2 - Church and state

Summary

A Protestant state

If a particular view of the importance of the English constitution became a whig legacy, so did a series of contentions about the church and its place in the struggle for freedom. And if the one contention demands examination in the light of what was to follow, then so does the other, for it may be that a retreat from the ideals of a Protestant state impinged on the ability of whig historiography to reproduce itself. Stubbs had, after all, been a bishop and had seen no incongruity between wearing the episcopal mitre and an academical gown; Gardiner married a daughter of Edward Irving and escaped the church no more willingly than Stubbs; James Anthony Froude's Protestantism lacked a certain humility, but it galvanized his sense of Henry VIII's reasonableness and interfered constantly with the rest of his political judgements. The issue goes further, for all that, than curiosity about the personal religion of a few historians in inviting any sensitive observer of late nineteenth-century historiography to think about the connexion between Protestantism and the English state as it had developed since the Reformation. It is clear enough that a simple model of secularization among European historians, familiar from Owen Chadwick's path-breaking work on the secularization of the European mind and more recently from ecclesiastical histories of Britain in the twentieth century by Adrian Hastings and Callum Brown among others, will not work for the English as compellingly as it does for the French and Germans.