During the latter phase of the Napoleonic Wars, the United Kingdom began directing unprecedented amounts of public money towards improving and extending its established churches. Despite the massive costs of the war, the parliamentary state invested heavily in building new churches, repairing and enlarging existing churches, providing church-based schools, building residence houses for the clergy, and increasing the incomes of poorly paid clergy. Combined with grants of money, the state also enacted measures of church reform, strengthening the powers of bishops, requiring higher standards of pastoral care from the clergy, and improving the incomes and conditions of curates. This movement...

In June 1895, a historian who had once threatened to detonate a mine when he was in Rome observing the Vatican Council in 1870 - where it was decreeing what he thought ought not to have been decreed - delivered his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of History in the University of Cambridge. His text ran to seventy-four pages, the notes to fifty-seven, but the smaller print of the notes meant that they contained many words more than the lecture. No man in the England of his time had thought more about ‘church and state’ over the long European past...

In the Southern Netherlands, under Spanish rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and under Austrian rule in the eighteenth century, the Catholic Church had the position of a state religion, recognised and protected by civil authority. In the first half of the sixteenth century Calvinist influence in these regions had been considerable, but the Catholic Counter Reformation had put an end to that. The Catholic Church had a wide range of activities: it served the pastoral needs of the faithful and also played a dominant role in education and in the care of the poor and sick. The higher...

The relation between church and state has seldom commanded much political interest in the Netherlands. One might argue that the Netherlands, arguably the least ‘confessionalised’ state of continental Europe in the early modern period, had the least distance to go towards a church-state relationship most people would regard as ‘modern’, that is, an arrangement in which there is no privileged or established church. Already a relatively religiously plural country in 1780, it is not surprising that the Netherlands had developed a system of ‘principled pluralism’ by 1920, in which religious and non-religious organisations alike enjoyed equal access both to the...

The political and legal relationship between church and state was particularly complex in Germany as so many core parameters of this relationship kept changing. In the early nineteenth century the political map of Germany altered profoundly. At its outset, many member states of the former Holy Roman Empire disappeared completely or lost their status as autonomous political units, a few also did so later. Others grew through the incorporation of these formerly independent territories. Through these changes in the political landscape previously mono-confessional states frequently became multi-confessional.

The successor formations of the Holy Roman Empire also changed. The German Federation...

The relationship between state and church in the Scandinavian countries in the period covered by this volume remained profoundly influenced by two major developments: the sixteenth-century Lutheran Reformation and seventeenth-century absolutism. The account that follows identifies challenges and adaptations to these ‘foundations’ but the state-church relationship cannot be understood without some preliminary commentary which explains their significance.

After the Reformation, the Evangelical Lutheran Churches were established as state churches, resulting in a close cooperation between the monarchy and the ecclesiastical authorities, foremost the bishops, who in practice were senior civil servants. Despite similarities in the Nordic countries, their circumstances did...

On 22 June 1866, Archbishop Henric Reuterdahl of Uppsala (1795-1870), Speaker of the Estate of Clergy in Parliament, faced with the fact that the four-estate parliament was to be abolished and replaced by two elected chambers, gave vent to his feelings about this step - the greatest political change of the position of the church in Sweden since the Middle Ages: “When I say that our work is forever ended, I say this without delight, but without sadness as well. I cannot delight in changes which interrupt the whole development history of an old people to start a new one....