Charles Leslie
Charles Leslie (1650–1722)
Charles Leslie (27 July 1650 – 13 April 1722) was a Church of Ireland priest, theologian, and polemicist who became one of the leading Jacobite propagandists after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. One of the few Irish Protestants to actively support the Stuarts after their deposition, he is best remembered today for his role in publicising the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe and for his prolific theological writings defending the Nonjuring cause.
Life
Charles Leslie was the sixth of eight surviving children of John Leslie (1571–1671), Bishop of Raphoe and later of Clogher, and Katherine Cunningham, daughter of Dr Alexander Cunningham, Dean of Raphoe. The elder Leslie, originally from Stuartfield in Scotland, had served as Bishop of the Isles (1628–1633) before moving to Ireland and joining the Church of Ireland episcopate.
Born in Dublin on 27 July 1650, Charles was said to be named after the martyred Charles I. He studied at Enniskillen School and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating M.A. in 1673. After his father’s death in 1671, he trained in law in London, but soon sought ordination, becoming priest in 1681. He then returned to the family estate at Glaslough, County Monaghan, and married Jane Griffith. They had three children: Jane (married Rev. James Hamilton) and two sons, Robert (1683–1744) and Henry—both later Jacobite sympathisers and friends of Jonathan Swift.
Early Ministry
Leslie was appointed curate of the parish of Donagh, though most of his flock were Roman Catholic or Presbyterian. His father had been a chaplain to Charles I and a supporter of Caroline religious reforms, and Charles inherited a strong Stuart loyalism combined with Protestant conviction.
When the Catholic James II succeeded to the throne in 1685, his brother-in-law, Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and soon appointed Leslie Chancellor of Connor Cathedral and a Justice of the Peace. Leslie opposed Catholic appointments under Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, and wrote polemical defences of the Test Acts at Clarendon’s request.
After the Revolution of 1688, Leslie was in the Isle of Wight and later followed Clarendon into exile from official life. Refusing the oaths of allegiance to William III and Mary II, he was deprived of his preferments and joined the Nonjuring clergy. Bishop Gilbert Burnet of Salisbury called him “the violentest Jacobite” active in England.
Jacobite Polemic and Publications
For two decades Leslie was among the most energetic pamphleteers of the Nonjuring movement. His writings attacked what he saw as the doctrinal errors of Quakers, Socinians, Deists, Jews, and Papists alike, and defended the apostolic order of the English Church against both Roman and Puritan extremes.
Much of his work addressed events in Scotland, where the 1690 Settlement abolished Episcopacy. His most notorious tract was Gallienus Redivivus; or, Murther will Out (1695), a vehement critique of William III that accused the king of complicity in the Dutch lynching of Johan de Witt (1672) and used the Massacre of Glencoe (1692) as a parallel example of royal perfidy. The pamphlet circulated widely and was later reprinted at the order of Charles Edward Stuart during the 1745 Rising.
Leslie served as an informal agent between the exiled court of James II at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Nonjuror bishops in England, including Jeremy Collier, Thomas Ken, and George Hickes. He defended Collier and others who controversially absolved two condemned Jacobites, Sir John Friend and Sir William Parkyns, in 1696.
The Rehearsal and Later Years
In 1704, Leslie began editing a weekly paper, The Observator (later renamed The Rehearsal ), blending High-Church polemic and Jacobite politics. The periodical ran until 1709 and produced nearly 400 issues. Although sharing Tory sympathies with readers such as Henry Sacheverell, Leslie quarrelled with party allies when he refused to moderate his Jacobitism.
Charged over his pamphlet The Good Old Cause; or, Lying in Truth, he fled to Paris in 1711. He continued to serve the court of the Old Pretender but found life in Roman Catholic surroundings spiritually difficult. He published his collected Theological Works (1719) in two folio volumes, securing over 500 subscribers in the English Parliament.
Leslie was permitted to return to Ireland in 1721, where he died at Glaslough on 13 April 1722. His descendants included Charles Leslie MP and John Leslie, Bishop of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardagh.
Legacy
Leslie’s writings—numbering over eighty pamphlets plus his monumental Rehearsal series—represent one of the most articulate expressions of post-Revolution High Church Anglican resistance. His Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1697) influenced later apologetic writers, while his defense of apostolic episcopacy and sacramental theology anticipated later Anglo-Catholic thought.
Although ridiculed by Whig historians like Thomas Babin Macaulay and admired by Samuel Johnson as “a reasoner not to be reasoned with,” Leslie’s polemics continued to shape Anglican discourse through the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement.
Selected Works
- A Short Method with the Jews (1689)
- The Snake in the Grass (1696) – against the Quakers
- Gallienus Redivivus; or Murther will Out (1695) – attack on William III and the Massacre of Glencoe
- The Socinian Controversy Discussed (1697)
- A Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1697)
- The True Notion of the Catholic Church (1703)
- The Case Stated between the Church of Rome and the Church of England (1713)
- The Good Old Cause; or, Lying in Truth (1711)
- The Theological Works of Charles Leslie (1719, 2 vols.)
References
- Ciaran Diamond, “John Leslie (1571–1671),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2009).
- Robert Cornwall, “Charles Leslie (1650–1722),” Oxford DNB (2007).
- William Frank, Charles Leslie and Theological Politics in Post-Revolutionary England (Ph.D., McMaster University, 1983).
- John Flaningam, The Occasional Conformity Controversy (Journal of British Studies, 1977).
- Paul Hopkins, Glencoe and the End of the Highland Wars (1998).
- Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe 1688–1788 (1994).
- Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. 16 (1911), s.v. “Leslie, Charles.”