This article examines the character of John Hynde Cotton, a leading tory opponent of Sir Robert Walpole, who played a particularly puzzling role in the conspiracies behind the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and the parliaments of George II. Entering a coalition ministry in 1744, he was immersed at the same time in intrigue with the exiled Stuart court, and at one stage pledged to use resignation from government as the signal for rebellion. The article explores the background to his career, tracing the intellectual, professional and kinship networks into which he was pressed, and their impact on his political commitments. Cotton's views on government and society were the product of a man caught up in a conflict between image and reality, torn between a set of different identities: robust doyen of rural squiredom, political and commercial ‘insider’, scholar, and ideologue shaped profoundly by the politico-religious crises of the previous century. The article aims to stimulate a new analysis of the facts of a tory-Jacobite career, and so enhance a debate that is in danger of appearing stale. It aspires to reach a deeper understanding of the meaning and principles of eighteenth-century toryism, beyond the mere counting of ‘Jacobite’ or ‘Hanoverian’ heads.
Established in 1662, the New England Company introduced the first crown-sponsored initiative for propagating the gospel among the native populations bordering English America. Under the leadership of Robert Boyle, its work influenced royal policy, but awakened contention over the practice of Atlantic colonization and, simultaneously, the making of the Restoration church. This article examines the reception of the Company in England, showing how its architects sought to link the plantation process to the advancement of a global Protestant mission. The ambition drew Company leaders into debates over the reshaping of church institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, the mission became a vehicle for the promotion of Protestant ‘comprehension’, as a bid to unite the different streams of the reformed religion, and widen the fold of the established church. However, the Company was frustrated by the confessional antagonisms that entered into domestic politics. Divisions between congregations thwarted missionary collaboration, and stirred doubts in England and America over the relationship between colonization and the ‘Protestant interest’. The article will identify the conflicts within the Restoration church as a formative factor behind competing ideas of overseas expansion, and a substantial obstacle to the emergence of the Protestant mission as part of the colonizing strategies of the English crown.
The clergyman-scholar Charles Dodd used the study of the past to articulate a defence of the English Catholic community that enjoyed a rich legacy. His Church history proclaimed a vision of Catholic patriotism that appealed to the influence of medieval and Reformation history on contemporary religious debates, and informed the later push for civil emancipation. Dodd's work brought together two fashionable but seemingly contrary, historical sensibilities: grounded upon antiquarian recoveries of the gothic past, but shaped by a cosmopolitan spirit of ‘reason’ that drew upon continental reformist schools. Challenging the narratives forged through the Reformation, he pitched his works across a wide spectrum of English scholarly life, seeking dialogue with high-churchmen, constitutionalists, and supporters of religious toleration. But Dodd's later reputation as a herald of Catholic Enlightenment belied the controversies roused in his career. In delivering his view of history, Dodd was forced to suppress radical thoughts on the nature of English monarchy, stumbled into conflicts with fellow clergymen, and risked the taint of heresy with reflections upon the Holy See. Conceived to construct a new intellectual platform for his co-religionists within their national community, his works served inadvertently to reveal the complexity and fragility of English Catholic life.
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