The eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival had run its course, the French Revolution, threatening Britain, had come and gone and England had settled down to enduring a succession of ludicrous nineteenth-century monarchs. By 1811, George III had been pronounced permanently insane, his son George IV was noted for his dissipation, his extravagance and his heartless treatment of his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, from whom he separated after a year, and in 1830 he was succeeded by William IV of the same disastrous royal house. ‘Silly Billy’, as he was called, had ten illegitimate children by an Irish actress before he married a German princess.

By way of sharp contrast, it was in these thirty dark years, when the throne was shamed, that Evangelicalism reached a high pitch, a fact recorded with great candour by the famous High- Churchman and Tractarian, Edward Bouverie Pusey: