Historians on Clarkson's religion

Clarkson was not an Evangelical, but is sometimes labelled as one owing to his friendship with leading Evangelical abolitionists such as William Wilberforce.Footnote ⁹ In his volume of the New Oxford History of England, Boyd Hilton wrote that the ‘sudden nationwide explosion of moral indignation’ against the slave trade ‘was largely due to Thomas Clarkson, an Anglican evangelical and itinerant campaigner’.Footnote ¹⁰ While conceding that ‘it is difficult to identify him with certainty as an evangelical’, Clarkson was none the less included in the Blackwell dictionary of Evangelical biography based on some doubtful evidence.Footnote ¹¹ In addition, scholars who do not clearly label Clarkson an Evangelical can leave an impression that he was one.Footnote ¹² When Christopher Brown discusses the formation of a group of ‘devout Anglicans’ at Teston in 1786, he points to the presence of James Ramsay and visits by Clarkson and Wilberforce before declaring: ‘Teston, not Clapham became the first headquarters for Evangelical abolitionism.’Footnote ¹³ Brown is usually careful to refer to Clarkson as a ‘devout’ or ‘pious’ Anglican, rather than an Evangelical. Yet it was understandably easy for a leading scholar of slavery, when reviewing his book, to be left with the impression that Clarkson was one of the Evangelical Anglicans.Footnote ¹⁴

The common association of Clarkson with Evangelicalism owes something to the five-volume Life of Wilberforce, written by his Anglican High-Church sons.Footnote ¹⁵ Reacting against Clarkson's own personal account of the abolition movement, this work deliberately diminished his role in the campaign. With the help of his Unitarian friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, Clarkson published a critical response to the biography of Wilberforce, but the damage had been done.Footnote ¹⁶ As a key primary source for the study of abolitionism, the Life of Wilberforce ensured that the Evangelical politician long occupied centre stage in the story of abolition – something reflected in the 2006 film Amazing Grace.Footnote ¹⁷

Some scholars stress Clarkson's affinity with the Quakers. This is understandable given that he worked closely with them in founding the campaign for abolition, and proceeded to write a three-volume study of Quakerism and an influential biography of William Penn.Footnote ¹⁸ Dee Andrews and Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner have argued that Clarkson's association with the Quakers was ‘essential to his development’ both as an abolitionist and as a writer of ‘a new kind of history … that sought to combine the empirical drive of social science with the passion of social reform’. In the Quakers, they claim, Clarkson ‘found his chief moral argument – that the slave trade was not a political cause so much as a moral one’.Footnote ¹⁹ This is questionable, as Clarkson had come to see slavery as a great moral evil before he met the Quakers.Footnote ²⁰ That said, having made a good case for the various ways the Quakers influenced his activist and literary careers, Andrews and Lapsansky-Werner note that Clarkson ‘left us few clues’ as to why he ‘never joined the Religious Society of Friends’. They speculate that the Quakers ‘may have been too theologically reticent to compete with the evangelical fervour of many of Clarkson's other allies. Or the abolitionist's political compass may have steered him more toward the well-connected Anglicans than toward the politically powerless Quakers’.Footnote ²¹ Here again we see the conventional focus on Clarkson's connections to both Quakers and Evangelicals. When Tsar Alexander i asked if he was a Quaker, Clarkson famously replied ‘not in Name, but I hoped in Spirit; I was nine parts out of ten of their way of thinking. They had been Fellow Labourers with me in our Great Cause, the more I had known them, the more I had loved them’.Footnote ²² The context is important. The Tsar had expressed an enthusiasm for Quakerism and Clarkson was trying to cultivate his support for anti-slavery. Back when Clarkson was writing his Portraiture of Quakerism, a friend noted that ‘he greatly admired them without adopting their opinions’.Footnote ²³

While Clarkson was undoubtedly attracted by many aspects of Quakerism, it distracts attention from the fact that he remained an Anglican throughout his life. Observing that most historians ‘have got the religious labelling wrong’, Ellen Gibson Wilson noted in her biography that ‘we know that he was a committed Christian but he defies categorisation. Most previous writers have either put him in the Clapham Sect with Wilberforce or labelled him a Quaker. The latter has more substance’.Footnote ²⁴ Like many scholars, however, she displayed a limited interest in religion – tending to pass over Clarkson's writings on religion with a mere sentence or two.Footnote ²⁵ While noting that Clarkson ‘remained in the Church of England, yet rejected ordination as a priest, clerical clothes and the title “reverend”’, Wilson inferred that he was put off by the ‘notoriously lax’ nature of the Church in ‘the age of the fox-hunting parson, the hard drinker and high liver who abandoned his parish (or parishes) to a curate and enjoyed rank and fortune in society’.Footnote ²⁶ This caricature of a worldly, intellectually arid and neglectful eighteenth-century Church has, however, been overturned by revisionist historians – it reflects nineteenth-century Evangelical and secular polemics more than the eighteenth-century reality.Footnote ²⁷

In a revisionist approach, Nicholas Hudson has argued that abolitionism was largely a product of conservative Anglican ideology, highlighting figures such as Samuel Johnson and stressing the orthodoxy of Granville Sharp. Avoiding any discussion of Clarkson, Hudson simply stated that he ‘was an Anglican clergyman’ who supported his interpretation:

This is an odd grouping of ‘Anglican divines’. Ramsay was an Evangelical, while William Paley and Thomas Clarkson were Latitudinarians.

There are three main reasons for this confusion about Clarkson's religion. First, he was of an irenic disposition, with friends of various denominations and dispositions, and focused on building a popular abolitionist campaign that attracted supporters from a variety of religious, political and social backgrounds.Footnote ²⁹ Second, there is a problem of evidence. As Earl Griggs noted, Clarkson was ‘always reticent about his personal affairs’, he ‘seems to have mentioned nothing of his youth’ and in old age destroyed nearly all of his voluminous manuscripts and correspondence.Footnote ³⁰ As a result, there is a lack of manuscript sources for his formative years as a student at Cambridge and his surviving correspondence is overwhelmingly devoted to anti-slavery activity. Third, as R. K. Webb has observed, ‘the structural foundations of religion in the British Isles are sunk in a terminological swamp’.Footnote ³¹ It is easy to make mistakes or miss nuances when studying eighteenth-century religious opinions.

Anglican Latitudinarianism

Despite these difficulties, analysis of the surviving evidence suggests that Clarkson developed anti-Trinitarian theological views within the tradition of Anglican Latitudinarianism. Latitudinarianism originated in the seventeenth century, and was a term applied to those who sought to harmonise Anglican Protestantism and the Scientific Revolution.Footnote ³² Latitudinarians questioned traditional practices and doctrines that had evolved in previous centuries, and argued that rational critical study of the Bible would promote an enlightened Christianity based on the core truths originally taught by Jesus Christ. They combined a faith in the Bible as containing God's word and the power of reason to detect the essential doctrines of ‘primitive Christianity’. The philosopher John Locke, for example, aimed to show ‘the doctrine of our Saviour and his apostles, as delivered in the Scriptures, and not as taught by the several sects of Christians’ in his Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).Footnote ³³ Latitudinarians believed in the social and political value of an established national Protestant Church of England, but wanted to tolerate a latitude of views on debatable, non-essential theological points.

While united in their commitment to toleration and critical study of the Bible, Latitudinarians developed diverse theological views. In the context of the Enlightenment, by the late eighteenth century a number of Latitudinarians linked to Cambridge University had become Unitarians and were pushing ‘the boundaries of enlightened Christianity beyond even the elastic limits tolerated by the Church’.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, some left the Church of England while others continued to practice a Latitudinarian form of Anglicanism that came to be called ‘Broad Church’ in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁵ Following his conversion experience in the 1780s, according to his sons, the Cambridge-educated William Wilberforce set out to counter the ‘deadly leaven’ of ‘Latitudinarian views [that] had spread to an alarming extent among the clergy; and whilst numbers confessedly agreed with his Socinian tenets, few were sufficiently honest to resign with Mr. Lindsey the endowments of the Church’.Footnote ³⁶ It is in this context that Clarkson was educated and turned his back on a clerical career, while remaining a member of the Church of England.

Clarkson was a student at Cambridge University during a time of fierce debate over theology and the requirement that students and clergy subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. These articles articulated orthodox theology centred on the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost (or Spirit) – understood to mysteriously form three ‘persons’ of a unified monotheistic God. According to this orthodox doctrine Jesus Christ, the Son, was God incarnate and died on the cross as a sacrifice to atone for human sinfulness. By the late eighteenth century, however, a number of liberal-minded Latitudinarian Anglican clergy had adopted anti-Trinitarian views. Some became Arians, believing that Jesus was divine and had pre-existed his life on earth, but was a subordinate being to God – effectively a super-angel.Footnote ³⁷ Others adopted Socinianism, in which Jesus was a human being given a special commission by God, and then resurrected to an exalted status following his crucifixion. Both varieties of anti-Trinitarianism were at times called ‘Unitarianism’, as they both made Christ a ‘creature’ who was subordinate to God rather than part of the incomprehensible Holy Trinity. As Arianism became less fashionable in the late eighteenth-century, Unitarianism was increasingly equated with Socinianism.Footnote ³⁸ While Unitarianism spread among the liberal minded during the Enlightenment, it was technically illegal until the extension of toleration by the 1813 Doctrine of the Trinity Act. Given the centrality of the Trinity to orthodox belief, anti-Trinitarians often had heterodox views on other doctrines such as original sin, atonement and eternal punishment.

In the early 1770s some Anglican clergy, meeting at the Feathers Tavern in London, had petitioned parliament for relief from the requirement that they subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles.Footnote ³⁹ The subscription controversy generated a pamphlet war over theology and religious liberty. After parliament rejected two petitions in 1772 and 1774, heterodox clergy faced a difficult choice. A small number resigned. Most notably, Theophilus Lindsey proceeded to establish a non-conformist Unitarian chapel. His close friend, John Jebb, left Cambridge and re-trained as a physician in London, where he became a leading Unitarian and radical political activist. Others continued their careers in the Church – William Paley allegedly quipped that he ‘could not afford to keep a conscience’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet as support for the established constitution in Church and State hardened in the polarising revolutionary era, heterodox Latitudinarian clergy like Paley found themselves passed over for promotion, or unwilling to be promoted because it would require them to again declare belief in the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Unitarianism spread in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, with the nonconformist Rational Dissenter, Joseph Priestley, publishing many combative pamphlets and books, such as A history of the corruptions of Christianity (1782), which caused a storm of controversy while Clarkson was a student at Cambridge.Footnote ⁴¹ In the late 1780s Dissenters launched a failed campaign urging parliament to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, which barred non-conformists from many civil offices. In essence, they wanted to replace religious toleration with full religious liberty. A leading parliamentary supporter of this campaign was William Smith, a Unitarian who also played a leading role in the campaign to abolish the slave trade – developing a close friendship with both William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson.Footnote ⁴²

In contrast to the more conservative Oxford, Cambridge was noted for producing many heterodox Latitudinarian clergymen and students.Footnote ⁴³ A particularly relevant example is the Revd Peter Peckard, Master of Magdalen College. He preached against slavery in 1784 and then, when serving as vice-chancellor of Cambridge in 1785, set the essay question that started Clarkson's anti-slavery career: ‘Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?’Footnote ⁴⁴ Clarkson observed that Peckard ‘had distinguished himself’ with ‘publications on the intermediate state of the soul, and by others in favour of civil and religious liberty’ – not a compliment that would have been paid by an orthodox Anglican.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘Liberal to the point of heterodoxy’, in a sermon preached to the University of Cambridge on 5 November 1783 Peckard declared that God ‘gave to All equally a natural Right to Liberty’ and argued that forcing clergy to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles was ‘an impediment only to those who are honest’.Footnote ⁴⁶ We do not know whether Clarkson attended this particular sermon, but it is a good example of the liberal attitudes espoused by some academics at Cambridge.Footnote ⁴⁷ Clarkson dedicated the second edition of his Essay on slavery to Peckard, and the Fellows and students of Cambridge, as ‘guardians of humanity and religion’ and advocates of the ‘unalienable rights of men’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Clarkson's later writings on religious topics reflect the view, common among liberal Latitudinarian Anglicans and Rational Dissenters, that the simple religion taught by Jesus had been corrupted by theological developments in the centuries following his crucifixion. When advocating pacifism in 1817, for example, Clarkson argued that early Christians considered war to be unlawful, and that this notion ‘continued while Christianity was pure and unmixed with the interpretation of political men’. While ‘Christianity was the purest’ in its first two centuries, ‘the corruption of Christianity was fixed as it were by law’ following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, whose Council of Nicaea established ‘certain innovations’ as orthodox Christianity in 325.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is notable that Clarkson here echoes the title of Priestley's influential History of the corruptions of Christianity, which had been the subject of controversy during his time as a student at Cambridge. In the final years of his life, while criticising the Oxford Movement's High Church views on infant baptism, Clarkson noted that Christianity had been ‘so much deformed’ by the ‘Nicene church in the fourth century’, and asked ‘In what endless contradiction to the Scriptures do the doctrines of the corrupt Nicene church involve us?’Footnote ⁵⁰

The young Clarkson and Unitarianism

Clarkson was reticent about not pursuing his intended career as an Anglican priest, but circumstantial and surviving evidence suggest three reasons: his commitment to anti-slavery agitation, a desire to be independent and theological heterodoxy. Clarkson travelled extensively while campaigning for abolition of the slave trade, and when visiting Shropshire in 1791 he stayed with the Evangelical Revd Joseph Plymley whose sister, Katherine, kept diary notes. When queried about his religious stance, Clarkson responded that ‘I have left the Church, after due examination, I mean as a Clergyman only … my reasons concern myself alone.’ Given his public role as an abolitionist, it would have been easy to simply explain that he needed to devote himself full-time to the cause. Instead, however, he kept the reasons private, only noting that they were based on ‘due examination’ and that he trusted his friends would not ‘blame me for doing what I verily believe to be right’.Footnote ⁵¹

A decade and a half later, in his History of the abolition of the African slave trade (1808), Clarkson implied that he had not become an Anglican priest because the enormous task of abolition would have no hope of success unless it was ‘taken up by some one, who would make it an object or business of his life’.Footnote ⁵² According to his History, Clarkson thought there were many arguments against his adopting that role. The most weighty were that ‘I had been designed for the church; that I had already advanced as far as deacon's orders in it; that my prospects on account of my connections were then brilliant; that, by appearing to desert my profession, my family would be dissatisfied.’ Clarkson nevertheless decided in the summer of 1786 to become a full-time abolitionist ‘in obedience, I believe, to a higher Power’.Footnote ⁵³ This account is generally accepted as providing the reason why Clarkson turned his back on the priesthood. Yet there appear to have been additional reasons.

Clarkson's early career milestones hint at a reluctance to become a priest that pre-dated his involvement in abolition. Clarkson graduated BA and was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in June 1783. The common course was to be ordained a priest in the following year, yet while Clarkson won the Latin essay prize for ‘middle bachelors’ in 1784, he was not ordained a priest. In 1785 he won the Latin prize for ‘senior bachelors’ with his essay on slavery, but he was still not ordained a priest. Clarkson confessed he was ‘wholly ignorant’ of the slave trade until he started researching it for his 1785 essay.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, at the very least, a commitment to abolitionism cannot explain why he did not become a priest in 1784. Perhaps he was just taking his time? While that may have been the case, it appears there were other factors that contributed to his decision to turn away from a clerical career.

In 1805 Clarkson's wife Catherine accompanied him on a visit to the Plymleys in Shropshire. She told them that

In 1785 Clarkson had served briefly as ‘Domestic Chaplain to the Earl of Portmore’.Footnote ⁵⁶ But Clarkson was worried that ‘as a man of small fortune’ it would be necessary for him ‘to do many things that he did not think would suit the character of a clergyman’. According to Katherine Plymley, Catherine Clarkson regretted ‘that he has left the church; Mr Whitbread and others were anxious to give him a living and she thinks he might have done much good by the excellent example he would have set in a country parish’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In light of these comments, made by his nonconformist wife two decades after Clarkson became an abolitionist, and as reported by the Evangelical Anglican, Katherine Plymley, there were at least two reasons Clarkson did not become a priest.

Theological heterodoxy appears to have been a third reason: as Plymley's diary records, he was suspected of having ‘Unitarian opinions’.Footnote ⁵⁸ We lack clear proof of this for his early years, and Katherine Plymley herself doubted he was Unitarian when she observed him during a church service in 1805. However, the contextual evidence of his political views and marriage suggests he may have adopted some form of anti-Trinitarianism during the last decades of the eighteenth century.

In 1791 a ‘Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge’ had been established that deliberately excluded anti-Trinitarian Arians who believed in the pre-existence of Christ, and also those Socinians who were happy to worship Christ.Footnote ⁵⁹ Its narrow and uncompromising manifesto declared that:

Edward Garnham, who had been educated at Cambridge, became an enthusiastic founding member of the Unitarian Society; and five years later he conducted Thomas Clarkson's marriage service.

While not listed as a member of the society, it is possible that Clarkson considered himself a form of ‘Unitarian’ in the 1790s. The many anti-Trinitarian members of Cambridge University were conspicuous by their absence owing to its narrow manifesto.Footnote ⁶¹ The radical William Frend had resigned his two clerical livings in 1788 and published a Unitarian Address to the inhabitants of Cambridge and Thoughts on subscription to religious tests in the same year, for which he was dismissed from his tutorship. He remained a Fellow of Jesus College and joined the Unitarian Society, but soon withdrew ‘on account of some things said of Christ’.Footnote ⁶²

Clarkson openly supported the French Revolution and the ‘Rights of Man’, and as Jonathan Clark has argued, there was a strong link between religious heterodoxy and radical politics in eighteenth-century England.Footnote ⁶³ In the early 1790s the orthodox Plymleys had great admiration for Clarkson's tireless commitment to the anti-slavery cause, but they worried about his political radicalism. Katherine observed that Clarkson was in favour of ‘liberty in every respect’, and shared Thomas Paine's view of the French Revolution. Like William Wilberforce, the Plymleys urged Clarkson to stop openly championing the French Revolution, as it could turn loyalists into opponents of abolition.Footnote ⁶⁴ A bill to gradually abolish the slave trade passed the House of Commons in 1792, but it stalled in the House of Lords, and became side-lined as war started between Britain and republican France. By 1796 Wilberforce confessed that he could no longer host Clarkson in his home because ‘his conversation was so very unguarded in politics’.Footnote ⁶⁵ A commitment to religious liberty was part of Clarkson's enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Travelling to Paris on abolition business in late 1789, he saw ‘superstitious’ peasants kneeling at roadside Catholic shrines and crucifixes, and hoped the Revolution would see the ‘dawning of the Day when religion would be kept open to free Enquiry’.Footnote ⁶⁶

In 1792 Clarkson met a young freethinking radical, Catherine Buck (1775–1856), who was from a prosperous Dissenting family that attended the Whiting Street Independent Chapel in Bury St Edmonds. Her close Unitarian friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, considered her ‘the most eloquent woman I have ever known, with the exception of Madame de Staël’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Catherine and Clarkson were married by licence in 1796 in St Mary's Church in Bury St Edmonds, with the service being read by the Revd Robert Edward Garnham, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and one of Catherine's closest friends.Footnote ⁶⁸ Garnham had become a Unitarian, resigned his curacies in 1789, and established a public library containing the works of leading Unitarians.Footnote ⁶⁹ The influential Rational Dissenter, Joseph Priestley, referred to him as ‘a valuable part of our corps’ for assisting in the composition of a Unitarian translation of the Bible.Footnote ⁷⁰

Catherine's uncle, the philanthropic Evangelical Dissenter, Joseph Hardcastle (1752–1819), worried about Clarkson's religious opinions. Clarkson often visited his home in Surrey, Hatcham House. Upon the marriage, Hardcastle penned a heartfelt letter to Catherine's father, reflecting at length on his evangelical sense of God's grace and mercy, and noting that ‘I willingly encounter the derision of the wise, while my heart embraces the inestimable truth.’ He hoped that if Thomas and Catherine

While Evangelicals could worry about the souls of conventional Christians, Hardcastle's letter needs to be considered in the light of the reputation Catherine had gained as a radical ‘free thinker’. In the case of Thomas, we can probably rule out deism at this stage as he was a life-long member of the Church of England.Footnote ⁷² This anxious letter by an Evangelical friend suggests, however, that he may have embraced some form of anti-Trinitarian heterodoxy in the 1790s.

With the cause of abolition waning in the context of war with France and government repression of radicalism, the Clarksons moved to Ullswater in the Lake District, where it was noted that they read on Sundays rather than attend church.Footnote ⁷³ They tried farming, and Clarkson wrote his Portraiture of Quakerism, while becoming close friends of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge had been radicals in the early 1790s, and were developing into the foremost Romantic poets of the age.Footnote ⁷⁴ Wordsworth wrote a sonnet celebrating his friend's campaign for abolition, and his poetry was influenced by Clarkson's Portraiture of Quakerism.Footnote ⁷⁵ Catherine developed a close sisterly relationship with Dorothy Wordsworth; and Coleridge wrote ‘I never saw a Woman yet, whom I could so imagine to have been of one parent with me at one Birth, as Catherine Clarkson & she has all, all, that is good in me.’Footnote ⁷⁶ While both Coleridge and Wordsworth became conservative as they aged, it is notable that Jesus is not mentioned in the latter's poetry until 1810.Footnote ⁷⁷

When the Clarksons visited the Plymleys in 1805, Thomas and Catherine were watched closely for indications of their religious views. Katherine Plymley noted in her diary:

It was possible, however, for Arian anti-Trinitarians to participate via subtly modified versions of the Apostles’ Creed and the Gloria Patria.Footnote ⁷⁹ Being a member of a congregation was less demanding than officiating as a priest. While many Anglican clergy lived with a tension between their personal beliefs and the orthodox articles of the Church, some resigned in the late eighteenth century; and this was probably another reason Clarkson did not pursue his intended career as an Anglican priest.

Clarkson's Christianity in old age

Religious views often change over a lifetime, and this appears to have been the case with the Clarksons. Joseph Hardcastle's anxious letter in 1796 was passed on to Catherine Clarkson. Near the end of her life she gave it to one of Hardcastle's Evangelical daughters, and noted that her youthful free-thinking sentiments had altered, with the ‘light of revelation’ shining ‘brighter above the light of reason’, and that her husband had also devoted himself to ‘prayerful study of the Word of God’ in his later years.Footnote ⁸⁰ This is reflected in the annotations Clarkson made in old age on his copy of the New Testament.

Enlightened liberal Protestants championed the right of private judgement, and the need to study Scripture as the sole authority in religious matters. In his 1843 Essay on baptism, Clarkson lamented that some of the clergy ‘are not reading men’ and often adopt beliefs ‘without examining the originals as searchingly as they ought, and without thinking for themselves’. Of those who do read, some unfortunately rely on the early ‘fathers of the church … and, forgetting that most of these divines lived after Christianity had been exceedingly corrupted, are led to receive the traditions of men instead of the word of God’.Footnote ⁸¹ Drawing on his Latitudinarian education, knowledge of the Quakers, association with Romantic poets and a lifetime of reading, Clarkson's marginal notes on the New Testament were an exercise in determining his own understanding of Christianity. They show him grappling with texts in an effort to discern the nature of Jesus Christ. His annotation is fragmentary and often difficult to read, and Clarkson wrote at the start: ‘I have long had a desire to make a few notes on different verses of the New Testament, and have gone over it for that purpose, but I find I have not done the work to my mind, as far as neatness is concerned. Being now in the eighty first year of my age, and being nearly blind.’ He had made many blots ‘in a very slovenly manner. I have never been able to see whether my pen is overloaded with ink’.Footnote ⁸²

Clarkson's New Testament notes depict Christ as subordinate to God. Christ was pre-existent, having been ‘with God in the Beginning’, and he ‘had Glory with the Father and his angels’, but he did not desire to be ‘equal to God’ or ‘worshipped as God’.Footnote ⁸³ He interpreted Jesus in Luke xviii as saying of God that ‘there is one that is good (or he who is good is one)’.Footnote ⁸⁴ He noted on the first chapter of Hebrews that Jesus ‘being above the Angels themselves in Dignity and Glory, claims to be heard above every other Teacher’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Some comments in the elderly Clarkson's writings can sound orthodox. His Essay on baptism contains a passing comment that Jesus was ‘the most proper mediator, being God and man at the same time’, and discusses ‘the work which God had assigned Jesus Christ’.Footnote ⁸⁶ And while noting that Acts vii.59 contained ‘the only prayer that has the least semblance of being addressed to Jesus Christ in the whole of the New Testament’, he added that when Stephen ‘said “Lord Jesus receive my Spirit”, it is evident that “he called upon God” … from whence it is clear that Stephen considered God and Christ to be one’.Footnote ⁸⁷ In these instances Clarkson arguably used the word God as a reference to Christ's divinity. It is notable that some Arians were comfortable in referring to Christ as ‘God’, in the sense that it reflected his pre-existence and appointment as ‘Lord, King and Governor of all’ by ‘the Father’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Arians fundamentally rejected, however, the Trinitarian doctrine that Christ was equal and consubstantial with God the Father.Footnote ⁸⁹

Clarkson's opposition to the worship of Jesus suggests that, in old age at least, he held a broadly Arian Christology. In Latin Western Christianity there had traditionally been some reticence about addressing prayer directly to Jesus.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the eighteenth century, however, with anti-Trinitarians increasingly rejecting prayer to Christ, and excluding it from their alternative liturgies, orthodox Trinitarian polemicists defended the practice.Footnote ⁹¹ In 1780 a Dissenting clergyman defined the essential issue as whether Jesus Christ should be addressed ‘as the most high God, or as Mediator? Trinitarians in general say the former: Anti-Trinitarians the latter’.Footnote ⁹²

Clarkson's comments on the worship of Jesus are similar to those of the Arian Rational Dissenter Richard Price, who wrote in 1787:

In support of this Price cited John xvi.23. In his notes on this same text, Clarkson likewise interpreted Jesus as saying: ‘consider me in the character of Mediator or Advocate, and if you want anything, you must ask it of God the Father in my Name’. Like Price, Clarkson concluded this was ‘a direct notice to pray to God the Father for all our wants, and never to the Son, but in his name, or through his sufferings or for his sake. There is not a command in the whole New Testament to pray to the Son’.

Another example was John v.23, which declares ‘that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him’. Clarkson noted in response to this text:

While the mention of atonement sounds orthodox, it was open to differing interpretations. Near the start of the Gospel of Luke, Clarkson noted that ‘we may say without any fear of contradiction that Belief in Christ … is Salvation of itself’.Footnote ⁹⁵ In his study of the Quakers, Clarkson noted that he had,

Clarkson's notes reflect a fundamental commitment to developing his personal understanding of Christianity based on scrutiny of the Bible rather than adherence to the orthodox doctrine of the Church of England.

The first chapter of the Gospel of John is a key text for orthodox Trinitarian Christianity, and Clarkson read it in a manner that reflected the influence of both Quaker notions of an ‘inner light’ and Romanticism on his heterodox Anglicanism. On John i.4 Clarkson noted that as ‘no interpretation of this verse, which I have yet seen, pleases me’, he would ‘therefore give my own view of it’ on two blank pages at the end of his copy of the New Testament. While Christ was on earth he had both ‘animal life in him as a man’ and ‘Spiritual Life’ which he communicated to others, providing them with ‘Light and Knowledge to discern and to comprehend spiritual things’. Those in ‘whose soul the Spiritual Life of Christ dwells must be on the Road to eternal Life’. Clarkson drew a sharp distinction between ‘natural man’ and ‘spiritual man’. The ‘natural man’ does not comprehend ‘the Beauties of Nature’, and reads the Bible only ‘historically, or as containing events, circumstances and sayings’, but does not comprehend their spiritual meaning. In contrast, when the ‘spiritual man’ observes nature and reads Scripture he has greater comprehension of God's goodness and ‘Government of the world’. As a result, ‘the life of Christ, when communicated to the soul of man, gives him Light and knowledge, not only to understand the texts of Scripture spiritually, but to see things through a different medium, or a different way from others’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Clarkson's distinction between the natural and spiritual man echoes a passage in his Portraiture of Quakerism in which he observed that by tending to live in towns rather than the countryside the Quakers deprived themselves of the moral and spiritual benefits of engaging with the rhythms of nature: ‘The natural man is pleased with these … but the spiritual man experiences a sublimer joy.’Footnote ⁹⁸ His comments on the first chapter of John also reflect the influence of Romanticism, which he encountered directly through his friendship with Coleridge and Wordsworth when they were neighbours in the Lake District: ‘When Spiritual Life is given to a man, it does not give him Doctrine, but a new and enlarged and feeling knowledge of divine things, so as to affect the Heart, and new and sanctified notions also of the Creation, of human Nature, and of objects, things and occurrences in the world.’Footnote ⁹⁹ While this reflects the influence of Romanticism, it also echoes Anglican Latitudinarian tradition that began in the seventeenth century with toleration of theological diversity, and which distinguished between ‘reason’ and ‘right reason’. For example, Robert Boyle, the pioneering chemist and founding member of the Royal Society, argued that the ‘mere natural man’ was an inferior scientist to those who exercised ‘right reason’ informed by Christian revelation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Having devoted his life to the cause of anti-slavery, much of Clarkson's old age was spent in reading and interpreting the Bible. He drafted a ‘summary of religious doctrines from the lips of Jesus Christ’ for his daughter-in-law and showed it to his Unitarian friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, who noted:

Clarkson studied the early chapters of the Old Testament and concluded that the Jews had first gained their doctrines through ‘an oral revelation, from God himself’ as such knowledge could not be gained through the ‘light of reason’ alone; after which Moses acted as a ‘mediator between God and man’. Jesus later restored ‘the knowledge of God to all the nations of the earth, whose ancestors had lost it through unbelief’, and added the ‘message of salvation to all who should receive him’.Footnote ¹⁰² Clarkson followed this with an Essay on baptism, with some remarks on the doctrines of the Nicene Church, on which Puseyism is built (1843), which sought to oppose one of the ‘monstrous doctrines’ of the High Church ‘Oxford-Tracts’. When the American abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe visited his grave, Catherine Clarkson showed some of her husband's belongings, which included a manuscript commentary on the Gospels that ‘he had written with great care, for the use of his grandson’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Henry Crabb Robinson had visited Clarkson when he was ‘busily employed writing’ these notes, and told Wordsworth that ‘though these are not annotations by which Biblical criticism will be advanced, yet they show a most enviable state of mind’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Christianity and anti-slavery

As denominational identities hardened in the early nineteenth century, the Church of England was a broad tent in which the heterodox Clarkson was happy to remain a member, but not officiate as a priest. His funeral was notable for its simplicity and its multi-denominational attendees, and he was buried in St Mary's Anglican church near his home at Playford, Suffolk. In 1856 Catherine, who had been raised a Dissenter, was buried alongside him. Their graves lack tombstones and lie under grass surrounded by iron rails on which hang simple marble plaques.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Some who became theologically heterodox in the ‘Age of Reason’ felt compelled to champion their views publicly, while others thought it best to exercise their Protestant right of private judgement quietly, avoid dispute over doctrines and focus on living a Christian life. The latter approach is understandable as, in the words of one historian, England experienced ‘a pugilistic clerical Enlightenment, and the intellectual contretemps often took on the character of a back-alley brawl with few, if any, holds barred’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While Clarkson expressed general support for religious and political liberty, he kept his theological thoughts private, and publicly focused on being a ‘humble instrument’ of ‘Providence’ in building a multi-denominational campaign to end the slave trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ When he published on religious topics in later life, it was to argue that the early Christians were pacifists, and in opposition to the rise of the Oxford High Church ‘Tractarians’ in the 1830s, who argued for a return to some traditional Catholic doctrines and practices.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Clarkson was educated at predominantly Latitudinarian Cambridge in the 1780s, at a time of heated debate over Unitarianism, and turned his back on a career in the priesthood. The radical-minded Clarkson was suspected of holding ‘Unitarian opinions’, but the circumstantial evidence does not allow us to be certain as to the nature of his youthful theological views. Assuming he became an anti-Trinitarian, he may have become an Arian and stopped there, or he may have had a fashionable Socinian Unitarian phase. Whatever the case, Clarkson remained a lay member of the Church of England, and his writings in old age display a deep Protestant commitment to personal critical study of the Scriptures as the sole authority in religion, and a broadly Arian view of Christ.

This study of Clarkson's heterodox Anglicanism provides evidence for both the general importance of Christianity in the rise of abolitionist agitation during the late Enlightenment, and the role played by varieties of heterodox Protestantism. Evangelicalism's increasing weight of numbers and leadership of anti-slavery in the nineteenth century, along with the influence of the Life of Wilberforce, has long overshadowed the role of the quieter ‘rational piety’ that motivated heterodox Protestants like Clarkson to act as agents of Providence.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Alongside Clarkson were William Smith mp and Josiah Wedgwood, to name just two prominent and avowedly Unitarian abolitionists. In the year before he died, Clarkson described an anti-slavery protest published by American Unitarians as ‘the most beautiful and Christian address’ he had ever seen.Footnote ¹¹⁰ With his heterodox theology, and commitment to religious liberty, Clarkson argued that his History of the abolition of the slave trade demonstrated the importance of acting with ‘brotherly affection’ toward those who ‘may differ from us in speculative opinions’ and ‘articles of faith’, and that being motivated by the ‘spirit of Christianity’ was ‘infinitely more important than a mere agreement in creeds’.Footnote ¹¹¹