The Great Fight at Wolverhampton: The John Street Chapel Case, 1816-39 The second Act of Parliament for which Charles Mander was at least in part responsible is where religious history again enters the story. Like many early industrialists, Charles was a pious nonconformist whose business was run on paternalistic-religious lines, with prayers in the workshop to begin every day. The flavour of life in his early factory is caught in the description by Jemima Cox, associated with the firm as a devoted and faithful servant for 54 years from September 1817. In 1871 she describes in her memoirs the fervour which governed all business dealings, and the pious regimen of the factory floor: My dear master had a zeal for the cause of God. A large parlour in front of his house had been used for Divine Service previous to the opening of the old Baptist Chapel. Many a happy hour have I had in that old Meeting House while listening to the truth. Mrs. Mander’s sweet voice started the hymn tunes. I suppose my master’s purse found a good share of the expenses of the supplies... After a portion of the Scripture read at breakfast time, prayers for blessings on the day followed, and for years a portion of the Scripture was read in every shop on the premises, in failure of which there was a fine to pay. There were many groupings of dissenters following the Toleration Act of 1689, including Presbyterians, Baptists and Independents. Charles pondered long and hard over his successive allegiances, changing denomination from Unitarian to Trinitarian, until in later life he became a Baptist, and finally a ‘Particular’ Baptist. He was throughout a courageous defender of religious freedoms. His tendencies hardened over time solidly against the emerging ‘new’ Unitarianism, espoused by many similar trading families of the rising urban middle classes, and he found comfort in adherence to the more Calvinist and traditionalist Trinitarian doctrines, which became aligned more closely with evangelical Anglicanism. The background is complex. The Toleration Act had formalized the acceptance of Dissent, but it became narrower and less structured in polity, increasingly focusing on the self-governing meeting house and congregation rather than a national church as the unit of association, with ministers as the head of a congregation of believers, and financial control in the hands of lay trustees. The result was that the deacons and richer members of the congregation often dictated to the minister himself, and the trustees who controlled the endowments became an unaccountable, self-perpetuating oligarchy. In doctrine, Dissent had shifted from the enthusiasm of the mid-seventeenth century, to the rationalism, materialism and latitudinarianism of the early eighteenth, and in the process often leaned dangerously towards heresy. Already by the mid-seventeenth century, Unitarianism in particular was becoming anti-trinitarian, so that it was proscribed altogether. Unitarians were excluded from the benefits of the Toleration Act when, under the Blasphemy Act of 1698, they were liable for three years’ imprisonment for propagating their doctrines. A schism started to widen between the Trinitarians and the Unitarians, with their emphasis on intellectual ‘necessitarianism’ and polemic for rational Christianity, as well as political reform. Unitarianism became associated in its extreme form with a schematic framework of the denial of the divinity of Christ, departing from the primitive ‘Socinian’ tradition, which had been textual: Bible-centred and exegetical. The Midlands, with its middle class wealth and the education that went with it, was a focus of Unitarian activity. Its doctrines were developed and debated there by members of the intelligensia. Coleridge observed that Joseph Priestley, with his avowal of Socinian Christianity and his indefatigable proselytising at this time in Birmingham, ‘must be considered the author of modern Unitarianism’. Perhaps John Mander, sharing a broad professional interest also in the new experimental chemistry, attended meetings of Priestley and his circle. The father of William Hazlitt, the essayist, was Unitarian minister at Wem, in Shropshire. He was visited by Coleridge, who was planning in 1798 to replace Mr. Rowe as full-time Unitarian minister at Shrewsbury nearby. The origins of Unitarianism in Wolverhampton go back further, to the ejection of the minister, John Reynolds, from his living at the main Collegiate Church in 1662. The local history of Dissent had focussed on the John Street chapel, built in 1701 as a Presbyterian ‘meeting house’, when his followers congregated under the care of John Stubbs. Gerald Mander takes up the story from the arrival of John Cole as ‘settled’ minister in Wolverhampton in 1759: It was during the ministry of Rev. John Cole that further trouble arose to agitate this small religious body, but this time trouble came from within and not without. It was also at this time that the Mander family, whose property lay near the Meeting House, became interested in the movement and in August 1772 the name of Benjamin Mander, together with that of Peter Pearson, was added to list of trustees. The friction which agitated and divided the small congregation of the Meeting House in John Street arose from questions of doctrine. Unitarianism was becoming popular (although in fact it was still proscribed) and Mr. Cole leaned towards this new line of thought. Matters came to a head in September 1780 when the Calvinist section under John Mander (the brother of Benjamin), his cousin John Hanbury and one Joseph Linney sent an ultimatum to Mr. Cole demanding his resignation. But Mr. Cole was a man of peace and decided to go rather than fight the issue. On his suggestion, Mr. William Jameson, who had preached eight probationary sermons, was appointed and, on 24th April 1781, he arrived with his family and all his worldly possessions to take up his appointment.
The situation was not working out as the Calvinist Trinitarians under the Manders and their friends wished, but the Unitarians under Joseph Pearson and his son Peter seemed to be in complete possession. Charles Hunter, stepfather of Benjamin and John Mander, and a Scottish Presbyterian by upbringing and training, sought to take possession of the chapel, but found the Unitarians under Pearson entrenched, and had to retire, leaving them masters of the situation. A new chapel was started in Grey Pea Walk (now Temple Street) and to that place Charles Hunter, his friend and fellow-countryman John Smith ‘late of Creigmuie, Linen Merchant’ and the Manders transferred their support. At the John Street chapel itself, violent scenes took place during which it was successively occupied and reoccupied by the warring parties under respectively the Manders and the Pearsons. The Rev. William Jameson found the doors locked against him on 24 April 1781; the rioters assembled in the chapel in 1791, and hooted; and then the Socinian Unitarians shouted abuse on Sunday 6 October 1816, and followed their precedent of barring out the minister on the 19 October, when the Trinitarian Calvinists forced an entry the next day, and tumult reigned. These events had important consequences for the history of Dissent when the Mander faction in the meeting house began proceedings which soon threatened the Unitarian movement at its heart, just when it was gathering strength and respectability in Parliament, local government, the professions, and in the movement for social reform. Their law suit became unwittingly a national cause: ‘The Great Fight at Wolverhampton’. It was one of the most widely reported of several cases at the time which came to challenge in the courts the tenure of all nonconformist chapels and endowments. The strength of Charles’s convictions was never in doubt. He claimed to act out of ‘enlightened and cordial attachment to the great principles of religious liberty’, founded on the rights of conscience and the word of God. On these principles, he pursued, financed personally, and finally won (as something of a pyrrhic victory) a chancery suit for recovery of funds belonging to the chapel which lasted intermittently for 22 years, from 1817 to 1839. Arguably it lasted longer. Gerald Mander writes, ‘Around this building the consuming heats of the Court of Chancery smouldered from 1816 until they finally burnt themselves out in 1863’. The Manders fought their corner hard, seeking the best legal counsel from the start. Benjamin as paterfamilias early sought a conference with John Wilks (c. 1765-1854), august secretary of The Protestant Society for the Protection of Religious Freedom, who was later member of Parliament for Boston, home town of Jemima Mander. His first opinion written to Benjamin Mander is dated 14 November 1816: Your estimable son-in-law [Mr. Pearsall] … brought me the papers relating to the disputes as to the Meeting House–has intimated your determination to assert your rights as a Trustee … especially for the protection of the Revd Mr. Steward… I cannot but feel personally interested in your case. The conduct of your opponents manifests a persecuting and intolerant spirit which I must disapprove and your opposition therefore acquires an importance which produces a peculiar solicitude for your success... To be firm but cautious–To be decided but reserved–To evince the most determinate resolution with Christian gentleness is the conduct which I respectfully advise and which I am persuaded you will display. From this point the most eminent lawyers in the land were involved in the case. Sir Samuel Romilly, himself a reformer, was duly instructed as counsel for the Mander faction and fought the case with the obdurate determination advised by Wilks. Romilly argued that Unitarianism was illegal at common law, and so no endowments made for its support could be lawful. The Unitarians, too, saw it as a crusade for religious liberty in the age of reform. Counsel for the Pearson faction was also an eminent lawyer, if not a great speaker, Sir Robert Gifford (1779-1826). The case at Chancery was finally heard before the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon, himself. It came to trial on 14 July 1817, and took four days. Eldon was conscientious but indecisive in court, proverbially known as ‘Old Bags’, from his carrying home in different bags the cases still pending his judgment. This case was no exception, and he reserved judgement. But he eventually found that the law was strictly on Charles Mander’s side. The progress of litigation surrounding the ‘Great Fight’ was widely reported and excited long-standing national interest in a wealth of records. Among nonconformists, the case rapidly became something of a cause célèbre, filling many columns of turgid print in the nonconformist-liberal magazines of the day, namely the Congregational Magazine and the (Unitarian) Monthly Repository. The furious pamphlet war which paralleled the case in the tracts and journals, and the privately-sponsored publications of Dissent was prolific, and often intensely vitriolic, giving a valuable insight into the depth of feelings inspired by a religious controversy rooted in socio-economic change–and possibly arrières-pensées to do with the personal rivalries, prestige and property of the litigants themselves. An array of publications found their way into print. Charles Mander launched into his polemic as a feuilletonist with An Appeal to the Public in 1818, swiftly followed by An Appendix to an Appeal to the Public. These exacted an anonymous reply by Joseph Pearson, his Unitarian adversary; Remarks on an Appendix to an Appeal, in 1819, and finally his Addenda to the remarks on the appendix to the appeal to the public. Charles Mander rejoined with his fullest diatribe yet, A Minute Detail of Circumstances relative to the Old Meeting House in John Street, Wolverhampton in March 1819, to which the inevitable retort was An Answer to the Calumnies contained in Mr. C. Mander’s Minute Detail, and a pamphlet by one mysterious ‘Verax’ entitled Facts connected with the Case of the Old Meeting House in Wolverhampton in reply to a statement which appeared in Monthly Repository for March 1818. The Rev. J. Robertson then published Religious Liberty applied to the case of the Old Meeting House, Wolverhampton and Infringement of Religious Liberty exposed in the case of the Meeting House, John Street, Wolverhampton.
But when judgment finally went in favour of Mander, it created a precedent in charity law which, with other similar cases, seriously threatened to affect nearly all Unitarian chapels in the country–all but 20 or 30. It presented an alarming decision for the Unitarians, when it was recognised that 200-300 similar cases could come before the courts if parliament failed to intervene with statutory measures. As the century progressed, the Unitarians were becoming less radical, and more liberal and middle of the road, with increasing political representation. Opinion in high places, including that of the prime minister, Robert Peel, also by now of a manufacturing background (in his case, Manchester cotton, and estated in Staffordshire), and the Lord Chancellor Eldon, shifted to their side. The affair culminated in the Tory government introducing the Dissenters’ Chapels Act of 1844 which limited the rights of Trinitarians in chapels occupied by Unitarians, securing chapels from then on to the congregations who had worshipped in them for the previous 25 years. It roused support in many quarters and Lord John Russell, Peel and Gladstone all spoke to the bill when it was raised in Parliament. Despite many petitions from the orthodox, it passed both houses with large majorities. The Act had no retrospective effect, of course, and did not reverse the decision in the Wolverhampton case; there the former Unitarian congregation lost both their endowments and the chapel. Charles Mander had repaired the chapel building in 1828, probably when he became a Baptist. Eventually the chapel had to be sold to pay the costs of the action. In 1871 it became a chapel-of-ease (by purchase) to St Peter’s church. Its final fate was to be absorbed into the Manders’ paint and varnish works in 1890, as their premises continued to ramify down John Street. The shell of its four walls remained, and there was a yard to mark the spot in my childhood. Today its site is buried somewhere under the Mander Shopping Centre. Charles married Jemima Small (1791-1834), the daughter of a linen draper from Boston, Lincolnshire, who was orphaned before she was thirteen. She matched him in piety and, Charles wrote proudly, she ‘lived and died in the fear of the Lord’. Gerald Mander relates the manner of their meeting in his History: There was some romance in the meeting… He was travelling the eastern counties in [1808] and lost his way, which in the general absence of sign posts and A.A. men was confusing. The rider wisely left matters to his mount, and the old mare instinctively led him to Boston, where Mrs. Charles Mander that was to be, dwelt, the eldest of a family of orphans, and aged [17]. But her uncle and guardian made her wait till 21. Some of the early correspondence of their courtship is preserved, including the first letter the love-smitten Charles wrote to Jemima on 17 November 1808, when she was 17, letting rip a touchingly candid outburst of passion for one whose surviving letters, with much in the way of tedious prayers and preachings, usually show drear restraint: My dear, very dear Jemima! It is now little more than a week since I left Boston in which sweet place I spent many happy hours; many more than I have since I left it. I am now more & more persuaded by experience that there is nothing like affection to bind one, either to a place or a People. It is an old observation & still remains a very true one, that ‘where the treasure is, there will the heart be also’ –indeed, I who have a heart so very hard, have found it so of late, if I never did before! When, my dear, I reflect upon my first interview with you where and when I most instantly approved of you! upon my second in which I admired and esteemed you! and upon the third, in which I not only felt a love for you, and failed not to declare it, but for the first time ventured to kiss those sweet lips, from which afterwards I received so much pleasure; with the delightful seasons I afterwards experienced with you: I say when I reflect upon the train of events, connected with the very singular manner in which it pleased Providence to bring them about, I am really lost in astonishment!! Being late before I left Boston, I only reached Bingham that evening, and that not till after it had been sometime dark. Upon my arrival there, to my great mortification it was their fair, and the house very full of company; so that, what with dancing and one strange noise and another, I was fearful I should spend a miserable evening, and have no time to myself for reflection; but all was much better than my fears, for the Old Lady very kindly put me into a room by myself, so that though I heard their clamour at a distance, I was not much annoyed by it. And now my dear Girl! to convince you (that at a time I was thus surrounded with the vanity and bustle of the giddy multitude) I had not forgotten one so dear to me; I will give you, out of the abundance of my thoughts which that evening passed though my mind, a few… Can this be love? I must confess my dear Jemima I do really think it is! nay, if I am capable of judging from my own feelings, I am sure I love you! Well be it so, I must confess I feel very great pleasure in the reflection… May I not hope that some breach may be made in that strong citadel which you expressed yourself so capable, and determined of defending against all attacks of the enemy? May I not hope that I may yet find favour with the little sentinel! who keeps guard, and from him get possession of the keys, by which an easy access may be gained to the strong weapons (?) of the Castle?… As I have formed so strong an attachment for you, that it is my wish to live and die with you, so it is also my most earnest desire, that we may live to him who is alone able to make us happy in life, in death, and to all eternity! Charles also enclosed some powder for her friend, a Miss Hill, perhaps some new-manufactured cosmetic to conceal the ravages of the pox, which he was able to obtain in the Midlands: I enclose the powder, and although it is very far from being a mill, to grind old women young; if properly applied, it may add to their beauty by taking away part of their deformity.
Her reply is delayed, dated 3 December, a rebuff indicating that on the advice of her guardian, aunt and ‘best friend’, Mrs. Lee, she should remain in her present situation, and wait four or five years, ‘and indeed I’m firmly resolved not to engage with any one at present’. You wish’d me to write an affectionate letter, that I cannot do, nor dare I even confess you sincere when I recollect what I said; but it will teach me for the future to be careful how I speak my mind before the Gentlemen. Furthermore, she thinks that any liaison would be most unsuitable between her, as an Independent, and ‘Mr Mander’, a Calvinist, so that she professes herself ‘unworthy your notice’. He continues to ‘plague’ her, as she complains, with long god-fearing letters, and sends her a pair of trays, doubtless Japan work of his own manufacture, as well as a cornelian clasp and brooch to wear on her gown, and a silver one for her pelisse. Nothing I understand is more fashionable than the few trinkets herewith enclosed… the brooch for those sweet flowing ringlets must be placed where my little girl pleases Her portraits depict her as striking in a coy and severe Georgian manner; in one she is depicted ‘with a bauble’, perhaps the one given her by Charles. As Gerald Mander points out, any good looks which may survive in the family seem to have come from her. Charles, describing her upbringing in Boston, and her religious ‘impressions’, was obviously struck with her high moral and religious interests: She was born in Boston in Lincolnshire, and from everything she could remember, and could learn about them, her parents, lived and died in the fear of the Lord, but both being removed by death, before she attained the age of 13 years, she was left in the hands of guardians. Some years before this time, she had serious impressions, and would frequently leave her playfellows to listen to the conversation of those who were considered godly people, when she had an opportunity, and so much enjoyed those seasons that play was forgotten by her. She continued at times to have some concern about her immortal soul, and often feared the thoughts of dying. She was very moral in her outward conduct, and strictly careful always to tell the truth, and that even if she may suffer by so doing. He was eleven years older, and lapses easily into a prissy, avuncular tone. He seems to have taken her on as a candidate to convert to his own doctrines as an earnest spiritual counsellor, with ‘a zeal for the cause of God’, and his conviction in a ‘particular’ providence, which was ‘special’, rather than a ‘dangerous’ free will: But having embraced the dangerous doctrine of free will, she thought she could fall in with the offer of mercy and repent and believe when she pleased, and despised the free grace doctrines of the gospel. In this state Mr. Mander found her, when he was first brought to an acquaintance [with] her and for some time after he had formed an attachment to her, he thought he must have given her up on this account alone. But being persuaded that he was led by the special direction of providence to a knowledge of her and knowing that the Lord could if it pleased him, break down all prejudice against the truth, ?teach her, her utter helplessness, and ruin; and bring her to be willing to be saved in His own way. He frequently made her ease a matter of pray[er] and made the doctrines of free discriminating grace the principle topic of his letters, in reply to one of which she said, she was surprised he could say so much upon the inability of the creature. She could pray when she liked, repent when she liked, and believe when she liked. To this he replied, if you can, pray and repent, and believe when you like; you deserve to be damned if you don’t. This coming from one who professed such great love to her, she thought very hard, but upon investigating the matter, she concluded he was right; for if she could, and would not, she certainly deserved to be lost. She therefore resolved on trying what she could do, and soon found to her great mortification she could do neither. All her boasting was put an end to, and soon began to be more and more out of love with herself.
An account of her death is preserved, from clinical detail to spiritual edification: On Saturday 11 October 1834, she went down into the cellar and it is supposed took cold in consequence thereof. The next day, finding herself unwell, she only attended chapel twice, and Monday medical aid was called in, and Wednesday following, from the very painful state of her head, leeches were applied to her temples, by which the pain was removed, and she appeared so much better that her medical attendant said she may come downstairs on the following Sabbath. This proved to be more exercise and excitement than she could bear, and caused a relapse of her complaint. She gradually became weaker until Friday evening October 31st … after 8 o’clock, as her husband was sitting by her bedside, she … said, "What a poor, vile, sinful wretch am I. Too bad to be spoken about." And a few minutes after she exclaimed, "Oh! How wonderful, that He who is the high and lofty one that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is holy, should condescend to take upon himself one creature to bleed and die for poor sinners, and for us!" turning, and looking with great expression at him as he sat by her. About 10 o’clock she look[ed] at her husband with a sweet smile, and said, "All is well my Dear! All is well!" From which time she soon became insensible, fell into a sound sleep out of which she never awoke, or became conscious of anything; till she burst her prison with sweet surprise and awoke in Glory! about a quarter past nine o’clock on Saturday night November 1st. Charles’s loss was ‘a heavy billow over his soul’, according to Jemima Cox. But ‘his sorrow was not as one without hope’, because his deceased wife’s younger sister, Elizabeth, came to help in the household and ‘was now a valuable help in his bereavement, taking all care off his hands’. She must have cared fondly, for he married her six years later, aged sixty, on 17 March 1840 at St Peter and Paul’s Church, Aston, Warwickshire. Perhaps he was by then mellowing, in sympathy with the reviving Church of England. Elizabeth was 43 and, like Jemima, helped with the accounts and invoicing for the firm. She was described by Jemima Cox as ‘a great economist [or housewife] and a real Christian’. Ten years later, aged seventy, having set up his sons in partnership to follow him, Charles retired to the sea air of fashionable early Victorian Brighton. He died suddenly of apoplexy in Croydon three years later, on 22 December 1853. His estate was valued at £16,154 12s. 3d., including £4,000 in property and £3,750 in Mander Brothers. His obituary, no doubt guilty of fulsome hyperbole, declared that he was by then representative of ‘the oldest family now in the Town’. In fact, the family had been settled there little more than a century. As member of the emerging merchant classes which were fast coming into political and economic prominence, Charles ‘Boots’ Mander had championed the philanthropic causes of the time as his conscience dictated for reform, but with his ‘lovely countenance which beamed with kindness’ captured in his portraits, he was by temperament quiescent, fastidious and benign, and never interested in the tiresome graft of official duties. His obituary notice in the Wolverhampton Chronicle remarked that he took little part in public affairs, as he was ‘possessed of a Tyburn ticket’–or mirror of one, feeling himself exempted from office by his early intervention to save the lives of the soldiers Hall and Morrison. He was a man of scrupulous integrity ‘in the faithful discharge of whatever appeared to be his conscious duty’. He was also an accomplished man of affairs, and his varnish business was to prosper and endure effectively to this day.
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