The extraordinary career of the last Prince Bishop of Durham, like almost everything else about the early nineteenth-century High Church movement, had its roots in the eighteenth-century circle surrounding William Stevens: an alliance of prosperous lay churchmen from mercantile, financial and legal backgrounds and campaigning High Church clergy.

Many of Stevens' circle were actively involved in the politico–theological contests of the eighteenth century. His cousin George Horne, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and his close friend William Jones, perpetual curate of Nayland, Suffolk, played a leading part in the controversies inspired by the maverick biblical scholar and polemicist, John Hutchinson.

Hutchinson's idiosyncratic approach to decyphering the true meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures was merely laughable to mainstream Hebraists, but his work also had live political implications. Horne and Jones vigorously defended Hutchinson's insistence on the centrality of Revealed Truth to all human knowledge and the absolute dependence of man on God. They also endorsed his affirmation of the biblical basis for a high doctrine of kingship, duelling in print with the Whig Hebraist, Benjamin Kennicott, who accused them not only of using ‘the pretence of glorifying revelation’ as an excuse to ‘insult and trample upon reason’ but also of Jacobite sympathies. The Jacobite tag was unjustified, despite Horne's friendship with Samuel Johnson. Stevens and his circle held firmly to doctrines of divinely ordained kingship and passive obedience, but invoked them in support of the Hanoverian dynasty.