'He had received the united thanks of a neighbouring nation's bishops': Nelson's 'Life of Bull' and the hopes for union with the Gallican Church

But however difficult the Employment might prove to Dr. Bull, in the decline of his Strength and Vigour, it certainly concerned the Honour of the Nation, not to suffer a Person to die in an obscure Retirement, who upon the account of his Learned Performances, had shined with so much Lustre in a neighbouring Nation, where he had received the united Thanks of her Bishops, for the great Service he had done to the Cause of Christianity. Accordingly he was consecrated Bishop of St. David's, in Lambeth Chapel on the 29th of April, 1705 ...

And so it was that on the Third Sunday after Easter in 1705 that George Bull was consecrated to the episcopate. Robert Nelson, in his 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull, notes that, despite Bull's advanced age, such elevation to the episcopate was only fitting for a divine who had received the praise of the bishops of the Kingdom of France. 

This passing reference to the bishops of "a neighbouring Nation" exemplifies why the early 18th century Church of England responded very positively to Gallicanism, hoping to encourage the emergence of a national episcopal church in the kingdom across the Channel.

That Tory High Churchmen such as Bull and Nelson (a former Nonjuror) had a natural affinity for Gallicanism is not surprising. A union of sorts with a French national episcopal church would have avoided the domestic difficulties - feared by High Church Tories - that would inevitably have arisen from a union with non-episcopal churches. The latter development would have been interpreted as encouraging 'comprehension' in England and the acceptance of English non-episcopal ministers. This being so, however, it is perhaps more surprising that High Church Tory affinity with Gallicanism was widely shared across the Church of England. 

Shortly after Bull's death, William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1716, was very active in encouraging the prospects of a union with a Gallican Church. He had extensive correspondence with Louis Du Pin of the Sorbonne, an influential Gallican divine and historian. What makes this particularly significant is that Wake was a committed Whig. Added to this, Great Britain's entry into the Quadruple Alliance with France in 1718 - and under the Whigs - gave political momentum to Wake's plans. 

As a late 19th century history of the Wake-Du Pin dialogue captured the eirenic spirit and potential:

Even in our Articles ... there has been shown to be but little to which Du Pin took serious exception. More than that, his calm, un-dogmatizing temper, and his true catholicity of spirit, enabled him to allow for what might be good in what was unfamiliar to him, and to distinguish between trifles and essentials. Wake met him in the same liberal spirit ... in Du Pin's own words, "the controversy between us may easily be settled, if only the fairer Theologians are heard on both sides, if dictating is avoided, and we are led, not by party spirit, but by love of seeking the truth".

For Whigs and Tories alike, Low Church and High Church, a union of sorts with a Gallican Church - like the Church of England, the national episcopal church of an ancient kingdom - served both ecclesiastical and political ends.

Wake's support for Gallicanism was no innovation amongst the Whigs. In 1683, Gilbert Burnet had responded to The Letter writ by the last Assembly General of the Clergy of France to the Protestants, inviting them to return to their communion. Burnet the Low Church Whig heaped praise on the French Catholic Church. He regarded the The Letter as an expression of the "true learning" of the Church of that nation, setting it apart from the divinity promoted in Spain and Italy:

But now we have before us a work of much more importance, in which we may reasonably conclude the strength of the Roman cause is to be found: Since it is the unanimous voice of the most learned and soundest part of that Communion: For while the Spaniards have chiefly amused themselves with the Metaphysical subtilties of School-Divinity, and when the Italians have added to that, the study of the Canon Law, as the best way for preferment; the French have now for above an Age been set on a more solid and generous pursuit of true Learning: They have laboured in the publishing of the Fathers Works, with great diligence, and more sincerity than could be expected in any other part of that Church; where the watchful Eyes of Inquisitors might have prevented that Fidelity which they have observed in publishing those Records of Antiquity: So that the state of the former Ages of the Church is better understood there than in any other Nation of that Communion. 

Burnet reserved particular honour for the Jansenists:

The World will be for ever bound to Honour the Names of Godeau, Paschall, Arnauld, and the Author [Pierre Nicole] of the Essays of Morality.

We might mention here that such praise for the Jansenists reflects a wider Episcopalian engagement with Jansenist thought, seen, for example in Jeremy Taylor's regard for Antoine Arnauld. Thomas Palmer's 2018 study Jansenism and England: Moral Rigorism across the Confessions has demonstrated how Richard Allestree, John Evelyn, Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, and Herbert Thorndike all drew from the wells of Jansenist works, shaping a learned and popular Episcopalian divinity and piety. Burnet's words, therefore, stand as witness to how Jansenist divines were held in high regard by an influential stream of Episcopalian divines.

What is more, Burnet contends that, through its emphasis on patristic studies, French Catholicism has underwent something of "a Reformation" and contains much that is "highly Imitable":

Nor is the Learning of the Gallican Church that for which they are chiefly to be esteemed: It must also be acknowledged, that from the study of the Ancient Fathers many of them seem to have derived a great measure of their Spirit, which has engaged diverse among them to set forward as great a Reformation as the Constitution of their Church can admit of. They have endeavoured not only to discover the corruptions in Morality and Casuistical Divinity, and many other abuses in the Government of the Church, but have also infused in their Clergy a greater Reverence for the Scriptures, a deeper sense of the Pastoral Care, and a higher value for Holy Orders, than had appeared among them for divers Ages before. Some of their Bishops have set their Clergy great Examples: and a disposition of Reforming mens Lives, and of restoring the Government of the Church according to the Primitive Rules, hath been such, that even those who are better Reformed, both as to their Doctrine and Worship, must yet acknowledge that there are many things among them highly Imitable, and by which they are a great reproach to others, who have not studied to copy after these patterns they have set them.

In Wake and Burnet, we see how Church Whigs, no less than High Church Tories such as Bull and Nelson, sought and encouraged a communion of the national episcopal churches of England and France. That Nelson related Bull's consecration to the episcopate to the praise he had received from the French bishops is indicative of how such a communion would have flowed from a theological culture shared by the Church of England and the Gallican Church - in which Jansenist and Gallican divines were read and admired in England, and English divines of what we might loosely call the tradition of Arminian Conformity (a tradition which, by the way, embraced both Low Church and High Church figures) were read and admired in France.

This was, of course, a road not taken. While Gallicanism reached a high point with the 1682 Declaration of the Clergy of France, Louis XIV shortly thereafter turned against it. Gallicanism continued to have deep roots in the French Church but, by the 1720s, in the face of political opposition, the hopes for such a union were dead. For the decades, however, in which the hopes of a union with the Gallican Church were pursued by divines of the Church of England, such hopes revealed how the Anglicanism of 'the long 18th century', far from being insular, had a cosmopolitan character.