3 The Church of England, 1714–1783 Robert G. Ingram ‘My last gave you an account of the Death of our good Lord, and the circumstances of it; To this I am now to add that the Bishop of Lincoln kissed the King’s hand for the Archbishopric yesterday.’ 1 So Archbishop Thomas Tenison’s chaplain, Edmund Gibson, announced Tenison’s death and William Wake’s succession to the see of Canterbury in late December 1715. From one perspective, Tenison’s passing might seem to mark the end of a long, divisive era in the nation’s religious and political history. This chapter argues that it did not; rather, subsequent Church leaders confronted many of the same challenges that had confronted Tenison and other late Stuart churchmen and they confronted them in Tenisonian ways. To understand the eighteenth- century Church of England, then, requires starting with Tenison and the world from which he emerged. 2 Thomas Tenison had served as archbishop of Canterbury under Queen Anne (r. 1702–14), the last of the Stuarts, the royal family whose members had been usurped not once but twice during the religio-political revolutions of the seventeenth century. Anne came to the throne in 1702 hoping to heal the wounds opened up by England’s ‘troubles’. The seventeenth century had been especially brutal for the Church of England. The institution had nearly been destroyed in the 1650s, during England’s stretch of ‘unkingship’ and religious disestablishment. Even after the monarchy’s restoration and the Church’s re-establishment in 1660, the memory of those years remained fresh and reminded churchmen what might happen if religious Dissenters got their way. The Test and Corporation Acts (1661, 1673) disbarred Protestant Dissenters from public office, hoping to prevent a return of the religious and political anarchy of the mid-century. Yet the Glorious Revolution (1688–9), 1 Gibson to William Nicholson, 17 Dec. 1715, Bodleian Library (Bodl.), Add. MS A269, p. 51. 2 Cf. Grant Tapsell, ‘Introduction: The Later Stuart Church in Context’, in Grant Tapsell (ed.), The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 (Manchester, 2012), pp. 1–17.