ABSTRACT
The Hanoverian Church of England had an appallingly bad press, and, at more length, how justified the standard criticisms made of it still appears to be in the light of twentieth-century research. Edmund Gibson was selected by Sir Robert Walpole as the chief ecclesiastical arm of Whig policy because William Wake, Archbishop Tenison's successor at Canterbury, was distrusted by the ruling party for his supposed 'softness' towards Tories and High Churchmen and for a less than accommodating attitude to the dissenters. Months before William Wake's death he had put to Walpole the pragmatic, erastian case for the elevation of a scholarly nonentity. As long as Bishop Edmund Gibson reigned the Church of England could still boast its fair stock of able and energetic prelates, and not all the dedicated ones were men, like George Hooper of Bath and Wells, whose careers had been formed in an earlier and more exacting environment.
