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‘Master in the Art of Holy Living’: The Sanctity of William Stevens
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
The following paper explores the sanctity of the late eighteenth-century High Church Anglican layman, William Stevens (1732—1807), as seen through the eyes of his biographer, Sir James Allan Park (1763–1838). A largely unstudied figure, Stevens, a prosperous London hosier who dedicated most of his adult life to philanthropic, theological and ecclesiastical concerns, arguably represents one of the most important figures within pre-Tractarian High Churchmanship. Park was a close friend of Stevens. A judge of the Common Pleas and a founding member of Stevens’s ‘Club of Nobody’s Friends’, Park shared Stevens’s interest in theology and church-related concerns, even publishing in 1804 a short discourse directed towards young people, on the need for a frequent reception of Holy Communion. In focus here is a facet of Stevens’s life that came to be closely associated with his many achievements as a lay divine and activist within the pre-Tractarian Church of England, namely, his personal sanctity; this was marked by a close connection between faith and works, a strict dedication and devotion to the Church of England’s services and sacraments, and a rejection of’enthusiasm’ in its pejorative sense — all of which he held while maintaining a strong sense of cheerfulness and zeal. A portrait of sanctity that conforms to what is known about pre-Tractarian spirituality, the Memoirs may additionally be viewed as offering a representative understanding of what constituted holiness for this Anglican tradition.
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References
1 Since Park, the only account of Stevens’s life has been Rowell, Geoffrey, The Club of ‘Nobody’s Friends’ 1800–2000 (Durham, 2000), 1–31.Google Scholar
2 See, e.g., Varley, E. A., The Last of the Prince Bishops: William Van Mildert and the High Church Movement of the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992), 8–9, 63–4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sack, James J., From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1993), 190–3 Google Scholar; and Nockles, Peter B., The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), 14 nn. 47, 50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 See Park, James Allan, An Earnest Exhortation to a Frequent Reception of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (London, 1804).Google Scholar
4 The term ‘pre-Tractarian’ distinguishes traditional Anglican High Churchmanship from its post-1830s Tractarian divergence. Pre-Tractarian High Churchmanship is a tradition within Anglicanism which emphasized its catholic, sacramental and monarchical roots, whilst not rejecting its reformed and Protestant heritage as Tractarianism often did. The pre-Tractarians are also referred to as the ‘Orthodox’.
5 See Park, James Allan, Memoirs of William Stevens, Esq. (London, 1812)Google Scholar. Citations here are from the fourth edition, Memoirs of William Stevens, Esq. : Treasurer of Queen Anne’s Bounty (London, 1825). A fifth edition appeared in 1859, though this was edited by Christopher Wordsworth, junior (see [G.E. Colcayne] Biographical List of the Members of ‘The Club of Nobody’s Friends’ (London, 1885), 4), who, aside from taking the liberty of substantially cleaning up and simplifying the grammar of what appears to be the fourth edition, also added a preface. Though it makes for easier reading, the 1859 edition is not, therefore, by Park alone and has thus not been used here.
6 Gentleman’s Magazine 77 (1807), 173–5.
7 ODNB, s.n. ‘Park, Sir James Alan (1763–1838)’.
8 See Nockles, Oxford Movement, 1–43.
9 Park, Memoirs, 131.
10 Originally published as The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living in 1650, the work was also known by the shorter title, Holy Living. For a critical edition, see Taylor, Jeremy, Holy Living, ed. Stanwood, P. G. (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar
11 Park, Memoirs, 6–8.
12 Ibid. 3.
13 Ibid. 1–3.
14 Ibid. 2.
15 Ibid. 3.
16 Ibid. 23.
17 Ibid. 29.
18 Ibid. 23–5.
19 Ibid. 24.
20 Ibid. 25.
21 Ibid. 26–7.
22 Ibid. 26.
23 Ibid. 23.
24 Ibid. 35. See also Nockles, Oxford Movement, 256–61.
25 Park, Memoirs, 35.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid. 37.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid. 37–8.
30 Ibid. 38–9.
31 Ibid. 41.
32 Ibid. 40.
33 Mee, John, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2005), 25–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34 Nockles, Oxford Movement, 191.
35 See, e.g., Jones, William, The Theological, Philosophical and Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. William Jones, M.A., F.R.S., 12 vols (London, 1801), 1: 245–300 Google Scholar, esp. 278–82.
36 Park, Memoirs (1859 edn), App. II, 157.
37 See Nockles, Oxford Movement, 40–1.
38 Park, Memoirs, 38.
39 Ibid. 39–40. For confirmation of this, see London Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, etc., no. 90 (10 October 1818), 655.
40 Park, Memoirs, 46–7.
41 Though Park does not in any way elaborate on it, Stevens does in fact confess in a section quoted in the Memoirs that he often possesses a ‘melancholy cast’ that ‘sometimes … leads him to the habitations of the afflicted’: ibid. 81.
42 Williamsburg, VA, College of William and Mary, Swem Library, MS Jonathan Boucher Papers, Bf/2/5-20, letters of William Stevens to Jonathan Boucher, 1789–94.
43 Boucher, Jonathan, Reminiscences of an American Loyalist 1738–1798 (Port Washington, NY, 1967), 146.Google Scholar
44 As quoted in Park, Memoirs (1859 edn), 18.
45 Nockles, Oxford Movement, 26. Cf.Burns, Arthur, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England (Oxford, 1999), 17Google Scholar; Brandwood, Geoffrey K., ‘“Mummeries of a Popish Character” — The Camdenians and Early Victorian Worship’, in Webster, Christopher and Elliott, John, eds, ‘A church as it should be’: the Cambridge Camden Society and its Influence (Stamford, 2000), 62–97, at 67Google Scholar; Faught, C. Brad, The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and their Times (Pennsylvania, PA, 2003), 35Google Scholar; Locke, Kenneth A., The Church in Anglican Theology: A Historical, Theological and Ecumenical Exploration (Farnham, 2009), 70.Google Scholar
46 Nockles, , Oxford Movement, 196.Google Scholar
47 Ibid. 193–5.
48 Rowell, ‘Nobody’s Friends’ 1800–2000, 2. The Hackney Phalanx dominated church affairs in the early nineteenth century. Led by the layman Joshua Watson (1771—1855), it contributed significantly to the upkeep and maintenance of the many church societies that flourished during the first half of the nineteenth century.
49 The best evidence for this is the 1859 edition of the Memoirs. Aside from containing a list of the club’s early members (ibid. 168–216, App. III), the preface lauded Stevens’s memory. Its author, Christopher Wordsworth, claimed that the members of the club ‘may be regarded, in a certain sense, as his [Stevens’s] posterity’; furthermore, the club’s role was that of ‘cherishing and maintaining those sound religious and political principles, which its Founder advocated unswervingly and unflinchingly, but charitably and wisely, in his writings, and exhibited in his life’: ibid. iv. The paragraph from which these quotations are taken from is also quoted in [Cokayne] Biographical List of the Members of ‘The Club of Nobody’s Friends’, viii.