In March 1719 a six-penny pamphlet was published, written by a young whig fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Thomas Herne, under the pseudonym ‘Philanagnostes Criticus’. Entitled An Account of All the Considerable Pamphlets that have been Published on Either Side in the Present Controversy between the Bishop of Bangor and Others, to the End of the Year MDCCXVIII, it was an astute contemporary assessment of the controversy. Herne held strong latitudinarian and tolerationist views, and he did not disguise his Hoadleian bias in his Account. His partisanship, however, did not significantly impair his judgment about the importance of the various writings on both sides, and his Account (together with its Continuation published a year later) remains a very useful guide to the dispute.

This chapter is in part an account of ‘all the considerable pamphlets’ in the controversy, and as such it surveys again the controversial landscape which Herne so ably mapped out in 1719–20. Writing in the Continuation, Herne described his work as the necessary groundwork for an intellectual history of his own age (which Herne saw as itself part of a larger project – the history of the post-Reformation era). This chapter, in a similar manner, by describing the shape of the controversy as it developed, is intended to form the basis of an assessment of the self-understanding of the Church of England as it proceeded into the Georgian era – an assessment with which chapters 5, 6 and 7 are concerned.