Abstract Edward Stephens, a barrister-turned-cleric, was a prolific pamphleteer in post-revolutionary England. He has thus featured frequently, if fleetingly, in historiography on politics and religion in the period after 1688. Yet no historian has provided a comprehensive or convincing interpretation of Stephens’s religious and political views. Given that Stephens was a founding member of the first Society for the Reformation of Manners, the debate about the religious politics of the moral reform movement has seen characterisations of Stephens confusingly bifurcate into that of a low churchman, on the one hand, and a high churchman, on the other. This article therefore removes Stephens from this well-worn historiographical debate in order to examine his political, religious and intellectual trajectory on its own terms. In so doing, it enhances our understanding of the process of religio-political realignment which followed the Revolution of 1688/9. Stephens was initially an ardent ‘Puritan-Whig’ supporter of the Revolution. However, the same providentialism which had motivated his attacks on the worldly Tory-Anglican hierarchy of the Restoration increasingly saw Stephens sympathise with Tories and Nonjurors as he became alert to the new threats of theological heterodoxy and rational religion apparently posed by the ‘latitudinarianism’ of the post-revolutionary Whigs. Not only does this invite us to reconsider the centrality of ecclesiology to historiography on late Stuart politics of religion, but it also poses a challenge to potentially teleological accounts of the origins of the early English Enlightenment.
MATTHEW LEECH-GERRARD (Thu,) studied this question.