By the time of his death on 26 January 1716 Dr Daniel Williams was the most eminent of the English Protestant dissenters. Consulted by leading politicians, greatly respected as theologian and preacher, he deployed his financial astuteness to establish an enduring legacy for the benefit of his co-religionists. It was understandable that his primary concern was for the ministers of dissent, and the education of candidates for the dissenting ministry. It was essential to the future of the dissenting denominations that successive generations of educated ministers be provided for their congregations and academies. Having overcome hardships in his early life, Dr Williams made it his priority to serve his fellow ministers of religion and, in the words of his memorial plaque at the library, ‘to make their path to solid learning easier than he himself had found it’. That purpose he implemented through a bursary to be held at the university of Glasgow for ministerial candidates, through grants to individual dissenting ministers, and the establishment of the library which, more than three hundred years later, still bears his name.

Dr Williams's Library has been central to the history of Protestant dissent in Britain, and particularly to that of the Presbyterians, Congregationalists (or Independents, as they were usually known during the eighteenth century) and Baptists, who constituted the principal dissenting denominations. Its successive locations in London enabled it to become a repository for dissenting archives as well as a meeting place for inter-denominational co-operation. Subsequently, with very substantial increases of its holdings of rare printed books, important manuscript collections, and other primary documents, it acquired an international reputation as a major resource for the religious history of Britain. That reputation was consolidated by the foundation in 1947 of the Friends of Dr Williams's Library and the series of annual lectures, that it has sponsored (seventy-three by 2020), and by the numerous acknowledgements made in the prefaces of academic monographs that have drawn upon the library's collections. The three-hundredth anniversary of the death of its founder has provided further opportunities for reflection upon and consolidation of the history of the Dr Williams's Trust and Library. In this regard, Dr David L. Wykes, who served as Director of the trust and library from 1998 to 2021, has made a significant addition to the literature.

In 1996, in one of the most wide-ranging collections of essays on the subject of British rational dissent, Professor R. K. Webb contributed a chapter with the title ‘rational piety’. He raised the question as to whether the very notion of ‘rational piety’ was oxymoronic; after all, he asked, was not the worship of rational dissent characterised by carefully modulated, enlightened common sense, politeness and a high intellectual quality, eschewing and despising ‘enthusiasm’, mysticism and fervent displays of emotion? But Professor Webb made out a convincing case for ‘rational piety’, evident through the growing liturgical tradition and hymnody in the devotions of many congregations that were adopting unitarian tenets. Those devotional exercises evinced in particular a deep reverence for the created world and a strong sense of duty towards others. The lawyer and unitarian sympathiser Capel Lofft declared in 1788: ‘By rational piety, I understand gratitude to the Supreme Goodness, manifested in an affectionate interest in the welfare of that part of the creation which is accessible to our good offices.’ That last theme suggests the possibility that a case might be examined for a distinctively ‘rational’ approach to philanthropy in its broadest senses, during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Unitarianism and philanthropy: definitions

Before proceeding with that enquiry, however, one should recall the dictum of Professor Webb in the essay cited above, namely that ‘Debates are won by those who control the definitions.’ There is an obvious case for clarity in the use of key terms, ‘Unitarian’ and ‘Philanthropy’. As Alan Ruston has observed, it is inappropriate to use the term ‘Unitarian’ with a capital ‘U’, implying a fully fledged religious denomination, at least before 1825–26, the years in which three existing unitarian organisations – the Unitarian Fund, the Association for the Protection of the Civil Rights of Unitarians, and the Unitarian Society, established in 1791 by the former Anglican clergyman and founder of the first openly unitarian congregation in Britain Theophilus Lindsey, merged to form the British and Foreign Unitarian Association. Only then did more formal denominational structures take shape. Nonetheless, the existence of these earlier bodies, reinforced by periodical literature, notably (from 1806) the Monthly Repository, indicates a growing sense of denominational consciousness among unitarians (with a lower-case ‘u’), and with that consciousness came increasing evidence of organised unitarian responses to poverty.

Dissent, charity and philanthropy: the current historiography

This volume examines the distinctive contribution made by Protestant Dissenters from the Church of England to the history and development of charity and philanthropy in Britain from 1660 to the beginning of the twentieth century. The key terms used in the volume will reflect the definitions made by the Unitarian minister Abraham Rees in his Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature in 1819. Drawing upon Matthew xxii, 37–40, Rees defined charity as ‘one of the three grand theological virtues; consisting in the love of God and our neighbour’, implying altruism primarily in a personal or individual sense, although frequently involving financial generosity on a substantial scale. He defined philanthropy as ‘a general benevolence towards the species’, signifying a more organised, although nonetheless private and voluntary, method of alleviating hardship and, by implication, thereby contributing to the public good.

Religion has long been seen as a primary motivation for charity; indeed charity has formed a central part of Christian teaching from the earliest days. While the Church was the vehicle for providing much of the charity in the medieval period, historians see a decisive transformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in response to major economic, social and religious changes. The Protestant Reformation, together with the development of a capitalist economy in many parts of Europe and the rapid growth in numbers of the labouring poor, required new strategies for relieving poverty, not least in the role of the individual, which led to major changes in emphasis. Charity initiated and controlled by secular authorities increasingly supplemented the work of the Church. Historians more recently have labelled the benevolence of this earlier period as charity, and identified a major change in the late eighteenth century with the beginnings of ‘philanthropy’, the relief of human suffering, as something distinctive from ‘charity’. The first person to be recognised publicly as a philanthropist in England was the prison reformer John Howard, a member of the Congregational Church in Bedford, whose career is the subject of Hugh Cunningham's chapter in this volume (Chapter 3).

The history of charity and of philanthropy has attracted increasing scholarly interest in recent years. Over the last two decades there have been studies of changes in attitudes to poverty and its relief, health care, histories of specific charitable and philanthropic institutions, and of public provision through the poor law and, in more recent times, the welfare state. Recognition that charity played an important part in the lives of the English poor is now widely accepted.

FOR the Trustees of Dr Williams's Library, and indeed for all those who have an interest in the Library's scholarly resources, the publication of Roger Morrice's Entring Book is a major academic event. The manuscript of the Entring Book has for many years been among the most important of the Library's archival collections. Its value to historians of late-seventeenth-century Britain has resulted in frequent consultation of its text; this, however, has raised serious difficulties in connection with the conservation of what is a frail original manuscript. The length of the Entring Book and the intricacies of Morrice's shorthand, together with the difficulties of providing the necessary scholarly apparatus, have rendered very difficult the production of a full, contextualised edition that would meet modern standards of accuracy and be of essential service to students of the period. Nonetheless, the pioneering work on the Entring Book undertaken by Douglas Lacey and Robin Gwynn and their assistants has been of great value to the present edition, and it is appropriate that the Trustees take this opportunity to express their appreciation of it.

Mark Goldie's acknowledgements pay due tribute to those whose efforts and expertise have made this edition possible. The Trustees particularly thank the editors of the individual volumes, Tim Harris, Mark Knights, John Spurr, and Stephen Taylor, together with Frances Henderson and Jason McElligott. It is a pleasure for the Trustees to acknowledge the contribution made by the staff of the Library, in particular the previous Librarians, Roger Thomas and John Creasey, and the present Director, David Wykes, and the Conservator, Jane Giscombe, who have applied their scholarly skills to the preservation and interpretation of Roger Morrice's extensive manuscript collection. Above all, however, the Trustees acknowledge with gratitude the work of Mark Goldie, who has brought scholarly experience, effective leadership, and  not least  an unfailing good humour to the lengthy and complex process whereby the project was brought to the point of completion. Dr Goldie, with the aid of Jason McElligott, arranged the successful Morrice conference at Clare College, Cambridge, in July 2003, and helped to bring to the attention of the wider reading public the existence of an underused source for late-Stuart Britain.

In adopting as its subtitle ‘Was there a ‘resurgence of Toryism” in the 1770s?’, this essay threatens to take up a very familiar theme. As long ago as 1942, G. H. Guttridge claimed to identify a ‘New Toryism’ in ministerial policy after 1760 in his English Whiggism and the American Revolution and on its re-issue in the early 1960s, Professor Christie effectively demolished the idea. But there are perhaps two reasons why another study of at least one aspect of the subject, namely the ecclesiastical one, might be justified now. First, neither in his original essay nor in his more recent analysis of the personnel of the House of Commons in the 1770s, in which he illuminated a considerable degree of continuity between the Pelhamite ascendancy and that of North, did Professor Christie seriously consider ecclesiastical matters. Secondly, in the last few years, other works have postulated a Tory revival of at least some sort in the time of North. One thinks of J. A. W. Gunn's Beyond Liberty and Property and Paul Langford's demonstration that many representatives of old Tory families backed North's coercive policy and, by imbuing it with the ‘mindless authoritarianism’ of the country gentry, helped to create the conditions ‘without which an unprecedented war against colonists could not have been fought’. In 1989 Dr Bradley took this line of argument much further, writing of a ‘Resurgence of Toryism’ during the American Revolution.