in the kingdom to bring about the separation of Church and State, and so far to destroy the Constitution which has hitherto been the boast of every Englishman. ⁽¹⁷⁾

    Many clerical abstainers who read the Magazine's warning knew from experience the inroads which Nonconformists were making in British parishes. Of the 415 declared Anglican teetotal clerics of England and Wales whose positions could be traced, 381 were parish ministers. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Others, including domestic missionaries, teachers and chaplains to social agencies, had at least indirect connections with parish work.

    Most Anglican teetotal parsons lived in centres of concentrated population where industrialization had created the greatest problems of adjustment for both Church and people. Anglican clerical teetotalism was least popular in rural areas where problems were more familiar and the population relatively stable. Most areas where Anglican clerical teetotalism was concentrated were still receiving abnormally high numbers of internal migrants in the decade prior to initiation of the Church teetotal society. These were the areas where the Anglican Church had most difficulty holding its own against Nonconformists.

    Some Anglican clergymen admitted entering the teetotal field partly because they feared that the Nonconformist connection with teetotalism had created a source of leakage from the parish church. Henry Ellison told delegates to the 1862 Church Congress at Oxford that many workingmen who were the "strength and ornaments" of the Nonconformist sects were Nonconformists only because they were reformed drunkards and "the dissenters showed them the way to recover from their terrible sin." ⁽¹⁹⁾ Robert Maguire told Anglican clergymen that if they wanted to find the workingmen absent from their services "they could scarcely do better than pay a visit to the Temperance halls in their neighbourhood, and they will find there the very best of the workingmen, ready to be enlisted in any good work." ⁽²⁰⁾ Maguire even admitted in passing that if teetotalism were used "simply as a lever restoring lost and lapsed attachments to our Church we could not go amiss." However, he was quick to add that "this is not our main object. ⁽²¹⁾Anglican clerical teetotalism then was at least partly rooted in a crude Anglican-Nonconformist competition on the local level to determine which could attract more worshippers.

    The main reasons for Anglican and Nonconformist offensives against drink, however, went beyond denominational differences. Estrangement of the working classes from religious adherence, revealed in the Census of 1851, had shocked Nonconformists only slightly less than Anglicans. The relatively greater success which Nonconformists had often enjoyed over Anglicans in attracting congregations in the main commercial and industrial areas of England was almost overshadowed by the failure of all Christians to establish habits of worship among the working classes.

    The Anglican teetotal cleric saw the main rival to his influence not in the Nonconformist minister but in the publican. In industrial England the pub, not the chapel, had assumed the role of community centre once performed by the parish. The pub was the most obvious symbol of the disorientation which drove workingmen to seek convivial refuge from the misery, toil and anonymity of an often unfamiliar industrial society. At the same time it clearly symbolized the frequent failure of the parish to relieve this disorientation by providing workingmen with doctrines and programmes relevant to their urban situation. The Anglican teetotal cleric therefore attacked the pub not only to reassert his claim that the parish was the rightful centre of modern community life, but to legitimatize that claim by defeating drink as the cause of most moral, social and economic problems which workingmen faced in adjusting to industrial society. The Nonconformist might not support attempts to reassert the central importance of the Anglican parish in the modern community; but he could not deny the importance both of attracting workingmen to religious adherence and of adjusting their life styles to conform with industrial society. Most teetotal Nonconformists shared with most Anglican teetotal clergymen a common Evangelicalism which made the spiritual salvation of Britain a necessary goal. Teetotal Protestants of all persuasions usually found in the liberal foundations of teetotalism agreement on the best method of achieving the slightly less necessary goal of a prosperous Britain.

    Anglican teetotalism absorbed from the liberal climate a belief that social distress could be more effectively eliminated by relying on self-help rather than on state intervention or increased wages. The Anglican teetotal cleric who told his parishioners to improve their lots by the discipline of sober lives displayed a belief in self-help which would have been accepted in most Nonconformist chapels; he also exhibited a distrust of the state which was shared by the secularist, as well as the Nonconformist exponent of disestablishment, and an opposition to increased wages which would have pleased any employer. ⁽²²⁾ If he also supported the prohibitionist United Kingdom Alliance, the Anglican teetotal parson, by asserting that the majority of a community should have the right to legislate prohibition, virtually endorsed democratic decentralization. ⁽²³⁾

    Anglican teetotal clerics usually admitted the debt they owed Nonconformists for introducing teetotalism into parochial life and expressed embarrassment that they had neglected a movement which in their view the Church had a responsibility to promote. The Church of England Temperance Magazine for October, 1867, observed that: "If any good movement becomes a dissenting movement in this country, then it is because the Church has not done its duty in respect to that movement." ⁽²⁴⁾ This observation implied both sympathy with Nonconformist complaints against the Church and a comprehensive belief in the Church's responsibilities towards the nation. Anglican clerical abstainers partly agreed with Nonconformists that their Church had failed to come to terms with the industrial age.

    Anglican clerical abstainers, however, denied that their Church was incapable to adjustment to modern conditions. They justified creation of a separate Church teetotal society, in a field dominated by Nonconformists, with the proposition that the unique resources of the Established Church would enable them to exercise "a special work for which no other Society is so specially qualified." ⁽²⁵⁾ In the November, 1862, issue of the Church of England Temperance Magazine, the Anglican parochial system was said to offer exceptional possibilities for the spread of teetotalism. It provided a network by which all inhabitants in the most remote parts of the country could be reached. ⁽²⁶⁾ Those teetotal clergymen who also supported prohibition or more restrictive liquor licensing emphasized the additional power for moral legislative reform which their bishops could exert in Parliament. ⁽²⁷⁾

    Anglican teetotal parish ministers assumed, then, that their own responsibilities and those of their bishops were as great in the present industrial age as they had been during the rural and feudal era in which the parochial system and the political power of the episcopal bench had been created. They hoped that by using the institutions of the Established Church to combat intemperance they would demonstrate to Nonconformists that disestablishment would deprive the Kingdom of these unique resources for social and moral amelioration.

    The Anglican parish minister and the bishop were both assured by clerical abstainers that they could earn the same sort of gratification from Nonconformists if they, too, co-operated in movements to combat intemperance. Teetotalism would help revive the parochial system by actually extending the influence of parish ministers over all the people in their jurisdictions.

    If the clergy and bishops did not co-operate in anti-drink campaigns, they would demonstrate the sort of irresponsibility which might lead to the deterioration and destruction of Anglican institutions. Anglican clergymen and bishops were told in 1868 that if they did not soon join the fight against intemperance,

... there is no doubt whatever but that their indifference to the misery and vice and crime committed to their charge will be used as... a most powerful argument for the entire destruction of our Church as the Established Church ... ⁽²⁸⁾

    By the end of 1868, influential Anglicans began to take such arguments seriously. The increased interest in the temperance question which was beginning to appear in the highest forums of the Church reflected the common view that there was a link between two of the most controversial issues raised in the first Gladstone ministry -- the future of the Church and the future of drink. Before 1873, delegates to the annual Church Congresses rarely heard intemperance discussed, but at Liverpool, in the fall of 1869, they were told that "the Nonconformists were calling to (the Church) for help, and in no way could she better use her influence than in supporting the Temperance Movement." ⁽²⁹⁾

    From the end of 1868 to 1873, Anglican prelates, led by the two English Archbishops, frequently took up the theme of Anglican-Nonconformist co-operation in the fight against intemperance. Archbishop William Thompson of York was the most prominent active supporter of the National Association for the Amendment of the Liquor Laws which Henry Ellison and others organized at the end of 1868 to meet licensing legislation expected from the new Gladstone ministry. The National Association, although primarily an Anglican organization, was careful both to include Nonconformists and others in its activities and to court their favour with fairly radical licensing polities. Thomson also supported other efforts to secure temperance legislation which were more obviously inter-denominational. In April, 1871, at a meeting over which he presided to urge Sunday closing of liquor establishments, Thomson acknowledged the dignitaries present, including the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Manning, Bishop Charles Ellicott of Gloucester and Bristol and Newman Hall, a Congregationalist minister. He also expressed satisfaction that the drink question had "brought together persons who on other occasion might be separated." ⁽³⁰⁾ As Archbishop of Canterbury, A. C. Tait lent support to the National Association; and in February, 1873, used the prestige of his office to launch the Church of England Temperance Society. The C.E.T.S., which soon became the most honoured temperance organization in the kingdom, was inaugurated at a special Lambeth Palace conference during which the ecumenical character of the temperance movement was frequently praised. ⁽³¹⁾

    The prominent support given by Anglican prelates to the temperance movement after 1868 cannot of course be explained entirely by their desire to impress Nonconformists. Like their episcopal colleagues, Thomson and Tait gave the usual religious, social and economic reasons for inlisting in the battle against intemperance. ⁽³²⁾

    Such reasons do not entirely explain the suddenness with which Anglican bishops after 1868 embraced the temperance movement. The new element in 1868 was that the election with heavy Nonconformist support of the first Gladstone ministry had added a political dimension to the drink questions which, as legislators and Churchmen, the bishops could scarcely ignore. If they did so, they would help prove the validity of Nonconformist claims that the Established Church was a socially useless institution and intensify demands for disestablishment which the recent election had uncovered and which to some extent the current parliament was satisfying.

    Although Anglican bishops after 1868 supported the temperance movement partly as an aid to Church defence, they were unwilling to stop drinking themselves or to recommend teetotalism as a condition of Church membership. Consequently, most Anglican teetotal ministers felt the dilemma of choosing between the strict teetotalism which they had long recommended and the episcopal patronage which they had long desired. With some reluctance, they agreed in 1873 to the establishment of the Church of England Temperance Society, with sections for teetotalers and moderate drinkers. ⁽³³⁾

    Most Anglican teetotal clergymen would no doubt have preferred to see the Anglican hierarchy sanction an organization similar to the League of the Cross which Archbishop Manning founded the previous year on strict teetotal lines. By agreeing to support a Roman Catholic teetotal society in 1872, Manning for the second time offered distinguished support to antidrink movements. In 1867, a year before Anglican bishops began to express firm interest in the Parliamentary drink question, Manning had already responded favourably to advances from the United Kingdom Alliance. By the time several Anglican prelates began at the end of 1868 to offer public support for more restrictive liquor licensing, Manning had declared himself a prohibitionist. ⁽³⁴⁾

    Anglican supporters of anti-drink movements displayed towards Manning's temperance activities mixed feelings of competition and cooperation similar to those they showed Nonconformists. When Manning began to appear on temperance platforms in 1867, Anglican teetotal clerics were visibly embarrassed that they and the temperance community had to rely on a Roman Catholic Archbishop for the prestigious support they had long sought from their own bishops. Robert Maguire confessed, in the Church of England Temperance Magazine, that at a meeting of leading temperance reformers at the London City Guildhall in April,1867:

... we felt as though we were marshalled under strange leadership, when we found ourselves following (longo intervallo) in the retinue headed by Archbishop Manning, from the Council Chamber to the dais of the Guildhall ... ⁽³⁵⁾

    In the next twenty months, the theme became a favourite of Anglican teetotal clergymen as they tried to shame their bishops into action.

    There were, however, more positive reasons for Anglican ministers and bishops to appear on temperance platforms with Manning during the first Gladstone ministry. The Roman Catholic minority in England, as even W. E. Gladstone admitted, suffered from social distress disproportionate to their numbers. Massed together in major British cities, the postfamine Irish immigrants had been easy prey to the ravages of both excessive drinking and unscrupulous English businessmen. Most Irish poor lived in those commercial and industrial areas where Anglican teetotal clerics had concentrated their greatest efforts, but there was little, hope of Anglicans using their temperance activities to proselytise among Roman Catholics as they sometimes did with Nonconformists. The Anglican clergyman could not, however, oppose with impunity the efforts of Roman Catholics, such as Manning and Father James Nugent of Liverpool, to increase the sobriety and respectability of the Irish poor. ⁽³⁶⁾ The Anglican minister or bishop who did so risked the charge that he was indifferent towards many of the poorest and most intemperate of those who lived within his jurisdiction, no matter how formal his claim over them had become.

    There were political reasons for Anglican to co-operate with Roman Catholics in the temperance movement after 1868. The developments during the first Gladstone ministry had shown Anglican leaders the dangers of Roman Catholic-Nonconformist political alliances and the usefulness of Anglican-Roman Catholic co-operation. ⁽³⁷⁾

    Anglican co-operation with Roman Catholics in anti-drink movements, then, might help prevent Irish M.P.'s, most of whom favoured temperance reform, from joining in Parliament with Nonconformists to attack further Anglican prerogatives. It might also strengthen Anglican links with English Roman Catholics which had recently been shown useful in defending such prerogatives against Nonconformist attack. Even more important, however, was the desire of Anglican leaders to help demonstrate to Nonconformists by their temperance activities that disestablishment was unnecessary.

    To discuss the extent to which Nonconformists were mollified by this Anglican demonstration of concern would be outside the range of this paper, but there are indications that the Anglican temperance movement may have helped in a secondary way to prevent disestablishment. There may have been some truth in the exaggerated claim made about 1883 by W. S. Caine, a Baptist M.P. and advocate of disestablishment as well as teetotalism and prohibition, who served fifteen years as a C.E.T.S. vice-president:

1. For the development of temperance and teetotal movements in Victorian England, cf. Brian HARRISON, Drink and the Victorians, London, 1971. Brian HARRISON, "Drink and Sobriety in England 1815-1872. A Critical Biblic raphy," International Review of Social History, Vol. 12 (1967), pp. 204-276. Gerald Wayne OLSEN, Pub and Parish: The Beginnings of Temperance Reform in the Church of England, 1835-1875, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1972.