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This book explores ritualism in the Church of England, covering the whole of the British Isles and not just the well-known churches and clergy beyond which many earlier studies did not venture. There has been a good deal of debate among historians and theologians as to whether or not the phenomenon that became known as ritualism was a logical extension of the developments in Anglican High–Church theology known as the Oxford Movement. Although many aspects of Victorian religious history have been the subject of revisionist studies in recent years, there has been no major reassessment of Anglican ritualism. Such a revisionist study is, therefore, the overall aim of this book. It examines Anglican historiography and considers the origins of ritualism to emphasize the strength of influences that were not wholly religious but permeated other areas of British culture: architecture, art, historical research, literature, philosophy, and political thought.

The Anglican Catholic Revival of the nineteenth century has been seen as an attempt to recover for the Church of England, and those churches descended from it, some of the doctrines and liturgical practices of the medieval church that were discarded at the Reformation. As a result, apologists for the Catholic Revival have tended to have a low opinion of Anglican doctrine and liturgical practice from the 1560s to the 1830s. An exception has been made for the Caroline divines and the eighteenth-century non-jurors, but no more. The teachings of the Tractarians and the innovations of the early ritualists cannot, however, be understood without a better appreciation of the nature of Anglicanism in the three centuries between the Reformation and the Oxford Movement. This chapter argues that neither Tractarianism nor ritualism burst upon a church wholly unprepared for them and that the Catholic Revival of the nineteenth century was not without precedent. It also discusses the status of Protestant establishments in England and Ireland on the eve of the Oxford Movement.

The interest that was to emerge in the Victorian period in a revival of ceremonial in public worship was not without precedent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The view that an interest in ceremonial was not part of the earliest phase of the Oxford Movement is also one that requires some careful modification. This chapter examines the relationship of Victorian ritualism to other High–Church developments in the 1830s and relates both to the wider aesthetic and antiquarian movements that were to provide the climate in which a reassessment of traditional Anglican spirituality proved such an attraction for a significant number of High–Churchmen, both clergy and laity. In addition to antiquarianism, medievalism, and romanticism, the Oxford Movement and the English Reformation are discussed, along with Tractarianism, ecclesiology, and ritualism and non-Anglican influences on Anglican ritualism.

Ritualism was one of the features of the Oxford Movement from its earliest manifestations. Much of the history of ritualism has concentrated on a few well-known ritualist churches in both London and the provinces and this has given a misleading impression of the relationship of the ritualist movement to the overall development of the Church of England and the other Anglican churches in the British Isles in the second half of the nineteenth century. This chapter re-examines the nature and extent of influence of Anglican ritualism before the passing of the Public Worship Regulation Act in 1874. As far as churches are concerned, the publication of guides to ritualist churches, which began with the Tourist's Church Guide in 1874, provides a relatively accurate guide to the geography of ritualism. This chapter looks at the Society of the Holy Cross and its members, the relationship between religious orders and ritualism, ritualism in the parishes from 1845 to 1874, ritualism in Scotland and Ireland, and comparative developments in Anglican churches overseas.

In 1859, there were attempts to persuade the Scottish Reformation Society to take a stand against the ritualism that was beginning to be manifested within the Scottish Episcopal Church. This chapter analyses the divisions that existed within the Church of England over matters of ritual. It surveys the responses of the different sections of the church — the clergy, the laity, the bishops, the cathedrals — to ritual innovation, and considers the exploitation of the patronage system of the Church of England for the benefit of ritualist clergy, as well as the pressures within the church from those who wanted to use the divisions over ritual as arguments in favour of disestablishment or schism. All sections of the church, clerical and lay, were divided over ritual, and Anglican opponents of ritual were encouraged in their opposition by Protestant dissenters, who used the evidence of growing ritual within the Church of England as additional ammunition in their campaigns to destabilize the Anglican establishment.

The divisions that existed within the Church of England over matters of ritual prompted authorities to enact legislation as a means to control ritualism. This chapter examines why it proved to be so difficult to control Anglican ritualism, whether through existing or new legislation. It looks at the motives of those who were determined to place limits on ritual innovation, as well as those of the many clergy and laity who were equally determined that such limits must be resisted, and those of the pragmatists who recognized that the judicial process had its limitations in matters of religious belief where opinions were strongly held and defended. It also discusses attempts to determine the legitimacy of doctrinal teaching through appeal to the courts, the impact of public opinion on discussions in Parliament, the establishment of the Royal Commission on Ritual in 1867, and the implementation of the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874.

This chapter explores the increase of ritualist activity in Anglican parishes in the thirty years following the passing of the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874. It examines the effect that Tractarian theology and ritualist practice had on how some Anglican High–Churchmen viewed their relations with the Roman Catholic Church and sought practical ways of implementing reunion schemes. It takes account of ritualist innovations in other Protestant churches in Britain, which could hardly be expected to be unaffected by the developments in Anglican ones. By the 1890s, the failure to prevent the spread of ritualist practices within the Church of England and beyond it led to what has been termed the ‘Crisis in the Church’ and eventually to the setting up of a Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline. This chapter also looks at ritualism in the parishes between 1875 and 1904, along with ritualism in Protestant dissent and the Church of Scotland.

The report of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline provided something of a watershed in the history of Anglican ritualism. The commission's recommendations plunged the Church of England into twenty years of wrangling about revising the Book of Common Prayer, only to have its efforts unappreciated by substantial sections of that church and to suffer the ignominy of the revised prayer book being rejected, not once but twice, by Parliament. One thing that happened in the first decade of the twentieth century was a change in ecclesiastical terminology. Ritualists stopped being called ritualists and became known as Anglo–Catholics. A further change occurred in the second half of the century with the growth of charismatic Evangelicalism, which both permeated the dominant group of central churchmen and further isolated the Anglo–Catholics. Initially, most Anglo–Catholics were unable or unwilling to recognize that the acceptance of so much Tractarian thinking, and even moderate ceremonial, by those of central churchmanship, was making Anglo–Catholicism seem both less attractive and more irrelevant.

Four main issues emerge from this study of Anglican ritualism in the nineteenth century. First, how did the ritualist movement relate both to traditional Anglicanism and to the earlier phases of the Oxford Movement? Secondly, what were the factors that created support for ritualism among Anglican clergy and laity? Thirdly, what was the overall impact of the ritualist movement on both the Church of England and wider Anglicanism in the second half of the nineteenth century? Finally, what effect has the ritualist movement had on the development of Anglicanism in the twentieth century? All these questions have to some extent been answered, at least tentatively, in the preceding pages, but it is desirable that this book should conclude with a clear and rounded assessment of the ritualist movement and the place it occupies within the broad spectrum of Anglican history over the past 450 years.