Thomas Cook (4 page)

They believed that infants should be instructed in the Christian church but not made members of it. Faith, it was argued, required intelligence and should not be undertaken by a parent, but by each boy or girl. After being instructed in the basic doctrine of Christianity, each should decide personally to follow Christ. Young children were not of an age to make such a decision; for salvation to be effective, men or women must, by their own choice, believe. This was shocking to the Catholic, Anglican and other churches. A baby was often carried to church through rain, snow, sleet or wind because, if a christening was deferred and a babe died unbaptised, his soul went to limbo, lost with nowhere to go. A child must have the words ‘Dearly beloved, for as much as all men are conceived and born in sin . . .’ said over him and be sprinkled with holy water.

Smyth and Helwys set up the earliest Baptist church at Spitalfields, London, near Guy’s Hospital in 1612.
²
Helwys died in prison; Smyth was a Pilgrim Father, sailing from Plymouth on the
Mayflower
in 1620. Eighteen years later the first actual Baptist church in America was set up on Rhode Island by Roger Williams.

The Baptists, like other Nonconformist religions, believed people needed to examine every line of the Bible themselves and not rely on interpretation by the clergy. Followers were encouraged to have a personal and direct relationship with God, with no priest acting as an intermediary.
³
The literates took pride in plodding through the hundreds of pages of the Old and New Testaments, and beginning again when they finished. For them, ignorance of the scriptures meant ignorance of Christ.

Church attendance increased in all denominations after Sunday schools had been started by Robert Raikes, the printer, prison reform campaigner and the proprietor of the
Gloucester Journal
. Seeing prisons crowded with people whose lives had been shaped by deprived childhoods, Raikes opened the first Sunday school in St Catherine’s Street, Gloucester, in July 1780. Any child aged between five and fourteen was admitted, no matter what the state of their clothes. Raikes, the hero of the striving poor, helped to destroy illiteracy. Not until the Education Act of 1870 were elementary schools provided at public expense in England and Wales, and not until 1889 was schooling in England compulsory. The private and ‘dame’s schools’, and the schools set up by charities, mainly the Church of England, were sorely inadequate. The Church, anxious not to lose control and fearful of schools not teaching the Anglican catechism, opposed all government grants. The first grant occurred in 1833 when £20,000 was shared by two religious societies, the National Society (for Anglicans) and the British and Foreign Society (basically non-sectarian but predominantly for Nonconformists).

On Sundays, children who slaved for six days in factories, farms and mines put on their ‘Sunday best’ and attended Sunday school. They were taught the Scriptures, the Catechism, the Psalms and basic reading. The monitoring method of advanced pupils teaching beginners, who, in turn, became teachers themselves, later grew into the pupil–teacher training system. Churches of all denominations brought the rudiment of literacy to the poor,
⁴
but it was the Nonconformists who were at the forefront of the Sunday school movement.

From the time when Henry VIII had dismantled papal authority over the Church of England and parliament had declared him ‘the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England’,
⁵
various splinter groups of Dissenters, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists,
⁶
Presbyterians and Unitarians
⁷
had become independent of the main church. Unitarians were the most extreme, denying the existence of Hell and rejecting the Trinity – the belief that God reveals himself in three persons, God the Father, God the Son (Jesus) and God the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost). While acknowledging Jesus as a teacher, they denied that he was a deity.

After the Reformation anyone not attending services in the Church of England could be prosecuted. This changed during the eighteen years of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, but was revived after the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1858 and the abdication of his son Richard the following year. The restoration of King Charles II in 1660 made life difficult again for Dissenters.

The iniquitous Corporation Act of 1661 cemented Anglican supremacy. Members of municipal corporations and officers of state had to show proof of having recently taken communion within the Church of England. The following year, the term ‘Nonconformist’ was used to describe the Dissenters who risked fines and a possible prison sentence and left the Church of England rather than conform to the terms of the Act of Uniformity. This ensured that all clergy and teachers conformed to the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles printed in it as an appendix.

Next, the Test Act of 1672 was rushed through parliament. It excluded Nonconformists, Catholics and Jews from any government post, civil or military, unless they submitted a sacrament certificate that they had taken Holy Communion at a Church of England service. Among other restrictions put through during the reign of Charles II was the banning of all religious assemblies of five or more persons other than those living in a house. Anyone breaking this was subject to a penalty of £20 on each person, or imprisonment if this was not paid. John Bunyan was one of the thousands who ended up behind bars. Just how draconian these laws were can be seen by looking at the history of the Quakers. During the four decades after George Fox, a Puritan, set up the ‘Friends of Truth’ in 1646, about 21,000 Quakers were fined or incarcerated in England, many of them more than once. At one time there were as many as 4,200 behind bars, where about 450 died.
⁸
The Quakers were against war, oaths, paid ministers, gravestones, black in mourning
⁹
and all fixed ceremonies, addressed everyone as ‘thou’ and refused to doff their hats. They also denied that the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper were instituted by Christ. They were the most independent and daring of the Dissenters.

When James II came to the throne in 1685, he attended mass in public and showed his inclination to overthrow both the constitution and the Church, but when William Penn, the English Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania, returned from America, his influence on the king was so great that in 1686 1,200 Quakers and all men and women imprisoned on account of their religious convictions were released. Nothing, though, disguised James’s pro-Catholic stance. Public outrage turned into rebellion, and before Christmas 1688, James II threw the Great Seal of State into the Thames and escaped across the Channel to France. William of Orange, and later his wife and cousin Mary, crossed the Channel from Holland. After they had been crowned as joint sovereigns of Britain, the life of Dissenters improved. Just as William’s ‘Grand Alliances’ in Europe were based on the defence of Protestantism, his reign was a milestone in the growth of religious liberty
¹⁰
– aside from Catholics. The introduction of the Toleration Act of 1689
¹¹
granted freedom of worship to Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians (but not Unitarians and Quakers). They could pray publicly behind unlocked doors, providing that the meeting place was registered with the diocesan bishop or Court of Quarter Sessions. Fines and prison for non-attendance at Anglican services, executions and burnings at the stake became memories of a harsher age. In 1727, after George II succeeded, an Act was passed allowing Nonconformists to build chapels and meeting houses.

However, like Catholics, the Nonconformists were still obliged to pay church tithes, register their assemblies with the nearest bishop, archdeacon or justice of the peace
¹²
and marry in Anglican churches. Because of the Test and Corporation Acts they remained second-class citizens in relation to Anglicans,
¹³
and continued to be blocked from civil or military posts. Sometimes this ban was circumvented with ‘occasional conformity’, when a vicar signed a make-believe statement, but, on the whole, they were barred from the professions, universities and parliament. Talented Nonconformists gravitated towards commerce.

All Nonconformists, whether poor labourers or factory owners, were forced each month to pay the much-hated church tithes or the church rates. Income for the Church was gathered from the whole population. Members were forced to pay twice where Anglican churchgoers paid once. Nonconformists were obliged to contribute to the leisured comfort of the vicar and his family and the whole structure of the Church of England, with its vast and ill-distributed wealth. (Of 10,478 benefices in 1836, 7,890 provided incomes between £50 and £400 a year, 297 below £50, 2,107 between £400 and £1,000, and 184 over £1,000, including 118 over £2,000.
¹⁴
) The income of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Durham was £19,000 per year, while that of the Bishop of Winchester was a lavish £50,000. The Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian and Congregationalist chapels in Melbourne relied solely on the voluntary subscriptions and donations of its congregation. As in other grand chapels, the Baptist chapel in Melbourne had galleries, raised seats for the choir and for the preacher in the pulpit. These alterations had been part of the major rebuilding project in 1756 when an increasing number of converts had called for a larger chapel. Some female members of the congregation had sold their wedding rings to contribute to the cost.

On top of grievances about church tithes there were objections to restrictions on burials and the laws which obliged Nonconformists to be married in Anglican churches. Education, too, was a sore point. Most schools were run or dominated by the Anglicans. Taking the sacrament as a member of the Church of England was still a requirement to enter Oxford or Cambridge, the only two universities in England. But dissenting academies brought a high level of scholarship to Nonconformism.

Benjamin Disraeli in his novel
Sybil
¹⁵
divided the nation into the rich and the poor: ‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each oth’rs habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were . . . inhabitants of different planets.’ He had temporarily forgotten that the manufacturing and trading
bourgeoisie
had created a new stratum, the non-landed urban middle classes, who longed to be part of the gentry.

In spite of the hat-touching and servility, England was frequently less ‘class conscious’ than ‘church-and-chapel conscious’.
¹⁶
With their numbers boosted by recent converts, the Nonconformist spire-less chapels had a disproportionate number of people from the lower end of communities. Belonging to a chapel could be an indication of humble origins. The Church of England was bound by silken chains to the Establishment
¹⁷
and so identified with the upper classes that it was later referred to as ‘the Tory party at prayer’. The radicals were often Dissenters or anti-clericals.

In England in the nineteenth century, the numbers of Presbyterians were declining because they tended to merge with the Unitarians, who had been given a boost by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Unitarian convert who became a part-time preacher at Nether Stowey near Taunton. Robert Southey was another convert. The expansion of the Nonconformists continued throughout the first half of the century with the Baptists and Congregationalists increasing, though not as rapidly as the Methodists. Each denomination had a separate doctrine, creed and dogma, but, as they had all been alienated and excluded from civil and military life for so long, there was a feeling of cooperation between most chapels. Faith also had the benefits of a club. A busy social life revolved around each chapel and members gave each other mutual help, especially in finding jobs and in business. Thomas is an example of someone propelled not just by his beliefs, but by contacts made through his beliefs.

In contrast, in the Anglican church there was much division. Squires and yeomen, accustomed to the timidity of the poor, expected weavers, labourers and cottagers to know their place at the rear of the church. Such partitions, accepted as a natural part of God’s will, were parodied in the jingle ‘God bless the squire and his relations and keep us all in our proper station’, or in the hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small . . . the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate . . .’. Scrubbed and groomed, with waistcoat, watch-chain and silver-topped cane, the richer, established men, usually so upright in their saddles, lounged in square box-pews in the front of the church. There were always empty pews. One parishioner, Joseph Dare of Leicester, in a report had said, ‘We do not go ourselves to a place of worship because our clothes are not fit; the rich tuck up their fine things and sit away from us, as if we were filled with vermin.’
¹⁸
He added that a large number were absent, preferring a day of ease, while others stayed in bed ‘while their
body-linen
is being washed, and to rest their limbs, as the work is too much for the food they get’.
¹⁹

Separating Church and Dissent was a wall-like barricade. Vicarages were usually elegant and many incumbents were the younger sons or poorer relations of the upper classes. The pace of their social life could be intense. A refrain of the Evangelicals had been a call for them to desist from hunting and other pursuits unbecoming to their cloth. Vicarages usually had good cellars and curates did much of the routine work. Richard Church, Dean of St Paul’s, in
The Oxford Movement
²⁰
described the ‘country gentlemen in orders, who rode to hounds, and shot and danced and farmed, and often did worse things’. Vicars usually scorned the ministers of the Nonconformists in their ‘little Bethels’.

Anthony Trollope
²¹
described the Anglican clergy preaching ‘in their black gowns, as their fathers had done before them; they wore ordinary black cloth waistcoats; they had not candles on their altars, either lighted or unlighted; they made no private genuflexions, and were contented to confine themselves to such ceremonial observances as had been in vogue for the last hundred years. The services were decently and demurely read in their parish churches, chanting was confined to the cathedral, and the science of intoning was unknown . . .’. Trollope could have also been describing the Baptist chapel in Melbourne. But the Baptist cleric, rejecting many elements of Anglican usage and ceremonial considered to bear too close a similarity to the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, wore no surplice; the chapel had a plain interior, and there was more emphasis on the Bible, not the authority of the church, being the source of religious truth.