The Professionalization of an Elite: The Nineteenth Century Episcopate

A number of Victorian writers identified a change in the episcopate in the nineteenth century: Dean Burgon, for example, believed that a remodeled episcopacy emerged at this time. Historians have advanced the view that the changes were generated by the Whig ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s. Indeed it is part of the schemata of ecclesiastical history that bishops in the eighteenth century were fundamentally different from those in the nineteenth century. Yet, as C. K. Francis Brown admitted, there has been no attempt to establish a pattern of this in the career and social history of the nineteenth century episcopate. This is all the more surprising since a structuralist analysis of the Caroline and Hanoverian episcopate has existed for some years. The traditional view of Church history, that the ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s and 1840s were the principal engine of change, have tended to overlook the structural changes in bishops' career patterns and that there was a change in the concept of the episcopal function. The context of this changed concept of episcopal duty is important. Recent work on the professionalization of the clergy has focused on the immediate impact of the Reformation and the development of the Church as a profession up to the early eighteenth century. Rosemary O'Day and Geoffrey Holmes have demonstrated that between 1580 and 1730 the clerical profession became increasingly stratified. The overpopulation of the clergy in the eighteenth century accelerated this trend, establishing a Church in which there were extremes of wealth and poverty. At the same time the clergy were subject to greater lay control than any other emergent profession. This tension between professionalization and institutions of the state has been examined in other occupations, but throughout the nineteenth century it grew stronger in the Church. From patronage of a living to nomination to a see, laity dominated the Church. In spite of Whig reforms of the 1830s and 1840s lay control established strict parameters within which the professionalization of the episcopate occurred. The effect of control from outside the Church was that the paths to the bench of bishops remained more numerous and varied than the limited paths to the elite of other professions like the judiciary. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also saw functional trends that brought about the professionalization of the clergy. These changes have been thoroughly analyzed by Anthony Russell. The self-conscious spirituality of the Tractarian movement also effected changes in the popular view of the clerical function, and the episcopate was not immune to these changes. By the closing decades of the nineteenth-century bishops were appointed whose careers had been touched by these trends. Equally important were developments within the episcopate that altered the bishops' roles.