Description
Before Queen Anne’s reign had even begun, rival factions in both Church and State were jostling for position in her court. Attempting to follow a moderate course, the new monarch and her advisors had to be constantly wary of the attempts of extremists on both sides to gain the upper hand. The result was a see-saw period of alternating influence that has fascinated historians and political commentators.
In this engaging new study, Barry Levis shows that although both parties claimed to be in support of the Church, their real aim was advancing their respective political positions. Uniting close analysis of Queen Anne’s changing policies towards dissenters, occasional conformity and church appointments with studies of the careers of several prominent churchmen and politicians, Levis paints a gripping picture of competing religious values and political ambitions. Most significantly, he shows that, far from being restricted to the church and political elites, these conflicts were to have a cascading influence on the division of the country long after the Queen’s reign ended.
About the Author
Dr R. Barry Levis is Professor Emeritus of History at Rollins College, Winter Park, FL. He has published numerous book chapters and journal articles on ecclesiastical history with a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Prologue, 1698–1702
2. The Tory Ascendancy, 1702–4
3. The Shifting Balance of Power, 1705–6
4. Strife in the North: A Case Study of Local Ecclesiastical Politics
5. The Whig Supremacy, 1706–9
6. The Sacheverell Trial, 1709–10
7. The Return of the Tories, 1710–14
8. Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Endorsements and Reviews
Render Unto Caesar is a remarkable study of the religious politics of the reign of Queen Anne, rooted in a profound knowledge of manuscript sources. Barry Levis has revealed how central the Church was to the period of ‘the rage of Party’. It is further evidence that the Church was a source of passionate controversy in the early eighteenth century.
William Gibson, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Oxford Brookes University
Using an impressive range of archival and printed sources, Levis details the high politics of ecclesiastical policy politics in the early eighteenth century. Render Unto Caesar offers a reliable guide to the complex debates about the relationship between church and state in post-revolutionary England.
Brian Cowan, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History, McGill University
R.B. Levis grounds this first deep-dive regnal analytical narrative of Queen
Anne’s struggle to rule with moderation in a thorough exploitation of the extant
sources, making especially effective use of the surviving fragments of the diary and
correspondence of Anne’s figurative confessor, the embattled Anglican moderate
John Sharp, Archbishop of York. T e result is a definitive study of Church-State
politics for Anne’s reign for our times and, one anticipates, for many years to come.
R.O. Bucholz, Professor of History, Loyola University Chicago
Leavis, by contrast, considers the Church of England through the machinations involved in its governance. Render Unto Caesar is to be commended for its exceptionally close reading of the personalities at the court of Queen Anne. But one cannot help wondering whether politics, even ecclesiastical politics, is bigger than that. Brent S. Sirota, North Carolina State University In Church History, Volume 92 , Issue 4 , December 2023
Outside of the bishops’ correspondence, much of Levis’s evidence base is the familiar ground of the famous pamphlets that made up the “Rage of Party,” spurred from wellunderstood debates like the Occasional Conformity controversy, and the Sacheverell Riots. These sources will probably never stop attracting scholarly attention, not least because of their remarkable readability: Swift’s Conduct of the Allies, and many of the others that feature in Levis’s book, are pleasures to read centuries later. They have also been shown to be central to literary and political developments of the long eighteenth century. Levis’s lens of analysis presents these pamphlets in a fresh perspective. Levis’s capacity to do so leaves one wondering what insights these sources will be used for next. William H. F. Mitchell, London School of Economics and Political Science, In Journal of British Studies, April, 2024
