Jonathan Mayhew Was the Neglected Prophet of Pre-Revolutionary Boston

The Rev. Jonathan Mayhew--a religious and political radical and visionary of old Boston.

When the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew died in Boston on July 9, 1766 his moral, religious, and political legacy was far from accomplished.  Indeed, years and decades would unfold before the depth of his influence became apparent in a new nation and in a new faith.  Mayhew, then only 46-years-old, was the minister of Old West Church, and much beloved by his congregation and admired by the hot heads and radicals being rallied by Samuel Adams who would soon become the Sons of Liberty.  He was decidedly unpopular with the majority of his ministerial peers, conservative civic leaders, and with the Royal Governor of Massachusetts and his Council. 

Mayhew was born on Martha’s Vineyard on October 8, 1720, a fifth generation descendent of Thomas Mayhew, the Elder who first arrived in the New World with the Great Migration fleet of Puritan settlers in 1631.  Ten years later the original Mayhew secured a proprietary colony grant for Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, the Elizabeth Islands, and other small islands.  Installing himself as governor he began populating his grant with new immigrants and also established his own farm and whaling operations.  Thomas, his son, and grandson also were missionaries among the local Wampanoag and established such fair and friendly relations with the natives.  They made it clear that religion and governance were separate.  The tribe was welcome to embrace Christianity, but Mayhew was at pains to assure them that their governance and lands were secure on their own.  Relations were so good that despite vastly outnumbering the settlers the local Wampanoag did not join the general uprising known as King Philips War that almost wiped out the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1675-76.

Although the small proprietary colony was absorbed by Massachusetts after 1688, the family, or much of it, remained on the island in relative isolation from the mainstream of Puritan society.  Devoutly religious, their local version of the Congregationalist New England Standing Order drifted from the harsh and rigid Calvinism of the mainland.

Young Jonathan, noted for his scholarly bent, left the island to pursue the Lord’s work as a student at the factory of divines, Harvard College.  Upon graduation Mayhew he found New England in a religious upheaval.  

Puritan firebrand Rev. Jonathan Edwards appalled Mayhew.

The Connecticut minister and theologian Jonathan Edwards helped inaugurate the first round of revival meetings in the 1730’s. In 1841 he scared the hell out New England with his fiery sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God which quickly became the first big best seller in the Colonies in pamphlet form.  Mayhew rejected Edwards view declaring that “total depravity [is] both dishonourable to the character of God and a libel on human nature.”  He likewise rejected the five points of Calvinism including the doctrine of irresistible grace and the doctrine of the Trinity as taught by the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds.

At the same time Mayhew also rejected the Great Awakening—the first of a series of huge revival movements that have periodically swept Americans up into a religious frenzy.  Mayhew saw the principal mover of the Awakening, the English preacher and revivalist George Whitefield, an Anglican preacher who became a founding figure in Methodism, at camp meetings in what is now Maine.  He was repulsed by the mindless emotionalism he witnessed which he suspected would burn brightly but soon extinguish itself.  He found Whitefield’s followers, ‘of the more illiterate sort,” and the preaching “confused, conceited and enthusiastic.”  He was repelled by the “extravagance and fanaticism, and violent gestures and shrieks” of people in the throes of religious ecstasy.

Mayhew made his views publicly know.  He proposed a third path based on religious rationalism and a view of a loving, but firm God as Father as revealed in a careful reading and analysis of The Bible.  

Boston's Old West Church called Mayhew.  It's working-class members responded to Mayhew's radicalism.  The steeple shown was torn down by the British during the Siege of Boston in the American Revolution in part to prevent it from being used to signal Colonial troops in Cambridge and in part as punishment for being Mayhew's pulpit of rebellion.

These views made it difficult for the young minister to find a parish.  But in 1747 West Church in Boston, one of the city’s nine Congregational Churches—and the least prosperous—called him to be their minister.  Only two of the other ministers in the city would even agree, as was customary, to be at the service of installation and ordination for the customary laying on of hands, symbolizing a welcome into the ministerial community.  One prominent minister is known to have scolded his barber when the man expressed interest in hearing Mayhew warning him not to go hear “that heretic.” 

Shortly after assuming the pulpit Mayhew crossed the ocean to pursue his Doctor of Divinity at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, an intellectual hot bed of the Scottish Enlightenment.  Although the liberal ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were taking hold among a young and rising generation of Virginia Tidewater aristocrats, they were a novelty in New England where most ministers who pursued advanced degrees in the Mother Country did so at firmly Puritan institutions.

Despite the cold shoulder of his colleagues, Mayhew perused a ministry that presaged Unitarianism—a theological position that did not even yet have a name—by more than two decades.  His belief in a firm, fair, and loving God/king led him to believe that even the worst sinners, after a period of punishment and reflection, could be reconciled and dwell thereafter in Heaven with the saints and the angels.  This was a kind of universalism, making Mayhew probably the first North American preacher to combine the two ideas which became the two streams of modern Unitarian Universalism. 

But Mayhew, however far seeing as a religious pioneer, is best remembered for the political sermons that helped stir rebellion. 

His most famous and influential sermon was preached on the centennial of the execution of King Charles I, January 30, 1750.  Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers refuted the growing opinion that the king was a martyr.  It was a long, scholarly history of the monarchy and the development of the English constitution and built a Biblical argument against the Devine Right of Kings and in favor of popular resistance to unjust government in answer to a higher law.  He concluded that the execution of Charles was justified when he when he “too greatly infringed upon British liberties."  It was also a lesson for any future monarch with inclinations to despotism.

The sermon was widely printed and circulatead pamphlet, for a while supplanting Jonathan Edwards's old screed in popularity.  It was also reprinted in London in 1752 and again in 1767 as relations between the Mother Country and the Colonies were reaching crisis.  Mayhew became an international celebrity, albeit a highly controversial one.  His radicalism was denounced from other pulpits, and, of course, condemned by authorities.

But Sam Adams and his boys and a rising generation of patriots did listen.  Years later Sam’s cousin John Adams recalled, that Mayhew’s sermon “was read by everybody.”  Some would call it the intellectual opening salvo in the run-up to the American Revolution.  

Mayhew's words inspired the Sons of Liberty, seen here burning copies of the Stamp Act.  They were "read by everybody" recalled John Adams.

Mayhew continued to preach influential, widely circulated sermons including two election day charges in 1750 and 1754 espousing colonial rights and the civic duty to resist tyranny.  He became particularly aroused with the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765.  The essence of slavery, he argued in a new sermon, consists in subjection to others—“whether many, few, or but one, it matters not.” The day after his sermon, a Boston mob attacked and destroyed Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s house.  Mayhew and his sermon were held responsible by the “respectable citizens of Boston.” 

Powerful Lt. Governor Thomas Hutchinson blamed Mayhew's sermon for the mob that burned down his house.

In 1763 Mayhew rebuked the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for its plans to dispatch missionaries, priests, and teachers to the Colonies as well as the eminent appointment of an Anglican Bishop.  He regarded all of this as a camel’s nose under the tent meant to bring the colonies back into conformity with the Crown and its institutions.

In 1765 Mayhew was invited by Harvard to deliver the annual Dudlean Lecture on religion. This was a rare show of approval from the New England establishment and an acknowledgement of his popular leadership against the Crown.

The Snare Broken was a thanksgiving discourse preached by Mayhew on May 23, 1766 occasioned by Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp Act.  It was a warning to William Pitt and others in England who he knew would read it that taking self-government into private hands in some circumstances must surely proceed from “self-preservation, being a great and primary law of nature.”

Weeks after delivering this last famous salvo, Mayhew died.  Most of the Boston clergy still avoided his funeral as did virtually all officeholders.

In addition to his influence on the Sons of Liberty and the American Revolution, Mayhew’s religious ideas, except for his proto-universalism, were quietly adopted by a new generation of Harvard graduates and ministers.  In the years following the revolution all most all Boston churches affiliated with the Standing Order were quietly but unofficially unitarian.  An open break with the Congregationalists however did not come until William Ellery Channing’s Baltimore sermon in 1819.  Ironically Mayhew’s old congregation Old West was one of only two Boston churches to remain with the orthodox Congregationalists. 

Puritan Goodwife Anne Bradstreet was Colonial America's First Published Poet

No authentic portrait of Anne Bradshaw exists.  Puritan women were generally not considered important enough for the expense of a painting.  She is usually depicted as a generic Puritan woman of her era.  We know that she was dark haired, small, and plagued by ill health and the toll of eight childbirths.  Her attractive face was scarred by small pox. 

It is easy to identify the essential founder of American literature if you put preconceived notions aside.  Despite a near glut of over educated clergy and highly literate laymen, the first poetic voice to emerge from the struggling colonies in New England and first published poet to rise from the stony soil was a sickly young woman, the mother of eight, who was discouraged in every way from expressing herself.

Anne Dudley was born in North Hamptonshire, England on or about March 20 by the old Julian Calendar in 1612.  Her father Thomas was a Puritan leader and her mother Dorothy Yorke was the well-read daughter of a noble family. Her parents took Simon Bradstreet, the son of a minister, into their household when his father died when she was 16 and he was 25.  Anne married the man who had been a virtual brother to her.

Bradstreet was commemorated by this stained-glass window in the dissenter's chapel in her English hometown.

Young Bradstreet became a junior officer of the Massachusetts Bay Company and her father an investor and supporter.  In 1630 the whole extended family boarded the Arabella, the flagship of the Winthrop Fleet of 11 vessels that brought the first large wave of the great Puritan Migration to re-enforce the tiny, struggling colonies planted two years earlier.

Thomas Dudley soon became Governor John Winthrop’s Deputy and Bradstreet took the third ranking post of administrator.  Frail young Anne had suffered on the arduous sea voyage and found the primitive life of a frontier village hard.  She suffered from a variety of ailments, including smallpox which scarred her face, and a joint condition, probably rheumatoid arthritis.  Both her husband and father frequently traveled to other Puritan villages in their duties.  She passed these times when she was bedridden by studying her father’s extensive library.  She mastered not only the Bible, as expected, but dense theological texts and works in Latin, French, and German.  She also read and adored poetry and began to compose verse of her own which she shared privately with her family.

 

Simon Bradshaw in middle age.  Anne's husband was a member of the Puritan governing elite.

Despite her frail health and scholarly bent, Anne was a devoted wife.  She gave birth to eight children who she doted on.

As the Colony prospered, so did her family’s prospects.  They helped establish the new principal city of Boston and in a few years moved across the Charles River to New Town, soon to be renamed Cambridge.  In 1636 both her husband and father became founders of Harvard University, from which two of her sons would later graduate.

Anne Bradstreet was close friend of Anne Hutchinson and shared many of her religious opinions.  She witnessed Hutchinson's persecution, exile, and eventual hanging at the hands of Governor Winthrop, her husband's mentor and closest associate. 

The following year Anne received a strong lesson on the perils of being caught making public expressions when her close friend, Anne Hutchinson, with whom she privately shared many views, was brought to trial before Governor Winthrop and sentenced to exile from the colony, expected to be a death sentence by starvation among the “savages” and eventually execution by hanging for heresy.

The family moved twice more, first to Ipswich and finally to North Andover in 1640.

 

The title page of the English first edition of Bradstreet's poem.  Note the publisher's address.

It was with some consternation that Anne learned that her brother-in-law the Rev. John Woodbridge had secretly copied her poems and taken them to London where they were published in 1650 under the title, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, by a Gentlewoman of those Parts.  None-the-less, she was proud of the accomplishment, and the laudatory interest with which it was received. 

Anne continued to write, although not for publication.  Here themes were as wide ranging as her reading—by this time she had amassed a personal library of perhaps 800 books, perhaps the greatest depository in the colony.  She touched on religious themes, but also closely observed nature, politics, and domestic life.  She wrote both short pieces and long, almost epic verse dense with allusion.  She composed a series of devotions for her family’s private use,

Increasingly crippled and bed-ridden more frequently, Anne suffered the loss of a beloved daughter and other relatives and a devastating 1666 house fire that destroyed virtually everything the family owned, including Anne’s precious library.  Despite these reversals she continued to passionately embrace life and thank God.

Bradstreet's last house in North Andover.  It still stands and is marked as the "Governor Bradstreet House."  

Due to her family’s prominence, they were able to rebuild a comfortable home.  Anne died there in on September 16, 1672 at the age of 60. 

An expanded American edition of The Tenth Muse including several unpublished poems was published posthumously in 1678 in Boston as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning.  Despite the lingering Puritan disdain for expression by women, no less an august personage than Cotton Mather himself admired the work.

In the mid-19th Century, the religious poems she composed for her family were published as Contemplations and brought about renewed interest in her as a poet.  By the early 1900’s, however, her work was dismissed as a historical curiosity rather than as a substantial contribution to literature.

 

Bradstreet's worn and broken tombstone was replaced by a modern marker.

The rise in Women’s Studies set off a re-assessment of her work, which is now regarded as both highly original in many respects and well-constructed within the poetic disciplines of her time.

Anne Bradstreet made other contributions to American letters, culture, and public life through her many descendants who include Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Rev. William Ellery Channing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Jr., Richard Henry Dana, abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Sarah Orne Jewett, Herbert Hoover, Justice David Sauter, and actors John Lithgow and Sarah Jessica Parker.  

Sometime after the London publication of The Tenth Muse Anne wrote her thoughts of mingled shame and pride in a poem, naturally.

The Author to Her Book

 

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,

Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

The visage was so irksome in my sight;

Yet being mine own, at length affection would

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.

I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.

I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,

Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save homespun cloth I’ th house I find.

In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.

In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,

And take thy way where yet thou art not known;

If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;

And for thy mother, she alas is poor,

Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

 

—Anne Bradstreet

 

 

The Toleration Act of 1689 as Far as it Went—Which Was Not Very Far at All

 

King William shown giving his assent to the Act of Toleration.  His wife and co-monarch Queen Mary concurred.

All-in-all it sounded like a much bigger deal than it was when on May 24 William and Mary gave their joint Royal Assent to England’s Act of Toleration of 1689.  The act gave relief from persecution to a narrow set of exclusively Protestant dissenters—including Puritans, Baptists, and some Quakers.  Such largess was not extended to Catholics, Jews, non-Trinitarians, and atheists—a term applied to virtually no one we would recognize as godless today, but to a great many folks with unorthodox religious scruples. 

To even become eligible to stop being subject to arrest, imprisonment, and at least theoretically, execution by being burnt at the stake as heretics, nonconformists had to pledge an Oath of Allegiance to the monarchy and an Oath of Supremacy acknowledging the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England as well as reject the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. This obviously excluded Catholics, but many Protestant dissenters, including most Quakers, eschewed oaths or had other objections.

                                                            The cover for the official publication of the Toleration Act.

Those who signed on the dotted line could cease looking over their shoulders for the sheriff and were even given leave to worship, but not in homes—who knew what kind of heresy might be preached in small gatherings behind the sanctity of the English home?  Their buildings could not be called churches—chapel or meetinghouse were the preferred terms—nor could the building have a bell tower or steeple.  Preachers had to be vetted for orthodox opinions and licensed by the state. 

Moreover, individual adherents of Dissenting sects were still banned from holding any public office, attending universities, and even testifying in certain court cases.  And, of course, they were subject to taxation in support of the established church.

Dissenters' Chapels or Meetinghouses were forbidden to have towers or steeples or most of the characteristics of a church building.  Like this early one in the market town of Devizes, Wiltshire.

The last person actually executed for heresy was the unfortunate dissenting clergyman Edward Wightman way back in 1612.  The Church of England and Protestants had become less concerned with each other than being united in opposition to the Papists who were seen as an existential threat not only to the established Church but to the monarchy.  William and Mary had come to the joint throne earlier the same year from the Netherlands in the Glorious Revolution as Protestant rulers to prevent the return of Catholic Stewarts.  They and Parliament hoped that the symbolic toleration of Protestant dissidents would solidify their rule.

Influential Enlightenment philosopher John Locke had been advocating for just such toleration for years.  But now it was especially politically expedient.

A woodcut portrait of the unfortunate Edinburgh student who was the last person executed for blasphemy in Great Britain in 1697.  His case has inspired poetry, plays, and even a musical. 

Under the Act perhaps some dissenters were safe from the lingering threat of the horrors of the flames and the stake.  But apparently a cheeky schoolboy still had plenty to worry about.  In 1697 Thomas Aikenhead was a 20 year old Edinburgh student who with the swaggering bravado of many a young man, and a tongue likely oiled by the Scottish national beverage, was overheard making shocking statements to his friends. To wit:

…that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Muhammad to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ.

…Or so read the indictment against him for blasphemy drawn up by the zealous Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart, who demanded the death penalty to set an example to others who might otherwise express such opinions in the future.  The boy refused to recant and a court convicted and sentenced him. 

The case was appealed to the Privy Council where two members of the Court and two prominent ministers begged for mercy on account of the defendant’s tender age.  The Council declined to commute the sentence unless the Church of Scotland interceded on his behalf.  Not only did the church refuse, but its General Assembly also urged “vigorous execution” to curb “the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land.”

At the appointed time the lad was taken from jail where upon he delivered a fine speech that may have been a semi-recantation and was taken to the gallows to be swung.  “the preachers who were the poor boy’s murderers crowded round him at the gallows, and…insulted heaven with prayers more blasphemous than anything he had uttered,” according to Thomas Macaulay’s much later account.

Aikenhead’s death was a testimony to how hollow Toleration could be.  He may have been the last to be sent to the gallows for blasphemy, but plenty more would rot in prison for it.  The last would be John William Gott of the Freethought Socialist League who served the last of several sentences with 9 months at hard labor in 1922.  Yes, you read that right, 1922.  The harsh conditions of his final imprisonment broke his health and he died at the age of 56 shortly after his release.

Boston Puritans were happy to hang young Quaker Mary Dyer and two of her co-religionists.  Illustrator Howard Pyle painted her been marched to her doom in a public spectacle.

But back to the days and years after the Act.  It affected the far off North American Colonies.  Perhaps nowhere more significantly than in New England.  The virtual Puritan theocracy there saw that the act gave some relief to their English cousins.  But they had always vigorously persecuted any deviation from their own Standing Order.  Baptist Roger Williams was driven out to establish Rhode Island.  Anne Hutchinson, her family and allies were banished in 1637 and she had to make a nearly fatal 40 mile trek through virtual wilderness to join Williams.  Mary Dyer and her family were allies of Hutchinson and were also banished.  But Mary returned to England where she met William Fox and became a Quaker preacher.  She boldly returned to Boston, where the pious authorities were glad to hang her and three other Quakers in 1660.

Now, under the Act of Toleration, Protestant dissidents were finally given some measure of freedom in the New England colonies.  Not, however, Catholics who remained in danger.

Naturally Rhode Island and William Penn’s Pennsylvania went further than the Act required and forbad any established religion.  They were joined by neighboring New Jersey and Delaware.  But only Pennsylvania extended toleration to Catholics.  In Maryland, the proprietary colony of Catholic Lord Baltimore, Anglican settlers had swamped his first Catholic settlement and upon gaining the upper hand in the Assembly had promptly disenfranchised the “bloody Papists.”

Virginia Anglicans refused to acknowledge that the Toleration Act applied to the Established Church of the Commonwealth and continued to harass, assault, jail, and fine dissenters.  Here a mob dunks to Baptist Preachers found conducting an open air worship.  As a result Baptists became one of the leading proponents of both religious toleration and strict separation of Church and State.

In Virginia the haughty planters who controlled the government refused to recognize that the Act of Toleration applied to them.  They rallied to the support of the Anglican clergy who demanded the persecution of rapidly spreading dissenting sects, particularly the pesky Baptists.  Baptist preachers were assaulted and arrested, open air meetings were rousted by the militia, homes invaded to prevent private services.  The persecution continued for decades, as did appeals by the Baptists for relief.  Despite numerous attempts and the support of some members of the elite who were schooled in the Scottish Enlightenment, Virginia failed to extend protections to the Baptists and others right up to the American Revolution. 

Thomas Jefferson, shown in an official Presidential portrait years after the fact, considered the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1777 as one of his greatest achievements.

A sympathetic Thomas Jefferson and his allies would finally rectify matters with the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1777.  Jefferson’s ally James Madison would ensure that religious liberty and the Separation of Church and State were enshrined in the new Constitution.

Back in the Mother Country a long list of reform acts slowly, excruciatingly slowly, widened what passed for religious freedom.  Here is a list to give you some idea.

The Papists Act of 1778—Allowed some Catholics who would make oaths of loyalty to the Crown and reject claims of Pretenders to hold some public offices, inherit or purchase land.  Perpetual imprisonment for keeping school was abolished and the persecution of Catholic clergy lifted.

Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791—Admitted Catholics to the practice of law, permitted the exercise of their religion, and the existence of their schools.  Chapels, schools, officiating priests, and teachers were to be registered; assemblies with locked doors, as well as steeples and bells to chapels, were forbidden; priests were not to wear their robes or to hold service in the open air; children of Protestants were not to be admitted to their schools; monastic orders and endowments of schools and colleges were prohibited.

Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813—Extended the protections of the Act of Toleration of 1689 to Unitarians on the same basis as other Protestants.

Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829—Allowed Catholics to be elected to Parliament and most Crown offices.

Roman Catholic Charities Act of 1832—Extended the protection of the Act of Toleration to Catholic schools, places of worship, education, and charities.

Religious Disabilities Act 1846—Ended most remaining restrictions on Catholics for education, charities, and property although Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham Universities were allowed to ban Catholics.

 Jews, once driven from the Kingdom, did not receive protections under the Toleration Act until 1858 during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Jews Relief Act 1858—Extended the protection of the Act of Toleration to Jewish schools, places of worship, education, and charities.

Places of Worship Registration Act 1855—Offered an optional system of registration for non-Anglican places of worship was passed which gave certain legal and fiscal advantages for those that registered, and finally held that “alternative religion was not only lawful, but was often facilitated by the law.”

University Tests Act 1871—Allowed Oxford, Cambridge and Durham Universities to admit Catholics and allow them on their faculties.

Promissory Oaths Act 1871—Repealed most, but not all, of the remaining restrictive clauses of the Act of Toleration.

Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1969—Repealed the final remaining provisions of the Toleration Act.

Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008—abolished the common law offenses of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales.  Blasphemy remains a criminal offense in Scotland.

 After his Coronation King Charles III was blessed by Orthodox, Coptic, and Catholic prelates.  Sheiks, Jews, and Imans got their turn to, but not pagans like Wiccans and Modern Druids, or avowedly on the skeptic/agnostic/atheist spectrum.

The Church of Scotland—Presbyterian—is a “National Church but not a State Church.”  The Anglican Church of Ireland was disestablished as a State Church by the Irish Church Act 1869.  The Anglican Church in Wales was disestablished by the Welsh Church Act 1914.  But the Church of England remains the state church there with King Charles III now as its official head who ironically shares his name with a Monarch beheaded for religious reasons.  After being Crowned in Westminster Abby and exiting the chapel and while still ceremonially robed allowed himself to be blessed by Catholic prelates, ministers of dissenting sects, and even Sikhs,  Rabbis, and Imans.