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Debating the Legal Status of the Ornaments Rubric: Ritualism and Royal Commissions in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2020

Dan D. Cruickshank
Dan D. Cruickshank*
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
*
*Theology and Religious Studies, No. 4 The Square, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ. Email: d.cruickshank.1@research.gla.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This article uses the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to explore the emergence of claims to self-governance within the Church of England in this period and the attempts by parliament to examine how independent the legal system of the church was from the secular state. First, it gives an overview of the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer and the Acts of Uniformity, presenting the legal uncertainty left by centuries of Prayer Book revision. It then explores how the Royal Commission into Ritualism (1867–70) and the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) attempted to control Ritualist interpretations of the Ornaments Rubric through secular courts. Examining the failure of these attempts, it looks towards the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1904–6). Through the evidence given to the commission, it shows how the previous royal commission and the work of parliament and the courts had failed to stop the continuation of Ritualist belief in the church's independence from secular courts. Using the report of the royal commission, it shows how the commissioners attempted to build a via media between strict spiritual independence and complete parliamentary oversight.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 56: THE CHURCH AND THE LAW , June 2020 , pp. 434 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2020

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Footnotes

I should like to thank the Anglo-Catholic Historical Society for the award of a bursary that enabled me to present the paper at the Ecclesiastical History Society Summer Conference on which this article is based.

References

1 Morris, Jeremy, ‘George Ridding and the Diocese of Southwell: A Study in the National Church Ideal’, JEH 61 (2010), 125–43Google Scholar, at 126.

2 Kilcrease, Bethany, The Great Church Crisis and the End of English Erastianism, 1898–1906 (London and New York, 2017), 1Google Scholar.

3 See, in this volume, Nicholas Dixon, “The Church of England and the Legislative Reforms of 1828–32: Revolution or Adjustment?’, 401–18.

4 Palmer, William, A Narrative of Events connected with the Publication of the Tracts for the Times with Reflections on existing Tendencies to Romanism and on the present Duties and Prospects of Members of the Church, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1843), 2Google Scholar.

5 Ibid.; emphasis mine.

6 Electronic Irish Statute Book (eISB), ‘Church Temporalities Act, 1833’, online at: <http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1833/act/37/enacted/en/print.html>, accessed 25 February 2019.

7 Palmer, Narrative of Events, 4.

8 Herring, George, The Oxford Movement in Practice: The Tractarian Parochial Worlds from the 1830s to the 1870s (Oxford, 2016), 191–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ibid. 198–9.

10 Herring, George, ‘Devotional and Liturgical Renewal: Ritualism and Protestant Reaction’, in Brown, Stewart J., Nockles, Peter and Pereiro, James, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2017), 398–409Google Scholar, at 400.

11 Morris, J. N., ‘British High Churchmen, Continental Church Tourism and the Roman Connection in the Nineteenth Century’, JEH 66 (2015), 772–91Google Scholar.

12 Herring, Oxford Movement, 209.

13 The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church according to the Use of the Church of England (London, 1992), 14.

14 Ironically, it was the prosecution of Ritualists that established in the courts that the Ornament Rubric was legally binding as a result of being part of the Prayer Book attached to the Act of Uniformity of 1662: S. M. Waddams, Law, Politics and the Church of England: The Career of Stephen Lushington, 1782–1873 (Cambridge, 1992), 296–7.

15 2 & 3 Edw. VI c.1.

16 Dearmer, Percy, The Parson's Handbook (London, 1899), 32Google Scholar.

17 1 Edw. VI c.1.

18 See digitized versions online at: <http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1559/BCP_1559.htm>, accessed 25 February 2019.

19 1 Eliz. I c.2.

20 Ibid.

21 The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (Goring Heath, 1999), 212.

22 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT, and London, 2005), 568.

23 Lane, Calvin, ‘Before Hooker: The Material Context of Elizabethan Prayer Book Worship’, Anglican and Episcopal History 74 (2005), 320–56Google Scholar, at 339–40.

24 The role of common law as an integral part of the English ecclesiastical legal system predates the Reformation and even the Norman conquest: see Russell Sandberg, Law and Religion (Cambridge, 2011), 18–25.

25 Elements of the Act of Supremacy of 1558 were repealed during the nineteenth century; it is difficult to ascertain which sections, but it appears those parts relating to ornaments were left intact.

26 First Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship, &c. according to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland; with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices, 3951 (London, 1867), iii.

27 Hubbard, more of a Puseyite than a Ritualist, had paid for the construction of St Alban's, Holborn, only to clash constantly with its first curate and ritualist pioneer, Alexander Mackonochie: see Nigel Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1999), 96–7.

28 First Report, iii.

29 R. C. D. Jasper, Prayer Book Revision in England, 1800–1900 (London, 1954), 101.

30 First Report, vii.

31 Ibid.

32 Second Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship, &c. according to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland; with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices, 4016 (London, 1868), 2.

33 Ibid. 3–7.

34 Ibid. 1.

35 Fourth Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship, &c. according to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland; with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices, C.218 (London, 1870), 96.

36 Third Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship, &c. according to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland; with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices, C.17 (London, 1870).

37 The rubric alterations proposed all sought to limit ritual practice, emphasizing the need for services to be audible to the congregation, that there had to be a minimum of two communicants and that wafers were forbidden for use at communion. Arguably none of these were alterations to the rubrics of the Prayer Book of 1662, but merely re-emphasizing what the rubrics left implied: see Fourth Report, 17, 20.

38 Ibid. x–xx.

39 Yates, Anglican Ritualism, 234–5.

40 James Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Attempt to Legislate for Belief (Oxford, 1978), 46–54.

41 Ibid. 49.

42 Peter T. Marsh, ‘The Primate and the Prime Minister: Archbishop Tait, Gladstone, and the National Church’, VS 9 (1965), 113–40, at 115.

43 Bentley, Ritualism and Politics, 49.

44 Marsh, ‘The Primate and the Prime Minister’, 120.

45 G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1869 to 1921 (Oxford, 1987), 71.

46 Allen Warren, ‘Disraeli, the Conservatives and the National Church, 1837–1881’, in J. P. Parry and Stephen Taylor, eds, Parliament and the Church, 1529–1960 (Edinburgh, 2000), 96–117, at 116.

47 Machin, Politics and the Churches, 1869 to 1921, 74–5.

48 HC Deb (3rd series), 15 July 1874 (vol. 221, col. 80).

49 Warren, ‘Disraeli, the Conservatives and the National Church’, 109.

50 HC Deb (3rd series), 15 July 1874 (vol. 221, col. 80).

51 The act specifically states that parishioner ‘means a male person of full age’: Public Worship Regulation Act 1874, 37 & 38 Vic. c.85 §6. Women were thus legally excluded from complaining about abuses in the churches they attended.

52 Ibid., §8.

53 Ibid., §9.

54 The judge was to sign a solemn declaration that he was a member of the Church of England: ibid., §7.

55 Michael Hennell, Sons of the Prophets: Evangelical Leaders of the Victorian Church (London, 1979), 66.

56 Bentley, Ritualism and Politics, 82–3.

57 Machin, Politics and the Churches, 1869 to 1921, 82–3.

58 Morris, ‘George Ridding’, 140.

59 Frances Knight, ‘“A Church without Discipline is no Church at all”: Discipline and Diversity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Anglicanism’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, eds, Discipline and Diversity, SCH 43 (Woodbridge, 2007), 399–418, at 404.

60 Marsh, ‘The Primate and the Prime Minister’, 138.

61 All three were deemed illegal in the Ridsdale case: Bentley, Ritualism and Politics, 97–9.

62 Dearmer, Parson's Handbook, 1.

63 Charlotte Smith, ‘Martin v Machonochie / Machonochie v Penzance: A Crisis of Character and Identity in the Court of Arches?’, JLH 24/3 (2003), 36–58, at 43–5.

64 For a thorough overview of the various campaigns inside and outside parliament that led to the formation of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, see G. I. T. Machin, ‘The Last Victorian Anti-Ritualist Campaign, 1895–1906’, VS 25 (1982), 277–302.

65 G. K. A. Bell, Randall Davidson: Archbishop of Canterbury, 3rd edn (London, 1952), 456–8; R. C. D. Jasper, The Development of the Anglican Liturgy, 1662–1980 (London, 1989), 75.

66 MP for East Gloucestershire (made vacant by his father's death) 1874–85, Bristol West 1885–1904; chancellor of the exchequer in the first and third governments of Lord Salisbury 1885–6, 1895–1902: Martin Pugh, ‘Beach, Michael Edward Hicks, first Earl St Aldwyn (1837–1916)’, ODNB, 2010, online at: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-33859>, accessed 10 March 2019.

67 Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline: Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline: Volume One, Cd.3069 (London, 1906), 13.

68 See Dan Cruickshank, From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Ritualism and Anglo-Catholicism in the Evidence of the Royal Commission into Ecclesiastical Discipline, 1904–6 (London, 2018).

69 Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline: Volume One, 13.

70 Ibid. 13, 22, 23. It is not clear who created the template: Yates claims it was the English Church Union but provides no reference to substantiate this: Anglican Ritualism, 327. I would agree with Yates that this is the likely source of the template, although it cannot be certain.

71 Ibid. 308.

72 London, LPL, RCED 4, fols 200–9, Charles Gore to the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, [February 1906].

73 Ibid., fols 201–2.

74 Report of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, Cd.3040 (London, 1906), 2. The question of whether it was through parliament that the nation expressed its idea of right religion would play a central role in the Prayer Book crisis: John G. Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–1928 (Woodbridge, 2009).

75 Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline: Report, 2.

76 Ibid. 75.

77 Ibid. 76.

78 Ibid. 53.

79 Ibid. 75–6.

80 See my study of the Prayer Book crisis: Cruickshank, Dan D., The Theology and Ecclesiology of the Prayer Book Crisis, 1906–1928 (Cham, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The struggle between church and parliament would not end with the Prayer Book crisis but would continue well into the twentieth century: Maiden, John and Webster, Peter, ‘Parliament, the Church of England and the Last Gasp of Political Protestantism, 1963–4’, PH 32 (2013), 361–77Google Scholar. In the twentieth-first century the issue rumbles on, with threats to enact legislation to allow women to join the episcopate coming from parliamentarians after it was rejected by the General Synod of the Church of England in 2012: Patrick Wintour, ‘Female Bishops Controversy: Government says it will not step in’, The Guardian, 12 November 2012, online at: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/21/women-bishops-controversy>, accessed 28 January 2019.