ABSTRACT
The historiographical consensus on the Church of England in the period of what has become widely accepted as that of the Tong eighteenth century', is that the few decades of church party controversy and division following the Glorious Revolution and culminating in the reign of Queen Anne (170214) were succeeded by a long period of comparative religious peace, consensus and 'protestant unity'; a kind of 'ecclesiastical analogue' to the J.H. Plumb thesis of the 'growth of political stability'.1 The argument for a mid-eighteenth-century Anglican consensus built on the ideal of 'moderation' and unity, and the non-partisan nature of much churchmanship in the period, with high churchmen grudgingly 'accommodated' to the prevailing ethos as well as political realities, has been well made and is convincing.2 However, it becomes less convincing for the period from the 1770s onwards. The argument for eighteenthcentury Anglican and Protestant consensus has not always taken sufficient
1 John Walsh and Stephen Taylor, 'The Church & Anglicanism', in John Walsh, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of England, c. 1689-c. 1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), p. 29; J.H. Plumb, Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London, 1967); Geoffrey Holmes, Religion and Party in late Stuart England (London, 1975), p. 30.
