METHODISM AND REVOLUTION

by J. H. S. Kent

This is an issue which has to be traced back to itssource in Halevy, and in the article which he wrote,ca-led "The birth of Methodism," published in 1906 andrecently translated and reprinted by the American historian,Bernard Semmel. 1 In this article the first significantreference to the links between Methodism and revolutionstates that "it is generally agreed that during the lastyears of the eighteenth century the influence or- Methodismcontributed a great deal to preventing the French Revo­lution from having an English counterpart. "2 Halevy'sthesis, as it is often termed, is popularly connectedwith the allegedly stabilizing effect of Methodism onEnglish society in the early 19th century, but in thisarticle Halevy began by proposing that it is alreadyagreed that Methodism helped to avert revolution in Eng­land in the late 18th century; then, in a later part ofthe essay, he argued more specifically that the birth ofWesleyanism was closely linked, and even causally con­nected, with a threat of profound social disturbance, ifnot revolution, in the late 1730's. It has sometimesseemed to me that one has only to state the wide-rangingnature of the claims which Halevy could make for Methodismas a pacifying influence in English affairs to make clearthat something must be wrong with his assertions; on theother hand, one can boil down this series of events--thedangers of the 1730's, the 1790's, the 1830's and 40's,and even the late 19th century, when Halevy was stillprepared to see the same process going on--into a singlebroad generalisation: that the Evangelical Revival, inall its forms, Anglican as well as Wesleyan, Baptist aswell as Irvingite, played a decisive role in stabilisingEnglish society between the 1730's and 1900. At thatlevel of generality it might almost be sufficient to ob­serve that 18th and 19th century religious groups, in sofar as they existed as distinct social influences, wereapt to behave pacifically, so that it would requirepositive evidence to sustain the opposite position toHalevy's, that is, that throughout this period, or at anydefinite time within it, Evangelicals, Anglican, Wesleyanor other, acted as a socially disruptive force, either

1 E. Hal~vy, The Birthand ed. by Bernard Semmel.1971.

2 Ibid., p. 51.

of Methodism in England, tr.University of Chicago Press,

making "revolution" more likely, or tending to makesociety more stable. And of course what does not rockthe boat may be seen as helping to stabilise it. Halevy,however, had not this negative idea of social signifi­cance in mind.

Great problems of definition are raised here, andone of them involves the word "stability." Again andagain Halevy returned to the claim that English societyhad shown itself more stable than French society, in asmuch as there had been no English equivalent of the FrenchRevolution. As Bernard Semmel has pointed out, Halevyhad found this idea in a general form in such writers asGuizot, Hippolyte Taine, and W. E. H. Lecky, whose Historyof England in the Eighteenth Century, in seven volumes,was published between 1878 and 1890. The argument thatbecause a violent revolution happened in France in the1790's, there must have been a potential revolution inEngland which was somehow prevented, has never convincedme; it sounds suspiciously like the Russian view that therevolution of 1917 must be followed by a similar eventin Germany, a view which led to the disastrous Spartakistrising, which was not in itself evidence that a revolu­tionary situation existed in Germany at all. I thinkthat it is very difficult to conceive the status of anallegedly historical event which ought to have happenedaccording to some philosophy or interpretation of history,but which cannot be said actually to have taken place intime and space. It is all very well for E. P. Thompson,for example, to say that "in the 1 790' sso.mething likean 'English Revolution' took place, of profound importancein shaping the consciousness of the post-war workingclass."3 On the following page he has himself to saythat "if there was no revolution in England in the 1790'sit was not because of iethodism but because the onlyalliance strong enough to affect it fell apart; after1792 there were no Girondins to open the doors throughwhich the Jacobins might come. If men like Wedgewood,Boulton and Wilkinson' had acted together with men likeHardy, Place and Binns--and if Wyvill's small gentry hadacted with them--then Pitt (or· Fox) would have been forcedto grant a large instalment of reform. But the FrenchRevolution consolidated Old Corruption by uniting land­owners and manufacturers in common panic; and the popularsocieties were too weak or too inexperienced to affect

Methodism and Revolution J..j{

3 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English WorkingClass, Penguin edition, 1968, p. 194.

138 Methodist History/A.M.E. Zion

either revolution or.reform on their own.,,4

This is a fascinating passage, but one cannot makea revolutionary situation out of so many "ifs." More­over, Thompson here suggests that the French Revolutiondrove the industrial bourgeoisie into alliance with thestatus quo; if was was so--and if anything Thompsonexaggerates the extent to which some such movement wasnecessary--one can hardly also assert that the FrenchRevolution created an English revolutionary situation,for its major effect would have been to detach frompotentially revolutionary groups the very leadershipusually regarded as essential to their success, and thiswould amount to defusing the situation as a whole. Therecould then be no question, as Thompson admits in passing,of Methodism playing an important role in preventingrevolution as such. Thompson errs semantically, it seemsto me, in using the word "revolution" for the socialtinrest of the late 18th and early 19th century~ He usesa more accurate term when he says of Luddism that "fromone aspect, Luddism may be seen as the nearest thing toa 'peasant's revolt' of industrial workers; instead ofsacking the c~teaux, the most immediate object whichsymbolised oppression--the gig-mill or power-loom millwas attacked. Coming at the close of twenty years inwhich the printing-press and the public meeting had beenvirtually silent, the Luddites knew of no nationalleadership which they could trust, no national polic~

with which they could identify their own agitation."?

A revolt of "industrial peasants" does not, however,make a revolution. Dr. Thompson is right to talk of thecomplicity of whole working-class communities in York­shire and Nottingham in 1812 in the attacks on textilemachinery and mills, but the scope and intentions ofthis violence remained limited, and it is not surprisingthat after 1815 the surviving Luddites put their energiesinto the campaign for parliamentary reform. In itsprimitive, classical form the concept of revolution meanta sudden, commonly violent, change of government; in the18th century this idea of radical, violent, change hadbeen coupled with predominantly humanistic dreams of aperfect society which could be attained by freeing men

4 Ibid., p. 195. Wedgwood, Boulton and Wilkinsonrepresented the industrial group; Hardy, Place and Binnsthe working-man interests of the London CorrespondingSociety; Wyvill was a Yorkshire minister, a moderatereformer, active among the smaller gentry.

5 Ibid., pp. 656-57-

Methodism and Revolution 139

from the tyranny of kings and priests. There were Eng­lish Jacobins who shared this ideology, but they hadlittle obvious influence on the troubles in the textilemills. In such circumstances stability depended on thewill of the governing groups to retain their position;and there is not the slightest reason to suppose thatbetween 1789 and 1848 the occasional moments of panicwhich swept the possessing classes (e.g. 1797, 1812,1832 and again at the height of the Chartist agitation),implied the kind of irresolution and lack of self-beliefwhich normally herald the collapse of a social order.

In other words, if one defines "stability" in termsof the presence or absence of a revolution like that inFrance, one is bound to conclude that British societywas "stable"; the conclusion is mistaken because thedefinition is misleading. There is no need to make whathappened in France the rule for what happened in England.Looked at by itself for the moment English societyshowed many signs of instability (not of incipient revo­lution) between about-r760 and 1848. If one thinks ofthe American War of Independence as an English as wellas an American event, however, it becomes clear, I sug­gest, that the important crisis of stability was situatedbefore the French Revolution and not after it. The firstand second American wars (1776 and 18l2),.while "freedomwars" on one side of the Atlantic and "status wars" 0)1

the other, were also a kind of renewal of the 17th cen­tury Civil War; in England as well as ~rt the Coloniespeople were deeply divided, but it was in A~erica thatthe aristocratic principle was abolished. Dr. Thompsonhas shown very clearly how already in the 1790's a chasmwas opening between the new industrial working-class andthe remainder of English society, a division which bythe end of the 19th century would largely replace theolder gulf between some sections of the ruling class and"historic Dissent"; b.ut the vital socio-politicaldecisions, which determined the degree of support whichthe working-class could expect from any "revolutionisedbourgeosie," h;ad been made be.fore 1789, and neither theEvangelical Revival nor religious in;luences in generalmade much difference to the outcome.

6 The American war, that is, was not only about thepolitical rights of the colonists under the old Britishconstitution; it was about the kind of society whichought to exist on both sides of the Atlantic; the majorityof the English middle-class supported the aristocracy inthe defence of the traditional society and so committed

140 Methodist History/A.M.E. Zion

We must return, ~however, to Halevy's 1906 essay onthe birth of Methodism. Hal~vy was not only concernedwith the 1790's but with the early 18th century, andthe next reference to "revolution" in the essay refersto this period. He had described how George Whitefieldand John Wesley had begun to preach in the open air in1739; how could one explain~ he asked, the rapid spreadof Wesleyanism after that date? llJust at the time whenthe religious revolution led by Wesley and Whitefieldwas beginning, a political revolution was under way inEngland. The simultaneous character of the two eventsis not, nor could it be, a pure coincidence; it seemsthat one must have been the effect of the other, or boththe effect of an identical cause. 117

This is a good example of the looseness with whichHalevy used his terms. When the word "revolution" istransferred to Wesley and Whitefield it loses anydefinite meaning; both men combined the rationalism ofthe age with a determination to go back religiously;they did not threaten their hearers with any kind of newrevelation turned towards the future but threatened themwith the spiritual consequences of not returning to thepast. In a society in which the steady growth of peace,order and prosperity after the various tumults of the17th century and the French War against Louis XIV pro­duced guilt in many who felt a conflict between the newmarket-society humanism and the traditional Christiandoctrine of the corruption of human nature, this approachproved profitable; but it was not "revolutionary,T1 anadjective which suggests discontinuity, not the re-estab­lishment of continuity with the past. Now it was charac­teristic even of John Wesley's idea of Christian per­fection that this was a last-ditch effort to preservethe world-renouncing ascetic tradition by domesticatingit within the market society: Wesley, one might say,sought to vulgarise Fenelon's amour pur.

The lack of logic in Halevy's argument should nowbe evident. On the religious, as distinct from thepolitical, side of his thesis the birth of Wesleyanismwas neither as dramatic nor as innovatory as Halevy, no

England to opposition to the revolutionary ideology longbefore 1789. When the English poor emigrated to theUnited States in the 19th century, however, they oftenmade a conscious choice of what seemed to them a freerand fairer society.

7 Semmel, op.cit., p. 62.

141Methodism and Revolution

According to Hal~vy's argument (in the 1906 essay),Methodism began at a time when the once flourishingwoollen industry which spread south from Bristol wasgoing to ruin. He painted a vivid picture of daylabourers marching against "the leading industrial towns,where the merchants resided. They plundered, theyburned; they besieged the houses of the merchants .... InWiltshire, at Trowbridge, Bedford and Melksham, the dis­turbances became so serious that a state of siege wasproclaimed and the sOBdiers were permanently quarteredin these localities." Halevy admitted that contem-porary sources made little reference to this major crisis,which he coupled with the gradual collapse of Walpole'spower: in fact, Hal~vy relied largely on Country Common­sense, by A Gentleman of Wiltshire, a series of essayswhich had appeared in the Gloucester Journal before beingpublished together in 1739, and which took the side ofthe workers against the clothiers, a position not un­popular with the local gentry in Gloucestershire, whohad their own reasons for disliking some of the localclothiers. The writer of the pamphlet has since beenidentified as either .the elder or the younger ThomasAndrews of Seend, a village between Trowbridge and Devizes,and so close to the scene of the most persistent troublesin Wiltshire; J. de L. Mann, ~n The Cloth Industry inthe West of England from 1640 to 1880 (Oxford 1971), saysthat "his eloquence made an impression throughout thecountry and has helped to create the widespread but un­true impression that the Wiltshire industry was alreadymoribund.,,9 Hal-evy may be regarded as one of his victims.

I

II doubt following the Wesleyan mythology which he pickedI up at first-hand in the opening years of the presentI

I century, believed it to have been; its growth was slow,I and probably owed much more than can easily be measured

to careful institutionalisation and to centralised,rather than charismatic, leadership. It follows thatthere can have been no religious revolution which re­quired extraordinary social and political circumstancesfor its occurrence; but this does not mean that we canavoid looking in some detail at Halevy's discussion ofthe state of the woollen industry in the south-west inthe 1730's, for he relied on this evidence to justifyhis claim that Wesleyanism had prevented "revolution"in the very moment of its birth.

It is certain that the woollen industry was an

8 Ibid.9 J. de L. Mann, op.cit., pp. 109-10.

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142 Methodist History/A.M.E. Zion

unhappy one. Mann says that "up to the middle of thecentury there was an almost continuous deciine in ratesfor weaving. "10 There were riots in Wiltshire and EastSomerset in 1726-27 and in Gloucestershire in 1727;there were more riots in Wiltshire in 1738, when severalpeople were hanged; there were to be further outbreaksin Gloucestershire in 1756; bitterness over the intro­duction of new machinery led to unrest which culminatedin the burning of Littleton Mill near Trowbridge in 1802.There is nothing to suggest a potentially revolutionarysituation at any point, however; the weavers usuallyacted in a legal manner in order to get what they believedto be their legal rights; it was the clothiers who norm­ally disregarded legal obligations, and there is littleevidence that they felt the need of Wesleyanism as afurther restraint on their labour force. Inde€d, J. deL. Mann observed that although the rise of the SundaySchool movement in the 1780's did something to alleviatethe economic distress in some parts of Gloucestershire,"It did nothing to reconcile the workers to their lot orto produce a more acquiescent attitude towards theirmasters. 1fll In this sense Halevy's statement of 1739that "the despair of the working-class was the rawmaterial to which Methodist doctrine and discipline gavea shape" implied a causal relation which he did not prove.Nor in view of the" history of the West of England clothIndustry after 1739 is there much substance in hisquestion: "Why, then, did the working-class agitationof 1738, after its violent beginnings, take the form ofa religious and mystical movement whose ideal was afterall extremely conservative, rather than terminating insocial revolution?,,12

Hal~vy's argument takes the form: (a) that revo­lution was possible in the late 1730's, if the working­class had stuck to a secular programme, and found ade­quate leadership; (b) that a drive in this direction,towards social conflict, was stopped; (c) that Whitefieldand Wesley stopped the political process by transmutingsecular to religious energies.

One finds it difficult to believe in (c) at all,

10 Ibid., p. 109.11 Ibid., p. 114. Mann sees the situation as a

problem of social order, not of potential revolution;he does not require a "religious and mystical movement lf

to eX~lain the history of the west of England cloth trade.2 Semmel, op.cit., p. 74.

~'

j;;

Methodism and Revolution 143

that is, that a desperate working-class which had alreadyjshown the ability to riot could be persuaded to forget~its political needs and economic grievances; the evidence~is that it did not, but that the vigour with which orderJwas restored, whether at Melksham in 1738 or at Trow-:!bridge in 1803, when Thomas Helliker was hanged for theiburning of Littleton Mill, took the heart out of theIagitation: this happened again in the late 1830's.

j Hal€vy developed his theory a state further. TheI workers, huddled about industrial centres, required a1doctrine, an ideal. They would naturally appeal to the

bourgeoisie for leadership: but the middle-class, neitherirreligious nor republican, gave to working-class dis-

! content "a religious and conservative form."13 Therefore! in the long run Wesleyanism expressed the will of thei bourgeoisie to support a social order founded on anj inequality of rank and wealth. That the English middle­4 class accepted the structure of the 18th century defer-1 ence society was certainly true.

Hal€vy at this point brought his essay to an endrather precipitately, without appearing to consider thatwhat he had really said was that the choice of revolutionor acquiescence lay with the middle-class, not with th~·

workers, and that therefore any explanation as to whythere was no 18th century revolution in England (a ques­tion which has of course to be put with the qualificationswhich I have already outlined above), would have to bein terms of the bourgeoisie, and therefore need not beput in terms of Wesleyanism at all. Indeed, Hal~vy's

whole generalisation seems to collapse in these concludingpages, where he necessarily admits that the bourgeoisiewas neither atheistic.nor republican nor genuinely bitterabout rank: Arkwrights might envy the gentry but in theend he became the knight and squire that he had alwayswanted to be. There was no middle-class deep sense ofeconomic frustration to demand the removal of a sickking, a puerile court and a government which could noteven win the first American War. Why all this was soseems to have had little to do with the existence of theWesleyan societies; the origins of those societies remainsomething of a mystery, which can be solved best byadding together a large number of different explanations.As to the general question, what remains of Hal~vy'sinvocation of the word "revolution" is the general, vagueproposition that the religious factor, limited in Halevy's

13 Ibid., p. 75.

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definition to Evangelicalism but obviously not so limitedin historical fact, played a decisive stabilising rolein English society between the 1730's and 1900. In otherwords, the problem towards which Halevy was drawingattention was the relation between religion and change,in a situation in which, in the 18th century, among themost forceful agents of change were the new industrialists.Religion did not inhibit their appetite for change, anymore than did the fresh religious vitality of the Vic­torian period. As for the working-classes, there is noevidence that they considered revolution in the 18th cen­tury, or that religious forces drew them away into saferkinds of meditation. Hal~vy was wrong about the prole­tarian influence of Methodism in the 18th century. Inthe 19th century, however, small groups of working-classpeople set up Methodist institutions. If Hal~vy wereright, the effect of these would again have been to delay(not prevent) change. When we consider specific working­class groups, however, like the struggling PrimitiveMethodist mining societies in the Somerset coalfieldround Midsomer Norton and Radstock, one concludes, firstthat they spent most of their time in a struggle to sur­vive at all, and consequently had little effect on theindustrial situation; and (b) that one cause of theirweakness was their inability to dominate or alter thepolitical moods and methods of the workers. In specificcases of this kind, the role of the religious groupseems neither "revolutionary" nor "conservative," but

I

that of a spectator.