ABSTRACT
At a dinner table in Paris in 1717, the Anglican chaplain William Beauvoir reportedly heard members of the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Theology declare that they “wished for an Union with the Church of England.” William Wake’s negotiations for a Gallican union were part of the Church of England’s intensified outreach to Christian Europe in the first decades of the eighteenth century. The Church of England, Wake went on, had “only thrown off, what they are weary of, the tyranny of the Court of Rome; without any change in any fundamental article either of the doctrine or Government of the Catholic Church.” William Wake was influenced by high churchmen’s interest in creating a more “primitive,” spiritually independent Church of England. Christian Europe – and, especially, Catholic Europe – made a unique mission field for members of the Church of England like William Wake and William Beauvoir because of the past Protestants and Catholics shared.
