An Anglican British world: The Church of England and the expansion of the settler empire, c. 1790–1860 9780719097126

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
General editor's introduction
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Church of England, migration and the British world
The recruitment of colonial clergy, c. 1790–1850
The making of a colonial laity
The Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund and the contest over colonial Church reform
British support for overseas expansion
Imperial ecclesiastical networks
The Church, associations and ethnic and loyalist identities
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790–1860

JOSEPH HARDWICK

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General editor John M. MacKenzie

When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. Studies in Imperialism is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this everexpanding area of scholarship.

An Anglican British World

SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES MISSIONARIES AND THEIR MEDICINE A Christian modernity for tribal India David Hardiman

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WELSH MISSIONARIES AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM The Empire of Clouds in north-east India Andrew J. May EMPIRE, MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN THE BRITISH WORLD Edited by Kent Fedorowich and Andrew S. Thompson WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES Edited by Andrew S. Thompson MISSIONARY FAMILIES Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier Emily J. Manktelow

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An Anglican British World The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790–1860 Joseph Hardwick

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester

Copyright © Joseph Hardwick 2014

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The right of Joseph Hardwick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER, M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library cataloguing-in-publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 8722 6

hardback

First published 2014

The publisher has no reponsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Trump Medievel by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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For my dad, Charley Hardwick 1946–99

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CONTENTS

General editor’s introduction — viii Acknowledgements — ix Abbreviations — xi Introduction: The Church of England, migration and the British world — 1 1 2 3 4 5 6

The recruitment of colonial clergy, c. 1790–1850 The making of a colonial laity The Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund and the contest over colonial Church reform British support for overseas expansion Imperial ecclesiastical networks The Church, associations and ethnic and loyalist identities Conclusion — 239 Bibliography — 248 Index — 272

[ vii ]

22 65 99 132 169 205

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GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

The Church of England has been studied extensively in its national context. Until recently there was no equivalent body of writing about the Church of England as an imperial institution. This book is one of a small number of studies that are redressing that imbalance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Anglicanism had a very limited presence overseas. Fifty years later it had spread throughout the settler empire and beyond. How did that come to pass? What part did the Church play in the emigration process? What was the relationship between demographic expansion and spiritual expansion? How different was the Church of England at home to that overseas? Was settler religion a recognisable phenomenon across a British World, or were churches defined by the character of colony to which they belonged? These are some of the questions that Joseph Hardwick addresses in this important study. Anglican churchmen and congregations were key if somewhat neglected agents of global connection. Hardwick offers insights into Anglicanism’s role in the forging of settler identities, showing how religion was a vital part of the colonist experience, how Irish and Scottish traditions were just as influential as English, and how colonial congregations made different demands on their clergy from their metropolitan counterparts. This book will therefore be of interest not only to historians of religion, but to all those who seek to understand the dynamics of settler society and identity in the early and mid-Victorian era. It is a welcome addition to a series that has long situated migration – voluntary and coerced – right at the heart of our understanding of empire.

Professor Andrew S. Thompson

[ viii ]

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First thanks must go to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British taxpayer. The AHRC covered the costs of the doctorate on which this book is – very loosely – based. In 2012 the AHRC graciously awarded me an early career fellowship that bought me out of seven months of teaching. A good chunk of the research and writing that went into this book was completed in this period. Northumbria University and the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church of the United States also awarded me smaller grants that allowed me to undertake short research trips in Britain, Ireland and Canada. The AHRC also contributed to a six-week research trip to Sydney back in 2007. I’m grateful that all these funding bodies saw the value of my research project. A great number of individuals have helped me develop my ideas on imperial and Anglican history over the course of the past six years or so. My PhD supervisor, Miles Taylor, first suggested the feasibility and importance of a research project that revisited the Church of England’s relationship with colonial reform politics. All of the following have at some stage given me comments that have fed into this book: Allen Warren, Bill Sheils, Henrice Altink, Don MacRaild, James McConnel, Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Porter, Arthur Burns, Jeremy Gregory, Gordon Pentland and Joanna de Groot. Special thanks must go to John Powell for meeting with me to discuss Gladstone, empire and colonial Church politics. I would also like to thank Charlotte Alston and Sasha Handley – friends and colleagues – for helping me to focus my ideas by giving me enormously helpful comments on the research proposal that went to the AHRC. Oliver Moss also gave valuable assistance. The anonymous reviews that I’ve received on research and book proposals and from journal article submissions have helped me develop my approach. Elements of the research in this book appeared as ‘Anglican Church expansion and the recruitment of colonial clergy for New South Wales and the Cape Colony, c. 1790–1850’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:3 (2009); ‘Vestry politics and the emergence of a reform “public” in Calcutta, c.1813–1836’, Historical Research, 84:223 (2011); and ‘Mid-Victorian periodicals and the colonial Church of England’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 39:1 (2012). I have also presented aspects of the current work to the Imperial History and Modern Religious History seminars at the Institute of Historical Research: I would like to thank all the individuals who participated in these [ ix ]

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

seminars for asking questions and giving me guidance. My research has also benefited from receiving feedback at numerous seminars and conferences. I would also like to thank Michael Gladwin for writing an outstanding doctoral thesis: his work on the Australian clergy has helped me to develop my own thinking on the Anglican Church and throughout this book I have tried to show how his findings have relevance for developments in other parts of the empire. On a personal note I would like to thank Professors Marie McGinn and Mark Roe for allowing myself and Rachael to stay at their Highgate flat at a considerably reduced rental. During that period I was able to access numerous archives and libraries in London. Pippa has put me up in London countless times. My parents have supported me in everything that I’ve done and my mum has given me advice, confidence and encouragement. Final thanks go to Rachael: she’s a partner in every sense of the word and without her unfailing academic and emotional support I’d never have finished this book.

[x]

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ABBREVIATIONS

ADB AO BLB BP CCS CERC CMS CO CTA DAB DCB DHA DOA DSAB DUSC GP HRA LMA LPL ML MTCL RHL SACA SMH SP SPCK SPG TCD TCT TMRL TNA UCCS UDSC UYL

Australian Dictionary of Biography Archives of Ontario ritish Library Manuscripts Broughton Papers Colonial Church Society Church of England Record Centre, London Church Missionary Society Colonial Office City of Toronto Archives Dictionary of Australian Biography Dictionary of Canadian Biography Diocese of Huron Archives, London, Ontario Diocese of Ontario Archives, Kingston Dictionary of South African Biography Durham University Special Collectons Gladstone Papers Historical Records of Australia London Metropolitan Archives Lambeth Palace Library Mitchell Library, Sydney Moore Theological College Library, Sydney Rhodes House Library, Oxford The South African Commercial Advertiser The Sydney Morning Herald Strachan Papers Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Trinity College Dublin Archives Trinity College Toronto Archives Toronto Metropolitan Reference Library The National Archives, Kew Upper Canada Clergy Society University of Durham Special Collections University of York Library, Microfilm Collection

[ xi ]

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INTRODUCTION

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The Church of England, migration and the British world

In 1859 an obscure Salford clergyman named Thomas Atkins published his reminiscences of ten years’ journeying as a missionary and chaplain in Australia, India and South Africa. Atkins’ rambling book – he called it The Wanderings of a Clerical Ulysses – gave a revealing account of a former Congregationalist’s peripatetic career through the Church of England’s distant outposts in the 1830s and 1840s. Atkins’ wanderings began in 1836 when he took the post of chaplain to the convicts at Norfolk Island off the coast of eastern Australia. After protesting about the ‘unjust, cruel, and vindictive system of penal discipline’, Atkins was removed to a chaplaincy among the ‘idle and dissipated’ colonists on the Lower Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. For the next ten years Atkins yo-yoed between continents. He also moved from denomination to denomination. After a spell in Calcutta with the London Missionary Society he moved back to Australia in 1841 to start a Presbyterian Free Church at Balmain. In late 1843 he was back in Calcutta serving as curate to the Anglican archdeacon and chaplain to an orphan asylum. Colonial bishops rather than colonial administrators were now the target of his ire: according to Atkins, bishops were ‘the worst tyrants, whether civil or ecclesiastical, that have oppressed humanity and disgraced human nature’. By 1846 he had had enough of episcopal authority and the colonial world. On the way back to England he preached in a Cape Town church and took notes on the ecclesiastical state of a colony that 1 had no bishop. Atkins may have been an eccentric but he was not unique. Every colonial diocese had clergy who returned to Britain after globetrotting careers that had taken them across the empire and wider world. Thomas Earle Welby, a former Indian army officer of Leicestershire gentry stock, served the Church in Canada, England and South Africa before becoming bishop of St Helena in 1862.2 On one level, then, the value of Atkins’ narrative lies in what it tells us about the careers of the men who served [1]

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the colonial Church. Not all clergy roved to the extent that Atkins did, but many were motivated by poor pay and missionary ambition to take up a variety of ecclesiastical jobs. But perhaps more importantly the account provides glimpses of how the colonial Church functioned as an imperial institution. In narrating his career Atkins was describing the evolution of a Church that was beginning to set down an institutional presence in a variety of colonial locations. The Church that Atkins moved through was one with clearly defined centres of authority and a hierarchical governing structure, but it was also an institution that struggled to regulate the movement of its personnel: empire held out a range of professional opportunities to men like Atkins, and there was space for him and others to criticise those in positions of ecclesiastical and secular power. Atkins also found that there was little to stop him switching his denominational identity. This book takes a new look at the Church of England as an imperial institution in the period between the American Revolution and the coming of colonial self-government in the 1850s. Most students of British history will know that the period between 1790 and 1860 was one of profound transformation for Anglicans in mainland Britain; imperial historians will also know that the period threw up particularly difficult challenges for their counterparts overseas. Partly this was because the era of the privileged Anglican establishment was coming to an end by Atkins’ time: a colonial Church that had once enjoyed a special relationship with the imperial state was stripped of many of its legal and constitutional privileges and left as a voluntary institution that had to make its own way in the world. While on the one hand the Church had to negotiate political changes that had a bearing on its status and identity, it also had the equally daunting task of responding to imperial expansion. In 1800 the Church’s colonial presence was limited to eastern North America, parts of the Caribbean, and the presidencies of British India. By mid-century the Church could claim to be a global institution with branches across the British empire and beyond. To argue that the Church underwent a marked transformation in this period is to tell students of colonial religion nothing they do not already know. We already possess impressive surveys that chart the ways in which Anglican institutions and doctrines were transformed by 3 imperial and then global expansion. Scholars have also examined how Anglican justifications for imperial engagement and global expansion shifted in accordance with the Church’s changing relationship with the state.4 But while these ideological, intellectual and broad structural adjustments have received attention, basic questions about how the Church of England functioned as an imperial or indeed transnational institution have not, for the most part, received sustained analysis. What [2]

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INTRODUCTION

were the structures and networks that allowed the global transfer of Church institutions, personnel and information, and when did they emerge? How did the Church staff its overseas branches? Was its response to social, political and demographic change in Britain linked to its extension overseas? Were colonial dioceses self-contained, independent and autonomous units with distinct identities, or were they connected to other colonies, seeing themselves as part of a wider ‘Communion’? How was power distributed in an imperial institution of this kind? How could a Church that was quickly becoming a voluntary association maintain its unity and a distinct denominational identity? These are some of the questions addressed in this book. This book will not provide an exhaustive account of the Church’s inner workings in all parts of the British empire. Its focus is narrower: what concerns us is the Church’s response to the movement of hundreds of thousands of people from Britain to the colonies of European settlement in the first half of the nineteenth century. Migrants had a part to play in the extension of a formal and territorial British empire, but they also created a British ‘world’ or ‘diaspora’ that in time would come to be divided into self-governing colonies and dominions. Though it is sometimes unclear what the British world refers to (one might ask, for instance, whether it includes the informal empire and those parts of Asia and Africa where whites were a minority), it is broadly true that the historian who studies this British world is concerned with a different set of issues to the historian of empire. While the latter addresses questions of power and racial and cultural contact, the British world specialist is interested in how migrant communities sought to replicate and modify 5 familiar institutions, customs and laws in a variety of new world settings. The British world approach has recently attracted historians of religion.6 Important work by Hilary Carey has shown how the main Christian denominations came to see the settler empire as a mission field – albeit one where the aim was not to convert but to keep existing believers within the Christian fold.7 Indeed religious figures were among the first to recognise that there was such a thing as a ‘British world’: Charles Inglis, the Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia, referred to his inhabiting such a thing as early as 1812.8 Recently, scholars working on the Church of England have explored the varying contributions that Anglican clerics made to the creation of ‘neo’ or ‘Better Britains’. Anglican clergy were missionaries, but they were also migrants, teachers, scholars, farmers, progenitors of families and community leaders.9 This new focus on settler religion has opened up new horizons for the historian of religion and empire. Where the historian of mission as conventionally understood (that is, as a conversionary act) might be interested in the question of how religions adapt and change through [3]

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cultural contact, the British world scholar is primarily concerned with the role that churches played in perpetuating metropolitan identities and cultures overseas. This is not to say that historians of non-European and settler mission do not also share much common ground: both are concerned with the question of how churches replicate themselves overseas; how churchmen go about maintaining transregional links; and how authority figures within churches interact with a wider community of believers. This recent work has drawn attention to the array of institutions, groups and individuals that provided men and money for settler missions. Rowan Strong has written extensively on the significance of the expansion of the Anglican episcopate after 1840.10 and Carey has given us an overarching survey of the evangelical and high church mission organisations that raised funds and recruited clergy for migrant communities. There is also a sizeable literature on the development of the various ‘national’ branches of the Anglican Church.11 These studies of the Church’s inner workings are, however, far from exhaustive. Carey’s discussion of clerical recruitment is broad-ranging and is not based on a systematic examination of the social, educational and professional backgrounds of the hundreds of men who served in the colonial clerical profession. It would also be fair to say that we have a much clearer sense of the institutions that drove Anglican expansion than the individuals involved: as we shall see, numerous churchmen, settlers, colonial administrators, politicians, private citizens and military personnel had a hand in Church expansion. This book marries a local approach of this sort with a global and imperial perspective. Nineteenth-century churchmen did not, after all, always think parochially or nationally. By the 1840s many of those involved in the promotion of Anglicanism had a strong sense of the connections that tied the colonial branches of the Church together, and many were also keenly aware of the metropolitan Church’s close connection to empire. This book both reconstructs the connections between branches of the colonial churches and also moves across the barriers that have traditionally separated the history of the Church in mainland Britain from its branches in the colonies. Looking at the Church of England and Anglican expansion from this kind of global perspective will help us to broaden our understanding of how the institutional Church was transformed from a privileged 12 establishment into what was ostensibly a great voluntary association. While there is a growing literature on how the Church and individual clergymen negotiated this dramatic shift,13 some of the implications of the change of status have not been fully examined. Here we will see how the journey towards voluntarism required churchmen to revisit old questions about the role and identity of the Church, as well as the [4]

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INTRODUCTION

question of how denominational loyalty could be maintained in an institution where voluntary organisations – whether they were missionary societies or individual churches – held sway.14 In short, the journey towards voluntary status generated a set of contests and tensions within the Church that are not sufficiently understood. Lay communities viewed the Church in similar terms to the various other benevolent, philanthropic and fraternal organisations that were sprouting up across the British world: just as these organisations were governed by meetings and had an elected officer class, so colonial congregations wanted to see a role for the laity in Church governance and the election of both clergy and bishops. But this view of the Church raised problems for the ministry: how were they to articulate their authority in an organisation run like a benevolent society and in which membership was purely voluntary? How would bishops prevent congregations leaving their dioceses and setting up their own independent, self-governing, voluntary churches? These were not new questions, but they were ones that had a particular resonance in colonies where Anglicans had to come to terms with voluntarism much more quickly than their counterparts in Britain. These questions take us to the heart of the difficulties that faced churchmen in settler communities. Answering them will help us to see how the Church – like many ostensibly ‘conservative’ institutions – occupied a curiously ambivalent position in empire: from one perspective it was an institution that was associated with forms of clerical authority that seemed out of place in colonies that were moving towards elected legislatures and universal male suffrage; from another, the Church was a voluntary organisation that sat well with the voluntarism, laissez-faireism and liberalism that increasingly came to define the nineteenth-century British settler 15 empire. But before we can understand the Church’s place in the British world we need to backtrack and look at Anglican attitudes towards, and involvement in, migration from Britain in the period before 1860.

The Church of England and migration Thanks to recent research we are beginning to understand the role that the Catholic and Protestant churches played in peopling the British world. Anglican clergy were one of a number of agencies involved in the emigration of thousands of individuals and families from England and Ireland across the nineteenth century. During the period of governmentassisted emigration in the years after 1815 clergy served as intermediaries between prospective migrants and the emigration bureaucracy: clergy wrote applications for illiterate parishioners, [5]

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provided character references and relayed information on government emigration schemes to their congregations.16 The Rev. Thomas Sockett used funds drawn from parish rates and the local landlord to assist the passages of 1,800 people from Petworth, Sussex to Upper Canada between 1832 and 1837.17 In addition to landlord schemes, clergy were also given the opportunity to play a formative role in the emigration process once the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 permitted parishes and the new poor law unions to establish emigration funds. Though take-up was patchy, the parochial model remained the key means by which the clergy engaged with emigration across our period.18 Other schemes, such as the British government’s system of using colonial land sales to fund emigration or the Australian bounty system – both introduced in the 1830s and 1840s – were administered by professional agents and left little room for clerical involvement.19 Clerical attitudes to emigration varied throughout the century.20 In the 1820s we can find colonial clerics talking about the social, economic and political benefits of removing Britain’s surplus population.21 Malthusian parish clergy saw government-assisted emigration as the only way to remove the burden of a surplus population who relied on property holders and parish relief for their subsistence. Anglican clergy could also help to redefine migration as a positive act by presenting settlers as members of a single national and Christian community.22 But clergy also appeared among the ranks of the emigration critics. Some lamented the damage done to families and communities in areas of high emigration.23 Recent doctoral work has shown that migration was particularly contested in Ireland. Parish clergy in both southern and northern Ireland worried that the steady removal of their most loyal and industrious Protestant parishioners would undermine the embattled, garrison Church of Ireland.24 Churchmen were, nevertheless, keenly aware that a new overseas mission field was taking shape in the colonies of settlement. Carey’s broad argument is that Church attitudes towards the colonies of European settlement grew more positive as churchmen began to recognise the economic, political and religious importance of what was coming to be known as ‘Greater Britain’. Growing Anglican interest in the settler empire peaked during the era of ‘Christian colonisation’ in the 1840s.25 For some Anglicans these new idealised Christian colonies – the first attempt to build one came with the Canterbury settlement in New Zealand in the late 1840s – were spaces in which the Anglican Church could realise its potential as a spiritual, missionary and catholic institution. But Christian colonisation was something that took place in ‘empty’ spaces‘like New Zealand and – as one clergyman hoped – northern Ontario in Canada.26 For the bulk of our period the Church was [6]

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INTRODUCTION

engaged in a different task: how to keep the older colonies of settlement – places like Upper Canada, New South Wales and the Cape Colony in South Africa – supplied with bishops, cathedrals, clergy, churches and prayer books. This book looks at how Anglicans went about this task. It should be pointed out that for most of our period emigration and the expansion of the Church were not linked developments. Missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the Church’s main outreach organisation, were required to ‘instruct, exhort, admonish and reprove’ their shipmates,27 but only in rare cases before 1860 did the Church contribute directly to the expansion of the settler dominion. In this sense the Church of England cannot be likened to the political and legal institutions that, in Jamie Belich’s view, powered the growth of anglophone settler society.28 The Canterbury settlement was one dramatic example of Church-led migration, and there were smaller schemes such as the ill-fated experiment in juvenile migration that the Children’s Friend Society organised to the Cape Colony in 1838.29 Individual clergy sometimes proposed migration schemes. In 1818 one Irish clergyman told the Colonial Office that he planned to lead a party of 1798 veterans who were ‘ready to flight & bleed’ for the Protestant constitution in a new settlement in Upper Canada. Though the clergyman hoped ‘this brave little Colony, might possibly [...] be the means, under Providence, of preserving, for his majesty & his illustrious house, this valuable portion, of his Majesty’s Dominions’, the plan went 30 unrealised. Proposals were made in the late 1840s for a form of ‘parish emigration’ that would see the transplanting of complete parishes overseas. In reality, proposals for a ‘Church Emigration Boards’ that would facilitate the flow of emigration would not be realised until the formation of the National Association for State Colonization in 1883 and the Church Emigration Society in 1886.31 At mid-century calls were being made for the Church to play a visible role in all stages of the emigration process. If moving clergy and parishioners together was impracticable, then at least the emigrant should receive spiritual instruction from Anglican ministers at the point of departure, during the voyage, and on arrival in the colony. Not only did the emigrant ship become the Church’s domain, the whole emigration process began to be conceived in terms of a moving congregation that was to be channelled through a parochial structure that stretched from England to the colonies. Thomas Cove Childs, chaplain at Plymouth Dock, thought that ‘the Church ought to say Goodbye my children, the Lord be with you, & the Church in the colonies ought to be the first to say I am glad to see you my children, the 32 Lord bless you’. From the late 1840s the SPG and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) began to pay chaplains to [7]

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provide spiritual ministrations to the emigrants at embarkation ports.33 The emigrant chaplain at Liverpool, William Welsh, saw himself as the critical link connecting both the colonial and metropolitan churches and successive waves of migrants: ‘I appear to them as a sort of link connecting them with those they love in Australia or Canada; and who knows but that this circumstance may prepare their hearts to receive the gospel message?’34 Calls for chaplains to accompany the migrants on the voyage led to the formation, in 1849, of a new branch of the SPG called the Emigrants’ Spiritual Aid Fund. Around this time colonial bishops also appointed emigrant chaplains: these men provided pastoral care to recent Anglican emigrants and passed their details on to the clergy who would serve them at their final point of settlement.35 But these were plans that were introduced late in our period. For much of the period 1790–1860 the Church was trying to catch up with migration and rectify past neglect. The task of providing existing settlers with spiritual care meant putting in place an array of institutions, initiatives and structures that would help churchmen fund and supply the colonial churches with religious literature and staff. This book does more than simply describe these initiatives: it argues that by examining these institutional structures we will get a new perspective on why colonial churches looked different to those in Britain, despite the seeming commonalities in church architecture and worship. Nineteenthcentury colonial churches were distinct in the sense that they were orientated towards a lay community that was coming to play a vital role in financing and administrating the Church. Indeed senior English churchmen worried that colonial churches looked more like the voluntary churches of republican America than the established Anglican churches in England and Ireland. The phrase ‘informal Presbyterianism’ goes some way towards describing the unique power relations that emerged between ministers and congregations in nineteenth-century 36 colonial churches. Indeed, the distribution of ecclesiastical authority in colonial establishments was one of the things that struck churchmen who had recently arrived from mainland Britain. These distinctive features arose because the Church had to adapt to new landscapes, environments and political cultures. But the nature of the Church’s administrative infrastructure was also important. For instance, what we might call the ‘laicisation’ of the Church stemmed in part from the arrangements that were put in place to finance it.

Institutions and identities To focus on institutional Church history and questions of personnel and administration is in some senses to cut against the grain of recent trends [8]

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INTRODUCTION

in the broad field of religious history. While studies of institutional Church history continue to appear,37 it would be fair to say that historians have been increasingly drawn to religious practices, behaviours and energies that took place in spaces outside the formal institutions of the Church. Social and cultural historians of religion have opened up new historiographical horizons by recovering the religious worlds of the private home and the voluntary society.38 This book’s focus on the mechanisms and administration of Church expansion will also not satisfy those scholars who have called on historians of mission to pay more attention to the theological dimensions of their subject.39 But the institutional approach can help us to understand two issues that have received only limited attention in the existing literature. The first issue concerns the imperial dimensions of Church reform and the connections between British and colonial churches. Existing accounts of the Church’s response to social and demographic change in mainland Britain usually make only fleeting reference to colonial developments; certainly they rarely consider how the impulse to reform and extend the Church radiated out across the empire. To a certain extent it makes sense to treat the Church at home and the Church in the colonies as discrete units: legislation such as the 1819 Ordinations for the Colonies Act – which made it difficult for those who had been ordained for colonial service from taking posts in the English Church – reinforced a sense of difference between colonial and metropolitan Anglicans. But this book reveals that Church expansion resulted in the formation of networks and webs that, on the one hand, allowed for reform initiatives to spread out from the metropole, and, on the other, helped build a sense of connectivity between disparate churches. The flow of ideas and initiatives was generally from metropole to colony, but we shall also see how the Church’s restructuring of its British support for colonial mission meshed with (and indeed gave impetus to) the revival and expansion of ecclesiastical structures at the level of the parish, the archdeaconry and the episcopate. One outcome of this trade in ideas between British and colonial churchmen was that contemporaries gained a sense of the Church as a global institution; another was that it helped clergy and laity to envisage chains of causation that linked what went on in one part of the empire with another. Second, a study of the expansion of the institutional Church can help us answer questions about the Church of England’s ethnic significance and its relationship with national identity in the British world. Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism and Nonconformity regularly feature in discussions of the Irish, Scottish and Welsh 40 diasporas. The Church of England, by contrast, has only occasionally been accorded a role in maintaining and perpetuating ethnic or national [9]

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identities in new settler communities. One familiar argument is that Anglicanism lost its traditional associations with Englishness as it became a global faith.41 Carey’s starting point is different, as her interest is in how the Church worked, as she put it, to ‘preserve older ethnic religious allegiances’ among expatriate communities.42 For Carey, the Church of England’s relationship with national identity in the colonies changed very little between 1800 and 1900: according to her, disestablishment did not deflect senior Anglican churchmen from the belief that their Church was a British institution with a special claim to be the national Church of a ‘Greater Britain’. The situation was more complicated. Certainly there were churchmen who wanted to build a broad, tolerant and comprehensive ‘British’ Church of England that represented the diversity of settler religion.43 There were also those who attached greater significance to the Church’s catholicity and universality than to its putative national identity. But this book argues that colonies were environments that encouraged clergy to develop clearer conceptions of their Church’s relations to national and ethnic identities. Just as colonial surroundings may have encouraged those of English descent to develop distinct conceptualisations of the character, behaviours and values of the English, so the colonial encounter may have prompted clergymen to ask questions about the Englishness of their Church that perhaps did not 44 occur to their metropolitan counterparts. Though this book makes frequent reference to a group of high churchmen who emphasised the Church’s unique relationship to a narrower English identity, it also highlights the contested quality of Anglican ethnic identity. Indeed, Anglicans may well have had a more difficult task than Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Catholics when it came to attaching the Anglican Church to a national identity: not only was the colonial Church an institution inhabited by a wide range of ethnicities, it was 45 also one administered by a multinational clerical workforce. The final chapter explores the contested nature of the Church’s relationship with national and ethnic consciousness by examining the links that emerged between Anglican clergymen and the ethnic associations that sprouted up across the nineteenth-century British world. For much of the pre-1860 period Anglican clergy occupied privileged and visible positions in the displays of Irish and English corporate behaviour that took place in Anglican cathedrals and churches on saints’ days. The significance of this phenomenon has so far gone unnoticed and unexamined. One of the advantages in studying associations of this sort is that they give us a means of connecting Church history with the study of ethnic diasporas. Associations also offer a new way to explore the Church’s changing role in colonial society. In recent years historians [ 10 ]

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INTRODUCTION

have begun to ask how a Church that was staring down the barrel of disestablishment went about reaffirming its authority and relevance to wider society.46 William Westfall sees the establishment of an Anglican university in Toronto in 1851 as evidence that Anglicans still believed their Church was a public institution providing a public service to Canadian society.47 Meanwhile, recent Australian scholarship has presented the-colonial clergy as individuals who thought of themselves as leaders of a civil society that extended far beyond a core community of regular, identifiable ‘Anglicans’.48 Churchmen also tried to reaffirm their relevance and importance by presenting themselves as the leaders and spokespersons of national and ethnic communities. Philip Williamson has shown how the introduction of special days of fasting, thanksgiving and prayer in Britain in the later nineteenth century was part of a broader Anglican attempt to present the Church of England as the leader of the nation’s religious life.49 Anglican bishops and clergy would also play a prominent role in the national days of prayer and humiliation that were held in the colonial world; indeed, Robert Gray of Cape Town took credit for suggesting the idea of a day of thanksgiving for the cessation of hostilities with the Xhosa in 1848.50 But colonial churchmen also made use of a different set of events and institutions: for them, ethnic associations such as the English St George’s societies were an opportunity to remind people of the historic ties that bound the national Church to a culture and people. In this way the study of the Church’s relationship with ethnic associations can feed into a wider project on Anglicanism’s place in national culture, both in old and new world contexts.

Imperial ecclesiastical networks Exploring the Church’s relationship with national identity will help us to show how the Anglican Church can – and should – be of interest to more than just historians of religion. This book’s other key aim is to understand how the Church of England operated as an imperial and international institution. Though there is a rich literature on the development of the Church in particular colonial locations, little has been said about the connections that facilitated the transfer of ideas, information, money and personnel between outposts of the Church. We know that evangelical missionaries were adept at building and maintaining transregional networks. The communication links that emerged between missionaries on the imperial frontier and metropolitan humanitarians were means by which evangelicals contributed to the formulation of British imperial policy; such networks may also have given indigenous communities a means of communicating with [ 11 ]

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aboriginal peoples elsewhere in the empire.51 This book asks whether Anglican churchmen and Anglican settler congregations displayed a similar capacity to build long-distance connections. The Church historian who wants to reconstruct Anglican imperial connections can draw on over a decade’s worth of research on imperial networks. What has been called the ‘networked conception’ has encouraged scholars to rethink how the British empire was structured: the older image of a dominant core and subordinate periphery has given way to a more complicated picture of a decentred empire made up of series of nodes and networked communities, each of which was capable of building open and participatory channels of communication and 52 The network turn has also suggested new ways of exchange. approaching the history of the commercial, educational and religious institutions that inhabited the British empire. Recent work on imperial academic networks has, for instance, shown that colonial educational institutions were not isolated national bodies that looked no farther than their immediate colonial community. The colonial university of the later nineteenth century may have been rooted in a particular territory and place, but the academic staff who inhabited these institutions were highly networked individuals who used travelling scholarships, research grants and long-term sabbaticals to build close personal connections 53 The national with colleagues in Britain and the wider empire. institutions that made up the Church of England in the colonies were held together by a similar mixture of institutional and personal links. Although it is undoubtedly true that institutional structures like the missionary society – the most prominent Anglican example was the SPG – played a vital role in opening lines of communication between Anglican outposts, we should also bear in mind that the Church was a fluid structure that gave settlers and other lesser actors the opportunity to recruit clergy and raise funds for the erection of churches. Families and familial connections played particularly crucial roles in animating the colonial Church. The clergymen who took colonial posts often did so because they wished to go out to live near family members who had migrated years or decades before, and many of the churches that popped up in settler communities were funded by money donated by the friends of families of clergy and prominent local settlers. Scholars of the Church would do well to consider the lessons of recent historical studies that have pointed to the critical role that extenuated families played in 54 extending and maintaining the empire and imperial institutions. Every network has its limits, however. Some of these restrictions were imposed: colonial bishops recognised that personal and familial connections held out benefits, but many also struggled to see how [ 12 ]

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INTRODUCTION

denominational loyalty and a distinctly Anglican character could be maintained within a Church that delegated authority to lay communities, voluntary mission societies and informal networks. Hence we find colonial bishops and missionary societies seeking to police, if not shut down, the networks of recruitment and exchange that ran through settler communities. Networks were also uneven: not every part of the Anglican world was connected, and some networks were denser than others. For instance, the connections that emerged between Anglicans on the periphery of empire were undoubtedly of less importance than the institutional and non-institutional links that connected colonial churches and the various branches of the Anglican Church in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Britain was the centre of colonial governance and the colonial Church: colonial Anglicans looked to Britain to provide men and money for Church expansion, and bishops, clergy and settlers built personal connections with fund raisers, recruiters and political advocates back in Britain.55 The pull of Britain can also be seen in the number of colonial clergy who wanted to get back to it after a period of colonial service. By ‘metropole’ we do not mean the English branch of the Anglican Church. Colonial churches drew on all parts of the British Isles for clergy and for models of church expansion. Yet the Anglocentric basis of many accounts of the domestic support for overseas expansion suggests that Church historians do need to take on board the lessons of the ‘new’ (or not so new) British history and attend to the different influences that English, Irish and Scottish Anglicans made to the colonial Church. Indeed, in some parts of the empire the colonial Church looked more 56 like an extension of the Church of Ireland than the Church of England. The structures that were put in place to staff and fund the overseas Church also promoted ethnic diversity: clergy were recruited from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and both evangelical and high church missionary societies encouraged non-English communities to provided funds towards the expansion of the Church. The colonial Church’s ethnic variety led one Irish-born Australian cleric to describe 57 the colonial Church as a ‘British Church’. Given this, and the interest that many churchmen had in building a broad and comprehensive multiethnic church,58 it is surprising that it is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to explore the transatlantic and imperial networks that tied Anglicans in Ireland and elsewhere in the British Isles to British North America.59 There was a different rhythm to the contribution that the Church of Ireland and the Episcopal Church of Scotland made to the colonial Church. Differences stemmed in part from the distinct political status of each Church and their differing religious identities. But also important in [ 13 ]

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shaping these churches’ relationships with empire was a series of domestic factors. We know little, for instance, about how Irish support for colonial Church expansion interacted with the ‘Protestant crusade’ and ‘second reformation’ campaigns that were launched in the 1820s and 1830s to convert Catholics to Protestantism. There are also questions to answer about the relationship between Irish support for mission to settlers and the reconstruction of Irish Protestantism and conservatism in the wake of Catholic emancipation in 1829. In terms of Scotland, little has been said about the unique relationship that the independent Episcopal Church of Scotland had with colonial churches that were rapidly becoming autonomous institutions. Each of these metropolitan branches would leave a different kind of imprint on colonial Anglicanism. Reconciling these Irish, Scottish and English Anglican traditions was one of a number of challenges confronting those who hoped to build a popular, comprehensive and national Church of England in the colonies. This was a familiar conundrum for Anglicans. For centuries English churchmen had wrestled with the problem of how a national Church could represent people of different religious views who might have had stronger attachments to ecclesiastical parties than a national Church. While colonial clergy had to deal with familiar Church party configurations, they were also confronted with the problem of building a popular British Church out of a variety of ethnic groups. Though the chief markers of difference between Anglicans often had a theological root, we shall also see how ethnicity mattered too: warring clergy often made references to each other’s nationality, and Anglicans of varying ethnic backgrounds brought with them different agendas that were not always easily reconciled. The problem of maintaining unity and diversity in a single institutional structure is a key theme of this book.

The Church in imperial history This book advances two core lessons about the Church’s place in empire. One is that the Church of England was an institution that was more adept at dealing with migration and imperial expansion than is often thought. The old image of a cumbersome Church unsuited to the colonial environment dramatically underestimates the institutional Church’s ability to negotiate social, demographic and political change. This book very much aligns itself with those revisionist works which have pointed to the enduring strength of religious establishments and the popularity of Anglicanism in both metropolitan and colonial 60 settings. The second point is that the colonial Church cannot be understood [ 14 ]

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INTRODUCTION

as a monolithic or monochrome institution. This might seem obvious given that Anglicanism, by its nature, is a diverse religion formed out of various traditions: puritan, catholic, liberal and conservative. But this book draws attention to some hitherto under-examined dimensions of colonial Anglicanism. Historians have long been aware that the tensions between evangelicals, high churchmen and Anglo-Catholic Tractarians fragmented both the home Church and its colonial counterpart: in a sense there was no such thing as a single ‘colonial Church’.61 This book adds another layer of complexity to this story by pointing to the traditions of Anglican churchmanship that Scottish Episcopalians, Irish evangelicals and Irish high churchmen brought to the colonial Church. We will also see how the Church could perform some unfamiliar functions. It is true that it was one of the empire’s foremost conservative institutions and that it did populate the British world with clergy who went on to preach patriotism and loyalism. But the Church could also serve as a laboratory for reform and change.62 Chapter Two – which focuses on the colonial laity – will demonstrate that efforts to open up ecclesiastical institutions to the public blended with the campaigns for the introduction of trial by jury, representative government and a free press in places such as Cape Town and Sydney in the 1820s. This view of the Church as a reform space was hardly how contemporary bishops or subsequent historians saw the Church. Though the point might seem trite, it was the case that different actors in Church expansion viewed the institutional Church and Anglicanism in very different ways.

Upper Canada, New South Wales and the Cape Colony This book is primarily concerned with how the Church functioned as an imperial rather than national institution. The various colonial branches of the Anglican Church cannot be viewed in isolation, not only because each colonial diocese wais nourished by the same sources of manpower and funding, but also because many of the features that may seem unique to individual branches of the Church can be found elsewhere. But to understand how the Church of England functioned as an international and global institution we need to know how it set down roots in particular local contexts. Hence this book adopts both transnational and comparative approaches. In addition to examining the movements of personnel and information between colonial churches and between the ‘mother Church’ and its ‘colonial daughters’, this book focuses on the development of the Church in three colonies that were a focus for European settlement in the early nineteenth century: Upper Canada, [ 15 ]

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New South Wales and the Cape Colony. This book cannot provide an exhaustive account of the expansion of the Church in each of these locations; its aim instead is to tell the story of Church expansion in episodic fashion by drawing out key themes from case studies. The use of case studies obviously has certain practical benefits: by limiting our attention to the clergy who served in particular colonies, the task of studying how clergy were recruited for the colonial Church becomes more manageable. Case studies also help us to pick out differences and similarities in how the Church developed in different parts of the settler empire. The Church’s rituals and forms remained largely unchanged as it set down roots overseas. Indeed, the colonial Church’s apparent sameness led some contemporaries to argue that the Church could be an agent for imperial unity.63 But differences were important too. Upper Canada, New South Wales and the Cape Colony were very different colonies and in each area the clergy were faced with a different set of challenges. From its foundation in 1791 Upper Canada (or Ontario as it is now known) was transformed by successive waves of American loyalist, Irish Protestant and Roman Catholic migrants. Settlement in New South Wales was very different: there the Church was transformed from a convict chaplaincy into a civilian Church that ministered to a growing free society. The Cape Church was different again. It never enjoyed ‘established’ status and always felt itself to be catching up with the various nonconformist mission societies that entered the colony in the period between British occupation in 1806 and the arrival of British settlers in 1820. The clergy were paid differently in each colony and the local churchgoing public played varying roles in Church administration. The congregations of English and Dutch who gathered in Cape churches also looked very different to the communities of Irish Protestants and American loyalists that made up a large part of the Anglican public in Upper Canada. Yet there were similarities in how clergy dealt with cosmopolitanism. In Australia, South Africa and Canada all adopted conciliatory attitudes towards their congregations and demonstrated a willingness to bend the Church’s rituals, forms and traditions to suit local demands. The Church in these colonies also shared some important similarities. In the early nineteenth century Anglican churches in New South Wales and the Cape Colony grew up within an authoritarian 64 Napoleonic-era empire that was run as a naval and military despotism. Though the Church in Canada was not so closely associated with the colonial ‘fiscal-military state’ – military attitudes, military finances and military structures did not dominate empire in the western hemisphere in the way it did in the east – there were striking connections between [ 16 ]

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INTRODUCTION

the early Church and the colonial military complex: the laymen who built Upper Canada’s first churches were men who had fought in the American Revolution or Napoleonic Wars, and clergy often hailed from military families. There were also similarities in how Anglicans in the three areas contributed to the demise of this empire and the rise of a new one based on the interests and attitudes of European-settlers and traders.65 The similarity between the institutions and administrative structures that churchmen in Canada, Australia and South Africa introduced to deal with settler expansion shows that ideas were traded between colonial sites. It is also a sign that Anglicans across the settler empire maintained similar ambitions and outlooks. In no sense can the Church in these three colonies be described simply as a ‘settler Church’. Though the Australian clergy’s engagement with indigenous communities was minimal in the period before 1850,66 clergy elsewhere – particularly in South Africa in the later 1840s – did provide spiritual instruction to both the European settler community and the nonChristian population; in parts of Upper Canada, for example, settlers often sat alongside members of the First Nations communities in the same services.67 The reader should also bear in mind that the nomenclature and geography of these colonies frequently changed. Upper Canada changed its name to Canada West in 1841, and New South Wales – which in 1800 comprised the eastern half of Australia and the whole of modern-day Tasmania – shrank as the new colonies of Van Diemen’s Land (1825), South Australia (1836), Victoria (1851) and Queensland (1859) were formed. These areas drift out of our story at their moment of foundation. Though these political boundaries are useful means of framing our project, they were not necessarily critical geographical units for contemporary churchmen. The fact that the first colonial Church atlas was organised by dioceses rather than colonies tells us that Anglicans used their own ecclesiastical geography to divide up the empire.68

Structure The chapters in this book are arranged thematically. The first considers the recruitment of the foot-soldiers of the institutional Church, the colonial clergy. Recent doctoral work on the Australian clergy and an earlier article by the present author has turned the spotlight on what for many years were a forgotten group. While this chapter draws on this recent work, its aim is to highlight the common dynamics in the development of the clerical profession in Canada, Australia and South Africa.69 Chapter Two looks at another under-examined group, the Anglican [ 17 ]

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD

laity. In many ways all settler churches experienced a process of ‘laicisation’: lay persons played crucial roles in initiating Church extension by financing and administrating new churches, and they also came to play visible roles in Church administration at the diocesan level. Through an exploration of the laity’s efforts to open up ecclesiastical institutions, the chapter shows how ecclesiastical authority was distributed in the institutional Church. Ecclesiastical authority was a crucial and contested issue at mid-century. The Tractarian emphasis on missionary bishops and episcopal authority sat awkwardly with the practical realities of a Church that was increasingly coming to rely on lay financial support. It also seemed to jar with the 70 democratic trajectory of settler colonies. These tensions between varying understandings of how the Church should be organised and authority distributed is continued in Chapter Three’s discussion of the formation of new colonial bishoprics in the period after the creation of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund in 1841. While the first half of the book broadly focuses on the personnel and institutions involved in Church expansion, the final three chapters consider ecclesiastical networks and identities. Chapter Four considers the domestic support for colonial Church expansion from a British perspective. In addition to considering the connections between overseas expansion and Church reform in Britain, the chapter also explores the difficulties that bedevilled those who tried to build a durable and coherent domestic support base for the colonial Church. Chapter Five explores the extent to which information, personnel and ideas flowed between colonial churches on the ‘periphery’ of empire. While new nodal points were emerging in the Anglican Communion, it was still the case that the metropolis remained, in an ecclesiastical sense, the centre of empire. The final chapter examines the Church’s relationship with national consciousness through an original study of the Church’s relationship with ethnic associations. The source material on which these chapters are based include the printed and manuscript records of Anglican missionary societies; the private papers, diaries and correspondence of clergy and bishops; the diocesan and congregational records of the three colonial churches; and finally a wide range of printed material intended for popular consumption, including pamphlets, sermons, periodicals and newspapers.

Notes 1 2

T. Atkins, The Wanderings of a Clerical Ulysses (Printed for the author, 1859), pp. 64, 128–9, 192, 250. ‘Welby, Thomas Earle’, Dictionary of South African Biography (hereafter DSAB), IV

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3 4 5

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6

7

8

9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19

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(Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1981), p. 768. W. Sachs, The Transformation of Anglicanism: From State Church to Global Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). R. Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. ch. 4. The literature on the British world is growing rapidly, but a good place to start is K. Fedorowich and C. Bridge (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003). H. Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British world, c. 1801–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. chs 3 and 5 for the Anglican dimensions of her study. Eighteenth-century churches were aware of a Britain beyond the seas, though they did not call it a ‘British world’. For settler religion in eighteenth-century colonial America, see N. Rhoden, Revolutionary Anglicanism: The Colonial Church of England Clergy During the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1999); J. W. Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984). Northumberland County Archives Service, Brooks Collection of Autographs, vol. 20, BEQ/4/20/171A, Bishop Inglis to the secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (hereafter SPCK), n.d. (1812). M. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen in Australia and the British Empire, 1788–1850’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010). Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, ch. 4. C. Fahey, In His Name: The Anglican Experience in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); A. Hayes (ed.), By Grace CoWorkers: Building the Anglican Diocese of Toronto 1780–1989 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1989); A. Hayes, Anglicans in Canada: Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004); P. Hinchliff, The Anglican Church in South Africa (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963); B. Kaye (ed.), Anglicanism in Australia: A History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002); I. Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). W. Jacob, The Making of the Anglican Church Worldwide (London: SPCK, 1997), esp. ch. 4. See W. Westfall, The Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002) for the Church’s changing approach to education; Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’ for the responses of clergymen on the ground. For this tension in Ireland, see D. Hempton and M. Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1750–1890 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 62–3. For the ambivalent position of freemasonry in empire, see J. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Such examples are found throughout the emigrant applications held in The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Records of the Colonial Office (hereafter CO) 384. W. Cameron and M. McDougall Maude, Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada: The Petworth Project 1832–1837 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). R. Lee, Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815–1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 87–90. M. Harper, ‘British migration and the peopling of the empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 77–8. Carey, God’s Empire, pp. 307–8. J. Strachan, Remarks on Emigration from the United Kingdom (London: J. Murray, 1827), p. 44.

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD 22 23 24

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25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37

38 39 40

41

42 43

44

J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the AngloWorld, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 146–53. Examples are cited in Lee, Rural Society, p. 89. S. Roddy, ‘The churches and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland’ (PhD thesis, Queen’s University Belfast, 2010), ch. 1. Carey, God’s Empire, chs 11 and 12. Church of England Record Centre (hereafter CERC), Overseas Bishoprics Fund Records, OBF/CORR/DIO/IO/, Toronto, James Beaven to the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund (hereafter CBF), 20 December 1851, fo. 3. C. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G. (London: SPG, 1901), p. 818. Belich emphasises the role that representative government, common law and a free and accessible public sphere played in facilitating migration: J. Belich, ‘How much did institutions matter? Cloning Britain in New Zealand’, in J. Greene (ed.), Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas 1600–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 248–68. E. Bradlow, ‘The Children’s Friend Society at the Cape of Good Hope’, Victorian Studies, 27:2 (1984), pp. 155–77. TNA, CO 384/3, J. E. Burton to Earl Bathurst, 13 January 1818, fos 197–9. H. Malchow, ‘The Church and emigration in late Victorian England’, Journal of Church and State, 24 (1982), pp. 119–38. Rhodes House Library (hereafter RHL), United Society for the Propagation for the Gospel Archives, C/EMIGRANTS/1/12, Thomas Cove Childs to SPG, no date. Lord Lyttelton, A Letter to the Rev. Ernest Hawkins, Secretary of the SPG, on the Principles of the Operations of the Society, Especially with Regard to Emigrants (London: Francis & John Rivington, 1849). RHL, C/EMIGRANTS/1/1, William Welsh report ending February 12 1857, fo. 13. Ibid., C/EMIGRANTS/1/14, Bishop Broughton, ‘Regulations for Chaplains to Emigrants – a report’ (1849). The term has been used to describe dynamics in eighteenth-century English congregations: M. Goldie, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, Historical Journal, 46:4 (2003), p. 980. J. Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660–1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and Their Diocese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); A. Burns, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England, c. 1800–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Goldie, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, p. 998. A. Porter, ‘Evangelical visions and colonial realities’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38:1 (2010), p. 153. Protestant churches have been presented as ‘forums for ethnic fusion’: C. Houston and W. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 169. B. Stanley, ‘Afterword: The C.M.S. and the separation of Anglicanism from “Englishness”’, in K. Ward et al. (eds), The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999 (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 344–52. Carey, God’s Empire, p. 83. M. Gauvreau, ‘The dividends of empire: Church establishments and contested British identities in the Canadas and the Maritimes, 1780–1850’, in N. Christie (ed.), Transatlantic Subjects: Ideas, Institutions, and Social Experience in PostRevolutionary British North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), pp. 214–17. R. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (New York: Blackwells, 2008). Brian Young argues that metropolitan clergy rarely asked questions about their national identity: B. Young, history of variations: the identity of the eighteenth-century Church of England’, in T. Claydon and I. McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and

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INTRODUCTION

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50 51

52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

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68 69

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Ireland, c.1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 107. Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, pp. 218–19. A. Burns, ‘The authority of the Church’, in P. Mandler (éd.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 179–200. Westfall, Founding Moment. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’. P. Williamson, ‘State prayers, fasts and thanksgiving: public worship in Britain 1830– 1897’, Past & Present, 200 (2008), pp. 169–222. C. Gray, The Life of Robert Gray, vol. I (London: Rivingtons, 1876), p. 163. E. Elboume, ‘Indigenous peoples and imperial networks in the early nineteenth century: the politics of knowledge’, in P. Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), pp. 59– 62. G. Magee and A. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 26–30. T. Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). For example, M. Finn, ‘Anglo-Indian lives in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33:1 (2010), pp. 49–65. Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 17. D. Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1984), p. 264. Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL), Tait Papers, vol. 169, Hussey Burgh Macartney to Bishop Tait of London, 6 February 1866, fo. 4. Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, pp. 218–19. R. Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World: High Churchmen, Evangelicals and the Quebec Connection (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). J. Gregory, ‘Refashioning Puritan New England: The Church of England in British North America, c.1680–1770’, Transactions of the Royal History Society, 20 (2010), pp. 85–112. Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World. J. Hardwick, ‘Vestry politics and the emergence of a reform “public” in Calcutta, 1813–36’, Historical Research, 84:223 (2011), pp. 87–108. A. Davies, Proposals for Uniting the British Colonies with their Mother-Country (London: Trelawny Saunders, 1851). C. Bayly, ‘The first age of global imperialism, c. 1760–1830’, in P. Burroughs and A. J. Stockwell (eds), Managing the Business of Empire: Essay in Honour of David Fieldhouse (London: Frank Cass, 1998), pp. 28–47. Ibid., p. 40. J. Harris, One Blood. 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity: A Story of Hope (Sutherland, NSW: Albatross Books, 1990), chs 1 and 2. Nine ‘Indians’ sat alongside twenty-five Europeans on Christmas Day 1841 in Delaware church, Ontario: Diocese of Huron Archives, London, Ontario (hereafter DHA), Christ Church Delaware Fonds, Vestry Records 1836–1848, PREG 226, ‘Communicants at the Delaware Church on Xmas Day 1841’. The Colonial Church Atlas (London: Rivington, 1842). Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’; J. Hardwick, ‘Anglican Church expansion and the recruitment of clergy for New South Wales and the Cape Colony, c. 1790–1850’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:3 (2009), pp. 361–81. A. Cooper, ‘The Australian bishops and the Oxford Movement’, in S. Brown and P. Nockles (eds), The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 112.

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CHAPTER ONE

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The recruitment of colonial clergy, c. 1790–1850

Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Church of England emerged as one of Britain’s largest employers. Few other professional groups were as numerous, or as ubiquitous, as the clergy who tended the Church in England, Ireland and Wales.1 By the end of the eighteenth century the clergy were growing in numbers and also spreading out. America would be shut off after 1783 but fresh mission fields opened up as the British empire entered a period of expansion in the post-American Revolution period. The demand for clergy also grew as Church establishments came to figure more prominently in a new species of authoritarian imperial rule.2 In the 1830s fresh stimuli – notably increased emigration from Britain and a new period of Anglican missionary enthusiasm – prompted further exports of men. By 1850, 14 per cent of the Church’s 17,377 clergy were serving outside Britain.3 This chapter answers a series of questions relating to the training and recruitment of the ordained Anglican ministers who served the British and European communities in Upper Canada, the Cape of Good Hope and New South Wales. Where were these men educated? Did colonial service tend to be their first ecclesiastical job? Who recruited them? What does their recruitment tell us about the aims and objectives of recruiters and the wider Church at different points in time? These are not new questions and this chapter is not the first to undertake an examination of this sort. Prosopographical studies of missionaries abound and recent work has explored patterns in the recruitment of the 4 clergy who were sent out to the British world. Michael Gladwin’s work on Australia, and Hilary Carey’s on the empire more generally, has answered questions about the social, educational and national backgrounds of colonial clergy, the similarities and differences between colonial and metropolitan clergy, the kinds of men recruiters were after, and what the appointment of clergy reveals about the imperial visions of churchmen.5 So far, however, no one has systematically compared the [ 22 ]

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recruitment of clergy across colonial case studies. Though Carey offers general comments about the broad shifts in clergy recruitment, she does not look at the experiences of the men who were actually sent out. As a result it is not clear whether the patterns and processes that occurred in one part of the empire are relevant elsewhere. Comparing different recruitment streams will help us to judge whether we can talk about’ a distinct imperial clerical profession in the first half of the nineteenth century. The chapter is based on an analysis of the 455 clergymen that were known to have been appointed to three colonies between 1790 and 1850.6 This workforce was varied and included military chaplains, rectors in possession of endowed parsonages, missionaries who sought the conversion of the ‘heathen’, and other clergy – though still termed ‘missionaries’ – whose primary duty was to minister to congregations of existing Anglicans. The aim is not to simply count and categorise the clergy; we are primarily interested in what recruitment tells us about changing perceptions of the Church’s role in settler communities. Historians of colonial Anglicanism all agree that the mission of the Church changed as it lost its established status in the 1830s and 1840s. Where the Church of the pre-1830 ‘establishment’ period had seen itself as an ally of the colonial state, its post-1830 counterpart developed a new 7 sense of itself as an independent, spiritual and missionary organisation. Were these shifts reflected in the recruitment of colonial clergy? Was there, for instance, a conscious attempt in the earlier period to recruit individuals who conformed to the stereotype of a clerical magistrate who preached loyalty to the imperial state? The first half of this chapter explores these questions by looking at the changing administration of clerical recruitment over the 1790 to 1850 period. Gladwin’s research on Australia has shown that there was a long-running debate about what the ideal colonial clergyman looked like; here we extend his research by looking at the perspectives of clergymen in Canada and South Africa. The second half of the chapter considers whether the changing understandings of the Church’s place in the colonial world were reflected in the social, educational and theological backgrounds of the men who were selected. Names of clergy can be found in the Colonial Office’s ‘blue books’, and details on their backgrounds were sourced from biographical dictionaries, alumni records, published memoirs, newspapers and missionary society records. This chapter will shed further light on the variety of clergy who peopled the colonial Church. It will also tell us something about how authority and power were distributed in the Church in the colonies – a topic rarely considered in existing accounts of clerical recruitment. On the one hand an examination of recruitment mechanisms underlines the [ 23 ]

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importance of Britain – but not necessarily England – to the colonial Church. But this does not mean that power was centralised in a small number of metropolitan churchmen. Efforts to centralise the training and recruitment of colonial clergy never got very far, and as a consequence there was space for a range of individuals, groups and organisations to play a role in recruitment. The colonial Church had bishops and centres of authority, but it was also an institution in which power was distributed among a range of actors, both clerical and lay, both evangelical and high church, and both metropolitan and colonial.

The changing institutional structure of recruitment It is not easy to write a narrative of the changing structure of colonial clerical recruitment as a great variety of institutions, networks and groups were involved in the recruitment process. Essentially, four main groups had a part to play. The British government was responsible for appointing all the chaplains who were paid out of imperial funds. Meanwhile, churchmen recommended and selected the missionaries that the Church’s chief missionary arm – the SPG – sent out to British North America and elsewhere. There was also space for a number of voluntary groups to influence recruitment. The input that the fourth and final group – the colonial laity – had in the selection process varied from colony to colony. In parts of British North America it was extensive; in the convict establishments of New South Wales it was more circumscribed. Each group pursued different agendas and each had different ideas on what the ideal clergyman looked like. The military men who ran Britain’s ‘second empire’ tended to judge clergymen on their ability to communicate imperial authority to colonial communities. John Graves Simcoe, Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor, was one who saw Church establishments in political terms: in 1795 he told the Bishop of Quebec that his ideal colonial clergyman was not the learned cleric who had been ‘habituated in every situation to a greater degree of refinement and comfort than can be found in a New Country’. What was needed was the man who displayed ‘just zeal, and primitive manners’ and who could 8 imbue feelings of ‘Religion and Loyalty’ in the colonial population. Clergy did not always see their role in such narrow terms. Richard Johnson, New South Wales’ first chaplain, was one who fell foul of the colonial authorities because he did not follow the official line. The lieutenant-governor, Francis Grose, assumed Johnson was there to preach morality and loyalty; instead he found that Johnson spent his time criticising the lifestyles of the military and feeding the convict population with hopes of personal salvation.9 Across the empire [ 24 ]

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chaplains would struggle to reconcile their official role with their missionary ambitions, and tensions between the secular authorities and the clergy were commonplace.10 The clergy who served in early New South Wales and the Cape often complained that their bosses in the colonial administration gave little practical support to the colonial Church establishment. Robert Jones, the Cape’s first civil chaplain, told the Bishop of London that his efforts to ‘excite a spirit of education’ at the Cape had failed because the ‘government seem to oppose all plans of education and improvement, under the broad charge of their favouring Methodism’.11 What was particularly aggravating was that the same men who showed such little interest in the fortunes of the Church were also the ones who controlled ecclesiastical patronage. The chaplains who served in early Australia were technically Crown appointments and after 1807 governors of the Cape Colony had the authority to collate ministers to benefices and grant marriage licences.12 Jones fumed that Lord Charles Somerset, governor from 1814 to 1826, controlled all ecclesiastical patronage but spent his Sundays racing horses.13 Some colonial officials played an active role in finding suitable clergy, others were happy to pass the responsibility onto others. Jones had been recommended by Sir John Cradock, and Somerset used his aristocratic connections to source at least one clergyman – William Geary – for the Cape in 1822.14 The first governors in New South Wales played little role in the selection process, but later incumbents would have differing reasons for getting involved. Philip Gidley King (governor 1800–6) was forced by a lack of alternatives to appoint the transportee, Henry Fulton, chaplain at Norfolk Island in 1801, while in 1811 Lachlan Macquarie (governor 1810–21) tried to counter the influence of the existing evangelical clergy in the colony by engineering – unsuccessfully as it turned out – the appointment of two young Irish clergymen who had been recommended to him by his secretary, John Thomas Campbell (one of the men recommended was 15 Campbell’s brother, a curate in northern Ireland). Churchmen in Canada also grumbled about the level of state involvement in the sourcing and appointment of clergy. In Upper Canada the British government and its colonial representative, the lieutenantgovernor, claimed the right to appoint all those clergy who received money from provincial funds.16 Problems came when government officials recommended men who churchmen thought unsuitable. Peter Russell, Upper Canada’s senior executive administrator from 1796 to 1799, regarded Thomas Raddish – who had been appointed by the home secretary in 1796 – as precisely the kind of educated gentleman needed in an infant colony: Raddish, Russell thought, would ‘impress on the Inhabitants of this new Country a proper sense of their religious duties’ [ 25 ]

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as he was a gentleman of an ‘easy familiar manner, yet properly measured and respectable in his conduct’. Bishop Mountain of Quebec, by contrast, thought Raddish the worst appointment imaginable, as his ‘manners, conversation, & dress’ looked ridiculous on the frontier. In an echo of Simcoe, Mountain said ‘it is not so much talents that we want, as a sincere zeal, governed by a sound discretion’. In the event it was Mountain who was right. Raddish stayed in Canada long enough to tie up some profitable land purchases and then fled back to England. He did not give up his Canadian salary until 1799 and so for a short time Raddish could claim to be a particularly unique kind of non-resident and pluralist cleric.17 Government involvement in the selection of clergy was, however, short-lived. Early in the nineteenth century the imperial and colonial authorities passed the responsibility for recruiting clergy on to the SPG and other voluntary organisations. In 1814 the secretary of state for the colonies, Earl Bathurst, arranged for the British Parliament to pay the SPG an annual grant towards the extension of the Church of England in the North American colonies. This cash injection allowed the SPG to support sixty new clergymen in Upper Canada between 1814 and 1831. Less than half – twenty-six – were men who had been sent out from the mother country. This was not necessarily because the society was still struggling to find curates or graduates who were willing to go out (though this may have been a factor); rather it was because the society was in a position to ‘adopt’ men who had been sourced by senior clerics in the colonies. In all the society adopted thirty-two men who had been trained in Canada at clergymen’s homes or the schools and seminaries run by John Strachan at Cornwall and York and Joseph Braithwaite at Chambly near Montreal. The SPG did all it could to promote local recruitment: for example in 1815 it provided £200 scholarships for the training of divinity students who were sourced from among the Upper Canadian population. It is not clear whether the SPG was after a particular kind of cleric. Candidates had to come armed with letters of recommendation and certificates of ordination, and they also had to demonstrate their theological knowledge and their ability to preach and pronounce 18 properly. The society said it would only take on deacons and priests, but throughout our period we can find instances where it took on nonordained men.19 There is evidence that in the 1830s and 1840s SPG recruiters were after men with at least two years’ experience in a curacy,20 but there is little suggestion that this was a consideration in the earlier period; indeed, the correspondence of the SPG’s secretary suggests the society was happy to get whoever it could (though the society was in a position to turn down William Coyte in 1821: in his ambitious [ 26 ]

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application he revealed that he had suffered a stroke that had ‘taken the use of my left side wholly away’).21 Recruits either applied directly or were recommended by one of the SPG’s many contacts. These patronage networks were numerous and varied; they are also, perhaps, impossible to reconstruct in their entirety. We know that figures involved in the revival of the Anglican establishment in Britain and overseas were connected to the SPG. Bishop Pretyman-Tomline of Lincoln, a supporter of Pitt’s regime, engineered Jacob Mountain’s appointment to the Quebec bishopric in 1791, but we also know that Pretyman-Tomline got one of his Grantham curates, James Sutherland Rudd, appointed to Cornwall in 22 Upper Canada in 1802. Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London from 1787, was another Pittite figure who bridged the revival of the Church in Britain and its extension overseas. Porteus was the reason why John Langhorn, who was going nowhere in a Cheshire curacy, became the SPG’s first Upper Canadian missionary in 1787. Langhorn shared none of his patron’s tolerance for Dissenters or Roman Catholics, but like Porteus he assumed that the future of empire depended on the extension of a 23 strong national Church overseas. While the SPG could serve as a channel through which a revived conservatism could be extended to the colonies, we should also remember that the society was willing to take on men who were recommended by lesser and more obscure clergy. The other key players in the recruitment process were a network of evangelical Anglicans that encompassed well-known figures like John Newton and William Wilberforce and a series of lesser lights in Cambridge and Yorkshire. This network – they were given the name ‘Clapham Sect’ – were famous for buying up advowsons (patronage rights) so that they could appoint a succession of evangelical ministers to 24 English parishes. Gradually this project was tried out in the colonies. By utilising their extensive political connections, Wilberforce and his evangelical coterie were able to ensure that a stream of evangelicals were appointed to colonial chaplaincies to the east of the Cape of Good Hope. Evangelicals were drawn to the appointment of chaplains because their efforts to regenerate and moralise the empire through other means – namely the abolition of the slave trade and the opening of India to missionary traffic – had run out of steam in the 1790s. India was a key area of interest. Charles Grant, an evangelical member of the East India Company’s Board of Control, worked with Charles Simeon, the evangelical minister of Cambridge’s Holy Trinity Church, to secure the appointment of evangelical Cambridge graduates to company 25 Clapham chaplaincies in Bengal in the 1790s and early 1800s. evangelicals also had a say in the recruitment of chaplains for New South Wales. The first three appointments – Richard Johnson, Samuel Marsden and John Crowther – were all from Yorkshire, had all been [ 27 ]

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educated at Hull Grammar School, had all attended Magdalene College Cambridge and had all come under the influence of Simeon and the wider network (though Crowther never actually got to Australia). They had also been supported through their studies by the Elland Society, a Yorkshire organisation that raised funds for poorer men to enter the ministry. In 1808 Marsden travelled to England to search for candidates. He was not particularly successful (he later said that ‘the Very Name’ of New South Wales ‘was offensive to Many’), but the two men he did find – William Cowper and Robert Cartwright – were Yorkshire curates: Cartwright had been educated at Oxford’s St Edmund’s Hall – a college with an evangelical reputation – while Cowper had been influenced by 26 the evangelical revival during his time as a military clerk in Hull. The ‘young men of good talent, and of real, but sober, piety’ who Simeon was looking to recruit were not necessarily the ideal footsoldiers of a state-led Anglican design.27 Lay communities were also unlikely to have had the interests of the wider empire in mind when they selected ministers. Of course not all lay Anglicans were allowed to choose their clergy: there was no suggestion, for instance, that the convict or military communities in Australia and the Cape Colony would be given a say in the selection of government-appointed chaplains. But in Canada it was a different story. Settlers in Nova Scotia had enjoyed a voice in the selection of ministers long before the American loyalists brought a tradition of popularly elected ministers to Canada in the 1780s.28 Meanwhile, lay involvement in the Quebec diocese was nurtured by perceptive clergy who understood that the future of the Church depended on harnessing the energies of the local community.29 John Stuart, Upper Canada’s first clergyman, encouraged the congregations at Niagara and Oswegatchie to source their own clergy from the United States as he recognised that ‘it depends, almost wholly, on the Opinion entertained by the People of the missionary, whether they will conform to our Church or not’.30 Admittedly, Stuart’s enthusiasm for lay-elected clergy did cool somewhat when he discovered that Canadian congregations looked to America rather than Britain or British Canada for their ministers.31 Lay communities in chaplaincy establishments were occasionally given the opportunity to have a say in the selection process. The 4,000 assisted emigrants who went out to the Cape Colony in 1819 were, for instance, permitted to take ministers of their choice with them. In the event, the two Anglican clergy who went out were both chosen by the leaders of the party rather than the emigrants themselves. William Parker, a Cork merchant, chose the Irishman Francis McClelland as minister for his party of English and Irish settlers. Thomas Willson, another party leader, selected a Blackburn grammar school master [ 28 ]

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named William Boardman because he thought Boardman would be a suitable person to educate his children. Boardman might also act as Willson’s agent or ‘colleague’ once in the colony. The impoverished Boardman – he was father of nine children – had been looking for a colonial posting for some time and evidently had a sharp awareness of the confusing array of individuals and institutions that had a part to play.32 That Boardman was far from a popular choice is clear from his later experience in the colony (at one point Boardman labelled his party ‘fraudulent and addicted to falsehood’ when they accused him of mishandling land grants).33 Delegating the selection of clergy to lay persons did not, therefore, always lead to a popular Church. But the key point that we should take away from all this is that the architects of the state-driven ‘Anglican design’ did not personally select all the empire’s clergy. Indeed, the colonial authorities had misgivings about both Boardman and McClelland: the former was rumoured to be a drunkard and questions were raised about whether the Irishman McClelland would be able to minister to the large numbers of English who formed 34 Parker’s ostensibly Irish party.

The reform of clerical recruitment after 1819 The recruitment of clergy in the pre-1820 period illustrates that different groups wanted different things out of the expansion of the Church. The evangelicals who surrounded the Clapham networks had the reform of empire in view when they sought the appointment of ‘pious chaplains’. Lay communities, by contrast, wanted men with attractive personalities who could provide moral leadership and deliver a good sermon, preferably extempore. We have also seen that there was an unregulated quality to recruitment in the early period: a variety of agencies had a say in the selection process and clergy moved around the empire through various channels. Anglican clergy were, for instance, among the loyalist migrants who fled revolutionary America for Nova Scotia, Upper Canada 35 and other Atlantic world sites. From early on the Canadian Church accepted the services of men who had migrated to the colonies and then offered their services after spending time in other professions. The English-born Richard Pollard served spells as a merchant in Detroit and as a judge and sheriff in Upper Canada before being ordained by Bishop Mountain of Quebec in 1802.36 Anglicans at the Cape made use of clerics – one example is George Milner Sturt, chaplain at Simonstown from 1819 – who had initially moved to the colony for their health.37 Finally, there were an unquantifiable number of clergymen who went to the colonies as farmers and ministered to the local community on a purely voluntary and ad hoc basis. These men were wholly independent and [ 29 ]

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never part of any diocesan structure, but they still made a contribution – albeit an undocumented one – to colonial Anglicanism.38 In the 1820s colonial administrators began to raise doubts about the existing recruitment arrangements. Officials in the Colonial Office and the metropolitan Church wanted to know more about applicants and also about the chaplaincies to which they were being sent. Bishop Howley of London felt that as the final licensing authority he did not have any ‘means of obtaining the information with respect to the qualifications of Candidates for Colonial Clerical situations’. Thomas Hobbes Scott, Archdeacon of New South Wales from 1825 to 1829, had previously pointed out to Howley that several of his chaplains had been accepted on the basis of their testimonials, without any inquiry into their personal 39 character. These criticisms registered with colonial officials: Robert Wilmot-Horton, the under-secretary, called for the creation of both a chaplain general and a new department at the CO to oversee recruitment.40 Reform of the recruitment process took two forms. First, a new body, the Ecclesiastical Board for the Colonies was created in 1824. The aim of this institution was to give central government and the Church hierarchy closer control over the selection, stationing and movement of colonial clergy. Second, closer links were built between the recruitment of colonial chaplains and SPG missionaries. Anthony Hamilton, the Archdeacon of Taunton, was the crucial link: from 1824 to 1833 he was joint secretary of both the SPG and the Ecclesiastical Board. The creation of a streamlined recruitment bureaucracy was in keeping with the changing style of colonial administration in the 1820s and 1830s. On the one hand the Board reflected a desire among colonial officials to open up the murky world of colonial appointments to some kind of public scrutiny. The 1820s was, as Zoë Laidlaw has shown, a moment when colonial officials were taking steps to relocate the administration of all kinds of colonial patronage to authorities in the 41 metropole. The Board also contributed to a new era of information collection at the CO: while colonial clergy were asked to provide the Office with regular updates on their ministrations, colonial governors and ecclesiastics were told to provide statistics on the denominational composition of colonial populations and the size of colonial ecclesiastical establishments. The collection of information on the characters of the clergy and the shape of colonial establishments would give the Board the tools it needed to roll out a more uniform imperial 42 ecclesiastical policy. It is significant, for instance, that the 1820s saw the first attempts to apply policies tried in one colonial location in another. New South Wales, for example, received a clergy reserves scheme in 1826 that was modelled on the system that had been introduced in Canada back in 1791. [ 30 ]

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The Board also formed part of a broader Church reform agenda that encompassed both the colonial and metropolitan Church. In Britain, successive Tory governments sought to extend the reach of the national Churches: money was put into church-building projects, efforts were made to raise the incomes of poorly-paid curates and bishops were encouraged to get tough on non-resident clergymen.43 In the colonies, reform meant building churches, improving the pay and conditions of overseas clergy (for example, by giving new appointments glebe land), tightening the Church’s grip over education and recruiting betterqualified clergymen. Attempts were also made to strengthen ecclesiastical authority and build a disciplined Church that was based on a clearly defined Anglican identity and strict conformity with Anglican liturgy. In New South Wales in 1814 governor Lachlan Macquarie tried to stop his chaplains (men he called of ‘Low rank’ and ‘much tinctured with Methodistical and other Sectarian principles’) from using Goode’s unauthorised version of the psalms as he feared that they would give a ‘Latitude to Dissent’ in such a ‘Young and Unschooled colony’.44 Such strictures obviously did little good, as when Thomas Hobbes Scott arrived he found evangelical chaplains fraternising with nonconformists and services ‘administered much more after the manner of a Methodist Chapel than of a Church’. Scott told his chaplains not to use ‘any Prayers but such as are in the Liturgy’ and he also asked them to keep him updated on their whereabouts and activities on Sundays.45 Back in Britain Anthony Hamilton was trying to fashion a colonial clerical profession. He never outlined the qualifications of his ideal candidate but he did tell Archdeacon Scott that he wanted to recruit more men like Charles Wilton (Wilton was appointed to New South Wales in 1826). The son of a clergyman, Wilton had been educated at Oxford and had served as a curate and as a teacher in a National School. If his Australian sermons are anything to go by he was also a man of safe, conservative, views (Hamilton probably did not know that Wilton was fleeing debts worth £78).46 There is evidence that men with particular skills were privileged in this period. William Bedford, a former staymaker, was presumably sent to Van Diemen’s Land in 1821 as assistant military chaplain because he had previously served as ordinary in Newgate jail (as chaplain responsible for ministering to condemned prisoners). Hamilton was also able to meet Thomas Hobbes Scott’s demand for clergy who had experience working in National Schools: four of the men appointed in the 1820s (Thomas Reddall, Thomas Sharpe, Charles Dickinson and George Innes) had experience as schoolmasters, and a fifth, Robert Forrest, would gain a reputation as a successful headmaster of the King’s School in Parramatta.47 [ 31 ]

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Whether Hamilton was after men with particular doctrinal views is harder to assess. Australian historians point out that the advent of the Board broke the evangelical stranglehold on the colony and resulted in the arrival of high churchmen such as Wilton and G. K. Rusden.48 Metropolitan high churchmen did find the new arrangements fruitful: Joshua Watson, the lay leader of a high church network known as the ‘Hackney Phalanx’, got Edward Judge, one of Bishop Blomfield of Chester’s protégés, appointed master of the grammar school that opened in Cape Town in 1826.49 This does not mean that the colonies were suddenly shut off to evangelicals.50 Evangelicals like John Vincent and Robert Forrest were appointed to New South Wales in the 1820s, and we can find Archdeacon Scott grumbling about the ‘Evangelical influence at the colonial office’ in 1827 (James Stephen, the Office’s legal adviser, married the daughter of an influential Clapham Sect member).51 Evangelicals also still had access to the SPG. In the 1820s the society adopted at least three Canadian clergymen (Samuel Armour, Francis Evans and Saltern Givens) of evangelical views.52 The frequent references to the ‘respectability’ of candidates in the Board’s correspondence suggests the moral standing and leadership qualities of candidates were prized ahead of theological sensibilities. The selection process was also never entirely controlled by the ecclesiastical and colonial authorities in London. The SPG, for instance, allowed colonial clerics to come back to England to find clergy in much the same way as Marsden had done in 1808. Charles James Stewart – the SPG missionary who became bishop of Quebec in 1826 – was able to undertake recruitment tours in Britain in 1820, 1826 and 1830. The two men Stewart recommended to the SPG in 1820 resembled the Clapham recruits: both were ‘literates’ – men who did not possess a degree – 53 Clergy in areas of serving poorly paid curacies in Yorkshire. concentrated migrant settlement were also able to recruit their own local clergy: at least thirty-two of the seventy-three men who were appointed to Upper Canada after 1814 had been ordained in Canada. John Strachan – who became the Archdeacon of York in 1827 – thought that recruiting local men was a way to negate the threat posed by popular evangelical preachers. For Strachan, the success of these nonconformist preachers brought into stark relief the problems that would face those clergy who came out from England with ‘profound and extensive’ learning but whose ‘manner and habits’ were unsuited to the rough and 54 tumble world of the colonial frontier. In the event, Strachan’s hopes of establishing a permanent system for training local clergy were frustrated: the colony’s executive council refused to pay for the education of ordination candidates and non-Anglicans in the colony’s legislature [ 32 ]

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blocked plans for a ‘Missionary College’ modelled on the college that Bishop Middleton had established at Calcutta in 1822.55

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Recruitment in a new era of voluntarism The period between the late 1810s and early 1830s was in many ways an interlude in the history of clerical recruitment. This was the high point of a long-running ‘Anglican design’ that had been rolled out since the loss of the American colonies. The ‘design’ never really got beyond the planning stage: in the period before 1831, only 27 clergy were sent to the Cape and 25 were appointed to New South Wales. Upper Canada was better served, with 83 men serving before 1831 (65 of whom were appointed after 1819). The project was also hindered by a series of 56 insurmountable administrative problems. Episcopal authority was weak, not all clergy had parsonages and glebes, recruiters complained about a lack of suitable candidates and colonial Church establishments, though state-supported, remained dependent on men and money from Britain. When William Grant Broughton arrived to take up the post of Archdeacon of New South Wales in 1829 he found a colony with few clergy, fewer schools and parsonages and a convict population that was fast ‘becoming pagans and heathens’.57 Imperial religious policy changed markedly with the arrival of a new Whig government in the early 1830s. The Whigs did not want to dismantle establishments and national churches: they simply wanted them to work better.58 As privileged establishments were likely to promote imperial discontent rather than imperial loyalism, the interests of religion dictated that more was to be achieved by replacing Anglican monopoly with a system of ‘multiple’ or Christian establishment.59 This was hardly new policy: since the early 1820s the British government had paid money towards the support of Presbyterian and Roman Catholic chaplains in New South Wales and Upper Canada.60 What was different about the 1830s was that non-Anglican denominations could expect a much larger share of the money and resources that had once been the property of the Church of England. The Church gradually lost its special privileges: the parliamentary grant to the SPG was withdrawn in instalments after 1832; a new system of multiple establishment was introduced in New South Wales in 1836; and, most controversial of all, arrangements were made in 1840 to sell off Church property – Canada’s clergy reserves – and distribute the proceeds among the major Protestant denominations. The winding up of the Ecclesiastical Board in 1833 was a signal that the imperial and colonial authorities were about to withdraw from the recruitment process. Colonial governments were not about to surrender their patronage of the chaplaincies but they were prepared to pass [ 33 ]

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responsibility for finding future clergy on to others. The SPG remained an important institution, but as Hilary Carey and others have pointed out, the 1830s also saw the appearance of a number of new evangelical mission societies: the Colonial Church Society (CCS) (it was established in 1835 out of an earlier society, the Western Australian Church Missionary Society) was perhaps the most notable and successful, but there was also the short-lived Upper Canada Clergy Society (1838–46, UCCS) and the Upper Canada Travelling Mission Fund, an organisation that the Hexham clergyman W. J. D. Waddilove had established in 1834 to provide funds for his relative, Charles Stewart, Bishop of Quebec.61 The evangelical involvement of the 1830s and 1840s should not be seen as a continuation of the earlier activities of the Clapham Sect. The CCS and the UCCS belonged to a new strain of evangelicalism that was more aggressive, more anti-Catholic and more uncompromising than the rationalist and moderate evangelicalism of the early nineteenth century.62 The CCS’s literature presented missions to settlers as part of a global war on Catholicism and its committees were populated by conservative evangelicals who lent support to the Reformation Society’s proselytising efforts among Catholics. Meanwhile, the UCCS drew support from Protestant communities in Ireland who were in the front line of the ‘Protestant crusade’.63 At least one of the society’s recruits – a Waterford curate Samuel Ardagh who went to Canada in 1842 – had been involved in mission efforts to Catholics in Ireland.64 The significance of these institutions partly lies in the role that they played in imprinting a new kind of evangelicalism on the colonial world. Ardagh and other figures associated with the UCCS would transfer a strain of Irish Protestantism to the New World and would contribute to the development of the Orange Order in Ontario. But these organisations are important for two other reasons: on the one hand evangelical mission societies promised to give the laity a louder voice in recruitment; on the other, these societies diversified colonial Anglicanism by opening up connections between Irish, Scottish Anglicans and imperial Anglicans. It is fair to say that existing accounts have paid insufficient attention to these dimensions of the evangelical mission societies. Since the early nineteenth century high churchmen had worried that laymen were too heavily involved in the nomination and examination of 65 SPG missionaries. In fact, lay involvement in the SPG was limited compared to the extensive authority that laymen wielded in evangelical mission societies like the CCS. No clergy sat on the CCS’s committee and the society would not rule out the appointment of laymen of ‘earnest piety, robust health, strong sense, and good elementary education’ to its missions.66 The society also spurred lay initiative in the colonies. Committees of subscribers grew up wherever the society set down [ 34 ]

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missions (by 1841 it had auxiliaries in Prince Edward’s Island, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Swan River in Western Australia and the Cape), and these committees could have an important say in the selection of the CCS’s missionaries. East India Company servants convalescing at Wynberg near Cape Town formed themselves into a CCS committee and then arranged for one of their number, a former Company captain named Thomas Blair, to be appointed as CCS missionary to a kind of ‘proprietary’ chapel they had built themselves. Anxious bishops claimed that CCS committees claimed rights over ministers that were comparable 67 to those of lay patrons back in England. The Upper Canada Clergy Society is less well known but it too promised to develop a model of Church expansion that would have handed considerable authority to lay communities. The UCCS drew support from ‘Bible gentry’ figures, such as Randolph Stewart, the 9th Earl of Galloway, the English baronet Sir Walter Rockliffe Farquhar and the Earls of Roden and Mountcashel, but the idea for the society lay with Captain William Wellesley, a nephew of the Duke of Wellington who was one of a number of military figures in the evangelical Exeter Hall circle. Wellesley initially set out to establish a society that would encourage the formation of missions that were driven by local lay communities rather than clergy or bishops. Delegates from the society would go out to Canada and form a system of committees or ‘vestries’ – made up of lay representatives of the settler community – who would then raise funds for ministers supported by the parent society. The clergy would initially work on a temporary basis, as Wellesley believed that settlers should ‘reserve for themselves the right of seeing and of liking the Clergyman who they voluntarily undertake to support’. Wellesley recognised that ‘the genius of the Ch. of England is adverse to the republicanism of the plan’, but he added that if the Church did not harness the energy of the laity then it would never set down firm roots 68 in settler societies. Many colonial bishops would have agreed. Charles Perry, the evangelical Bishop of Melbourne, noted that a ‘prosperous church’ had to a have a ‘popular character’ and he too wanted a system whereby ministers were elected by ‘certain representatives of the congregations’.69 The problem with the Wellesley’s model was that it threatened to create a missionary church in which power extended up from the laity rather than down from the bishop. The founding principle of the society – that laymen could choose ministers – was also disquieting. Unsurprisingly, Bishop Charles Stewart of Quebec only grudgingly gave the society his backing (despite the fact that one of the society’s backers, Randolph Stewart, was his nephew).70 The second important feature of these two societies was that they were British institutions that drew support from evangelicals in Ireland, [ 35 ]

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Scotland and England. Wellesley wrote his early proposals in Edinburgh and he recognised that his plans for a system of colonial vestries were influenced by Presbyterian models. Scottish gentry such as Galloway lent support and the society was also in contact with Scottish evangelicals such as Edward Bannerman Ramsay with regard to recruits.71 Both the CCS and UCCS also set down Irish foundations: in the early 1840s the UCCS looked to prominent Irish evangelicals to recommend ‘additional labourers of a kindred spirit’ to the several Irish clergy it had already appointed (five of the seven men it sent to Upper Canada were Irish-born).72 Waddilove’s ‘Upper Canada Travelling Mission Fund’ was never as ambitious or controversial as the UCCS (all Waddilove did was raise money for Canadian bishops to find new missionaries), but it too had a British support basis (Waddilove was related, by marriage, to the Earl of Galloway). The subscription list from 1834 to 1838 names thirteen Edinburgh subscribers and refers to two collections in Edinburgh churches.73 The British character of these institutions did not by itself make them problematic for colonial bishops. As Michael Gauvreau has pointed out, Canadian bishops were happy to appoint non-English clergy because their aim was to build British churches that could appeal to a crosssection of the colonial population, and not just the English-born.74 Even Bishop Broughton, who in certain lights appears as an advocate of an English empire and Church, ordained three Presbyterian converts – James Allan, Francis Cameron and John Gregor – after the tremors from the ‘disruption’ in the Church of Scotland reached Australia in 1843.75 What was more worrying was that these societies seemed to be losing their Anglican identity as they built connections with evangelicals outside England. This was particularly the case with the UCCS: if Wellesley had had his way then the society would have promoted a system of vestries that looked more Presbyterian than Episcopalian. It is also noteworthy that two of the Canadian Church’s leading evangelical supporters in Britain – Randolph Stewart and Waddilove – maintained ecumenical relations with non-Anglicans: Waddilove told Stewart that he was prepared to support Presbyterian missions in Upper Canada because, as he put it, ‘ours is a common cause’.76 The actual recruitment achievements of these societies were modest: the UCCS supported seven missionaries before it folded in 1846; Waddilove could only find funds for twelve; and the CCS was shut out of colonies where bishops were hostile. The UCCS also lost its radical edge. The society that produced the first annual report in 1838 was a pale imitation of the one that Wellesley had proposed in 1834: no colonial lay committees were established; the system of vestries was never implemented; and Wellesley himself resigned from the society in May [ 36 ]

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1840. That same year William Gladstone (himself a former UCCS committee member) arranged for the absorption of the UCCS into the SPG on the grounds that this would bring ‘unity and efficiency’ to Anglican mission efforts.77 But these societies are important not because they achieved what they set out to do but because they illuminate evangelical understandings of the organisation and role of settler churches. The Church envisaged by evangelicals was one that nourished lay initiative and worked alongside non-Anglican denominations. It was also organised so that authority flowed up from the community of believers rather than down from the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Missionary societies were not the only channels through which evangelicals found their way to the colonies. Michael Gladwin has pointed out that Australian recruitment became much more decentralised and ad hoc in the new era of voluntarism. This may well be true for Australia, but as we have seen, there had always been a pragmatic quality to recruitment in Canada. Evangelical clergy in Australia included men who had arrived as migrants, missionaries or military chaplains and who were subsequently taken up by bishops who 78 were hungry for ordained ministers. Irishman John Cheyne is an example of an Australian cleric who took orders and entered the Church after a decade of farming in Victoria. The nature of settlement and immigration in Canada meant that men like Cheyne were much more common in Ontario. The SPG tried to clamp down on clergymen arranging their own travel79 but they were fighting a losing battle: at least twelve of the clergy who were appointed to Upper Canada between 1830 and 1850 were ordained clergymen who had emigrated from Britain and had either entered immediately into the Canadian Church or had taken up some other trade – usually farming. Eight were Irishmen, but there were English clerical migrants too. George Hallen left a Worcestershire curacy because he thought he could support his eleven children more effectively by farming in Ontario. He was adopted by the 80 SPG in 1840. The evangelical George Mortimer was so disillusioned with the political and religious condition of England in 1832 that he was willing to resign his Shropshire curacy and move to Upper Canada without organising any ministerial appointment. His gamble paid off, as he soon found himself rector of Thornhill.81 Clearly, clergy did not always move through the structures and channels laid down by missionary organisations.82

The SPG and the role of bishops in recruitment Colonial clerical workforces were in many ways formed for bishops rather than by them. Senior clerics who hoped to recruit a kind of [ 37 ]

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colonial ‘clerisy’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s term for a band of cultured gentlemen who would bring spiritual and intellectual improvement to all around them – were likely to be frustrated.83 Statistics show that the institutions that may have been the vehicles for a new high church engagement with empire, such as the SPG, were not as important as once thought. Gladwin points out that over a third of clergy appointed to the Australian colonies before 1850 had no connection to the society.84 In some senses the same might be said for Upper Canada: only nine of the hundred and forty or so men who were appointed between 1830 and 1850 were definitely recruited by the SPG in Britain; the rest were locally trained or had been adopted by the society in the colony. However, these Canadian figures tell half the story, as if we look at how the Canadian Church was funded we see that North American dioceses were becoming more dependent on the SPG in the 1830s and 1840s. Key here was the fact that the SPG did well out of the reform of the clergy reserves. An 1840 parliamentary Act ruled that the reserves would be sold and the proceeds distributed among the Church of England (which got the biggest slice), the Church of Scotland (which got half the Anglican share) and all other Protestant denominations (they got threeeighths of the whole). Crucially, the Anglican share from the sales would 85 be paid to the SPG rather than the Church authorities in Canada. This did not necessarily mean that Ontario Anglicans were dependent on the SPG for men; what it did mean was that all future clergymen would be dependent on the SPG for at least part of their salary (in the 1840s the SPG ruled that it would pay missionaries £100 if the local community found at least £50). This had the knock-on effect of centralising recruitment around the SPG and the bishop: John Strachan, the Bishop of Toronto from 1839, told prospective British candidates that they had to secure SPG salaries before they came out. Strachan also recognised that his ability to appoint new men was conditional on SPG support. The continuing relevance of the SPG for the Church in Canada reminds us that the ecclesiastical hierarchy did still have a decisive role to play in peopling the Church overseas. In Britain the episcopate’s share of ecclesiastical patronage was growing as a result of the creation of new 86 parishes; overseas, colonial bishops developed new ways of controlling and regulating the training and selection of clergy. Most employed commissaries in England who would raise money and recruit men for their dioceses.87 All would establish theological colleges so that local men could be trained in a colonial environment. With this in mind we might expect colonial bishops to have been in a position to put together a clerical workforce of their choosing. In contrast to earlier North American bishops, Strachan had more applicants than vacancies and he [ 38 ]

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felt secure enough to turn down Methodists who were looking to be ordained into the Church. He also insisted that candidates display-high academic qualifications.88 The Crown’s control of the patronage of colonial chaplaincies was also not as serious an obstacle as it might have been. The 1840s did see high profile contests between bishops and colonial administrators in Tasmania and Madeira that threatened to exclude bishops from the selection, appointment and licensing of chaplains, but these were isolated incidents and there was no wider reassertion of state control. In the late 1840s Earl Grey, the secretary of state for the colonies, allowed Robert Gray, the Cape’s first bishop (he arrived in 1848), to exercise a 89 ‘practical power’ over the appointment of chaplains. A fund-raising tour in late 1847 furnished Gray with funds for twenty-four new ministers, several of whom were recruited before he set out.90 Gray was one of a new breed of bishop who wished to put together a hand-picked workforce: his plan was to take out a mixture of ordained men and nonordained catechists, with the latter being sent to his own home at Protea near Cape Town for training. Non-graduates still had to possess high academic qualifications: a shop assistant who applied for work had to learn Latin, and Gray’s archdeacon, Nathaniel Merriman, turned down 91 one candidate because his classical learning was not up to scratch. Bishop Tyrell of Newcastle also headed to his Newcastle diocese in northern New South Wales with five clergy, three of whom were nonordained men who he could train and mould on the spot. In reality, no bishop had free rein over the recruitment of clergy. Training local candidates took time and bishops had to rely on whatever the SPG sent out to them. Broughton noted that there was a ‘vast variety of shades of opinion’ among his SPG recruits.92 Bishops also had to keep in mind the religious opinions, prejudices and needs of their congregations. Had they not done this, bishops may well have been much more enthusiastic recruiters of Tractarian clergy. Like other high churchmen in the ‘orthodox’ mould, Broughton, Strachan and Gray were attracted to the early Oxford Movement because it showed how the Church could mould a new identity as a spiritual and missionary institution that was independent of the state. The Movement also gave each of them the confidence to introduce liturgical practices such as the offertory and surplice that were considered in keeping with Anglicanism’s ancient Catholic identity.93 All three looked to recruit men who had been influenced by the British high church revival: in 1837 Broughton asked his English commissary to find him students of Newman’s ‘school’, as, according to him, ‘they take [...] the most just and comprehensive view of the true constitution of our Church, and of its actual duties in the present state of the world’.94 Strachan corresponded with Newman and he was [ 39 ]

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also in touch with high church bishops in the Episcopal Church of Scotland – an institution that gained a reputation as a Tractarian outpost – about potential recruits.95 Among Gray’s early appointments were the university-educated high churchmen James Green, Henry Master White and Nathaniel Merriman, each of whom would gain reputations among a largely low church laity as ‘ritualists’. The recruitment of Tractarian clergy never got very far. Strachan’s overtures to Scottish bishops yielded one (evangelical as it turned out) recruit and those Tractarians who did arrive in the colony – the two most notable were James Beaven and Edward Dewar – arrived through different channels.96 Gray told the SPG in 1847 that he did not want extreme Tractarians as they might do ‘incalculable mischief’, while Strachan thought the professors at his new Trinity College should ‘belong to neither extreme of the Church’.97 Partly this was because Gray, Strachan and Broughton all became more hostile to the Movement when it entered its later Catholic phase; partly it was because colonial bishops could pick what they wanted from the Tracts and preach a kind of modified, colonial version at their theological colleges.98 But high church hesitancy also stemmed from the fact that bishops recognised that their primary duty was to broaden the popularity of the Church by building a comprehensive and national Church that tolerated doctrinal diversity. Colonial bishops were in much the same position as their counterparts in Ireland: neither could afford to alienate Protestant support by appearing to be in cahoots with Tractarians.99 Strachan’s detestation of the ‘Low Church malady’ did not stop him from posting evangelicals to remote mission stations, as, according to him, they were best equipped to collect ‘a congregation out of a divided and scattered population’. Wherever possible, Strachan tried to match Irish clergy with Irish congregations.100 He also told congregations that clergy would only be sent to parishes after it had been ascertained that the appointment was ‘agreeable to all parties concerned’.101 The policy had its limits: when the congregation at Rice Lake asked Strachan to appoint a clergyman named Charles Brown, Strachan, who called Brown ‘unsteady’, turned them down.102

Assessing the structure of clerical recruitment The history of clerical recruitment in the sixty years after 1790 is a messy and complicated one.103 Recruitment was decentralised to the extent that no group or Church party could claim a monopoly over the selection process. It was not just that a range of groups had a hand in the selection process: individuals who we might expect to have had similar views on the kind of men needed for colonial work could disagree quite [ 40 ]

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markedly. Gladwin uses the debates surrounding the establishment of St Augustine’s college to show how senior high churchmen could not agree on where colonial clergy should be educated, whether they should be trained in England or overseas, whether a grammar school or university education was necessary and if men from a humble or more elevated status should be recruited.104 Colonial bishops also had different views on what made the ideal clergyman, but they also recognised that their first duty was to satisfy a diverse Anglican public. It is nevertheless possible to spot some patterns in this complicated history. The early 1830s heralded both an era of voluntarism and closer episcopal supervision of recruitment. Bishops had to adopt pragmatic approaches to recruitment but they were still in a position to insist that 105 recruits possess certain skills and educational qualifications. There is also a sense in which both colonial bishops and candidates understood that the mission and role of the colonial Church was changing. It was common for early applicants to stress their loyalty to the British constitution, monarchy and established order; by contrast, in the era of missionary enthusiasm in the 1830s and 1840s candidates were much more likely to cite religious motivations in their applications.106 Statements in missionary applications do need to be treated with caution, but such changes suggest that Tractarian ideas about the Church’s missionary identity were having an effect.

The recruits Patterns can also be found in the social, educational and national backgrounds of the recruits. One of the striking things about recruitment in the Napoleonic period is that the imperial ambitions of colonial and ecclesiastical administrators ran far ahead of their recruitment achievements. The four men that the SPG sent out to Upper Canada before 1815 had impressive qualifications on paper (two were Cambridge graduates, one was from Oxford and a fourth – John Langhorn – had been educated at St Bees), but none were particularly successful appointments. Langhorn, the first appointment, was an eccentric whose determination to keep to the Church’s rubrics was not conducive to winning over nonconformists; Robert Addison (appointed 1792) was stiff, scholarly and initially unpopular; James Sutherland Rudd (1801) clashed with American settlers and quickly left for Lower Canada; and the fourth, William Devereux Baldwyn (1814) was after a glebe and 107 parsonage house and not much else. All four were in their 30s and 40s had experienced professional disappointment in Britain. The ten chaplains who served in New South Wales before 1819 were also hardly the ideal foot-soldiers of a Church militant: four had had no classical [ 41 ]

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education, all but one were from modest backgrounds and one, Henry Fulton, had been transported after being implicated in the 1798 Irish rebellion. Then there was the problem of fraudulent clergy. In 1789 John Stuart exposed a man named John Bryan who had used forged ordination documents to get himself elected by a township meeting to a position as minister in Upper Canada. Two decades later a former Roman Catholic and suspected murderer named Laurence Halloran managed to get an appointment as chaplain to the military forces at the Cape Colony 108 despite the fact that he had never been ordained. The Church’s lax recruitment policy led the Canadian cleric John Stuart to complain in 1802 that ‘bankrupts, buffoons, or indeed any man who has failed in everything else can gain an easy admittance into the Church of England’.109 The 1819 Ordinations for the Colonies Act was designed to make sure that ‘irregular persons’ (as Bishop Mountain of Quebec called them) who had been ordained overseas had to get special dispensation before they could take up postings in the home church. This legislation seemed to confirm earlier fears about the calibre of the men serving overseas; it also encouraged contemporaries to talk about the ‘colonial clergy’ as a distinct category within the Victorian clerical profession (the poverty-stricken ‘mountain clergy’ of Wales was another 110 discursive category). The tendency to think of the colonial clergy as a class – usually an inferior one – has persisted in modern scholarship.111 The following section provides a more rounded analysis of the differences and similarities between the colonial and metropolitan clergy. Certainly, there was nothing unique about the colonial clergy’s diversity: a northern English diocese like Ripon had the same mix of university graduates, non-graduates, literates and theological college men as dioceses in Canada.112 The men who served overseas could also be of an equal social and educational status as the clergy who ministered in English and Irish dioceses. The fact that 29 per cent of the clergy in our sample (133 of 455 clergy) had experience of working in the Church in Britain as curates, chaplains or incumbents of rectories or vicarages further suggests that the colonial and metropolitan clergy should be seen as part of a single professional community. It was not the educational or social backgrounds of the colonial clergy that marked them out; rather it was the fact that contemporaries themselves were aware that work in the colonies required a distinct kind of clergyman. Indeed, by mid-century senior recruiters had reason to be fairly satisfied with their workforces.

Social and educational backgrounds Only tentative conclusions can be made about the clergy’s social and educational backgrounds as we do not have details on all the men who [ 42 ]

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served in our three case studies. Alumni lists provide details on the family backgrounds of the clergy who were educated in British universities, but it is more difficult to determine the social backgrounds of non-graduate clergy and those who had been educated in colonial institutions. Even alumni lists do not provide a foolproof method of determining an individual’s social status: the categories used at the ancient universities to denote classes of students – ‘sizar’, ‘pensioner’ and ‘fellow commoner’ – give us a reasonable sense of an individual’s financial position, but many of the terms used in the lists to describe fathers’ occupations – ‘gentleman’ and ‘esquire’ are two examples – are 113 Yet the sources that are available do suggest that the imprecise. colonial clergy resembled their metropolitan counterparts in the sense that they were an educated community that was drawn from the middling ranks of society.114 Michael Gladwin has recently reconstructed the social and educational backgrounds of the Australian clergy: here we shall see that the story he tells about the rising social status and educational qualifications of the Australian workforce can also apply for the men who laboured in the Toronto and Cape dioceses.115 The story in New South Wales is of a largely plebeian and evangelical clerical workforce giving way to a more middle-class and theologically diverse community.116 The ten clergy who served in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land before 1819 were mostly from modest backgrounds (Samuel Marsden’s father was a butcher; John Cross’s was a shoemaker; and William Cowper was of yeoman farmer stock), though one of the recruits – Robert Cartwright – was descended from a prominent Welsh border family, and Robert Knopwood – a man who was unfairly labelled as debt-ridden sporting parson – heralded from Norfolk gentry. Three of the four who attended Cambridge were ‘sizars’, men whose education was dependent on lower fees or external funding. New South Wales would continue to receive such men (five more sizars can be found among the post-1819 appointees), but in general the clergy who came later were a more middle-class community: Gladwin calculates that around 71 per cent of the Australian clergy had fathers in 117 The clergy who business, finance and the established professions. served in New South Wales in particular were of a middle-class cast: of the 91 whose fathers’ occupations are known, 17 were the sons of clergy, 18 had fathers who are listed as ‘gentlemen’ or ‘esquires’, 9 had fathers in the military (two – W. J. M. Hillyar and Robert Lethbridge King – were the offspring of admirals), while the fathers of another 28 had been in the medical, legal, mercantile banking or educational professions. A smaller number hailed from farming families (7) and the lower trades like butchery and stay-making (9). The fact that men from aristocratic and gentry backgrounds began to arrive in colonial dioceses in greater (albeit [ 43 ]

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still modest) numbers was a particularly exciting development for senior clerics. Robert Gray, for instance, took Thomas Earle Welby’s arrival in South Africa as a sign of the vitality and respectability of his missionary Church.118 The clerical profession in Upper Canada evolved in a similar way to Australia’s. All three of the Cambridge graduates who served in Upper Canada before 1818 were sizars, but from then on such men became a rare sight in Ontario. Twenty-four Cambridge graduates would serve in Upper Canada after 1819 but only six were sizars, and all those who attended Trinity College Dublin were listed as ‘pensioners’ and ‘fellow commoners’, the two highest classes of student. Though we do not have details on all the Upper Canadian clergy, what we do know reveals that that the bulk came from professional and clerical families, with a particularly significant number – twenty-one – being the sons of military fathers. The metropolitan recruits were largely drawn from the middle and upper strata of society: of the 56 whose details are known, 21 were sons of clergy, 12 had fathers who were termed ‘gentlemen’ and another 12 came from legal or mercantile families. Among the sample of 57 local recruits were sons of clergy (10), gentlemen and peers (9), merchants (4), surgeons (4), military officers (13), lawyers (2), politicians (2) and government servants (4). That the colonial-born largely hailed from Canada’s emergent professional community and colonial elite was no doubt a source of satisfaction for Strachan: his aim had long been to populate the Church with ‘the children of Clergymen, respectable 119 settlers, farmers [and] half pay officers’. It is revealing that the early students at Strachan’s Trinity College – founded 1851 – were mostly the sons of clergy, barristers, merchants, prominent ‘Family Compact’ politicians and men styled ‘Esquire’ or ‘Gentleman’ in the 1851 census.120 Colonial bishops were surprised that an institution that offered poor pay and conditions was able to attract men from the middle and upper echelons of metropolitan and colonial society.121 In the 1830s and 1840s Canadian educational institutions were attracting men with outstanding scholarly qualifications,122 while Australia furnishes the examples of Robert Allwood and Fitzherbert Marriott – both came from prosperous families, both were well connected and both moved to the colonies because they saw them as a respectable and attractive career move.123 But this does not mean the colonial clerical workforce was a purely middle-class affair. Strachan maintained that clergy should be of high status, but at points he was pushed into recommending or ordaining men from the lower ranks of society. He was, for example, willing to train the Irish emigrant Samuel Armour despite the fact that he found Armour rough and ill-educated.124 But Strachan may have been a unique case, as [ 44 ]

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other bishops felt that the future of the colonial Church depended on recruiting men from humble backgrounds. W. F. Hook urged the appointment of working-class recruits in 1844 and two years earlier Broughton proposed that young men from humble families who had been educated at schools in England might be sent for training in the colonies for work in remote districts.125 For Broughton, the future of the Church depended on finding men who had the ‘acquirements, feelings, principles and characters of gentlemen’ but who had the means of engaging with a colonial population that was ‘rude, inconformable, and vicious’.126 The Canadian churchmen John Stuart and Charles Inglis had made similar comments decades earlier about the importance of securing the services of men who could stand as moral leaders but who could also develop a rapport with frontier communities.127 It is difficult to pinpoint the men from humble backgrounds as alumni lists tend to record the occupations of fathers in the professional and landed classes. There may also have been men of low status among those whose fathers were in the military and clerical profession, but it is hard to tell. Our sample throws up several examples of sons of clergy who either attended university as sizars or who did not have the funds to 128 go at all. Gladwin estimates that around twenty-seven per cent of the Australia clergy were from the ‘aspirational middle class’ or some lower social group. Details on the Canadian clergy are too sketchy for us to make a comparable statistical analysis: we do know that the cohort included the sons of tradesmen (John Stoughton, appointed 1819), yeoman farmers (John Grier, 1824) and domestic servants (George Grout, 1827). Among the men whose father’s occupations are not known were sizars, graduates of St Bees’ theological college, literates who had not been to university and individuals who had come from some lowerstatus profession, such as school-teaching. The Cape stands out as it was gradually being populated by clergy who resembled the men of humble status who laboured for the evangelical missionary societies. Indeed, Gray’s aim was to fill his diocese with a mixture of middle-class graduates and men of lowly backgrounds who were fired by a sense of missionary zeal. John Quinn, a former Roman Catholic, only earned £75 as a scripture reader in London city mission; Samuel Sandberg, a converted Polish Jew and former shoemaker, had previously served as a missionary in India; and William Anderson Steabler, another one of 129 Gray’s catechists, was a shop assistant with no higher education. This is in contrast to the period before 1831, when the Cape’s workforce was divided between a small number of former sizars and low-status clergy and a larger group who had been pensioners at university and who were descended from peers, merchants, army officers, gentlemen, civil servants and clerics.130 The Cape was evidently attractive to such men as [ 45 ]

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the work was not onerous (at least in the prediocesan period) and the climate was conducive for those with health worries. Gray’s recruitment of humble missionaries was a sign that a distinctive clerical profession was taking shape in the colonies. Another indication of this was the number of clergy who established clerical dynasties once they arrived in the colonies. This was not an easy thing to do: supporting a young man’s theological education was expensive and colonial clergy who were on £200 or less had to find help from scholarships and other funding schemes.131 Professionalism could also be inculcated by ensuring that all clergy passed through the kind of specialist training that was not on offer at the ancient universities. This was the reasoning behind the theological colleges that sprouted up in dioceses across the British world in the 1830s and 1840s. Strachan wanted to connect his college at Cobourg to a series of ‘outposts’ where young men could be ‘practically instructed in the labours of a missionary’.132 Broughton would establish a college in Sydney in 1848 but in the early 1840s he too toyed with the idea of ‘ecclesiastical brotherhoods’ where four or five clergy would learn the arts of mission while living together in the bush.133 Strachan frequently reminded British candidates that the clerical profession in Canada was distinct from that in Britain. It was not just that colonial clerics had to be young and capable of enduring physical hardship: for Strachan, disestablishment and the threat posed by Roman Catholicism and Dissenters meant that colonial clergy had to have a much stronger sense of Anglicanism’s ‘distinctive principles’ and the significance and authority of the sacraments.134 An analysis of the educational backgrounds of the Toronto clergy reveals that Strachan’s efforts to reform clerical training met with some success. Before 1831 only sixteen of the eighty-three clergy appointed to Upper Canada had been educated in the colony; from then on the locallytrained became the largest group in the colonial clerical workforce. Thirty-six of the forty-six identifiable local recruits had received a theological education at schools or at the theological colleges at Cobourg and Chambly (38), and there was a smaller number who had been tutored in clergymen’s homes (4) or at Upper Canada College and King’s College (3). By contrast, the graduates of the ancient English universities gradually became less important. Before 1831 23 (27 per cent) of the clergy had attended Oxford or Cambridge; in the period between 1831 and 1850 Oxford and Cambridge were only supplying 14 per cent of the workforce (23 of the 162 appointments). The figure increases to 35 per cent if we include the 37 men who came from Trinity College Dublin, but the overall picture is of home-grown and locally educated clerical workforce. [ 46 ]

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An indigenous clergy was slower to emerge in Australia and the Cape: these areas had to wait until the 1830s and 1840s for bishops and neither area received the kind of Protestant emigration that Canada did. Broughton’s college in Sydney furnished recruits from 1849, but according to Gladwin only around 4 per cent of the pre-1850 Australian clergy had been formally trained in a local theological institution. The majority of clergy in New South Wales and the rest of Australia were universityeducated. Around 63 per cent of the 126 clergy who were appointed to the colony before 1850 are known to have attended an English, Irish or Scottish university (according to Gladwin the figure for the whole of 135 Australia was 70 per cent). The Cape was always a unique case – with no bishop to ordain or train clergy it was inevitable that those who served in South Africa before 1850 were drawn from Britain (47 of the 84 had university educations) or from missions and chaplaincies in India. The colonial clergy were therefore better educated than contemporary comment and recent historical writing would lead us to believe.136 Colonial clerics were also quick to put in place structures to train a workforce whose sense of class identity stemmed from the possession of a set of professional skills (historians have sometimes thought that it was negative factors, such as poor pay and a sense of victimisation, which led the colonial clergy to see themselves as a class). In the early period, the clerical workforces in Upper Canada and Australia resembled those dioceses in Wales and northern England where non-graduate clergy formed from two-thirds to a half of the clerical workforce.137 At least 5 of the 23 clergy who served in New South Wales before 1831 had no formal higher education, and 17 of the 83 Upper Canadian clergy were either literates or had been prepared for the Church by a clergyman in Canada or England. By the 1830s and 1840s it was much more likely that the colonial clergyman had attended university or had graduated from some specialist course of theological study in the colony itself. Colonial clerics may have been drawn to the latter group, but here again they had to take into account the wishes of the local Anglican public. Strachan told a British applicant in 1862 that he preferred ‘those candidates who have been educated among ourselves’, but three years later he was telling a student at St Augustine’s College that ‘clergymen ordained in England seem to be preferred to those 138 Other colonial ordained in the Colonies by the population here’. bishops found that their hopes of raising a new kind of colonial cleric did not sit well with the views of some in the lay community. Robert Gray had to rethink his policy of recruiting catechists once settlers made it known that they were worthy of ordained men. As Gray noted in 1849, ‘people were anxious for Clergymen of their own Church, and everywhere raised subscriptions for Clergymen’.139 [ 47 ]

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National backgrounds Colonial clerical work did not, therefore, attract a particular type of cleric. Colonial dioceses also attracted a mixture of nationalities and ethnicities. We know that some colonial bishops wanted to recruit a solidly Anglophile clerical community. Charles Perry of Melbourne told Broughton in 1850 that he wished to ‘secure the services of a sound sensible sober-minded Englishman’, and the men who Broughton recommended to metropolitan recruiters were – at least early on in his episcopal career – men from southern England.140 The timing of these statements might suggest that the 1830s and 1840s was a moment when senior colonial clergymen were beginning to reconsider who their Church was for. Michael Gauvreau has argued that in the 1830s and 1840s the Church in Canada was transformed from a comprehensive, inclusive and British institution into a more Anglican and English one.141 The comments by Perry and Broughton suggest that this kind of argument might work for other parts of the empire too. But what we find is that the Anglican clerical workforce was not becoming more English, nor were bishops necessarily trying to introduce a form of ethnic cleansing in the colonial Church. Bishops recognised that they could not close off the recruitment networks that linked colonial churches with Anglicans in Ireland and Scotland. They also recognised that there were benefits in recruiting a workforce that represented the ethnic and religious variety of the colonial settler population. The English were the most important (but by no means the dominant) ethnic group in the colonial clerical workforce. Of the 200 Canadian clergy whose details are known, 71 were born in England (29 per cent). The English were more noticeable in the establishments in New South Wales and the rest of Australia: at least 80 (63 per cent) of the 126 New South Wales clergy were English-born, and Gladwin has found that the English formed around 67 per cent of the entire 142 Australian clerical workforce between 1788 and 1850. Details on the Cape clergy are harder to track down (partly because a large number of the later recruits went out as catechists and have left few educational, ordination or missionary society records), but the picture is similar to Australia: 38 of the 84 men who went out as catechists and clergy between 1806 and 1850 were English-born (it was probably much more, as we do not know the national backgrounds of 34 men). In the early period the clergy fit the stereotype of the northern-born cleric who was forced by a lack of opportunities to take a poorly-paid curacy. From around 1819 onwards the colonies started to attract a more regionallyvaried clergy; indeed of the 71 English and Welsh born who served our three colonies before 1831, 39 were born south of the line running [ 48 ]

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between the Bristol Channel and The Wash, with a cluster of 23 men coming from London and the south-east. The high visibility of the English in the clerical community does not mean that this was an English church serving a purely English overseas community. The clergy were British, imperial and international: the sample includes men born in Scotland, Wales, the West Indies, India, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Poland, Germany, Malta and France. The largest non-ethnic group were the Irish; indeed the importance of the Irish element in the colonial clerical workforce suggests that we should think of the Anglican Church as an important component in the creation of a ‘Greater Ireland’ and Protestant Irish diaspora. Twentyeight per cent of the Upper Canadian workforce was of Irish origin. New South Wales and the Cape did not receive the same numbers of Protestant Irish migrants but the Irish were still important elements in their clerical workforces. Around 15 per cent of the New South Wales clergy were Irish-born (19 of a total of 126) and at least 7 of the 84 men who were appointed to the Cape were Irish. Colonial dioceses became more Irish as the century progressed. The Irish-born were the largest ethnic group in the clergy appointed to Upper Canada after 1831 and 16 of the 19 Irish who served in New South Wales arrived after 1831. Irish Protestant migration was one factor; another was the increasingly insecure nature of ecclesiastical careers in the Church of Ireland. Not every Irish cleric was fleeing depressed circumstances, but the worsening religious and political situation in Ireland – as well as the increasingly insecure nature of clerical incomes – forced many to look overseas. The County Longford curate Benjamin Cronyn was among a party of five Irish curates who chose to migrate to Canada in 1832 rather than stay and eke out a living in an Irish Church that was shrinking as a result of 143 Examples of Irish curates, the Whig reforms of the early 1830s. graduates and (in several cases) incumbents who left because they saw little future in the Irish Church are easy to find in missionary society records.144 The ethnic diversity of the colonial clergy was part accident, part design. We have seen that early recruiters could not be too picky about the national backgrounds of their clergy. There is evidence that those that came later were interested in broadening the appeal of the Church by seeking out non-English recruits. The SPG administrators who moaned about Irish applicants were very much minority voices: most would have agreed with Ernest Hawkins, the society’s secretary, that the SPG and the Church were national institutions that represented the spectrum of Anglican opinion in the British Isles.145 The creation of fourteen new SPG district committees in Ireland between 1840 and 1845 reflected this mindset, but it also pointed to the increasingly British [ 49 ]

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character of Anglican high churchmanship in the 1830s and 1840s. We have long known that evangelicalism drew much of its strength from its pan-British character; recent scholarship has shown that Tractarians and orthodox high churchmen also tried to extend the reach of the high church revival by maintaining close contacts with coreligionists in Ireland and Scotland.146 SPG recruitment policy reflected and strengthened these links. A significant number of the Irishmen who entered the colonial Church went out as migrants rather than as missionaries. Migrant clergy were particularly thick on the ground in Upper Canada and examples can be found in the Australian colonies (the insignificance of Irish migration to South Africa explains why the Cape’s Irish clergy were all society 147 missionaries). Though there is no evidence that Irish clergy came out with their congregations, they were likely to be links in a complex network of chain migrants that linked the colonies to Ireland. Benjamin Cronyn left Ireland because of the ‘tithe war’ but it is notable that he already had a clerical cousin – Job Deacon – in the colony; it also seems that Cronyn decided to take a mission in the London district in western Ontario because he had friends there. The Irish communities around London would become a magnet for Irish clergy in the next two decades: eighteen of the forty-two identifiable Irish clergy serving in Canada West in 1850 served in the western portion of Ontario, with eight stationed around London. There are plenty of examples of Irish clergy whose decision to migrate was guided by familial connections. One of the reasons why John Travers Lewis took an SPG mission post in Upper Canada in 1849 was because his widowed mother had gone out the year 148 before. This chain migration could have been much greater than it in fact was: Strachan was regularly asked by his Irish clergy to take on their relatives but he was rarely in a position to accept.149 An Irish patronage network can also be seen in the rare instances where Irish laymen had the right to appoint to ecclesiastical posts. In the 1840s Earl Mountcashel, the proprietor of Amherst Island on Lake Superior, appointed two Irish evangelicals, John Radcliff and William Agar Adamson.150 The Irish (and some English) clergy who built networks of chain migration remind us that the colonial Church was sustained by both formal institutional structures and a multitude of personal connections. Beyond this it is difficult to assess the significance of the Irish colonial clerical community. Partly this is because it is unclear whether we should treat them as a distinct group or indeed whether we should 151 emphasise their Irishness at all. It is tempting to see the Irish as a ‘race apart’ from their English- and colonial-born counterparts: most of the metropolitan recruits had been educated at Trinity College Dublin; most [ 50 ]

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displayed a propensity to group and network (clusters emerged in Melbourne in Victoria, in Upper Canada’s London district and along the Ottawa valley);152 and they also showed a remarkable ability to marry into one another’s families. Irish clergy in Australia could also clan together to oppose transportation and creeping Tractarianism.153 But there are strong reasons for not seeing the Irish as a distinct community. The clergy who came out from Ireland were a diverse bunch, A large number displayed the distinct Calvinistic evangelicalism that characterised the nineteenth-century Irish Church, but there were high churchmen too. Gladwin points out that Charles Elrington, Regius Professor of Divinity at Trinity College and a prominent Irish Tractarian sympathiser, recommended candidates for Western Australia, and we also know that Elrington tutored John Travers Lewis, a high church SPG missionary who would become bishop of the diocese of Kingston in 154 High church Irishmen in Upper Canada eastern Ontario in 1862. include William Bernard Lauder (appointed 1849), John Flanagan (1839) and Edward Denroche (1833), and there is the example of William F. Gore (1843) in New South Wales. It is also questionable whether clergy’s ethnicity really mattered. The nature of European migration to South Africa meant that the Irish clergy there had little opportunity to project an Irish identity. The impression one gets from reading the biography of Charles Orpen – he arrived at the Cape on the same boat as Gray in 1848 – is that his identity as a missionary, a physician and Anglican clergyman was more important 155 than his Irishness. We shall see in a later chapter that Irish Protestant clergy could make an important contribution to Irish community life, notably through cultural institutions like the St Patrick’s societies and loyalist organisations and quasi-ethnic bodies like Orange lodges. But it is striking that when Irish clergymen tried to define their identity they chose to call themselves English or British. A clergyman in India said he ‘was an Englishman, although an Irishman [...] with the spirit of a freeborn Englishmen glowing within me’, while in Canada Charles 156 Brough said he educated his children as ‘Anglo-Saxons’. This did not mean that an English or British identity was imposed on them. Scholarship has shown that Irish Protestants found a place in a British imperial venture because they moulded an ‘imperial Britishness’ that elided any close linkage between Englishness and Britishness.157 Irish clergy helped introduce a Protestant and evangelical strand to what was already a cosmopolitan colonial Anglicanism.158 But the significance of the Irish clerical community also lies in how they were viewed and handled by others. High church bishops were undoubtedly prejudiced against them: Broughton told his English commissary in 1850 that the SPG should avoid sending out ‘too large a proportion of Irish [ 51 ]

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graduates’, and in 1834 Strachan said he was ‘afraid to allow’ Irishmen ‘to preach for they seem never to have known the distinctive principles of the Church of England’.159 But Vaudry is correct that high church hostility to Irish clergy was more a matter of doctrinal and theological differences than evidence of any deep-seated ethnic tension.160 The same colonial bishops who criticised Irish clergy in private can be found appointing Irishmen – and not always high church ones – to senior posts: Perry of Melbourne appointed an Irish cleric named Hussey Macartney Archdeacon of Geelong in 1848; Strachan appointed the evangelical Dominick Blake – ‘an excellent clergyman’ – rural dean; and the ‘scientific and eccentric’ Irishman Charles Orpen was among Gray’s first recruits. Even Broughton supported Irishman William Gore in his 161 These contests with Parramatta evangelicals in the late 1840s. appointments suggest two things: one is that the Irish – even evangelical ones – could be insiders in the empire and colonial Church; the second is that the need to build a comprehensive, popular and national Church did indeed override all other considerations. The main challenge that faced colonial bishops was reconciling members of different Church parties, not clergy of different ethnicities. The tendency of Irish churchmen to describe themselves as British suggested that – outwardly at least – the members of the separate Anglican communions of England, Ireland and 162 Scotland could unite in a ‘British’ Church of England.

Patronage and personal networks Finally, it is possible to pick out patterns in how men got their first colonial job. Examining the steps that men took to secure a position in the colonial Church can shed light on two of this chapter’s central concerns: first, it can help us understand the ecclesiastical networks that traversed the empire and sustained the colonial Church; second, it gives us a clearer sense of where power lay in that Church. We know that in the home Church a graduate’s or curate’s chances of ascending the ladder of preferment depended largely on whether they 163 were able to build personal contacts with the patrons of benefices. This was true whether a benefice was in the hands of private patrons (in 1853 roughly half of English and Welsh benefices were of this type)164 or if the patronage rights lay with a clergyman, an ecclesiastical corporation, a college or a bishop. Nineteenth-century bishops may have insisted on new standards of professional competence, but the patronage market remained important and those who had not been born in the right family or attended the right college had to know the rules of the game.165 Recent research on the exercise of patronage in colonial administration reveals a strikingly similar story. Men who wanted to [ 52 ]

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secure a posting in the colonies had to spend a considerable time sourcing, employing and maintaining a series of personal connections with colonial governors, CO officials and well-placed intermediaries. In time, the responsibility for selecting colonial officials would be passed from the CO to the colonies, but this did not mean that personal connections became less important: the empire remained a space tied together and sustained by a variety of personal connections based on family, profession, obligation and acquaintance.166 Patronage may not have been such an important business in the colonial Church. Indeed, in some quarters the Church in the colonies was viewed as a meritocratic institution that was accessible to outsiders who had no meaningful personal networks. The files containing the applications to the Ecclesiastical Board throw up several examples of curates and graduates who sought colonial work because they did not have, as one candidate put it, a ‘great man’ who could help them through the Church.167 That the Board took on some of these men might be taken as a sign that the Church was interested in recruiting clergy with professional skills rather than impressive contacts. The ability to teach was a particularly prized skill. John Vincent was appointed to New South Wales in 1828 because he convinced the Board that he was able to ‘educate youth in various branches of Classical, Scientific and Polite Literature’.168 It is also revealing that individuals were rejected who had the kind of contacts that got men secular posts in colonial administration. Edmond Stanley Ireland told the Board in 1825 that he was the nephew of the chief justice of Madras and was connected to the Duke of Wellington (he had relatives who had seen service in the Peninsular campaign), but his application does not appear to have been successful.169 The recommendations that carried weight were those that came from ecclesiastics. Hamilton was interested in taking on the Cambridgeshire vicar Thomas Cadogan Willats because he was recommended by the Bishop Blomfield of Chester, while the Irish curate Henry Revell found that a recommendation from the 4th Earl of Mayo got him nowhere.170 (Revell would eventually find work in the Toronto diocese in 1846 after migrating to Canada in 1844.) Many of the men who served in colonial establishments in the pre1830 period got their appointments because they personally approached metropolitan recruiters and senior colonial clerics. A Scottish emigrant named Thomas Campbell was ordained by the Bishop of Quebec shortly after his arrival in the colony in 1819 because he managed to impress Strachan in an interview (Strachan presumably saw the ordination of a former Presbyterian like Campbell as something of a publicity coup).171 The clergy who served in Upper Canada broadly fell into three groups: individuals who were the sons of notable settlers and who were educated [ 53 ]

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by clergy in the colony; men who had been recommended to the Bishop of Quebec after they had come to the notice of clergy, prominent settlers and administrators in the colony; and a final group of individuals who had come out from Britain under the auspices of the SPG and usually had few contacts of note. Job Deacon, a relative of Benjamin Cronyn’s, fell into the second category: he had migrated to Canada in 1819 and was recommended by Salter Mountain, son of the Bishop of Quebec, to the Earl of Dalhousie, the lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia. The time that Deacon spent as tutor to Dalhousie’s children was presumably crucial in securing his ordination as a deacon in 1823 and his subsequent posting to a SPG mission at Adolphustown.172 James Clarke, who was appointed to St Catherine’s in 1829, was an impoverished Irish curate of ‘riper years’ with a large family but no notable sponsors: he got his post because the SPG and the colonial Church were desperate for men. But overall the clergy who served the settler empire in the period before 1831 were remarkably unconnected. The New South Wales clergy were either recruited by the evangelical network or were men who applied to the Ecclesiastical Board because they had few other opportunities in the home Church.173 Though men did not always need contacts to progress, it was nevertheless true that an extensive range of patronage networks connected the colonies with England. William Grant Broughton was in touch with a relative of the Bishop of Bath and Wells about a number of university-educated curates in the dioceses of Exeter, Salisbury and Ely who were interested in coming to the colony. These contacts resulted in the appointment of a Devon curate named Edmund Diclcen who had 174 been educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge. There were plenty of other men who got their colonial posts because they knew the right person at the right time: Henry Tarlton Stiles was able to secure a post in Australia in 1832 because he had tutored the family of James Stephen, the permanent counsel at the CO. The patronage and friendship of the Bishop of Derry helped the convict Henry Fulton to secure a regular commission in New South Wales in 1808.175 At some point every candidate had to develop personal connections of some kind. Thomas Campbell may have impressed in interview but he still had to provide Strachan with references showing that he was ‘intimate’ with clergy in the Scottish Episcopal Church. The testimonials that SPG candidate had to provide from three clerics could be crucial: it is unlikely, for instance, that the SPG would have sent the 83-year-old former Roman Catholic James Byrne to Upper Canada in 1823 if he had not been endorsed by the 176 Bishop Howley of London. Senior high churchmen began to get their protégés appointed to posts in the Church in New South Wales in the later 1820s. Archdeacon Joseph Pott, chancellor of Exeter cathedral, got [ 54 ]

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George Innes, a Devon curate, appointed to Parramatta’s King’s School while Innes’ replacement, Robert Forrest of St Bees, had been recommended to the CO by Bishop Blomfield of London in 1831.177 In the 1830s and 1840s bishops like Francis Nixon in Tasmania and Gray in Cape Town would try to ensure that clergy were personally known to themselves or their commissaries and close colleagues.178 We know that anyone who wanted to move up the ladder of colonial bureaucracy had to build a chain of personal connections that extended vertically up through the hierarchy of the colonial administration.179 This was true – to an extent – of the colonial Church. The clergy who ascended to senior posts were those who had been hand-picked by a bishop or had demonstrated years of effective service. Flopkins Badnall’s meteoric rise through the Cape Church – he was appointed Canon of Cape Town in 1862 and Archdeacon in 1867 – was linked to his long and close relationship with Bishop Gray (Badnall had been Gray’s curate in Stockton in the 1840s). But power in the colonial Church did not always flow up to the senior office class, nor did clergy always get their first position because they knew a bishop. The influence of a prominent colonist could be just as useful. In the 1820s and 1830s a prominent Cape settler named Thomas Philipps tried to convince clerical friends in Staffordshire and his native Pembrokeshire to follow him out to Bathurst in the eastern Cape. In 1827 the Rev. William Carlisle, the son of one of Philipp’s ‘radical’ friends, came out from Staffordshire (two of William’s brothers had also come out in 1820), and in 1836 Philipps also helped George Booth, a Warwickshire curate, to secure an SPG post at Fort 180 Beaufort (Booth also had a brother who had come out to the Cape). In 1847 churchwardens in Moore Township in western Ontario made arrangements with Strachan for the Rev. J. Price, the curate of Bucklebury in Berkshire, to be appointed to their church.181 We do not know why the connection between Price and Moore Township emerged (Price may have had relatives there), but the fact that the churchwardens took the lead shows that congregations and clergy cultivated personal connections that did always pass through the senior clergy. There are also instances of congregations working through the evangelical societies to secure hand-picked clergy. In 1854 a group of evangelicals at Port Elizabeth at the Cape tried to remove their Tractarian minister by getting the CCS to sponsor a London curate named Samuel Vaughan.182 Though such practices were not unknown in England – there were places where the patronage of the parish lay in the hands of the parishioners183 – the colonial Church does seem to have been unique in terms of the degree to which lay communities could exercise power over appointments. As colonial dioceses became self-funding so personal [ 55 ]

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connections of this kind came to play an increasingly important role in colonial Church expansion.

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Conclusion The tangled history of clerical recruitment tells us a good deal about how the Church of England functioned and replicated itself in the settler empire. This chapter has shed light on the various institutions and individuals who played a role in peopling and sustaining the Church in the colonies. Different groups may have wanted to achieve different things with recruitment, but no group was in a position to dominate the recruitment process. The advent of colonial theological colleges meant bishops had the ways and means to ordain whoever they wanted, but even the most enthusiastic Tractarian had to moderate their ambitions. John Strachan is a good example of a bishop who used his patronage responsibly and with an eye to pacifying evangelical and Irish opinion. Recruitment, like so much else in colonial Anglicanism, was a matter for negotiation. The recruitment of clergy also tells us a something about the individuals and groups who wielded power in colonial Churches. Aspiring clergy did not necessarily have to build close or long-lasting personal connections with the ecclesiastical and colonial elite. Prospective clergy could engineer colonial appointments through their familial contacts or by cultivating connections with local communities and prominent settlers. Where the Church differed from the wider world of colonial administration was that one did not necessarily need to call on an elite network to get into it. The colonial clerical workforce of 1850 was markedly different to the one that had served the Church in the Napoleonic era: it may not have been better paid, but it was more numerous, better educated and probably had a stronger sense of itself as a distinctive community and professional group. The transformation of the colonial clergy was a gradual process and there is little reason for us to suppose that things changed dramatically in the 1830s. The decade’s key developments – the emergence of Tractarianism and the Whigs’ implementation of a new imperial religious policy – tended to speed up processes that were already in train. As early as the 1820s Anthony Hamilton was trying – albeit with mixed success – to counter the negative effects of the 1819 Ordinations for the Colonies Act by raising professional and educational 184 Colonial clerics would take standards among the colonial chaplains. definite steps towards raising a local clergy in the 1830s and 1840s, but ideas of this sort had been germinating for decades. The rise of new religious movements also had a modest impact. Evangelicals may have [ 56 ]

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thought that ‘Puseyites’ were monopolising the SPG but in reality the high churchmen who were influenced by Tractarianism preferred to build a popular and representative Church rather than a Tractarian one.185 The 1830s was an important decade for a different reason. The political changes that came with the ‘age of reform’ heralded a new era in which the laity would play a more visible role in funding and administering the Church. Lay communities would only ever exercise a nominal role in the selection of clergy, but there is evidence that bishops in all three of our colonies were coming to recognise – as John Stuart had done decades earlier – that the future of the Church depended on its ability to represent the divergent views of an increasingly powerful lay community. Bishops had the problem of managing a diverse colonial clerical workforce. They also had to find a way of wielding authority in a church that was becoming increasingly orientated towards a diverse and not always easily identifiable Anglican public. The following two chapters show how this tension was a defining characteristic of the colonial Church in the period before 1850.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

W. Jacob, The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), introduction. C. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989). Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 28. S. Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries 1789–1858: The Social Background, Motives and Training of British Protestant Missionaries to India (Oxford: Sutton Courtney Press, 1984). Carey, God’s Empire, part III; Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, ch. 1. There is an older literature: J. J. Talman, ‘Some notes on the clergy of the Church of England in Upper Canada prior to 1840’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 32:2 (1938), pp. 57–66; T. Millman, The Life of Charles James Stewart (London, Ont.: Huron College, 1953), appendix. This chapter makes considerable use of the huge amount of detail that Ken Cable amassed on the Australian clergy in his ‘Cable Clerical Index’. The Index can be found at http://anglicanhistory.org/aus/cci/. Carey rightly points out how difficult it is to accurately determine the number of clergy in British colonies. Some clergy migrated independently and may not have taken up paid posts in the colonies: see H. Carey, ‘Religious nationalism and clerical emigrants to Australia, 1828–1900’, in K. Fedorowich and A. Thompson (eds), Emigration, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 92. The number of clergy in New South Wales and the Cape can be determined with a high degree of accuracy as most received money from government and so are listed in ecclesiastical returns that colonial officials sent back to London each year. The Upper Canadian clerical workforce is more difficult to calculate as its clergy fell into different categories. A range of sources, including Church Society reports, blue books, and clergy lists kept by missionary societies and colonial bishops were used to reach the figure of 245 clergy used in this chapter.

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Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, ch. 4. Simcoe quoted in A. H. Young, ‘The Revd. John Langhorn Church of England Missionary at Fredericksburgh and Ernesttown 1787–1813’, Ontario Historical Society’s Papers and Records, 23 (1926), pp. 8–9. A. Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History. Volume One: The Beginning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 178–9. J. Hardwick, ‘Anglican Church expansion and colonial reform politics in Bengal, New South Wales and the Cape Colony, c. 1790–1850’ (PhD dissertation, University of York, 2008), pp. 76–89. LPL, Howley Papers, vol. 1, Robert Jones to the Bishop of London, 22 July 1816, fo. 365. J. Hewitt, Sketches of English Church History in South Africa: 1795 to 1848 (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, 1883), p. 12. LPL, Howley Papers, vol. 1, Jones to the Bishop of London, 10 January 1817, fo. 372. G. M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, IX (London: William Clowes, 1901), p. 23; G. M. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, XIV, Somerset to Bathurst, 22 June 1822, p. 412. Historical Records of Australia, I:III (Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1915), Governor King to the Duke of Portland, 21 August 1801, p. 125 (hereafter HRA); HRA, I:VII, Governor Macquarie to the Earl of Liverpool, 28 October 1811, p. 449. J. Talman, ‘The position of the Church of England in Upper Canada, 1791–1840’, Canadian Historical Review, 15:4 (1934), p. 370. T. Millman, Jacob Mountain, First Lord Bishop of Quebec. A Study in Church and State, 1793–1825 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1947), p. 94; Diocese of Ontario Archives (hereafter DOA), John Stuart Papers, 3–2, Bishop Mountain to John Stuart, 16 August 1798, fo. lla; R. Black, ‘Established in the faith: The Church of England in Upper Canada 1780–1867’, in Hayes (ed.), By Grace Co-Workers, p. 23. A. Newcombe, ‘The appointment and instruction of S.P.G. missionaries’, Church History, 5:4 (1936), pp. 340–58. Canadian examples include John Cochrane (appointed 1835), George Armstrong (1840), William Henry Norris (1840), Michael Boomer (1840) and George Winter Warr (1842). RHL, X-109, ‘Candidates’ Correspondence 1846–55’, Archdeacon H. Hyndman Jones to T. Wannop, 15 August 1849, fo. 67. RHL, H94, ‘Correspondence re constitution and organization of SPG’, William Coyte to Anthony Hamilton, 17 June 1824, f. 72. Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, pp. 73–4. For Porteus, see Bayly, Imperial Meridian, pp. 139–40. Jacob, Clerical Profession, pp. 90–1. Simeon considered sending out twenty-five Cambridge scholars between 1805 and 1815: Ridley Hall Archives, Cambridge, Letters from Charles Simeon, Box 2. A. T. Yarwood, Samuel Marsden: The Great Survivor (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977), p. 116; HRA, I:VII, Marsden to Governor Macquarie, 15 May 1818, p. 779. Ridley Hall, Letters from Charles Simeon, Simeon to Charles Grant, 31 October 1814, fo. 81. J. Fingard, The Anglican Design in Loyalist Nova Scotia, 1783–1816 (London: SPCK, 1972), p. 162. Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, p. 212. DOA, Stuart Papers, 2–3, Stuart to the Bishop of Nova Scotia, 5 June 1793, fo. 12a. Ibid., 3–1, Stuart to the Bishop of Quebec, 23 August 1795, fo. 6a. Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, XXI, Thomas Willson to Bathurst, 14 April 1825, p. 23; TNA, CO 384/1, William Boardman to Bathurst, n.d. [1817], fo. 71.

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, XV, Boardman to Thomas Willson, n.d. (1823), pp. 201–2. For accusations about Boardman’s drinking, see TNA, CO 48/41, Dixon Robinson to the CO, 29 November 1819, fos 730–2; Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, XII, Francis McClelland to Bathurst, 23 November 1819, p. 375. Fingard, Anglican Design, pp. 44–8. ‘Pollard, Richard’, Dictionary Canadian Biography (hereafter DCB), VI (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 599–602. Hewitt, Sketches, p. 34. In 1836 Henry O’Neill found the Rev. Brougham – an Irish emigrant – farming and preaching in an unofficial capacity in Upper Canada’s Colchester region: RHL, X-7, ‘Journals of UCCS Missionaries, 1836–45’, ‘Henry O’Neill’s Journal, No. 2, 11 November 1836’, fo. 21. LPL, Howley Papers, vol. 24, Robert Wilmot-Horton to Bishop Howley of London, November 15, 1824, fo. 144; TNA, CO 201/157, ‘Undated memorandum by Archdeacon Thomas Hobbes Scott’, fo. 264. LPL, Howley Papers, vol. 24, Wilmot-Horton to Earl Bathurst, 6 July 1824, fo. 14; RHL, C/CAN/GEN/4, Wilmot-Horton to Anthony Hamilton, n.d. (1824?), fo. 27. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45, p. 103. For the circulars that were sent to all colonial chaplains, see ‘Queries addressed the civil Chaplains in His Majesty’s Colonies, by direction of the Secretary of State’ preserved in RHL, X-154, ‘General Correspondence Book’, fos 242–6. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, pp. 170–5. S. Brown, ‘The reform and extension of established churches in the United Kingdom, 1780–1870’, in K. Robbins (ed.), The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe: Political and Legal Perspectives (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), pp. 37–50. HRA, I:VIII, Governor Macquarie to Earl Bathurst, 7 October 1814, pp. 337. RHL, C/AUS/SYD/4, Scott to Hamilton, May 21, 1827, fo. 31. LPL, Howley Papers, vol. 1, Scott to Howley, 9 January 1826, fo. 777; Mitchell Library, Sydney (hereafter ML), Letter Book of Thomas Hobbes Scott, ML A850, Scott to his clergy, 25 November 1825, fos 134–5. RHL, X-154, Hamilton to Thomas Hobbes Scott, 7 October 1826, fo. 288; ‘Wilton, Charles Pleydell Neale (1795–1859), Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), online edition (last accessed 4 October 2011); for Wilton’s debts, see Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 131. For Scott’s requirements, see the ‘Report on the Church and School Establishments by Archdeacon Scott, 1 May 1826’, in HRA, I:XII, p. 311. B. Fletcher, ‘The Anglican ascendancy 1788–1835’, in B. Kaye (ed.), Anglicanism in Australia: A History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), p. 23. For Blomfield’s involvement with Judge, see LPL, Blomfleld Papers, vol. 66, Bishop Turner to Calcutta to Bishop Charles Blomfleld, 17 October 1829, fo. 131. ML, Marsden Papers, CY A1992, Simeon to Samuel Marsden, November 10, 1833, fo. 549. RHL, C/AUS/SYD/4, Scott to Hamilton, 23 March 1827, fo. 30. For their classification as evangelicals, see Fahey, In His Name, p. 281. RHL, C/CAN/QUE/4/370, Charles James Stewart to Hamilton, 7 February 1821, fo. la. G. Spragge (ed.), The John Strachan Letter Book: 1824–1834 (Toronto: The Ontario Historical Society, 1946), p. xv. J. Strachan, Appeal to the Friends of Religion and Literature on Behalf of the University of Upper Canada (London: R. Gilbert, 1827), p. 13. Fingard, Anglican Design, pp. 189–98. RHL, C/AUS/SYD/2, William Grant Broughton to A. M. Campbell, 17 November and 9 December 1834, fos 1–2.

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61 62 63 64 65

66 67

68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

J. Wolffe, ‘Anglicanism, Presbyterianism and the religious identities of the United Kingdom’, in S. Gilley and B. Stanley (eds), World Christianities, c.1815–c.1914: The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 301–22. P. Burroughs, ‘Lord Howick and colonial Church establishment’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 25:4 (1974), pp. 381–405. Fletcher, ‘Anglican ascendancy’, p. 16; Talman, ‘The position of the Church of England’, p. 371. Carey, God’s Empire, ch. 5. B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 401–7. J. Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 2. S. Boddy, A Brief Memoir of the Rev. Samuel B. Ardagh (Toronto: Rowsell and Hutchinson, 1874), p. 9. Pusey House Library, Oxford (hereafter PHL), Liddon Bound Volumes, vol. 47: Harrison to Pusey, 1831–1882, Benjamin Harrison to E. B. Pusey, 18 September 1839, fo. 50; R. Teale, ‘Dr Pusey and the Church Overseas’, in Perry Butler (ed.), Pusey Rediscovered (London: SPCK, 1983), p. 196. Colonial Church Record, 1:6 (January, 1839), p. 81; Carey, God’s Empire, p. 161. Hewitt, Sketches, p. 86; G. J. Mountain, A Short Explanation of Circumstances Preventing Coalition with the Colonial Church and School Society (Quebec: Mercury Office, 1859), pp. 7–8. For Wellesley’s proposals, see the undated letter entitled ‘Rough notes on the Private Letter of Capt. W. on the Projected appeal &c’, in RHL, C/CAN/GEN/7/1. Durham University Special Collections (hereafter DUSC), Henry George Papers, GRE/B115/3, Perry to Earl Grey, 27 November 1849, fo. 11. Millman, The Life of Stewart, p. 134. RHL, C/CAN/GEN/7/2, Wellesley to Sir W. R. Farquhar, 9 January [1834?]. RHL, X-156, ‘UCCS Letters Sent 1839–1845’, Septimus Ramsey to Joseph Henderson Singer, 7 September 1840, fo. 63; ibid., Ramsey to the clergy of Waterford, 2 October 1840, fos 65–6. W. J. D. Waddilove, The Stewart Missions (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1838), pp. 228–9. Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, pp. 218–19. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 63. RHL, C/CAN/QUE/4/370, Waddilove to the Earl of Galloway, 1 November 1834, fo. 125. ‘Draft of letter proposed to be addressed by the present committee of the UCCS to the S.P.G.’ dated March 1840, British Library, Manuscripts Collections (hereafter BL), Gladstone Papers (hereafter GP), Add MS 44357, fos 98–100. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 61–6. For the SPG’s hostility to clerical migrants, see RHL, C/CAN/QUE/12/467, James Magrath to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 13 March 1827, fo. 105. Archives of Ontario (hereafter AO), Strachan Papers (hereafter SP), F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–66, Strachan to Campbell, 28 April 1840, fo. 7. J. Armstrong, The Life and Letters of the Rev. George Mortimer, M.A., Rector of Thornhill (London: Aylott and Jones, 1847), pp. 175–6, 183. A point touched on by Carey, ‘Religious nationalism and clerical emigrants’, p. 86. H. Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen and the expansion of empire’, Journal of Religious History, 32:2 (2008), pp. 193–215. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 60. W. Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario

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86 87 88

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90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), pp. 103–5. Burns, Diocesan Revival, pp. 133–8. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 66–7. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–1843, Strachan to Edward Denroche, 5 March 1840, fo. 43; RHL, C/CAN/TOR/3/2, Strachan to Septimus Ramsey 4 September 1840. DUSC, Papers of Henry George, GRE/B80/9, Gray to Earl Grey, 14 July 1847, 21 March 1848 and 26 May 1848, fos 7, 9 and 11. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, pp. 125–39. University of York Library, African Records of the USPG, Microfilm Collection (hereafter UYL), C/AFS/3, J. Merriman to Ernest Hawkins, 27 July 1848, fo. 253. Moore Theological College Library, Sydney (hereafter MTCL), Broughton Papers (hereafter BP), William Grant Broughton to Edward Coleridge, 5 November 1844, 1/44. For the Tractarian influence in Upper Canada, see Westfall, Two Worlds, ch. 4; Fahey, In His Name, pp. 241–4. MTCL, Sydney, Broughton Papers, Broughton to Coleridge, 19 October 1837, 1/3. AO, SP, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–43, Strachan to Henry Newman, 22 May 1840 and to Bishop Skinner of Aberdeen, 16 February 1841, fos 59 and 96. For Tractarian relations with Scottish Episcopalians, see P. Nockles, ‘“Our Brethren of the North”: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 47:4 (1996), pp. 655–82. ‘Dewar, Edward Henry’, DCB, IX, pp. 204–5; ‘Beaven, James’, DCB, X, pp. 39–40. The Episcopal recruit was the Glasgow-born Robert Jackson McGeorge. UYL, C/AFS/2, Gray to Hawkins, 14 August 1847, fo. 421; AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–66, Strachan to the UCCS, 30 April 1840, fos 75–6. J. Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 122. P. Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant sect? The Church of Ireland, high churchman-ship, and the Oxford Movement, 1822–1869’, The Historical Journal, 41:2 (1998), pp. 488–9. AO SP, F 983–1, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Henry Patton, 26 April 1854, fo. 19; 23 May 1842, ibid., Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–66, Strachan to A. M. Campbell, fo. 39. Strachan disliked John Mulock but appointed him to Carleton Place in western Ontario because he was an ‘Irishman’ and was suited to the largely Irish congregation there: ibid., Letterbook 1844–1849, Strachan to Bethune, 30 October 1845 and 16 August 1845, fos 134, 117. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1853–54, Strachan to W. B. Lauder, 20 October 1853, fo. 316; Black, ‘Established in Faith’, p. 37. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Colonel Brown, 24 April 1858, fo. 251. A point made by Hardwick, ‘Anglican Church expansion’, and, more recently, Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’. Ibid., pp. 91–109. Ibid., p. 153. For examples, see RHL, X-154, Frederick Hamilton to Bathurst, 11 January 1825, fos 89–90; ibid., Edmond Stanley Ireland to Bathurst, 20 May 1825, fos 63–4. Grant, Profusion of Spires, pp. 42–3; for Baldwyn, see, RHL, X-147, ‘Secretary’s Letter Book 1805–14’, Morice to the Bishop of Quebec, 31 July 1812, fo. 100. For Bryan, see DOA, Stuart Papers, 2–3, Stuart to the Bishop of Nova Scotia, 2 October 1789, fo. 4a; For Halloran, see Hewitt, Sketches, ch. 3. AO, Stuart Family Papers, F966, Series B, File 1, Stuart to James Stuart, 6 March 1802. A. Burns and C. Stray, ‘The Greek-play bishop: polemic, prosopography, and nineteenth-century prelates’, The Historical Journal, 54:4 (2012), p. 1014. Fingard, Anglican Design, p. 55.

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117 118 119 120 121

122

123 124 125

126 127 128

129

130

131

132 133 134 135 136

A. Haig, The Victorian Clergy (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 196. Jacob, Clerical Profession, p. 41. Ibid., p. 39. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 115–27. For similar developments in the eighteenth-century clerical profession: Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, p. 15. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 119. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 275. AO, SP, F 983–1, Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–49, Strachan to A. N. Bethune, 21 May 1846, fo. 182. Trinity College Toronto Archives (hereafter TCT), F1005, 990–0053, Matriculation Register, 1852–1929. Clerical salaries were falling across the empire. For Australia, see Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 48–51. Cape clergy who arrived in the later 1840s were only entitled to £100 from the government: Hewitt, Sketches, p. 93. For Canada, see Westfall, Two Worlds, pp. 103–5. James H. Harris, Thomas Phillips, Charles Mathews and Charles Dade were all noted university scholars who took positions as professors at Upper Canada College, a grammar-school style institution established by governor Colborne in 1829. ‘Marriott, Fitzherbert Adams (1811–1890)’, ADB, online edition (last accessed 23 May 2013); ‘Allwood, Robert (1803–1891)’, ibid. (last accessed 23 May 2013). Toronto Metropolitan Reference Library (hereafter TMRL), Strachan Papers, S66 1820– 1823, Strachan to Dr Mountain, 9 July 1821. RHL, H95, W. F. Hook to Hawkins, 2 June 1844, fo. 38; RHL, C/AUS/SYD/2, Broughton to Archdeacon Hale, 25 June 1842, fo. 12; Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 108. MTCL, BP, Broughton to Coleridge, 15 February 1841, 1/11. Fingard, Anglican Design, p. 55. John Frederick Whinfield’s decision to head to the Newcastle diocese in 1848 as a lay reader was probably motivated by the fact that his father, the Rev. Richard Whinfleld of Heanor, could not afford to send him to university: the value of Whinfield’s vicarage was only £109 in 1831. The Clerical Guide and Ecclesiastical Directory (London: Rivingtons, 1836), p. 95. See Quinn’s application in UYL, C/AFS/4, fo. 41; for Sandberg, see C/AFS/3, John Rashdale to Hawkins, 11 December 1845, fo. 101–5; C/AFS/2, William A. Steabler to G. H. Fagan, 9 September 1846 and 31 October 1846, fos 399–402. Of the 27 who were appointed in this period, 5 of the 22 university men were sizars, while 8 were pensioners. Six were sons of peers, gentlemen or esquires; 3 had clergymen fathers; and 2 came from mercantile families. Other occupations included medicine (1), customs house agent (1) and prosperous farmer (1). Only Fearon Fallows (weaver) and William Carlisle (clerk of country house) had fathers in lower status occupations, while the status of Laurence Halloran and William Boardman is suggested by the fact that former attended Christ’s Hospital charitable school and the latter was desperate to leave his teaching job at a Blackburn grammar school. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 119. Canadian clergy who had sons who followed them into the ministry include John Stuart, Edward Denroche, Francis Evans, James Mockridge and Frederick A. O’Meara (all four of his sons entered the ministry). AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–43, Strachan to Featherstone L. Osier, 25 February 1841, fo. 99. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 104–6. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–43, Strachan to unnamed applicant, 10 July 1843, fo. 250. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 121–4. Ibid., p. 121.

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THE RECRUITMENT OF COLONIAL CLERGY 137 Jacob, Clerical Profession, p. 56. 138 AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 13, Letterbook 1854–62, Strachan to A. H. Boyle, 22 September 1862, fo. 422; ibid., F983–1, Reel 8, Strachan to J. Francis, 16 October 1865. This preference for metropolitan recruits may explain why the British-born predominated in the Australian clerical workforce in 1900: Carey, ‘Religious nationalism and clerical emigrants’, p. 94. Carey underestimates the interest that churchmen – both metropolitan and colonial – showed in recruiting local men at pp. 100–1. 139 Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, pp. 235–6. 140 MTCL, BP Misc.; Broughton to Campbell, 14 August 1837, RHL, C/AUS/SYD/2, Charles Perry to Broughton, 7 June 1850, fo. 14. 141 Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, pp. 234–5. 142 Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 78. 143 AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 2, Archbishop of Dublin to Strachan, 2 June 1832, fo. 2. 144 See the nine applications from Irish clergy in RHL, X-107, ‘Candidates Correspondence 1828–29’. 145 PHL, Liddon Bound Volumes, vol. 47, Harrison to Pusey, 22 October 1844, fo. 54; Irish Ecclesiastical Journal, 16 (October 1841), pp. 268–9. 146 Nockles, ‘Our Brethren of the North’; Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant Sect?’ 147 D. McCracken, ‘Irish settlement and identity in South Africa before 1910’, Irish Historical Studies, 28:110 (1992), p. 135. 148 ‘Cronyn, Benjamin’, DCB, X, p. 205–10; D. Schurman, A Bishop and His People: John Travers Lewis and the Anglican Diocese of Ontario, 1862–1902 (Kingston: Ontario Diocesan Synod, 1991). 149 AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Thomas William Allen, 28 September 1855, fo. 90. 150 C. Wilson, A New Lease of Life: Landlords, Tenants and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), p. 69. 151 Gladwin treats the Irish clergy as a distinct community: Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 84–5. 152 ‘Irish Protestants’, in P. Magocsi (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Canada’s Peoples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 770; G. Forth, ‘Anglo-Irish’, in J. Jupp (ed.), The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 465–67; Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 84–5. 153 M. Gladwin, ‘Flogging parsons? Australian Anglican clergymen, the magistracy and convicts, 1788–1850’, Journal of Religious History, 36:3 (2012), pp. 386–407. 154 Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 74–5. 155 E. L. Le Fanu, Life of Dr Orpen (London: Charles Westerton, 1860). 156 Rev. Morton quoted in Report of a Public Meeting Held at the Town Hall, Calcutta, on the 24th November, 1838 (London: Stewart and Murray, 1839), p. 38; Brough quoted in The Episcopal Controversy (London: Free Press Steam Printing Office, 1857), p. 8. 157 J. Ridden, ‘Britishness as an imperial and diasporic identity’, in P. Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland! Irishness and Britishness 1837–1901 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 88–105. 158 Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, pp. 142–6. 159 MTCL, Broughton Papers, 1/81, Broughton to Edward Coleridge, 8 May 1850; ibid., Perry to Broughton, June 7, 1850; AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 10, Letterbook 1827–39, Strachan to Archbishop Whately, 28 April 1834, fo. 243. 160 Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, p. 146. 161 Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 84–5; AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 10, Letterbook 1827– 39, Strachan to the Bishop of Quebec, 16 October 1833, fo. 235; Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, pp. 130–1. 162 Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, pp. 201–2, 218–22.

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD 163 Jacob, Clerical Profession, pp. 75, 78, 87–92. 164 M. J. D. Roberts, ‘Private patronage and the Church of England, 1800–1900’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 32 (1981), p. 202. 165 Ibid., pp. 204–7. 166 Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, pp. 102–5, 13–16. 167 RHL, X-154, Lewis Jones Lambert to Bathurst, 3 August 1824, fo. 38. Robert Fawcett applied after his patron died: ibid., X-106, ‘Candidates’ Correspondence 1827–28’, Fawcett to Hamilton, 2 February 1828, fo. 113. 168 RHL, X-154, John Vincent to Hamilton, 18 November 1826, fo. 322–3. 169 Ibid., Edmond Stanley Ireland to Bathurst, 20 May 1825, fos 63–4; Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, pp. 21–7. 170 RHL, X-154, Hamilton to Bishop Blomfield of Chester, n.d., fo. 202; ibid., Henry Revell to Hamilton, 6 November 1825, fo. 97. 171 TMRL, John Strachan Papers, S66, 1815–1820, Strachan to Rev. Mountain, 9 November 1819. 172 See the biography in Millman, Life of Stewart, appendix. 173 For examples, see RHL, C/AUS/SYD/4/8, W. Chester to William Huskisson, 16 May 1825, fo. Ill; ibid., George Dodsworth to George Murray, 17 June 1828, fo. 114. 174 RHL, C/AUS/SYD/2/1, Broughton to Campbell, 14 August and 1 December 1837, fos 14, 16. 175 ‘Stiles, Henry Tarlton (1808–1867)’, ADB, online edition (last accessed 24 May 2013). Yarwood, Samuel Marsden, p. 114. 176 TMRL, John Strachan Papers, S66, 1820–1823, Hamilton to the Bishop of Quebec, 2 April 1823. 177 See Innes’ obituary in Gentleman’s Magazine, 103 (1833), p. 375; ‘Forrest, Robert’, ADB, online edition (last accessed 9 May 2013). 178 Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 105. 179 Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, pp. 102–10. 180 R. Thorne, ‘Tom’s letters to his kinsfolk’, National Library of Wales Journal, 23:4 (1984), pp. 360–1. For Philipps’ involvement with Booth, see UYL, C/AFS/5, Thomas Philipps to George Booth, 5 July 1836, fos 27–9. 181 AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–1849, Strachan to Joseph Biddle and George Johnston, 9 March 1847, fo. 231. 182 London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), Commonwealth and Continental Church Society Records, MS 15674, General Committee Minute Book, 1850–55, minutes for 16 May 1854, fos 683–4; 18 July 1854, fo. 720; 21 November 1854, fos 756–7; 6 March 1855, fo. 791. 183 Jacob, Clerical Profession, pp. 85–7. 184 For the growing professionalism and group identity of the eighteenth-century clergy, see Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, pp. 76, 83–6 185 B. Stanley, ‘Home support for overseas missions in early Victorian England, c.1838– 1873’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1979), pp. 96–114.

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CHAPTER TWO

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The making of a colonial laity

In July 1801 James Sutherland Rudd, minister of Cornwall in Upper Canada, wrote to his superior, John Stuart, describing the difficulties he had faced when he tried to establish a church modelled on those he had served as a curate back in his native Yorkshire. Rudd’s travails began when he tried to organised a ‘vestry meeting’ to elect the churchwardens who would manage the church property. While Rudd assumed that ‘it was allow’d to be my Province, to nominate the one, & that of the Parishioners, to elect the other’, members of the wider community, many of whom were American-born, thought differently. A Mr Farr and – Rudd noted he was ‘not one of our Members’ – led a group who claimed that the elected churchwarden was ‘to be nominated by the Town’ at an American-style township meeting. Rudd, by contrast, insisted that only his regular congregation could take part in the election. Issues of Church governance were not Rudd’s only problem. He felt ‘a delicacy’ about visiting a pregnant Presbyterian woman because he doubted ‘whether I should consider it, as my Duty, to visit all, indiscriminately, or whether I was not improperly interfering with the Presbyterian Minister, by 1 visiting his Followers’. Rudd did not last long in Cornwall: by 1803 he had left for Sorel in Lower Canada, and five years later he was dead. The problems he faced on the Upper Canada-American border would have been familiar to any English-born clergyman who had to minister to Canadian congregations made up of American loyalists and emigrants.2 But this obscure event also points to a number of broader issues that would characterise Anglican Church expansion across the settler empire. One was the difficulty of transplanting English institutions, practices and ecclesiastical terminology overseas. English terms like ‘parishioner’ could not apply in colonies, such as Upper Canada, that were divided into townships rather than parishes. Clergy like Rudd also had little idea who to call a member of the Church of England. Were they those who attended church, or did the individual have to pass some stiffer test – [ 65 ]

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD

such as confirmation, baptism or regular communion – before they could call themselves an Anglican? The Cornwall episode also shows how differently the ministry and the laity could view the Church. While Rudd saw it as an English transplant, his flock seem to have regarded the church as the property of the community and as a civic resource. It is unclear whether Rudd managed to smooth over the differences with his congregation, but we do know that elsewhere in the empire conflicts flared up when clergy tried to restrict townspeople’s rights to elect church officers.3 This chapter examines the laity’s contribution to the expansion of the nineteenth-century colonial Church. In many ways the story that has been told about the eighteenth-century laity in the North American colonies also applies to the lay communities of the nineteenth-century settler empire. Historians have long recognised that Church life in parts of colonial America was characterised by long-running tensions between the ecclesiastical and secular authorities on the one side and powerful local lay leaders and vestries on the other. In the southern colonies, for instance, vestries set the rates that supported the church and minister, and churchgoers claimed the right to select ministers without reference to the Bishop of London or governor.4 Rudd’s comments suggested that the laity of the ‘second empire’ wanted an equally extensive say in church administration. The extent of lay influence varied from colony to colony, but by the second quarter of the nineteenth century there were signs in each of our three case studies that ecclesiastical power was moving away from the clergy and towards vestries and prominent figures in the lay community. This process did not go unchallenged – the growth in the size and visibility of the colonial episcopate brought out tensions between a congregational and hierarchical model of Church government – but what we might call the ‘laicisation’ of the colonial Church did leave an enduring mark on the colonial Church.5 The chapter also continues our investigation of the nature of ecclesiastical power in early colonial churches, asking where that power lay and who exercised it. Attending to questions of this sort will help us to understand how different groups of Anglicans viewed, understood and interacted with the Church. Lay communities helped turn the Church into an institution that resembled one of the benevolent, fraternal and ethnic voluntary associations that formed an important part of the colonial world’s civic landscape.6 The Anglican laity – a group that is sometimes denigrated as foot-soldiers of a loyalist, Tory empire – also have a wider political significance in colonial history. English vestries have been presented as spaces in which political apprenticeships were served, petition communities organised and protest repertoires [ 66 ]

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THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL LAITY

rehearsed.7 Colonial vestries and voluntary societies were significant simply because they gave colonists the experience of electing their own representatives: this was an important consideration in Crown colonies like the Cape and New South Wales that had to wait until the 1830s and 1840s for representative political institutions. These connections between the Church and the reformist elements in colonial political culture raised difficult questions for senior colonial clerics, as it was by no means clear how episcopal authority would sit with both the democratic temper of colonial society and the tradition of lay authority that was emerging in settler churches. But before we can tackle these broader issues we have to try and answer the question that Rudd was asking Stuart: who were the colonial Anglican laity?

The social and ethnic composition of the Anglican laity Identifying the laity is as difficult in the colonial context as it is in the metropolitan.8 Colonial governments did, it is true, compile statistical breakdowns on the denominational affiliations of colonial populations for the Colonial Office each year, but most clergy were suspicious of this census data. Bold Cudmore Hill, a UCCS missionary on Ontario’s Grand River, claimed that Presbyterians along Upper Canada’s Grand River told census compilers they were ‘Church of England’ simply because they had ‘no minister of their own among them’.9 Hill was one of those who recognised that in frontier areas varied communities of Anglicans, Presbyterians, Quakers and Baptists gravitated towards whatever religious service was available.10 In 1840 the Rev. W. H. Norris said it was ‘difficult to estimate’ the number of laity at Scarborough in Upper Canada, ‘as so many are without any fixed religious principles, too many belong to any & every sect, and many boldly tell you that they have never thought about it.’ Twenty years earlier another Canadian cleric, Salter J. Mountain, referred to the ‘common practice’ of settlers ‘frequenting the different places of Worship indiscriminately’.11 This fluidity is thought to have diminished as denominations formed established congregations, built stone churches and appointed resident clergy. But in 1860 many Upper Canadian churchgoers had still not embraced the kind of rigid denominational identities that we associate with modern religion.12 Methodists and Presbyterians can be found among the pew holders of the church at Fredericksburg near Kingston in 1859, while a Presbyterian and a Wesleyan sat on the vestry at nearby Bath in 1861.13 Clergy at the Cape similarly noted how Cape Dutch attended both the Dutch Reformed Church and English services. William Long claimed that the sizeable numbers of Dutch who attended [ 67 ]

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his services at Graaf Reinet and subscribed towards an Anglican Church did so because of the ‘beauties of our liturgy’, though he admitted these people still considered themselves members of the Dutch Reformed Church.14 As J. I. Little has pointed out, calling oneself Anglican was an easy way to emphasise one’s loyalty and respectability, and it did not require one to take communion, attend church regularly or identify with any of the rituals that Anglican clergy considered to be the crucial components of Anglican identity.15 It is also not clear that lists of baptisms, marriages and burials give us any clearer sense of the composition of the Anglican public. Clergy noted that individuals who refused to take communion wanted to see their children baptised; others felt that parents brought their children for baptism simply because ministers of other denominations were not available.16 Many may have found the rituals and celebrations of the Anglican Church comforting. Missionary reports suggest that the clergy did try to make devotion to the Eucharist the index of Anglican identity: as early as the 1820s Canadian clergy were being asked to distinguish between those who ‘joined the worship’ of the Church of England and those who regularly communicated and who paid for the erection of churches.17 We should follow suit and draw a distinction between the core of active laity who gave time and money to the Church and a much broader community of churchgoers whose adherence to a denomination could be based on a range of personal, familial or pragmatic factors. Reconstructing the latter community would involve the kind of mammoth trawl of extant church registers and census data that is not possible in a work of this kind. Even a full analysis of the social and ethnic backgrounds of the former group would require a far-reaching survey of reams of vestry records and church subscription lists. Our aim is not to provide a complete picture of the kind of people who formed the inner core of Anglican adherents; instead the following paragraphs draw on existing secondary material and a selection of congregational records to make some broad points about the social and ethnic backgrounds of the individuals who played a role in furthering the extension of the Church. These sources reveal that the Church of England expanded through a combination of elite initiative and popular support. In Upper Canada Church expansion was dependent on the former militia officers, landowners, JPs and Napoleonic War veterans who paid for churches, set aside land and began subscriptions. Elite sponsors came in many shapes and sizes. An Anglican missionary travelling in Ontario in 1837 noted that the church at Wellington Square had been paid for by William Johnson Kerr, a reform politician and landowner who was both grandson of Molly Brant, the Mohawk leader and intermediary, and son-in-law of [ 68 ]

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Joseph Brant, Molly’s brother. Such examples show how the Church was able to reach out to a range of ethnic groups and incorporate their representatives within its governing structures.18 Meanwhile, the extension of the Cape Church was driven in large part by the leaders of the settler parties who had arrived in the initial wave of British settlement in 1820. Richard Daniell – described by a clergyman as ‘the lord of the manor’ – was responsible for organising the building of Sidbury church.19 Prominent landowners and military men in New South Wales provided land for the church, read services when clergy were not around and, in a few instances, used their authority to pick clergy.20 Surviving church subscription lists (some were attached to memorials to missionary societies, others were printed in colonial newspapers) reveal that support for the church-building and clerical recruitment schemes came from a cross-section of society.21 Brian Fletcher notes that subscribers of modest means donated to churches in New South Wales: at Brisbane Water £10 was raised in ‘small sums’ donated by the ‘labouring classes’, while at Concord subscriptions varied from the two acres and £100 donated by one individual to the 10 shillings given by two men. Eight individuals subscribing similar amounts can be found on the list for a church at Paterson in 1837. Twenty-nine of the 307 individuals who subscribed towards Christ 22 Church, Sydney donated less than 5 shillings. Secondary work has pointed to lower-class and convict origins of large numbers of the parishioners in what became the colonies of Queensland and Tasmania.23 The subscription lists preserved in the SPG’s South African archives suggest a similar pattern for the Cape. The 145 Grahamstown colonists who petitioned government and the SPG for an Episcopal church in 1828 included blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, farmers, frame-workers, mechanics and carpenters – most of whom had come over in various parties in 1820.24 The thirty-five inhabitants of Port Elizabeth who petitioned the archbishops of York and Canterbury for more regular episcopal visitations and additional clergy were from more elevated backgrounds: the list includes notaries, surgeons, gardeners, merchants, a boarding school owner, a harbour master and an auctioneer.25 But the fifty-one heads of families who subscribed towards a clergyman’s stipend at Graaf Reinet in 1843 included seven men who gave less than 15 shillings.26 In the mid-1820s and early 1830s Anglicans at Maitland and Newmarket in Upper Canada gave their labour and building materials towards the erection of churches. Joseph Thompson was similarly given glass, nails, store-goods, wheat and cash to complete a church at Port Hope on the shore of Lake Ontario in 1822.27 Historians have noted that in the post-1825 period the colonial elite [ 69 ]

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was redefined and broadened so as to include groups who had been previously denied a political voice.28 In some sense the Church was also being opened up to marginalised groups. We know that women played a vital role in raising the funds that drove the expansion of the Anglican dominion, and there is some evidence that women went on from here to claim positions of influence in colonial Church administration. The heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts is perhaps the most famous donor from this period (she financed a number of new bishoprics in the 1840s), but we have other examples of women who served as metropolitan agents for colonial communities. Christine Crymble of Edinburgh was agent to her brother-in-law’s party of Scottish Episcopalians who had settled in Paris, Upper Canada and her representations to the Upper Canada Clergy Society – which included forwarding her sister’s letters on the ‘spiritual destitution’ of the settlement – convinced the society to send a 29 missionary to Paris in 1841. Meanwhile, an Anne Ledyard of Frome, Somerset, raised funds for a parsonage house for the church that her friend had built near Goderich in western Upper Canada. Anne also approached her local clergyman and the UCCS about a suitable clergyman for the settlement.30 The canons and legislation that governed the running of vestries in Upper Canada did not formally rule out female involvement, but the absence of female pew-holders in surviving vestry minutes suggests that there was an informal system of exclusion that women had to negotiate. Women, for instance, asked family members to represent them at vestry meetings. A John Mitchell is recorded as attending an Easter 1845 vestry meeting at Trinity church in St Thomas 31 as a proxy for his mother. In New South Wales the Church was able to draw emancipated convicts into its fold, partly because clergymen – the former transportee Henry Fulton is one example – stood up to advocate the political interests of the emancipist community.32 The appointment of former convicts as sextons in early New South Wales was the ecclesiastical equivalent of Governor Macquarie’s policy of appointing emancipists to positions of civil responsibility (even Samuel Marsden, who gained a reputation for opposing Macquarie’s policy, was prepared to employ convicts as choristers in his church).33 The Church also gave lower-class individuals opportunities to play a role in the administration of public institutions. At Brockville in Upper Canada in 1855 innkeepers, painters, joiners and a shoemaker sat alongside barristers, surgeons and merchants and a member of Parliament in the vestry. The congregation at St John’s church in Kingston in the early 1860s was made up of penitentiary guards, domestic servants, labourers and artisans.34 There is also evidence that Church administration at the diocesan level was taking on an increasingly democratic character. Of fifty identifiable lay delegates [ 70 ]

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who attended the Ontario synod in 1861–62, twenty-four were farmers occupying modestly sized homes. There was also a tailor and three clerks (delegates of more elevated status included four merchants, a gentleman and three barristers).35 This process was admittedly further advanced in Canada than elsewhere. The ecclesiastical institutions that appeared in New South Wales in the 1840s to raise funds for Church extension were dominated by elites: the thirty ladies and gentlemen who attended the Windsor branch of the Lay Association in October 1846 were described as ‘highly respectable’ and included JPs, surgeons and a member of the legislative council.36 A similar story can be told for the Cape. The lay delegates who attended the first diocesan synod in Cape Town in 1857 were mostly military men, surgeons and landowners.37 If we turn from the social to the ethnic backgrounds of the laity then an equally varied picture emerges. Quantifying the ethnic composition of the Australian Anglican laity is admittedly a tricky thing to do as birthplace details were not recorded in the 1841 census. Congregations in Australia were probably dominated by those of English origin, but there would have been some ethnic variety as settlers rarely congregated in ethnic clusters. Irish Protestants tended to spread out across settled regions and intermingled with other ethnic and national groups. There was some clustering of Ulster Protestants in the Kiama region south of Sydney, but even there only one inhabitant in four was Irish in 1871.38 Those serving gold rush regions in the 1850s found congregations of particularly varied ethnicity. An Irish missionary who toured the south and west districts of the diocese of Sydney in the mid-1850s noted that one of his services was attended by a ‘strange assembly’ of ‘natives of England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Van Diemen’s Land, Sweden, Germany & China’.39 In the 1850s the SPG asked its South African missionaries for details on ‘the nations or races’ who made up their missions. As clergy were effectively being asked to undertake pioneer censuses it is not surprising that some only gave estimations. Others were more precise. The missionary at Knysna reported a congregation made up 252 Europeans, ‘200 of Hottentot or Negro blood, 10 Fingoes, 5 Kaffirs, & the remaining 46 of mixed races’. John Quinn claimed that the ‘English Church’ population at Papendorp included eighty English, six Irish, six Americans, six Dutch, thirty-five Afrikaners and 110 ‘coloured’. Missionaries at Beaufort and Caledon reported congregations equally 40 divided between English and Dutch. These non-English communities did more than just attend church services. Several Cape clergy could report that the non-European element in their congregations had raised considerable money for church purposes – indeed the minister at Mossel [ 71 ]

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Bay reported his ‘Coloured’ population had outdone their white counterparts by raising £60 for the erection of a church in 1858.41 The fifteen Dutch who signed a petition for a clergyman at Graaf Reinet in 1844 similarly suggests that the Cape Dutch were not merely inquisitive spectators at Anglican services.42 An analysis of the lists of parishioners who attended the annual vestry meetings in Upper Canada shows that congregations there were similarly made up of a kaleidoscope of ethnicities. They also show that congregations were never enclaves of Irish, English or colonial-born. Admittedly, these sources only give us a partial picture of the Anglican laity, as vestries could be sparsely attended and membership in most parishes was limited to males who rented pews. Vestries can, however, tell us something about the ethnic weighting in Canadian congregations. Of the eight churches in eastern Ontario for which we have records (this is the area that would become the diocese of Ontario in 1861), individuals of Irish birth formed over 50 per cent of the vestries of five (Belleville, Camden East, North Augusta, Brockville and Portsmouth). While this is not particularly surprising – all five were in areas of strong Irish Protestant settlement in the Ottawa valley region – what is revealing is that the vestries of these churches were also attended by individuals of varied ethnicity. Of the forty-six individuals who attended the Portsmouth vestry in 1861, eleven were English-born and five were Canadian. The English also formed important minorities at Belleville (where they formed 21 per cent of the total), Barriefield (25 per cent), Camden East (25 per cent), North Augusta (50 per cent) and St George’s Kingston (50 per cent). The Canadian-born were strongly represented at Bath (seven of the ten whose details are known were born in the Canadas) and at Belleville, where at least four of the vestrymen were 43 Canadian. Clergy therefore found themselves ministering to unique assemblages. Further research in the surviving parish records for central and western Ontario would probably reveal an equally cosmopolitan picture. Those scholars who have sought to explain the international growth of Methodism have usually placed great emphasis on the role that a mobile Methodist laity played in recruiting ministers and establishing 44 class meetings and circuits. Similar can be said for the Church of England: the colonial Church grew because it was supported by a diverse lay community that was highly mobile and highly proficient in raising money and building networks of recruitment. The colonial Anglican laity was, however, a shifting, heterodox population who could voluntarily join the Church and voluntarily leave it. Not every lay person who attended church or who contributed to the extension of the Church did so for religious reasons. Some colonial landowners admitted [ 72 ]

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that they built unoccupied churches and parsonages in order to increase the value of their colonial estates.45 Work on a church at March in Upper Canada stalled in the mid-1820s because the community could not agree where to site a church that could potentially add value to their holdings.46 Churchmen in both Canada and the Cape claimed that colonists built churches simply because they wanted ‘something respectable to build’.47 Clearly different groups within the lay community wanted different things from the Church. Congregations were also composed of people who were from various ethnic backgrounds and who had brought different religious cultures with them when they emigrated. Meeting the spiritual demands of these varied communities was a challenge for bishops and clergy who would have shared a cultural background and religious outlook with only a small proportion of their congregation. The other challenge facing the clergy was that they were answerable to a lay community that was fast gaining a sense of itself as an important player in the colonial Church.

The development of lay institutions The growing visibility of the laity in colonial Church structures was a product of the Church’s increasing dependence on funds voluntarily donated by the colonial laity. Clergy across the colonial world were apt to complain that parishioners did not do enough to support the Church.48 The arrangements for funding early clergy were certainly not likely to encourage lay giving. Upper Canada’s first clergyman, John Stuart, noted that his parishioners would not make ‘any provision whatever’ for him while his £150 salary was paid jointly by the colonial Government and the SPG.49 Voluntary activism seemed to be a nonstarter in those places, such as New South Wales, where all clergy were government-funded chaplains. Yet external funding did not completely rule out lay involvement in Church development. In Upper Canada retired officers read services, local notables petitioned for clergy and in some cases midwives administered the baptism service.50 From the 1830s the imperial authorities handed the Anglican laity and the missionary societies greater responsibility for the expansion of the colonial Church. From 1839 Bishop Strachan of Toronto would only send ministers to those congregations who were prepared to build parsonages, could set aside land for a church and provide at least £50 towards a minister’s salary.51 In New South Wales the 1836 Church Act ruled that government would only fund new churches if local communities contributed half the money themselves. Similarly, in the late 1840s the Cape government provided £100 towards ministers’ salaries if the local community and the Church could raise the same [ 73 ]

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amount.52 This did not mean that clergy suddenly became the ‘bondsmen’ (as one Australian cleric put it), of the laity.53 It was only towards the tail end of the 1850s that Cape clergy became noticeably more dependent on free-will offerings. Of the seventeen clergy in the Cape Town diocese who sent reports to the SPG in 1859, nine received a substantial portion of their salaries from the local community and one, the minister at Mossel Bay, received two-thirds of his payment from his parishioners. In the early 1850s most New South Wales clergy still received part of their salaries from government: one estimate is that around 29 per cent of clergy were wholly dependent on money provided 54 by voluntary offerings and the SPG. We should also note that colonial bishops who were fearful that the voluntary system compromised clerical independence made arrangements for paying their clergy out of funds that were administered on a diocesan as opposed to congregational level. The ‘Church Societies’ that appeared in Canada and South Africa in the 1840s were founded on this principle. Nevertheless, the Church’s changing funding basis did mean that colonial establishments became increasingly orientated towards the laity and a series of institutions in which the laity were vocal presences. The basic lay institution was the vestry. Some Canadian vestries aped their metropolitan counterparts by administering a rudimentary form of poor relief;55 others functioned in much the same way as other voluntary charitable and benevolent societies. The vestry at Tyrconnel in Ontario, for instance, organised donations for Irish famine sufferers.56 Essentially, vestries were annual meetings where members of the Church met to elect churchwardens, scrutinise church accounts and order any church business. The establishment of these institutions was not always a lay initiative – Upper Canadian missionaries claimed they had to convince settlers to organise committees or vestries to raise church-building funds – but once they were established the laity guarded the rights that came to them as the proprietors of church property.57 The following discussion of the development of the lay institutional presence sheds light on two important issues. First, we see how settler communities helped to change the character of what in some areas had been a military chaplaincy. We also see how the development of the Church connected with wider social and political developments. The moment when the colonial laity came to see itself as a critical community in the colonial Church was also the moment when colonists were gaining a sense of themselves as a colonial ‘public’ with rights to assert. The ecclesiastical institutions that emerged at the Cape and New South Wales also had a bearing on colonial politics, as vestries were representative institutions that provided models for how politics should be structured in the secular realm. [ 74 ]

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The Cape of Good Hope The Cape was occasionally visited by Indian and Australian bishops but for the most part the colony lay outside direct episcopal authority until Robert Gray arrived as bishop of Cape Town in 1847. As a consequence, the Cape’s Anglican Church was in large part a church built from below. The Cape’s churches were built through funds donated variously by the laity, the government and missionary societies, though the initiative for erecting churches usually lay with the colonial public. For settlers, the British government’s failure to provide them with churches was another sign that they had been abandoned by imperial authorities that were more interested in advancing the interests of humanitarians than 58 settlers. The Cape government might have countered these criticisms by pointing to the £5,000 it ploughed into the building St George’s in Cape Town (the Cape’s first church), but it was still the case that the rest of the money had to be raised by selling shares in the building. Buying a share in a church could be an attractive commercial proposition, as shareholders could make money out of selling or renting pews.59 Once churches were built, the colonial government handed the responsibility for governing them to shareholders. Church Ordinances’ – the name given to the government legislation that constituted the churches – gave shareholders the authority to elect trustees who would supervise the erection of the church. Once the debt that had been incurred from erecting the church had been paid off, the rest of the Anglican community would be given the right to attend vestries and elect churchwardens. St George’s in Cape Town was the first church to be built in this way, and further ordinances were passed for churches at Bathurst (1832), Wynberg (1833), Grahamstown (1839), Port Elizabeth (1842), Sidbury (1842) Rondebosch and Fort Beaufort (1845) and Graaf Reinet (1846). Later writers thought the Ordinances set up ‘a feeble kind of Erastian Congregationalism’ that resulted in a fragmented colonial Church made up of individual ‘established’ churches. For the laity, however, the Ordinances were the legal basis of a tradition of lay authority that would be a key feature of Church life at the Cape up to 60 1860 and beyond. The laity guarded their right to say how these institutions were run. In 1840 the congregation at St George’s in Cape Town prevented their clergyman, George Hough, from adopting such ‘papist’ practices as preaching on fasting and wearing a surplice.61 Clergy fresh from England were startled by the authority that colonial congregations wielded over their clergy. George Booth, an SPG missionary fresh from a Warwickshire curacy, was prompted to write that ‘things quite at variance with the regulations at home seem to obtain here’ after he [ 75 ]

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heard that John Heavyside, the minister at Grahamstown, had been prevented from taking the chair at an Easter 1841 vestry by members of his congregation.62 The disagreement flared up over a familiar bugbear: Church membership. While Heavyside assumed that the right of voting at vestry elections should be restricted to communicants, his opponents defined the Church member as anyone who attended church. This group formed their own vestry, claimed the right to elect vestry chairs, and then excluded a livid Heavyside from all proceedings. The case was later referred to a Cape government. William Porter, the liberal attorney general, then opened the door to non-Anglican involvement in Church affairs when he rejected Heavyside’s appeal and stated that all those who professed to be churchmen should be deemed as full Church members with rights to vote at vestry elections.63 The Cape’s churches formed part of a wider associational culture that gave colonial males the chance to assert their place in a new colonial civil society.64 The growth of lay-orientated Church institutions was also politically significant, as the kind of autonomy and independence that eastern Cape settlers enjoyed in their churches fed into their wider political outlook. The British communities that emerged after the initial 1820 settlement have been painted as self-conscious groups whose sense of political entitlement and privilege extended towards demands for self-government and a separate eastern colony and legislature. Though historians have rarely accorded the Anglican Church a place in the political mobilisation of Cape communities – the classic work makes much of Methodism’s political significance but says 65 – it is reasonable to suppose that nothing about the Church participation in Church building could encourage a corporate political identity. The petitions that lay communities sent to the imperial and ecclesiastical authorities for money for churches formed part of a wider effort to wrest concessions from the colonial government. Notable players in the expansion of the Church on the frontier also figured prominently in the expansion of the colonial Church. For example, Thomas Philipps – the son of a Welsh rector who led a party of 1820 settlers from Pembroke – organised the appointment of a clergyman for the Albany community and also figured prominently in the early movement for eastern separation. A place might, therefore, be found for the growth of lay-orientated Church institutions in narratives of the expansion of colonial civic society, the growth of representative institutions and the emergence of a self-conscious political public that favoured the decentralisation of both secular and ecclesiastical power.

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New South Wales Formal lay involvement in the chaplaincy in New South Wales was practically nil before the 1830s. Chaplains were paid by government and churches were administered by ‘church committees’ composed of the minister and one or two unelected laymen who served as churchwardens (or ‘so-called churchwardens’ as the press called them). All these committees did was allocate pews and collect pew rents. The Clergy and School Lands Corporation – the body formed in 1826 to oversee how the money from the colony’s clergy reserves was spent – was a further obstacle to lay participation. The Australian laity could either complain 66 impotently about how monies were spent or they could channel their activism through the growing number of religious and philanthropic organisations that sprouted up in the colony in the 1810s and 1820s.67 Australian newspapers cast admiring glances at Cape churches that had churchwardens ‘annually chosen by the people’.68 An Anglican laity began to emerge at roughly the same time as a political public started to stir in New South Wales and Tasmania. This lay community was trying to open up Church structures at the same time as Anglican ministers were trying to find ways of cementing their own clerical authority and independence. The two campaigns did not necessarily mesh. In Sydney the issue around which the development of an active laity gained traction was the control of, and access to, pews. The perennially unpopular Archdeacon Thomas Hobbes Scott caused controversy when he tried to rearrange the distribution of pews in Sydney’s St James’s Church in the mid-1820s. The reformist Monitor claimed Scott had ‘descended from his high station’ and had claimed rights that were the preserve of the ‘Church-warden or director of the pew-openers’. The paper called for an inquiry into whether ‘the Vestry laws of England’ – notably the right of parishioners to elect their own church officers – ran in the colony. When Scott evicted the Monitor’s editor, Edward Smith Hall, from his pew – Scott claimed he could do this as he was the ‘ordinary’ of the church – the issue of archdeacon’s power to manage the pews became bound up in a larger debate about what Hall called ‘the capricious power’ of the clergy, and, by extension, the whole colonial administration. The case was later taken to Sydney’s Supreme Court, but no one was satisfied by the final ruling. Hall was found to have trespassed into the pew; Archdeacon Scott was told he could not claim the rights of an ordinary in England; and Justice Dowling, judge of the Supreme Court, ruled that there could be no churchwardens in New South Wales as colonial churches were not akin 69 to English parishes. One of the significant features in this case was that a seemingly [ 77 ]

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obscure dispute about pews was subsequently cast as bearing on wider political concerns. The Monitor latched on to this point when it compared the powers which chaplains had of ‘turning families out of their pews’ with an 1828 Act that allowed governors to remove convicts who had been assigned to work for supposedly unfit masters. The power chaplains wielded over pews and the authority governors exercised over the colonial labour force were treated as comparable ‘attacks on private property’ and comparable instances of tyranny in a colony that lacked trial by jury, a free press and elected assemblies.70 For the Monitor, what happened in Church had a wider political resonance and churches could become political spaces. Demands for representative forms of Church government also surfaced from the mid-1820s in Tasmania. Commentators in the press queried how churchwardens were elected, how they spent the pew rents and why accounts were not open to public scrutiny.71 Again, apparently trivial issues took on wider significance in a colony where the disenfranchised were pushing against the barriers that excluded them from formal politics. In 1825 a group of laymen in Launceston opposed the colonial government’s right to appoint an organist for St David’s Church: as several press correspondents pointed out, the community had paid for the instrument and three-quarters of his £100 salary would be paid for by local subscriptions. Organs became controversial objects in Sydney too: one layman noted that church officers should be elected by the congregation and subscribers and not – as he claimed was the case – by the clergy. Clergy who lauded it as the ‘Rulers of the Church’ should, 72 in this correspondent’s view, be ‘mere Agents of the Subscribers’. Echoes of demands for a system of representative colonial government can be heard in the words of a Tasmanian newspaper who responded to the organ debacle by demanding the ‘adoption of the English system of Churchwardens’, so that ‘the temporal government of the Church may be placed in the hands of the parishioners, who of course are (as in the Mother Country) the legitimate source of all parochial authority’.73 Complaints became louder when it emerged that funds from pew rents at St David’s Church had been mishandled by the clergyman and unelected churchwardens. The laity responded by demanding representative institutions – notably an English-style vestry and church officers appointed according to the ‘established custom at home’ – that would force churchwardens to open up the whole management of 74 colonial Church administration. Those who hoped to see the election of church officers pass into lay hands were initially frustrated, as in the early 1830s the New South Wales government began to exercise a much closer scrutiny over appointments.75 A wider sphere of influence was, however, opened up by [ 78 ]

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the Church Act (1836) and the ruling that government would provide funds towards the erection of churches equal to the amount raised by private donors (up to a maximum of £1,000). The act also formalised lay involvement in Church administration. Clause VII stipulated that the subscribers would elect between three and five trustees who would then manage the real estate attached to the church.76 A second piece of legislation, the Church of England Temporalities Act (1837), gave the laity a formal role in the management of individual churches, as it directed that each church would have three churchwardens (as opposed to the conventional two found in England). One was to be selected by the minister, one by the trustees and one by the pew-holders and renters of sittings who showed up to vote at the annual election. All this shows that both legislative enactments and the actions of ordinary laity had a part to play in building an inclusive Australian Church that brought a varied community of emancipated convicts, free settlers, elite figures and military personnel within its governing structures. Openings for lay involvement at the diocesan level also increased as the Church became more dependent on voluntary funding. The Church of England Lay Association, established by Bishop Broughton in 1844 to organise lay contributions towards Church extension, was one such opening, though evangelicals claimed its unelected committee was packed by high churchmen in the pocket of 77 the bishop. More promising was the ‘Parochial Associations’ that appeared in Sydney parishes in the early 1840s. These entirely lay-run bodies raised money from among the Anglican community for the extension of churches and schools within their parishes.78 There were then instances when the laity and the bishop worked together. But it was also true that the demands that the laity was putting forward for a greater say in Church administration could pose a challenge to episcopal authority. New South Wales’s liberal newspapers, for instance, regularly featured demands by lay Anglicans for greater control over clerical patronage. This could extend to demands for elected bishops.79

Upper Canada The lay institutions that emerged in Canada did not have the kind of political significance as those that appeared in Crown colonies: after all, the philanthropic, religious and charitable organisations that popped up in the Cape and New South Wales from the 1810s onwards were often colonists’ only chance to participate in representative organisations. Upper Canadians, by contrast, had numerous opportunities to play a role in local government and civic affairs.80 The growth of the Canadian laity is significant because it sheds light on the range of influences that shaped the development of the Upper Canadian Church. [ 79 ]

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All the dioceses in British North America were influenced by an American ecclesiastical tradition that placed considerable emphasis on congregational control and local initiative.81 The models of church government that loyalists and later settlers brought with them from America did not always sit comfortably with the designs that British administrators had for the colonial Church. In 1793 lieutenant-governor Simcoe attempted to placate the loyalists by passing an act that empowered Upper Canadians – or at least the householders among them – to form American-style ‘township meetings’ where town officers would be elected.82 Though these meetings were pale imitations of their American forebears, they did rule out the need for English-style vestries, as the act’s seventh article stipulated that wherever there was a ‘parish’ church the householders who were entitled to attend the township meeting also had the right to elect one of the two churchwardens.83 We have also seen how lay communities also demanded a say in the selection and appointment of clergy, though unlike their counterparts in Nova Scotia, Upper Canadians never formally won the legal right to present clergy to livings. This American influence would endure: as late as the 1860s the descendants of American loyalists were leading campaigns against the centralisation of ecclesiastical authority. Richard J. Cartwright, a descendant of prominent Kingston loyalist family, spearheaded the demand for an elected rector of St George’s Church in Kingston in the 84 But loyalists would find that neither the postearly 1860s. Revolutionary empire nor the colonial Church represented their interests.85 A popularly-elected loyalist minister named John Bryan was removed from his post at Prescott when the bishop’s commissary discovered he had used forged ordination papers.86 Settlers lost control of the selection of clergy and, in time, the vestry rather than the township meeting became the chief model of Church administration. It is not clear when or why this shift took place – Rudd’s comments suggest the process was underway quite early in Cornwall – but it is likely that the advent of migration from about 1815 onwards had a role in drawing Upper Canada away from American ecclesiastical traditions. American settlers were not the only ones to bring democratic understandings of Church polity to the Canadian colonies. English and Irish congregations were just as likely as their American counterparts to denounce anything they thought would lead to the centralisation of 87 ecclesiastical authority. Irish Protestants had a particularly strong conception of lay authority. The demands that the Ontario Irish made for an extensive lay role in the Church – this could encompass elected clergy and bishops – was born out of their evangelicalism, their experience of participating in civil government and their knowledge and [ 80 ]

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experience of organising voluntary organisations such as temperance societies and Orange and Masonic lodges.88 Demands for elected bishops in the eastern parts of Canada West in the mid-1850s came from congregations with a strong Irish component. Five of the eleven speakers who addressed one meeting at Brockville in 1856 were Irish (the meeting was held to resist an attempt to fill the proposed Kingston bishopric with a nominated as opposed to popularly elected candidate).89 The campaign that emerged in New South Wales in the early 1850s for democratic forms of synodical government similarly featured a strong Irish element.90 The American influence on Church development lessened as English models of ecclesiastical administration were legalised and became the norm. In 1841 the Church Temporalities Act (4 & 5 Victoria, cap. 74) legally established vestries and ironed out the ambiguities surrounding voting qualifications. These institutions were not democratic or inclusive spaces. The 1841 Act limited the right to attend vestries to pew-holders, though in some congregations, such as at St Paul’s in London, non-pew-holders seem to have been able to attend vestries 91 informally. It was not until the formation of synods in the later 1850s that canons were passed that allowed churches with free sittings (i.e. those without rented pews) to broaden the right to sit in vestry to all those over the age of 21 who declared themselves Church members.92 The widening (within limits) of vestry membership in the later 1850s and 1860s was in line with the Church’s increasing dependence on lay funding. Another sign of this shifting emphasis was the formation of new ecclesiastical institutions similar to those found in New South Wales. The ‘Church Society’ that Bishop Strachan established in 1842 was designed to free individual churches from financing themselves through inadequate pew-rents, shield clergy from relying directly on congregational support and generally make the Church more selfsufficient. For a fee of 15 shillings a layperson could become a member of a district or parochial branch of the society. As a nod to the lay voice in the colonial Church, subscribers were given the choice about whether they wanted their donation to go towards minister’s salaries, new bishoprics or the erection of churches and parsonages.93 Unlike in Quebec, where parish subcommittees controlled three-quarters of the money they raised, parochial branches in Upper Canada could not spend any money. In order to protect clerical independence, the control of three-quarters of the funds by parochial associations was vested in district committees, with the remaining quarter going to the central, diocesan, body. Laymen had a voice at that level too, as the standing committee was composed of ten clergy and ten laymen, all elected by Church Society members.94 [ 81 ]

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This discussion of the institutionalisation of the lay presence in colonial churches shows that colonial lay communities were attached to what was familiar. Wherever possible the laity established vestries that would give them a say in Church administration, though the use of township meetings in early Upper Canada suggests that colonists did not always look to England for institutional models. Colonial newspapers noted that colonists viewed the Church in much the same way as they saw English law, trial by jury and a free press: for the Giaham’s Town Journal, the Church was one of those benefits to which the colonist was ‘justly entitled’ and which he carried ‘with him to whatever part of the Empire he may remove’.95 But there was more going on here than simply the transplantation of familiar ecclesiastical institutions. The treatment that Heavyside received at Grahamstown suggests that the authority wielded by colonial congregations went beyond that seen in English parishes. In Upper Canada demands for a lay voice in the selection of ministers snowballed into calls for elected bishops, and once that demand was won – elections were held for the new bishoprics of Huron in 1857 and Kingston in 1861 – senior churchmen could not prevent demands for wider powers. When John Travers Lewis, the newly elected bishop of Kingston, tried to appoint a rector of St George’s cathedral church in Kingston in 1862 he incurred the wrath of a lay community who thought that they should have the right to vote for both rectors and 96 bishops. Such disputes – one newspaper likened events in Kingston to the furore over lay patronage that led to the 1843 ‘Disruption’ in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland – prepared the ground for further lay assaults on clerical and episcopal authority in the 1870s and beyond.97 The emergence of a vocal colonial laity also suggests that the Anglican Church of the early nineteenth century was not, as has sometimes been suggested, a static, hierarchical and exclusive institution that ran against the grain of colonial political culture.98 Though it has largely gone unnoticed, the Anglican Church did make an important contribution to the development of a new kind of reformed empire in the post-1815 period, one that was made up of colonial publics who possessed free presses, jury trials and representative assemblies.99 In New South Wales, for instance, two clergymen – Samuel Marsden and Henry Fulton – helped forward the development of a political public when they solicited signatures for a petition that colonists had drawn up in early 1819 demanding trial by jury and the lifting of trade restrictions.100 The growing self-confidence of the Anglican laity fed into the growth of this colonial political public, as efforts to open up ecclesiastical institutions to lay control mirrored the campaigns that surfaced in most colonial towns for free speech, representative [ 82 ]

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legislatures and trial by jury.101 Interestingly, conservatives who denied that there was such a thing as a colonial public also dismissed the idea that the colonies possessed an active colonial laity. Archdeacon Thomas Hobbes Scott had been part of the commission of inquiry that had advised against introducing trial by jury to New South Wales; he also could not see why the Church in New South Wales needed churchwardens.102 It is true that there was not always a tight link between lay activism and reform politics – it was, for instance, Kingston’s conservative community who spearheaded demands for an elected clergy in the early 1860s. Most Upper Canadians who rented pews would have had little interest in letting the community at large play a role in the management of churches that they deemed to be their property. Vestries in New South Wales could also become bastions of elite privilege once the 1837 Temporalities Act gave multiple votes at vestry elections to those who owned multiple pews. Still, the march of voluntarism did mean that a wider colonial community was steadily brought into the Church’s governing structures.

The relationship between parishioners and clergy Another way to gauge the scope of this lay authority is to look at the power dynamics that developed between clergy and laity. On the one hand the relationships that emerged in local churches between clergy and parishioners can provide clues for how the laity viewed their Church and how they conceived of Church government beyond the parish – a topic considered in the next chapter. On the other they can tell us something about how power was distributed in the colonial Church. Though it is difficult to generalise, it does seem that the traditional view that clergy and parishioners were locked in conflict has serious 103 limitations. Recent scholarship has argued that we should think about parishioner-clergy relations in terms of cooperation rather than conflict.104 Australian scholars, for instance, have asked us to reconsider old assumptions about relations between convicts and clergy: clergymen advocated the causes of individual convicts; appealed for reduced sentences; arranged convict marriages; and provided legal advice to illiterate convicts.105 This positive interpretation can work for other colonies. We have already noted the willingness of the laity to pay for new churches and, where they had the funds to do so, contribute towards clergy stipends. Gift-giving could also signal that clergy and parishioners were pulling in the same direction: Ebenezer Wilshire at Fort Beaufort in South Africa found, for example, that his congregation were willing to offer their Christmas gifts to meet the costs of an organ.106 [ 83 ]

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But such moments of harmony and rapport hid a more complicated situation. Relations between parishioners and clergy were often characterised by negotiation, compromise and concession. Many clergy would have been aware that they were serving congregations where a kind of ‘informal Presbyterianism’ (to use a phrase deployed by one scholar of early modern religion) was operating.107 Voluntarism put new demands on both the parish clergy and the bishops. The great challenge facing colonial bishops – one that perhaps did not face their metropolitan counterparts quite so starkly – was how to build a popular Church out of a diverse laity and an equally diverse clerical workforce. Bishops had to have an intimate knowledge of the ethnic composition and religious views of individual congregations, and they continually found themselves making judgements about whether clergy were suitable for particular parishes or missions. They also had to be prepared to move 108 Bishop Strachan’s reason for removing unpopular clergy elsewhere. high churchman Edward Jukes Boswell from his Carleton Place post in 1842 are murky, but it is likely that Boswell’s difficulties with his congregation stemmed from a dispute over alleged ritualism.109 In New South Wales Broughton removed the Irishman John Espy Keane from his Bathurst parish in 1836 after he offended his parishioners.110 Clergy who were paid by the government probably had greater latitude to exert their clerical authority. Ebenezer Wilshere at Fort Beaufort was one such clergyman: he claimed that ‘everything seems to depend on the Clergyman’s individual faith & effort’ and went so far as to ‘put aside’ the ‘ordinance for the election of Churchwardens & Sidesmen & others’.111 Clergy could find themselves in hot water with their parishioners when they strayed into political disputes. The congregation at Pakenham in Upper Canada wanted to see the back of Hannibal Mulkins after he wrote letters to newspapers defending the controversial Rebellion Losses Bill of 1849.112 Generally, however, battles were fought over ritual and churchmanship rather than politics. At Oakville in western Ontario in 1844 the evangelical churchwardens and parishioners succeeded in forcing their incumbent, George Winter Warr, to resign his post after Warr placed a cross on the outside of the church that the congregation thought ‘Romish’.113 Events at Easter 1848 at St John’s Church in Parramatta, New South Wales provide a window on to the growing strength of the New South Wales laity: when the minister Henry Bobart removed an evangelical clerk and introduced the surplice and offertory, evangelical pew renters responded by refusing to pay the salaries of the church officers until the minister had returned to what the congregation termed ‘the decent and orderly method of performing Divine Service which has so long prevailed in the Church’. All Saints’, Parramatta’s [ 84 ]

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other church, also saw a campaign against Puseyite changes.114 Clergy could be thrown into an untenable position if they lost the support of important brokers in the colonial community. John Vincent had to be removed from his post at Moreton Bay in northern New South Wales after he fell out with the commander of the convict settlement there.115 William Morse’s Trollopean experience at Paris in Upper Canada in the late 1830s illustrates how clergy could be left isolated by conflicts between parishioners. Morse’s appointment came about because a Mrs Dickson – she turned out to be a Presbyterian – had contacted the UCCS for a minister for the settlement. Dickson claimed to act as the spokesperson of the community, but when Morse arrived he found that she had acted alone and had ignored the demands of the community for a clergyman sourced locally. To make matters worse Dickson was also embroiled in a dispute with the rest of the community about where the church should be sited – a familiar conflict in colonial communities. When a public meeting found that the community did not have the ‘power to set aside an appointment made by the bishop’, a number of parishioners left the church, ‘saying they would have nothing to do with such kind of government and discipline’. Morse took himself off to the neighbouring village of St George, as there he was not ‘looked 116 upon as a person not wanted’. The clergy’s desire to present themselves as community leaders could also lead to difficulties. We know that colonial clergy made a positive contribution to the development of civil society by leading the establishment of schools, hospitals, newspapers, charities, mechanics institutes and fraternal societies.117 The clergy’s claims to leadership status was fine so long as they could lead communities on their own terms; things became more difficult when the laity asked the clergy to lead causes that jarred with their clerical consciences. This was a particular problem for those Upper Canadian clergy whose congregations were largely made up of members of the Orange Order. In 1840 George Street told his local Orange lodge in Ontario’s Newcastle region that he would only deliver a sermon on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot if they would leave their ‘banners and regalia’ at home. The lodge refused, and though Street prided himself on his ‘independence’, he found his church on the following Sunday ‘literally almost deserted’.118 Street was an Englishman serving a largely Irish community. Whether conflict was more likely in places where clergy of one ethnic group served congregations of another is a moot question and one that is rarely addressed in the existing literature. We know that clergy would have found themselves ministering to people of diverse ethnicity (the policy of matching clergy with congregations’ co-ethnics did not get [ 85 ]

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particularly far: Irishman John Pentland served Whitby in Ontario – an area where the English formed 47 per cent of the population at midcentury – from 1841 to 1857).119 Michael Gauvreau has pointed out that clergy got round this problem by adopting different postures towards different ethnic groups. Gauvreau uses Bold Cudmore Hill – a UCCS missionary on the Grand River in western Upper Canada – as an example of a clergyman who recognised that he had to negotiate and conciliate if he was to realise his mission of seeking out the ‘lost sheep of the Church of England & all, in general, speaking the English language’.120 Hill’s compromises included delivering morning and evening prayers to Ulster Presbyterians from heart rather than from a visible prayer book and giving a democratic gloss to the prayers for the King to American loyalists.121 Elsewhere in Canada we have evidence of English-born clergy providing uneventful and uncontroversial service to largely Irish congregations: this was true of Samuel Spratt Strong, who laboured in the Bytown area for twenty years, and James Padfield, who served the strongly Irish settlements at March and Huntley in the Ottawa Valley. However, relations between clergy and churchgoers of differing ethnicity could be fractious. The fact that Englishman Edward Boswell resigned from the Irish settlement at Carleton Place in 1842 and was replaced by an Irishman might suggest that ethnic tensions were at the root of Boswell’s resignation, but the lack of collaborating evidence means we will never know.122 The evangelical UCCS missionary Featherstone Lake Osier had numerous troubles with the scattered Irish communities who composed the bulk of his flock in Tecumseth and West Gwillimbury. In an early letter to an English friend he referred to congregations formed of ‘the lowest order of Irish’ who lived in ‘wasteful extravagance’.123 Members of Osier’s congregation countered his criticism by claiming that he was ‘more partial to the English’. The congregation did give Osier cash towards a parsonage, but he still had to go into the woods and find the materials himself. Yet Osier’s career is an illustration of how ethnic divisions could be bridged by years of effective pastoral service, and, in Osier’s case, by a common evangelicalism. Across a twenty-year career Osier would establish twenty-eight congregations and numerous Sunday schools, and as early as 1839 he claimed to have won the affection of ‘his people’.124 The missionary reports of Osier’s UCCS colleagues suggest that settlers rarely noticed the ethnicity of ministers; indeed, it seems frontier communities were happy with whatever they could get. Furthermore, tensions were just as likely to arise between Irish ministers and Irish congregations. In 1854 the Rev. J. A. Morris, who heralded from Shrule in Ireland, had trouble with the same Irish congregation at [ 86 ]

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Carleton Place that had clashed with Englishman Edward Jukes Boswell back in 1842.125 Even if Irish clergy did find themselves ministering to Irish congregations it was unlikely that the clergyman and the parishioners heralded from the same region of Ireland. Benjamin Cronyn had been born in Kilkenny and had experience as a curate in County Longford, but a large section of the community he served in the London district were Protestants from County Tipperary.126 Meanwhile, James Barnier, a former incumbent in the diocese of Leighlin, County Carlow, found himself ministering to a concentration of Ulster Protestants in New South Wales at Kiama.127 The Canadian historian Richard Vaudry is probably right to argue that it was tensions over doctrine and theology – rather than ethnicity – that threatened to disrupt hopes of a broad, British Church in the colonial world.128 Overall, it is the low incidence of conflict between parishioners and clergy that is striking. Adapting forms of worship to local exigencies was one of a number of strategies that Anglican ministers adopted in order to maintain a popular national establishment and extend the Church in unfamiliar colonial surroundings.129 Holy communion was a key point of tension. Bold Cudmore Hill found that he could not make communion the basis of Church membership: at one point he had to tell Presbyterians on the Grand River that their taking communion was not a ‘renunciation of their own Systems’ or a sign that they were now members of the Anglican Church.130 Across our period Canadian clergy noted that the reluctance of many colonists to take communion stemmed from popular anxieties about the solemnity and seriousness of the event: W. D. Baldwyn stated that it was ‘an Opinion of their own Unworthiness’ that stopped the laity from taking communion (similar attitudes have been found among eighteenth-century English congregations).131 Work on the Quebec diocese has shown that the number of colonists who called themselves Anglican was always far greater than the number who regularly took communion, and the same applies for parishes and missions in other parts of the empire.132 The reports that Cape clergy sent back to the SPG in the later 1850s reveal that the number of communicants was rarely above a quarter of the total number of identifiable Church members in each mission. The Rev. Orpen at Colesberg administered communion once a month but in six years he saw the number of communicants in his mission increase from twenty-one to just thirty-nine.133 In the 1850s the majority of Cape clergy were administering holy communion at least once a month, but in this respect they may have been unique. At mid-century many Quebec clergy were still only holding communion four times a year because they did not wish to alienate the less obviously ‘Anglican’ members of their congregation.134 [ 87 ]

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Negotiations also occurred at the diocesan level. John Strachan’s hopes of building an inclusive, tolerant and comprehensive Church led him to allow congregations to decide whether they would allow their minister to don the surplice. He also disciplined clergy who went against the wishes of their parishioners by refusing to bury nonconformists.135 But the argument that forms of worship were continually a matter of negotiation can be overdrawn. Clergy from all party backgrounds were convinced that building a recognisable Anglican Church and turning colonial populations into Anglican communities relied on faithfulness to the forms of worship proscribed in the prayer book.136 Clergy testimony reveals the tenacity with which many insisted on lay conformity to the Anglican liturgy and supposedly Catholic practices such as kneeling at prayers. Travelling missionaries in Upper Canada who served unsettled congregations and encountered hostility and apathy still urged lay conformity to prayer book worship. Henry O’Neill found that the congregation at Elsa refused to join ‘in the general confession and the Lord’s Prayer’. Nevertheless, a few days later O’Neill was kneeling in front of a congregation at Camboro who ‘sat and stared keeping their seats all through the service’. The congregation at O’Neill’s next stop, Dunnville, responded to prayers more enthusiastically. When prayer 137 books were not available, O’Neill recited prayers from memory. Even the conciliatory Hill insisted on prayer book worship because ‘coldness & formality is scarcely less to be dreaded than that chaotic state’ of religion that would be engendered by a lack of ‘Scriptural form of Prayer’.138 O’Neill’s and Hill’s experiences are revealing for what they tell us about the clergy’s battle to maintain authority and independence. The social, economic and political forces that were leading the colonies towards voluntarism, political democracy and free trade seemed to spell the end of clerical independence. But what is remarkable is how clergy maintained a sense of their own authority, even after responsibility for paying their salaries had passed from the state to the wider 139 community. This independence can be read in clergy’s fidelity to what they considered the key features of a distinctive Anglican faith. As Sachs notes, adaption had to be balanced with loyalty to established precedents. In South Africa it is striking how high church clergy were willing to risk conflict with a largely evangelical settler laity by introducing Anglo-Catholic forms of worship.140 Some clergy would not negotiate at all.141 Edward T. Scott, who arrived at George in South Africa in 1845, said he was warmly received by both English and Dutch, but that this ‘soon cooled down, when they found I did not think it right to come into all their ways’.142 George Booth, minister at Fort Beaufort, refused to preach in a Methodist chapel and to – as he put it – [ 88 ]

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‘amalgamate our church with the dissenting Methodists’. Booth complained that while the Roman Catholic priests could ‘glory in their consistency’ the Anglican clergy were forced to compromise their ecclesiastical authority and their spiritual and financial independence.143 Men who took these kinds of stances did not last long. Scott, for example, resigned his post in 1849. Veteran clergymen like the loyalist John Stuart recognised that the weight of authority in voluntary churches rested with the congregation, and that the health of the Church – and the fortunes of a popular national establishment – depended on the clergyman bowing to the local wishes and needs. Stuart said in 1804 that whenever the interests of his congregation interfered with his ‘Rights as a Clergyman’, he always ‘sacrificed the latter as the Purchase of 144 Peace’.

The significance of the lay contribution to Church expansion This chapter has shed light on the distribution of power in colonial churches. Shifts in the relationship between Church and state and the gradual advent of voluntarism left the laity with important roles to play in the Church at the parish level. Though the laity worked alongside the clergy to extend the Church, their motives for doing so were not always religious, nor did the laity necessarily view the Church in the same way as the ministry. The lay Church was one that resembled a voluntary association. In the same way as the benevolent society had an elected officer class who were accountable to subscribers, so the lay communities who paid for churches thought that they should have extensive rights over ministers. Clergy too could view the Church as a kind of association – John Strachan once said that he wanted his diocese to ‘form one great Association, acting through a central and supreme Committee under the 145 superintendence of the Bishop’. The associational model did, however, present problems to a ministry who were already struggling to impose their authority in colonial and frontier environments. The laity in South Africa and Australia helped transform a military chaplaincy into a civilian Church. Scholars of Australia religion have noted that the outlooks, traditions and rituals of the military and early clergy could clash, and we know that ministers like Samuel Marsden campaigned to free the Australian Church from military discipline.146 When Bishop Mountain of Quebec refused to ordain former military men into holy orders in 1821 he was – perhaps unknowingly – helping to push the Canadian Church away from any association with the old ‘fiscalmilitary’ complex.147 Lay communities also railed against military [ 89 ]

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interference in their churches,148 and this in spite of the fact that many of the laymen who donated money and lands for churches had themselves been members of the Napoleonic-era fiscal-military state. Richard Daniell, founder of Sidbury church in South Africa and a pioneer of the wool-growing industry, had previously been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.149 Hamilton Ross, the prominent Cape Town merchant and reformer, was a significant contributor to Church extension who had seen military action in South Africa and India during the Napoleonic era.150 In Upper Canada, retired officers on half pay established churches, held church services and mingled with Anglican clergymen in frontier settlements. Recent research has similarly pointed to the sizeable military contribution to the early Australian Church.151 The number of clergy who were descended from military families and who married into the military (Gladwin calculates that around 27 per cent of Australian clergy wives were the daughters of military men)152 might suggest that the Church and the military were mutual supports of a Tory empire, but this would be to misread the evidence. What was happening was that former employees of Britain’s fiscal-military state were helping to forge a ‘second empire’ that differed markedly from the empire of monopolies and paternalistic and authoritarian government that they had helped protect in the Napoleonic period. An aspect of this was the emergence of a colonial Church that was conceived, financed and administered by the laity. The lay contribution to the colonial Church therefore has a significance that extends beyond Church history. The emergence of the colonial laity paralleled, and fed into, the evolution of colonial society and politics. Demands for Church authority to be taken out of the hands of clergy, bishops and metropolitan missionary societies mirrored movements for colonial self-government, but what was also important was how churches – institutions that have often been cast as bulwarks of a Tory empire – were venues in which more democratic understandings of ecclesiastical and secular government could germinate, ideas that had 153 a bearing, if indirectly, on political debates in the secular realm. Lay authority grew from several roots. Ideas about the rights of subscribers gained traction because they fed into debates about the status of the colonial public. A crucial role must also be accorded to evangelicalism. Canadian historians have noted how ‘the evangelical impulse’ – particularly its emphasis on individual faith and the importance of voluntarily sharing in God’s grace – was of seminal importance in the colonial rejection of what one scholar has called the ‘inherited model of religious, social, and political organization, founded 154 upon tradition notions of rank, status, and social subordination’. While the Church of England is usually seen as losing out in this [ 90 ]

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evangelical moment, it is also true that evangelicalism had a bearing on government within the Church. The idea that a church was composed of an association of free and equal individuals brought with it the idea, expressed cogently by one Australian Anglican, that the authority of the Church ‘lies in the community at large, and not in the corporation of its ecclesiastics’.155 Demands for extensive lay participation in the spiritual and temporal affairs of the Church flowed from this rationale.156 What we might call the ‘laicisation’ of the colonial Church did not sweep all before it. A key question in the 1840s was what lay involvement at the diocesan level would look like. This had not been a pressing issue earlier in the century, as all the evidence suggests that the diocese was not a particularly important ecclesiastical structure for most colonial Anglicans. Bishops were distant figures and few ecclesiastical institutions connected local congregations to archidiaconal or diocesan structures. This would change in the 1840s. New colonial bishoprics were established, diocesan organisations like the Church Society started to appear, and the ‘missionary bishop’ became a key symbol of Church expansion. Historians of the metropolitan Church use the term ‘diocesan revival’ to explain the process of internal Church reform that led to the revival of diocesan institutions – such as the rural dean, the archdeacon 157 and episcopal visitation – which had fallen into disuse. ‘Revival’ is not really an appropriate term to describe colonial developments – there it was more a case of creating rather than reviving the diocese – but colonial developments did feed into a common diocesan Church reform moment. The next chapter traces the development of the colonial episcopate in the twenty years after the establishment of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund in 1841. While the Fund found the money for new sees, colonial bishops took the first steps towards strengthening popular attachment to the diocese. John Strachan thought his Church Society would strengthen the laity’s connection to the Church because it tied parishes to the diocese and united all Church members in ‘one heart and one soul’.158 Australian scholars have noted how popular attachments to dioceses – many of which had developed particular religious and theological characters – grew appreciably as the nineteenth century progressed.159 But diocesanism of this sort lay very much in the future. The problem for early reformers like Strachan was that the vision of many colonial churchgoers remained decidedly local. Lay persons in the Quebec diocese donated money for local church purposes but showed little interest in contributing to diocesan projects sponsored by Quebec’s Church Society. Missionary reports from the Cape in 1859 show that congregations raised small amounts for missions and other diocesan causes but were mostly [ 91 ]

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preoccupied with stumping up the cash that would pay for church repairs and church instruments.160 Senior clerics in Upper Canada tried to avoid this localism by ruling that district branches of its Church Society would administer three-quarters of the funds raised at the parochial level. The society’s early reports show, however, that churchgoers saw their first duty as paying for clergy salaries and contributing towards church building in their parish.161 Chapter Three examines how the local perspectives of colonial communities sat with the diocesan agenda that was brought to the colonies by a generation of Anglican bishops in the 1830s and 1840s. The expansion of the episcopate was, as we shall see, a global endeavour. Interestingly, senior churchmen began to see the struggle between lay and episcopal conceptions of Church polity in international terms. High churchmen saw similarities in the development of the laity in different parts of the empire. Archdeacon Merriman of Grahamstown told Ernest Hawkins in 1851 that the ‘Pew rents, & unpaid subscription lists, & select vestries, & all the like paraphernalia’ that Hawkins had found when he toured North American churches in 1849 could also be 162 Merriman, who arrived in South Africa in 1848, found at the Cape. was one of those high churchmen who wanted Church expansion to be placed on a very different footing. The arrival of men like Merriman could be disruptive, as they brought with them the question of how lay authority could be squared with a new model of Episcopal Church expansion.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10

DOA, John Stuart Papers, 4–2, James Sutherland Rudd to John Stuart, 25 July 1801, fos la-lc. J. I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792–1852 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), chs 10 and 11. Hardwick, ‘Vestry politics’, pp. 87–108. P. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 41–54. Fingard, The Anglican Design, p. 195. This argument builds on a suggestive comment in Schurman, A Bishop and his People, p. 103. P. Salmon, ‘“Reform should begin at home”: English municipal and parliamentary reform, 1818–32’, in C. Jones (ed.), Partisan Politics, Principle and Reform in Parliament and the Constituencies, 1689–1880 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 93–113. F. Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 24–5. RHL, C/CAN/TOR/1/502/35, Bold Cudmore Hill to the UCCS, 24 March 1840, fo. 6. John S. Moir, The Church in the British Era: Prom the British Conquest to Confederation (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), p. 84.

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RHL, C/CAN/TOR/2/515, W. H. Norris to SPG, 23 October 1840, fo. 48; C/CAN/QUE/9/447, Salter J. Mountain to Anthony Hamilton, 24 December 1821, fo. 132; Akenson, Irish in Ontario, pp. 223–4. Akenson, Irish in Ontario, pp. 223–7. DOA, Fredericksburg vestry minutes, 1–AM-l, vestry meeting 9 April 1861; ibid., Bath vestry minutes, 4–BM-3, vestry meeting April 1861. RHL, Copies of Letters Received, 112: Cape and Mauritius, E T. Scott to Ernest Hawkins, 22 December 1845 and William Long to Hawkins, 30 December 1845 fos 255–6, 252–3. Little, Borderland Religion, pp. 260–1. RHL, C/CAN/QUE/9/442, George Okill Stuart to secretary Morice, 17 September 1804, fo. 46. See question ten of a questionnaire circulated by the Bishop of Quebec in November 1827. Copies are held in DOA. F. Knight, ‘From diversity to sectarianism: the definition of Anglican identity in nineteenth-century England’, Studies in Church History, 32 (1996), p. 386. RHL, X-7, ‘Henry O’Neill’s Journal No. 3, 13 February 1837’, fo. 27. UYL, C/AFS/2/5, Francis McClelland to Ernest Hawkins, 30 July 1841, fo. 39. B. Fletcher, ‘Christianity and free society in New South Wales 1788–1840’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 86:2 (2000), p. 106. Ibid., pp. 102–3. Edward Parry, the superintendent of the Australian Agricultural Company, secured a succession of evangelical ministers at Port Stephens in New South Wales: P. Robinson, Proclaiming Unsearchable Riches: Newcastle and the Minority Evangelical Anglicans: 1788–1900 (Leominster: Gracewing Fowler Wright Books Ltd, 1996), p. 46. Prospect: Sydney Herald, 23 February 1837, p. 1; Concord: Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 15 February 1841, p. 2; Christ Church: Sydney Herald, 30 December 1840, p. 3. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 222. See the petition enclosed in John Bell, secretary to the Cape government, to the CO, 28 June 1828, UYL, C/AFS/1, fos 201–4. For the settlers, see E. Morse Jones, Roll of the British Settlers in South Africa. Part I up to 1826 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1971). UYL, C/AFS/2, ‘Memorial of Chaplain, Church managers and other inhabitants of Port Elizabeth to Archbishops of Canterbury and York and Bishop of London’, 25 April 1832, fos 36–7. UYL, C/AFS/2, R. Southey to the civil commissioner, 21 February 1843, fos 360–1. AO, Church Records Collection F978, Reel 11, #70, ‘St James’ Church, Maitland, Ont., Subscription List 1827–27; ibid., Microfilm Reel 2. #9b, Newmarket Anglican Church, Subscribers List, 1833–1837; RHL, C/CAN/QUE/9, Joseph Thompson to Anthony Hamilton, 26 February 1822, fo. 452. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, pp. 175–7. RHL, C/CAN/QUE/7/3, Christine Crymble to the UCCS, 18 February 1838. Ibid., C/CAN/QUE/13/498, Anne Ledyard to Joseph Algar, 9 January 1837, f. 102; Ledyard to Charles Bettridge, 14 July 1838, C/CAN/QUE/7/3. DHA, Trinity St Thomas vestry minutes, minutes for 25 March 1845. Fletcher, ‘Anglican ascendancy’, p. 29. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 176. Marsden’s involvement with the convict James Ring, who he employed as a singer, would embroil him in controversy: Yarwood, Samuel Marsden, p. 245. DOA, St. Peter’s, Brockville, vestry minute book, 1833–57, 8–BM-l, vestry meeting 9 April 1855; ibid., St John’s church, Portsmouth (Kingston), Portsmouth Parochial Register of Baptisms, Confirmations, Marriages & Burials, 5–K-l, List of voters for lay delegates to synod, 1861.

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40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Acts of the Provincial Parliament Relating to Synods (Kingston: William Lightfoot, 1863), pp. 69–71. Sydney Morning Herald (hereafter SMH), 28 October 1846; ibid., 13 June 1845. Minutes of the Proceedings of the First Synod of the Diocese of Capetown (Cape Town: Diocese of Cape Town, 1857), p. 4. D. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), pp. 14, 17. Trinity College Dublin Archives (hereafter TCD), MS 6203, Edward Synge, Missionary Journal. UYL, E Series, Volume E2, Report of William Andrews, Knysna, 31 February 1856, fo. 45; ibid., John Quinn to Bishop of Cape Town, 7 June 1855, fo. 61; ibid., Report of John Maynard at Beaufort, 19 January 1855, fo. 55; ibid., Report of E. S. Wilshere at Caledon, 1 March 1857, fo. 19. Ibid., SPG report of Thomas Sheard at Mossel Bay, dated 12 February 1859, fo. 35. The names of subscribers are attached to UYL, C/AFS/5, Southey to the civil commissioner of Graaf Reinet, 21 February 1844, fos 161–4. The national backgrounds of vestry members were found in the 1851 and 1861 Canadian census. Vestry membership was determined by examining the backgrounds of individuals attending vestry meetings close to the episcopal election of 1861 (all the following vestry minutes are held at DOA). Samples were taken from St Peter’s Brockville for 9 April 1855 (8–BM-l); from Bath 1 April 1861 (4–BM-3); for Barriefield 1 April 1861 (3–BM-l); from St Luke’s Camden East 1 April 1861 (1–CM-1); from from Belleville, 4 October 1860 (7–BM-l); from St George’s Kingston 1 April 1861 (2–KM-6); and North Augusta 1 April 1861 (4–NM-l). D. Hempton, The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), p. 165. RHL, C/EMIGRANTS/1/17, W. Cotton to Ernest Hawkins, 29 January 1849. TMRL, John Strachan Papers, S66, 1824–1829, Amos Ansley to Archdeacon John Strachan, 24 January 1825. UYL, C/AFS/5, Merriman to Hawkins, 25 February 1849, fo. 298; Little, Borderland Religion, p. 261. Fingard, Anglican Design, pp. 94–100; Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 362–4. S. Spragge, ‘Managing the household of faith: administration and finance, 1780–1867, in A. Hayes (ed.), By Grace Co-Workers: Building the Anglican Diocese of Toronto 1780–1989 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1989), p. 222–3. P. Friesen, ‘The saints in the land: 1780–1867’, in ibid., p. 166. Spragge, ‘Managing the household’, p. 228. Parliamentary Papers 1852, XXXII (355–1) ‘Copies of Any Petitions to the Queen, and of any representations to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State in the Colonial Department, on colonial church legislation’, Sir H. G. Smith to Earl Grey, 21 January 1850, pp. 39–40. RHL, C/AUS/SYD/1/37, W. B. Clarke to Hawkins, 30 November 1839. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 50. An example is St Peter’s Brockville in Upper Canada: AO, St. Peter’s Anglican Church, ‘Offertory and Poor’s Account Book 1833–1851’, F2188. See minutes for 4 April 1847, St. Peter’s, Tyrconnell, DHA, ‘Vestry Records 1846– 1938’, fo. 72. RHL, X-7, ‘Henry O’Neill’s Journal no. 5, August 1837’, fos 58–9, 61. S. Dubow, ‘How British was the British world? The case of South Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:1 (2009), p. 19. Hinchliff, Anglican Church, p. 23. Ibid., pp. 22–4. Ibid., p. 17.

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65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89

90 91

UYL, C/AFS/5, George Booth to Hawkins, 31 May 1841, fo. 53. For the Grahamstown affair, see the South African Commercial Advertiser (hereafter SACA), 1 May 1841, and the Cape Frontier Times, 28 April, 6 May and 19 May 1841. K. McKenzie, ‘Of convicts and capitalists: Honour and colonial commerce in 1830s Cape Town and Sydney’, Australasian Historical Studies, 118 (2002), p. 222. B. Le Cordeur, The Politics of Eastern Cape Separatism 1820–1854 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 78. For example, see Monitor, 10 April 1833, p. 2. Fletcher, ‘Christianity and free society’, pp. 95, 103. Australian, 13 February 1829, p. 4. For the Court’s findings, and for Scott’s appeal against the judge’s ruling on his ecclesiastical authority, see HRA, I:XV, Governor Darling to Sir George Murray, 25 August 1829, pp. 131–40; Monitor, 5 July 1828. See also the correspondence from the evicted pew holder and subsequent comment in ibid., 14 July 1828. For Hall’s case, see ibid., 29 September 1828, and 14 March 1829 for the judge’s ruling. Monitor, 4 April 1829. Letter of ‘Simon Plainway’, in the Colonial Times, 19 August 1825. See the letter of ‘A Subscriber’, Hobart Town Gazette, 17 December 1824 and articles on 11 March and 1 July 1825. For Sydney, see letter of ‘A Subscriber to the Organ’, Monitor, 29 October 1827. The colonial state was responsible for appointments of church officers, though there were accusations that clergy usurped the patronage: Colonial Times, 26 August 1825 and 10 February 1826. In several instances clergy fired sextons and church officers, assuming that they were their servants rather than the community’s: Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 176. Colonial Times, 21 July 1826. Letter of ‘No Churchwarden’, Colonial Times, 14 December 1831, p. 2; also see the editorials in ibid., 21 March 1832 and ibid., 18 June 1833. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 176. Ibid., p. 313. Sentinel, 12 March 1845. For example, see The Sydney Herald, 21 September 1840 and 16 October 1841. Colonist, 2 June 1836. Akenson, Irish in Ontario, p. 96. Fingard, Anglican Design, pp. 99, 169; Little, Borderland Religion, p. 6. G. Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years 1784–1841 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd, 1963), p. 30. The Statutes of the Province of Upper Canada (Kingston: Francis M. Hill, 1831), p. 36. Narrative of a Dispute Between the Bishop of Ontario and the Congregation of St. George’s, Kingston, Relative to the Appointment of Dr Lauder (Toronto: W. C. Chewett, 1863). M. Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire (London: Harper Press, 2011), pp. 202–9. Talman, ‘Some notes’, p. 58. Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, p. 212. Akenson, Irish in Ontario, pp. 138, 213–23. For the 1856 meeting, see Papers and Correspondence Relative to the Proposed New See of Kingston (Brockville: J. McMullen, 1856), pp. 25–36. The ethnic composition of the vestry was based on an analysis of the members who attended on 9 April 1855: DOA, St Peter’s Brockville, 8–BM-l, Vestry Minute Book 1833–57. Note the career of Cork-born Richard Sadleir: ‘Sadleir, Richard (1794–1889)’, ADB, online edition (last accessed 24 October 2012). See ‘Minutes of a vestry meeting held at St Paul’s Church in Easter Monday 21 April 1851’, DHA, St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘Minutes of Vestry Meetings – 1844–1860’; Acts

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94 95 96

97 98

99 100 101 102 103

104

105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

Passed in the Fifth Session of the Thirteenth Provincial Parliament of Upper Canada (Kingston, 1841), pp. 6–11. Friesen, ‘The saints in the land’, pp. 172–3; Spragge, ‘Managing the household’; Constitution and Canons of the Synod of the Diocese of Toronto (Toronto: Rowsell and Ellis, 1858), pp. 51–2. For examples, see DOA, St. Peter’s Church Brockville, 8–BM-2, vestry minute book 1842–52. Fahey, In His Name, pp. 224–5; Little, Borderland Religion, p. 234. Graham’s Town Journal, 10 November 1840, p. 2. The patronage of the twelve rectories, of which St George’s was one, was handed to the synod in 1862, which in turn passed it to the bishop. The laity had called for a voice in selection of the incumbents, but Lewis, who would not tolerate any ‘divided responsibility’, refused: D. Schurman, ‘Scandal at St. George’s’, in D. Swainson (ed.), St. George’s Cathedral: Two Hundred Years of Community (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1991), pp. 229–43. Hamilton Times reprinted in Kingston Daily News, 13 December 1862. N. Christie, ‘“In these times of democratic rage and delusion”: Popular religion and the challenge to the established order, 1760–1815’, in G. Rawlyk (ed.), The Canadian Protestant Experience 1760 to 1990 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), p. 11. This point is touched on by Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia, p. 20. The petition was held at the two clergymen’s houses for signature: Sydney Gazette, 13 February 1819. For this argument in the Indian context, see Hardwick, ‘Vestry politics’. TNA, CO 201/157, Thomas Hobbes Scott to Earl Bathurst, 30 March 1824, fo. 176. A. Grocott, Convicts, Clergymen and Churches: Attitudes to Convicts and ExConvicts Towards the Churches and Clergy in New South Wales from 1788 to 1851 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1980). Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 369. Scholars have used a similar model to explain relations in the Georgian Church: Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, pp. 146–77. Gladwin, ‘Flogging parsons?’, pp. 386–407; A. Vincent, ‘Clergymen and convicts revisited’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 1:1 (1999), pp. 95–114. Cable, ‘Some Anglican clergy of the 1840s’, Descent, 4:2 (1969), p. 48, UYL, C/AFS/5/20, Wilshere to Hawkins, 26 December 1848, fo. 277. Goldie, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, p. 980. See, for example, Bishop Broughton’s comments about Arthur Wellington Wallis’ suitability, or lack of it, for a posting at Mudgee: RHL, C/AUS/SYD/2/12, Broughton to A. W. Wallis, 31 May 1842. Wallis was a scholar at Bishops’ College Calcutta who was temporarily staying in Australia. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–43, Strachan to the churchwardens of Carleton Place, 13 June 1842, fo. 189. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 370–4. UYL, C/AFS/5, Wilshere to Ernest Hawkins, 26 December 1848, fo. 278. Hull Packet, 31 August 1849. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–49, Strachan to Mr Biggar, 5 July 1844 and Strachan to Mr Lloyd, 6 August 1844, fos 32. Atlas, 4:179 (29 April 1848), p. 219; ibid., 4:181 (13 May 1848), p. 244; Empire, 24 April 1851. HRA, I:XVI, Governor Darling to undersecretary Hay, 18 January 1831, p. 29. RHL, X-7, ‘William Morse’s Journal to the UCCS, 22 July 1838’, fos 297–9. For the Australian’s clergy’s civic significance, see Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, ch. 3; for the clergy’s leadership role in general, see Jacob, Clerical Profession, p. 10 and ch. 8.

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THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL LAITY 118 J. Street, The Rev. George C. Street (1814–1889): A Brief Biography (Madison, Wis.: J. C. Street, 2000), p. 10. 119 Elliott, ‘English’, in Magocsi (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Canada’s People, p. 470. 120 W. Sachs, ‘Plantations, Missions, and Colonies’, in C. Hefling and C. Shattuck (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 213, 218; RHL, C/CAN/TOR/1/502, Bold Cudmore Hill to the UCCS, 12 December 1838, fo. 21. 121 Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, p. 213. 122 AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–1845, Strachan to Joseph Dogherty, 16 July 1842, fo. 195; ibid., Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–1849, Strachan to Bethune, 16 August 1845, fo. 117. 123 AO, Featherstone Osler Family Papers, F1032, vol. 2, Featherstone Lake Osier to Rev. Proctor, 26 October 1837. 124 Osier, ‘Sketch of My Life’, ibid., Diaries of Featherstone Lake Osier, fo. 9; ibid., ‘Second Journal, 1837’, fo. 31. 125 AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854–62, Strachan to R. Lewis, 8 August 1854, fo. 24. 126 B. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1988), p. 129. 127 P. O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia: 1788 to the Present (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), p. 102. 128 Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World. 129 Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, pp. 213, 218. 130 RHL, C/CAN/TOR/1/502, Hill to UCCS, no date, fos 4, 5, 12; ibid., Hill to UCCS, 13 January 1840, fos 11–12. 131 RHL, C/CAN/QUE/9, Baldwyn to the SPG, 22 July 1813, fo. 444. Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, pp. 264–70 for the reluctance to take communion in south-east England. 132 Little, Borderland Religion, pp. 260–3. 133 UYL, E Series, Volume El, SPG Report of Charles Orpen, dated 31 December 1854, fo. 75. 134 For the Cape clergy’s administration of monthly communions, see the missionary reports preserved in ibid., Volumes El to E4; Little, Borderland Religion, p. 262. 135 AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1839–44, Strachan to Mayor William Boulton, 14 October 1845, fos 130–31; ibid., Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Edward Denroche, fo. 127. 136 Sachs, ‘Plantations’, p. 159. 137 RHL, X-7, ‘Henry O’Neill’s Journal, No. 4, May 1837’, fos 51–2. 138 Ibid., C/CAN/TOR/1/502, Hill to UCCS, 13 January 1840, fos 11–12. 139 Clerical independence in the Australian context is considered by Gladwin in ‘Flogging parsons?’, esp. p. 403. 140 Sachs, ‘Plantations’, p. 160. 141 Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, p. 213. 142 RHL, CLR 112, Edward T. Scott to Hawkins, 22 December 1845, fo. 255. 143 UYL, C/AFS/5/3, George Booth to Hawkins, 26 November 1841, fos 69–70. 144 Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, p. 208; DOA, John Stuart Papers, 2–3, John Stuart to the Bishop of Nova Scotia, 14 September 1804, fo. 17c. 145 Strachan, A Charge, Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Toronto, at the Primary Visitation (Toronto: H. W. Rowsell, 1841), p. 31. 146 J. Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 23–6. 147 Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, p. 210; Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 388–9.

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD 148 In 1820 the parishioners of Bermuda’s St George’s parish complained to the Bishop of London about their being forced to attend the same religious services as the military. See the printed pamphlet held in LPL, Howley Papers, vol. 2, fos 821–43. 149 ‘Daniell, Richard’, DSAB, I, pp. 204–5. 150 ‘Ross, Hamilton’ ibid., II, pp. 606–7. 151 C. Wright, Wellington’s Men in Australia: Peninsular War Veterans and the Making of Empire, c. 1820–40 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), ch. 4; Gladwin, ‘Australian clergymen’, p. 363, n. 257. 152 Ibid., p. 348. 153 Hardwick, ‘Vestry politics’. 154 M. Gauvreau, ‘Protestantism transformed: personal piety and the evangelical social vision, 1815–1867’, in G. Rawlyk (ed.), The Canadian Protestant Experience 1760 to 1990 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), p. 49 and pp. 86–92. 155 Letter of ‘An Episcopalian’, Colonist, 17 November 1838. 156 A. Hayes, ‘The struggle for the rights of the laity in the diocese of Toronto 1850– 1879’, Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society, 26 (1984), p. 5. 157 A. Burns, The Diocesan Revival in the Church of England, c.1800–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 158 Strachan, A charge, p. 32. 159 B. Fletcher, ‘Anglicanism and the shaping of Australian society’, in B. Kaye (ed.), Anglicanism in Australia, p. 299. 160 Little, Borderland Religion, pp. 234–5. The congregation at Caledon raised £303 for various local church purposes – this included finding money for two new chapels and a harmonium – but could only find £5 towards the diocesan church fund and the ‘sick and aged’: UYL, E Series, Volume E2, SPG report of . . M. Wilshere, dated 16 February 1859, fo. 35C. 161 See the reports of the various district branches in The Ninth Annual Report of the Incorporated Church Society of the Diocese of Toronto (Toronto: Diocesan Press, 1851), pp. 12–44. Congregations that donated all they had raised to the Society and general purposes – Carrying Place was one example in 1851 – were notable because they were so rare: ibid., p. 18. 162 UYL, D Series, Merriman to Hawkins, 4 June 1851, fos 226–7.

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CHAPTER THREE

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The Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund and the contest over colonial Church reform

The 1830s and 1840s are commonly seen as the moment when the figure of the bishop came to dominate Anglican mission. When the high churchman Samuel Wilberforce popularised the idea of the heroic missionary bishop among British audiences in the late 1830s he was only giving voice to an idea that had been developed by others earlier in the decade. For example, the episcopate had been the focus of missionary work in America’s Episcopal Church since at least the mid-1830s.1 In Britain, Tractarianism helped Anglicans gain a clearer sense of the role, responsibilities and significance of the bishop. Political shifts – notably the gradual erosion of the old idea of a privileged establishment – also focused attention on the centrality of episcopacy for Anglican identity. For many Anglicans it was the episcopate, and not any vestigial ties to the state, that legitimated the Church’s claims to authority and its status as a branch of the holy, catholic and apostolic Church. A crucial moment in this recasting of Anglicanism was the formation, in 1841, of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund (CBF), an organisation that set itself the task of raising funds for the establishment of bishops in areas where government and settler support was not forthcoming. The CBF has been seen as important on two counts: not only did it show that the Church could negotiate the transition from the old ‘confessional State’ to the modern ‘Anglican Communion’ of autonomous, self-supporting churches; it also expressed the idea that a ‘national Church’ could be extended to the empire and unify its inhabitants through what William E. Gladstone, one of the CBF’s 2 treasurers, called the ‘ties of spiritual brotherhood’. Howard Le Couteur, building on earlier work by Rowan Strong, has recently pointed out that the Fund represented an important strand in a new high church engagement with empire.3 This chapter does not disagree with any of these interpretations, but it does suggest that existing work on the colonial episcopate and the CBF has overlooked two important issues. [ 99 ]

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While historians have recognised that the CBF was remarkably successful in filling the void left by the withdrawal of state funds, they have not asked why it seemed to operate so effectively. Here we explain these apparent achievements by using the, hitherto-unused, CBF manuscript sources to examine the Fund’s sources of support, its fundraising techniques and its involvement in the selection of colonial bishops. The second point is that the extension of the colonial episcopate was far more contested than existing accounts have suggested. For Le Couteur and others, the decades straddling 1850 were the moment when a new generation of colonial bishops succeeded in establishing a more high church, episcopal and English colonial Anglicanism. The gothic style came to dominate church architecture, forms of worship became more Catholic and a new cast of clergy were recruited. Most of the men appointed to colonial bishoprics in the 1840s were indeed English-born. One might conclude from this that the extension and revival of the episcopate was an attempt to transform a multi-ethnic colonial Church into a more recognisably English and Anglican one.4 But interpretations of this sort overlook the limitations of the colonial diocesan revival. Bishops may well have gone out with ambitious plans but once in the colonies they found themselves confronting lay communities who were more interested in protecting the rights of pew-holders than in taking on board Tractarian lessons about episcopal authority. Furthermore, like their counterparts in Ireland, colonial bishops found that it was difficult to enforce discipline and uniformity in areas that had been strongly influenced by evangelical voluntarism.5 This chapter uses Bishop Gray’s arrival in the newly formed Cape Town diocese in 1848 as an example of the contests that occurred when bishops tried to impose changes on communities that had developed particular traditions of church worship and church governance. Bishops would find that they had to adopt conciliatory and accommodative stances. Those who were responsible for selecting the bishops also increasingly understood that their first duty was to establish a colonial episcopate that would satisfy the demands of a diverse colonial public: establishing a high church or English episcopate was very much a secondary consideration. The CBF can therefore shed light on the contests and negotiations that took place when Anglicans put in place new schemes for extending the Church. But before we consider these issues we need to examine what the founders of the Fund were trying to achieve by setting it up, as the answer is by no means straightforward.

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THE CBF AND COLONIAL CHURCH REFORM

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The Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund: aims and operations In the decades after 1840s the metropolitan movement for diocesan reform and revival went colonial. There were a number of reasons why the early 1840s were an auspicious time to embark on the creation of new, voluntarily funded, bishoprics. First, there were metropolitan precedents: as Arthur Burns has shown, churchmen in England had been toying with the idea of Church-led extension of the episcopate since the later 1830s.6 Second, the Peel government’s refusal to provide special funds for Church extension in Britain was a clear sign that the Church would have to rely on its own resources in the future. Government would still grant money towards new bishoprics – in 1844 it provided money towards a new Bishop of Colombo – but the initiative would have to come from the Church.7 Finally, the early 1840s was a time when Anglicans across the party spectrum were investing in the idea of a new form of Church mission that was led by bishops as opposed to missionaries. The evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS) – an institution that had traditionally kept its distance from episcopacy – arranged for the archbishops and bishops to sit on its governing committees from July 1841.8 Reform of the episcopate encompassed efforts to both clarify colonial episcopal authority and increase the number of colonial bishops. The latter was an easier task than the former. Four months before the Clergy Reserves Act received the royal assent, Charles James Blomfield, Bishop of London, sent the Archbishop of Canterbury the letter that would be the genesis of the CBF. The letter has been discussed at length elsewhere so only a brief summary is needed here.9 Blomfield’s basic point was that past history demonstrated that the British government could not be relied on to provide funds for ‘planting and maintaining the Church of this country in it colonies’, as it had done nothing to ensure that colonies were provided with the essential element in Anglicanism, the bishop.10 Blomfield did not reject the establishment principle – he still maintained that ‘a Christian state’ had a duty to make ‘provision for the maintenance and extension of Christianity’ – but he was aware that the wider political context meant that the Church would have to act for itself and raise the necessary funds.11

The aims of the CBF The general aim of the CBF was to give Anglican missions a clearer Church and episcopal identity. This does not, however, exhaust the various aims and objectives that members of the Fund thought they could achieve by setting up new colonial bishoprics. Differences in opinion were present at the formative meeting in April 1841.12 [ 101 ]

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Rowan Strong has pinpointed four reasons that were put forward at the inaugural meeting as to why a Fund should be established. The first was that the state’s unwillingness to realise its obligations meant that the responsibility now fell on the Church.13 Charles Sumner, evangelical bishop of Winchester, made a second point when he argued that the Fund’s guiding aim should be to extend the national Church and the national religion to the colonies, just as other aspects of nationality – he mentioned commerce – had been transmitted overseas.14 The third point was that an episcopal Church would prove to be a more effective institution for evangelising the ‘heathen’ than a church unguided by bishops. Each of these positions would appear in early CBF publicity.15 A fourth and final point turned on the relevance of the Church for more than just Anglicans. A national Church supervised by bishops would be an agent of imperial unity, providing the familial bonds that would knit together what a later generation called ‘Greater Britain’.16 Flenry Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester, similarly thought that the Fund would restore ‘the one Catholic faith’ and perpetuate empire. These statements show how thinking about Anglican expansion had moved on from the late eighteenth century; in other ways it shows how little things had changed. The CBF’s aim of replicating English ecclesiastical structures and exporting the full parochial structure of the national Church of England to the colonies was one that had preoccupied senior churchmen since the late eighteenth century. Gladstone thought the Fund would do more than just replicate episcopacy: he seems to have envisaged it as helping to realise the ideal of a fully resident colonial clergy. In 1846 he told Ernest Hawkins that the Fund could also solve the financial difficulties of colonial clergy who lacked their own property by raising money for ‘the erection not only of Episcopal but of clerical 17 residences’. This model of Church expansion was far removed from the one offered by the founders of the UCCS: their vision of a Church that replicated itself through lay vestries was intolerable to high churchmen, as it did away with the centres of authority that CBF members thought was essential if the Church of England was not to degenerate into a patchwork of autonomous congregations. But to fully understand the Fund we have to move beyond its publicity and its stated aims and look instead at the extensive connections that existed between it and a range of other colonial organisations and projects. This reveals that the CBF’s aims were not only varied but also changed over time. Existing accounts tend to assume that the Fund pursued a consistent set of aims from its foundation in 1841 through to the later nineteenth century. In fact the Fund’s emphasis changed as the wider political and religious landscape in Britain and the colonies shifted. Where in the early 1840s the [ 102 ]

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projectors of the Fund had seen it as a means of performing a duty that should have been undertaken by the state, by 1850 the Fund’s work had become bound up in the issue of whether there should, or could, be a self-governing and self-financing colonial Church. Two developments gave the CBF’s work new significance. One was the debate about the future of the relationship between Church and state. The great Church– state clashes of the 1840s had little direct bearing on the colonial Church – episodes such as the famous Gorham controversy of 1849–50 were significant because they demonstrated that the relationship between the English Church and the state was not a partnership of equals – but they did show that the extension of the episcopate offered a tremendous opportunity to build dioceses where episcopal and Church authority could reign unimpeded. The second development that pushed the CBF towards the issue of Church independence was the campaign for colonial self-government. This might seem strange considering that episcopal authority and colonial independence appeared to be the antithesis of one another: for many colonial reformers, bishops seemed to be relics of an older, authoritarian era of colonial policy. But one of the striking aspects of the CBF – and one that has gone unnoticed – is that it attracted a range of metropolitan reformers involved in the campaign for colonial selfgovernment. William Gladstone was both treasurer of the CBF and an advocate of colonial independence. There was also significant crossover in personnel between the Fund and the Society for the Reform of Colonial Government (or Colonial Reform Society) – a cross-party political body formed in London in 1850 to coordinate the parliamentary campaign for 18 colonial self-government. Committee members Arthur Kinniard, Lord Lyttelton, Francis Baring, Earl Talbot and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford were all CBF subscribers. High churchmen like Wilberforce and Lyttelton may have been uncomfortable with the democratic temper of settler societies, but as Tractarian sympathisers they recognised that the Church could realise its spiritual mission in self-governing colonies. Yet while there was broad support for the idea of self-governing churches in 19 the society, none of its senior figures, apart from Lyttelton and Wilberforce, were major players in the CBF, and not even Lyttelton and Wilberforce took definite steps towards reconciling and connecting the expansion of the episcopate with the campaign for self-government. This was Gladstone’s great contribution to Church expansion. Gladstone built into the movement for colonial independence a parallel effort to free colonial churches from state interference.20 For Gladstone, emancipation of colonial legislatures and colonial churches were two sides of a single programme of colonial reform. Independence meant healthier colonies as well as healthier churches.21 How the [ 103 ]

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erstwhile defender of establishments became an advocate of voluntary institutions cannot be dealt with here: what we can say is that the Church-state disputes of the 1840s led Gladstone to the realisation that there were contexts in which the Church had a better chance of pursuing its spiritual mission if it worked independently of the state.22 In the early 1850s he introduced a series of parliamentary bills that would have opened the way for colonial churchmen to establish the synods that would enable them to manage their internal affairs. The bills were defeated but the issue was taken up by colonial legislatures who passed enabling legislation in the 1850s and 1860s. Gladstone’s initiative transformed the CBF’s mission: rather than simply establishing new bishoprics, the Fund was now contributing to the creation of a series of autonomous colonial dioceses who owed no formal allegiance to Canterbury and the mother Church. Examining the links between the CBF and other colonial organisations gives us a clearer sense of what the Fund’s administrators were hoping to achieve. On one hand the CBF sat well with a wider colonial reform project. Recent scholarship has also shown how the Fund connected with the efforts that a range of colonial reformers and conservatives were making to establish a new form of colonisation that would, in the words of colonisation theorist Edward Gibbon Wakefield, extend ‘a nationality truly British in language, religion, laws and 23 attachment to the Empire’. These connections between the extension of the Church and the reform of empire can be seen in the movement of personnel between the CBF and the Canterbury Association that John Robert Godley founded in 1848. The stated aim of the Association was to realise Wakefield’s vision of an ideal colonial society in the ‘waste’ land of New Zealand. Twenty-nine of the eighty-four members of the Canterbury Association in 1850 appear in the CBF’s subscription lists. They were a diverse crowd: members included reformist conservative politicians and orthodox Tories, Young England aristocrats and high churchmen who were influenced to varying degrees by the Oxford 24 Movement. Though these groups had various social and religious reasons for supporting the project, the links between the CBF and the Association help us to build a picture of the kind of empire that the members of the Fund were hoping to construct when they raised new colonial bishoprics. The Canterbury Association was in many ways a curious blending of the modern and the traditional. On the one hand the founders thought that their new model of Christian colonisation would not only resolve overpopulation in Britain but also illustrate to an encumbered metropolitan Church establishment what could be achieved through voluntary Church action. On the other hand, however, the Association’s [ 104 ]

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view of the ideal moral society and colony looked very traditional when placed next to the elected legislative assemblies, universal male suffrage and religious pluralism that defined many of the settler colonies at midcentury. Though Godley was an advocate of colonial self-government, the England that he and others wanted to reproduce was definitely not a Chartist England: Canterbury would be paternalistic and hierarchical society populated by an aristocracy, yeoman farmers and ‘sturdy and loyal labourers’.25 Given the project’s reform credentials, and given that fact that it drew considerable Tractarian interest, it is curious that the colony would also have an established Church. We do not know whether the CBF rank-and-file supported the Fund because they saw new bishoprics as a means of replicating this kind of idealised hierarchical society in the colonies. Still, the considerable links in personnel between the CBF and the Association do suggest that Howard Le Couteur is right to argue that the CBF was the institutional expression of a conservative and high church vision of empire that surfaced with particular force in the later 1840s.26 This claim should be qualified in the sense that the CBF was never a purely high church endeavour, nor can it be said to have expressed a single vision of empire: the Fund, like the SPG, was always careful to present itself as a national and comprehensive body. The involvement in the Fund of prominent evangelicals such as Earl Chichester, president of the CMS, was part of a broader ecumenical moment. This ecumenical spirit – Brian Stanley sees it as evidence of an evangelical desire to neutralise high church claims that the CMS was unorthodox and not really Anglican – was reciprocated: evangelicals were present at the inaugural CBF meeting in 1841, and when the evangelical, John Bird Sumner, became Archbishop 27 of Canterbury in 1849, the evangelical voice in the CBF became louder. In 1852 the CMS and its secretary, Henry Venn, raised funds for a bishopric at Sierra Leone, a colony established in the 1790s by Anglican abolitionists and former black slaves (the CMS began a mission there in 1807).28 It is well known that evangelicals brought a new perspective to colonial Church expansion. Whereas most of the senior figures in the CBF assumed that Anglican missions should have a Church and episcopal character from the outset, evangelicals tended to argue that bishops should follow rather than found missions. Venn only wanted bishops for those places where a strong laity was in place to act as a 29 counterweight to autocratic bishops. Evangelicals and high churchmen also differed on the cultural dimensions of mission. High churchmen may well have seen the Church as the vehicle through which the ‘highest English civilization’ would be exported to the colonies.30 Venn’s aim, by contrast, was to create self-supporting and self-governing [ 105 ]

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churches that took on the culture of the host community and used nonEuropean missionaries and bishops. Evangelical influence had a direct impact on the CBF policy. The 1851 report by the special committee for the Sierra Leone bishopric stated that a bishop was needed to raise a ‘Native Ministry’, and that a ‘A Native African Church, under a native ministry, would exhibit to the world the noblest triumph of British philanthropy’.31 The CBF should therefore be seen as an amorphous institution that looked in different directions and pursued a range of colonial agendas. In this it was similar to other non-state colonial organisations set up in the late 1840s: this was a unique period when politicians and churchmen of differing party identities could meet in institutions such as the Colonial Reform Society, the Canterbury Association and the CBF to push forward the moral regeneration of the British empire. Given that the CBF was an institution that maintained an identity as a broad-based, crossparty national institution, and given that it referred to the expansion of the episcopate as being a ‘national object’, it is unsurprising that it 32 should draw a varied crowd into its orbit. But once we look more closely at the Fund’s support base then it begins to look more like a party venture than a national one. It also looks like an elite one too. This had benefits – it meant, for instance, that funds could be raised quickly – but it also meant that the colonial episcopate was associated with particular metropolitan groups and interests. This, as we shall see in the chapter’s final section, had important repercussions for relations between bishops and laity on the periphery of empire.

Fund raising Existing accounts of the CBF have offered only brief comments on how the CBF went about raising the £10,000 that was needed to permanently endow new bishoprics.33 Both Henry Manning and Gladstone wanted the SPG and the CBF to call on the support of the nation: as the whole nation accrued financial rewards from empire, everyone had to help pay back the accompanying debt. ‘Every person is bound ... to come forward’ was how Gladstone put it. Manning, meanwhile, believed that the whole nation had the duty of righting the nation’s imperial sins, among which he counted the slave trade and the state’s maintenance of Hindu religion in India. Extending episcopacy was one way to do this.34 Although they saw themselves as national institutions, both the SPG and CBF struggled to build a popular base or publicise their work beyond a narrow community of high church laity and middle-and upperclass Anglicans. Indeed, the CBF may well have been behind the SPG when it came to deploying the methods of the popular missionary [ 106 ]

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societies. The CBF did not publish a periodical literature – its annual reports were unlikely to appeal to a popular audience and the Colonial Church Chronicle, a periodical that raised money for the Fund, was an independent venture. Fund-raising mechanisms like the collecting box, the public meeting and the sermon were rarely used. The 1841–54 list of donors, for example, only notes one ‘children’s box’.35 In its first decade the CBF only made two calls for funds from the Anglican community and wider public: the first was the initial general appeal made in June 1841; the second was transmitted through the pastoral letters that the Bishops of London and Salisbury made to the congregations in their dioceses in 1843 and 1844. A further appeal for two new bishoprics at the Cape and one in Western Australia was made in 1853.36 The CBF does not appear to have been a particularly well-known institution. As firm an Anglican as the Hampshire Tory Anne Sturges Bourne was still not aware of its existence in 1845. She also had to ask a friend whether funds for new bishoprics were sent to the SPG.37 So where did support come from? Jacob notes that 20 per cent of the total funds raised between 1841 and 1941 came from SPG and SPCK.38 Beyond this, funds for the ‘special fund’ (which focused on raising money for individual dioceses) and the ‘general fund’ came from three sources: donations and subscriptions from the public; occasional church collections; and capital investments in commercial ventures – such as railroad companies – in metropolitan Britain. The bulk of the CBF’s general fund came from one-off donations: between 1841 and 1846, £54,071 came from donations – roughly 75 per cent of the total general fund. The money raised in parish collections and appeals was modest: £12,759 was raised through parish collections, but once we discount the £1,238 that was raised in Gibraltar and £5,195 in Oxford colleges, we are left with the figure of £6,326 – roughly 2.4 per cent of the Fund’s total receipts of £264,544 for the period 1841–54 (the pastoral letters in the London and Salisbury diocese raised £8,192 and £1,107 respectively). The Fund, like the SPG, was heavily dependent on freewill offerings and particularly on donations from wealthy benefactors. Angela BurdettCoutts gave £35,000 for the bishoprics at Cape Town and Adelaide in 1847; an anonymous ‘Orphan Brother and Sister’ gave £10,000 in 1845 for a bishop at Hong Kong; the Queen dowager donated £2,000 for 39 Gibraltar in 1842; and Earl Eldon gave £1,000 in 1849. The list of donors tells us something about the geographical distribution and class basis of CBF support, though the considerable number of anonymous donors and nameless individuals who contributed to parish collections means our conclusions cannot be definitive. Still, the support base does seem to have been narrow: it is revealing, for instance, that Marianne Dyson, a parish collector in Sussex, expected [ 107 ]

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individuals to give £10 each.40 A sample of the first 200 named individual subscribers and donors on the 1854 list reveals that eighty-one (around 40 per cent) were clergymen, archdeacons, bishops or archbishops, and forty-four were ‘esquires’ (admittedly a rather indeterminate label). The sample also included a viscount and viscountess, two baronets, the daughter of a baronet, two Barings, the Baron of the Exchequer, a countess, three military officers, a naval officer (Sir Francis Austen, brother of the more famous Jane), and Nicholas Vansittart, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. That fifty-nine (around 29 per cent) were women is another illustration of the depth of female involvement in overseas mission. That less than a quarter of our sample (forty-seven) gave less than £1 Is, and only eight donated less than £1 reveals that this was a middleclass affair. There is no evidence that the CBF ever went after penny subscribers, unlike evangelical societies. Hawkins admitted to Gladstone in 1844 that the CBF needed ‘more than one mode of action’, but he did little to diversify the support base.41 The largest group – eighty-five donors, gave between £5 and £15, and twenty-three gave over £50. The locations of the subscribers – the places of residence of 142 of the 200 sample are known – reveals that the Fund’s support base was overwhelmingly from southern and south-east England. There was only one parish collection in Ireland – at Stackallen in County Meath where £1 Is. was raised – and there was only a smattering of Irish donors, most of whom were bishops. Support was also fleeting. Most chose to donate towards the erection of one bishopric rather than the episcopate in general. Of the sample of 200 donors, only twelve were subscribers (four for less than five years) and only thirty-three (16.5 per cent) made more than one donation. Ninety specified the bishopric they wanted to donate towards. Fifty-one (56 per cent) stipulated Sierra Leone while only twenty-nine selected one of the settler colonies. Such findings lend weight to Hilary Carey’s argument that mission and anti-slavery work 42 loomed larger in the metropolitan imagination than mission to settlers. Obviously, the CBF’s limitations as a fund-raising body must be balanced against its success in finding enough funds to endow thirty new dioceses before 1872.43 But it does seem that modern scholars have underestimated just how limited the support for the expansion of the episcopate was. Enthusiasm for the ‘missionary bishop’ can be seen in the considerable funds raised for the Sierra Leonean bishopric, but it was absent elsewhere. Only £84 was raised for Colombo, £166 for Tasmania and £366 for Rupert’s Land. Indeed, without the help of wealthy patrons it is probable that many of the bishoprics would never have been endowed. The Cape had been on the initial list of colonies in special [ 108 ]

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need of a bishop, but a lack of donations meant the committee had to shelve it. Only Angela Burdett-Coutts’ intervention rescued the plan.44 The 1854 list only names eleven donors or collections for the Cape before 1847, and once we discount Burdett-Coutts’ £17,500 grant, then donations specifically for the Cape only amounted to £193. The funding shortfall meant that the CBF was not always in a position to endow bishoprics outright – this occurred in the case of Fredericton (1845), Montreal (1850), Adelaide (1847), Cape Town (1847), Victoria/Hong Kong (1849) and Gibraltar (1842). In several cases the CBF had to search for alternative funding. Colombo (1845), Antigua (1842) and British Guiana (1842) were financed by the treasuries of each colony, while the salaries of the new bishoprics at Melbourne and Newcastle in New South Wales (both established 1847) were paid by the CBF, the colonial treasury and Bishop Broughton of Australia – he sacrificed £600 of his salary for the Melbourne diocese.45 While the elite character of CBF support is obvious, it is more difficult to determine whether the Fund was backed by particular Church parties. We know that the SPG’s attempts to reach a popular, evangelical, audience were brief and do not seem to have survived the intense party conflict of mid-century. According to Brian Stanley, disputes with evangelicals over the question of the SPG’s links to Tractarianism prompted the society to focus on its traditional high 46 church and middle-class support base. Determining whether the Fund’s support came from similarly high church communities would require an exhaustive survey of the theological identities of individual donors. A more manageable, and equally revealing, exercise is to plot the geographical spread of CBF parish collections and then compare these with clusters of SPG support. Collections for the CBF tended to concentrate in southern and south-east England, the West Midlands, Leeds and parts of the West Country. By contrast, there were only seven collections north of York, and only two in Wales. Stanley finds similar for the SPG: its support was mostly drawn from the dioceses of 47 Salisbury, Ripon, York, London and Chichester. The only anomaly to this broad correlation was the limited support that came from County Durham, an area which Stanley notes was a strong SPG centre. The CBF and the SPG may have shared a similar, if not identical, support base, but this does not mean that we should describe both as purely high church. The CBF drew most of its support from the high church community, but the men who it sent out – the bishops – were not necessarily the agents of a high Anglican view of empire. Any attempt to build a high church colonial episcopate ran up against the problem that it was the state – in the form of the monarch and the secretary of state for the colonies – who made episcopal appointments. [ 109 ]

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As we shall see, this lingering state involvement meant that an ecumenical rather than party outlook can be detected in the appointment procedure for the new colonial bishoprics.

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The appointment and agendas of the colonial bishops Existing accounts of the CBF tell us little about the role its members played in appointing new colonial bishops. Not only is our understanding of the appointment process limited, we also do not know whether those who were appointed were a body of like-minded individuals sharing a particular vision of empire. It seems unlikely that the bishops would be a coherent group as the appointment procedure was convoluted and changeable. Until the 1850s the decision to appoint rested with the secretary of state for the colonies and the Crown. Secretaries of state varied in the role that they played in the process. The 3rd Earl Grey, who held the post between 1846 and 1852, took a minute interest in appointments, going so far as to turn down candidates who were suspected of Tractarianism or who had criticised the government’s 48 colonial policy. The writer of a pamphlet that called for appointments to rest with the Church probably had Grey in mind when he wrote that the state’s interference in episcopal appointments was ‘unscriptural, unca-nonical, and unconstitutional’ and would impair the ‘influence and efficiency of the Church of England in her operations in the Colonies as well as the Mother Country’.49 By contrast, Gladstone – who was briefly secretary of state in early 1846 – gave Howley, the Archbishop of Canterbury, greater responsibility for finding candidates.50 At no point in the period 1840–60 did the state surrender its prerogative over appointments (Henry Labouchere, the secretary of state, was still asserting the state’s right over the Grahamstown bishopric in 1856), but the broad movement was towards greater non-state involvement. Of critical importance was the recognition that the individuals and groups who provided the funds towards the endowment of a see should have the right to nominate candidates (comparisons can be drawn between the mode of appointing bishops and the arrangements 51 that Strachan put in place for selecting clergy in his diocese). This seemed to give the CBF high command the opportunity to put together a colonial episcopate staffed by high churchmen, but complications came when Anglicans in the colonies began to use their synods to claim a voice in the appointment process. The establishment of diocesan synods in the later 1850s and 1860s pointed to a future in which colonial synods nominated bishops to the secular and ecclesiastical authorities in England. New Zealand and South Africa led the way in drawing up rules for the election of future bishops, although the first bishop to be actually [ 110 ]

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elected was Benjamin Cronyn, who became bishop of the new diocese of Huron in Ontario in 1857. At this point synods only had the authority to elect candidates who would be nominated to the Queen. By the 1860s, however, it was recognised that colonial dioceses in self-governing colonies had the unbounded right to elect and consecrate bishops.52 The important point is that from the 1850s colonists could establish their own bishoprics’ funds and organise their own election and consecration of bishops. This meant no one group could claim a monopoly over the selection of bishops. Indeed, it looked as if an episcopate that was supposed to bring ecclesiastical unity might lead to fragmentation. High church involvement was strongest during Gladstone’s time as secretary of state for the colonies in late 1845 and early 1846. Gladstone’s tenure was too brief for him to resolve the legal and administrative issues that were preventing the Church from realising its mission. Funds for only two bishoprics had been found by the time he left office. Gladstone’s CO stint did, nevertheless, represent the high point of Tractarian and high church influence over colonial Church policy. Ernest Hawkins – secretary of both the SPG and CBF – would have an important role in finding candidates throughout the 1840s, and Edward Coleridge, another crucial node in the high church network, also advised Gladstone about potential candidates for the planned colonial 53 bishoprics in Australia, the Cape and Canada. The involvement of Hawkins and Coleridge opened up possibilities for a Tractarian colonial episcopate: Pusey, for instance, recommended John Medley for Fredericton,54 and Bishop Broughton of Australia had the opportunity to recommend the Tractarian sympathiser Robert Allwood – an SPG missionary who had arrived in New South Wales in 1839 – to the planned Newcastle bishopric.55 Earl Chichester, the evangelical president of the CMS, claimed in 1847 that the appointment process was monopolised by a group of high church bishops,56 but this was not entirely accurate: the tussles that developed between Howley and Earl Grey over the appointment of bishops for two new Australian dioceses in 1847 shows that high church influence was in fact diminishing. Howley’s correspondence reveals that his preference was indeed for Oxford-educated high churchmen. Two of his three recommendations withdrew on health grounds, while Grey rejected the third after he unearthed evidence that the man in question held Tractarian views. Grey would therefore emerge as one of the chief obstacles standing in the way of the colonial high church revival. While Howley was using his high contacts to find recruits, Grey looked to Robert John Eden, the brother of George Eden, the 1st Earl of Auckland, to recommend suitable evangelical candidates. Ede used his Clapham contact Henry Sykes Thornton to find the evangelical Charles Perry for [ 111 ]

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the Melbourne bishopric, and he also gave Grey detailed reports on the doctrinal and theological sentiments of the candidates who Howley was putting forward for the Australian bishoprics and the Cape.57 Yet despite the long shadow that Grey and the evangelical network cast over the appointment process there was still room for Howley, Hawkins and a wider network of Tractarian sympathisers to get their men appointed to colonial posts.58 Howley made sure that the ‘ardent evangelical’ John Harding, rector of St Anne’s Blackfriars, was rejected for the Newcastle bishopric.59 Those who were appointed during Howley’s time can mostly be described as orthodox high churchmen who were influenced to varying degrees by Tractarianism.60 Robert Gray of Cape Town was an exemplar of an orthodox high church bishop, and we can also categorise Nixon (Tasmania, 1842), Augustus Short (Adelaide, 1847), William Tyrrell (Newcastle, 1847), George Selwyn (New Zealand, 1842), John Medley (Fredericton, 1845), Francis Fulford (Montreal, 1850) and George Tomlinson (Gibraltar, 1842) – all CBF sponsored – as high churchmen in the ‘orthodox’ mould. Most sought to define a new identity for the colonial Church that was framed around such high church principles and doctrines as apostolic succession, baptismal regeneration, sacramental worship and the spiritual independence of the Church. All emphasised the importance of the episcopal office, ancient ecclesiastical institutions, and the value of external forms – such as the sacraments, music and church architecture 61 – in worship. All can be placed among that large community of orthodox high churchmen who were sympathetic to Tractarianism but who did not sit at the movement’s inner core. This was even true of Medley, a man sometimes described as the first colonial Tractarian bishop.62 This did not mean that appointments rode on an individual’s theological and doctrinal affinities. Scholarship was also probably not a factor. Recent research has revealed that those responsible for appointments to the English episcopate rarely appointed men on the basis of their knowledge of ancient Greek, and much the same can be said for colonial appointments.63 One candidate, for example, was thought not to be ‘of the highest intellectual powers’.64 Few of the appointees were noted classicists. Robert Gray came out of Oxford with an honorary fourth-class degree, while John Armstrong – appointed to Grahamstown in 1856 – got a third (Charles Perry of Melbourne and George Selwyn of New Zealand were more noted scholars). Candidates were selected because they were known to the archbishops (Francis Nixon of Tasmania, was a Howley protégé), or because their activities in the SPG or Church reform qualified them for continuing the work of [ 112 ]

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Church revival overseas. Robert Gray’s role in setting up SPG parochial associations after 1840 was a factor in his appointment; Edward Feild (appointed to Newfoundland, 1844) came to the notice of Bishop Blomfleld because of the reports he wrote for the National Society on parochial education in 1840; and George Selwyn had authored a pamphlet in defence of cathedral institutions (though it was his brother, William, who was approached first). There is no evidence that candidates were matched to particular settler colonies. As in the case of the recruitment of colonial clergy, recruiters and the recruited seem to have envisaged the empire as a single, undifferentiated, space. It is revealing, for instance, that George Shepheard Porter cited his four years’ experience as a chaplain at the Cape Colony as proof of his suitability for the Adelaide bishopric. Porter later changed his mind and put his name forward for the Cape instead.65 The other distinguishing feature of the 1840s bishops was that they were all English. This was continuing a tradition: all but three of the bishops appointed between 1787 and 1850 were English-born. The exceptions were the Irishman Charles Inglis, who was appointed to Nova Scotia in 1787; the Scotsman, John Strachan; and the New York-born John Inglis, who would take the Nova Scotia bishopric in 1825 (we might also add the London-born Charles James Stewart, Bishop of Quebec from 66 1826 to 1837, who heralded from a Scottish gentry family). Senior churchmen and high Anglicans were not the only ones who wanted to see metropolitan appointments. Though the established Canadian dioceses were appointing local men as bishops from an early date (George J. Mountain would become Bishop of Quebec in 1836 after serving as archdeacon during his father’s episcopate, while Robert Stanser and John Inglis were local clergy who were appointed to Nova 67 Scotia in 1816 and 1825), it is notable that colonists continued to prefer men sourced from England and Britain. For instance, when colonists in Canada West won the right to elect bishops for the new Huron and Ontario dioceses in 1857 and 1861, high churchmen initially tried to put forward metropolitan candidates.68 Similarly, in late 1842 New Brunswick colonists hoped that their new bishop would be ‘selected from the clergy in England’ as they did not want the government’s local candidate.69 Later in the century Australian Anglicans delegated the task of recruiting bishops to a committee of English bishops, with the result that only one of the Australian bishops appointed in the nineteenth century – Samuel Edward Marsden – was Australian-born (and even he had been educated in England). When recruiting from home was not an option, settlers plumped for local candidates whose ethnicity was familiar and whose doctrinal leanings chimed with their own. In 1857 the Irish-born evangelical Benjamin Cronyn was elected first Bishop of [ 113 ]

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Huron by the strongly low church and Irish congregations in the London district in western Ontario. The English origins of the bishops might lend weight to Le Couteur’s argument that colonial bishops were disseminators of a particular high Anglican English civilisation. All except Gray and Tomlinson were born in southern England, all came from middle-class or upper-class families, all were educated at private or grammar schools. Five – Short, Medley, Nixon, Gray and Fulford – were Oxford-educated, though they had all graduated and left Oxford before the advent of the Tractarian movement. As editor of the Colonial Church Chronicle, Francis Fulford regularly published articles that cast the Church as a vehicle for the propagation of English mores and values overseas. The other bishops may well have shared his views. William Grant Broughton – he was not one of the CBFsponsored bishops but he was from a similar party background – said that his aim was ‘to make the Colonies so like England, that they may form 70 together with one body in reality as we as in name’. The frequency with which bishops approvingly noted the ‘English’ character of the society, landscape and architecture in the colonies might also suggest that they saw themselves as furthering a process of cultural transplantation.71 These pieces of anecdotal evidence can hardly be built into a definite conclusion, however. Indeed, some of the bishops rarely commented on such matters: Robert Gray’s printed memoirs, for example, suggest that he was more interested in mission than issues to do with national identity.

A ‘broad church’ episcopate Despite the evidence of overlap in the interests and attitudes between bishops, the claim that they were representatives of a particular interest or vision, while holding some water, does need qualifying. The variety of individuals who had a hand in appointments meant that the episcopate was never simply a vector for the transmission of a high church Anglicanism or particular English civilisation. Bishops differed on issues such as episcopal authority and the role of the laity, and each displayed varying degrees of sympathy with Tractarianism. Augustus Short, sometimes categorised as a Tractarian, placed less stress than his counterparts on episcopal authority and believed that the bishop, clergy and laity should have an equal voice in Church government and Church 72 affairs, even in matters of faith. Medley agreed that the assent of bishops, clergy and laity was necessary before any Church measure could be passed, but he differed from Short in his belief that the laity had no authority to speak on matters of faith and doctrine. The Australian bishops Tyrrell and Nixon, by contrast, were more uncompromising in their attitude towards lay authority.73 [ 114 ]

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The argument that the CBF propagated a high church vision of empire also fails to take into account the growing evangelical involvement in episcopal appointments. Charles Perry, Bishop of Melbourne, had been active in the CMS in Cambridgeshire and came to the notice of Clapham evangelicals who then forwarded his name to Earl Grey. George Smith, appointed bishop of Hong Kong in 1849, had been a CMS missionary in China. Owen Emeric Vidal was another evangelical who, prior to his appointment to Sierra Leone in 1852, had used his linguistic skills to produce Malay and Yoruba grammars for the CMS. Sumner secured the bishopric of Rupert’s Land (which was not endowed by the CBF) for one of his protégés, David Anderson, in 1849.74 This influx of evangelicals continued into the mid-1850s. The influence of Sumner, Palmerston and Earl Shaftesbury (Palmerston’s chief advisor on episcopal appointments) can be detected in both the appointment in 1856 of the Clapham evangelical and India veteran Henry Cotterill to Grahamstown and the uncompromisingly anti-Catholic Frederic Barker to Sydney. Cotterill’s appointment infuriated Robert Gray: he claimed it was a party move and used it as a reason to get his synod to draw up rules for electing future bishops.75 The appointment of men like Cotterill might suggest a party agenda; there is, however, equally strong evidence that what we might call a ‘broad church’ mind-set was beginning to inform selection policy.76 ‘Broad church’ was a term that began to be used in the early 1850s to describe churchmen whose interest in a tolerant and comprehensive national Church marked them out from the opposite party extremes. John Wolffe has shown that broad church ideas began to influence appointments during Palmerston’s administration in the 1850s. Palmerston’s preference for toleration and his dislike for religious controversy – principles that were bound up with his wider hope of making the Church of England more acceptable, efficient and popular to the nation at large – led him to assemble an episcopal bench that reflected the relative weight of different religious opinions in Church 77 and nation. Broad churchmanship left a faint imprint on the colonial Church at mid-century – John Colenso of Natal was the only broad church colonial bishop during this time, and it was not until the post-18 60 period that a distinctive broad church approach to mission and empire emerged.78 But broad church ideas can be detected in appointments to the colonial episcopate in the later 1840s. Earl Grey was drawn to Clapham evangelicals but his main aim was to build an inclusive and ecumenical episcopate that reflected the diversity and plurality of national religious culture. His willingness to appoint the evangelical Perry to Melbourne, the moderate Tyrrell to Newcastle and the high church Tractarian sympathisers Short and Gray to Adelaide and Cape [ 115 ]

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Town shows that his overriding aim was, like Palmerston, to put together a balanced episcopate that would strengthen the Church’s claims to comprehension and nationality.79 Even Howley intimated that he wanted to see a balance between Cambridge and Oxford men in the episcopate.80 The decision that was taken in 1849 to recast the CBF as a ‘council of colonial bishoprics’ composed of the English archbishops and bishops can also be taken as evidence that both the Church and the CBF recognised that the episcopate had to have a more inclusive image.81 The effort to balance the episcopate continued into the 1850s: Sumner, a Clapham evangelical, appointed high churchman Herbert Binney to Nova Scotia in 1851 and also recommended Fulford to Montreal. Though rough parity between high churchmen and evangelicals had been achieved by the early 1850s, there was some way to go before these claims to comprehensiveness were justified. In no sense did the colonial bishops reflect the varied ethnicities and communities that made up the colonial Anglican community at mid-century. Rough party parity also hides the fact that in 1855 all but one of the thirteen colonial high church bishops served dioceses dominated by European settler populations (the odd one out was Thomas Parry of Barbados), and of the settler colonies, only Sydney and Melbourne had evangelical bishops. Evangelicals, by contrast, tended to dominate in the mission fields of India, the West Indies and British possessions in Africa. The episcopate in the settler empire may still have looked like a vehicle for the export of a high church English civilization, but we must keep in mind that this high church monopoly was weakening as groups who had previously played only a marginal role in the appointment process were given a voice. The principle that those who paid for new bishoprics should also nominate candidates was extended to the point that in the later 1850s settlers in Canada West were given the right to establish what were 82 effectively their own ‘bishopric funds’ and elect two new bishops. High church attitudes to this step were positive – Gladstone thought it was a step towards an independent Church while Hawkins looked forward to elected bishops in Britain.83 But elected bishops would not necessarily be high church ones. The first election in 1857 returned a bishop – Benjamin Cronyn – who was far removed from those who had been appointed in the high church moment of the 1840s. The second bishop, John Travers Lewis, was described by an Ulster newspaper as an ‘Orange bishop’. The description was inaccurate – Lewis renounced his prior links to the Orange Order when he moved from Ulster to Canada in late 1849 – but it did show how the episcopate was increasingly perceived as a vehicle for the transmission of a host of religious and non-religious agendas.84 [ 116 ]

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It is not easy to summarise either the CBF’s aims or its achievements. The Fund was a catch-all institution that represented a range of different views about the Church and its place in empire. Though later writers tended to laud the Fund as a model of a successful voluntary church, it was, at least in its early stages, not fully independent, and Gladstone threatened to show how Church and state could work together when he sat in the CO in the mid-1840s.85 The CBF’s contribution to the revival of colonial episcopal authority was also mixed. On the one hand the Fund helped increase the size of the overseas episcopate and made bishops more visible figures in Church expansion. On the other hand, however, episcopal and Church authority was compromised by the increasing role that lay donors and colonial communities played in the appointment of colonial bishops. The CBF’s reliance on wealthy donors was also something of a double-edged sword, as these individuals could treat the bishoprics they had financed as their property. An indication of this emerged in 1866 when Angela Burdett-Coutts protested against Robert Gray’s efforts to establish a Church in South Africa that was independent of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities in Britain. In a petition to Parliament Burdett-Coutts explained that she would have refused to endow sees that were not formally integral parts of the Church of 86 England. The aims of the funders and the people they were funding did not, therefore, always match. Yet in spite of the substantial contribution that evangelicals made to the CBF, and despite the Fund’s claims to be a ‘national’ body, this was an institution that was dominated by high churchmen and was, it seems, largely dependent on high church support. Though we should resist the temptation to treat the colonial bishops as a team sharing a single mindset born out of common educational background or Church experience, there are grounds for arguing that the colonial bishops appointed in the 1840s were proponents of the kind of aristocratic and hierarchical vision of empire recently described by David Cannadine.87 But the emphasis which high churchmen placed on episcopacy, mission and Church unity did not, as we shall see in the next section, always sit comfortably with how the laity and local communities viewed their Church.

Challenges to the expansion of the episcopate In many ways the CBF was attuned to religious and political developments in both the colonies and metropolitan Britain. The model of a global Church that high churchmen were working towards resembled the image of empire envisaged by members of the Colonial Reform Society: just as the empire would be formed of self-governing [ 117 ]

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colonies who owed allegiance to the Queen, so the ‘Anglican Communion’ would be composed of independent dioceses, each free to manage their own internal affairs.88 Though episcopacy and colonial selfgovernment could be reconciled, in other ways the CBF did not sit quite so well with colonial political culture. The key question was whether the establishment of bishoprics would fit with the tradition of lay authority that, as shown in Chapter Two, was a key characteristic of settler churches. Gladstone tried to resolve this problem when he planned new forms of ecclesiastical government that would give the laity a role in colonial Church administration (he also advocated lay representation in Scottish Church synods in 1852). Indeed, Gladstone was one of those who wanted to give the laity the right to nominate ministers to colonial posts, as this was an easy way to strengthen ‘a sense of community of interest’.89 But many of the bishops who were appointed in the era of the CBF were more interested in emphasising episcopal authority than in giving the laity an enlarged role in Church government. One of these bishops was Robert Gray, Cape Town’s first Anglican bishop. Gray told a metropolitan correspondent in 1849 that his aim was to ‘engraft a new system – a new phase of religion – upon a previously existing one’.90 Building this new system meant imposing episcopal authority in a colony where evangelical voluntarism had reigned for decades. In many ways we can draw comparisons between what Gray was trying to do in South Africa and what the Church hierarchy in Ireland was setting out to achieve in Ulster in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Both were trying to build a recognisably Anglican Church out of a loose collection of churches and voluntary societies, each of whose denominational loyalty and identity 91 was suspect. Gray’s early years have tended to be overshadowed by the dramatic event that clouded his later episcopate, the famous Bishop Colenso controversy of the mid-1860s. Gray’s attempts to depose John Colenso from his Natal bishopric (on the grounds that Colenso had committed heresy when he published his doubts about the literal truth of the Bible) had tremendous theological significance and also had huge bearing on the question of ecclesiastical authority and the relationship between colonial and home churches. But the earlier period is important, as it is an instance of what happened when groups of settlers who held differing views of the Church came into contact.

Robert Gray and the Cape laity Though its senior administrators were aware that the CBF had to rest on popular support, the protracted efforts to establish a bishopric at the Cape Colony show how the Fund was a marginal institution for many [ 118 ]

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colonial communities.92 The clergy universally welcomed the appointment of a bishop,93 but lay support was more limited. No subscriptions of any note were raised in the colony itself,94 and those who were supportive did not necessarily see the value of episcopacy in the same terms as the CBF high command. The Graham’s Town Journal argued in 1840 that the absence of a Cape bishopric was an example of how the colony had been overlooked by the home administration. An episcopate, in the paper’s view, was one of ‘those advantages to which ... every part of the British Empire, no matter how remote from the centre, is entitled and ought fully to enjoy’.95 A clergyman visiting Cape Town in 1843 noted that the inhabitants had no religious reasons for wanting a bishop, but were rather ‘jealous that a younger colony should have a Bishop, while they are considered unworthy of one’.96 Given this context (the only notable address of thanks was signed by 330 Cape Town inhabitants)97 it is not surprising that the arrival of Bishop Robert Gray in 1848 generated considerable hostility. Cape colonists compared the new Anglican bishopric with the introduction of convict transportation and cited both as evidence that the CO wished to hold back the march of colonial self-government.98 Crucially, the wider political context also meant that a political community beyond the Church now took an interest in Anglican affairs: the liberal newspaper editor John Fairbairn noted that the question of the bishop’s authority over parochial clergy involved ‘a principle that touches society’ as it was a form of ‘imperium in imperio, that the civil power cannot overlook’.99 Anglicans too were discomfited by Gray’s arrival. Historians have rightly pointed to the considerable differences between British communities at the Cape (the contrast between Cape Town’s liberal communities and the frontier outlook of the settlers in the eastern Cape is crude but carries some truth), but there were striking similarities between the ways in which communities in the eastern and western Cape reacted to Gray’s arrival.100 These reactions were partly conditioned by the distinct features of the Cape Church. One was the extensive authority wielded by the laity in local Church affairs; another was the high level of movement between Protestant churches. Experimentation and consumer choice appears to have bred a latitudinarian attitude towards worship that infuriated clergy who hoped to enforce a more rigid conformity with Anglican liturgy. As elsewhere, lay religion at the Cape was characterised by a Protestant evangelicalism that was highly sceptical of the high church liturgical revival flowing from Britain. Gray’s Church reform programme had two overarching aims. The first was to combat the image of the Church as an imperial, alien imposition by recasting it as an indigenous institution. This meant implementing many of the initiatives that bishops elsewhere had used to [ 119 ]

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make their churches self-governing and self-supporting. In 1848, for instance, Gray established a ‘Church Society’ that resembled Canadian institutions that raised money for churches, schools and clergy salaries through a central board and a system of parochial committees.101 The second aim was to transform a set of independent congregations into a united church. In a move that echoed events in other colonies in previous decades, Gray looked to bring church property that had been in the hands of private subscribers under the control of the bishopric. Control of churches was wrestled out of the hands of lay shareholders by buying up their shares from funds raised either through subscriptions, loans or funds from Britain.102 Gray’s efforts to exert episcopal authority in this way were controversial. While some congregations agreed to hand over control of the property and revenues of their church, others did not. The congregation of St George’s in Cape Town – which included prominent reformers like F. S. Watermeyer, John Ebden, J. H. Wicht and H. E. Rutherfoord – was one congregation that agreed to come under episcopal 103 By contrast, the congregation at St Helena claimed that the control. bishop had no authority to interfere in what they claimed was private property.104 The congregation at Cape Town’s Holy Trinity – a church that had been built by funds from the CCS – was equally hostile. The CCS’s Cape Town corresponding committee regarded the church as a private institution comparable to the ‘proprietary chapels’ found in Britain and other parts of the empire. Such opposition led Gray to comment that the Cape population was ‘more Independent than at home – more wilful, head-strong, and more unwilling to submit to restraint. 105 By the early 1850s the They have all the notions of free churches.’ conflict had shifted to Port Elizabeth, a town that Nathaniel Merriman – Gray’s archdeacon – christened ‘the Plymouth of South Africa’. Merriman explained to Gray that ‘there is no place in the Diocese where the laity have their pastor under their thumb as here’.106 When Gray sent the high church W. H. Fowle to the settlement, a portion of the congregation left Gray’s diocese, formed their own church, and approached the CCS to send out a more suitable clergyman. Fowle resigned and went back to England when Henry Cotterill, Grahamstown’s evangelical bishop, recognised the new church and minister in 1858.107 There were several subsidiary but equally controversial strands to Gray’s reform project. Church services were made to conform to high church and Gothic forms. Gray did not negotiate like Strachan in Upper Canada: South African congregations were not, for the most part, asked to decide on whether surplices, offertories and more frequent services and celebration of the sacraments should be introduced. Steps were [ 120 ]

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taken to increase the number of Sunday services in Cape Town’s churches; the Eucharist was observed every Sunday (prior to 1848 holy communion took place only four times a year in Cape Town’s chief church, St George’s); religious festivals and saints’ days were celebrated; and the surplice and weekday services – something often associated with Tractarianism – were introduced.108 Ecclesiastical architecture was also transformed. Existing churches built in the classical style, such as St George’s Cape Town, were dismissed as ‘Chinese pagodas’. Merriman introduced lower pews and alterations to the chancel arrangements, such as a more visible altar, linen for the altar and communion plate.109 In fact it was Gray’s wife Sophy who played the crucial role in the Cape’s Gothic revival: it has been reckoned that of the fifty or so churches founded by Gray, at least forty were designed by her.110 Gray’s reform programme also involved an attempt to define who was an Anglican and who the Church should serve. In terms of the latter aim, Gray wished to transform a Church that turned away nonwhites into a missionary institution that provided religious instruction to British settlers and the wider Cape Dutch and black population.111 Gray’s missionary ambitions explain why he was so opposed to the system of renting pews: not only did it give shareholders claims over Church administration, it also meant the poor and non-whites were crowded out of churches.112 Likewise, Merriman believed the pew system had ‘cankered the Church here to the heart’s core’ and given rise to a feeling that ‘none but pew renters are thought of as the objects of the Church’s care’.113 But opening the Church up to all did not mean that participation in its government became similarly inclusive. Gray understood that a church that operated as a voluntary society had to have a much clearer sense of who its members were and who should be allowed to participate in Church government. It certainly meant moving away from the situation where those who did not consider themselves Anglicans had a role in administering church property. One clergyman claimed that before Gray arrived the government defined ‘a Church of England man’ as simply ‘everyone who did not profess to belong to any other religious denomination’.114 The ordinances governing the management of Cape churches allowed Methodists, Presbyterians and even Jews to buy pews and to participate in vestry elections. There was also nothing to stop those who identified themselves as non-Anglicans from offering their services as churchwardens. Anglican churchmen who sought to combat this liberality and diversity had no formal definitions of Church membership on which to draw; hence it is unsurprising that churchmen in different parts of the empire had different ways of defining an [ 121 ]

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Anglican.115 Gray was one of those who defined the Church member and the ‘parishioner’ as a male over 21 who regularly participated in the Eucharist. These parishioners would then have the right to vote for churchwardens and church-officers. He also required members to sign a declaration that read that the individual was ‘a member of the Church in the Diocese of Capetown, in communion with the United Church of England and Ireland’. Evangelicals were particularly worried about the line in the declaration that read that the individual would ‘conform to the doctrine and discipline of the said Church’ as they were not clear what ‘doctrine’ they were signing up to.116 Though Gray’s instructions were intended to apply only to those churches that had not been established by government ordinances, the lesson was that renting a pew or subscribing money towards the Church no longer brought with it rights.117 Ebenezer Wilshere, minister at Fort Beaufort, claimed to have established Gray’s ‘model church’: seats were free, there were no pew rents, the offertory was used to raise funds, a ‘kaffir’ had taken the Eucharist, and the ordinance that allowed Dissenters to stand as churchwardens had been ‘put aside’.118 But efforts to introduce this model elsewhere sparked controversy about issues as various as what defined Anglican identity, what a church should look like architecturally, and what its role in society should be. Noncommunicants rejected Gray’s definition of Church membership. A father who claimed his daughter had been forced to sign the declaration believed that Gray was trying to define an Anglican as one who 119 identified with a particular set of high church doctrines. At a meeting held at St George’s Church in Cape Town in 1856 a non-communicant who would not sign the declaration demanded the right to vote for delegates to the forthcoming synod on the grounds that he had ‘been a member of the church since ever it was built’.120 It was predictable that Gray’s proposed changes in the areas of ritual and church architecture created a storm of protest.121 Pamphlets popularising the evangelical line on baptismal regeneration appeared as early as 1847 and continued to be published at the Cape in the 1850s.122 Gray and Merriman pressed on but there were moments when they bowed to pressure. Merriman, for instance, had to remove such offending items as altar cloths and communion plate after complaints from the vestry and churchwardens of St George’s Church in Grahamstown.123 Such clashes reveal the differing perceptions of the Church held by senior churchmen and the wider community. Clearly Gray’s view of the Church as a divine society was not one that registered with evangelicals and other churchgoers. The Church was one of those institutions whose symbols or practices provided an entry point to respectable society for [ 122 ]

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people who were not of direct British descent. Indeed, there are good reasons for seeing churches as elements in what has been called the ‘rise of respectable society’ at the Cape.124 Certainly, the coupling of the Church with a particular form of British respectability might explain the incidence of individuals of non-British descent among Anglican congregations.125 Prominent among the Cape Dutch who attended Anglican churches in Cape Town were the constitutional reformers J. H. Wicht, D. J. Cloete and F. S. Watermeyer: these men may have had religious reasons for attending Anglican services, but it is also significant that they were anglicised Afrikaners who called for representative government not as Afrikaners, but as British subjects and as members of a British constitutional and political tradition.126 Attending an English church was part of a process by which the Afrikaner elite – and perhaps those lower down the social scale – adopted and appropriated British traditions, values, symbols and institutions for various political, social and professional ends.127 Gray had little truck with those who saw the Church as a gateway to respectable society. The Cape Dutch and non-communicating Anglicans who held shares in church property were, to him, little more than commercial speculators. These differing perceptions can be seen in the seemingly mundane memorials that adorned the walls of Cape churches. These memorials – St George’s Cape Town had ones to prominent commercial, military and political figures – were a source of revenue for the church, but they were also freighted with symbolic meaning for the laity and wider community. William Westfall’s comment that memorials were a physical acknowledgement of the laity’s place in the 128 Memorials can be Canadian Church works in the Cape context too. read as attempts by colonial families to gain acceptance in society: this might explain why the family of the Jewish businessman Joshua Norden paid for a memorial in Grahamstown’s church.129 Memorials declined sharply after Gray’s arrival. Not only did they challenge the Church’s claims to be an inclusive institution, they were also regarded as out of step with the gothic aesthetic. Merriman instructed the local military to erect stained-glass windows rather than stone memorials to commemorate their dead, and in 1856 Gray took over the control of the erection of memorials from the churchwardens of St George’s Church in 130 Cape Town. The memorial issue connected with the larger question of what role the laity should play in Church government. Bishops, clergy and laity could all agree that a more effective system of colonial Church government was needed, and most could agree that self-governing colonies should have self-governing churches. Where they differed was over the form this new system of government should take. Cape laymen [ 123 ]

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echoed their counterparts in other parts of the empire when they envisaged a form of parochial Church government where vestries elected both churchwardens and ministers.131 Parish government would lay the basis for a ‘liberal Church constitution’ that compared with the representative form of secular government that the Cape had won in 1853. All this was in contrast to the current system of ‘ecclesiastical asphyxia’ that gripped a Cape Church in which the bishop claimed the ‘various functions of defendant or plaintiff, prosecutor, judge, maker, and enunciator of the law’.132 Evangelical anxieties were raised when Gray only invited the clergy to his first informal synods in 1849 and 1851. When he proposed a diocesan synod in 1856 he did include plans for lay delegates, but there were still concerns that lay representation would be swamped by the bishop and clergy whom Gray had appointed. Synods looked more like the old governor-dominated legislative council than institutions in tune with the Cape’s 1853 liberal and colour-blind franchise. Synods gave high churchmen the tools to separate their dioceses from Canterbury, introduce doctrinal changes and establish independent Tractarian churches.133 Hence, when Gray did finally call his synod in 1857, seven parishes refused to send delegates. These congregations would form the basis of the breakaway ‘Church of England in South Africa’, a separatist institution that was established in 1870 in response to the formation of Gray’s – apparently Tractarian – ‘Church of the Province of South Africa’.134 The tensions that surrounded the introduction of synods are well known,135 but what has not been acknowledged is that the debates about Church government were examples of how the colonial laity sought to mould the ‘diocesan revival’ to their own uses. Lay Anglicans were not opposed to bishops, nor were they opposed to the idea that the diocese should play a more visible role in their churchgoing lives. What evangelical laymen wanted was a system of diocesan government where authority extended up from the parish rather than down from the bishop. The laity’s understanding of Church government was shaped by various influences. The Episcopal Church of the United States was popular as it had bishops who were elected by both clerical and lay representatives; it 136 also gave the laity an equal share in the administration of the Church. But colonists could also look closer to home for lessons on how Church government should be organised. The system of subscriber democracy found in most fraternal and benevolent associations was easily transferable to ecclesiastical institutions. At the Cape calls were made for a Church founded on the principle that ‘the supporters of every public institution’ had ‘uncontrolled power to select its officers’. The same commentator underlined the importance of the wider associational culture in shaping conceptions of Church government when he [ 124 ]

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questioned why an ‘effete and worthless spiritual despotism’ existed in ‘the midst of civil institutions’ that were ‘growing and expanding into freedom every day’.137 Clearly, many in the colonial community had a hard time seeing how episcopacy of the sort envisaged by the CBF founders could sit with colonial political and associational culture.

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Conclusion A range of ecclesiastical parties and Anglican groups invested in what we have been calling the colonial ‘diocesan revival’. Support for the extension of the colonial episcopate drew support from a cross-section of colonial clergy, and lay communities had various reasons for wanting to see the creation of new bishoprics. In Britain, diocesan reform gained traction because it drew in both high churchmen and Claphamite evangelicals who, like their orthodox counterparts, could see the value of reviving an ancient institution and bringing unity and coherence to a fragmenting Church.138 The same holds true for the revival overseas. Nevertheless, the extension and revival of the colonial episcopate was overwhelmingly associated with high churchmen and high church ecclesiology. This chapter has shown that the high church reform agenda – of which the CBF was just one element – had both an ecclesiastical and cultural agenda. The CBF is best seen as an ambitious attempt to organise a colonial Church with a unified institutional structure and clear centres of authority.139 For its founders, the great achievement of the CBF was that it unified the Church and arrested what Bishop Broughton and others called the ‘presbyterianis-ing’ of the Church.140 Bishop Blomfleld claimed in 1847 that the advent of the CBF meant that the ‘Church assumes a definite form’.141 There is also some evidence to support Le Couteur’s view that the CBF and the wider revival of the colonial diocese were coupled with the extension of a particular high Anglican English civilisation overseas. Most of the bishops appointed in this period were English-born and many assumed that the Church and the colony should be extensions and facsimiles of England. While Rowan Strong and others are right that the political changes of the 1830s brought a new emphasis on the episcopate and episcopal authority, this chapter has drawn attention to the limitations of the high church reform agenda. Events in Cape Town showed that lay communities could place strict limits on the authority of bishops. Gray was a more enthusiastic reformer than either Broughton or Strachan, but even he found that he had to bend to the wants of local communities. Bishops placed constraints on themselves as they understood that they were in the business of extending what had been an established and [ 125 ]

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national Church. We have also seen how not everyone saw the extension of the episcopate as a means of extending episcopal authority or a high church reform agenda. The rise of what we have called a ‘broad church’ ethos in the selection of colonial bishops shows that there were those who thought that the episcopate should reflect the existing diversity of the settler Church rather than a create a new Church that was based on a narrower and high church view of what Anglicanism was and what an Anglican Church and Communion should look like.

Notes 1

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16 17 18 19

20

T. Yates, ‘The idea of the “missionary bishop” in the spread of the Anglican communion in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Anglican Studies, 2:1 (2004), pp. 52–61. Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church; Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, ch. 4,-Sachs, Transformation of Anglicanism, pp. 114–16; H. Carey, ‘Gladstone, the colonial Church, and imperial state’, in H. Carey and J. Gascoigne (eds), Church and State in Old and New Worlds (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 155–82; H. Cnattingius, Bishops and Societies: A Study in Anglican and Colonial Missionary Expansion, 1698–1850 (London: SPCK, 1952), pp. 204–5. Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen’. Ibid. Also see Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, pp. 234–5. Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, pp. 63–9. T. Yates, Venn and Victorian Bishops Abroad: The Missionary Policies of Henry Venn and the Repercussions upon the Anglican Episcopate of the Colonial Period, 1841– 1872 (London: SPCK, 1978), p. 101; Burns, Diocesan Revival, ch. 8 and pp. 197–205. Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, p. 109. Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 92. Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, ch. 4. E. Hawkins, Documents Relative to the Erection and Endowment of Additional Bishoprics in the Colonies (London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1855), p. 14. Ibid., p. 16. Proceedings of a Meeting of the Clergy and Laity For the Purpose of Raising a Fund Towards the Endowment of Additional Colonial Bishoprics (London: Rivingtons, 1841). This paragraph draws on Strong’s Anglicanism and the British Empire, pp. 200–12. Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen’, p. 214. See, for example, the draft of an attachment to be sent as part of the declaration arising from the April 1841 meeting, dated 16 February 1842, CERC, OBF/REPORTS 1841–91, fo. 4. Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, pp. 198–221; Carey, God’s Empire. BL, GP, Add MS 44528, Gladstone to Hawkins, 28 February 1846, fo. 40. I would like to thank Dr John Powell for drawing my attention to this point. C. B. Adderley, the founder of the society, was a warm supporter of emancipated churches: see C. B. Adderley (ed.), Extracts from Letters of John Robert Godley to C. B. Adderley (London: Savill and Edwards, 1863), pp. 200–1. Carey notes Gladstone’s importance in establishing voluntary colonial churches but she does not link this to the movement for self-government. See Carey, ‘Gladstone, the colonial Church, and imperial state’; also J. Powell, ‘Gladstone and the colonial Church clause: an episode in church-state relations, 1849–50’, in M. Desjardins and H.

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21 22 23

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24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Remus (eds), Tradition and Formation: Claiming an Inheritance. Essays in Honour of Peter C. Erb (Kitchener: Ont.: Pandora Press, 2008), pp. 153–72. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 74. P. Butler, Gladstone: Church, State and Tractarianism. A Study of his Religious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809–1859 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. chs 4, 5 and 7. Wakefield quoted in W. P. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell (London: Frank Cass, 1966), p. 479. C. Blain, ‘The Canterbury Association (1848–1852): A Study of Its Members’ Connections’, available at http://anglicanhistory.org/nz/blain_canterbury2007.pdf (accessed 8 March 2012). Details on CBF subscribers can be found in the appendix attached to Hawkins, Documents Relative. H. T. Purchas, Bishop Harper and the Canterbury Settlement (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1909), p. 32. Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen’, pp. 196–202. Stanley, ‘Home support’, pp. 92–6; Yates, Venn and Victorian Bishops, pp. 76–8; Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen’, p. 209. Henry Venn had proposed the establishment of a see at Rupert’s Land to the CBF in 1845: CERC, OBF/MIN/1, fo. 74. C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of a Self-Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 1990), p. 15. Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen’; the phrase was used by a contemporary: Lord J. Manners, The Church of England in the Colonies. A Lecture Delivered Before the Members of the Colchester Literary Institution, on Wednesday January 22nd, 1851 (London: Simpkin, Marshall and W. H. Smith, 1851), p. 34. Hawkins, Documents Relative, p. 46. CERC, OBF/REPORTS/1841–91, ‘Draft of sheet to accompany declaration, approved by the Bishop of London, 16 February 1842’, fo. 4. Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, pp. 115–16. Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, p. 209; Proceedings of a Meeting, p. 29; for Manning see Strong, ‘The Oxford Movement and the British Empire’, in S. Brown and P. Nockles (eds), The Oxford Movement, p. 89. Donations and Subscriptions for the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, in Hawkins, Documents Relative, p. 7. W. F. France, The Oversea Episcopate: Centenary History of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund 1841–1941 (London: Colonial Bishoprics Fund, 1941), p. 23; Hawkins, Documents Relative, p. 28. Hampshire Record Office, Sturges Bourne – Dyson Correspondence and Sketchbooks, 9M55/F31/25, Marianne Dyson to Anne Sturges Bourne, n.d. (1845). Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, p. 115. These figures are based on the list of donations for the period 1841–54 included in Hawkins, Documents Relative. Hampshire Record Office, 9M55/F45/11, Marianne Dyson to Anne Sturges Bourne, 18 August 1845. BL, GP, Add. MSS 44361, Hawkins to Gladstone, 25 May 1844, fo. 139. Carey, God’s Empire, p. 80. Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, p. 116. Hawkins, Documents Relative, p. 18. CERC, OBF/MIN/1, Bishoprics Committee Meeting, 16 February 1846 and 20 March 1846, fos 101–3, 107. Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 116. Ibid., p. 177. UDSC, Papers of Henry George, GRE/B80/5, Earl Grey to Archbishop Howley, 2 February 1847, fo. 35.

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51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62

63 64 65 66

67 68

69 70 71

SPG, On Appointments to the Episcopate in the Colonies and Mother Country (London: FO and J. Rivington, 1851), pp. 7, 13. UDSC, Papers of Henry George, GRE/B80/5, Howley to Grey, 10 April 1847, fos 49-50. Grey did give subsequent archbishops a say in appointments, but very much on a nominal, informal basis: ibid., GRE/B80/7, Grey to Archbishop Sumner, 20 December 1848, fos 6–8. Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, p. 126. Teale, ‘Dr Pusey’, pp. 191–2. Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, p. 154. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 100; BL, GP, Add MS 44137, Edward Coleridge to Gladstone, 16 May 1846. Teale, ‘Dr Pusey’, p. 192. CERC, OBF/CORR/DIO/11, Australia (I), Broughton to Justice Coleridge, 19 June, 1845, fo. 2. UDSC, Papers of Henry George, GRE/B80/20A/1, 3rd Earl of Chichester to Grey, 3 April 1847. For the Howley-Grey appointments, see Robinson, Proclaiming Unsearchable Riches, pp. 68–76. Cooper, ‘The Australian bishops and the Oxford Movement’, pp. 100–10. Robinson, Proclaiming Unsearchable Riches, p. 70. The Indian bishoprics were different, with the influence of evangelical Company chairmen ensuring it was mostly evangelicals who were appointed to the presidency bishoprics. Robert Gray’s first sermon in Cape Town was on episcopal authority. Medley was author of a defence of episcopacy and was the founder of the Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society in 1841. Selwyn wrote pamphlets in defence of cathedrals and against the incursions of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Short wrote a defence of Newman’s Tract 90, Selwyn had known Newman since school, and Fulford and Medley were close friends of Pusey. Medley’s biographer paints him as an ambiguous character who, on the one hand, was influenced by Tractarianism and Romanticism, but, on the other, was drawn to seemingly antithetical ideas associated with the Enlightenment, rationalism and utilitarianism: see B. Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness: Bishop John Medley and the Evolution of the Anglican Church (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005). Burns and Stray, ‘Greek-play bishop’, pp. 1013–38. UDSC, Papers of Henry George, GRE/B80/5, ‘Abstract of letter, dated 17 January 1847’, fo. 24. CERC, OBF/CORR/DIO/11, George Porter to the secretary of the subcommittee of the bishopric of South Australia, 5 April and 26 September 1843, fos 6, 10. We are discounting Michael Solomon Alexander (1799–1845), a converted Polish Jew who despite not being a British subject became first bishop of Jerusalem in 1840 by a special Act of Parliament. ’Stanser, Robert’, DCB, VI, pp. 731–2 Edward H. Dewar looked to the Bishop of London to supply the names of suitable English candidates for two bishoprics: TCT, A. N. Bethune Fonds, Box 1, Correspondence 1850–1859, 1–3, Dewar to Archdeacon Bethune, 3 and 10 May and 11 June 1855. CERC, OBF/CORR/DIO/9, Fredericton, Mr Chipman to the Bishop of Nova Scotia, 9 December and 19 December 1842, fos 7–8. MTCL, Broughton Papers, Broughton to Coleridge, 17 February 1842, 1/15. See John Armstrong of Grahamstown’s comments about the ‘thoroughly English’ character of Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown at the Cape: T. T. Carter, A Memoir of John Armstrong (Oxford: Parker, 1857), pp. 272–3. Also see Bishop G. J. Mountain’s comments about the ‘very English’ character of communities in Lower Canada:

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73 74 75 76 77 78

79

80 81 82

83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97

Church in the Colonies. No. XVIII. A Journal of Visitation in a Portion of the Diocese of Quebec, by the Lord Bishop of Montreal, in 1846 (London: R. Clay, 1847), p. 88. F. Whitington, Augustus Short (London: W. Gardner Darton, 1888), p. 154; B. Kaye, ‘The strange birth of Anglican synods in Australia and the 1850 bishop’s conference’, The Journal of Religious History, 27:2 (2003), p. 184. Craig, Apostle, p. 156; Kaye, ‘Strange birth’, pp. 184–5. UDSC, Papers of Henry George, GRE/B80/7, Sumner to Grey, 14 March 1849, fo. 22. Hinchliff, Anglican Church, pp. 58–9. This point is touched on by Austin Cooper in his ‘The Australian bishops and the Oxford Movement’, pp. 107–8. J. Wolffe, ‘Lord Palmerston and religion: a reappraisal’, English Historical Review, 120:488 (2005), pp. 907–36. S. Brown, ‘The broad Church movement, national culture, and the established Churches of Great Britain, c. 1850–1900’, in H. Carey and J. Gascoigne (eds), Church and State, pp. 119–23; Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, p. 202. Robinson, Proclaiming Unsearchable Riches, pp. 76–7, does not call Grey’s perspective broad church, but does note that his aim for balance sat alongside his preference for evangelicals. UDSC, Papers of Henry George, GRE/B80/5, Howley to Grey, 7 September 1846, fos 35–6; Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, pp. 125–6. Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 105. For the foundation of a bishoprics fund in western Ontario (initial meetings were organised by the clergy but lay representatives joined later), see DHA, DH-1000-01-06, ‘Minutes of a meeting of clergy and laity within the limits of the rural deanery of London’ (1854). J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, I (London: Macmillan, 1905), pp. 794–5; AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, after p. 188 of Letterbook 1839–1866, Hawkins to Strachan, 31 July 1857. Armagh Guardian, 5 July 1861. For Lewis and the Orange Order, see Schurman, A Bishop and His People, p. 50. Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen’, p. 213; Carey, God’s Empire, p. 90. CERC, OBF/MIN/1, Gladstone to Archbishop of Canterbury, 14 January 1846, fos 104–6. ‘The Church in the Colonies’, Derby Mercury, 9 May 1866; A. Stephenson, The First Lambeth Conference: 1867 (London: SPCK, 1967), p. 83. D. Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Strong, ‘The Oxford Movement and the British empire’, p. 96. BL, GP, Add MS 44363, Gladstone to Bishop Spencer of Jamaica, 27 March 1846, fos 362–3. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 248. Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, pp. 63–9. CERC, OBF/CORR/LTT/1, ‘Colonial Bishoprics Letter Book vol. I, 1841–61’, Hawkins to the Bishop of Nova Scotia, 18 May 1842, fo. 5. For the support of the clergy, see UYL, C/AFS/2, William Long to SPG, 15 March 1847, fo. 377; ibid., C/AFS/5, Herbert Beaver to Hawkins, 4 December 1845, fo. 116. Rare congregational support came from Port Elizabeth: ibid., ‘Memorial of Chaplain, Church managers and other inhabitants of Port Elizabeth to Archbishops of Canterbury and York and Bishop of London, 25 April 1832’, fos 35–7. The only memorial which the CBF received from the Cape in 1842 came from clergy and laity in the eastern province: see Hewitt, Sketches, Appendix D, p. 122. Graham’s Town Journal, 10 November 1840, p. 2. RHL, C/AFS/2, Frederick Batchelor to Hawkins, 22 May 1843, fo. 355. ‘Episcopate in the Colonies’, Colonial Church Chronicle (hereafter CCC), no. 2 (May 1849), pp. 413–19.

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102 103

104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

116

117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125

Gray was right that the anti-convict agitation took ‘an anti-Church line’: Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 245. SACA, 19 July 1856. J. Lambert, ‘“An unknown people”: reconstructing British South African identity’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37:4 (2009), p. 602. Constitution and Rules of the Church Society of the Diocese of Cape Town (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1848). For similar developments in India, see Hardwick, ‘Vestry politics’. Report of the Committee Appointed By the Shareholders of St George’s Church, At a Special Meeting, Held on the 31st March 1848 (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1848), pp. 8–9. SACA, 26 March 1853. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 162; C/AFS/4, Gray to Hawkins, 9 August 1849, fos 360–61. UYL, D Series, Merriman to Gray, 2 August 1852, fo. 318. Carter, Memoir of John Armstrong, pp. 280–1; LMA, CCS Records, General Committee Minute Book, 1850–55, MS 15674, minutes for 16 May 1854, fos 683–4; 18 July 1854, fo. 720; 21 November 1854, fos 756–7; 6 March 1855, fo. 791. For changes in Cape Town, see R. Langham-Carter, Old St. George’s: The Story of Cape Town’s First Cathedral (Cape Town: Balkema, 1977), pp. 51, 55–6. D. Matthew and H. Varley (eds), The Cape Journals of Archdeacon N. J. Merriman, 1848–1855 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1957), pp. 21, 85. D. Martin, The Bishop’s Churches (Cape Town: Struik, 2005), p. 13. Matthew and Varley (eds), Cape Journals, p. 8. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 95. Matthew and Varley (eds), Cape Journals, p. 19. Ibid., p. 16. Knight, ‘From diversity to sectarianism’, p. 385. The proforma that the SPG sent to its missionaries defined Church members as ‘those of any age who are baptised, and do not profess to dissent from the prayer book’. Canadian bishops defined the Church member as one who was baptised, who consented and conformed ‘to the rules and ordinances of the Church’, and who contributed to the support of the Church: see minutes of conference of bishops, 1 October 1851 in H. Clarke, Constitutional Church Government in the Dominions Beyond the Seas and in Other Parts of the Anglican Communion (London: SPCK, 1924), p. 212. Instructions for the Guidance and Information of the Ministers and Parishioners in Parishes of the Communion of the Church of England, in the Diocese of Capetown (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1850), p. 3. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 249. UYL, C/AFS/5, E. S. Wilshere to Hawkins, 3 April and 2 August 1849, fos 282, 286–7. W. Sampson, Correspondence Regarding the Declaration Required to be Signed by Members of the Church of England in this Colony (Cape Town: Saul Solomon, 1851). Correspondence Between the Lord Bishop of Capetown and F. R. Surtees, Esq. on the Subject of the Introduction of Synodical Action (Cape Town: A. S. Robertson, 1857), p. 54. Matthew and Varley (eds), Cape Journals, pp. 6–7; Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 187. See the list of publications in Hewitt, Sketches, appendix. Matthew and Varley (eds), Cape Journals, pp. 85–6. R. Ross, Status and Respectability at the Cape of Good Hope: A Tragedy of Manners, 1750–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 4. N. Worden et al., Cape Town: The Making of a City (Kenilworth, SA: David Philip, 1998), p. 123.

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THE CBF AND COLONIAL CHURCH REFORM 126 A. Du Toit and H. Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought: Analysis and Documents. Volume One: 1780–1850 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983), pp. 249–51. 127 Dubow, ‘How British was the British world?’, pp. 2–3; Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, p. 36. 128 W. Westfall, ‘Constructing public religions at private spaces: The Anglican Church in the shadow of disestablishment’, in M. Van Die (ed.), Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 36. 129 Langham-Carter, Old St. George’s, ch. 13, and for Norden, see Matthew and Varley (eds), Cape Journals, p. 24. 130 Ibid., p. 25; Langham-Carter, Old St. George’s, p. 41. 131 SACA, 9 July 1856. 132 Ibid., 19 April 1856. 133 The Nature, Origin and Tendency of the Colonial Church Bill: Addressed to the Members of the Church of England (Cape Town: A. S. Robertston, 1852), pp. 23–31. 134 A. Ive, The Church of England in South Africa: A Study of its History, Principles and Status (Cape Town: Church of England Information Office, 1966). 135 Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, p. 129. 136 Stephenson, The First Lambeth Conference, ch. 4. 137 SACA, 19 April 1856. 138 A. Burns, ‘A Hanoverian legacy? Diocesan reform in the Church of England c. 1800– 1833’, in J. Walsh, et al. (eds), The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 278–9. 139 Carey, God’s Empire, p. 64. 140 MTCL, BP Misc. Broughton to Joshua Watson, 30 April 1852; ‘State of the Colonial Church’, CCC, IV (January 1851), p. 258. 141 ‘Consecration of Colonial Bishops’, CCC, I (August, 1847), p. 55.

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CHAPTER FOUR

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British support for overseas expansion

Hopes of building a self-sufficient colonial Church were far from being realised at mid-century. The penury of colonial congregations and continuing suspicion of the voluntary system prompted colonial churchmen to look to home for everything from clergy to church bells. Of course, those who wanted colonial transcripts of England’s ‘immemorial customs and ordered social polity’ would have welcomed the fact that the colonies were nourished by the steady infusion of Oxford and Cambridge graduates.1 Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century a variety of societies, organisations and networks were established to support the extension of the colonial Church – some were formal Church initiatives, others were independent and unofficial ventures. This chapter explores the changing face of the domestic support base for colonial mission across the period, 1790– 1860. Though there is an extensive literature on domestic support for mission to non-Christians, it is only recently that the subject of metropolitan involvement in settler churches has received substantial scholarly attention. Brian Stanley’s important unpublished Cambridge thesis was primarily a study of the support that the major Christian denominations gave to missions to the ‘heathen’, though he did give 2 some attention to the evolution of the SPG’s mission to emigrants. There are also article-length studies on the support which individual settler colonies received from metropolitan Christians,3 and recently Rowan Strong has looked at the ideologies that drove Britons to donate money towards mission.4 The most sustained analysis of the relationship between the churches and emigration to the ‘British world’ is Hilary Carey’s recent monograph on the colonial missionary societies that raised funds and sent out clergy to emigrants. Though some of these bodies, like the SPG, are well known, others are not: for Carey, historians’ ignorance of colonial mission has left us with an

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anachronistic understanding of the term ‘mission’ as something tied fundamentally to conversion.5 Though these works have made valuable contributions to our understanding of emigration’s place in nineteenth-century mission, a number of issues remain unaddressed. One is the nature of the connections between the expansion of the institutional Church overseas and the reform and revival of the Church in mainland Britain. We know that the churches in Britain were revitalised by mission overseas (historians call this the ‘reflux benefit’), but so far there has been little consideration of how colonial Church expansion could energise Anglican institutional structures.6 This kind of study would help us to reconsider whether Church extension in the colonies and Church reform in Britain were isolated, or interconnected, phenomena. Here we shall see that the evolution of the domestic support for mission was as much a response to emigration as a reaction to a series of domestic issues, notably the threats posed by Roman Catholicism, the dissolution of the Church’s constitutional privileges and parliamentary interference in church property. Two examples of this link between colonial and domestic Church expansion are examined here. One is that the reorganisation of the Church’s missionary arm – the SPG – was intimately linked to the reform and revival of the Church’s institutional structures in the decades before and after the constitutional crisis of the late 1820s and 1830s.7 The second is the interrelationship between the growth of the evangelical missionary societies such as the Colonial Church Society (CCS) and the wider ‘Protestant crusade’ that sought to both defend the Protestant constitution and convert Catholics to Protestantism.8 A second issue that has received limited attention is the distinct contribution that Irish and Scottish Anglicans made to the development of the Church overseas. In recent years the study of empire has benefited from work that has spotlighted the differing relationships that each of Britain’s constituent nations developed with empire.9 The study of the colonial Church can also benefit from a similarly ‘four nations’ approach. Though there is a growing scholarship on the Church of Ireland’s relationship with emigration and empire, existing accounts have not shown how the Irish contribution compared or contrasted with the Scottish, English, or, to a lesser extent, Welsh experience.10 We shall see that there was a different rhythm to the support that each of the British branches of the Church gave to the colonial Church. These rhythms were partly dictated by the different theological flavours of the English, Irish and Scottish Church, but the domestic political and religious context could also be important – this was particularly the case in the Irish example. [ 133 ]

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This chapter follows those historians who have argued that the Church had trouble adjusting to the new era of denominational competition and missionary expansion in the post-1832 period. But here we focus on a set of difficulties that have so far not received sustained consideration. One was the difficulty of establishing a British support base that did not impair the unity of the colonial Church. Churchmen also struggled to keep metropolitan audiences informed about the progress of the colonial Church. Though high church Anglicans would adopt the kind of missionary publicity methods pioneered by evangelicals and nonconformists, the dissemination of information was, like so much in colonial Anglicanism, contested: commentators recognised that the information fed to metropolitan communities on the status of settler churches was partial and revealed more about the interests of particular churchmen than the reality of the Church’s position in colonial society.

Church information and representations of the settler empire The study of the circulation of news and information has been a key growth area in the study of the British empire. Historians have shown how the dissemination of information on colonial geography and demography helped develop a sense of global community among British expatriates and also played a formative role in shaping metropolitan attitudes towards race and Britishness. We know that evangelical mission organisations were important disseminators of information on empire.11 But while the historiography on the spread of information on missions to ‘the heathen’ is well developed, the study of how the established Church represented and disseminated information on settlers and the settler empire is, broadly speaking, uncharted territory. Carey has noted that the growth in the circulation of Church periodicals in the 1840s roughly coincided with a general enthusiasm for mission, the popularisation of a positive view of settlers, and the development of the idea of a new form of ‘Christian colonisation’.12 Though Carey’s is a useful starting point, her work passes over the difficulties faced by the Church’s missionary arm, the SPG, when it came to popularising its work. Recent scholarship that points to the less progressive features of imperial information systems has a bearing on discussions of the circulation of ecclesiastical news. Simon Potter has argued that the formation of an ‘imperial news system’ later in the century resulted in the closing down of information flows, the homogenisation of news, and the marginalisation of some colonial voices. Here we shall see that [ 134 ]

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similar ‘systematising’ forces were at work in the colonial Church: the testimony of colonial clergy reveals that many were aware that metropolitan readers were being fed standardised material that reflected and promoted the viewpoints of only certain Church interests.13

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The development of high Anglican publicity The SPG always trailed behind the CMS and the other voluntary missionary societies when it came to spreading information on missions and empire.14 Metropolitan clergymen routinely complained that they were being asked to promote the SPG without any adequate information on its overseas activities. One claimed that the lower and middle class could ‘hardly help supporting those societies which present them with such interesting details of the subjects of their labours, when there is no corresponding demonstration on the part of any Society connected with the Church’.15 Though the SPG did publish a report which utilised many of the techniques deployed by the other mission societies, clergy regularly complained that these reports – which before 1833 were the only form of communication the society had with its subscribers – were not sent out. Clergy tasked with putting together sermons and speeches for the SPG found themselves mining CMS publications for basic information. From the mid-1830s there were calls for maps (‘to make the rustics comprehend what you are about’), monthly publications (as the ‘Reports are far too voluminous for the perusal either of Farmers or of cottagers’) and the kind of four-page quarterly publication that the CMS had long sent to small subscribers among ‘the Labouring Classes and the Young’.16 Given the SPG’s claims to be a national institution it is surprising that the society and the Church was so slow to experiment with alternative modes of communication. Eight-page Quarterly Papers were introduced in 1839. The 1840s saw the appearance of the 1842 Colonial and Missionary Church Map of the World, the Church in the Colonies series (1843), the Missions to the Heathen periodical (1844) and the Annals of Colonial Dioceses (1847) (the latter were ostensibly Church histories composed of letters from colonial bishops and missionaries). Neither the length nor the style of these publications meant they were 17 intended for anything other than a clerical or middle-class audience. Efforts to diversify the SPG’s publicity machine came in 1852 with the introduction of the Gospel Missionary, a halfpenny monthly that was intended for children, and a Quarterly Paper published in Welsh. 1852 was also notable for the publication of the Monthly Record (later titled the Mission Field), as this was the kind of publication that the parochial clergy had been calling for since the early 1830s.18 [ 135 ]

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To these official Church publications should also be added the Colonial Church Chronicle (1847), an independent venture that promoted the interests of the CBF. Again, the content of this publication – which comprised mostly lengthy articles, correspondence and a few popular pieces such as accounts of the lives of missionaries – meant it was unlikely to reach beyond an educated middle-class audience.19 The other main channel through which metropolitan congregations were exposed to the needs of the settler churches was via the deputations of colonial clergy and missionaries who periodically visited local associations. The arrival of a colonial cleric could create a stir in English and Irish parishes,20 but according to Stanley few metropolitan congregations got the chance to meet one.21 To get round this lack of contact the SPG tried to assure incumbents that it took ‘little skill’ to put together lectures that would ‘engage the interests of people of all classes’.22 It is difficult to estimate how successful this diversification of SPG publicity was. The 1840s is usually seen as the moment when the SPG tapped into the climate of missionary enthusiasm and diversified its support base: indeed, after 1838 the society could report an increase in the funds raised through collections in parish churches and public meetings. In 1837 only £878 had been raised through such collections; by 1850 – the last year for which we have data – the figure was up to 23 £6,265. The records of the district committees provide evidence of growing support from children and those donating a guinea or less.24 But the fact that the SPG commissioned an inquiry into its periodical literature in 1854 suggests lingering concerns about both the effectiveness of its publicity machine and its continuing failure to engage with the new and enlarged audiences reached by other evangelical missionary societies. SPG publications, the report concluded, were expensive to produce, were longer than those of other missionary 25 societies and reached much smaller audiences. This literature used a customary set of techniques to encourage metropolitan giving. A broad distinction has been drawn between the literature that justified mission to expatriate settlers and the texts that tried to elicit support for the conversion of the non-Christian ‘heathen’: the former was predicated on the idea that the metropolitan benefactors and settler beneficiaries were members of the same national community; the latter, by contrast, dwelt on the otherness, depravity and immorality of alien societies.26 The situation was actually more complicated. Broadly speaking, missionary journalists had to show how indigenes were simultaneously similar and different to Europeans: their culture might be sunk in depravity and immorality, but individually they were at least on the same ladder of civilisation and did have the capacity, if [ 136 ]

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tutored appropriately, to throw off their culture and embrace the benefits of British civilisation.27 A similar kind of ‘double vision’ was at work in representations of the settler empire. Those who turned up to hear the speeches delivered by Bishop Inglis of Nova Scotia in his 1839 and 1840 fund-raising tours heard much about pious settlers who walked fifty miles to hear itinerant missionaries, who bankrupted themselves in building churches and who would gladly swap the temporal gains they had made in the colonies for spiritual instruction.28 But just as the need to win support for mission to the ‘heathen’ resulted in attention being drawn to the negative aspects of foreign societies, so the need to raise funds meant that advocates of settler mission presented colonists as displaced Britons who, if left without spiritual ministrations, would become disloyal sectaries and republicans.29 Ernest Hawkins’s Ann ah cited clergymen who claimed that settler communities without resident ministers were deteriorating towards ‘practical atheism’ and disloyalty to the imperial connection.30 An offshoot of this degeneration thesis was the idea that colonial populations would lose their nationality and slip into American republicanism if they were not given what Lord John Manners called the ‘elevating element’ of the Church of England and other institutions that made up the ‘highest English civilisation’.31 That old ideas about the dangers posed by empire and migration to Europeans were reprised at this point suggests that the positive view of settlers was far from achieving complete hegemony.32

Contested information Missionary literature often bore little relationship to colonial reality. We know that mission publicity reduced the demographic, social and cultural complexity of the empire down to a set of simplified and standardised images and ideas.33 Just as the image of ‘the heathen’ became standardised, so stock images of spiritual settlers were widely circulated. This is perhaps not surprising given that mission publicists were regurgitating heavily edited missionary reports, but it is also doubtful whether deputations gave metropolitans a clearer sense of settler realities. In his 1839–40 SPG tour, Bishop Inglis delivered repetitive speeches that trooped out familiar arguments about colonial demands, the providential duty falling on metropolitans, and the threat posed by other denominations. Fast-forward to 1858, and we find Archdeacon Abraham, a visitor from New Zealand, telling a metropolitan audience that the material benefits of emigration were 34 offset by the moral and spiritual perils of life of the frontier. The isolated backwoods settler, rather than the urban dweller, was the image [ 137 ]

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that predominated, and important ethnic and class distinctions in settler communities got little coverage. Missionary appeals were, then, more about satisfying the imaginations and prejudices of home audiences than in communicating accurate representations of settler religiosity.35 There was, therefore, considerable scope for controversy in the selection, presentation and circulation of information on the progress of the colonial Church. Some colonial clergy refused to provide the SPG with information on their missions because they felt that they were being asked to divulge details about their parishioners that should remain private.36 Others thought that metropolitan communities were being fed representations of the colonial Church that were partial, inaccurate, and designed to promote the interests of particular groups. The webs and networks that developed as the Church expanded were not set up to allow the democratic and equitable dissemination of all views and opinions on the Church. One early critic was John Leeds, an otherwise obscure clergyman who had left a career in poorly paid Norfolk curacies to serve as a schoolteacher in Quebec and as SPG missionary in Upper Canada from 1819 to 1828. Leeds’s difficulties in establishing a congregation other than ‘the more respectable householders’ at Port Erie left him disillusioned and in a series of letters in 1827 he challenged the idea – one that was central to the missionary propaganda described above – that expansion of the Church was driven by colonial demand. Leeds claimed it was ‘vain to say that the tendency of the population is towards the Church’ and pointed out that pretensions to establishment made Anglicanism less attractive to colonists. Leeds argued that this negative take on Church policy was never represented to the British public: the idea that colonists wanted the ministrations of Anglican clergy was, in his view, the invention of a ‘few leading people – landowners, who want to create the appearance of a 37 village on the spot, or to promote the growth of one already begun’. Richard Vaudry has argued that concerns over the accuracy and reliability of ecclesiastical information were tied to anxieties about episcopal authority and the clergy’s dependency on the patronage and powers of the bishop. SPG publicity in the 1840s did little to calm fears about episcopal control of information: The Church in the Colonies series noted that the ‘journals of our Colonial Bishops will form the best materials for the History of the Church in their vast dioceses’. It is also notable that parochial clergy were advised to rely on episcopal visitation reports when they lectured their flocks on the needs of colonists.38 Vaudry points to the example of James Reid in Quebec who, like Leeds before him, criticised the ways colonial bishops and missionary societies accumulated information on what were, in reality, failing missions. Writing in the early 1850s, Reid claimed that the visitation returns and [ 138 ]

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missionary reports that the SPG relied on were puffed up to please the bishop and boost the author’s chances of preferment. Reports of growing congregations and native attachment to Anglicanism that circulated at home were, in his view, ‘shameful pious fraud’ designed to deceive metropolitan subscribers and create a community of interest that did not in fact exist.39 Leeds and Reid were frustrated characters who underestimated the number of channels through which information on colonial churches was transmitted home. Evangelical mission societies, such as the CCS, were attuned to the episcopate’s dominance of ecclesiastical information – they labelled much of it ‘partial, prejudiced, uninformed, and misinformed’ – and called for the opening up of more democratic channels of communication. CCS supporters among the clergy likewise criticised the SPG on the grounds that it was dominated by bishops and 40 told the wider public little about its inner workings. The periodical established by the CCS in 1838 – The Colonial Church Record – laid the platform for the growth of an evangelical press that gave colonial evangelicals the opportunity to publicise the dangers of Tractarianism and unregulated episcopacy. A notable publication was the British Banner, a periodical edited by John Campbell, a Scottish Congregationalist supporter of the Anti-State Church Association: it ran accounts of the march of ‘church and state principles’ in the colonies alongside reports of the imperial spread of ‘Puseyism’ from colonial clergy and colonists.41 Anglican missionary institutions tried to tailor information to different audiences, and, in the case of the SPG, it seems this move helped broaden the appeal of a traditionally elite organisation. But the Church press and information machine, like the wider imperial news system which it formed part, filtered news and information in such a way that voices, such as the lay Anglican or recalcitrant clergyman, were marginalised and images of empire and its inhabitants standardised. This was only partly resolved by the proliferation of Anglican periodicals after mid-century. Debates about how missionary organisations should inform their metropolitan audiences and promote their work were tied to questions about how they should organise themselves and mobilise support back in Britain. The disagreements which surfaced around this question, like those which turned on the question of how the Church should be represented to metropolitans, point to enduring tensions between rival Church parties and rival understandings of how the Church should respond to the spectre of disestablishment.

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Connecting Church reform at home and extension overseas The SPG’s high command was always sceptical about employing the methods of popular religious philanthropy. Though spokespersons for the SPG saw the extension of the Church as a national endeavour that involved all members of the Church, discomfit with such things as popular appeals, congregational collections, public meetings and household missionary boxes reflected a high church suspicion of voluntarism and the ‘irregularity’ of voluntary societies.42 Brian Stanley has pointed out that the majority of SPG members maintained that the development of Anglican missions had to be tied to the Church’s existing diocesan, archidiaconal and parochial structures: as Samuel Wilberforce, then Archdeacon of Surrey put it in 1839, the SPG should think of itself less as a ‘society’ than as a ‘missionary of the Church’.43 The CBF saw itself in similar terms. Stanley’s study of the development of the SPG’s home support base reveals that the hopes of Wilberforce and others were broadly realised: by 1840 the society had established a pyramid of diocesan societies, district committees and parochial associations, all supervised by organising secretaries who were often rural deans or archdeacons.44 Stanley’s valuable discussion tends, however, to assume that the SPG was grafted onto a pre-existing Church structure, when in reality the Church’s diocesan, archidiaconal and parochial machinery was in the process of being revived and reformed. The development of the Anglican mission base and the reform of the metropolitan Church were, therefore, contemporaneous and connected. Arthur Burns’ work has shown how a series of ecclesiastical institutions and practices that had fallen into abeyance in the eighteenth century – his examples are the rural dean, the archdeaconry and diocesan assemblies – were gradually revived in the decades before and after the constitutional crisis of 1828–32. Burns notes how the formation of new SPG branches fed into a wider Church reform project: revived institutions such as the rural dean organised mission work and the SPG, once it was incorporated into Church structures, provided a means by which the laity and lesser clergy could participate 45 in Church administration and develop a sense of Church membership. Burns does not, however, provide a sustained discussion of the development of the SPG, nor does he dwell on the links between metropolitan Church reform and the extension of the domestic Anglican mission base. For much of the early nineteenth century the SPG’s efforts to build a popular support base were hampered by the support that the society received from the imperial state. In the late 1810s the high church [ 140 ]

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Hackney Phalanx looked to organise a structure of parochial associations and district committees that would raise funds, organise meetings, and disseminate missionary literature. Take-up was, however, patchy: membership of the SPG district committee at Marsden in Yorkshire in 1820 was confined to the clergyman, his wife and their daughter.46 It was not until the 1830s – when the pressure was there for the SPG to redefine its missionary role and adopt voluntarist strategies – that we see the real proliferation of the SPG presence across England, Wales and, to a lesser extent, Ireland.47 In 1839 some 144 meetings were held in support of the SPG and the same year the society coordinated a series of fundraising tours in northern England, Wales, the south-west and the southeast. Samuel Wilberforce, in his autumn tour of the West Country, travelled some 1,500 miles and collected £2,074. After 1833 the SPG received a range of suggestions about how it could popularise its work, but it was the perspective of Samuel Wilberforce, and in particular his argument that the development of the SPG had to be tied to existing Church structures, that came to dominate. Stanley notes that Wilberforce was something of a contradiction, as while his 1839 tour was a case of Anglicans borrowing the techniques employed by the voluntary evangelical societies, he maintained that the SPG would increase its popularity by presenting itself as an orthodox Church 48 venture. Wilberforce wanted to see the rapid spread of parochial associations. In his view, local organisations of this sort were one of the chief means by which the ‘inhabitants of the lower ranks of life’ were able to contribute ‘their small donations’ with the ‘utmost readiness’.49 The important point was that these associations would be tied to the wider Church infrastructure. In late 1839 Wilberforce wrote to the SPG explaining the benefits of ‘interlacing as far as possible all your local machinery with Church functionaries & Church arrangements’, and added that if this was not done, and if the SPG acted as ‘a mere society’, it would ‘never outstrip or even keep up with other societies’. Wilberforce told the SPG that its establishment of ‘different district and diocesan societies’, each acting independently of the local Church administration, would ‘in practice ... sever you from Church arrangements’. What he wanted to see was the appointment of ‘archdeacons & rural deans’ as the 50 SPG’s ‘acting officers’. Wilberforce’s suggestions were part of a wider effort to meld Church societies such as the SPG, the National Society and the Church Building Society into the Church’s administrative structures. Bishop Otter of Chichester had taken steps towards this when he established a ‘diocesan association’ in January 1838 that would administer a fund for church building and additional curates, tasks that until then had been done by separate societies.51 Reform of the SPG was in this sense part of a broader project of Church reorganisation.52 [ 141 ]

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A number of Church reform figures – mostly they hailed from the Chichester and Salisbury dioceses, areas that were central to the diocesan revival – joined Wilberforce in recommending the ‘interlacing’ of the SPG with the parochial, archidiaconal and diocesan framework. As early as 1827 the SPG had received correspondence from three clergymen advising them to use rural deans to organise and collect parochial collections.53 Henry Manning, Wilberforce’s brother-in-law and a prominent figure in the revival and reform of the diocesan machinery at Chichester (he was secretary of Otter’s diocesan association), noted that ‘there is hardly any one principle in which people hereabouts are more agreed than to merge Societies into functions of the Church acting in the Diocese’.54 William Dansey, a noted populariser of the revival of the office of rural dean, also recommended the integration of the SPG into Church structures and a broader Church reform movement.55 Dansey’s plan was for the SPG to organise itself through a hierarchical system with parish clergy at one end and the diocesan secretary at the other, with the rural dean acting as intermediary between the two. Elsewhere Dansey wrote that ruridecanal chapters – meetings of clergy who belonged to a deanery – would serve as the ‘standing machinery’ that would publicise and coordinate the society’s work.56 Those who wanted to see the SPG bolted onto existing Church structures did so because they saw benefits flowing in two directions: overseas missions would gain from increasing donations, while the greater prominence of the SPG and the sense of missionary fervour it engendered would, it was hoped, encourage stronger attachment to the home Church and deepen popular involvement in the institutional Church from the diocesan level downwards.57 Institutions as well as individual benefactors would both benefit from investment in overseas mission.58 Wilberforce noted that once a parishioner donated money and could see on a map ‘the very part of the World which is assisted by the sacrifices they make’, they would ‘feel an inherent interest in it: the spread of the Church becomes an object of their desire & prayer; & the Church hereby ceases to be a name and an abstraction’. Dansey commented that ‘we shall be able to break down our large diocesan aggregates of population into archdeaconries, deaneries, & parishes, & to bring home to each parochial conscience ... the quantum of its zeal in the cause of orthodox church missions’. The assumption was that mission work would strengthen attachments to units of ecclesiastical, rather than secular, geography.59 It would also, presumably, encourage metropolitan churchgoers to see themselves as part of an imperial as opposed to simply national institution. Those who hoped to merge the SPG with the revived diocesan [ 142 ]

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machinery achieved mixed results in the pre-1860 period. It is true that by the mid-1840s the secretaries of SPG district committees included curates, prebendaries, rectors, archdeacon and rural deans. As Burns points out, the SPG also organised extensively at deanery level: the 1835 SPG Report lists forty-two deanery committees, six of which had rural deans as secretaries. Collections were made at deanery level and individual rural deans set an example by making house-to-house collections.60 We know that Samuel Wilberforce organised his Oxford diocese so that extension in Britain and expansion overseas proceeded in tandem. In 1859 the SPG’s organising secretaries in the Buckinghamshire and Oxford archdeaconries were both rural deans,61 and more generally Wilberforce saw the decanal chapter meetings and more informal meetings of rural deans as opportunities to raise funds for the SPG and form parochial associations.62 But even here the development of the SPG could be slow: as late as the early 1870s Wilberforce was still telling rural deans to coordinate missionary society collections.63 Dansey’s plan had been to transform the ruridecanal chapter meetings into the standing machinery of the Church societies; an analysis of chapter meetings reveals that the SPG was often rarely mentioned – this was even the case in areas strongly associated with the diocesan revival, like the diocese of Chichester.64 As late as 1849 representatives from the SPG were touring the diocese telling rural deans to further the interests of the society by adopting ‘the existing ecclesiastical divisions and machinery now already in use’.65 Though deanery committees took time to get going, those that were set up were significant institutions, as in many cases they were formed decades before bishops started to call on their rural deans to summon chapters of clergy. The Storrington District Committee – established in 1819 and hence one of the first of its kind – embraced the deanery of Storrington in the Chichester archdeaconry, had a membership which extended to all the clergy and laity in the deanery, and met annually on the day of the bishop’s visitation.66 Significantly, it was not until 1840 that Bishop Otter of Chichester instructed his rural deans to call quarterly chapter meetings where parochial clergy would report on the state of their churches and – as we noted above – give details on the funds that had been raised in their parishes for Church societies such as the SPG.67 Although it is impossible to state definitely whether these rural chapters were building on top of pre-existing deanery meetings – the sources do not reveal the relationship between the earlier committees and later chapters – the chronology suggests that it was the development of overseas mission and the evolution of charitable societies which, in certain instances at least, laid the foundations for the [ 143 ]

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reinvigoration of ancient Church structures, and not the other way around. Church expansion overseas and the revival of Church institutions in Britain were in many ways interconnected and fed off one another. Contemporaries understood that institutions that managed local Church affairs could also look globally and have imperial responsibilities. Robert Wilberforce captured these interconnections when he noted that SPG parochial committees would ‘prove as conducive to the efficiency of the Church in Britain, as it is essential to its extension in the Colonies’.68 But as Brian Stanley has pointed out, the policy of binding mission to Church structures did meet opposition from those who thought that efficiency lay in separating the two. A Rev. Mclver in Liverpool, for instance, claimed the SPG lagged behind the CMS because the latter had full-time professional organising secretaries and special missionary agents. The SPG, by contrast, left the task to overworked clergy.69 Others criticised the rigidity of the SPG’s organisation structure. The Rev. Best opposed the Bishop of Salisbury’s plan of organising the SPG at rural deanery level because he felt that it would strengthen episcopal authority: according to him, the bishop would become ‘the mainspring Si institutor of any erection’ of committees or associations. Best’s proposal for town committees which bore no relation to ecclesiastical geography cut against the grain of orthodox thinking and the whole ‘diocesan revival’. Neither Mclver’s suggestion for independent paid agents nor Best’s proposals were taken up.70 Whether the home diocesan revival benefited the home Church but harmed the fortunes of the colonial Church, as Best seems to have been implying, is difficult to answer. On the plus side the melding of the SPG and the home Church may well have deepened a sense of community between British and colonial Churches. It may also have gone some way towards realising the Tractarian aim of presenting the ‘Church as the Missionary Society’.71 Increases in the SPG’s donations suggest that the policy of establishing parochial associations and district committees was remunerative. It is likely that the difficulties that Stanley highlights as facing the SPG – its dependency on free-will donations, its patchy geographical coverage, its reliance on the middle and upper classes and the low amounts collected by individuals at sermons – had deeper causes than the policy of running the Church’s missionary operations alongside its domestic pastoral work. Mission to settlers always played second fiddle to conversion work, the SPG struggled to shake off the Tractarian taint, and, perhaps more so than the other missionary societies, the SPG was competing with a raft of other Church charitable societies that asked the public for funds. [ 144 ]

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The British dimensions of domestic support for overseas missions A further problem confronting the SPG was that for all its claims to be meeting the needs of British emigrants it was associated with an English identity. John Henry Newman’s description of the SPG as an ‘English society’ was hardly how the SPG wished to see itself.72 The next section charts the hitherto under-explored efforts that the SPG, and the colonial churches themselves, made to cultivate British support by reaching into Scotland and Ireland. It is instructive, for instance, that when senior colonial churchmen returned home to raise funds for their churches – a good example is A. N. Bethune’s visit in aid of Trinity College Toronto in 1852 – they adopted tour itineraries that were British in scope.73 We shall see, however, that the difficulties which the SPG and others had in setting down roots outside England, particularly in Ireland, point towards the differing relationship that each of the metropolitan branches of the Anglican Church had with empire. Furthermore, the networks that Scottish and Irish Anglicans built with empire not only contributed to the contested quality of colonial Anglicanism, but also challenged the idea that the Englishness of the Church would become more apparent 74 after disestablishment.

The Episcopal Church of Scotland As an independent organisation the Episcopal Church of Scotland had a special relationship with colonial Anglicans. On the one hand Scotland’s Episcopal Church reassured colonial churchmen that churches did not need state backing to survive and thrive. On the other hand, however, the Episcopal Church reminded colonial Anglicans that voluntary churches had a propensity to fragment. The succession of a group of evangelicals from the Scottish Episcopal Church in the early 1840s suggested that independent churches had difficulty dealing with diversity. Voluntary organisations struggled to discipline their own members and could not prevent dissentient groups from setting up their own breakaway churches. Scotland’s Episcopal Church had a long history of imperial involvement. In the eighteenth century significant numbers of Episcopalian clergy had moved to America in response to the increasingly harsh restrictions that were placed on Scottish Episcopalians as a consequence of the failed Jacobite rebellions of 1715, 1719 and 1745 – rebellions that were supposedly supported by the ‘nonjuring’ Episcopalians who had refused to recognise William of Orange 75 Post-Revolutionary American and the Protestant succession. Anglicanism also had an important Scottish root, as it was the Scottish [ 145 ]

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bishops who ordained Samuel Seabury as America’s first Protestant bishop at Aberdeen in 1784 (Episcopalians would follow this up in 1825 when they consecrated Matthew Luscombe as the missionary bishop to continental Europe). Seabury’s consecration was great publicity for Scottish Episcopalians, as high churchmen who wished to de-emphasise the Church’s establishment status and elevate its distinct spiritual integrity and identity could now look to Scotland for examples of how this would work in practice.76 Episcopalians continued to make a modest contribution to the expansion of the Anglican dominion in the nineteenth century. The Episcopalian Church’s distinctive forms of worship and liturgy were carried into British North America by Scottish emigrants. A Scottish missionary in Upper Canada named George Petrie remarked in 1843 that the ‘old Liturgy of the Church in Scotland’ – by which he meant the Episcopal Church’s distinctive communion service – was ‘greatly 77 respected on this side of the Atlantic’. (The popularity of the Scottish liturgy may also have stemmed from the number of American settlers in Canada, as the prayer book which American Episcopalians had framed in 1789 was strongly based on forms found in the Scottish book.) The Episcopal Church also furnished the empire with money and men. John Strachan hailed from an Aberdeen Episcopalian family and the high church tradition found in northern Scotland would be an important influence when he came to reconsider his churchmanship in the 1830s. Episcopalian clergy who had been ordained in Scotland were subject to penal laws that prevented them from holding English and colonial benefices, but when this legislation was relaxed in 1840 there was an increase in the number of episcopally ordained clergy who entered work overseas. South Africa, for example, received two ministers from the Episcopal Church in the 1850s. Scottish churchmen also lent support to those who were trying to win for the colonial Church the kind of independence already enjoyed by Scotland’s Episcopal Church. William Forbes – a prominent Episcopalian lawyer who advocated the retention of the Scottish Church’s distinctive liturgy and identity – advised Gladstone during the debates on colonial Church independence in the early 1850s. Forbes thought Gladstone’s parliamentary bills were too cautious: he wanted to see metropolitan provinces that were not subject to Canterbury and colonial churches that had the authority to change the liturgy and consecrate bishops without the involvement of the Crown. In this way, the Scottish model of a distinct independent Church 78 could be replicated overseas. Generally, however, Episcopalians in Scotland were either too poor or too concerned with their own extension schemes to give any substantial support to the English mission societies. In 1846 Scotland [ 146 ]

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only raised 315 pounds and sixteen shillings for the SPG,79 and it was not until the 1870s that Scottish Episcopalians launched their own missions in India and southern Africa.80 Indeed, it was more common for aid to flow in the opposite direction, with Scottish Episcopalians looking to English and colonial Anglicans for the men and money that would support their own domestic extension schemes.81 A number of colonial clergy from the pre-1860 period travelled to Scotland to take up posts in the Episcopal Church. The clergyman journalist Robert Jackson McGeorge left Streetsville in Ontario to take a post in Oban in the 1850s, and Henry Cotterill, the bishop of Grahamstown from 1856 to 1871, became Bishop of Edinburgh in 1872. Former colonial clergy also made a modest contribution to the development of a breakaway Anglican Church in Scotland that came to be known as the English Episcopal Church. This Church – it was designated ‘English’ because its members, who were mostly Englishmen, claimed to be the real Church of England in Scotland – was made up of evangelical congregations who chose to separate from an Episcopal Church that, in their view, was moving towards Tractarianism and 82 Rome. This independent Church was an attractive destination for evangelical clergy who failed to find work in England and who could also not remain in colonial dioceses run by high churchmen. One example is a former Canadian missionary Charles Besly Gribble: in 1845 Gribble took up the post of assistant minister at St Jude’s English Episcopal Church in Glasgow after an unhappy spell in the Toronto diocese. St Jude’s was a natural home for a man who had shown himself to be hostile to both Church establishments and episcopal authority during his short time in Canada (indeed, one of the reasons why Gribble was asked to leave the Toronto diocese was because he had refused to take 83 the oath of canonical obedience to John Strachan). In Scotland Gribble continued to argue that clergy had the right to separate themselves from any ecclesiastical authority which asked them to compromise their personal principles and their ordination oaths. In an 1848 pamphlet he explained that no clergyman who had been ordained in the Church of England (he had been ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln) was obliged to recognise the authority of bishops – such as those in Scotland – who were not in communion with the English Church. Gribble saw Scotland’s English Episcopal Church as the true branch of the Church of England, and it was there, and not in Scotland’s Episcopal Church or the colonial Church, that he felt he could maintain his identity and integrity 84 as a clergyman of the English Church. These links between the Church in the colonies and the Scottish Episcopal Church grew stronger from the mid-1830s. There was, in fact, nothing unique about the interest that colonial churchmen showed in [ 147 ]

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the Scottish Church: in the 1830s and 1840s churchmen of various nationalities and various Church parties would strengthen their links with an Episcopal Church that was taking on a new significance. Rowan Strong points out that the evangelical, high church and Tractarian elements in the Scottish Church regarded themselves as members of wider transnational and trans-imperial Church parties.85 In the 1840s the ten congregations that made up the English Episcopal Church took steps to strengthen ties with English evangelicals and the Church of England.86 High churchmen also tried to open up stronger communications between English and Scottish churchmen (the campaign to remove the penal legislation that prevented Scottish clergy from holding English benefices was one aspect of this), though different kinds of high churchmen found different things to admire in the Scottish Episcopal Church. As Peter Nockles has shown, English Tractarians were drawn to the tradition of high churchmanship that had been preserved among Episcopalians in northern Scotland: Tractarians liked northern, ‘nonjuring’ Episcopalianism because it placed considerable emphasis on episcopacy and the Church’s status as an independent spiritual institution; they also thought that the Eucharistie theology contained in the Episcopal Church’s distinctive communion service – the ‘Scottish office’ – was superior to that found in Church of England’s prayer book 87 because it taught the real corporal presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Meanwhile, high churchmen who were hostile to Tractarianism were closely aligned to those ‘southern’ high churchmen who wished to discard the Scottish office and bring the Scottish Church into closer communion with the Church of England.88 Finally, high churchmen who were more sympathetic to Tractarianism – Gladstone was one – admired the Scottish Church as it showed how an Anglican Church could uphold catholic principles without leading its members towards Rome.89 Given the Episcopal Church’s importance for the high church revival it was natural that Gladstone and others would come to see Scotland as the place where high church missions could be launched overseas.90 The growing strength of the links between English, Scottish and colonial high churchmen was reflected in the establishment of a training facility for Episcopal clergy at Glenalmond in Perthshire in the early 1840s by Gladstone and the Anglo-Catholic layman James Hope. The aim – beyond the general one of providing clergy for a self-sufficient Episcopal Church – was to build a monastic environment where a native Scottish ministry – not an English import – could be trained alongside students who would go on to secular professions. Members of the nonTractarian, ‘southern’ tradition of Scottish high churchmanship thought the decision to adopt the Scottish communion office at the college [ 148 ]

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marked the college out as a Tractarian institution,91 but in fact the college would come to be governed by churchmen like Charles Wordsworth – Gladstone’s choice as Glenalmond’s first warden – who repudiated Tractarianism’s advanced ritualism.92 The use of the Scottish office was nevertheless significant, as it shows that Gladstone and the other founders saw the college as a means of spreading a catholic and distinctly Scottish high churchmanship over Scotland and, potentially, further afield. Early on in the planning process Hope told Gladstone that the college would be a ‘channel through which a useful class of missionaries may be prepared for our Colonial Churches’,93 and in 1842 Gladstone drafted an address to the SPG that stated that it might use Trinity College as a means ‘to obtain an appropriate preparation for persons about to become missionaries of the Society’.94 Gladstone’s hopes of raising a colonial clergy at Glenalmond seem strange as they conflicted with the principal on which Glenalmond was founded: that countries should be served by their own native clergy. But they are understandable if we bear in mind Gladstone’s attachment to the Scottish office liturgy and his belief that men who would serve autonomous colonial dioceses were best educated in an independent Church in Britain.95 Hopes that Glenalmond would furnish both a native Scottish clerical workforce and a stream of high church colonial missionaries were not, for the most part, realised. A significant proportion of the early college intake were offspring of Scottish churchmen (there were six among the sixteen who entered in Trinity Term 1847), but only a small number of students went on to careers in the Episcopal Church: of the thirty-one future clergy among the pre-1860 intake, only thirteen were Scottishborn, and only eight of them would serve in Scotland.96 The college produced a stream of colonial military officers, colonial farmers and imperial administrators, but it only furnished two colonial clergy prior to 1860: William Skinner Wilson, who served in New South Wales from 1863, and Francis A. Gregory, an SPG missionary in Ceylon.97 Stronger links between Glenalmond and the colonies came later in the century: Bertram Hawker (1868–1952), appointed chaplain to the Bishop of Adelaide in 1895, had been educated at Glenalmond and Cambridge; David Sandford (1831–1906), Bishop of Tasmania from 1883 to 1888, was a Glenalmond alumni; and Alfred Barry (1826–1910), the third Bishop of Sydney, had been a sub-warden at Glenalmond between 1851 and 1854. Scotland’s Church – and the separate English Episcopal churches – therefore only made a modest material contribution to the expansion of the colonial Church. Nevertheless, colonial churchmen who were confronting the problem of disestablishment did look to the Episcopal [ 149 ]

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Church of Scotland for support and advice. The reason why John Strachan asked Bishop Russell of Glasgow to send him ‘some of the children of the good old Non-Jurants’ in 1842 was because Strachan felt that Episcopal clergy would help the Church negotiate the transition from establishment to voluntarism. Though Russell – an anti-Tractarian from the southern group of high churchmen – sent him only one, evangelical, recruit, it does seem that part of Strachan’s attraction to the Episcopal clergy lay in the fact that he saw them as furthering the high church revival. A month after contacting Russell, Strachan wrote to Bishop Skinner of Aberdeen that he wanted men who had ‘been nurtured in your communion’ because ‘they are generally unflinching in church principles’.98 Strachan’s correspondence may not have been successful – Skinner sent him a man named Laurie who was trying to atone for some previous misdemeanours – but his appeals tell us something about the rising importance of Scottish Episcopalianism in the post-establishment period.99 For high churchmen like Strachan, Scottish Episcopalianism – or, more specifically, its northern, non-juring, high church tradition – had a positive role to play to the revival and recasting of Anglicanism in the colonial world. Colonial clergymen were also drawn to Scottish Episcopalianism because they recognised that Scottish churchmen were tackling problems that they too would soon have to face. More specifically, Scotland’s Episcopal Church provided lessons on how a nonestablished church could deal with two conundrums: one was how an independent church could insist on loyalty to a common liturgy and a set of essential doctrines; the other was how bishops could discipline clergy or laity who failed to abide by these doctrines and who, as a result, were considered to be in breach of communion. Scotland’s Episcopal Church was interesting to colonial churchmen because its record in these areas was poor. The schisms that had led to the formation of the breakaway English Episcopal Church in the mid1840s was only partially healed in the 1880s. As Patricia Meldrum has shown, these Anglican disruptions came about because the dominant high church ethos of the Scottish Episcopal Church ruled out the possibility of compromise: while evangelicals felt they could not maintain their Protestant heritage in a Church that made the Scottish office its official liturgy (evangelicals claimed it went as far as teaching transubstantiation), the high church majority believed that a viable Church had to be able to enforce order, discipline and loyalty to 100 The Church could not prevent proscribed rituals and liturgies. evangelicals from going their own way (Patricia Meldrum has estimated that around thirteen per cent of Scotland’s Episcopal clergy had joined the breakaway Church by mid-century), but it did have more success [ 150 ]

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keeping Tractarians within the Episcopal fold. Partly this was because Tractarians had room to build their own enclaves in the Church (the diocese of Perth was a noted Tractarian centre); partly it was because the Church authorities chose to censure Tractarian troublemakers rather than convict them for heresy.101 There were colonial churchmen who kept a close eye on these events. In August 1849 Robert Gray of Cape Town was reading up on the case of Sir William Dunbar, a minister at St Paul’s chapel in Aberdeen who back in 1843 had been excommunicated by Bishop Skinner for refusing to use the Scottish communion office in his services.102 Gray’s interest in Dunbar presumably stemmed from the fallout which came with the resulting court case at Edinburgh’s Court of Session. In early 1849 the judges ruled that Skinner and the other Scottish bishops could not claim jurisdiction over churchmen who did not recognise their authority.103 Skinner told Gladstone the whole affair ‘must prove ruinous to our Scotch Episcopacy’ as the decision of the secular court had put ‘an end to the exercise of any ecclesiastical Discipline’.104 For Gray, the Dunbar case demonstrated that bishops outside England had to find a way to get the members of a Church to commit to both a set of principles and a system of ecclesiastical discipline. Gray also drew parallels between the Scottish schisms and his own difficulty in dealing with recalcitrant congregations at the Cape. In August 1849 Gray told Hawkins that if he did not gain control of ecclesiastical property the colony would see a repetition of the same kind of disruptions that had 105 In the event, Scottish ecclesiastical divided the Church in Scotland. history would be repeated in South Africa, as like their Scottish counterparts, South African evangelicals would respond to high church dominance by establishing a breakaway ‘Church of England in South Africa’ in 1870.106 In both cases Anglican evangelicals could not see how they could remain within a Church whose governing councils were dominated by an opposing Church party. Overall, Scottish Episcopalianism nourished the colonial churches with ideas and examples rather than personnel. This does not mean that the Episcopalian element should be overlooked in discussions of the diverse, and contested, nature of Anglicanism in the colonial world. The testimony of missionaries like Petrie in Upper Canada suggests that Scottish Episcopalianism did not, as one historian has suggested, simply blend into the wider Anglican Communion.107 High church colonial churchmen like Strachan were happy to receive Episcopalian clergy because they regarded Scotland’s Episcopal Church as a model of an independent high church institution. But if Strachan had been pressed on the value of Scottish Episcopalianism in the colonial context he would have probably [ 151 ]

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recognised that there were aspects of Scottish Episcopal culture that were best left in Scotland. It was unlikely, for instance, that anyone wanted to import the Scottish Church’s more extreme Tractarian elements. When Archdeacon Bethune journeyed to St John’s chapel in Aberdeen in July 1852 he found the services performed by the Tractarian Patrick Cheyne very high church and unlike anything he had seen in Canada. Bethune told Strachan that a ‘good deal of formality is used in the presenting and consecrating the elements’; he also commented on the priest’s turning away from the congregation, the cross on the altar, 108 and the stained glass. Strachan may have admired Scotland’s distinct non-juring tradition but he had no intention of making the controversial Scottish office the basis of Anglican faith in the Toronto diocese. He also recognised that the task of building a popular and broad-based Church in Canada did not leave any space for promoting a distinctively Scottish churchmanship or Scottish Church identity. Indeed, Strachan can be likened to the ‘Anglicising’ elements in the Episcopal Church who were working to bring Scotland and Scottish Anglicanism into closer communion with England and the English Church (significantly Strachan’s key contact in the Scottish Church, Bishop William Skinner of Aberdeen, promoted an Anglicising policy while at the same time 109 The British Church advocating the retention of the Scottish office). that Strachan was trying to build was, at root, an English institution that took the English 1662 Book of Common Prayer as its official liturgy. The Scottish office was never a plausible alternative: if the disruptions in Scotland taught anything, it was that popular and broad churches were those with rituals and liturgies that could be read and used in different ways by different kinds of Anglican. As Patricia Meldrum has pointed out, the Church of England’s prayer book did this; the Episcopal 110 Clergy who imported Church’s Catholic communion office did not. Scottish office prayer books into Canada were very much acting independently and without the support of the Church hierarchy.111

The Church of Ireland Recent doctoral research has broadened our understanding of the Church of Ireland’s relationship with empire. This work has shown how the development of Anglican colonial mission in Ireland was an offshoot of the debate about emigration that engaged all the major Christian denominations in the nineteenth century. The Irish Roman Catholic clergy were not the only ones to develop schemes for facilitating or limiting emigration from their parishes.112 The analysis of the evolution of Irish colonial mission offered below draws on this research, and while it does not claim to be an exhaustive survey of the Church of Ireland’s [ 152 ]

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response to emigration – the focus is very much on the Church’s institutional response as opposed to the emigration activities of individual clergy – it does use the manuscript archives of the main Anglican missionary societies to offer comments on why colonial mission took off when it did, the nature of the support base, the personnel involved, and the distinct quality of the Irish contribution to the expansion of the colonial Church. It also points to the importance of situating Irish colonial mission in its political context. The formation of Irish missionary societies from the mid-1820s through to the late 1830s took place against the backdrop of the efforts that Irish Protestant loyalists, both elite and plebeian, were making to mobilise Protestant forces against the threat posed by politicised Catholicism. The way in which colonial mission piggybacked on Protestant activism at home is another example of how colonial and metropolitan developments could be interlinked. The efflorescence of a range of voluntary religious societies was one of the key features of Ireland’s evangelical revival. The Bible, preaching and missionary societies that sprouted up in the first three decades of the nineteenth century were part of a far-reaching ‘crusade for moral and social reform’ that embraced both the conversion of the ‘heathen’ overseas and the reformation of Roman Catholics closer to home. Evangelical societies drew together evangelicals from various denominations and countries and helped give coherence and unity to a ‘broad church’ evangelicalism. These organisations presented major problems for the Church hierarchy. In a broad sense institutions like the Hibernian Bible Society and the Irish Society contributed to the strengthening of a revived Protestantism that lay, for the most part, outside formal institutional structures. Inter-denominational societies also threatened to blur all-important boundaries between denominations. Irish churchmen much preferred the old Anglican denominational societies like the SPG and SPCK: not only were these recognisably Anglican institutions, they were also bodies that they could control. The growth of the SPG presence in Ireland was therefore as much a response to Protestant evangelicalism as it was a reflection of a greater Irish interest in mission and the plight of Irish migrant 113 The only problem was that this attempt to communities overseas. impose hierarchical control through the revival of Anglican societies did not get very far. The SPG only had two district committees in the whole of Ireland before 1840 (one was in Dublin, the other was founded by Archdeacon Henry Cotton at Cashel in County Tipperary in 1826). For a time it looked as if William Magee, the combative Archbishop of Dublin, would make the establishment of SPG auxiliaries part of a broader Church reform project, but nothing concrete came of this early [ 153 ]

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enthusiasm.114 Indeed, in 1833 Archdeacon Cotton explained to the SPG that the limited funds donated by the sixteen Cashel subscribers were due to the ‘shattered fortunes’ of an Anglican laity who were trying to deal with financial repercussions of the ‘tithe war’ that was gripping the Irish countryside.115 In the 1840s SPG publicists tried to deal with the ‘preposterous prejudice’ towards the society by reassuring Irish donors that it was not – as many felt – the organ for a particular Church party.116 In six years eighteen district committees were established in eleven of the twelve Irish dioceses, with a further twenty-two parochial associations being set up. The spike in Irish interest in the SPG stemmed from increasing Protestant emigration, a rising awareness among churchmen that emigrants were still their concern, and a general sense that the Church could not leave settlers to fall into the hands of other denominations.117 A strong case can also be made for seeing the revival of the SPG in Ireland as an aspect of the stronger links that emerged between Irish and English high churchmen in the early Tractarian era (and which were still present after relations between Irish high churchmen and English Tractarians began to sour around 1840).118 Though the SPG attracted anti-Tractarians like Richard Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin, much of the energy for the revival of the SPG came from high churchmen sympathetic to the Oxford Movement: Ernest Hawkins travelled to Ireland in 1839 and 1848 and John Fuller Russell, who was a friend of Pusey’s, led an 1841 deputation.119 Further Tractarian support for the SPG came from the Todd brothers: James Henthorn, a Trinity College fellow who was widely regarded as the foremost ‘Puseyite’ in Ireland, was vice-president of the university auxiliary from 1844, and William Gowan, who later converted to Rome, was secretary of the Limerick diocesan branch while he was curate at Kilkeedy in the mid-1840s.120 Given all this high church involvement it is curious that the SPG laid down the firmest roots in Ulster – an area strongly associated with evangelical Protestantism. The diocesan auxiliary in the diocese of Down, Connor and Dromore was, for example, the third most profitable SPG branch in the early 1850s. A district committee and eleven parochial associations were established in the diocese of Armagh between 1840 and 1846, and in 1845 the area supplied £346 of the total £731 (around 47 per cent) raised for the SPG in Ireland in that year.121 The SPG’s strong showing in Armagh was partly down to the fact that the society could call on the support of Tractarian sympathisers such as the Irishman Lord John Beresford, Archbishop of Armagh from 1820 to 1862, and the Englishman James Edward Jackson, the Dean of Armagh from 1830 to 1841.122 The Ulster support is not particularly surprising [ 154 ]

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given that the area harboured a prosperous Protestant middle class that had long given support to Protestant missionary causes. But the growing strength of the SPG presence in the north of Ireland might also be taken as further evidence that churchmen were finding ways to channel evangelical enthusiasm through orthodox institutions.123 It is significant that even a noted evangelical firebrand like the Rev. William Mcllwaine of Belfast was willing to serve as the secretary of an SPG parochial association.124 The SPG adapted to Irish conditions in other ways. Historians have sometimes treated Ireland’s missionary societies as English institutions. Societies such as the London Hibernian Society (1806), the Hibernian Bible Society (1808) and the Irish Society were indeed either founded by Englishmen or received strong English backing. They have also been associated with a form of English cultural imperialism.125 The presence of English-born clergy like Beresford, Whately, Cotton and Jackson in the SPG in Ireland might give the impression that the society was indeed another English import. But to cast the SPG in Ireland in such terms would be to underestimate both the level of indigenous involvement and the extent to which the society also served to transmit some of the distinctive strains in Irish Protestantism overseas. All but one of the secretaries of the parochial associations in the Armagh diocese in 1846 126 had been born in Ireland and educated at Trinity. We know that some of the more prominent men maintained a distinct Irish identity. For example, W. G. Todd, the high church secretary of the Limerick diocesan branch, authored several works that argued for the existence of an independent and distinct Irish Church with an ancient Celtic lineage that stretched back to St Columba.127 The SPG also took on an Irish cast in the sense that it recruited men who would go on to spread an Irish evangelical culture across the colonial world. Though nineteenth-century Irish evangelicalism has tended to be cast in broad terms as defensive, confrontational, Calvinistic and anti-Catholic, there were various strands within evangelical Protestantism, and not all Irish evangelicals fit the stereotype of Liverpool’s Hugh McNeile.128 One SPG recruit who went on to play a prominent role in the colonial world’s ‘Protestant crusade’ was Stephen Lett, a member of a notable Anglo-Irish family who was posted to Toronto in 1848. Lett would later serve as grand chaplain of the Orange Order in Canada West in the 1850s. It is also noteworthy that the year after Lett’s appointment the SPG also sent out John Travers Lewis, the future Bishop of Ontario. Lewis had served the Church in northern Ireland and he was a member of the Orange Order, but in contrast to Lett, Lewis was a high churchman; indeed, according to his modern biographer, Lewis helped to carry a distinct Irish high [ 155 ]

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churchmanship to western Ontario (Lewis’s tutor at Trinity College Dublin, Charles Elrington, had written a biography of James Ussher, the seventeenth-century Archbishop of Armagh, that purported to show that Ussher was a bearer of a native high church tradition).129 The suggestion from all this is that the SPG in Ireland was a different beast to its English sister society. Irish auxiliaries funnelled distinctively Irish recruits to the parent society and to the colonial Church more widely. They were also independent entities whose growth was linked to a series of factors that were native to Ireland. Here, as elsewhere, it is the independence of Irish churchmen, and not their reliance on English ideas and institutions, that is evident.130 The SPG’s recruitment activities in Ireland in the 1840s clearly jarred with the hostile attitude that many of its senior administrators held towards Irish evangelicals. But it also showed that the SPG represented the nation’s diverse religious culture and not the interests of a small group of English high churchmen. We should not, however, overestimate the scale of this SPG revival; indeed, high churchmen enjoyed about as much success in entrenching the SPG in Ireland as they did in converting the Church of Ireland to Tractarian principles. The unprofitable week-long trip to Ireland that Archdeacon Bethune took in August 1852 in aid of Trinity College Toronto (the only notably churchman he met was Archdeacon Stokes of Armagh and he could raise no collections at all in ‘low church’ Belfast), is a useful illustration of 131 high church difficulties. In the early period the SPG suffered because of its association with the pre-reform era Ascendancy interest. The subscribers of the Cashel branch in 1833 were, for instance, dominated by the members or dependants of the Pennefather family, a familial network that exercised the kind of control over the unreformed town corporation enjoyed by the Protestant gentry elsewhere in Ireland.132 Churchmen who were worried about stirring up unnecessary conflict also tended to back away from an institution that always struggled to rid itself of the Tractarian taint. J. H. Todd worried that if the society were tolerated at Trinity then, as he put it, ‘we cannot with good grace object to Irish Societies’ and evangelical mission societies.133 Samuel Hinds’s claim that the famine had damaged SPG fortunes carried weight, but it is also revealing that when rural deans in Ulster warned against an SPG ‘county meeting’ in the famine year of 1848 (or ‘our weakness will be exposed’), they also noted that such a meeting would be inadvisable ‘at the best of times’.134 Though there were signs of popular support in parts of Ireland – in 1856 the Powerscourt association near Dublin included twenty-four individuals who donated less than two shillings – elsewhere we find SPG organisers struggling to collect anything after services and relying entirely on local gentry for support. Clearly, then, there was a [ 156 ]

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mismatch between the SPG’s widespread recruitment of Irish clergy and its limited popular support.135

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Irish evangelical mission It is hard to separate Irish colonial mission from its metropolitan context. As we have seen, the revival – if we can call it that – of the SPG formed part of the broader orthodox response to the individualism and voluntarism of evangelical Protestantism. Colonial mission was also connected to metropolitan developments in the sense that many of those who sponsored mission to settlers were also involved in various social and religious reform movements in Ireland itself. Elias Thackeray – a relative of the novelist – was rector of Dundalk, secretary to the local SPG parochial association and also a prominent player in the reform of the Irish charter schools, institutions that were set up to give free education to Roman Catholic children on the proviso that they be converted to 136 Protestantism. The interconnections between colonial mission and the metropolitan civilising mission were particularly evident in the evangelical societies like the CCS and the UCCS, both of which put down roots in Ireland. Again, there was significant crossover in personnel between colonial mission societies and institutions – such as the Church Home Mission and the Islands and Coast Society – that pursued the conversion of Ireland’s Catholic population. But there was also a sense in which the Irish evangelicals who backed the ‘Protestant crusade’ were coming to see emigration, colonial mission and conversion of Catholics as 137 interconnected and part of a single war on Catholicism. As Sarah Roddy has argued, evangelicals in Ireland at mid-century believed their work had an important international dimension: their mission, as they saw it, was to feed the colonies with Catholics who were either already converted or were ripe for conversion.138 Home support for colonial mission was, therefore, driven in large part by the belief that colonial societies were continuing work that had begun in Ireland. Though the CCS’s place in the anti-Catholic ferment has been noted,139 the overlap in the support bases between conversion work in Britain and the allied work of strengthening Anglicanism overseas has not been fully explored. The CCS built on the support bases that one of its forerunners, the Western Australia CMS had built at Dublin, Belfast, Londonderry and Wicklow.140 A CCS deputation to England, Ireland and Scotland in 1839 contrasted its success at Dublin with the poor reception it received at Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow.141 By the mid-1840s the CCS was maintaining associations at Dublin and Rosscarbery, with periodic collections at Cork, Limerick, Bandon, Belfast, Clonmell in South Tipperary, and Ennis in County Clare.142 The UCCS was a much smaller [ 157 ]

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organisation and its administrative presence never extended beyond Dublin and Bandon. Nevertheless, the society’s manuscript records suggest that Irish clergy responded to appeals more positively than their English counterparts.143 Though the CCS’s dependency on England would become more apparent in the 1850s (it made collections in 131 places in England and Wales in 1855), statistics bear out the importance of Ireland to both organisations in the 1840s: in 1845, 1846 and 1847 the amounts raised by the CCS’s Dublin association (£240, £150 and £216 respectively) were only bettered by the North London Ladies’ collections. Only the Cheltenham branch of the UCCS had more subscribers than the Bandon auxiliary.144 There were extensive crossovers in personnel between the evangelical colonial mission societies and metropolitan Protestant agencies such as the British Reformation Society (1827), the Protestant Association (1835), the Evangelical Alliance (1845) and the Irish Church Missions (1847). The bulk of support for the CCS and UCCS came from the Conservative MPs, peers, landowners and professionals who backed the Reformation Society’s proselytising efforts among Catholics and who also gave support to the Protestant Association and the political defence of the Irish Church and Protestant constitution. Robert Jocelyn (the 3rd Earl of Roden), a UCCS vice-president, held vice-presidencies at the Protestant Association and the Reformation Society. He was also president of the Irish Protestant Conservative Society. The 3rd Earl of Mountcashel – vice president of both the CCS and UCCS – was a member of the Reformation Society and the Protestant Association, while the Lords Barham and Bexley were vice presidents of both the UCCS and the Reformation Society. In 1839 the CCS committee included Captain Vernon Harcourt, the son of the Archbishop of York and prominent Reformation Society figure, and John Hardy, the Whig MP for Bradford who regularly attended Protestant Association gatherings. The twenty-one members of the UCCS’s 1839 committee included five individuals who attended Protestant Association meetings in some capacity (either as vice-presidents, committee members or as attendees), and four of the committee appear as Reformation Society 145 Lower down, the names of twenty-nine UCCS subscribers in 1843. subscribers appear in the list of Reformation Society subscribers in 1843. Richard Murray, the Dean of Ardagh from 1829 to 1854, was a vicepresident of the UCCS and is listed as a director of the Islands and Coast Society in 1843.146 The links in personnel between the Islands and Coast Society and the CCS were, on the whole, limited, though the family of Hamilton Verschoyle, Ireland’s leading CCS representative, did make donations to the society in the mid-1850s. The wife of John Gregg, who organised CCS donations in his Holy Trinity church and lectured for the [ 158 ]

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Home Mission, was also an ICS donor.147 In 1851 the Bandon branch of the Islands and Coast Society included the names of ten individuals who can also be found on the list of subscribers in the UCCS’s second report.148 In these ways evangelical colonial mission fed off the metropolitan crusade against popery. The other important context to consider when we explain the growth of Irish evangelical support for colonial mission is political. For conservatives in both England and Ireland, the years after the late 1820s were a period of adaptation as Protestants came to terms with the altered political landscape left behind by constitutional reform and the politicisation of Irish Catholicism. Some, like Benjamin Cronyn, responded to Catholic emancipation and Irish Church reform by abandoning Ireland altogether.149 Others stayed put and tried to reconstruct Protestantism as both a political and missionary force. Politically, this rejuvenation embraced new initiatives, such as the conservative associations that organised the registration of voters, and traditional forms of loyalist expression such as the Orange Order (the Order was closed down in 1825 but reappeared in 1828 before again being prohibited in 1835). The place that mission to settlers occupied in the conservative and Protestant response to the political changes of the 1820s and 1830s has largely gone unnoticed. An analysis of the support bases of the CCS and the UCCS provides further evidence that support for colonial mission was, in large part, propelled by the defence of Protestantism at home. The Anglo-Irish Bernard family of Castle Bernard near Bandon is a good example of how missions to settlers connected with the reinvention 150 and reorganisation of the Irish Protestant political cause. The Bernard family was instrumental in making Cork a focal point of CCS and UCCS activity in southern Ireland. The nearby CCS auxiliary at Rosscarbery arose through the local influence of Mary Susan Albinia Bernard, Countess of Bandon (she was the daughter of Charles Brodrick, former Archbishop of Cashel, and Mary Woodward, daughter of Richard Woodward, former Bishop of Cloyne and populariser of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ revival of the 1790s). The Countess and her husband, James Bernard, the 2nd Earl of Bandon – a characteristic ‘Bible gentry’ figure – also helped form the 151 UCCS’s Bandon branch. Seven members of the family subscribed to the UCCS, and another, Charles Bernard, son of the 2nd Earl, offered himself as a missionary to the society.152 In addition to lending support for colonial mission, the Bernard family also figured in the various political and religious institutions set up by Protestants to deal with the manyheaded hydra of O’Connell, emancipation and political reform.153 The 2nd Earl supported the Brunswick Club movement in 1828–29 and also helped to found branches of the Protestant Conservative Society – an organisation [ 159 ]

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designed to register and mobilise Protestant voters – at Dublin in 1831 and Cork in 1835.154 Francis, his son, was vice-president of the UCCS and the Protestant Association, and later, in 1851, Francis appears as a member of the Irish Church Missions. These synergies between Irish colonial mission and the rejuvenation and reorganisation of Irish Toryism and Protestantism reached down to the local level; indeed, the picture at Bandon is of a colonial mission movement driven by the recasting of Irish Protestantism and conservatism. Bandon’s ultra-Protestantism and ‘folk Orangeism’ explains why it was such a prominent UCCS supporter (the town furnished sixty-seven UCCS subscribers and donors and produced one 155 In contrast to their counterparts missionary, Bold Cudmore Hill). elsewhere, Bandon’s Protestant community was able to strengthen its position in the 1830s: parliamentary reform enfranchised Protestant voters and new political initiatives like the Bandon Conservative Society (established 1841) and the Protestant Association (1844) gave conservatism form and coherence.156 The UCCS’s links to the Protestant Association and Protestant activism more broadly shows that colonial mission formed an element in the rejuvenation of Protestantism in Bandon and County Cork. In 1839, UCCS collections in the town were organised by the daughters of the town provost and secretary of the Bandon branch of the Protestant Association, John Wheeler (revealingly, these women also organised collections for home mission through the Islands and Coast Society in the later 1840s and 50s).157 The clergy subscribers were all present at the creation of the Bandon Protestant Conservative Society in 1841, and one, Horace Newman, had been involved in the ‘second reformation’ from the moment Archbishop Magee coined the term in his incendiary charge of 1822. Newman later served as a member of the Cork Brunswick Club (in 1834 Newman had organised petitions from the Bandon area in opposition to the government’s reform of the Church of Ireland).158 Members of Bandon’s Ford, Tresilian, Doherty, Moriarty, Browne, Montjoy, Belcher and Wheeler families all appear among the lists of UCCS, Conservative Society and Brunswick Club supporters. That many were women shows that while membership of the Orange Order, Masonic Lodge, Conservative Society and Brunswick Club was closed to them, colonial mission offered a channel through which such women could help to export the reformation and Protestant impulse overseas.159 Colonial mission can, therefore, be seen as one of a medley of initiatives that Irish Protestants of various denominations and classes introduced in order to revive Protestant fortunes in the wake of the Catholic political mobilisation of the late 1820s. As in England, support for overseas mission in Ireland was bound up with the defence and reform [ 160 ]

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of the Church in Britain. This Protestant cause was, as recent research has made clear, incoherent, unfocused and characterised by tensions between elite, middle-class and plebeian Protestants – each transmitted differing loyalist messages through various media and institutions.160 Irish colonial mission reflected these fault-lines. The minimal overlap in the membership of the SPG and the evangelical societies – at least at the level of the high command – not only points to familiar divisions between high churchmen and evangelicals but also to the fact that high churchmen were a distinct strand or sub-group in the Protestant cause.161 Furthermore, the largely middle-class and professional character of the Bandon subscription list suggests that if colonial mission was an aspect of the rejuvenation of embattled Irish Protestantism, then it was an expression of a respectable, middle-class Protestant loyalism that sat awkwardly with plebeian and Orange forms of Irish Protestantism.

Conclusion All the metropolitan branches of the Anglican Church had laymen and clergy who maintained a remarkably imperial outlook. C. H. Minchin of Dublin was an otherwise obscure clergyman who served as a connecting link between the colonial and metropolitan Church and between the Protestant crusade in Britain and the extension of the Church overseas. In addition to contributing to various metropolitan Protestant causes, Minchin sourced clergy for the UCCS, acted as a metropolitan agent for Irish colonial clergy and also facilitated correspondence between clergy who were about to leave Ireland with those who were already in the colonies. In the 1820s he had also tried to arrange the chain migration of some of his parishioners to the Cape Colony.162 Minchin and others were the nodes around which the metropolitan support for colonial Church expansion developed. The task of keeping overseas dioceses nourished with men and materiel from home was, however, a difficult one. As Hilary Carey points out, settler mission always struggled to match the appeal of conventional, colonial mission. Churchmen wanted to link the extension of the Church overseas with the revival of the Church in Britain, but it was increasingly clear that the Church did not have the financial resources or manpower to achieve a truly national coverage, let alone an imperial one. Irish high churchmen had a particularly hard time cultivating a metropolitan support base. Clergy were surprised that an island that had been fundamentally shaped by emigration could show 163 Scottish and Irish such little interest in missions to settlers. Anglicans, it seems, were too bound up in their own mission schemes to [ 161 ]

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commit substantial financial backing to the colonial Church; indeed, in many ways it was Ireland rather than the colonies that became the focus of missionary concern around 1850. In the early 1850s colonial auxiliaries of the Irish Church Missions began to appear in Canada and colonial clergy started to make trips to the scenes of missionary activity in Ireland.164 Another problem was that there was little sign that domestic support could be coordinated or brought under a single bureaucratic structure. Those who hoped to build a unified Anglican Church overseas were in many ways fighting a losing battle: a range of groups and parties played a role in providing men and money for the overseas mission effort, and each was able to leave a distinct imprint on an increasingly kaleidoscopic colonial Church. The evangelical societies that took root in Ireland were, for example, one of the springs from which a distinct Irish Protestantism flowed to the colonies. This is not to say that the primary role of the UCCS and CCS missionaries was to continue the metropolitan Protestant crusade overseas. UCCS missionaries such as Bandon’s Bold Cudmore Hill worked in areas of Protestant settlement and were primarily interested in bringing nonconformists back within the Anglican fold. But the UCCS did still send out clergy who went on to serve as leaders of Irish Protestant communities in Canada. Anglican mobilisation in Ireland promised a genuinely national Church in the colonies; what high churchmen found was that Irish evangelicals contributed the principles and personnel that would challenge the various educational and diocesan projects that the high church network were trying to promote in the colonies.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

Manners, The Church of England in the Colonies, p. 31. Stanley, ‘Home support’. f. Bollen, ‘English Christianity and the Australian colonies, 1788–1860’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 28:1 (1977), pp. 361–85. Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire. Carey’s God’s Empire, part II. A. Twells, The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: The ‘Heathen’ at Home and Overseas (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009); S. Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); S. Thome, ‘Religion and empire at home’, in C. Hall and S. Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 146. Burns, Diocesan Revival, esp. ch. 5. Wolffe, Protestant Crusade.

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

An example of the Irish contribution is B. Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Roddy, ‘The churches and emigration’, ch. 3. A. Lester, ‘British settler discourse and the circuits of empire’, History Workshop Journal, 54:1 (2002), pp. 25–7; Thorne, Congregational Missions, pp. 6–7. Carey, God’s Empire, pp. 91–7; A. Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 152–7. S. Potter, ‘Webs, networks and systems: globalization and the mass media in nineteenth and twentieth-century British Empire’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), pp. 621–46. Stanley, ‘Home support’, ch. 5. RHL, H94, R. W. Bosanquet to A. M. Campbell, 24 September 1835, fo. 26. RHL, H94, W. Dansey to A. M. Campbell, 14 August 1839, fo. 84; ibid., Charles Smith Royds to Campbell, 17 September 1839, fo. 85; ibid., E.. Bickersteth to Campbell, 25 February 1839, fo. 85. Stanley, ‘Home support’, ch. 2. Carey, God’s Empire, p. 95. C. Pascoe, Classified Digest of the Records of the SPG, 1701–1892 (London: SPG, 1893), p. 814. J. Hardwick, ‘Early Victorian periodicals and the colonial Church of England’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 39:1/2 (2012), pp. 255–84. AO, John S. and Robert D. Cartwright Correspondence, F24, R. D. Cartwright to J. S. Cartwright, 28 April-1838. Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 225. A Letter to a Friend on the Subject of Forming Parochial Associations in Aid of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (London: R. Clay, 1846), p. 5. Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 180; Pascoe, Classified Digest, p. 831 for the figures. RHL, X-289, Stow District Committee Minutes, Entry for 25 August 1841. RHL, H93, ‘Report on the periodical publications of the S.P.G.’ (1854). Carey, God’s Empire, p. 81. J. Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 118, 120, 129; A. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Based on an analysis of the reports in: Essex Standard, 26 July 1839, 2 August 1839 and 15 May 1840; Derby Mercury, 1 April 1840. Strong finds this idea in eighteenth-century appeals: Anglicanism and the British Empire, pp. 71–8. E. Hawkins, Annals of the Diocese of Toronto (London: SPCK, 1848), pp. 220–1. Manners, The Church of England in the Colonies, pp. 31, 33. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, p. 146. Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 234. Essex Standard, 22 September 1858. Cox, British Missionary Enterprise, p. 131. UYL, C/AFS/3, E. Glover to Ernest Hawkins, 15 January 1858, fos 217–18. RHL, C/CAN/QUE/10/451, Crosbie Morgell to SPG, 3 January 1827, fo. 32 and ibid., Leeds to Anthony Hamilton, 5 February 1828, fo. 33. The Church in the Colonies. Dioceses of Toronto, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. 1842, 1843. Vol. I (London: R. Clay, 1846), p. iii. Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, pp. 93–5. Colonial Church Record, 1:6 (January, 1839), p. 85. See the letter of a ‘Cape Colonist’, British Banner, 20 June 1849, p. 388. Cox, British Missionary Enterprise, p. 96.

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47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57

58

59 60

61 62

63

64

65 66 67 68 69 70

Stanley, ‘Home support’, pp. 76–91. Wilberforce quoted on p. 89. Pascoe, Classified Digest, p. 827. Burns, Diocesan Revival, esp. ch. 5. RHL, X-1339, ‘SPG District Committees and Irish Auxiliary’, Abraham Horsfall to the SPG, 29 March 1820. Worse still, their donations were stolen in the post. Porter, Religion versus Empire?, p. 158. Ibid., p. 91. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G, p. 827. RHL, H94, Wilberforce to Hawkins, 12 November 1839, fo. 66; Stanley, ‘Home support’, pp. 88–90. Burns, ‘Otter, William (1768–1840)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 42 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 102–3; Hampshire Advertiser, 17 February 1838, p. 2. Burns, Diocesan Revival, pp. 119–23. RHL, H94, ‘The humble petition of A.B. and C.D. to the incorporated body of the SPG’, February 1827, fo. 15. Ibid., Manning to Hawkins, 13 November 1839. Bums, ‘A Hanoverian Legacy?’, pp. 267–70. RHL, X-1340, ‘Papers regarding S.P.G.’s efforts to increase subscriptions and donations’, Dansey to Hawkins, 2 November 1839; Dansey, Horae Decanicae Rurales, vol. 2 (London: J. Bohn, 1835), p. 117. Burns, Diocesan Revival, pp. 125, 128. One clergyman in Wales thought that a ‘great advantage may result to the people themselves from a spread of true Church feeling’ by donating to missions: RHL, H93, Alfred Ollivant to SPG, 2 October 1839. B. Stanley, ‘“Commerce and Christianity”: providence theory, the missionary movement, and the imperialism of free trade, 1842–1860’, The Historical Journal, 26:1 (1983), p. 75. RHL, H94, Wilberforce, ‘Draft letter from the SPG to parochial clergy’ (1839), fo. 69; ibid., Dansey to Hawkins, 14 August 1839, fo. 84. John Scobell, the rural dean of Lewes, conducted such fund-raising techniques in his deanery: see the minutes of the chapter meeting on 30 November 1849, West Sussex Record Office, Lewes Rural Deanery Minutes, Ep 1/91/14/1/1. The Oxford Diocesan Calendar and Clergy List, for the Year of Our Lord 1859 (Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1859), p. 82. Arthur Ashwell, Life of Samuel Wilberforce, vol. I (London: Murray, 1880), pp. 283–4, 342. Diocesan societies at home could also promote a sense of attachment to a diocese or Church: Burns, Diocesan Revival, p. 119. See the bishop’s instructions that were read out at the meeting of the Wallingford ruridecanal chapter on 25 May 1871: Berkshire Record Office, Wallingford Rural Chapter Minutes, D/RDW/1/1. The SPG was mentioned once in the ruridecanal chapter meetings at Lewes in the early 1840s: see entry for 1 December 1840, East Sussex Record Office, Lewes Rural Deanery Minutes 1840–48, SHR3699. West Sussex Record Office, Lewes Rural Deanery Minute Books, Ep 1/91/14/1/1, minutes for 30 November 1849. Missionary Register (August, 1819), p. 356. Burns, Diocesan Revival, p. 95. RHL, X-1340, R. I. Wilberforce to Hawkins, 2 October 1839. Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 244; RHL, H94, Rev. Mclver to Hawkins, 17 February 1840, fo. 29. RHL, X-1340, S. Best to the Bishop of Nova Scotia, 24 June 1839; ibid., H94, Best to Hawkins, 8 November 1839, fo. 85; Best and Mclver are mentioned by Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 91.

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74

75

76

77 78

79 80 81

82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95

RHL, X-1340, R. I. Wilberforce to Hawkins, 2 October 1839. Ashwell, Life of Wilberforce, I, p. 110. For Bethune’s tour, see his letters to Strachan from the summer of 1852: AO, SP, F983–1, Reels 6 and 7. This section does not comment on the Welsh contribution. While the SPG did at various times seek to publicise its work in Wales, Welsh Anglicans do not appear to have left an distinctive imprint on the colonial Church. For A. M. Campbell’s tour of Wales for the SPG in 1839, see RHL, X-1340, Campbell to Hawkins, 1 September 1839, and 30 September 1839. Demands for Welsh-language SPG publicity, such as that made by R. Briscoe of Denbigh to J. C. Powell, on 9 October 1838 (RHL, H94, fo. 152), were not answered until 1852. D. Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 99; R. Strong, Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Reponses to a Modernizing Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 15. P. Doll, ‘American high churchmanship and the establishment of the first colonial episcopate in the Church of England: Nova Scotia, 1787’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43:1 (1992), pp. 50–1; Nockles, ‘Our Brethren of the North’, p. 658. RHL, C/CAN/TOR/5/536, George Petrie to John William Ferguson, 16 November 1843, fo. 2. BL, GP, Add. 44154, William Forbes to Gladstone, 1 March 1852, fo. 392. For Forbes’s defence of the Scottish Church’s independent identity and liturgy, see Strong, Episcopalianism, pp. 306–7. Report of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, for the Year 1846 (London: R. Clay, 1846), p. 24. D. Bertie, Scottish Episcopal Clergy 1689–2000 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Ltd, 2000), p. 663. Scottish Episcopalians in India donated money to the Episcopal Church Society in the early 1840s: J. P. Lawson, History of the Scottish Episcopal Church from the Revolution to the Present Time (Edinburgh: Gallie and Bayley, 1843), p. 445. Strong, Episcopalianism, p. 218. Fahey, In His Name, pp. 269, 287, n. 129; AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839– 43, Strachan to C. B. Gribble, fo. 194. For St Jude’s separation, see P. Meldrum, ‘Evangelical Episcopalians in nineteenthcentury Scotland’ (PhD thesis, University of Stirling, 2004), pp. 330–5; C. B. Gribble, The Mistake Corrected: A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Champneys, Head Master of the Collegiate School, Glasgow (Glasgow: David Bryce, 1848), pp. 15, 18–19. Strong, Episcopalianism, p. 299. Ibid., pp. 218, 221–2. Nockles, ‘Our Brethren of the North’, p. 663. Strong, Episcopalianism, p. 18. Ibid., pp. 660–4; R. Strong, ‘High churchmen and Anglo-Catholics: William Gladstone and the Eucharistie controversy in the Scottish Episcopal Church, 1856–60’, Journal of Religious History, 20:2 (1996), p. 177. ‘The Scottish Episcopal Church, and the missions of the English Church in foreign lands’, CCC, 4 (May, 1851), pp. 422–7. Nockles, ‘Our Brethren of the North’, p. 677. Strong, Episcopalianism, pp. 254–6. BL, GP, Add. 44214, Hope to Gladstone, 3 August 1841, fo. 147; ibid., Gladstone to Hope, 6 August 1841, fo. 150. Ibid., Gladstone to Hope, 27 January 1842, fos 216–17. S. Brown, ‘Gladstone, Chalmers and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland’, in D. Bebbington and R. Swift (eds), Gladstone Centenary Essays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 22. Gladstone told Bishop Skinner of Aberdeen that

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96 97 98

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99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119 120

121 122

123 124 125 126 127

Scotland had to have its own Scottish clergy: BL, GP, Add. 44300, Bishop Skinner of Aberdeen to Gladstone, 25 November 1845, fos 168–70. The Glenalmond Register: A Record of All Those Who Have Entered Trinity College Glenalmond 1847–1929 (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1929), pp. 1–35. Glenalmond Register, pp. 18, 25. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–43, Strachan to Bishop Russell of Glasgow and Galloway, 23 April 1841, fo. 108; ibid., Strachan to Skinner, 21 May 1842, fo. 180. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–43, Strachan to Skinner, 24 January 1843, fo. 223. Meldrum, ‘Evangelical Episcopalians’, pp. 311, 271–7. Most famously in the ‘Eucharist Controversy’ involving Bishop Alexander Forbes of Brechin: Strong, Episcopalianism, p. 28. Gray, The Life of Robert Gray, I, p. 250. Meldrum, ‘Evangelical Episcopalians’, p. 367. BL, GP, Add. 44300, Skinner to Gladstone, 9 March 1849, fo. 172. UYL, C/AFS/3, Gray to Hawkins, 9 August 1849, fos 360–1. Comparisons between the English Episcopal Church and the Church of England in South Africa are made by Meldrum in ‘Evangelical Episcopalians’, p. 419. J. MacKenzie with N. R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 174. AO, SP, Reel 7, A. N. Bethune to Strachan, 1 September 1852, fo. 8. Strong, Episcopalianism, pp. 293–4; Nockles, ‘Our Brethren of the North’, p. 665; Meldrum, ‘Evangelical Episcopalians’, pp. 278–9. The UCCS missionary George Petrie asked his Edinburgh Episcopalian contacts to send him Scottish prayer books: RHL, C/CAN/TOR/5/536, George Petrie to John William Ferguson, 16 November 1843, fo. 2. Roddy, ‘The churches and emigration’, p. xiii. Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, pp. 47, 61, 66–7. RHL, X-1339, ‘Memorandum on the request of William Magee asking for papers from the SPG, 4 January 1824’. RHL, H94, Cotton to W. A. Lendon, 18 September 1833, fo. 10; A. Acheson, A History of the Church of Ireland 1691–1996 (Dublin: Columba Press, 1997), p. 142. S. Hinds, The Speech of the Rev. Dr Hinds, At a Meeting of the Dublin University Branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 13th December, 1846 (Dublin, Charles, 1850), pp. 4–5. For the revival of the SPG, see Roddy, ‘The churches and emigration’, pp. 97–8, 122–3, 134–6. Ibid., ch. 1. Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant sect?’, pp. 466–71, 484–7. RHL, X-1340, J. Russell to Hawkins, 21 August 1840. H. White, Children of St. Columba: A Sketch of the History, At Home and Abroad, of the Irish Auxiliary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (Dublin: Irish Auxiliary of the SPG, 1914), p. 54. Report of the SPG, for the year 1846, p. 24. Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant sect?’, p. 462; J. B. Leslie, Armagh Clergy and Parishes (Dundalk: William Tempest, 1911), pp. 25–6. For Jackson’s SPG involvement, see RHL, H94, J. E. Jackson to Campbell, 19 December 1839, fo. 88. Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, pp. 59, 69. Report of the SPG, for the year 1846, pp. 127–41; Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, p. 122. Ibid., p. 60. Leslie, Armagh Clergy, pp. 63, 68, 77, 174, 201, 230, 269, 282, 332 and 436. Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant sect?’, pp. 474, 492.

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133 134

135

136 137 138

139 140 141 142 143 144

145 146 147

148 149 150 151 152 153

Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, p. xiii. Schurman, A Bishop and His People. Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant sect?’, pp. 487–8. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 7, Bethune to Strachan, 1 September 1852, fos 12–15. Names of subscribers are listed in Cotton to Lendon, 18 September 1833, RHL, H94, fo. 10; for the Pennefathers, see P. Salmon, ‘Pennefather, Matthew (1784–1858) ‘, in D. R. Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820–1832, online edition (last accessed 27 May 2013). TCD, Correspondence of J. H. Todd, MS 2214, J. H. Todd to Charles Elrington, n.d., fo. 209. Samuel Hinds, Speech, etc., Delivered at a Meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Held in Dublin in the Autumn of 1847 (Dublin: Charles, 1849), p. 4. A. Adams told Elias Thackeray on the 12 September 1848 that at Collon in the diocese of Armagh there were ‘but two in addition to myself’ who would give support: TCD, Elias Thackeray Papers, MS 5856–7/2/17, fo. 4. Report of the Dublin and Kildare Diocesan Auxiliary to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. For the Year 1856 (Dublin: SPG, 1857), p. 13. For limited support, see John Monsell to Mr Dickenson, 3 September 1862, at Ballykilcavan, near Stradbally in Queen’s County, TCD, Misc. Box 5, 211, MS 7398/la. Thackeray’s involvement is detailed throughout K. Milne, The Irish Charter Schools, 1730–1830 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997). Statistics of Popery in Great Britain and the Colonies (London: James Fraser, 1839). Roddy, ‘“The battlefield against popery for Britain, America and all the world”: Evangelicals, Catholics and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland’, unpublished paper delivered at the ‘Anti-Catholicism and the British world’ seminar at Northumbria University, September 2011. Carey, God’s Empire, p. 161. First Report of the Australian Church Missionary Society (London, 1835), p. 4. LMA, Commonwealth and Continental Church Society Records, Committee Minute Book 1839–42, CLC/005/MS 15,673, fo. 7. The Ninth Report of the Colonial Church Society (London, 1845), pp. 70–1. RHL, C/CAN/GEN/7, R. H. Ryland to the UCCS, 18 March 1841, and Charles Lindsay to UCCS, 3 February 1841. Ninth Report of the Colonial Church Society, p. 76; The Tenth Report of the CCS (London, 1846), p. 83; The Eleventh Report of the CCS (London, 1847), p. 80; Second Report of the UCCS, pp. 34–7; The Annual Report of the CCS, For the year 1854–55 (London, 1855), pp. 157–71. Sixteenth Annual Report of the British Society for Promoting the Religious Principles of the Reformation (London, 1843), pp. 28–45. Yearly Statement of Missionary Progress in Irish Islands, 1843 (Dublin: Goodwin, Son and Nethercott, 1844); Second Report of the UCCS, p. iii. Twenty-First Report of the Islands and Coast Society (Dublin: Goodwin, Son and Nethercott, 1856), pp. 54, 56; The Annual Report of the CCS, for the year 1866–56 (London, 1856), p. 189. Yearly Statement of the Missionary Progress of the Islands and Coast Society, no. XVI (Dublin: Goodwin, Son and Nethercott, 1851). A. Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland, 1789–1829 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), p. 262, notes that this was a common course of action. A. Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707–2007 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 285. Ninth Report of the CCS (London, 1845), pp. 65–73; Second Report of the UCCS, pp. 36–7. RHL, C/CAN/GEN/7/3, Charles Bernard to the UCCS, 14 May 1837. Jackson, The Two Unions, p. 284.

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD 154 ‘Bernard, James (1785–1856)’, Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament, online edition (last accessed 27 May 2013). 155 Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland, pp. 139–40. 156 I. d’Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork, 1812–1844 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1980), pp. 163, 173, 202–4, 206, 232. 157 ‘Protestantism in Ireland’, Protestant Magazine, 1 January 1844. For evidence of the Wheelers collecting for the ICS, see the Yearly Statement of the Missionary Progress of the Islands and Coast Society, no. XVI, p. xvii. 158 He spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Cork branch in 1828: A Report of the Proceedings at a Meeting of the Cork Reformation Society (Cork: Purcell & Son, 1828). See TCD, Correspondence of Bishop John Jebb 1795–1833, MS 6396, H. Newman to Jebb, 1 December 1822, fo. 159, in which Newman said he was ‘greatly pleased’ with Magee’s 1822 charge. National Library of Ireland, Manuscripts Department, Farnham Papers, MS 18,612, Newman to Lord Farnham, 26 June 1834, fo. 20. 159 Forty-seven of the sixty individuals listed in 1839 were females: Second Report of the UCCS, pp. 36–8; Cork Constitution, 24 January 1829; ibid., 9 October 1841. 160 Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland. 161 Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant sect?’, p. 467; Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland, pp. 238–9, 243–5, 261. 162 RHL, X-156, UCCS to Minchin, 21 December 1839, fo. 13; RHL, C/CAN/QUE/12/477, John Rothwell to Minchin, 22 March 1836, fo. 178; C/CAN/QUE/13/486, Richard Flood to Minchin, 9 February 1836, fo. 33; Theal, Records of the Cape Colony, XXXIII, Minchin to Robert Wilmot-Horton, 14 September 1827, p. 438. 163 RHL, H94, J.W. Stokes to Hawkins, 4 September 1839, fo. 88. 164 Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, p. 169.

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CHAPTER FIVE

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Imperial ecclesiastical networks

In November 1831 Bishop John Inglis of Nova Scotia wrote to his childhood friend and long-time correspondent Joshua Watson to thank him for a series of letters that Watson had sent him on the progress of the Church of England in India. The letters and a recently published memoir of the life of Bishop Middleton of Calcutta were Inglis’s first real contact with Indian Church affairs. What struck Inglis was ‘how very similar the difficulties have been and still are in the Eastern and Western extremity of the British possessions’. In reading Middleton’s memoir Inglis felt that he was reading an account of his father’s time as bishop in Nova Scotia: ‘many of the troubles which the good Bishop Middleton so feelingly describes and laments, I have been familiar from my childhood’, he said. The similarities were so obvious that Inglis jokingly 1 asked whether Middleton had in fact ever visited Nova Scotia. If we jump forward twenty years then a different picture emerges. Mid-century was an era of Anglican communication and internationalism. The march of Ultramontane Catholicism and changing relations between Church and state prompted English and colonial churchmen to take more notice of the progress of the independent branches of the Anglican Church in Scotland and America.2 In the early 1850s delegations from the English and American churches took advantage of the SPG’s 150-year jubilee to visit each other and open a new era of Anglican camaraderie. Colonial bishops met in a corporate capacity around the same time: a year after the Australian bishops held an informal synod in Sydney 1850 their Canadian counterparts met to discuss synods and other issues in Quebec. Bishops from Australia, Canada, South Africa and the West Indies then met in London during the jubilee celebrations to present their common grievances to the imperial and ecclesiastical authorities. Calls for an ‘Anglo-Saxon synod’ followed 3 these gatherings. As early as 1853 one advocate of greater communication was writing that ‘the Anglican communion no longer exists in its former isolation’, and that ‘a circumscribed Churchmanship’ [ 169 ]

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was ‘out of date’.4 A spirit of cooperation would reappear in the 1860s and lead up to first international gathering of Anglican leaders at Lambeth in 1867.5 This new era of communication raises questions about the nature of the networks and connections that helped widely scattered Anglican communities see themselves as members of a colonial Church or Anglican Communion. Though Church historians have begun to explore the personal and official networks that bound disparate Anglicans together,6 it would be fair to say that historians of colonial Anglicanism have shown nowhere near as much interest in networks as other imperial historians. Two types of network have engaged the attention of historians of the early nineteenth-century empire. On the one hand interest has been shown in the competing networks that a wide range of colonial groups built with centres of imperial power in Britain.7 On the other, historians have uncovered the great array of personal, non-official and day-to-day exchanges that flowed between colonial communities on the periphery of empire. While empires are essentially structures of power and coercion, networks have been cast as non-hierarchical, inclusive and participative formations that facilitated the movement of a wide range of ideas, people and information. The great benefit of the ‘networked conception’ is that it allows us to see the British empire in a completely new way. Britain’s empire was not just about a dominant core ruling a subjugated periphery: the complex assemblage of webs and circuits that made up the empire were open and fluid structures that enabled various groups to challenge established structures and realise their particular imperial agendas. It is not surprising that the network turn has registered so lightly with Church historians. The Church of England was, after all, an institution, not a network. Networks are participative and non-official; the Church, by contrast, was very much a hierarchical structure in which movements of men and information passed through specially prescribed channels. But if we look beyond its institutional operations then we can see that the Church was criss-crossed by a range of personal, familial and party networks. We have seen that the decentred nature of recruitment meant that a range of parties and groups within the Church could leave an imprint on colonial dioceses. We also know that individual colonial bishops developed a range of formal and information connections with metropolitan politicians, churchmen, lawyers and prominent fundraisers, of whom Edward Coleridge, a master at Eton, was 8 perhaps the most important. Yet until now little attention has been shown to the networks and connections that ran across the periphery of empire and connected Church institutions and Anglican settlers and lesser clergy in the colonies. This chapter’s first section draws attention [ 170 ]

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IMPERIAL ECCLESIASTICAL NETWORKS

to the ecclesiastical network that developed between evangelicals in India and the Cape. Connections did not just emerge between colonies lying within the formal British empire. The Church in Upper Canada was nourished by men, money and models of Church expansion from the independent Episcopal Church of the United States. By attending to these links, this chapter highlights some of the key nodal points in the early nineteenth-century Church. We shall see that these nodal points did not always map neatly onto the core-periphery model of empire, nor, as in the case of the Church in the United States, were they always located within the British empire or world. Attending to these networks will help to show that it was not just Tractarian and high church colonial bishops who worked to bring 9 Anglicans closer together. But the Church historian who is attentive to networks and intra-colonial connections can also gain a new perspective on how the Church operated as an imperial and international institution. Though the Church was gradually organised around episcopal centres of authority, laymen on the periphery of empire did still have room to open up links with other lay Anglicans. The network approach can also draw attention to the movements of personnel and information that did not travel back towards or through Britain. The clergy who spent their careers moving from post to post on the periphery remind us that the Anglican clerical profession was an international structure that held out a range of opportunities to those who were willing to travel. How far the Church can be decentred is a moot point, however: Britain, after all, remained a major source of funding and men for colonial churches. The mother country also had a broader symbolic significance for churchmen who saw their Church as a lynchpin of the future of the British world. The older, core-periphery, model may then still have its uses.

The Indian contribution to the South African Church Historians have begun to uncover the range of connections that linked British India to spaces in the metropole and to other parts of the British empire.10 Much of this research has focused on the networks that reached into India from elsewhere, but it was also true that India was an important exporter of men and ideas. This was particularly true in the case of the Church of England. The growth of the Anglican presence at the Cape Colony was nourished by imports of personnel and funds from both Britain and the British territories in India. This is perhaps not particularly surprising given that the Cape was an important transportation link between India and Britain. An East India Company chaplain captured these close ties when he described Cape Town as a 11 ‘quiet semi-dutch, semi-Indian place, full of recruiting Indians’. [ 171 ]

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Though historians have noted the contribution that East India Company servants made to the development of civil society at the Cape, only brief comments have been made about the Indian input to the Cape Church.12 Anglican bishops en route to India regularly stopped at Cape Town to ordain, confirm and consecrate. But India’s contribution to the Cape Church went beyond the infrequent visits of senior clergy. The Cape clergy who had served as chaplains and missionaries in India were Charles Wimberley, John Heavyside, Samuel Sandberg and Ebenezer Wilshere, while William Andrews had served as a doctor in India and the widely travelled Thomas Earle Welby – the future Bishop of St Helena – 13 had Indian military experience. An enduring mark was also left on the Cape Church by a community of Company officials, military officers and retired convalescents who had set down roots at Wynberg near Cape Town. This group built churches and schools and a range of missionary, temperance and benevolent societies. Though the ‘Anglo-Indians’ maintained an Anglican identity their chief significance lies in the contribution they made to the development of an ecumenical and evangelical Protestant culture from the 1830s onwards. The Cape’s evangelical Anglo-Indian culture initially revolved around William Wilberforce Bird, a cousin of William Wilberforce who had arrived at the Cape in 1807 as prize agent of slaves. In a varied career Bird spent time as a slave emancipator, as a private merchant and as secretary of the Cape’s colonial administration. He also helped to found an evangelical network that stretched from Cape Town to India: the marriage of one of Bird’s daughters to a former Indian cavalry officer named Hare was the basis for an evangelical grouping that was still an important part of the Cape’s religious fabric when Robert Gray arrived as 14 bishop in 1848. During a short stay in the colony in 1835–36 the invalided Company captain John Fawcett noted that the Bird-Hare network had established Sunday schools and temperance societies and had also found funds for new churches at Wynberg near Cape Town.15 Fawcett’s account is particularly interesting for the light it sheds on the close connections that these Anglican evangelicals built with the nonconformist missionaries who were regarded as a threat by the ordained Anglican clergy: Fawcett attended sermons delivered by John Philip of the London Missionary Society, and he also claimed to have led services at Wesleyan chapels at Wynberg and Stellenbosch. According to Fawcett, the ‘exclusiveness’ of the Anglican Church and its ‘questionable claims’ to be ‘the very Apostolic church’ was an obstacle to his ultimate aim of uniting the various Protestant denominations in a common crusade to save souls.16 For something to be a network there needs to be a degree of intensity in the exchanges between a point A and a point B.17 There is, indeed, [ 172 ]

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evidence that evangelical Protestantism at the Cape was regularly topped up by the arrival of Indian evangelicals: for instance, in the 1840s a group of Irish-born Company officers who had experience of evangelising in India began to wield considerable influence over evangelical culture at the Cape. The most prominent of the group – which included a son of Nathaniel Alexander, the Bishop of Meath – was one Richard Stewart Dobbs, an Irish Company officer who had been involved in evangelical campaigns in Southern India and had retired to the Cape for health reasons. During his stay in the colony in 1840 and 1841 Dobbs took over weekly prayer meetings at Wynberg and developed a kind of Methodist preaching circuit that took in Cape Town and its environs. Like his predecessors Dobbs cooperated with non-Anglican Protestants and preached in a Wesleyan chapel and at Philip’s prayer and missionary 18 meetings. Unsurprisingly, Dobbs fell foul of the established clergy. He was upbraided by George Hough, the senior chaplain, for establishing Sunday evening services in private homes and taking on responsibilities that Hough thought were the preserve of ordained ministers.19 From Hough’s perspective Dobbs and the Anglo-Indian party were building a subversive Anglican Church that sat independently of the government chaplaincy. There was some truth in this. Dobbs was among a party of ‘Indian friends’ who contacted the CCS to have the military chaplain Thomas Blair – himself a former Company officer who had married a daughter of the Hare family in South Africa – appointed minister of a 20 temporary ‘proprietary’ chapel in Long Street in Cape Town in 1841. Dobbs’s network then formed into the corresponding committee of the CCS and raised funds for a chapel that opened as Holy Trinity in 1845 (11 of the 42 subscribers of the committee in 1843 were Company employees).21 The Indian input to the Cape Church usefully illustrates the space that was available, particularly in the Church’s pre-diocesan phase, for groups of lay persons to establish their own church structures and organise the appointment of their own clergy. It also points to the nodal points on the periphery of empire that played a role in the expansion of the institutional Church. The Company officers who helped to build an evangelical presence at the Cape also reached out to Australia. Captain Frank Irvine – a former East India Company officer who settled with his family in New South Wales in 1820 – helped set up a corresponding committee of the CMS in Sydney in 1821. Irvine also came with plans for a school book society modelled on an institution he had encountered in Bengal. For Irvine, such institutions would foster ‘a British and Imperial spirit’ and ‘check the rise of sentiments of local feeling and 22 narrow patriotism hostile to the integrity of the Empire’. These interchanges built on the earlier connections between the evangelical [ 173 ]

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missionaries who had been sent out by the Clapham network. For instance, as early as 1798 Samuel Marsden was providing the Calcutta ‘Sim’ Claudius Buchanan with accounts of the progress of the Anglican mission in New South Wales. These fragile links between Marsden and Indian evangelicals continued into the 1830s. In 1834 Bishop Daniel Wilson of Calcutta told Marsden that he would gladly ordain and employ any evangelical laymen who came out from Australia.23 It was, however, difficult for these networks and exchanges to survive when bishops appeared on the scene. Bishop Robert Gray, like many other orthodox high churchmen, was disturbed by the influence that India exerted over infant colonial churches.24 Gray told a correspondent in England in 1851 that India was an evangelical hotbed that ‘sends us either profligates or fanatics, seldom a sober Christian. [...] The more I hear of the religious state of India, the more I am shocked at it.’25 Gray frequently bemoaned the ‘Indianism’ that infested his Church and noted that the ministers he found on his arrival had been ‘Indianised’ by their parishioners.26 Gray’s hostility to the tight-knit Anglo-Indian community stemmed from his fear that they would establish a Church that was administered by laymen and that bore little if any resemblance to the Church of England. Almost as soon as he arrived Gray found himself listening to ‘a long extempore prayer from an Indian layman who had turned the Church into a conventicle’.27 Elsewhere, ‘East India visitors’ dared to administer holy communion in prayer meetings. For Gray, anything suggestive of Protestant ecumenism had an Indian root: the attorney-general William Porter, for instance, was branded an ‘asian’ because he pressed for system of multiple establishments and the state-support of non-Christian religions. In fact, the Ulster-born Porter had never been east of the Cape.28 The Cape’s Anglo-Indian community members were a problem for Gray because they did not seem to be Anglican at all – indeed he dismissed them all as ‘Plymouth Brethren’. But there is also a sense in which the Anglo-Indian community were threatening to build a voluntary Church that operated more as a network than as an institution or hierarchical structure. The Church envisaged by this community was one without any clear centres of episcopal authority. It was also one where lay persons were free to build their own churches and to build farreaching recruitment networks.

Canadian-American ecclesiastical connections The ecclesiastical connections between India and the Cape and between India and Australia were, nevertheless, attenuated. Bishop Daniel Wilson [ 174 ]

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of Calcutta sent Australian clergy copies of his sermons and his predecessors occasionally adjudicated on disciplinary matters in the Australian Church. Generally speaking, however, communication between the branches of the Church was minimal. Wilson would himself admit that he could only give ‘friendly advice and consolation’ to Australian churchmen.29 If communication between the churches in the ‘eastern empire’ was intermittent, then that between the eastern and western hemisphere was, as Inglis’s letter to Watson suggests, practically non-existent. Even the Caribbean and the Canadian colonies formed two distinct Anglican zones. Bermuda’s inclusion in Inglis’s Nova Scotian diocese allowed for some journeying between the two areas, and Strachan kept up brief correspondence with the bishops of Antigua and 30 Firmer connections between colonial Jamaica in the mid-1840s. dioceses would emerge in the 1840s as colonial bishops banded together to advocate the cause of ecclesiastical independence.31 But for much of the early period contact between Canadian bishops was surprisingly infrequent: after 1836 Bishop Mountain did not see another Anglican bishop for ten years, and when he did meet Bishop Strachan on the Ottawa River in 1847 it was by accident.32 The key external influences on the Church in Upper Canada came from Britain and the United States.33 Though historians have long recognised the American contribution to Canadian Anglicanism, the recent upsurge in interest in Atlantic connections has drawn attention away from the official and non-official links that connected Anglicans on either side of the forty-ninth parallel.34 This border was never an impenetrable barrier separating British establishments from American voluntary churches. The border between Quebec’s Eastern Townships and the northern United States was, as J. I. Little has shown, a porous obstacle through which people, culture and religious ideas and religious institutions passed freely. Yet the fact that America’s radical religious movements failed to take root in Canadian soil is evidence that the border did nonetheless matter. For Little, American churches stagnated because their adherents tended to gravitate towards Wesleyan and 35 Anglican churches that were sustained by men and money from Britain. Little’s book reminds us of the differences between the Canadian ‘conservative’ and American ‘radical’ religious cultures, but the book does tend to overlook the contribution made to the development of the Canadian Church by the personnel and ideas that travelled over the border from the American branch of the Anglican Church. We might expect Canada’s senior clergy to have steered well clear of anything American. The American-born John Stuart – a loyalist who had fled the Revolution – wondered in 1791 whether ‘any thing good’ could ‘come out of Connecticut’ (a curious statement given that the state was [ 175 ]

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the focus of Anglican support for episcopacy),36 while Bishop Mountain of Quebec complained that the ‘Yankeefied’ parts of his diocese were inhabited by Americans who were ‘the most opposite possible’ to the kind of European ‘peasantry’ that he hoped would populate Canada. Strachan, like other advocates of established churches, saw America as spawning primitive, zealous and emotional forms of religion that mirrored its volatile political system.37 What was worse was that a formless and unsupervised American religion was spilling over the border through networks that could not be policed. In 1846 Strachan implored the SPCK to send more affordable Bibles and prayer books as, according to him, American pedlars were selling Canadian churchgoers cheap volumes that contained ‘many alterations’ to the established 1662 book.38 But Canadian Anglicans did not reject everything American; in fact senior Anglicans could actively promote exchanges across the border. Work on the political culture of early nineteenth-century Upper Canada has revealed that conservatives and reformers could look to both Britain and the United States for models on how political, social and economic arrangements in the province should be organised.39 The colonial Church might also be enriched by the introduction of aspects of American religious life: in the eyes of colonial churchmen America’s Episcopal Church appeared to be both a successful missionary institution and a cradle of the high church revival.40 In the 1830s and 1840s Canadian clerics began to publicise their long-running links to the Episcopal Church. Strachan published a eulogy of the high church Bishop Hobart of New York in 1832 and from about 1840 onwards he was looking to employ the sizeable number of American clergy who were offering him their services.41 Communication between Canadian and American churchmen was ratcheted up in the early 1850s amid calls for international Church unity. Canadian bishops started to attend the consecration of their American counterparts, funds were solicited from America for Canadian educational institutions, and from 1853 Canadian clergy became regular attendees of the Episcopal Church’s General Convention.42 Canadian high churchmen were not the only clerical group to develop links with American churchmen, nor were they the only ones that were drawn to the example of America’s Episcopal Church. High church Anglicans in England began to take greater notice of the American Church around the time that two American bishops – one of which was John Henry Hobart, the high church Bishop of New York – undertook fund-raising tours in England in the early 1820s. For the great mass of Americans who crowded into evangelical churches in the antebellum period, high church Episcopalianism seemed to be a remote [ 176 ]

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and minority religious movement, but for high church Anglicans in Britain and the colonies, men like Hobart were highly attractive and symbolic figures. America’s Episcopal Church was interesting because it was a Church that appeared to be realising its missionary ambitions without any aid from the state. America’s Church also focused attention on the shortcomings of the English establishment. Henry Handley Norris, the prominent Hackney Phalanx member, credited Hobart with reviving his interest in Anglican self-government: Norris told Hobart in 1820 that the ‘great grievance’ of English churchmen was that they did not have a Convention – as the Americans did – where bishops, clergy and laity met to discuss the governance of the Church. The Church of England did have convocations, but as Norris explained, these were ‘only the pageantry of what formerly so materially contributed to the purity 43 and consolidation of the Church’. Yet while English churchmen relished the opportunity to learn from Americans, physical contact between the American and English Anglicans was limited: legislation that had been passed in the aftermath of the American Revolution – and which was only partially repealed in 1840 – ruled that American churchmen could not officiate as ordained ministers in English churches. The American Episcopal Church attracted attention because it was a model of a working voluntary and independent Church; but also important was the fact that the American Church – or rather its high church elements – was identified with the theology and practices of the ancient, primitive Church. The key tenets that formed the core of American high churchmanship – the apostolic succession, the divine origin of the Church, baptismal regeneration and the real presence in the Eucharist – would all become central to Tractarian teaching in the 44 1830s. High churchmen in Britain and the colonies were therefore drawn to the American Church for similar reasons. But colonial high churchmen had their own motives for building bridges with American churchmen: for someone like John Strachan the career of Bishop Hobart provided pointers on how the distinct claims and practices of episcopacy and the high church party could be upheld – and indeed made popular – in contexts and environments where evangelicalism and voluntary religion held sway.45 Strachan claimed that it was thanks to Hobart that ‘a more general and correct knowledge now exists among the people of our communion in the United States, respecting the government of the Church, the beauty and excellence of her forms, the purity of her principles, and the spirituality of her devotions, than even in England’.46 America’s Church also held out practical lessons to colonial churchmen. The American Church’s system of synods was particularly attractive, and as early as 1847 Strachan was contacting Bishop Onderdonk of New York – a prominent American Tractarian – for details on how the [ 177 ]

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Episcopal Church organised its parishes and dealt with population growth. Strachan also looked to America for ideas for a sustentation fund that would provide stipends for clergy where local communities were out of pocket.47 But the American Church, like America in general, was something to be sampled selectively. Republican America, after all, demonstrated the failings and dangers of the voluntary system 48 The American Church was also one that was shaped by its wider political and social environment: the Church had a republican governing structure and a laity that wielded considerable authority in the election of ministers and Church administration.49 The authority of American bishops seemed to rest entirely on their force of personality: indeed, the fact that the General Convention was organised so that bishops voted alongside clergy led some to wonder whether the Episcopal Church really warranted the title ‘Episcopal’ at all.50 More promising was the constitution that Bishop John H. Hopkins had introduced in the diocese of Vermont in 1851. There the concurrence of the bishop was necessary before the diocese could pass legislation. Strachan thought this ‘episcopal veto’ should be used in colonial synods and in 1854 he asked Hopkins for details on ‘your constitution & canons & such hints as your long experience of the working of your system may suggest’.51 Vermont seemed to resolve the central question confronting colonial churchmen: how to find a place for episcopacy and episcopal authority in a modern democratic society.

Movement across borders All this shows that the ideas and information that influenced the development of colonial Anglicanism often flowed through channels that did not connect with the distant ‘mother Church’. But these Canadian-American ecclesiastical connections went beyond polite exchanges between like-minded high church bishops. The regular coming and going of clergy between America and Canada shows how the Episcopal Church was plugged into a wider ecclesiastical career network that both extended out from Britain and operated beyond it. What American bishops thought about this is not clear as their dioceses appear to have received the Toronto diocese’s flotsam and jetsam. Four of the Ontario clergy – Amos Ansley, Charles T. Wade, Rossington Elms and R. C. Boyer – left for the States after running into personal difficulties in Canada: Wade was accused of sexual indiscretions with a servant girl; Ansley was an alcoholic who abandoned his family for New York; Rossington Elms left for Indiana after pocketing money from land sales; and Strachan claimed that Boyer was ‘intemperate’ and had ‘descended 52 to be a marker of a billiard table’. Meanwhile, Clement Fall Lefevre, [ 178 ]

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who served for a short time in Kingston, fell victim to American radical religion and left Canada in 1829 to join the Universalist church.53 Of the clergy who were appointed to Upper Canada between 1790 and 1850, sixteen had been born, educated or served as clergy in America. Their number included men born in England, India, America and Ireland. Several had been educated in America at various kinds of educational and theological institutions. These men remind us of the multiplicity of roots through which clergy passed on their way to the colonial Church; they also point to the variety of educational institutions that supplied the British empire with clergy. Those who saw service in the Toronto diocese were only the tip of a larger group of ordained ministers and ordination candidates who applied for work. Nineteen unsuccessful applications can be found in Strachan’s papers, with most – thirteen – applying in the early 1840s. Strachan appears to have wanted to employ them, but an 1840 parliamentary Act prevented him from appointing those who had been ordained by a ‘foreign’ bishop to posts that received money from the British government (this applied to both Scottish and American bishops). One way round this was to employ American clergy as schoolmasters or as travelling missionaries. One cleric who entered Canada in this way was Henry Caswall: after a period as a rector in Indiana, Caswall was appointed grammar school master in Brockville, Ontario. Caswall would go on to become a kind of living embodiment of the new spirit of international Anglicanism: after his Canada stint he used family and friends to get a private act through Parliament that made it possible for him to take a post as a vicar in Wiltshire in 1842. With such international credentials it is unsurprising that Caswall was sounded out by Canadian high churchmen as a 54 potential colonial bishop in 1857. Most clergy neither had Caswall’s wherewithal or wealth to find the loopholes in the system; indeed, many admitted that they had taken American ordination without any knowledge of the accompanying restrictions. Though we do not know the backgrounds of all these applicants, most who served in Canada or applied to do so appear to have been British-born. The international and peripatetic careers of these men might be given both a positive and a negative spin: on the one hand it can be read as a sign of the opportunities that were available to clergy who were willing to look globally; on the other it shows the lengths that some graduates and ordained clergy had to go to before they found themselves in secure ecclesiastical employment. Some English clergy claimed they were fulfilling missionary and religious ambitions by 55 moving to America, but many were seeking financial security and professional preferment. Like its colonial counterpart, the American [ 179 ]

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Church seemed an inviting proposition to clergy like R. V. Rogers and Isaac Fidler who had been ordained in England but who had neither the ‘interest or patronage’ – as Fidler put it – to find a post in the Church at home.56 Though America could hold on to its British-born clergy, some did come to see it as a staging post in their career. As little is known about the American careers of many of the men who applied for work in Canada it is difficult to state definitively why they moved on. Fidler thought that it was because English clergy – like English emigrants in general – were given the meanest jobs, but there is little evidence that 57 foreigners formed an ecclesiastical proletariat in America. Applications came from both poorly paid travelling missionaries and from those who were termed rectors and who were settled as incumbents of selfsupporting parishes.58 Englishmen Francis Tremayne and Charles James Sterling – the latter an Oxford graduate – applied to Canada after serving as missionaries in the dioceses of New York and New Jersey respectively, while India-born Robert Gregory Cox approached Strachan after several years of service in Ohio. James Slessor Hildebrand – a welltravelled Cambridge graduate who had been ordained in Jamaica – was looking to move on to Canada within months of taking up a rectory in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania in 1854. Applications came from English clergy across America, and it was not just missionary clergy in pioneer settlements who looked north: Thomas S. Brittan, a former Congregationalist who had taken orders in America, applied to Canada when his church in Brooklyn dissolved because the congregation had 59 failed to pay him properly. Whether these British-born clergy gravitated towards Canada for professional or patriotic reasons is difficult to assess. If it was the former then many were to be disappointed. When R. V. Rogers arrived in Kingston, Canada, in 1836 he found himself labouring as a travelling missionary, a grammar school teacher and the chaplain of a penitentiary on a £100 SPG salary. After twenty-four years of financial hardship and difficult relations with Strachan, Rogers was finally appointed rural dean of the Midland District.60 Both Robert G. Cox and Thomas W. Allen – the latter was ordained deacon in Canada after serving for four years as a tutor at Long Island – faced lengthy careers as travelling missionaries when they first arrived from the States.61 Clerical writers liked to think that clergy came because they were searching for the sheltering embrace of British institutions and values. Both Strachan and Fidler, for instance, thought English clergy bore the brunt of American Anglophobia.62 The number of British-born among those who applied from America suggests that clergy, like other British migrants, had an umbilical attachment to Britain and a wider British world, but we cannot know for sure. [ 180 ]

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Recent studies have tried to show that the proliferation of family networks, settler societies, emigration agents and emigration propaganda served to strengthen ties between the settler colonies and the mother country and conditioned would-be migrants to think about moving to British colonies rather than the wider English-speaking world.63 Similar ties may have bound clergy to the colonies, though the number of men who moved from Britain to America shows that clergymen were willing to look beyond empire for professional opportunities. In 1832 Englishborn Edward Parkin told his Canadian parishioners that he was looking for work in America because the Church there ‘exists and flourishes in a state of purity almost unknown elsewhere’. In the event, all he found in America was a poorly paid teaching job in Vermont.64 George C. Street – who left Ontario in 1854 after a row with his parishioners – had a more fruitful career in the Church in Iowa and Illinois. Street maintained his links to both Canada and, it seems, his English identity: his brother made regular visits from Canada and would entertain Street’s Illinois parishioners with English songs.65 James Coghlan resigned his SPG mission at Port Hope in 1836 because of financial difficulties (he claimed to have lost £1,000 and there were reports that he had been arrested for ‘pecuniary embarrassments’) and took a rectory at Flatbush, New York. Within a year Coghlan had resigned from the American Church and was on his way back to a curacy in London’s Bethnal Green. In 1845 he had exchanged this post for the long-awaited stability of a rectory at Markfield in Leicestershire valued at £500.66 The careers of such men remind us that the need to find a job could override any desire to remain within a British world or diaspora. The clergy who moved back and forth between Canada and America and between America and Britain were minor actors in the wider processes that were bringing the branches of the Anglican churches into closer communication. They may also have made a small contribution to the development of a sense of ‘Anglo-Saxon brotherhood’ that was apparently drawing America and Britain together in the second half of 67 the nineteenth century. But the movement of clergy across the Canadian-American border is a reminder that the nineteenth-century clerical profession was not confined to empire: the Church of England was an institution that transcended the English-speaking world and held out a wealth of professional opportunities – some attractive, others less so – to those who had the finances, wherewithal and stamina to embark on international careers. Recent scholarship has tried to show how the business and commercial networks that oiled the first wave of globalisation tended to operate within the British empire. The Church of England was different; its professional networks extended beyond empire, and many of its personnel did not display the kind of ethnic and [ 181 ]

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patriotic prejudice that, according to modern scholarship, characterised other imperial professions.68 While the movement of clergy between America and Canada should prompt us to reconsider the parameters and nature of the Anglican Church’s professional diaspora, it is not clear that these connections really warrant being called ‘networks’. Networks are structures that facilitate a frequent and intense exchange of ideas, people or goods. The links between American and Canadian dioceses were, on the whole, pragmatic, unpredictable and did not lead to the sustained exchange of clergy or the formation of well-used channels of recruitment. There is no indication, for example, that permanent lines of communication were opened up between the Canadian Church and American ecclesiastical institutions such as New York’s General Theological Seminary. Indeed, much of the imprint that America left on Canadian Anglicanism came about through influences that are hard to detect or isolate. The widespread hostility found in Canadian congregations to such rituals as responding to prayers, kneeling at prayer, church baptisms and the churching of women indicates that the American influence on popular 69 religious belief in Canada remained strong. Senior colonial clerics were aware that these American influences had to be regulated and filtered if the establishments of the British empire were to maintain their conservative character. But Strachan and his colleagues knew that they would have to tolerate (and possibly encourage) aspects of American religious culture if they were to make their Church appealing to the sizeable American communities who inhabited their dioceses. Bishop Stewart of Quebec, for example, chose to blend English and American 70 traditions when he worked on the first Canadian hymn book.

The intra-colonial movement of personnel and information So far this chapter has questioned whether what has been called the ‘network conception’ can be applied to the study of the colonial Church. The Cape example suggests that where centres of ecclesiastical authority were absent, there was room for open and inclusive networks to emerge. These connections could result in varying forms of Anglican religious culture being transmitted between colonial outposts. We have also seen how networks of professional preferment did not always look back to Britain. But America also raises questions about whether there is anything to be gained from terming the connections that emerged between American and colonial churchmen as ‘networks’. While the network concept can only take us so far, this does not mean that we should ignore the growing strength of the ties that linked [ 182 ]

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colonial dioceses. Existing scholarship supposes that moderate high churchmen and Tractarians were the ones who promoted closer relations among the Anglican Communion’s distant branches.71 But other forces were important. One important development was the growing visibility of the clergy who moved between ecclesiastical postings on the periphery of empire. India was again an important node in this regard: a significant number of missionaries and East Indian Company chaplains left India in search of a healthier climate in Australia and the Cape. Michael Gladwin has found seven pre-1850 Australian clergy who came from India (three of whom served in New South Wales), and, as we have already noted, at least four of the Cape clergy appointed before 1850 had served in India as missionaries or Company chaplains (three more – George Sturt, Thomas Earle Welby and T. R. A. Blair – had seen military 72 service in India). The Canadian clergy included a number of men who had been born in India or who had served in the military there, but it appears that the Upper Canada Clergy Society missionary William Morse was the only one with Indian missionary experience. The flow of clergy from the settler empire to India was less significant: Henry Douglas, who served as Dean of Cape Town in the 1850s, would become Bishop of Bombay in 1869, and Edmund Ashton Dicken, who spent a short period in Australia, would take a missionary post in Madras in the later 1840s 73 after a spell as a curate in Devon. The intra-colonial movement of clergy followed well-trodden paths. The West Indies and India were notable exporters of men,74 but few clergy moved from Canada to Australia or Canada to the Cape, and those that did tended to have spent time in England before taking up their later colonial posts. Alexander Pyne, a UCCS missionary, resigned his post at Perth in Canada in 1857, took up work as a temporary curate in Rochdale, Lancashire, and then left again for a series of postings in Victoria, Australia.75 Similarly, Thomas Earle Welby resigned his mission at Sandwich in Upper Canada in 1843 on grounds of ill-health and returned to England to take temporary charge of a Leicestershire incumbency held by his father. Welby responded to Robert Gray’s call for clergy for the Cape diocese because, as he told the SPG in 1848, he had been to Cape Town in the past and his ‘desire has been great, ever since my return to England, to labour again in the Colonial Churches’.76 Though it is plausible that such globetrotting clergy helped colonial churchgoers imagine themselves as members of a wider community, we need to know much more about the colonial careers of these men before we can judge their full significance. It is questionable how much we will ever know about some of them. Certainly the nature of the historical record makes it difficult to see how the behaviour of a clergyman in one imperial posting was shaped by their prior experiences elsewhere. For [ 183 ]

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some there was little to compare their work in one part of the empire from another. Ebenezer Wilshere found that under Bishop Gray he was able to pursue the kind of Tractarian agenda that had got him into trouble during his time as an SPG missionary in the Madras diocese earlier in the 1840s.77 Welby’s work as a missionary to ‘the offspring of slaves, Hottentots, & negroes’ in the George area of South Africa was far removed from his previous work among the European community of Sandwich, Ontario.78 But others saw the settler colonies as part of a single undifferentiated space. Pyne, for instance, saw colonists as the same the world over: Canadians and Australians displayed ‘similar feelings’ towards church services, and elsewhere he commented on the ‘similarity in mind and sentiment amongst the great masses of our populations’.79 This tendency to essentialise colonial communities had been common since at least the 1830s. Elizabeth Elbourne has shown how the growth and spread of imperial information networks not only made the world smaller but also made the inhabitants of the empire seem alike. Missionary periodicals and settler newspapers propagated the idea that the empire was populated by homogeneous communities of ‘settlers’ and ‘aborigines’ and ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’.80 Pyne’s book was just one small part of a wider engine of missionary publicity that propagated simple categories and elided differences between colonial geographies. Overall, then, the sources left behind by the peregrinating clergy tell us little about the role they played in cultivating stronger links between distant Church outposts. Pyne’s book suggests that his career gave him a keen sense of the existence of a Greater Britain, but it tells us little about how he was viewed by churchgoers, whether his parishioners knew of his Canadian past, or if his presence helped local communities to see themselves as members of a broader global institution. Anglican unity may have been more strongly encouraged by the appearance, in the later 1840s, of an Anglican periodical literature that specifically charted the expansion of the colonial Church. Frederick Lundy – the minister of Grimsby, Ontario – thought the high church Colonial Church Chronicle was ‘very useful to the interests of our Colonial Branch of the Church Catholic’, not least because it helped him see himself as a member of a 81 single ‘colonial Church’. Colonial correspondents felt the Chronicle provided them with their first information on the expansion of the Church elsewhere.82 Advocates and critics of synodical government also used the periodical to keep pace with developments in the revival of convocation in other parts of the empire. Such literature did not create the uniformity of practice seen in colonial dioceses – this had been a perennial feature of Anglican churches overseas – but it is reasonable to [ 184 ]

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suppose that it furthered the spread of ideas.

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The limitations of imperial ecclesiastical networks Though colonial churchmen welcomed the chance to cast their eyes more widely, we should not overestimate either the practical benefits of these communication links nor the extent to which colonial clergy sought to strengthen contact or build networks with the rest of the Communion. Nathaniel Merriman, the Archdeacon of Grahamstown, had a ‘thousand & one questions’ that he wanted to ask Ernest Hawkins about the ‘working of other Colonial Dioceses’, but he also thought ‘that we can do our work as well in the main without being over anxious to know what our neighbour is about in all the Details of his operations’.83 Voluntarism could, as we noted in an earlier chapter, narrow ecclesiastical horizons. Colonial churchgoers were primarily interested in building their own churches and had little reason to think of themselves as members of a diocese, let alone the Communion more generally.84 Those laypersons who did think imperially were often aware of the dangers of looking to other colonies for models on Church government. Howson Rutherfoord, a prominent South African evangelical merchant and a critic of synodical government, said in 1856 that he was ‘one of those who do not wish to go beyond England, for a reference to the general practice in matters ecclesiastical or civil’.85 For Rutherfoord, too close an attachment to Australia – where synods were being tried out – would lead to the transfer of an episcopal despotism that was cloaked in a new form of synodical government. Even if colonial churchgoers did wish to broaden their horizons, it is questionable whether they would have been able to build connections with co-religionists that were not policed by some kind of overarching ecclesiastical authority. Although colonial episcopal authority was circumscribed, neither information nor people flowed freely in the colonial Church. Lower and higher clergy were both aware that the information that was fed to them from other colonial dioceses was not all it seemed. Merriman told Hawkins in 1853 that ‘it requires a particular medium of union or a particular key to understand what is not 86 told in printed Reports from that which is told’. James Reid, minister of St Armand East in Quebec, thought that the Chronicle was part of the problem because it merely broadcast inaccurate episcopal reports about the ‘piety, zeal and devotion’ of colonial congregations.87 The movement of clergy also continued to be regulated. The Episcopal Churches in America and Scotland – neither of which was considered to be in full communion with the Church of England – were prevented from [ 185 ]

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exporting their clergy to England and the colonies, and critics claimed that the 1819 Ordinations for Colonies Act severed the Church’s ‘natural branches’ from its parent at a time when the other Christian denominations were supposedly building open and fluid imperial institutions.88 Networks could also quickly shut down when new centres of ecclesiastical power and authority popped up. It is significant, for instance, that the trail left by Cape Town’s Indian evangelicals started to run dry shortly after Gray’s arrival as bishop. In addition to questioning the ease or intensity of imperial ecclesiastical communication, we should also be wary of overestimating the importance of intra-colonial connections. Britain remained the ecclesiastical centre of empire. Recruitment and funding networks could branch off in many directions, but the densest and most important connections were those that reached back to Britain. It is important to recognise that these connections did not always pass through institutions or clerical networks. At several points in this book we have seen that much of the funding and energy that facilitated Church expansion was transmitted through the webs of correspondence that settlers and clergy built up with their friends and families in Britain. The Australian cleric William Branwhite Clarke looked to his friends ‘in England & India’ to provide funds for his church at Castle Hill and Duval 89 Settlers also (he did expect much from the local inhabitants). frequently asked friends and family in England to find them funds and clergy, though in most cases familial agents found that their chances of finding a clergyman were considerably bettered if they forwarded the initial request on to a missionary society.90 By the 1850s the SPG was trying to clamp down on the whole system of independent fund raising as it believed that it interfered with their work.91 Metropolitan-based missionary societies still remained of critical importance for colonial Anglicans. The following section investigates two further aspects of this continuing metropolitan influence: one was the efforts that colonial churchmen made to mobilise support networks in the metropolis; the second was the significant number of colonial clergy who journeyed back to Britain to take up permanent posts there.

Anglicans, the Colonial Office and the British public Colonial churchmen were aware that building a pre-eminent Church depended in large part on mobilising metropolitan support and lobbying power brokers in Britain. In this sense churchmen were no different from other colonial interest groups. Colonists knew that imperial power resided in Britain, and they also knew that their chances of winning political representation, or altering colonial frontier policy, or perhaps [ 186 ]

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blocking political reform, depended on their ability to build up personal contacts with agents and lobbyists in the metropole.92 The frequency with which colonial Anglicans sent back agents to put forward the claims of the colonial Church suggests that we should regard the colonial Church as a great colonial lobby. Anglicans in the colonies had to look to Parliament and the CO and the other ‘loci of power’93 in Britain because they needed government to pass legislation that was favourable to the Church. Churchmen also knew that important pieces of legislation that were already on the statute book – namely the 1791 Act pertaining to the controversial Canadian clergy reserves – would only stay there if they managed to convince metropolitan politicians of their value. Not every ecclesiastical network advanced the Church’s corporate interests: we have examples of individual clergy who promoted their personal interests by employing families and friends as lobbyists in Britain. Samuel Marsden, for instance, managed to communicate his criticisms of Governor Macquarie’s regime in New South Wales to a 94 metropolitan audience through networks of this sort in the later 1810s. The Anglican lobby did, however, differ in important respects to the kind of settler and evangelical colonial interest groups recently described by Zoë Laidlaw. Colonial churchmen quickly adopted new tactics when they found that their cultivation of personal contacts within government did not bring about the hoped-for results. While other colonial groups were (according to Laidlaw) either hesitant about appealing to the public or did not have the tools to do so, colonial clergymen were aware that they could call on the support of an Anglican public who were already in the process of being mobilised in defence of the metropolitan Church. Colonial churchmen were also distinctive in the sense that they tended to send clergy with direct colonial experience to serve as delegates in Britain. In 1803 Bishop Jacob Mountain of Quebec commented that ‘near ten years experience has shewn me how little is to 95 be expected from representations to H.M. Ministers made by letter’. Suggestions were floated for a permanent agent who would provide ‘correct information to the government’ on the status of the Church’,96 and some former colonial clergy did occasionally ferry information between the CO and colonial clergy. For the most part, however, the permanent colonial lobby was something that was largely left to settlers and evangelicals. The desire to be there in person arose from a feeling that well-connected and senior churchmen would carry the most authority with metropolitan politicians. John Strachan, for instance, frequently implored Charles Stewart – Mountain’s successor as bishop of Quebec – to go in person to put the Church’s claims before the CO.97 But there is also a sense in which colonial churchmen felt that metropolitan churchmen simply did not know enough about the colonies. When A. N. [ 187 ]

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Bethune returned to England in the 1850s to raise funds for Toronto’s Trinity College he complained that speakers at SPG meetings had ‘imperfect knowledge of our ecclesiastical position’ but still felt ‘themselves more competent to legislate upon our church matters than we are ourselves’.98 Bethune’s comments point to both a lingering colonial inferiority complex and the Church’s continuing failure to keep members supplied with reliable information. The frequency and persistence of Anglican lobbying in the mother country in the Napoleonic and post-1815 period shows just how little faith colonial Anglicans had in the government’s ‘Anglican design’. The Canadian Church sent delegations to Britain in 1824, 1826, 1831, 1833, 1838 and 1839. It tended to be the top brass who travelled: Strachan went to Britain in 1824, 1826 and 1839; Charles Stewart, Bishop of Quebec from 1826 to 1837, made trips to defend of the clergy reserves in 1824 and 1831; and A. N. Bethune, the future Archdeacon of York, travelled as Stewart’s secretary in 1831. Canadian Anglicans were in stronger position than their counterparts elsewhere as they could send bishops and archdeacons: Cape clergy, by contrast, complained that they 99 had no one in London to represent their interests. One of the reasons why Canadian delegations travelled to England in the mid-1820s was because Canada’s senior clerics were aware that other, antagonistic, groups were managing to catch the ear of the imperial authorities. In the early 1820s the Scottish novelist and colonial lobbyist John Galt presented the CO with plans for selling the clergy reserves and using the proceeds to compensate loyalists who had suffered losses and damages during the 1812 war. In 1824 Galt went on to draw up more ambitious proposals for a land company – called the ‘Canada Company’ – that would sell off the Crown reserves and one-half of the clergy reserves and then pay an annual sum into the colonial treasury.100 When the CO looked as if they would take on board Galt’s proposals, Anglicans stirred into action and despatched two delegations – George J. Mountain, the Bishop of Quebec’s son, led a Church delegation, and Strachan went out as the representative of the Upper Canadian government. The two delegations inaugurated half-a-decade of successful Anglican lobbying at the CO. These early Anglican delegations were successful on two counts: first, they managed to steer the British government back towards a proestablishment religious policy; second, they succeeded in affirming a special status for the senior colonial clergyman in the corridors of imperial power. During his 1826–27 visit Strachan was able to get a charter for a Church-run university, and he also welcomed the parliamentary bill, passed in 1827, that permitted the sale of part of the [ 188 ]

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clergy reserves (the proceeds would go towards the support of the Anglican clergy). Colonial churchmen such as Strachan could influence metropolitan policy because they were among those privileged groups who imperial administrators looked to for information on the political, social and religious state of the colonies.101 For example, Robert WilmotHorton – the undersecretary – asked Strachan to report on the benefits of emigration and the union of the Canadas. Strachan knew that by providing this information he was drawing the British government into a more pro-Anglican policy: indeed, he told a Scottish friend that he had ‘a claim on Mr. Horton’ after he drew up an abstract of the evidence given to the 1826 parliamentary select committee on emigration.102 It is also significant that when Wilmot-Horton wanted details on the relative size of Canada’s Christian denominations, he looked to Strachan – and not Anthony Hamilton or the CO’s own Ecclesiastical Board – to provide it. Strachan’s ‘Ecclesiastical Chart’ of 1827 was controversial and inaccurate and led to a war of statistics as other denominations countered Anglican claims with their own numerical data.103 These personal links between colonial churchmen and the imperial authorities disintegrated during the reform crisis of 1828–29 (though close links did briefly re-emerge during Gladstone’s tenure during the mid-1840s). Strachan knew that the collapse of Lord Liverpool’s administration in 1827 was bad news for the colonial Church and he counted himself fortunate that he had managed to get a charter for his university before the arrival of a liberal Tory government under 104 From this point on Anglican delegations found themselves Canning. jostling with other colonial lobbyists. They also discovered that the case for a privileged Anglican establishment failed to register with the new cadre of Whig colonial administrators; indeed, the unsuccessful 1831 delegation led by Bishop Stewart and A. N. Bethune showed that the CO was working towards a resolution of the vexed clergy reserve issue without any reference to Anglican clergymen at all. There is no evidence, for example, that Lord Howick, under-secretary from 1830 to 1833, listened to either Bethune or Bishop Stewart of Quebec when he drew up proposals for handing the responsibility for paying colonial clergy to 105 Goderich, the secretary of state, was more colonial assemblies. amenable to Anglican claims and asked Bethune to provide information on the reserves, but even he toyed with the idea of a state-supported secular university, something that Strachan found intolerable.106 On the one hand, the letters that Bethune sent back to his masters in Canada were doleful comments on the difficulties that churchmen faced in making their voice heard in London; but on the other hand, they also show how quickly Anglicans adopted new tactics. Though Bethune thought that a permanent delegate in London would serve as a ‘powerful [ 189 ]

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check’ on government, he also suggested that the best chance of defending the Church’s exclusive claims lay not in personal connections, but in informing and mobilising the British public. To this end he disseminated literature on the reserves to well-connected college masters and also to the editor of the Albion, a New York weekly whose transatlantic circulation linked readers in Canada, America and Britain (Bethune thought the paper would ‘have some weight at the Colonial Office’).107 Even Strachan, who had advised against a petitioning campaign on the reserves issue in 1827, increasingly recognised that the future of the Church depended on mobilising a transatlantic Church public.108 As a result, Anglicans were ready when the clergy reserves issue reared up again in the late 1830s. On both sides of the Atlantic Anglicans managed to mount a petitioning campaign that, in terms of numbers of petitions produced, was highly successful. In 1839 and 1840 the houses of Parliament received 517 petitions – 416 of which came from communities in Britain – defending the Upper Canadian Church’s privileges.109 Early petitions demanded the restoration of the grants the British government had paid to the SPG; later ones sought to block the two clergy reserve bills that the Upper Canadian legislature had forwarded to Parliament in 1839 and 1840. The campaign was partly a matter of telling metropolitan and colonial congregations that their interests were one and the same; it was also partly about arming senior figures in the parliamentary ‘Church party’ like Sir John Pakington, Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter (who had relatives in Canada) and William Gladstone with the petitions and census data that would allow them to get the best deal possible for the colonial Church. The composition of this parliamentary Church party would change – Pakington, for example, went on to become a critic of imperial ecclesiastical independence – but colonial bishops proved highly adept at maintaining contacts with metropolitan politicians who promoted colonial Church causes in Parliament. The involvement of the British churchgoing public in Canadian Church affairs can be read as a sign that the overseas churches were being drawn closer to Church in Britain. One reason why the petitioning campaign gained traction was because it built on, and fed into, the efforts that churchmen were mounting against Whig Church reforms in Britain. That Welshpool’s small Anglican population chose to discuss both the claims of the Canadian Church and the proposed Ecclesiastical Revenues Bill at the same meeting in April 1839 suggests that metropolitan Anglicans were aware of the connections between British 110 The Whig government’s reform of the and colonial Church politics. home Church and the clergy reserves issue were, after all, about the [ 190 ]

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same issue: whether the state had the right to treat ecclesiastical property as public property. Colonial Anglicans certainly saw links between distant campaigns. Ontario’s Church newspaper commented in July 1838 that ‘the integrity and perpetuity of our Church property’ was a matter ‘as important to the mother country as to her colonial possessions’. The paper added that the ‘battle fighting for them is a combat also for us; and victory there will be re-echoed in the fullness of its triumph here’.111 A Lichfield clergyman told Gladstone that the defence of the Canadian Church was a natural extension of an earlier effort to protect the diocese of Sodor and Man, and in many ways he was right to see synergies between colonial and metropolitan campaigns.112 Interestingly, the same ecclesiastical machinery that had generated petitions against Whig reforms in Britain was used to mobilise the Church public in defence of the Canadian Church. Petitions on domestic and colonial Church reform were distributed through the same system of archdeacons and rural deans.113 The petitioning campaign did not save the Anglican monopoly over the reserves, but it may well have gone some way to strengthening a feeling of common interest and community between colonial and metropolitan churchgoers.

Returning clergy Another sign of Britain’s importance for colonial Anglicans is the number of overseas clergy who tried to get back to it. The back and forth movement of clergy between the mother Church and its colonial daughters was, in terms of numbers, of greater importance than the transfer of clergy between colonial dioceses. This was in spite of the restrictions that were placed on the return migration of clergy. As a rule, clergy who had been ordained in England could move about the empire and the Anglican Communion more easily than those who had been ordained either for or in the colonies. The 1819 Ordinations for Colonies Act ruled that the latter group could only work in England if they had special permission and references from both the sending and receiving bishop. Later legislation – the 1874 Colonial Clergy Act – left most of the restrictions in place and only made it easier for those men to return home who had been ordained in India or who had already secured 114 curacies and posts in England. Cape clergy were particularly likely to return: at least twenty-three of the eighty-four clergy who served at the Cape in our period returned to Britain, and it has been possible to reconstruct the subsequent career paths of eighteen of these individuals. Clergy were less likely to abandon dioceses where the settler Church was more firmly established. Twenty-nine of the 126 New South Wales clergy returned, while only twenty-six (about ten per cent) of the cohort [ 191 ]

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of 245 Upper Canada clergy came back to Britain. The majority of these returnees had been ordained in England, but a significant number – twenty-one – had either been ordained for, or in, the colonies and presumably had won special dispensation to take up positions in Britain. Though the study of return migration is an important growth area in migration studies, no one has so far undertaken a systematic survey of the returning colonial clergy.115 We know little about why men returned, what their subsequent careers looked like and whether their colonial experiences had any bearing on their ministry in England. We cannot address all these questions here, but what we can do is reconstruct the metropolitan careers of returning clergy from the published clergy lists: this will shed light on the networks of patronage and preferment that tied colonial Churches to the home Church, and it will also give us some idea of the status of colonial service. This focus on the clergy’s subsequent careers is not intended to give the impression that men returned home for purely professional reasons – factors such as health, homesickness and rejection of colonial life could prompt clergy to move back to Britain in much the same way as other return migrants.116 Our primary interest is in what the return of clergy tells us about how the Church functioned as an imperial institution. John Langhorn, the early Upper Canadian missionary, was terrified about going back to England as he feared that his poor job prospects would lead him to serve, and probably die, in Napoleon’s wars.117 In fact, many colonial clergy – particularly those who had spent limited time in the colonies – found themselves moving up the ecclesiastical ladder on their return. The poor pay and frontier conditions that Thomas Raddish endured in Upper Canada in 1796 were in marked contrast to his subsequent career as a pluralist holding rural vicarages and rectories in Sussex and Lincolnshire.118 John Short Hewett’s brief career as chaplain to the forces at the Cape was only a short interlude between his time as a perpetual curate in Norfolk and his later successful career as chaplain of Downing College and rector of incumbencies at Rotherhithe and Ewhurst with net incomes of £772 and £784 respectively.119 Thomas Erskine was another short-lived Cape clergyman who quickly entered a vicarage in Derbyshire valued at £312.120 William Bernard Lauder left his troubled career as a rector at St George’s Church in Kingston to take up the deanery at Leighlin in Ireland.121 Other colonial clergy who enjoyed promotions by entering permanent incumbencies were George Shepheard Porter (acting chaplain at Bathurst, Cape Colony 1830–33), Richard Kempthorne (chaplain of St Helena 1839–60), T. R. A. Blair (minister at Wynberg 1852–54), John Wilson (navy chaplain Upper Canada 1816–22), William C. Frith (military chaplain Upper Canada 1820–21), Arthur Palmer (rector of Guelph, Upper Canada 1836–76), John [ 192 ]

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Gamble Geddes (rector of Hamilton and Dean of Niagara) and Robert Jackson McGeorge (rector of Streetsville). There is little evidence, however, that it was colonial service that qualified men for high station in the home church. Many clergy secured incumbencies because they had the right institutional or personal connections, and not because their colonial career furnished them with marketable skills. John Short Hewett and George Shepheard Porter were presented to rectories that were in the patronage of their Cambridge colleges.122 Henry Collison returned to a Norfolk rectory patronised by a family member. It is not clear how other returnees got their first post as we do not know enough about the relationships between returnees and private patrons. Colonial service was important for the evangelical T. R. A. Blair, as the patronage of the Devon vicarage that he entered in 1854 was owned by Lieutenant-General John Michel, an imperial soldier who Blair may well have met when the former was stationed in South Africa during the Kaffir Wars in the early 1850s.123 Blair’s example shows that the clergy who went overseas were not stepping outside the webs of patronage and preferment; rather, empire served to stretch these patronage networks over a global canvas.124 Returnees could consider themselves to be retirees. Several (the Australian clergymen William Horatio Walsh, Francis Vidal and Francis Cameron are three examples) decided to stay on in England after initially securing temporary leave of absence on health grounds. Blair was one of a number of colonial clergy who swapped a colonial post for retirement in a rural English incumbency.125 Other colonial clergy who would spend the remainder of their careers ministering to thinly populated rural parishes were Richard Kempthorne (Elton in Ely diocese: population 900), Frederick Carlyon (Teversham, Ely: pop. 626), Hopkins Badnall (Goldsborough, York: pop. 488), Edward Thomas Scott (Mundesley, Norwich: pop. 451), George Villiers Thorpe (Thurlby, Lincoln: pop. 833), George Shepheard Porter (Anstey: pop. 417), Henry Collison (East Bilney, Norwich: pop. 166), William Frith (Chilfrome, Bristol: pop. 128), AVilliam Hough (Hambleton: pop. 334), Arthur Palmer (Ponsonby, Carlisle: pop. 174) and, perhaps most strikingly of all, Isaac Fidler, who ended his days as rector to a rural Oxfordshire parish with only thirteen inhabitants. Returnees may have stood out in terms of the mobility of their early careers, but like the majority of Victorian clergy, they tended 126 to stay in post once they secured a rectory. The sample does not reveal any geographical pattern to returnees’ destinations (there is no evidence, for instance, that returnees were returning ‘home’), nor is there any sign that the bulk of clergy gravitated towards incumbencies patronised by bishops, university colleges or private individuals. Thomas Henry Braim, who had served in Tasmania, New South Wales and Victoria since 1835, [ 193 ]

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was a rare example of a clergyman who returned to a position near his birthplace (in his case Doncaster). Not all returnees found themselves in a life of bucolic ease. Early Australian returnees were particularly likely to take up urban posts: Richard Johnson, the first to return, used his evangelical contacts to get two London rectories in 1810; Benjamin Vale served in Stoke-on-Trent; Elijah Smith was a curate in London; Thomas Atkins returned to Salford and Charles Woodward served various posts in London.127 In the early 1840s two colonial clergy – John Espy Keane, who had served in New South Wales, and James Coghlan, the Upper Canadian cleric – were appointed to two of the ten churches that Bishop Blomfield had built in Bethnal Green after 1837. It is tempting to argue that these men were sounded out because their colonial service equipped them with the skills and outlook necessary for work in what was ostensibly a missionary field: Coghlan would have been known to Blomfield because he had been ordained for the colonies back in 1828, while Keane was a hard-bitten Irishman whose Australian experience had seen him minister in challenging environments to communities of free settlers, emancipists and convicts.128 That Coghlan chose to exchange his London living for a highly remunerative Leicestershire rectory is perhaps another indication that the stability of a rural incumbency remained the aspiration for many. Most returnees found that colonial service did little to boost their career prospects. Thirty-six of the men in our sample returned home to a curacy, a chaplaincy or a perpetual curacy. Several returnees arrived back to the same kind of circumstances that had motivated them to leave Britain in the first place. When Archdeacon Bethune toured Britain in the early 1850s he found the former SPG missionary, Alexander Williams, living on at a ‘very poor living’ at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, valued at only £81. Williams was presented to a nearby rectory in 1855, but his appointment to the post – which was in private hands – came 129 through his local clerical service, not his brief career in Canada. The sample of thirty-six included five men who would move on to vicarages and rectories within two years, but others had to wait a considerable amount of time before preferment came their way, and fourteen men never got beyond a curacy, chaplaincy or perpetual curacy.130 Edward Williams was unusual in that he chose to embark on a new missionary career in New Zealand after spells in New South Wales in the 1850s and English curacies in the 1860s.131 Ebenezer Wilshere’s career as an SPG missionary in the Cape and Madras dioceses was followed by twenty years of service in five English curacies and a cemetery chaplaincy.132 Edward Thomas Scott left South Africa in 1845 but he would have to serve various curacies and perpetual curacies before he finally landed a [ 194 ]

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Norfolk rectory in 1862.133 George Winter Warr (returned from Ontario 1845), Samuel Gray (South Africa, 1858) and Benjamin Vale (New South Wales, 1816) stayed put in perpetual curacies in Liverpool, Pateley Bridge and Stoke-on-Trent because they were relatively remunerative, but others, like the New South Wales returnee Charles Woodward, were forced to move from position to position to-make ends meet. Woodward served a variety of curacies and teaching posts in London and Surrey in the twenty-one years between his return in 1853 and his taking a rural 134 One critic of ecclesiastical patronage used Devon rectory in 1874. Woodward as an example of the kind of hard-working lower clergyman who too often went unrewarded in the existing preferment system.135 Sadly, Woodward only had three years to enjoy his Devon rectory, as he died in 1877.136 An earlier chapter showed that the clergy who left Britain for the colonies formed a mixed bag of Irish evangelicals, Scottish Tractarians, well-connected orthodox high churchmen and hard-up English curates. The men who went in the opposite direction were an equally varied group. While several, were well-connected men who were able to smoothly enter well-paid metropolitan positions (this was particularly the case with men who had served as military chaplains), others were taking a gamble by returning home. Alexander Pyne had not organised a position before returning to England in the 1860s, but he managed to secure a temporary post in Rochdale by signing on to the ‘registry for curates’ – a list of poorly-paid curacies and temporary postings organised 137 Men had varying reasons for by the Additional Curates’ Society. coming back. Some returned to retire, others left because they had had enough of colonial life. This was true of both George Winter Warr – who fell out with his parishioners at Oakville in Ontario – and George Villiers Thorpe – who in the early 1850s decided to swop a £200-a-year SPG mission for a perpetual curacy at Walton in Cumbria valued at only £131.138 At face value, Thorpe’s decision to come home was curious (especially because he would have to serve two more curacies before taking a Lincolnshire vicarage in 1864), but it is highly likely that his fractious relationship with Bishop Gray was the reason why he was willing to come back to Britain.139 Edward Parkin – who the Bishop of Quebec considered ‘deranged in mind’ – was another who returned involuntarily.140 Returning clergy are significant for several reasons. On the one hand these men provided the colonial Church with an important metropolitan-based advocacy network. A. N. Bethune stayed at returnees’ homes and preached from their pulpits when he toured Britain looking for funds for Toronto’s Trinity College in the early 1850s. Francis Vidal, who left New South Wales in the 1840s, collected money [ 195 ]

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for Australian church bells during his time teaching at Eton.141 Returnees are also are significant for what they tell us about the mobility of the Victorian clergy and the networks of preferment and patronage that connected the British and colonial churches. Despite the restrictions that were placed on the movement of the colonially ordained, and despite the increasingly independent status of many colonial dioceses, colonial and British dioceses did form a single ecclesiastical structure. While most Victorian clergy were sedentary beings who rarely moved on from their first benefice, there were others whose search for promotion took them across an imperial and international landscape.142 Returnees can also tell us something about how the colonial Church was viewed. That colonial mission was taking on a rising status is suggested by the fact that two returnees – Hopkins Badnall and John Gamble Geddes – chose to head back to the colonies to take up senior Church posts.143 It is also significant that the vast majority of colonial clergy did not return but chose to make their way through the clerical profession overseas. But the fact that some did return suggests that the British and colonial Churches were regarded as different kinds of institution. Though we need to know more about returnee’s motives, it is likely that many came back because they saw endowed positions in the metropolitan church as a step up from the insecure and unsteady existences they had faced in the voluntary churches of the colonial world. The £100 SPG stipend that Frederick Carlyon subsisted on at Stellenbosch was a pittance compared to the £735 net income he received when he 144 became rector of Leverington rectory in 1870. Others went home for leave of absence but ended up staying permanently. Thomas Henry Braim, the former Archdeacon of Portland in Victoria, left Australia in 1865 but after an absence of two years he decided to accept a demotion by taking a poor living at Dorchester in 1867 (he would eventually be appointed to more remunerative rectories in Dorset and Derbyshire).145 It is not surprising that men who had been born in Britain should one day want to return. More surprising is that Canadian-born clergy like the former Methodist Hannibal Mulkins were among those who applied for metropolitan licences after the 1874 act: such examples shows the kind of draw that Britain could exert over men who worked for an institution that set itself up as a crucial link between colony and metropole.146 Uncovering the deeper significance of this movement of clergy is difficult as the evidence trail left behind by many returnees is thin or difficult to access. We cannot know for sure whether returning clergy helped to raise awareness of ‘Greater Britain’ among their congregations. We do know that returnees raised funds for colonial causes and provided metropolitan Church reformers with information and news on colonial [ 196 ]

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developments: Mulleins, for example, delivered speeches on the dangers of the voluntary system to the Church Defence Association when he took up a Wiltshire vicarage in the mid-1870s.147 Alexander Pyne compared his establishment of voluntarily funded churches in Lancashire with the ‘church movements’ he had started in Canada.148 It is, however, difficult to determine whether these men possessed a distinct colonial outlook or whether their colonial careers were important in shaping their relationship with metropolitan congregations and ecclesiastical authorities. John Espy Keane may have been one of those returnees whose metropolitan career was shaped by previous colonial experiences. On several occasions in the 1840s and 1850s Keane was censured by his superior, Bishop Blomfleld of London, for acting 149 Keane’s apparent disregard for independently of episcopal authority. episcopal authority may have stemmed from the fact that he had been labouring in an Australian Church where episcopal authority pressed lightly on clergy, but this is only speculation. We need to know more about these men’s metropolitan activities before we can judge whether metropolitan congregations saw returnees as a kind of physical embodiment of ‘Greater Britain’ and an Anglican Communion.

Conclusion Treating the colonial Church as a kind of global network has some benefits. By drawing attention to networks of preferment and patronage we can gain a clearer sense of the diverse nature of the nineteenthcentury clerical profession, as well as the varied paths that clergy took to move up the ecclesiastical ladder. But in the final analysis it is questionable how far the student of settler churches should take up the call to pay attention to ‘multidirectional flows and multifaceted transnational relationships’.150 Many of the connections that emerged between Church outposts in the pre-1860 period were so thin and temporary that they do not really warrant the title ‘network’ at all. If the network concept is to have intellectual validity, then it must refer to forms of imperial or transnational interaction whose coherence and durability was of a different order to more everyday forms of interpersonal contact. It is not clear that the intra-colonial and intradiocesan contacts discussed here can be compared to the kind of circuits and connections that usually appear in discussions of imperial 151 networks. The movement of personnel across the American-Canadian border suggests the existence of some kind of recruitment network, but really this traffic came about through the personal decisions of individual clergymen. Where intra-colonial networks did exist, they tended to be channelled through the key ecclesiastical centre of authority, the bishop. [ 197 ]

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This is not to say there were no models of Church expansion that would have facilitated the proliferation of more open, non-official and participative networks. The rise of voluntary-funded churches gave colonial congregations the opportunity to build their own recruitment networks and source their own clergy. This is what the promoters of the UCCS had in mind when they developed plans in the mid-1830s for a form of Church expansion that would have given specially appointed vestries the authority to nominate clergy to bishops. An example of what could happen when lay communities were given freedom to act can be seen with the Anglo-Indian network that developed in South Africa in the 1830s and early 1840s. In many ways the lay networks that crisscrossed the Anglican world were one of the Church’s main strengths: such networks facilitated the movement of men and money and gave the laity a stake in a popular and inclusive Church. But this kind of voluntarism and localism sat awkwardly with episcopacy. A hierarchical and coercive Church may have harboured within it a range of informal and personal networks, but these could not exist apart from pre-existing structural mechanisms and were unlikely to achieve anything without the consent of authority figures. It is undeniable that the horizons of colonial Anglican broadened over the course of the nineteenth century. Both lay persons and colonial bishops looked imperially and globally for models on how a voluntary 152 Church could be built. But while the idea of Anglican community and Communion did gain purchase in the decades after 1830, this was not because Anglicans fostered lasting intra-colonial networks or ‘transnational’ links. The ecclesiastical networks that mattered most were the flows of information, people and materials that passed back and forth between the metropolitan Church and the various branches of the colonial Church. Colonial dioceses relied on funds from home and colonial congregations displayed a lasting preference for clergy and bishops from Britain. It is true that American religious culture left an imprint on aspects of worship and Church organisation in parts of Canada, but colonial dioceses tended to respond to changes emanating from the mother country. The religious movements that shaped the nineteenth-century settler Church – key examples are Tractarianism and pre-millenarian evangelicalism – were ones that originated in Britain. (Though the controversy that arose from Bishop John Colenso’s The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined in 1862 – a piece of biblical criticism inspired by questions posed by Zulus – did show that the colonies could be the source of religious ideas that would shape debate in Britain.) But this looking back to Britain also had a deeper root. Colonial churchmen recognised that one of their roles was to build a colonial [ 198 ]

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Church that would disseminate the loyalist and patriotic attitudes that would bind a British world together. Maintaining a British identity meant drawing men and ideas from the centre of empire. This explains why Strachan told the SPG in 1844 that ‘a mixture’ of indigenous clergy and imports from Britain would ‘produce the most healthy state of the Diocese’ as ‘men from home’ were ‘fresh and keep us up’.153 Histories that focus on the processes that led to the supposed ‘indigenisation’ of the overseas branches of the Church of England run the risk of missing the physical and psychological ties that linked senior Anglicans to Britain and the British world.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

LPL, Joshua Watson Papers, MS 1562, John Inglis to Joshua Watson, 3 November 1831, fos 19–22. H. Caswall, America and the American Church (London: J. G. and F. O. Rivington, 1839); Caswall, Scotland and the Scottish Church (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1853), p. iii. Stephenson, The First Lambeth Conference, p. 45. Caswall, The Western World Revisited (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1854), p. iv. Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, pp. 155–8. Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World. A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Laidlaw, Colonial Connections. R. Strong, ‘Bishop Selwyn and the British Empire: colonial networks and colonial outcomes’, in A. Davidson (ed.), A Controversial Churchman: Essays on George Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand and Lichfield, and Sarah Selwyn (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books Ltd, 2011), pp. 159–75. For Coleridge, see A. Cooper, ‘Forgotten Australian Anglican: Edward Coleridge’, Pacifica, 3:2 (1990), pp. 257–68. S. Brown and P. Nockles (eds), The Oxford Movement, p. 4. Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks. BL, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, India Office Records, MSS Eur, Manuscript Journal of Edward Whitehead, BL, C667. R. Langham-Carter, ‘The “Indians” in Cape Town’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library, 35:4 (1981), pp. 143–50; also see A. Bank, ‘Liberals and their enemies: racial ideology at the Cape of Good Hope, 1820–1850’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1995), ch. 3. ‘Welby, Thomas Earle’, DSAB, IV, p. 768. ‘Bird, William Wilberforce’, DSAB, I, pp. 77–8. J. Fawcett, Account of an Eighteen Months’ Residence at the Cape of Good Hope, in 1835–6 (Cape Town: G. J. Pike, 1836). Fawcett, Account, pp. 8, 12, 13–14. J. Darwin, ‘In search of the British connection’, seminar paper delivered to the ‘After Networks: new directions in the history of the British Empire’ symposium at the Centre for the Study of Global Empires, University of Aberdeen, 19 April 2013. R. S. Dobbs, Reminiscences of Life in Mysore, South Africa, and Burmah (Dublin: G. Herbert, 1882), chs 2 and 3. Ibid., p. 153. Hewitt, Sketches, pp. 85–6.

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD 21 22 23

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24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42

43

44 45 46 47

The Seventh Annual Report of the Colonial Church Society (London, 1843). TNA, CO 201/127, Frank Irvine to John Thomas Bigge, 24 May 1821, fo. 267. LPL, Newton Papers MS 3972, Claudius Buchanan to John Newton, 1 October 1798, fo. 47; 18 August 1834, ML, Marsden Papers, CY A1992, Bishop Wilson to Marsden, fos 556–7. One periodical thought India’s Church was ‘little better than one of a number of religious sects’: CCC, 3 (April 1850), p. 396. Gray, Life of Robert Gray, I, pp. 342–3. Ibid., I, pp. 249, 419. UYL, C/AFS/2, Robert Gray to Ernest Hawkins, 20 March 1848, fo. 452. UYL, C/AFS/3, Gray to Hawkins, 9 August 1849, fo. 361. J. Bateman, The Life of Daniel Wilson (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1860), pp. 247–8, 298–9; for John Turner’s involvement in the case of Rev. Wilkinson, see HRA, I:XVI, Viscount Goderich to Governor Bourke, 25 September 1831, pp. 375–6. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–1849, John Strachan to the Bishop of Jamaica, 20 June 1845, fo. 109; ibid., Strachan to the Bishop of Antigua, 8 April 1844, fo. 15. Strong, ‘Bishop Selwyn’, pp. 166, 172. A. Mountain, A Memoir of George Jehoshaphat Mountain (Montreal: John Lovell, 1866), p. 270. M. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1992), pp. 265–84. Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World. Little, Borderland Religion. DOA, Stuart Papers, 2–3, ‘An imperfect Draught of a letter to Bishop Inglis, dated July 5 1791’, fo. 7c. J. Errington, The Lion, the Eagle and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), pp. 44–5; T. Howard, God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 32–45. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–1866, Strachan to T. B. Murray, secretary to the SPCK, 5 November 1846, fo. 24. Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada, ch. 7. P. Nockles, ‘The Oxford Movement and the United States’, in S. Brown and P. Nockles (eds), The Oxford Movement, pp. 135–6. J. Strachan, A Letter to the Rev. Thomas Chalmers On the Life and Character of the Right Reverend Dr Hobart, Bishop of New York, North America (New York: Swords, Stanford & Co., 1832). Journal of the Proceedings of the Bishops, Clergy, and Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America Assembled in a General Convention (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1854), pp. 318–19. W. Berrian, Memoir of the Life of the Right Reverend John Henry Hobart, D.D. (New York: Swords, Stanford and Co., 1833), p. 223. Exchanges between English and American clergy are discussed in H. G. Herklots, The Church of England and the American Episcopal Church From the Fust Voyages of Discovery to the First Lambeth Conference (London: Mowbray, 1966), pp. 121–5. Nockles, ‘The Oxford Movement and the United States’, p. 136. R. B. Mullin, Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. xiv. Strachan, A Letter to the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, p. 9. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–1849, Strachan to Bishop Onderdonk of New York, 24 March 1847, fo. 232; ibid., Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Bishop DeLancey of Western New York, 12 October 1854, fo. 33.

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51

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52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59

60

61

62 63 64 65 66

P. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760– 1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 88–9. Nockles, ‘The Oxford Movement in the United States’, pp. 144–5. Caswall, America and the American Church, p. 85; J. Hopkins, A Defence of the Constitution of the Diocese of Vermont, in Reply to the Strictures of the Episcopal Recorder (New York: Putney & Russell, 1854). AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Bishop Hopkins of Vermont, 23 March 1854, fo. 12. Westfall, ‘Amos, Ansley’, DCB, VII, p. 20; for Wade, see AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–1843, Strachan to the Bishop of Ohio, 7 November 1841, fo. 209; for Elms, see Glenn Lockwood, The Rear of Leeds and Lansdowne (Lyndhurst: Corporation of the Township of Rear of Leeds and Lansdowne, 1996), p. 159; for Boyer, see AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Miss Dickinson, fo. 122. For Lefevre, see RHL, C/CAN/QUE/4/370, fo. 58. TCT, A. N. Bethune Fonds, Box 1, Correspondence 1850–1859, 1–3, E. H. Dewar to A. N. Bethune, 10 May 1855. W. M. Jackson, Remains of the Rev. William fackson, Late Rector of St. Paul’s Church, Louisville, Ky. With A Brief Sketch of His Life and Character (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1847), pp. 18–19. I. Fidler, Observations on Professions, Literature, Manners and Emigration, in the United States and Canada (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833), pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. 133. W. Manross, The Episcopal Church in the United States 1800–1840: A Study in Church Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), chs 3 and 4. For Sterling, see AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–1849, Strachan to Sterling, 24 July 1844, fo. 41; Journal of the Proceedings of the Bishops, Clergy, and Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (New York: James A. Sparks, 1845), p. 263. For Hildebrand, see AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854– 1862, Strachan to Hildebrand, 15 December 1854, fo. 41; J. Venn (ed.), Alumni Cantabrigiensis, vol. II, Part III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–53), p. 365; Journal of the Proceedings of the Seventy-Second Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in the Diocese of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: J. S. McCalla’s Book Press, 1856), p. 186. For Brittan, see AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–1843, Strachan to Brittan, 28 October 1840, fo. 74. For Rogers, see AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–1843, Strachan to Robert Cartwright, 15 December 1840, fo. 85; Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–1849, Strachan to Rogers, 23 February 1846, fo. 164; Reel 13, Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Rogers, 5 December 1860, fo. 354. Ibid., Reel 12, Letterbook 1844–1849, Strachan to the Bishop of Ohio, 23 November 1847, fo. 266; For Allen, see The Canadian Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Self-Made Men (Toronto: American Biographical Publishing Company, 1880), pp. 146–7. Fidler, Observations, pp. 37–8; AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–1866, Strachan to A. M. Campbell, 13 March 1841, fo. 19. Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, p. 77. E. Parkin, Importance and Responsibility of the Christian Ministry. A Valedictory Sermon (Montreal: Printed for the author, by Thomas A. Starke, 1832), p. 24. Street, Rev. George C. Street. Coghlan’s Canadian career can be found in his letters preserved in RHL, C/CAN/QUE/12/478; N. Prime, A History of Long Island, From Its First Settlement by Europeans, to the Year 1845, with Special Reference toits Ecclesiastical Concerns. Part II (New York: Robert Carter, 1845), p. 328. The Clergy List for 1842 (London: Ecclesiastical Gazette Office, 1842), p. 125; Clergy List for 1846, p. 141.

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71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88

89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96

Thompson and Magee, Empire and Globalisation, p. 108. Ibid., p. 168. Little, Borderland Religion, ch. 10. K. Hull, ‘Charles James Stewart and the first Canadian Anglican hymn book’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 81:3 (September 2012), pp. 307–29. Jacob, Making of the Anglican Church, pp. 163–4, 171. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 61. For Douglas, see DSAB, III, pp. 236–7; for Dicken, see the Clergy List for 1841, p. 91. Robert Lugger, a missionary to Upper Canada’s Six Nations community, came from Barbados, and five of the clergy appointed to Australia before 1850 were sourced from the West Indies: Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 61. A. Pyne, Reminiscences of Colonial Life and Missionary Adventure in both Hemispheres (London: Elliot Stock, 1875), pp. 217–26. UYL, C/APS/1, Welby to unnamed correspondent, 1 July 1848 and 11 July 1848, fos 270–1. Gray referred to Wilshere’s troubled spell in Madras in a letter to Archdeacon Merriman dated 20 April 1849: RHL, C/AFS/5, fo. 303. Ibid., C/AFS/1, Welby to Hawkins, 10 August 1857, fo. 288. Pyne, Reminiscences, pp. 283, 333, 344. Elbourne, ‘Indigenous peoples’, pp. 65–6. AO, Rev. F. J. Lundy Diaries, MS 3, Reel 1 (1849–1850), diary entry for 14 January 1849. ‘Extract of a Letter from the Cape of Good Hope’, CCC, I (April, 1848), pp. 383–4. UYL, D Series, Archdeacon Merriman to Hawkins, 11 June 1853, fo. 957. Little, Borderland Religion, pp. 234–5. Correspondence Between the Lord Bishop of Capetown and F.R. Surtees, p. 65. UYL, D Series, Merriman to Hawkins, 11 June 1853, fo. 957. See Reid’s diary entry for 6 January 1850: M. Reisner (ed.), The Diary of a Country Clergyman 1848–1851: James Reid (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), p. 68. S. Wood, An Apology for the Colonial Clergy of Great Britain: Specially for Those of Lower and Upper Canada (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1828), pp. 33–4. The 1840 Act which supposedly brought the American and Scottish Churches into closer communion with the English Church still only allowed Americans and Scottish clergy to officiate in England for a maximum of two days. RHL, C/AUS/SYD/1, W. B. Clarke to Hawkins, 31 August 1840, fo. 37. George Moberley of Bristol felt he could raise money from his congregation for the church his brother, a former royal navy captain, was building at Penetanguishene in Upper Canada, but he looked to the SPG to find the missionary: ibid., C/CAN/QUE/13/498, George Moberley to W. P. Lendon, 31 October 1835 and Moberley to A. M. Campbell, 2 March 1836, f. 95 and f. 96 SPG hostility is mentioned in AO, SP, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854–1862, Strachan to Rev. Macnab, 21 February 1859, fo. 285. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, ch. 6. The phrase is Laidlaw’s: ibid., p. 127. Yarwood, Samuel Marsden, pp. 153–4, 218–19 DOA, John Stuart Papers, 3–3 Bishop of Quebec Correspondence 1801–3, Jacob Mountain to John Stuart, 17 March 1803, fo. 22a. Strachan suggested John Wenham, who had returned to England in 1830 after a career as an SPG missionary in Upper Canada: Strachan to Charles James Stewart, 25 November 1830, AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 10, Letterbook 1827–1839, fo. 101. Wenham was not employed as a permanent agent, but he did keep churchmen in Canada

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97 98 99

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100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115

116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

125 126 127 128

informed of goings-on at the CO: Strachan to Sir John Colborne, 31 January 1831, ibid., fo. 109. Ibid., Strachan to Stewart, 31 December 1828 and 25 February 1831, fos 25 and 116. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 7, Bethune to Strachan, 1 September 1852. LPL, Howley Papers, vol. 1, George Hough to the Bishop of London, 26 July 1824, fo. 446. Craig, Upper Canada, pp. 134–5. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, p. 160. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 2, Robert Wilmot-Horton to Strachan, 18 May 1824 and 24 May 1826; ibid., Strachan to Dr Brown, 15 December 1826. For the rise of statistics in colonial governance, see Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, ch. 7. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 2, Strachan to J. B. Robinson, 23 April 1827. Burroughs, ‘Lord Howick’, pp. 400–1. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 2, Bethune to Strachan, 11 June 1831; ibid., F983–2, Reel 10, Letterbook 1827–1839, Strachan to Bethune, 5 November 1831, fo. 170. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 2, Bethune to Strachan, 14 December 1831. For the Albion’s transatlantic significance, see Henry Scadding, Toronto of Old (Toronto: Adam, Stevenson and Co., 1873), p. 282. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 10, Letterbook 1827–1839, Strachan to Stewart, 31 December 1827, fos 9–10. These figures are drawn from the indexes of the foumals of the House of Commons, vols 94 and 95 and the foumals of the House of Lords, vol. LXXII, pp. 701–2. RHL, C/CAN/GEN/1/14, Hugh Wynn Jones to the SPG, 3 April 1839. Church, 21 July 1838. BL, GP, Add MS 44356, F. O. Oakeley to W. E. Gladstone, 18 April 1838, fo. 42. O. Brose, Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England 1828– 1860 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 152. For details on the Canadian petitions see RHL, C/CAN/GEN/1/14. Carey, God’s Empire, pp. 254–56. Ibid., pp. 379–80. For return migration see M. Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings, part II. A. H. Young, ‘More Langhorn letters’, Papers and Records of the Ontario Historical Society, 29 (1933), p. 25. ‘Raddish, Thomas’, CCEd Person ID: 37393 (last accessed 21 March 2013). ‘Hewett, John Short’, ibid., Person ID: 63866 (last accessed 21 March 2013); Ipswich Journal, 17 April 1824; The Clerical Guide, pp. 76, 170. Clerical Guide, p. 15; ‘Erskine, Thomas’, CCEd Person ID: 10792 (last accessed 5 April 2013). Clergy List for 1867, p. 416. Hewett was minister of Anstey in Hertfordshire from 1839: see The Clergy List for 1841, p. 5. Clergy List for 1856, p. 153. For the localism of private patronage, see P. Virgin, The Church in an Age of Negligence: Ecclesiastical Structure and the Problems of Church Reform 1700–1840 (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1989), p. 174. For the rural living as a form of pension, see Haig, Victorian Clergy, p. 321. Ibid., pp. 290–1. For Vale see ‘Vale, Benjamin’, CCEd Person ID: 20149 (last accessed 5 April 2013); Smith, see ‘Smith, Elijah’, CCEd Person ID: 532 (last accessed 5 April 2013). Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 222, 372–3.

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD 129 AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 7, Bethune to Strachan, 6 Jan 1853. The rectory at Upper Cerne was still only valued at £152: Clergy List for 1859, p. 45. For the importance of clerical service in securing patronage for otherwise unconnected men, see Haig, Victorian Clergy, p. 263. 130 For the problem of perennial curates in the Victorian Church, see ibid., p. 354. 131 See Williams’s entry in the Cable Clerical Index, http://anglicanhistory.org/aus/cci/ (last accessed 16 August 2013). 132 Crockford’s Clerical Directory for 1903 (London: Church House Publishing, 1903), p. 1501. 133 Clergy List for 1853, p. 194; Clergy List for 1858, p. 203; Clergy List for 1862, p. 166. 134 Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, pp. 320–2. 135 ‘Episcopal patronage: the claims of deserving curates’, Essex Standard, 28 July 1871. 136 Clergy List for 1876, p. 80; Crockford’s Clerical Directory for 1870, p. 789. 137 Pyne, Reminiscences, p. 217. 138 Clergy List for 1854, p. 223. 139 Thorpe’s difficult relationship with Gray is referred to in UYL, C/AFS/3, Gray to Hawkins, 9 August 1849, fo. 362. Gray would serve curacies at Butterton near Newcastle-under-Lyme and Churchill, Somerset: Clergy List for 1856, p. 218; Clergy List for 1862, p. 63. 140 ‘Parkin, Edward’, DCB, VII, pp. 681–3. 141 ‘Church bells in Australia’, SMH, 26 June 1852. 142 Haig, Victorian Clergy, p. 290. 143 Badnall became Archdeacon of Georgetown in 1862 and Geddes resumed his duties as Dean of Niagara after serving three years as rector of Tatsfield in Kent. Carey, God’s Empire, p. 247. 144 Clergy List for 1812, p. 132. 145 Portland Guardian, 18 November 1891; Clergy List for 1867, p. 70; Clergy List for 1869, p. 47; Clergy List for 1881. 146 Mulkins applied for and got a licence to permanently reside in England under the terms of the 1874 Act: see Borthwick Institute of Archives, COL.C 2/1. Register of Permissions and Licences granted 1874–1913. 147 York Herald, 4 June 1875. Joseph Hudson, a former military chaplain in Upper Canada, appealed for the sufferers of a Quebec fire when he became perpetual curate of Hexham in 1845: Newcastle Courant, 3 October 1845. 148 Pyne, Reminiscences, pp. 105, 218. 149 Keane was charged with illegally introducing pew rents, instituting alterations to the church fabric without prior permission and refusing to read thanksgiving prayers in their prescribed forms: LPL, Blomfield Papers, vol. 44, Blomfield to Keane, 21 November 1846, fos 388–9; ibid., vol. 46, Blomfield to Keane, 29 November 1847, fo. 212; ibid., vol. 47, Blomfield to Keane, 24 April 1848, fo. 81. 150 As outlined by K. Grant, P. Levine and F. Trentmann in their edited collection Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 8. 151 Thompson and Magee, Empire and Globalisation, ch. 2, esp. pp. 45–6. 152 William Woolls, a prominent Anglican churchwarden in Parramatta, New South Wales, was one layman who looked to America for models on Church polity: Diocese of Sydney Archives, Sydney, Parramatta North, All Saints – Correspondence, Churchwarden’s Treasurer, 1848–1851, 1930/3/59, William Woolls to Mr Statham, 19 March and 22 March 1852. 153 AO, SP, F-983–2, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–1866, Strachan to Hawkins, 24 May 1844, fo. 58.

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CHAPTER SIX

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The Church, associations and ethnic and loyalist identities

At various points in this book we have seen how the Church of England adapted itself to the culture of voluntarism that took root in the empire of European settlement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. One of the reasons why the Church was able to negotiate the political changes of the 1830s and 1840s was because it managed to establish voluntary institutions, such as the Church Societies in Canada, which channelled the energies and wealth of the laity. Anglicans also contributed to, and profited from, the expansion of a wider world of voluntary endeavour. Clergy made an important contribution to the growth of a range of charitable, educational and fraternal organisations 1 that lay outside the Church. In early nineteenth-century Ontario Orangemen set aside land for the simultaneous establishment of Orange halls and Anglican churches.2 Freemasonry was another visible presence in Church expansion. Church cornerstones were often laid with masonic honours and Anglican clergymen reciprocated by consecrating lodges. Strong connections also emerged between the Church and associations that, unlike freemasonry or Orangeism, originated in the colonies. For example, Anglican clergymen dominated the position of chaplain of the English St George benevolent societies that appeared in Canadian towns 3 from the 1830s onwards. This chapter will show that this culture of voluntarism held out important benefits as well as challenges for a Church that was trying to find a new role for itself in colonial society. The study of associations is well entrenched in the fields of migration and diaspora history. It has also attracted the attention of historians of Roman Catholicism. The Canadian Catholic Church’s efforts to attach itself to organisations such as the St Patrick’s Society and the Hibernian Society in 1850s Toronto have been seen as an example of a Catholic attempt to fuse Roman Catholicism to an Irish ethnic consciousness.4 Historians of Anglicanism have so far said little about the Church of England’s equally long-running involvement in [ 205 ]

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ethnic and fraternal associations. This lack of interest is curious, as two associations in particular – the national benevolent society and the Orange Order – can help us address two issues that have received only limited coverage in the existing literature. First, fraternal and ethnic organisations can shed new light on how a colonial Church that was gradually losing its establishment status tried to reassert its authority in colonial society.5 Second, associations provide a rare and valuable opportunity to explore the Church’s relationship with ethnic and national identities in the colonial context. Most scholars of the settler churches have portrayed the British-born clergy as helping to export Britishness and old-world identities overseas, but few have explored how the clergy went about performing this role.6 Ethnic associations like the English St George’s societies give us a unique opportunity to examine the clergy’s position as transmitters of British identities. Such an investigation is especially timely given the current scholarly interest in what has been called the ‘hidden English diaspora’. Locating the English has always been a tricky task: one Canadian editor wrote in 1840 that Englishmen did not ‘enter into separate national associations’ because they were ‘not so national in their feelings as their brothers of Ireland and Scotland’.7 Recent research suggests that the editor was wrong: the rapid spread of English St George’s societies brought Canada’s English population out into the open and showed that English communities engaged in the kind of ethnic corporate behaviour more readily associated with the Scots and Irish.8 Anglican clergymen were prominent players in the early phase of English corporatism. Not only did they serve as chaplains to the societies, they were also tasked with providing sermons and addresses at English national celebrations. The Anglican engagement with these English associations allows us to explore the ‘Englishness’ of the colonial Church in a way that has not been done before. Though historians have begun to explore the relationship between the Church and the colonial English, existing work has tended to cast bishops as carriers of a kind of high Anglican view of 9 English culture. Studies of the Englishness of the clergy have also tended to rely on anecdotal pieces of evidence drawn from diaries, public orations and memoirs.10 Associations, by contrast, provide a more systematic means of studying the links between English Church and English people. The sermons that were delivered by clergy at national celebrations can, for example, shed valuable light on how the clergy understood English character and nationality. The Church of England was not the only colonial church that tried to fuse itself to an ethnicity, but it may well have had the most trouble 11 trying to do so. Partly this was because the Church had historically [ 206 ]

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seen itself as a national institution serving a diverse and multi-ethnic public; partly it was because at the same as clergymen were building links with English associations, other clergy were attending the Orange Order and the Irish St Patrick’s society. These clergymen did not necessarily see the Church in the same way as their Anglophile counterparts. In addition to teasing out the significance of the Church’s engagement with English institutions, this chapter also looks at what the Anglican involvement in these other associations tells us about the different ways in which clergy, some of whom were Irish-born, conceived of the Church’s relationship with ethnic identity. The chapter concentrates on mid-nineteenth-century Ontario for two reasons. The first is simply because the Orange Order and the various national benevolent societies set down firmer roots there than elsewhere. The second reason is that Ontario’s Anglican public was characterised by a striking ethnic diversity. The English element in the Toronto diocese was challenged in a way unlike that in South Africa and Australia; consequently, the Church in Ontario provides an excellent case study of the difficulties facing a multi-ethnic, multi-national Church.

The Church and expressions of English consciousness Clergy may have helped found St George’s societies in Toronto (1836), Quebec (1836), Kingston (1835), Montreal (1837) and Ottawa (1844), but there was nothing that was natural or foreordained about Anglican involvement in English associational culture. This was partly because the pre-reform era Church had little reason to see itself as an English institution serving a distinct English community: if it had done it would have had little to do. Migration into the Canadas in the 1810s and 1820s was dominated by the Scots and the Irish, and it was only when the English economy slumped in the 1830s that English immigration rose. Michael Gauvreau has described the Canadian Church as a British institution that saw its role as propagating a comprehensive and latitudinarian Protestantism that, it was hoped, would promote feelings 12 of allegiance and loyalty among colonists. Hence we can find clergy at moments of national celebration coming forward to deliver sermons that affirmed both the Church’s link with the British monarchy and the clergy’s roles as spokespersons for the national community.13 The growing strength of non-Anglican denominations, changes in the political landscape and mounting English immigration prompted Anglicans to rethink their claims to national status. The Whig government’s decision to ‘establish’ the other Protestant churches in the 1840s left the Church in a position where it could no longer claim to be the Church of an extensive British community overseas. English [ 207 ]

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immigration into Canada also rose: three times more English arrived between 1830 and 1834 than they had done in the years since 1815. Anglican responses to these shifts were varied: on the one hand many churchmen continued to act as if their Church was a British institution serving a broad colonial community; on the other, increased usage of the terms ‘Church people’ and ‘our people’ by higher and lower clergy suggests that others thought that the Church should concentrate on a smaller community of nominal Anglicans. In Gauvreau’s view the British church of the age of revolutions was gradually replaced by a church that thought of itself as an English institution that was there to serve the religious needs of a core English community.14 Evidence to support this claim can be found in both the colonies and back home in the metropole. In England, as the Australian historian Howard Le Couteur has shown, a network of Oxford-educated Anglicans developed the idea that the Church and other English institutions – such as grammar schools – would disseminate a hierarchical and paternalistic form of English civilisation across the empire’s settler communities.15 Hilary Carey notes that this ‘Christian colonisation’ crested with the foundation of New Zealand’s Canterbury settlement in the later 1840s. But Christian colonisation was a matter of exporting English civilisation; what we find is that pressures within the colonies – notably the mobilisation of the Presbyterian community against the clergy reserves – prompted colonial Anglicans to call for closer ties between the existing English community and its Church. In 1838 a Toronto correspondent in The Church newspaper – the key high church organ in Upper Canada – urged the Church of England to rediscover its traditional identity as the Church of the English. He wrote: ‘had the English in Upper Canada remained as true to the Church as the Scotch to the Kirk, or as the Protestant Irish to the colonial branch of the United Church of England and Ireland, far different would have been the religious and ecclesiastical state of the Province at this present moment!’ For the correspondent, St George’s Day was an appropriate day for the English to not only ‘shake off’ their ‘habitual phlegm’ and celebrate their tutelary saint, but was also a moment when they should mobilise in defence of Anglican 16 establishment and the clergy reserves. These calls for the mobilisation of the English community had been anticipated by the formation of a St George’s society in Toronto in 1836. Two clergymen were among the founder members and the post of society chaplain was monopolised by Anglican clerics throughout our period (it was not until 1872 that divine services on St George’s Day were held in Wesleyan and Baptist places of worship). Clergy gravitated to the society because it seemed to offer a ready-made support network for the Church. Bishop Strachan thought that the St George’s societies [ 208 ]

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would be a wellspring of support for the Anglican university that he planned to build at mid-century: according to him, many of the ‘influential and wealthy’ members of the Toronto society were ‘attached to England & her institutions’.17 The early society did indeed look like a powerful pro-Anglican, pro-establishment, conservative lobby. The founder members William H. Boulton, G. T. Denison, Henry Sherwood, John Simcoe Macaulay, William Botsford Jarvis, Grant Powell, Robert Stanton, James Cull and G. A. Barber were all active Church members and all advocated the retention of the clergy reserves.18 The Toronto society’s stipulation that the second toast at every society dinner would be to the Church of England seemed to confirm these close ties between Church and association.19 In fact there is no evidence that the St George’s societies ever mobilised their members or the wider English community in defence of ‘their’ Church: members who did oppose the secularisation of the clergy reserves in the early 1850s, such as the Tory politician Henry Sherwood, did so in a private capacity. To understand why links between Anglicans and English associations developed we need to get a clearer sense of the society’s inner workings, their significance in the wider political context of mid-nineteenth-century Ontario and the multifaceted roles that such societies performed.

St George’s societies: formation and function Like the Church to which it was attached, St George’s societies were complex institutions that performed a range of civic and ethnic functions.20 Neither the Church nor the St George’s societies should be seen as props of some pre-reform status quo. If we look beyond the loyalist toasts at the dinners and elite membership then the societies were in tune with currents that were transforming society in Upper Canada. These were institutions that offered immigrants a place in colonial society; they also provided forums for men to fraternise, build professional networks, cultivate personal contacts and accumulate what we might call ‘social capital’. The society’s main public event – its annual saint’s day procession and dinner – evinced a cosmopolitan character that recalled eighteenth-century civic traditions. These gatherings were multi-ethnic, multi-denominational and open to all those respectable males who could prove their loyalty to the British imperial connection and constitutional tradition. Representatives of the Irish St Patrick’s and Scottish St Andrew’s societies regularly attended the dinners and joined in toasts to the monarchy, the British military and the British constitution. Christians of all denominations joined the society and attended the annual celebrations (by-law five of the Kingston [ 209 ]

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society only required its members to ‘believe in the Holy Scripture’).21 The attendance of the Scottish-born Roman Catholic bishop of Kingston, Alexander Macdonell, at the English dinner in Kingston in 1836 underlined the ecumenism of these gatherings.22 National celebrations of this sort shed light on both the significance of the Church and the social standing of the clergy. Earlier chapters have shown how many clergy struggled to articulate their authority in the rough and tumble world of the colonial frontier. By contrast, the gentrified surroundings of the national benevolent society provided a forum for clergy to perform their customary roles as community leaders.23 Three of the Toronto society’s chaplains occupied prominent positions in civil society: Henry Scadding, chaplain from 1840 to 1860, was minister at Holy Trinity church and was Toronto’s first historian. George Whitaker was provost of Trinity College Toronto and James Beaven – member from 1856 to 1858 – was professor of metaphysics and ethics at the University of Toronto (the Rev. E. K. Kendall, Trinity College’s mathematics professor, also delivered sermons to the Toronto society). Whitaker and Beaven helped to nurture strong links between the St George’s society and Toronto’s educational institutions. The cornerstone of King’s College was laid on St George’s Day 1842, and in 1861 and 1864 the university’s park witnessed the planting of oaks – ‘emblematical of Old England’ – to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary 24 of the society and the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. Though neither Trinity nor the university can be described as English institutions – the original King’s College was modelled on Scottish universities – they and the St George’s societies were cast as vehicles through which colonial society would be infused with an English character.25 The St George’s societies were therefore a way for the clergy to validate their status in an urban social milieu. The societies also allowed the clergy to plug themselves into important political shifts. St George’s societies allowed clergy to demonstrate the Church’s significance for a new strand of moderate conservatism that was taking shape in Upper Canada in the mid-1830s. David Mills has shown how the moderate Toryism that emerged in pre-rebellion Canada was distinct from the increasingly outmoded loyalism articulated by the elite Loyalist families that had monopolised political power since the post-American revolution settlement. Moderate conservatism was based on allegiance to the imperial connection and British constitutional models, but it was also more inclusive as it envisaged a position for immigrants and 26 religious and ethnic minorities in a new Canadian civil society. In this context the multi-denominational, multi-ethnic gatherings that occurred on saint’s days begin to make sense: these were forums in which colonial conservatives could project their idealised picture of new loyalist, [ 210 ]

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immigrant colonial society that would allow a range of religious and ethnic loyalties to coexist in a ‘British’ Canada. In offering this kind of inclusive civic space the national societies served as a kind of bridge between eighteenth-century Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the sectarian and ethnic separateness of later nineteenth century associational culture. The importance of the civic element in these associations might leave the impression that the St George’s societies were not really about Englishness or the English at all. From another angle, however, we can see that the articulation of a new British Canadian colonial identity was reconcilable with attachment to a narrower Englishness. The values and institutions that seemed to lie at the core of this colonial nationality 27 could, in some hands, be coded as English. If we look beyond the society’s annual celebrations and civic functions then we can see that the society could also articulate a sense of Englishness: after all, only those of English descent could join up, and the Society would only care for the English community. The ethnic aspect of the events in the 1830s and 1840s was admittedly fairly muted: toasts were accompanied by English songs, English food was served up, and reports of dinners in the later 1830s made only occasional references to ‘the honest heartiness of feeling peculiar to the English character’.28 The ethnic outlook did, however, become steadily more pronounced as the inclusive definition of civic identity began to unravel amid the sectarian tensions brought on by heightened Catholic immigration in the post-Irish Famine period.29 By the 1860s Ontario St George’s societies were opening up new channels for a broad English community to fraternise and to express their Englishness. The Toronto society put on balls, concerts, annual picnics, tourist excursions and symbolic planting of English oaks.30 In 1861 around 3,000 people were reported to have attended an evening service held at St James Cathedral on St George’s Day.31 The province-wide Shakespeare festival in April 1864 was another high point in the popularisation of English identity.32 Though the presence of Toronto’s Catholic bishop at the festival was a sign that hopes of an inclusive and tolerant civic society had not entirely evaporated, the various national benevolent societies do appear to have taken on more ethnocentric outlooks.33 The Anglican clergy had the task of giving this English consciousness a sharper definition when they delivered the societies’ annual sermon. Though only a small number of sermons have survived – fifteen were printed between 1836 and 1875 and the press passed comment on only a handful – an analysis of sermons is not without reward. Such sources cannot tell us much about the personal identities of either the clergy or the society members. They can, however, help us [ 211 ]

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to reconstruct an instance of what Peter Mandler has called ‘the public presentation of a group identity’, or, put differently, how an institution or group chose to construct and articulate a national identity or consciousness at a particular moment in time.34 The clergy were doing two things when they appeared in front of the St George’s societies. First, they were trying to define and disseminate an explicit notion of English identity that was based on a distinct English character. Second, the Anglican clergy were trying to achieve the same kind of fusion between religion and ethnicity that their Irish Roman Catholic counterparts sought to achieve when they began to control St Patrick’s Day in the early 1850s.35 Though the following section will concentrate on the Ontario examples, the small size of the sample and the similarities between those delivered at Toronto and elsewhere in Canada means that examples will be drawn from beyond Upper Canada.

St George’s Day sermons The sermons were on a range of subjects and did not always talk at length about Englishness or English national identity. Henry Scadding delivered sermons on the texts ‘Wisdom and kinship shall be the Stability of thy times’, ‘Sirs! Ye are brethren!’ and ‘Christianity triumphant over evil’.36 Some sermons discussed Christian charity;37 others affirmed the loyalist credentials of both the Church and the benevolent society.38 Those that did touch on questions of identity often left little room for an appreciation of a distinct English culture or character. Bishop Mountain of Quebec’s 1844 sermon articulated ideas about the universalism of English civilisation that fit right into what Krishan Kumar has called ‘missionary nationalism’. For Mountain, England had been ‘charged with the task of dispensing far and wide over the globe, the blessings and privileges, civil, social and religious, which, through the mercy of God, 39 have been enjoyed by herself’. Political sermons were common. Whitaker’s 1866 discussion of the role that England would play in moulding the colonial character spoke to concerns about the threats posed by Fenianism and militant Irish nationalism.40 If we look across our period then we see that the clergy who delivered these sermons were entering into a debate about national character that, according to Peter Mandler, first gained traction during the debates over parliamentary reform in the 1830s. While Mandler argues that much of the steam had gone out of the British debate around mid-century, the sermons suggest that this was still an issue that was engaging the attentions of colonial clergy.41 Two of the Toronto sermons – Henry Scadding’s English Civilization Undemonstrative of 1860 and George Whitaker’s 1866 The Responsibilities Attaching to National [ 212 ]

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Character – were discussions of the psychological characteristics or traits which all the members of the English nation or ethnicity were thought to possess. Both defined the essential English behavioural characteristics as reserve, truthfulness, simplicity, and a predisposition for independence that was tempered by a reverence for authority.42 Scadding and Whitaker intimated that a broader constituency than just the English-born could adopt these peculiarly English traits and characteristics. Both saw the colonial population as gradually being moulded by the infusion of what Whitaker in 1866 called English ‘institutions’, ‘manners’, ‘morals’ and ‘principles’. Scadding had previously given an address at the foundation of King’s College Toronto on St George’s Day 1842 that developed the idea that the English national character could be transmitted to those who had not been born in England. According to Scadding, universities were the means by which the ‘sterling traits and high tones’ of the English character were ‘being gradually ingrained into our character as a people’. At this point Scadding looked forward to Canada becoming a ‘noble suburban precinct 43 to metropolitan England’. By 1880 he was writing that the introduction of the humble English church bell, ‘wrung in the “old country” scientific way’, had added the final touch to the transformation of Canada into a ‘second England’.44 In drawing attention to Anglican colleges and church bells Scadding was trying to place the Church at the centre of conceptualisations of English character and identity. Other sermons drew an essential link between Englishness and Anglicanism, often going so far as to argue that the characteristics of the English people were, in fact, the product of the Church of England’s brand of Christian teaching. The Church argued that the ‘influences’ of the Anglican establishment were ‘transfused through every channel, through every vein and artery of the social and political body’.45 In an article published in the Church newspaper on St George’s Day 1851 the high churchman W. S. Darling similarly claimed that ‘many of those characteristics of the [Anglo-Saxon] race which are most estimable, have originally sprung from the religious teachings of the Church of God, which in England has always been closely united with the State’. The Church had ‘been so blended with every proceeding and institution of the land’, that it had played the key role in ‘moulding the national character’ and giving to it that ‘subordination to legitimate authority’ and ‘high sense of uprightness and integrity’. Darling’s article was really a warning about the dangers of disestablishment: in his view, the separation of Church and state was paving ‘the way for the moral deterioration of her people’, as once freed from the restraining hand of the Church, the English would be transformed into restless, independent 46 and republican Americans. [ 213 ]

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The kind of ‘romantic church nationalism’ that ran through these sermons is a language that is usually associated with the high church tradition, and most of those who stood up before the society were high churchmen of one sort or another.47 But in many ways these sermons show that the ideas associated with ‘broad church’ thinkers were creeping into intellectual defences of the national Church in colonial as well as metropolitan contexts. The sermons developed ideas about national religion and the historical and cultural significance of the national Church that looked a lot like those contained in the broad church manifestoes penned by Thomas Arnold and his son Matthew. Whitaker, Scadding and Darling were each picking up the broad church idea that nations had distinct religious characters and that the representative of this national religion – the established Church – had the duty to provide moral and spiritual guidance to all members of the national community, regardless of their party or denominational identity.48 The St George’s societies gave the impression that such a broad and theologically neutral Church did in fact exist. The sermons rarely made any reference to controversies over dogma and theology, and not all the clergy who were associated with the society were from the high church camp. Joseph Hemington Harris, a founder member, was an evangelical supporter of the multi-denominational Bible Society, and Septimus Ramsay, who delivered an address to the society in 1861, had been secretary of the UCCS. R. V. Rogers, a prominent English-born evangelical, would serve as chaplain of the Kingston society in 1859. The St George’s societies in Toronto and Kingston not only strengthened links between Church and nation; they also championed the diversity of a Church that was acting as if it were still a national and privileged establishment. Anglican engagement with the St George’s societies therefore tells us something about how clergy tried to justify their role in colonial society and national life more generally. Benevolent organisations like the St George’s societies allowed colonial churchmen to present their Church as a public institution that had relevance for more than just a 49 narrow Anglican community. In the early period ethnic associations had given the clergy the chance to reach out to a wider immigrant civil society; in later decades it was the English community who were being targeted. By presenting the Church as a central institution in the lives of English migrants, and by drawing a link between the institutional Church and the English national character, clergymen were essentially trying to realise three objectives: one was to identify and define an English national character; the second was to show that there was an essential connection between Englishness and Anglicanism; the third [ 214 ]

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was to perpetuate the idea that the Church of England was still the Church of the English when it travelled overseas. At the 1864 Shakespeare gathering Whitaker was still referring to an ‘English Church’ that was ‘the Church of our Country’.50 These efforts to present the Church as an English institution would no doubt have comforted those who worried that the colonial Church and the colonies themselves were ‘British in name’ but ‘American in character’.51 While the clergy had little trouble maintaining a monopoly over the society (it was not until after our period that the links between the Church and the St George’s societies weakened), most found that defining an English ethnic identity was a much trickier task. For the most part this involved pinpointing a distinct English character rather than a particular set of English traditions and customs. The clergymen studied here were not, for the most part, entirely successful in cultivating a strong English consciousness that explicitly separated England from Britain and English from British. That some referred to ‘Anglo-Saxons’ instead of ‘English’ suggests that any sense of being English could still be subsumed within wider and more capacious identities. Scadding’s idea that the English character was a marketable commodity that could be adopted by those who had been born outside England also suggests that understandings of who the English were could 52 be expansive. What Scadding had in mind was a kind of ethnic fusion in which Canada’s various ethnic and religious groups would be brought under a dominant English and Anglican civilisation or culture. All this meant that the clergy’s focus on Englishness did not necessarily mean that the Church was turning inwards to concentrate on a narrower, English-born community. It is questionable whether this Anglican discourse on English ethnicity achieved any kind of salience in Canadian society. The Toronto society itself ruled that printed copies of the sermons would only be disseminated among society members.53 There is no reason to suppose that this was an exclusive community. By the early 1860s membership of the Toronto St George’s society had broadened considerably. An analysis of the first 200 individuals on the 1862 membership list reveals that elites and professionals continued to dominate, but that lower-status professions, such as those in butchery, tailoring and artisan trades such as watchmaking, were represented. Still, not all the society members were Anglican and not all would have heard the sermons. But the important issue is not whether the Church was able to monopolise definitions of English consciousness; what concerns us is that the ethnic association was one of the forums in which churchmen were trying to carve out a new role for themselves in Canadian society. [ 215 ]

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The Church and St Patrick’s Day in Toronto So far we have seen that there is evidence to support Gauvreau’s argument that the Church of England responded to disestablishment by attaching itself to an English identity. But to claim that there was some sudden turn to Englishness in the post-1830 period would be to simplify what was a complicated situation. The colonial Church was still a British institution with a British outlook, and those who wished to attach the Church to an English identity were only a small group of Anglophiles within the Anglican community. Observance of St George’s Day was far from widespread in parish churches and in no sense did the Church engage with English associationalism on a corporate basis. John Strachan frequently turned down the St George’s society when it invited 54 him to attend their dinners. Non-English clergy gravitated towards the St Patrick’s society and the Orange Order rather than the English associations. These two institutions are of interest to Church historians for different reasons. While the St Patrick’s society is significant for what it tells us about the identities of a particular group of Irish colonial clergy, the Orange Order introduces us to some of the ways in which an ‘English Church’ came to play roles that went beyond simply transmitting English civilisation overseas. Given the extensive Roman Catholic involvement in Irish ethnic corporate behaviour it is perhaps surprising that until the early 1850s the religious dimensions of St Patrick’s Day were orchestrated by the Anglican clergy. It is true that by the early 1860s Irish saint’s day processions in Toronto revolved around mass in the Catholic cathedral, sermons by senior Catholic clergy and political speeches delivered from 55 a platform outside the cathedral. But prior to 1850 St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Toronto took a very different form. Two Irish organisations coordinated the celebrations. The earliest, the St Patrick’s society, claimed to be multi-denominational but it was in fact dominated by Anglicans and contained a strong Orange element (George Duggan, the noted Orange Tory politician, was society president). Two clergy of Irish descent, John McCaul and Henry James Grasett, served as chaplains of the Toronto society and delivered sermons every 17 March throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Concerns over Protestant influence led to the formation of the more liberal, reformist and Roman Catholic St Patrick’s Benevolent Society, in 1841. The societies attended separate St Patrick’s Day ceremonies in Anglican and Catholic churches, 56 but relations seem to have been harmonious. Anglican involvement in St Patrick’s Day tells us something about the trouble that Irish Anglican clergy had in cultivating a distinctive national identity in the context of empire and the colonial Church. [ 216 ]

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Surviving reports of St Patrick’s Day sermons and celebrations reveal that the assertion of any distinct Irish ethnicity was muted in favour of identification with a common colonial Britishness. At the service at St James Cathedral in 1848, Arthur Palmer – the Irish minister of Guelph – delivered a sermon on the text: ‘And I will make them one nation in the land of Israel’ that looked to a bright future of Protestant-Catholic harmony on both sides of the Atlantic.57 The discussion of Irish nationality that McCaul delivered in the evening got no further than an evocation of Irish luminaries such as Wellington, Grattan, Sheridan, Burke and (after a moment’s hesitation) Daniel O’Connell. These men were not, however, Irish property, as ‘their English and Scotch brethren also felt a pride in the distinctions which his countrymen had earned – for the three kingdoms were in reality but one’. McCaul said he was ‘Irish in feeling’, but added that his strongest identity was as a Briton inhabiting a ‘glorious’ British empire.58 Unlike their English counterparts, Irish clergy do not appear to have used the saint’s day celebrations as an opportunity to explore the links between their Church and a distinct national character. McCaul’s surviving sermons developed conventional ideas about the attachment to homelands and steered clear of attaching the Church of Ireland to an ancient Celtic Christianity.59 Peter Nockles has noted that attempts to connect the Church to an Irish identity were a delicate political issue, and it seems that Irish colonial clergy who were seeking a place in both the British empire and colonial Church may have seen greater value in presenting their institution as a British rather than Irish institution.60 Anglican involvement in St Patrick’s Day was short-lived but significant. On the one hand it reminds us that the colonial Church was inhabited by more than just English clergy who saw the Church as the vehicle for an English character or civilisation. On the other it shows how the Church took on different guises when it associated with English and Irish national societies. The institution that appeared as a custodian of English national character at St George’s Day celebrations was far removed from the comprehensive and British Church on display at St Patrick’s celebrations. It is not surprising that Church of Ireland clergy should gravitate to the one event and Church of England clergy to the other. But Anglican involvement in the Orange Order complicates this picture of the English and Irish elements coexisting side by side in a single colonial Church: what we see with Orangeism is a sense of how the colonial Church was gradually transformed as it was exposed to an Irish Protestant loyalism that in areas of heavy Irish settlement – such as in Ottawa valley in eastern Ontario – was a dominant social, religious and political force. [ 217 ]

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The Church and the Orange Order The Orange Order was a Protestant fraternal society that emerged in the 1690s and took its modern form in the volatile setting of Ulster in the mid-1790s. Orangeism’s overseas expansion in many ways mirrored the Church’s. Both grew because settlers provided funds and initiative, not because some central administration lay out a coordinated plan of colonial expansion. Both were similarly organised. Just as Anglican congregations formed themselves into larger, diocesan, administrative structures, so individual Orange lodges applied to the Grand Lodges at home for clearance to form the local Grand Lodges that would supervise local expansion. Ogle Gowan, a loyalist immigrant from County Wexford, established Canada’s first Grand Lodge in 1830. New South Wales received one in 1845. The independent Grand Lodges that made up nineteenth-century international Orangeism resembled the self61 governing colonial dioceses of the Anglican Communion. Anglican clergy were one of a number of groups in Canada who maintained positive relations with the Orange Order. Indeed, the enthusiasm with which the colonial clergy associated with Orangeism was in marked contrast to the more circumspect attitude of their counterparts in Britain. Though English clergy did join the Orange lodges in increasing numbers during the constitutional crisis of the 1820s and 1830s, most clergy found Orangeism too violent, too sectarian and too unrespectable.62 Overseas it was a different story. As Jessica HarlandJacobs points out, the Order was simply too powerful an institution for colonial loyalists and conservatives to ignore or alienate.63 These links between Anglicanism and the Order might seem strange given that Orange lodges often set themselves up as quasi-churches and evangelical Orangemen often violently criticised the Catholicising elements within the Church.64 It is also true that the Anglican high command were more hesitant than many lower clergy: Strachan privately warned his clergy about joining secret societies and he would only allow services on the Fifth of November that were ‘peaceful and affectionate’ and ‘partake nothing of politics’.65 Nevertheless, throughout our period we can find Anglican clergy attending Orange processions, hosting Twelfth of July celebrations and serving as grand, deputy and lodge chaplains in significant numbers. The Church that associated with the Orange Order looked more like a transplant of Protestant Ireland than England. While it is true that Orangeism underwent significant transformations when it established itself in frontier environments, and while it is true that lodges had a multi-ethnic appeal, the Order was an organisation that, in the Canadian context at least, retained strong connections to Protestant Ireland and a [ 218 ]

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distinctly Protestant loyalism.66 The following paragraphs point to the differences in how Orange clergy and those who associated with the English associations viewed the Church. In the Church of England’s relationship with Orangeism we see how the attempt to cast the colonial Church as a vehicle for an English identity had to compete with an Irish Protestant vision of the Church. The number of non-Irish clergy who joined the Order shows that this was not simply a competition between those who saw themselves as members of the Church of England and adherents of the Church of Ireland. Anglican engagement with Orangeism was, however, an awkward one: the Order gave the clergy another chance to broaden the Church’s appeal, but Orange loyalism was a protean and volatile entity that was not easily controlled. It must be noted at the outset that the Order in Canada was not an Anglican institution. The majority of Orangemen in nineteenth-century Ontario claimed allegiance to the Anglican Church,67 but the Orange ranks included Protestants of other denominations. Wesleyans and Presbyterians were commonly elected as lodge chaplains. The annual Twelfth of July celebrations could also take place in Anglican and dissenting places of worship. The Orange Lily, a prominent Orange organ, noted approvingly that by attending both an Anglican and Methodist service on 12 July 1850, the lodges of Bytown (now Ottawa) had ‘shown to the world that they can forget and lose sight of all sectarian differences, and unite to together to work for the general welfare of the Protestant Religion’.68 The Anglican Church did, nevertheless, build links with lodges and the Grand Lodge. The first grand chaplain in Upper Canada was the Anglican minister Rossington Elms, and between 1846 and 1870 the post was rotated between four Anglican clergy. Of the forty-five clergy elected as deputy chaplains of the Grand Lodge in 1858, twenty-five were Anglicans.69 The key role of the chaplain was to read prayers at the opening and conclusion of lodge meetings, but it is likely that colonial lodge chaplains had pastoral duties to perform also. Clergy became more noticeable presences at Orange events after the legislation that prohibited Orange parades – the 1843 Secret Societies Act – was repealed in 1851. In the early 1850s Orange sermons started to be published and clergy began to occupy prominent positions at Orange picnics, parades and other social events.70 Though it has not been possible to capture every clergyman who played some role in Upper Canadian Orangeism (this would involve a mammoth trawl of local newspapers), twenty-three of the cohort of clergy who served in Upper Canada between 1790 and 1850 have been identified as lodge or grand lodge chaplains. A further eight clergy delivered sermons and addresses [ 219 ]

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to the Order for Twelfth of July celebrations. The ethnic make-up of this Orange clergy mirrored the ethnic composition of Ontario Orangeism. The bulk – fourteen – were Irish-born, and another three had Irish parents or had been educated in Ireland. One of these men, J. G. Armstrong, is known to have had an Orange career in Ireland, but it is likely that many more did too. That the remainder of the clergy were born in England, Scotland, America, Canada and India shows that Orangeism in its Canadian manifestation was a pan-Protestant institution with broad appeal. A Hungarian – V. P. Mayerhoffer – was grand chaplain for a time in the 1850s; and a Scot, Robert Jackson McGeorge, was a prominent figure in Toronto Orangeism in the 1840s and 1850s. The alliance between Orangemen and Anglicans is understandable because it brought benefits to both parties. Churches sanctified the Order and gave it a respectable appearance. Meanwhile, Orangeism’s loyalist, monarchical, conservative and anti-republican character made it a natural ally for the Church, and this in spite of the fact that Orangemen like Ogle Gowan were among the most vocal critics of privileged established churches (the Lily also called the clergy reserves ‘a 71 grand barrier against the general union of Protestants’). John Strachan delivered sermons to Orangemen in York in the early 1820s because both he and the Orange lodges were pursuing the common aim of keeping Upper Canada culturally and politically British.72 Of course, many clergy were drawn to Orange lodges because they offered fraternity, familiarity and memories of home and history. Fraternal bonding may also have offered a way for clergy to gain acceptance in new surroundings. For V. P. Mayerhoffer, a former Roman Catholic priest who was ordained into the Church in 1829, a position as grand chaplain was a way to convince his Markham parishioners of his loyalty and animosity to his former 73 Catholic faith. Clergy would also have sought positions as chaplains as the alternative was to leave lodges under the religious supervision of laymen or ministers of other denominations. The critical comments that clergy periodically made about the latitudinarian Protestantism of many Orangemen suggests that a chaplaincy post was a valuable opportunity for clergymen to strengthen the Church identity of Orangemen.74 Essentially, the alliance between Anglicans and Orangemen came about because the former simply could not ignore the latter. The Order was the most important non-government institution in nineteenth-century Canada. In 1833 it claimed to have 11,243 members in Ontario; by 1860 the Grand Lodge estimated that it had a provincial membership of 100,000. George C. Street – a travelling missionary in the Newcastle District – noted that his parishioners in 1840 were ‘almost to a man’ ‘staunch Protestants and Orangemen’. Similarly, the largest congregation that James [ 220 ]

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Magrath faced in his Erindale church in the entire 1830s assembled on 12 July 1834.75 The Anglican clergymen who were drawn to Orangeism did not, however, necessarily come within the orbit of the same Orange Order. Upper Canadian Orangeism was never monolithic. The authors of Lord Durham’s report on the causes of the Canadian rebellion alluded to this when they called Orangeism in Upper Canada as ‘anomalous’. Particularly striking was the fact that the Order had sworn ‘many ignorant Catholics into their body’.76 To understand this ‘anomalous Orangeism’ we need to appreciate that the Canadian Order had a distinct moderate strand that emerged in the early 1830s and which persisted through to the end of our period. For this moderate group – their most prominent figure was Ogle Gowan, the ‘founder of Canadian Orangeism’ – the Canadian Orange Order looked very different to its counterpart in Britain and Ireland.77 Understanding the perspective of this group can help us to explain why the Order attracted Anglican high churchmen who we might otherwise have expected to steer clear of an institution that was traditionally allergic to anything suggestive of ‘ritualism’.

The Church and moderate Orangeism Orangeism’s Atlantic metamorphosis came about because colonial and metropolitan lodges were facing different enemies: in Ulster it was a politicised Roman Catholicism, in 1830s Upper Canada it was a ‘cunning, gloomy Yankee faction’ of reformers led by William Lyon Mackenzie. Anxieties about the growing strength of the latter prompted Gowan and his moderate supporters to redefine the Orange Order as a component of a wider political party that would represent the interests of immigrants – both Protestant and Catholic – who were shut out of political and civic power by the old Loyalist ‘Family Compact’ network. Though the Orange lodges would remain Protestant, Gowan and his colleagues envisaged new loyalist societies – Gowan called them ‘independent’ clubs – that would bring together loyalists in defence of the ‘Institutions of the Empire’ and the British connection. These ideas built on earlier calls for Canadian versions of the Brunswick Clubs that had proliferated in Britain in the Catholic emancipation era. In contrast to their metropolitan counterparts, these colonial clubs would uphold 78 British rather than anti-Catholic principles. As Gowan’s Brockville Gazette explained, the programme of Catholic-Protestant cooperation that appeared in the early 1830s stemmed from a belief that ‘our fellowsubjects of the Roman Catholic persuasion have shewn themselves loyal subjects’, and hence were worthy of ‘being united with their Protestant brethren in the bonds of a Civil Society’.79 The authors of the Durham report had Gowan’s programme in mind when they wrote that the ‘great [ 221 ]

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purpose’ of Orangemen ‘has been to introduce the machinery, rather than the tenets of Orangeism’.80 These Orange proposals for a multi-ethnic, multi-denominational civil society echoed the model of an inclusive immigrant society that was being propagated in the national benevolent societies around the same time.81 Though there was some crossover in personnel between the national societies and the Orange Order (Orangemen G. P. Bull and W. H. Boulton were St George’s society founder members), none of the St George’s society chaplains crossed over into Orangeism. Still, the outlooks of the associations did chime. In the early 1830s Gowan had helped form ‘emigrant societies’ that in some respects were the forerunners of the national societies (interestingly, early meetings of 82 these societies were often held on saints’ days). Gowan’s ‘independent clubs’ looked very similar to benevolent society gatherings: both sought to unite loyal interests in one conservative body; both were inclusive and looked to include immigrants within a reconstructed civil society; both made political principles, rather than religion, the chief criteria for entry into civil society. All these institutions were seeking to promote a new form of civic nationality where all the colony’s inhabitants, regardless of ethnic origin, were defined as ‘British’ – so long, that is, that 83 they recognised the British constitution. Significantly, Roman Catholic Bishop Macdonell blessed both institutions: his vocal support for Orangeism in the mid-1830s led to Protestant-Catholic cooperation at the polls at the 1836 election.84 There were Anglican clergy who were attracted to Gowan’s inclusive loyalism because his independent clubs gave them the chance to play a primary role in the new loyalist coalition and civil society. Alexander Neil Bethune, a high churchman who at this point was minister at Cobourg on Lake Ontario, had been repulsed by the image of Irish Orangeism but had more time for its apparently less sectarian, more accommodating, colonial offshoot. In July 1832 Orangemen in Durham and Northumberland counties explained to Bethune their plans to transform their Orange lodges into ‘Union Societies’ composed of Catholics and Protestants who were ‘actuated by the same principles of devotion and loyalty to our King and country’. This model of reconstructed Orangeism went beyond Gowan’s plans for separate patriot or independent clubs, but it was attractive to Bethune: while he thought his association with unreconstructed Orangeism ‘might wound the feelings of fellow Christians’, he accepted the invitation to provide a ‘prayer and sermon, descriptive of the cause and character’ of the new 85 institution on 12 July. This moderate strand was a minority element in Canadian Orangeism and was always in competition with the Order’s more ultra[ 222 ]

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Protestant, anti-Catholic and violent elements. Bethune’s service in July 1832 was, for instance, broken up by Orangemen who feared that their institution was about to be turned into a loyalist rather than religious organisation.86 Nevertheless, this moderate strand persisted through to the 1850s and beyond. Gowan maintained his vision of inclusive loyalism by cultivating an image as an independent reformer: he came out in support of a form of responsible government in the late 1830s; demanded the redistribution of the clergy reserves among all the recognised denominations; and built links with the new liberal conservative political grouping that was taking shape in the 1840s. Gowan’s overtures to Catholicism and reform prompted a split in Orangeism between moderates and more hard-line Protestant elements in 1853.87 For the latter group, events such as the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850–51 pointed to the need for Protestant unity and made Gowan’s ideas of a multi-ethnic, multi-denominational loyalist coalition unthinkable. But Gowan’s stance also attracted unlikely allies. One was Thomas D’Arcy Magee, the Irish republican revolutionary who became a liberal conservative Member of Parliament after emigrating to Canada from the United States in 1857. David Wilson has shown how Gowan’s Catholic-Protestant coalition, which included a system of separate schools for Roman Catholics, sat well with Magee’s plans for a broad and inclusive ‘new nationality’.88 Gowan’s proposals also attracted elements in the Anglican Church. Few sources have survived that shed light on clergy’s attitudes, but we do know that at least one cleric, V. P. Mayerhoffer, voted for Gowan at the 1853 Grand Lodge meeting, and that at least five of the nine deputy grand chaplains elected to Gowan’s Grand Lodge were Anglican ministers.89 Mayerhoffer’s Hungarian nationality might explain his attraction to Gowan’s inclusive definition of loyalism, but we do not know for sure. What we do know is that high church Anglicans, in the same way as Magee, were attracted to Gowan’s support for state-funded separate schools, principally because this was a chance for churchmen to establish Anglican institutions alongside Roman Catholic ones. This issue was enormously controversial for Orangemen. Splits developed between Orangemen who supported ‘Clear Grit’ politicians who called for the complete separation of Church and state, and those who were willing to give Catholics their own state-sponsored schools so that the 90 common school system could be left Protestant. In the mid-1850s links emerged between this latter group – often termed liberal conservative Orangemen – and Anglican supporters of separate schools; this may explain why senior clergy who had traditionally stood aloof from the Order now gave it their tacit support. Bishop Strachan, who was favourable to separate schools but who seems to have had no [ 223 ]

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engagement with the Order since the early 1820s, corresponded with the Orange liberal conservative John Hillyard Cameron on the issue in March 1856 (earlier that year Strachan had made a donation towards an Orange Hall library and reading room).91 The sermon that the conservative high churchman William Macaulay delivered to a lodge at Picton in July 1853 provides further evidence of Anglican clergy embracing a moderate and accommodative Orangeism. The sermon dwelt on the qualities of ‘faith, generosity, humility, benevolence, urbanity and forgiveness’ that made up the ‘portraiture of the true and loyal Orangemen’, but said little about Orangeism’s anti-Catholic identity and mission. Macaulay described the ‘fulminations’ of the Roman Catholic priesthood as ‘terrible’ and ‘ready to intimidate my soul’, but he also added that the Catholic Church was ‘one of the most wonderful and lofty of all the productions of God’s grace and providence’, and that the Orange community had a duty to treat their Roman Catholic counterparts with ‘dignity and forbearance’. Macaulay’s call for Orangemen to show hostility to the papal system rather than individual Catholics was a fairly characteristic Orange tactic; nevertheless, the sermon’s picture of a Canada inhabited by Protestants and Catholics did echo Gowan’s calls for a civil society shorn of 92 sectarian animosity. A lack of sources means we have no way of telling how far Gowan’s views were shared by other clergy. Significantly, Gowan’s grand chaplain, Stephen Lett, dealt a blow to Gowan’s Catholic-Protestant alliance when he refused to serve alongside a Roman Catholic in the Toronto St Patrick’s Society in 1854. Evidently, Anglican support for Gowan’s new Canadian nationality went only so far.93 The Church of England that built – albeit tenuous – associations with moderate Orangeism was dressed in the guise of a Church of a broad-based, loyalist, conservative and British colonial public. Moderate Orangeism appealed to high churchmen because its model of a loyalist but pluralistic colonial society was one in which Tractarian sympathisers would feel secure. An inclusive, non-sectarian and tolerant colonial society was definitely preferable to one governed by antiritualistic Orangemen. Anglican clergy would also have been drawn to the attempts by moderate Orangemen like Gowan to articulate what 94 David Wilson calls ‘a new vision of Canadian nationality’. Bethune’s eagerness to be involved in this project in the early 1830s, coupled with the evidence – though patchy – of Orange sermons in the early 1850s suggests that there were Anglican clerics who were not only drawn to this vision, but who also thought that they and their Church had a role to play in articulating this vision of a loyal, British and non-sectarian colonial society to Orangemen and the broader colonial public. [ 224 ]

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The Church and alternative understandings of Orangeism and loyalism But the Church could also take different forms and play different roles in its relations with Orangeism. Not all Orangemen saw the Order in Gowan’s terms, nor did they recognise Gowan’s particular brand of accommodative loyalism. Loyalism in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, as in early nineteenth-century Ireland, was multifaceted and contested.95 Throughout this period the Order struggled to reconcile Gowanism with an extremist, Protestant loyalism that had been carried to Canada by Ulster Protestants. Orangeism in Northern Ireland has been cast as more violent and incendiary than elsewhere in the British Isles, and as most of the Protestant Irish who arrived in nineteenth-century Canada came from Ulster it is not surprising that strains of this more hard-line Orangeism reached Upper Canada.96 For all its multi-ethnic appeal, Orangeism in Canada remained closely tied to its Irish and Ulster roots. The Irish-born were the strongest ethnic group among the committeemen of the 1858 Grand Lodge, and we have already seen how the bulk of the clergy who associated with the Order were Irish, though only three – the Revs Radcliff, Mulholland and Elwood – had ministered in Ulster. David Fitzpatrick points out that colonial Orangeism was more than just an Ulster offshoot and more than just a vehicle for the export of Irish tribal 97 animosities. But the South Australian case study used by Fitzpatrick to support his argument was very different from an Upper Canada that was strongly connected to Ulster. This Protestant strand was noticeable even as Orange parades sought to cultivate an air of respectability after Orange marches started up again in 1851. For the Orangemen who attended Orange processions, sang Orange songs and adopted an aggressive and hard-line stance against Catholics, Orangeism was primarily a religious, rather than political or simply loyalist institution. The increasing visibility of Anglican clergy in the Orange Order in the 1850s stemmed in part from the repeal of the party processions legislation, but it also came about because this was a moment when clergy recognised that the heightened sense of sectarianism brought on by Catholic immigration made a connection with the Protestant elements in Orangeism seem highly beneficial. On the same day that Macaulay delivered his sermon at Picton, Jonathan Shortt, the Jerseyborn editor of the evangelical Protestant Echo, delivered a sermon with a very different message to the Orange lodges at Port Hope. Shortt opened by criticising Gowanites who would ‘unite the Orange and the Green’, 98 and who had tried to transform the Order into a ‘political engine’. Shortt defined the Order in purely religious terms: its role, he said, was [ 225 ]

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to counter religious error with truth; protect Roman Catholics from the dangers of popery; and to continue a global war on popery, a war that had been begun – and, he claimed, was being won – in Ireland. Shortt agreed with Macaulay that the Orangeman’s enemy was the ‘Papal system’ rather than the individual Roman Catholic, but his sermon offered a more uncompromising picture of a Protestant Canada. The brand of Protestantism that Orangemen articulated in their public proceedings and print literature was one with a distinct Irish cast. Orange proceedings and Orange literature consistently reminded lodge members of the umbilical links connecting them and their far-flung Protestant brethren to Ireland’s past and present conflicts.99 The address that J. G. Armstrong delivered in February 1854 painted the Order as an Irish institution that linked Irish loyalists in Canada and Ireland in a common Atlantic crusade against republicanism and Romanism. The battle of the Boyne, the 1798 Irish rebellion and the 1837 Canadian revolt were all fed into a single story of Irish loyalist resistance.100 Other Anglican clergy felt the need to emphasise the role that their families had played in the 1798 rebellion and other symbolic moments in Irish Protestant history. For example, Alexander Dixon, rector of Louth, told Orangemen at St Catherine’s in the Niagara region in 1854 that his grandfather had raised a troop of cavalry ‘to stand up for William III’.101 That two Irish clergy like Armstrong and Dixon should have uttered these sentiments is not particularly surprising; what is more noteworthy is that non-Irish clergy came to articulate the language of Irish loyalism. Though we do not know what these non-Irish clergy said when they addressed Orange meetings, there is evidence that from the 1840s onwards an unlikely set of churchmen adopted elements of what Donald Akenson has called ‘the 102 Irish Protestant definition of colonial loyalism’. One was Alexander Bethune, the Canadian-born high churchman who back in the early 1830s had been involved in Gowan’s efforts to reconstruct the Orange Order. Bethune’s involvement in Orangeism in the 1840s looked very different from his support for Gowan’s project. As editor of the Church periodical Bethune wrote that Orangeism was the last bastion against ‘Popery, Infidelity and Republicanism’; its principles were the ‘maintenance of Protestant religion, and the defence of the throne’; and its members were ‘a portion of her Majesty’s loyal subjects upon whom so much depends for averting the dismemberment of the Empire’. The Church also ran regular features on the progress of the Protestant cause that argued that ‘Protestant ascendancy’ had to be ‘firmly and uncompromisingly upheld’ if Ireland was ‘to remain an 103 appendage to the Crown of England’. Such comments seem curious as they came from an individual who had been accused of Tractarianism by Orangemen and who joined Gowan’s more conciliatory Orange lodges [ 226 ]

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because they were so far from generating any ‘ill will and opposition’ to ‘fellow Christians’.104 In the 1850s and 1860s Bethune would continue to suffer at the hands of Orangemen – twice he ran in elections for new Canadian bishoprics and twice he was defeated by an ‘Irish clique’ with a strong Orange component. Yet in the mid-1860s we find him attending Orange processions and delivering sermons at the funerals of prominent Orangemen.105 Bethune’s journey from Orange sceptic to Orange advocate may not have been entirely sincere, but it tells us something about the compromises that Canadian churchmen had to make in order to maintain their Church’s popularity. Historians of the Church of Ireland have noted how Irish prelates could not afford to be drawn towards Tractarianism and had to present their Church as part of an intolerant Protestant consensus.106 If anything, Canadian churchmen adopted an even more intolerant stance than their Ulster counterparts. Bethune’s visibility at Orange events in Ontario in the 1850s and 1860s can be compared with the highly critical comments that Ulster high churchmen made about the ‘intemperate and ungovernable spirit of the Protestant Party’ in their part of the world.107 The colonial Church’s Protestantism stemmed from its dependency on Orangemen: Bethune even thought that Orangemen might be mobilised in defence of the clergy reserves, but the prospects for an alliance of this sort were unlikely.108 These Anglican overtures to Orangeism are another instance of how the colonial Church was in many ways coming to look more like an extension of Protestant Ireland than a high church England. Donald Akenson argued some time ago that the size of Ontario’s Irish population and the importance of Irish institutions meant that conservative and loyalist elements in Canadian society – this includes the Church – were forced to accommodate themselves to a dominant 109 What Akenson overlooks is that Anglican Irish Protestant culture. clergy were accommodating themselves to different sorts of Orangeism. The moderate and Protestant strands in Orangeism became more or less appealing to churchmen as the wider political, social and demographic context shifted. Bethune was drawn to Gowan’s inclusive Britishness because it chimed with the conservative moment of the pre-Catholic immigration period. Rising concern about Irish Catholic immigration and sectarian tensions forced him to adopt a new posture towards the Order. More broadly, the growth of the Orange Order had the knock-on effect of redefining the Church in Ontario. Anglican clergy were, however, never entirely comfortable with the 110 Bethune’s Church called on Order or with the Orange processions. Orangemen to do away with their processions; for him, the principles of Orangeism were better upheld in churches and through a ‘consistent and [ 227 ]

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religious life’.111 That no one was listening is a reminder that Orangeism was a form of loyalism that the Anglican clergy could not entirely control. Whereas clergy occupied positions of power in St George’s societies – they were, after all, the ones charged with defining the English ‘character’ – it is not clear what authority Anglican clerics would wield in the Orange Order. Not all chaplains were Anglicans, and lodges could always elect laymen as chaplains if they wanted to. Clergy had mixed success when they tried to assert their priestly authority at Orange events. Featherstone Osier used Fifth of November gatherings to impress on the assembled Orangemen the need for temperance and sobriety, and Macaulay was trying to define a particular character and mode of behaviour for Orangemen when he gave his 1853 sermon.112 Later in the century there were instances of clergy closing the doors of churches to Orange lodges who used non-Anglican chaplains.113 But these opportunities to exhort were not always open to clergy, and as George Street’s experiences in the Newcastle district testify, clergy who did face up to the Order could quickly find themselves ministering to sparse congregations. Events such as the St Patrick’s Day riot in Toronto in 1858 – an Orange-Catholic conflict that left a Catholic dead – showed that the clergy were never going to control a protean Orangeism that was in many ways a form of ‘vulgar conservatism’.114 Linked to the problem of authority was the issue of how support for the Order could be reconciled with the maintenance of Anglicanism as distinct from a generalised Protestantism. One reason why Orangeism thrived in the 1850s was because it chimed with the common Protestant identity that, according to William Westfall, became a notable feature of Ontario religious culture at mid-century.115 Anglican clergy helped to create this Protestant culture, but it was also the case that many worried that there was little place for the distinctive tenets of the Anglican faith in either the Protestant consensus or Orange Order.116 The Rev. John Stannage told Orangemen in Welland County in southern Ontario in July 1856 that their great fault was that they had become ‘nothingarians’. In his diary Stannage admitted that his efforts to impress on the Orangemen the idea that the Church of England had a special claim on them as the ‘oldest’ and ‘true apostolic Church’ did not do much good: his speech was delivered in the open and ‘all around ... people were walking & 117 talking & laughing. ... Nobody seemed to care whether I stayed or not.’ Anglican investment in the Orange Order may have helped churchmen to underscore their Church’s place in the Protestant crusade of the 1850s. It may also have helped to counter evangelical accusations that the high church party were pushing the Church of England towards Catholicism. But as Stannage’s comments suggest, it is questionable [ 228 ]

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whether involvement in the Order helped the Church to strengthen popular attachment to a distinct Anglican Church.

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Associational culture beyond Ontario So far we have argued that the varied relations that emerged between the Church and ethnic and fraternal associations were partly a reflection of the differing ways in which the clergy envisaged the role and character of their Church in a new period of religious pluralism. There seems to be less to say about the Church and associational culture elsewhere in the empire. The nature of European immigration to Australia and South Africa explains why associations arrived much later there than in Canada. Irish and Scottish benevolent clubs appeared in Cape Town in the 1820s but English associations had to wait until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was not until 1881 that a branch of the Sons of England, a working-class benevolent society, surfaced at Uitenhage. For most of the nineteenth century it was freemasonry that 118 Orangeism reached supplied the fraternal needs of the Cape British. South Africa – a lodge was established in Cape Town in 1852 – but it was a weak presence before the formation of a Loyal Orange Institution of British South Africa in 1905.119 Generally speaking, the heightened ethnic animosity of late century provided a much more fertile context for the spread of British associations than the liberal cosmopolitanism that characterised Cape Town’s mercantile community earlier in the century.120 Ethnic associations and Orangeism left a deeper, though still modest, imprint on Australia. The 1830s saw occasional (and poorly attended) St George’s Day dinners and balls, but it was not until Melbourne elites met in 1844 that Australia saw its first St George’s society.121 In South Australia Englishmen established a society and met for celebratory saint’s day dinners from 1851. This Adelaide society was designed to deal with ‘severe and sudden distress’ and to communicate ‘statistical details and authenticated facts’ to each English county so that emigrants had some idea of what to expect in South Australia.122 English associationalism gained traction in areas of raw colonial settlement where the English community felt threatened by ethnic and religious others. By contrast, associations came later in developed areas like Sydney – there the dominance of the English population lessened the need for fraternal bonding. Bathurst in New South Wales had a society with seventy members by 1886, while Sydney only got one in 1893.123 English associations were hard to sustain: after an enthusiastic start, attendance at Melbourne dinners became thinner and thinner until theatrical performances of Shakespeare’s plays took their place.124 [ 229 ]

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Meanwhile, Australia’s Church of Ireland clergy had few institutional opportunities to articulate an Irish identity: as early as 1827 Archdeacon Thomas Hobbes Scott was noting that senior colonial officials were attending St Patrick’s Day celebrations controlled by Roman Catholic priests.125 Similarities between Australian and Canadian ethnic associations are an indication that English fraternalists, like Orangemen, were ‘creatures of habit’.126 The proceedings of the dinners were the same; the toasts were largely the same; the same nationalist airs punctuated the dinners. Early Australian gatherings, like their Canadian counterparts, were also more about civic togetherness than ethnic separateness. The St George’s dinner in Melbourne in 1850 was described as an instance of the ‘cosmopolitan liberality’ frequently associated with the English, while a Tasmanian wanted a St George’s society because it would ‘establish a common forum [...] where all could meet and blend in joyous accents, the generous and enthusiastic feelings springing from British hearts’. Representatives of Irish and Scottish ethnic societies attended 127 the English dinners in Adelaide and Hobart in the 1850s. The presence of Roman Catholic clergy at the St George’s Day dinner in Adelaide in 1851 mirrored events in Kingston in the mid-1830s and suggests that a multi-ethnic, multi-denominational imperial civic culture was in place in both Canada and Australia.128 Melbourne was an exception, as early dinners there were English-only affairs. Though the volatile sectarian environment of mid-century Victoria may account for this (the 1840s had seen riots between Orangemen and Catholics), the nature of the toasts and the proceedings revealed that these were still in essence British and loyalist events.129 The main difference between the Australian and Canadian events was that the Anglican clergy were almost entirely absent from the former. Bishop Short of Adelaide was invited but could not attend the St George’s dinner in 1851. After then there is no record that he or any other Anglican clergyman attended any of the society meetings in Melbourne or South Australia. L. H. Rumsey’s appearance at the St George’s Day dinner in Ipswich, Queensland in 1863 is possibly the first recorded instance of an Anglican cleric taking part in a St George’s Day 130 The Church of England’s limited interest in gathering in Australia. Englishness at the Cape is understandable given that its high command were vocal in their attempts to cultivate a missionary identity for their institution. The invisibility of the Anglican clergy in English corporate behaviour in Australia is more surprising: the Church in Australia was, after all, facing the same challenges as the Church in Canada, and it may have seen the same benefits in attaching itself to an ethnic identity. The absence of Anglicans at English events in New South Wales is doubly [ 230 ]

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surprising given that Bishop Broughton often said his aim was to create a new England in Australia. This Australian situation is not easily explained. English associations appeared in settlements where the Church of England was weak, overstretched and preoccupied with the problem of setting down an institutional presence. Clergy were not always interested in fusing Anglicanism to an English ethnic identity: Melbourne, for example, harboured a strong Anglo-Irish clerical community at mid-century. Anglican investment in English associations and English corporate behaviour seems to have been a late nineteenth-century phenomenon 131 In Australia, for example, St both in Australia and South Africa. George’s Day in 1893 witnessed the start of an Anglican synod and the consecration of Anglican churches. Earlier a South Australian Anglican had called for St George’s Day to be set aside as a ‘Church holiday’ as this would engender a ‘sense of unity’ and ‘esprit de corps’ among the Anglican and English community.132 Though more work must be done on the late nineteenth century context, it seems that Anglican investment in English ethnicity increased as the English-born community became less noticeable and an Australian nativist movement gained strength.133 Before then, the English’s status as Australia’s largest immigrant community might explain why Anglican clerics felt little pressure to remind the English community of the relationship between English Church and English people. The Australian Church also differed to its Upper Canadian counterpart in its limited involvement in the Orange Order. This may have been because the impulse for the establishment of Orangeism in New South Wales and Victoria came largely from Presbyterians rather than Anglicans. The first Sydney lodge was planned in the church of the Ulster Presbyterian Rev. John Fullerton, while early lodge meetings in Sydney were held on the premises of Bros. Barr and Kitchen, two Ulster 134 William Kerr, a founder of printers who set up the Orange Sentinel. Melbourne Orangeism, was a Scottish Presbyterian and a protégé of John Dunmore Lang of the Free Church. Sydney’s Orangemen made an abortive attempt to attend divine service at the Anglican cathedral in July 1847, but for the most part Australian lodges celebrated the Twelfth in hotels and purpose-built halls and looked to the other Protestant denominations.135 The Orangemen who hoped to attend an Anglican church in Sydney in 1847 ended up toasting John Dunmore Lang and the ‘Protestant Clergy of Australia’.136 Sources on Orange gatherings are scarce but it seems that Richard Davis and David Fitzpatrick are right to argue that Australian Anglican clergy steered clear of the Orange Order (though the evangelical firebrand Zachary Barry, who arrived in Sydney in 1865, was criticised for damaging the Church’s reputation by [ 231 ]

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associating with Orangemen).137 At mid-century Orangeism was a minor presence in many New South Wales vestries. For example, a Parramatta Orangeman was politely ignored by the rest of the vestry when he suggested that All Saints’ church should hold services for Guy Fawkes’ day in 1851.138 Unlike their Canadian counterparts, Australian high churchmen could afford to dismiss an Orange institution that was a weak presence until Fenianism stirred up sectarian animosities in the late 1860s. Evangelical Anglicans could also look to a range of other Protestant institutions that performed similar functions to Orangeism. A Protestant Defence Association emerged in Tasmania in 1851 and similar organisations flourished in New South Wales and Victoria amid fears of 139 The Defence ritualism and Fenianism in the 1850s and 1860s. Association and the institutions it gave rise to were bound to the Order, but for clergy they provided Protestant fraternity and solidarity minus the unhelpful associations with Irish sectarianism. The associational culture that formed such an important part of mid-century Ontario was in an evolutionary stage in Australia, and clergy, it seems, could see that there were other ways to broaden the Church’s popularity.

Conclusion The moment when Anglican clergymen started to build links with fraternal and ethnic associations was also the moment when the first chips were made in the Church’s privileged status. Associations provide a new perspective on how Anglican churchmen tried to acquire new forms of spiritual and public authority in a time of political and social change. The preceding discussion has shown that ethnic and fraternal associations were important institutions for clergy who wished to lead both local and ethnic communities. The control that the Anglican clergy exerted over English and (for a time) Irish national events contrasted with its weakening control over other national days: in early Australia days of thanksgiving were led by establishment ministers, but quite early on in Canada, Presbyterians – who were not recognised as members of an established Church – were joining Anglicans in leading national 140 The world of voluntary associations held out benefits and prayer. challenges to the Anglican clergy. One basic problem was that there were many different kinds of associations to choose from: indeed, the range of institutions that drew clerical involvement shows that Anglicans could not agree what the ethnic or national identity was that the Church should attach itself to. Anglophiles who wanted to see the Church concentrate on a target constituency of ‘English’ had trouble deciding who the English actually were; they also found themselves [ 232 ]

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being crowded out by others who did not see the Church’s identity or role in such narrow terms. Orangeism seemed to offer the Church a way to connect itself with a broad Protestant British consciousness but, as we have seen, the Order remained strongly attached to the traditions and mythologies of a narrower Irish Protestantism. One of the stories that ecclesiastical historians tell about the nineteenth century is that the clergy adopted more ‘spiritual’ outlooks as ancient bonds between the religious institutions and civil society began to unravel in the 1830s: ministers who had once claimed central roles in civil society apparently came to see themselves as inhabiting a private, 141 religious sphere and performing purely spiritual duties. The Anglican engagement with associations challenges this somewhat Tractarian narrative as it speaks to the enduring importance of what we might call an establishment mindset among the Anglican clergy. The clergymen who attended meetings of the St George’s society and Orange Order still believed that the role of the Church was to represent communities beyond a narrow Anglican constituency. Furthermore, the Church’s ties to Orangeism shows that Anglican clergy were seeking to present themselves as the leaders of loyalist as well as ethnic communities. This kind of Anglican outreach formed part of the Canadian Church’s wider efforts to resist the processes that were threatening to push the Church and religion into a private sphere. Anglicans left a limited imprint on loyalist associationalism in Australia, but as Brian Fletcher has shown, nineteenth-century Australian Anglicans would find their own ways to 142 maintain a public voice in an increasingly pluralistic society. Providing spiritual and moral guidance for colonial loyalists did, however, bring its own challenges, as there were different kinds of loyalist and different languages of loyalty. Clergy identified with the inclusive, accommodative loyalism articulated by the early national societies and Gowan’s reconstructed Orangeism because it promised to build a British colony out of a pluralistic community. By contrast, the Anglican drift towards the ‘vulgar conservatism’ of Irish Orange Protestantism was an outcome of the growing institutional strength of the Irish Protestant community and the rising sectarian animosities of the 1850s. The institutional Church was therefore at one and the same time the bearer of religious beliefs and the vehicle through which various loyalist languages and practices were exported to the colonies.

Notes 1 2

Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, ch. 3. C. Houston and W. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: The Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 18.

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19

20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30

T. Bueltmann and D. MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St. George: English associations in the Anglo-world to 1930’, Journal of Global History, 7:1 (2012), pp. 79–105. B. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism: Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). Scholars of the metropolitan Church have begun to ask similar questions: Burns, ‘The authority of the Church’, pp. 179–200. Carey, ‘Religious nationalism and clerical emigrants’, p. 83. Patriot, 24 April 1840. Bueltmann and MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George’. Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen’. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, p. 90, n. 159. For the Roman Catholic perspective, see Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, p. 155. For comparisons with the Presbyterian involvement in South African Scottish associations, see MacKenzie with Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa, pp. 246–7. Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’. J. Strachan, A Sermon, Preached at York, Upper Canada, on the Third Day of June, Being the Day Appointed For A General Thanksgiving (Montreal: William Gray, 1814), p. 4. Gauvreau, ‘Dividends of empire’, pp. 234–5. Le Couteur, ‘Anglican high churchmen’. Letter by ‘Adam Fairford’, Church, 21 April 1838, p. 177. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 6, ‘Memorandum as to way and means of raising money for the proposed Church University in the Diocese of Toronto’ [1850]. For the members, see A. Storey, The St. George’s Society of Toronto: A History and List of Members, 1834–1967 (Agincourt, Ont.: The Society, 1987). Details are taken from DCB entries. City of Toronto Archives (hereafter CTA), St George Society of Toronto (Fonds 1575), Minutes of Meetings 1844 to 1866, Series 1093, File 12, Box 143587-Folio 1, ‘Constitution and Bye Laws of the St. George’s Society of Toronto. Revised March 1844’. F. Swyripa, ‘The monarchy, the Mounties, and Ye Olde English Fayre: identity at All Saints’ Anglican, Edmonton, 1875–1990s’, in P. Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds), Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration and Identity (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), pp. 322–38. DOA, St George’s Society Kingston, Constitution, By-Laws and Minutes, 1858–1886, St George’s Cathedral Kingston, Minute Books, XM-72–A, fo. 5. Kingston Chronicle and Gazette, 19 March 1836. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, ch. 3. Daily British Whig, 26 April 1861; Globe, 25 April 1864. Strachan thought King’s should have professors from England, and Whitaker noted at the 1864 Shakespeare ceremony that public schools had played a key role in ‘the formation of the national character and what he called the ‘characteristics’ of England’s ‘social and domestic life’: M. Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 20; The Globe, 25 April 1864. D. Mills, The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1785–1850 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1988), ch. 5. Bueltmann and MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George’, p. 84. Patriot, 30 April 1839. Michael Cottrell, ‘St. Patrick’s Day parades in nineteenth-century Toronto: a study of immigrant adjustment and elite control’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 25:49 (1992), p. 60. For example, see ‘St. George’s Festival’, British Colonist, 25 April 1851. For the

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31 32 33

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34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58

excursions, see the minutes from 1862 onwards in CTA, ‘Minutes of Meetings, 1844 to 1866’. Globe, 24 April 1861. Ibid., 25 April 1864. Ibid., 25 April 1864. For the more over ethnic character of Scottish associations in New Zealand, see T. Bueltmann, Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society, 2850–2930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 91–2. P. Mandler, ‘What is “national identity”? Definitions and applications in modern British historiography’, Modern Intellectual History, 3:2 (2006), p. 281. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, pp. 155–6. Scadding’s diary entries for 23 April 1840, 23 April 1841, 23 April 1846, TMRL, Henry, Scadding Papers, Diaries S98, vol. 5: 1837–44. E. K. Kendall, Christ Seen in the Stranger (Toronto: Rowsell & Ellis, 1860). R. R. Burrage, A Sermon Preached at the First Celebration of the Anniversary of St. George (Quebec: T. Cary & Co., 1836), p. 12. G. J. Mountain, The Love of Country, Considered upon Christian Principles (Quebec: W. Kemble, 1844), p. 9; K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). G. Whitaker, The Responsibility Attaching to National Character (Toronto: H. Rowsell, 1866). P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), ch. 3. H. Scadding, English Civilization Undemonstrative (Toronto: Rowsell & Hutchinson, I860); Whitaker, Responsibility Attaching. H. Scadding, The Eastern Oriel Opened (Toronto: Rogers, Thompson, 1842), pp. 7–8. H. Scadding, English Chimes in Canada (Toronto: Guardian Book and Job Office, 1880), pp. 3, 6. Church, 29 April 1839, p. 174. Ibid., 24 April 1851, p. 309. S. Gilley, ‘Nationality and liberty, protestant and catholic: Robert Southey’s Book of the Church’, Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), pp. 415–16. S. Brown, ‘The broad church movement’, pp. 112–13. Westfall, ‘Constructing public religions’, pp. 23–49. Globe, 25 April 1864. ‘Projected New Colony’, CCC, I (April, 1848), p. 370. If Scadding had understood the term ‘ethnicity’ he may well have agreed with Adrian Hastings’ comment that ‘ethnicities do not have hard edges’: A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 173. CTA, ‘Minutes of Meetings, 1844 to 1866’, Series 1093, File 12, Box 143587/1, minute book entry for 4 May 1860. See the entries in ibid for 4 April 1844 and 23 April 1846. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, pp. 155–56; R. Trigger, ‘Irish politics on parade: the clergy, national societies, and St. Patrick’s Day processions in nineteenth-century Montreal and Toronto’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 37:74 (2004), pp. 159–98; M. Cottrell, ‘St. Patrick’s Day parades in nineteenth-century Toronto: a study of immigrant adjustment and elite control’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 25:49 (1992); D. Adair and M. Cronin, The Wearing of the Green: A History of St. Patrick’s Day (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 38–44. British Colonist, 23 March 1842 and 19 March 1847. Ibid., 21 March 1848. Ridden, ‘Britishness as an imperial and diasporic identity’.

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64

65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83

84

J. McCaul, Emigration to a Better Country. A Sermon (Toronto: H. & W. Rowsell, 1842), pp. 3–4. Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant Sect?’, p. 490. D. Fitzpatrick, ‘Exporting brotherhood: Orangeism in South Australia’, Immigrants & Minorities, 23 (2005), pp. 278–9. H. Senior, Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 281. J. Harland-Jacobs, ‘“Maintaining the connexion”: Orangeism in the British North Atlantic world, 1795–1844’, Atlantic Studies, 5:1 (April, 2.008), pp. 27–49. D. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting: The Orange Order and Irish Migrants in Northern England, c.1850-1920 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2005), pp. 77–8. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 11, Letterbook 1839–43, Strachan to George C. Street, 28 October 1840, fo. 75. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting, p. 320. Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, p. 94. Orange Lily, 2:2 (15 July 1850), p. 20. C. Hopkins (ed.), Canada: An Encyclopaedia of the Country, vol. 6 (Toronto: Linscott Publishing Co., 1900), p. 268; Report of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Session of the Right Worshipful the Grand Lodge of the Royal Orange Institution of British North America (Toronto: Alexander Jacques, 1858), pp. 24–5. The denominational breakdown was 25 Anglican, 12 Methodist New Connexion, 3 Wesleyan, 1 Kirk of Scotland, 1 Episcopal Methodist and 2 Presbyterian. Anglican clergy addressed an Orange luncheon on the Toronto cricket ground in 1852: Church, 15 July 1852. Orange Lily, 6:14 (15 April 1854), p. 218. H. Senior, ‘The Orange and the green with the snow in between’, in R. O’Driscoll and L. Reynolds, The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada, vol. II (Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988), p. 565. V. Mayerhoffer, Twelve Years a Roman Catholic Priest, or, the Autobiography of the Rev. V. P. Mayerhoffer, M.A. (Toronto: Rowsell & Ellis, 1861), p. 96. See Adam Townley’s sermon ‘Duties and Responsibilities of Orangemen’ reported in Church, 27 September 1844. Street, The Rev. George C. Street, p. 10; AO, St Peter’s Anglican Church Erindale, Misc. Record Books, 1828–1973, registers of church attendance. G. Craig (ed.), Lord Durham’s Report (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), p. 98. Harland-Jacobs, ‘Maintaining the connexion’, p. 28. For the Brunswick Clubs, see Brockville Gazette, 21 November 1828. For Gowan’s plans for a broader loyalist colonial society, see H. Senior, ‘Ogle Gowan’, Orangeism and the immigrant question 1830–33’, Ontario History, 66:4 (December, 1974), pp. 193–210. Brockville Gazette, 30 November 1832; Senior, Orangeism: The Canadian Phase (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), pp. 21–3, 28–9. Craig (ed.), Lord Durham’s Report, p. 98. Mills, The Idea of Loyalty, pp. 84–90. Senior, ‘Ogle Gowan’, pp. 203–5. For Gowan’s conception of a ‘British’ colonial nationality, see ibid., p. 209. That Gowan believed that English, Scots and Irish could maintain both a British identity and an attachment to their ethnic identities is suggested by the fact that Brockville Gazette included articles on ‘national characters’ almost as soon as Gowan took over the paper: see Brockville Gazette, 7 December 1830. W. B. Kerr, ‘When orange and green united 1832–9: the alliance of Macdonell and Gowan’, Ontario History, 34 (1942), pp. 13–42.

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89 90 91

92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117

Upper Canada Herald, 18 July 1832. The event is mentioned briefly in Senior, ‘Ogle Gowan’, pp. 205–6. Senior, Orangeism: The Canadian Phase, chs 2–4. D. Wilson, ‘Thomas D’Arcy Magee, the Orange Order & the new nationality’, in Wilson (ed.), The Orange Order in Canada (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 89– 108. Kingston Daily Whig, 25 June 1855. Wilson, ‘Thomas D’Arcy Magee’, p. 105. AO, SP, F983–2, Reel 12, Letterbook 1854–62, Bishop Strachan to John Hillyard Cameron, 10 March 1856, fo. 124; ibid., Strachan to William Hopkins, 15 February 1856, fo. 120. W. Macaulay, The Portraiture of the True and Loyal Orangeman (Toronto: H. Rowsell, 1854). Orange Lily, 6:8 (4 March 1854), p. 121. Wilson, ‘Thomas D’Arcy Magee’, p. 107. A. O’Mahen Malcom, ‘Loyal Orangemen and Republican Nativists: Anti-Catholicism and historical memory in Canada and the United States’, in J. Bannister and L. Riordan (eds), The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), . 225; Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting, p. 313; Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration, pp. 36–42. Fitzpatrick, ‘Exporting brotherhood’, pp. 277, 280. J. Shortt, The Gospel Banner! A Sermon Preached to the Loyal Orange Lodges (Montreal: Wilsons & Noble, 1853), p. 2. O’Mahen Malcom, ‘Loyal Orangemen’. Orange Lily, 6:7 (25 February 1854), pp. 106–7; O’Mahen Malcom, ‘Loyal Orangemen’, pp. 225–7. Church, 27 July 1854, p. 207. Akenson, Irish in Ontario, p. 281. Church, 22 May 1841, 19 July 1844 and 19 December 1845. Upper Canada Herald, 18 July 1832. A. N. Bethune, A Sermon Preached in the Church of St. George the Martyr, Toronto, on Sunday November 19, 1876, on the Occasion of the death of the Honorable John Hillyard Cameron, Q.C. (Toronto: Rowsell & Hutchinson, 1876). Nockles, ‘Church or Protestant sect?’, pp. 488–9. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Letters and other papers of Primate Beresford, T2772/1/2, J. E. Jackson to Archbishop Beresford, 21 July 1838. AO, SP, F983–1, Reel 7, Bethune to Strachan, 22 October 1852. Akenson, Irish in Ontario, pp. 281–2. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting, p. 313. Church, 19 July 1844. RHL, X-7, ‘Featherstone Lake Osier’s Journal to the UCCS, No. 10’, fo. 391. This occurred at Christ Church in Ottawa in 1875: Schurman, A Bishop and His People, p. 103. Historians use the term ‘vulgar conservatism’ to describe the form of loyalism which emerged in Britain in the 1790s and which sat awkwardly with traditional ‘Church and King’ loyalism. See M. Philip, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–3’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), 44–69. For this culture, see Westfall, Two Worlds, and Noll, History of Christianity, pp. 266– 73. Church, 16 July 1847. DOA, Rev. John Stannage Diaries, 1848–1880, 1–KM-2, diary entry for 13 July 1856,

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AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD 118 J. Lambert, ‘Maintaining a British way of life: English-speaking South Africa’s patriotic, cultural and charitable associations’, Historia, 54:2 (2009), pp. 57–9. 119 Bueltmann and MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George’, pp. 103–4; J. Brown, ‘Orangeism in South Africa’, in D. McCracken (ed.), The Irish in Southern Africa 1795–1910 (Johannesburg: Perskor Books, 1992), p. 113. 120 Lambert, ‘Maintaining a British way of life’. 121 Australian, 12 April 1836; Sydney Herald, 17 April 1837. One correspondent claimed the indifference shown by the English community was due to the closeness of St George’s Day to St Patrick’s, and so suggested a date in July instead: Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 25 March 1839. 122 For Melbourne, see South Australian Register, 18 January 1845; for Adelaide, see ibid., 4 April 1851. 123 Bathurst Free Press, 1 April and 20 May 1886. Sydney Englishmen had called for an association since the early 1850s: see the letter by ‘One Willing to Subscribe’, SMH, 7 April 1853. Bueltmann and MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George’, p. 103. 124 Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer, 25 April 1856; Bendigo Advertiser, 26 April 1858. 125 RHL, C/AUS/SYD/4/2, Archdeacon Thomas Hobbes Scott to Anthony Hamilton, 23 March 1827, fo. 30. 126 The phrase is MacRaild’s: Faith, Fraternity and Fighting, p. 77. 127 South Australian Register, 4 April 1851; Letter of ‘An Englishman’ in Cornwall Chronicle, 26 January 1850. 128 South Australian Register, 24 April 1851. 129 Melbourne Argus, 25 April 1853. 130 North Australian and Queensland General Advertiser, 25 April 1863. 131 Bueltmann and MacRaild, ‘Globalizing St George’, p. 80; Lambert, ‘A British way of life’, p. 57. 132 Advertiser, 24 April 1893; for the call for a national Church holiday, see South Australian Register, 17 March 1892 and Advertiser, 5 December 1890. 133 Jupp calculates that the percentage of English-born in the Australian population dropped from 14.5 per cent to 10.2 per cent between 1891 and 1901: J. Jupp, The English in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 188. 134 The Early History of the Orange Institution of N.S.W. (Sydney: Grand Lodge of NSW, 1926), pp. 12, 17. 135 Ibid., p. 27. 136 Sentinel, 15 July 1847. 137 R. Davis, Orangeism in Tasmania: 1832–1967 (Newtonabbey: University of Ulster, 2010), pp. 20–1. Barry attended Maitland LOL in 1871 and was prominent Orange apologist throughout his career: Maitland Mercury, 20 July 1871; for criticisms, see SMH, 16 July 1880. 138 Report of the vestry meeting at All Saints’, Parramatta in the Empire, 24 April 1851. 139 Davis, Orangeism in Tasmania, pp. 9, 74. 140 Scholarship has pointed to the continuing Anglican leadership of days of prayer in Britain: Williamson, ‘State prayers’. 141 Jacob, Clerical Profession, pp. 9–10. 142 Fletcher, ‘Anglicanism and the shaping of Australian society’, pp. 293–315.

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Conclusion

In 1856 the Brighton clergyman J. S. M. Anderson published the third and final volume of his History of the Church of England in the Colonies and Dependencies of the British Empire. Anderson’s three volumes – the first appeared in 1845 – represented the first attempt to write a narrative of the Church of England’s colonial career from the fifteenth century to the era of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund. Anderson’s history was founded on the assumption that there was such a thing as a unified ‘colonial Church’.1 The establishment of a coherent and unified institutional church was an enduring preoccupation of Anglican clergymen in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chapter Four showed that efforts to tie the disparate colonial Anglican establishments together in a single institutional structure entered a new phase with the creation of the CBF in the early 1840s. The Fund’s founders drew a distinction between the disorganised colonial Anglicanism that existed prior to 1840 and the colonial Church they were trying to build: theirs would be a Church with clear centres of authority, a comprehensive and uniform diocesan structure and close ties between the Church’s different branches. The alternative was a colonial Church made up of self-governing, selffinancing congregations, each free to choose their own ministers and make changes to Anglican doctrines and liturgy. Though the high church model of Church expansion left room for dioceses to exercise control over their own affairs, this would go hand in hand with moves to enforce discipline and uniformity within dioceses. The absorption of the Upper Canada Clergy Society into the SPG in the early 1840s was evidence of a drive to create central colonial ecclesiastical bureaucracy. The fear was that if missionary societies were allowed to multiply then this would deepen party divisions and encourage local as opposed to global outlooks.2 But reviewers of Anderson’s History raised doubts about whether [ 239 ]

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there was or could be such a thing as a single ‘colonial Church’. One noted the tremendous diversity of what was coming to be called the ‘Anglican Communion’, and went on to question whether it was possible to bring all the disparate elements of colonial Anglicanism together in one history.3 This book has reached a similar conclusion: the Church in the colonies was an amorphous entity that was both conservative and reformist, high church and evangelical, and progressive and traditional. High church hopes of building a colonial Church governed by bishops and nourished by a single home missionary body were far from being achieved in this period. A range of missionary institutions, private individuals, independent clergymen and settlers had a hand in exporting Anglicanism overseas. We have also seen that various personal and institutional networks connected the colonial branches of the Church to Anglican communities in Ireland, Scotland and England. Connections also began to emerge between colonies on the periphery of empire, and, in the case of Upper Canada, to the United States and settler communities beyond the British empire. One of the results of this was that a range of groups had the opportunity to transmit rival understandings of the Anglican faith to settler communities. Given this diversity, it is striking that Anglican clergy should have continued to see themselves as agents of colonial unity and cultural connectedness (one of the reasons why clergy were keen to give lectures and sermons on Englishness, the English language and national icons like Shakespeare was because they wished to erode any sense of 4 difference between disparate colonial communities). It is also striking that Anglican clergy continued to assume that their Church had a unique ability to maintain its unity as it travelled overseas. One Upper Canadian clergyman noted that the clergy who gathered at a clerical meeting in 1837 ‘were natives ... of England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, America & Hungary, all of whom use the same prayers, eat the same bread and drink the same cup’.5 This was true in the sense that only very minor and practical alterations to the 1662 Prayer Book were made in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. Resolution VIII of the 1867 Lambeth Conference did give colonial dioceses the right ‘to make such adaptations and additions to the services of the Church as its peculiar circumstances may require’, but it was not until the twentieth century that substantial changes were made. The South African dioceses only made minor amendments when they translated the Book into 6 vernacular languages in the 1860s and 1870s. But while Anglican identity remained grounded in a common prayer book, there were differences between colonial dioceses and between congregations within dioceses. The fact that the dispute over baptismal regeneration spread across the British empire at mid-century pointed to both the [ 240 ]

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CONCLUSION

connectedness of the Anglican world and also the lack of any unity between churchmen. The seeds of this fragmentation were embedded in the institutions that financed and staffed the overseas Church. By the 1830s the number of institutions and personal networks connecting metropolitan and colonial Anglicans had proliferated remarkably. Missionary societies were also not unified entities: these were highly diverse institutions that propagated various understandings of the Anglican faith. The SPG, for example, was ‘high church’ only in the sense that its officer class was populated by orthodox high churchmen who displayed varying levels of enthusiasm for Tractarianism. The diversity of colonial Anglicanism also came about because different groups put forward different models for how the Church should replicate itself overseas. We know that there was considerable debate among churchmen about how the gospel should be spread among indigenous and non-Christian communities. Less has been said about the differing proposals that were put forward for how the Church should provide religious instruction to settler communities. Across our period, a range of military personnel, settlers, churchmen and private citizens contacted the SPG and the CO with plans for how the 7 Church could be established in colonial communities. Though most saw the Episcopal Church of America and its synods, lay representation, voluntarism and elected ministry as a model for replication, there were disagreements about how far the laity in British colonies would enjoy the kind of expansive role in Church administration seen in republican America.8 There was also considerable distance separating the models of Church expansion put forward by the CBF and the UCCS. One looked to expansion driven by bishops; the other envisaged an Anglican Church that replicated itself through a series of self-governing lay committees. In many ways the story of settler religion in the first half of the nineteenth century is the story of the tension between evangelical voluntarism and a Church hierarchy that was trying to mould a series of self-governing and self-financing churches into a coherent, disciplined and uniform Anglican Church. Colonial churchmen were, of course, not the only ones who were struggling to find a way of meshing voluntarism with ecclesiastical authority: Irish prelates in particular had to find a way to harness the energy and enthusiasm of evangelical religion without compromising their own authority or the distinctive principles 9 of the Anglican faith. But the problem was particularly acute in the colonial world. As we have seen, Robert Gray had difficulty asserting his episcopal authority in a colony where lay communities tended to see churches as voluntary associations in which the officer class – the bishops and clergy – were responsible to lay subscribers. Both Gray and [ 241 ]

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Broughton expressed fears that the colonial Church would be torn apart by the same secessionist impulse that had broken up the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in several stages between the eighteenth century and the famous disruption of 1843. The task of reconciling voluntarism with ecclesiastical authority was only one of the challenges facing colonial bishops in this period. Colonial bishops also had to find a way of getting laypersons and clergy of varying ethnicity and theological sentiment to live and work together. The task of reconciling different religious opinions in a single institution was hardly a new problem, but it again seems that those working in pluralistic settler societies faced unique challenges. Most senior clergy harboured some kind of prejudice towards the Irish – even that ecumenical Scot, Bishop Stewart of Quebec, was accused of this10 – but it was also true that most found a way to contain national and party differences within a single ‘British Church’. Even an advocate of English empire like Bishop Broughton made use of Scottish Presbyterian converts. For most of our period ethnicity was a relatively unimportant – or at least latent – issue in colonial churches. When ethnicity did become an issue – such as during the episcopal elections in Canada West in the later 1850s – the Church showed that it could resolve internal tensions by devolving power to local communities. When it failed to do this – Gray’s treatment of recalcitrant evangelical congregations at the Cape is an example – it could result in secessions and disruptions comparable to those seen in the Scottish Episcopal Church in the 1840s. For the most part, however, a mixture of compromise, toleration and negotiation ensured that Scottish ecclesiastical history was not repeated in the colonies in our period. (When secessions came, they came later in the century: the evangelical Church of England in South Africa appeared in 1870, and in eastern Australia in the mid-1860s a series of disaffected clergymen renounced episcopal authority and established what each 11 called a ‘Free Church of England’). We should also remember that colonial Anglicans, like their metropolitan counterparts, shared much common ground. Many evangelicals wished to display their orthodox credentials by stressing their commitment to episcopacy and other fundamentals of Anglican religion: that the UCCS’s evangelical clergy could show as much concern for holy communion and the externals of worship as their high church counterparts shows that there was a basis 12 for an ‘Anglican’ identity that was above and beyond party. This book has not tried to explain the historical roots of the modern Anglican Communion. Nevertheless, it is remarkable how many of the features of the contemporary Communion had begun to take shape at mid-century. The modern Communion is a pluralistic and diverse entity [ 242 ]

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made up of independent and autonomous churches: each has the authority to define their own doctrine and liturgy, but each is tied to Canterbury by a voluntary compact. In contrast to Roman Catholicism, authority in modern Anglicanism is dispersed.13 The colonial dioceses of the mid-nineteenth century had some way to go before they would take their modern forms: the Colenso case of the mid-1860s would graphically illustrate that colonial Churches were not yet free from interference from secular authorities. But the seeds of the modern Communion grew from the synods and the administrative structures that were put in place in this period to staff and fund the Church. The centrifugal forces that characterise the modern Anglican world were also in evidence in our period. The influence that bishops continued to wield over synods and the appointment of clergy meant that colonial dioceses became independent entities and bishops had the opportunity to leave their mark on their branch of the Church. The new era of Anglican communication and connectedness also did not mean that colonial dioceses and national churches lost their distinct characters and identities: churchmen in the United States continued to celebrate their 14 and although Scottish Church’s distinct American character, Episcopalians could use the English prayer book from 1863, the Church did still retain its distinctive ‘Scottish office’ liturgy. But just as colonial dioceses were drawing away from both the mother country and one another, the first of the councils and conferences that would hold together the later Anglican world were being mooted. Chapter Five showed that it was not just high churchmen who were working to open up lines of communication between dioceses. The Lambeth conference of 1867 occurred at a moment when a range of global institutions – and not just churches – were seeking to cultivate greater communication and contact between their transnational branches: in 1865, for example, the first international gathering of 15 Orangemen was held at Downpatrick in Ireland. Just as the Orange meetings emerged as a response to a changing political and sectarian climate, so the Lambeth conference was a statement of Anglican unity and authority at a moment when the Church was facing threats from within and without. It is important, however, not to overstate the extent to which churchmen saw their Church as a unified and networked community. The fact that the movement of clergy was closely regulated throughout our period suggests that many churchmen did not want their institution to be an interconnected transnational institution, criss16 crossed by ‘complex circuits of exchange’. There were limitations on the movement of people and information, and structures remained in place to keep the colonial and metropolitan branches of the Church distinct and separate. [ 243 ]

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Though the colonial Church that appeared at mid-century can be easily slotted into a narrative of the development of the modern Anglican Communion, it is not quite so clear where we should position the Church of England in existing narratives of nineteenth-century imperial history. Comparisons can be drawn between the Anglican clergy and some of the empire’s other main conservative groups – American loyalists, freemasons and Orangemen. Though they were all closely associated with imperial conservatism, all of them could be both ‘agents and critics’ of empire.17 The Church was a diverse institution, and consequently a place can be found for it in both accounts of colonial reform and colonial conservatism. Though colonial churchmen like John Strachan and William Grant Broughton were arch-Tory proponents of established Churches, hierarchical societies and monarchical and aristocratic rights, the institutional Church was not necessarily an obstacle to the development of the ‘second empire’ of free trading and self-governing colonies of settlement. Recent research has, for example, uncovered the considerable contribution made by the Australian clergy to the development of a rich and varied civil society.18 Chapter Two showed how colonial vestries served as forums in which colonists articulated ideas about representative and accountable forms of government that mirrored contemporaneous debates in the world of secular politics. The Church also sat well with the voluntarism that became a notable feature of colonial settler societies. As we have seen, churches merged into the wider colonial associational culture; indeed the Church was commonly described as a ‘voluntary association’. The Church also worked alongside a range of non-state institutions to provide benevolent, charitable and fraternal services to a broad colonial community. It is noteworthy that progressives in Britain took considerable interest in the achievements of the voluntary Church. It is not surprising, for example, that William Gladstone – who would build a political ideology out of laissez-faireism, voluntarism and minimal government involvement in welfare provision – should have been so interested and so involved in the 19 progress of the colonial Church. In many ways his experiences administering the CBF was of critical importance to the development of the liberal idea that the moral regeneration of the nation was the responsibility of voluntary associations rather than government. The Church of England and the ethnic association may have been politically aligned with the conservative elements in colonial society, but both made a substantial contribution to the development of a new kind of 20 liberal civic order in the colonies of settlement. But the Church should still feature in the story of colonial conservatism and loyalism. An imperial historiography that has long [ 244 ]

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CONCLUSION

been preoccupied with the liberal and reformist dimensions of nineteenth-century imperial history is just beginning to shed light on the loyalists, conservatives and military folk who inhabited and governed large parts of the British empire.21 The Church’s conservatism was multifaceted and complex. At times the Church appears as a support of the Napoleonic-era empire of monopolies, limited civil rights and authoritarian government. The slave-holding colonial clergy are perhaps the most vivid illustration of the Church’s connections to the unreformed empire.22 The Canterbury Association episode also gives the impression that the Church was the agent of a brand of colonial rural conservatism. But Canterbury was in many ways an unrepresentative oddity in the history of nineteenth-century Anglicanism. The conservatism articulated by churchmen in the 1830s and 1840s was not an archaic rural conservatism, nor was it the Toryism that legitimated the autocratic, pre-reform empire. Canadian churchmen built links with a colonial loyalism and conservatism that was dynamic and attuned to the political, social and demographic changes that were shaping settler colonies. The Church’s connection with Orangeism is a case in point. Ogle Gowan’s plans for a moderate, inclusive Orangeism drew Church support because it defined the British subject in broad terms and offered a practicable means of building loyal colonies out of disparate communities. In many ways there were strong parallels between Gowan’s mission and the Church’s: both wanted to bring minorities within their institution, and both saw themselves as strengthening the ties that bound diverse colonial populations to Britain and the British world. The Church’s significance in both narratives of colonial reform and conservatism complicates the traditional idea that the Church of England was overwhelmed by the social, political and demographic forces that transformed Britain’s empire of settlement in the last three quarters of the nineteenth century. Statistics of the Church’s presence in colonial communities do paint an image of an institution that was struggling to keep up with migration and the expansion of the settler dominion. It is also true that the Church in 1860 had major institutional shortcomings: clergy in South Africa felt that it would only replicate itself when there were wealthy English-born colonists who were willing 23 to donate land and money. But these institutional inadequacies did not mean that churchmen abandoned the ambitious aims that had inspired clergy earlier in the century. The colonial Church of the postestablishment period has often been wrongly represented as an institution that was set apart from the wider colonial community and comfortable with a limited, private role in colonial society. We can take [ 245 ]

AN ANGLICAN BRITISH WORLD

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an opposing view. The Church of the post-1850 period may have looked like any other voluntary association, but it was one that was inhabited by clergy who continued to see themselves as representatives of a national establishment that still had a duty to provide a range of religious and non-religious services for an expanded emigrant community living in a Greater Britain.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

J. S. M. Anderson, The History of the Church of England in the Colonies and Dependencies of the British Empire, 3 vols (London: Rivingtons, 1845–56). [Anon.], Reasons against the formation of a second General Society for supplying Christian instruction to the British colonies, published in The British Magazine, 13 (May 1838), pp. 556–7. Critic, 21 June 1845, p. 156. For colonial clergy’s popularisation of Shakespeare, see L. Wright, ‘Cultivating Grahamstown: Nathaniel Merriman, Shakespeare and books’, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 20 (2008), pp. 25–37. For clergy and the English language, see E. Dewar, The History of the English Language. A Lecture Delivered at Cohourg, C. W. March 15th, 1852 (Cobourg: Goodeve & Corrigal, 1852). RHL, X-7, ‘Henry O’Neill’s Journal, No. 6, 13 November 1837’, fo. 82. C. Botha, ‘Southern Africa’, in C. Hefling and C. Shattuck (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, pp. 196, 198–9. See, for example, the undated proposal that an Oundle printer named Abel Morgan put forward to Robert Wilmot Horton in the 1820s: RHL, C/CAN/GEN/4, ‘Needs of emigrants to Canada for religious instruction’, fo. 34. For the ‘Americanisation’ of the colonial Church, see Stephenson, The First Lambeth Conference, p. 58 and ch. 4. Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, p. 79. An Irish clergyman is reported to have said ‘the Bishop Dislikes Irishmen’ in 1828: Millman, The Life of Charles James Stewart, p. 165. E. D. Daw, ‘William Bailey and the Free Church of England in New South Wales’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 58:4 (1972), pp. 252–3. For a time in the late 1860s William Bailey, one of clergy who founded a separatist congregation, styled himself ‘the first bishop of the Free Church of England and Ireland in the Australian Colonies’ and ordained a handful of followers as deacons and priests. For the persistence of a sense of common Anglican identity in the late Georgian Church, see P. Nockles, ‘The waning of Protestant unity and the waxing of antiCatholicism? Archdeacon Daubeny and the reconstruction of “Anglican” identity in the later Georgian Church, c.1780–c.1830’, in W. Gibson and R. Ingram (eds), Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–1832 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 228–9. ‘Anglicanism’, in J. Bowker (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 67–70. A. Cleveland Coxe, ‘The characteristics of the American Church’, in A. Weir and W. D. Maclagan (eds), The Church and the Age (London, 1872), p. 53. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting, pp. 302–3. Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, p. 16. Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire; Hardwick, ‘Church expansion and colonial reform’, ch. 2; Gladwin, ‘Flogging parsons’, p. 407. Gladwin, ‘Anglican clergymen’, ch. 3.

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20

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21 22

23

Carey notes that the CBF was critical for Gladstone’s understanding of the potential of voluntary organisations, but she does not mention the implications this had for his political development: Carey, ‘Gladstone, the colonial Church and imperial state’, pp. 178, 180. T. Stubbs, ‘Patriotic masculinity and mutual benefit fraternalism in urban English Canada: the Sons of England, 1874–1900’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 45:89 (2012), pp. 25–50. Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; Bannister and O’Riordan (eds), The Loyal Atlantic. A head of an emigrant party at the Cape claimed that Francis McClelland purchased a slave: Theal, Records of the Cape Colony from June to October 1824. Vol. XVIII, Walter Synnot to the commissioners of enquiry, 16 July 1824, p. 146. UYL, C/AFS/1, Thomas Earle Welby to Ernest Hawkins, 10 August 1857, fo. 287.

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—, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G. (London: SPG, 1901). Pietsch, T., Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Piggin, S., Making Evangelical Missionaries 1789–1858: The Social Background, Motives and Training of British Protestant Missionaries to India (Oxford: Sutton Courtney Press, 1984). Porter, A., Religion versus Empire} British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Purchas, H., Bishop Harper and the Canterbury Settlement (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1909). Reisner, M. (ed.), The Diary of a Country Clergyman 1848–1851: fames Reid (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). Rhoden, N., Revolutionary Anglicanism: The Colonial Church of England Clergy During the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Robinson, P., Proclaiming Unsearchable Riches: Newcastle and the Minority Evangelical Anglicans: 1788–1900 (Leominster: Gracewing Fowler Wright Books Ltd, 1996). Ross, R., Status and Respectability at the Cape of Good Hope: A Tragedy of Manners, 1750–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Sachs, W., The Transformation of Anglicanism: From State Church to Global Communion (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). Schurman, D., A Bishop and His People: John Travers Lewis and the Anglican Diocese of Ontario, 1862–1902 (Kingston: Anglican Church of Canada, 1991). Senior, H., Orangeism in Britain and Ireland, 1795–1836 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). —, Orangeism: The Canadian Phase (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972). Spragge, S. (ed.), The John Strachan Letter Book: 1824–1834 (Toronto: The Ontario Historical Society, 1946). Stephenson, A., The First Lambeth Conference: 1867 (London: SPCK, 1967). Storey, A., The St George’s Society of Toronto: A History and List of Members, 1834–1967 (Agincourt, Ont.: The Society, 1987). Street, J., The Rev. George C. Street (1814–1889): A Brief Biography (Madison, Wis.: J. C. Street, 2000). Strong, R., Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Reponses to a Modernizing Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). —, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Theal, G. M., Records of the Cape Colony, 36 vols (London: William Clowes, 1897-1905). Thorne, S., Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Twells, A., The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: The ‘Heathen’ at Home and Overseas (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009).

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INDEX Aberdeen (Scotland) 152 Albion (New York newspaper) 190 Allwood, Rev. Robert 44, 111 American loyalists 16, 28, 29, 80, 86, 244 American settlers 65, 80 Anglo-Indians 172-4 Armour, Rev. Samuel 32, 44 Armstrong, John (Bishop of Grahamstown) 112, 128n.71 Armstrong, Rev. J. G. 220, 226 associational culture 5, 9, 10, 18, 66, 205-38, 244 Church and 4, 5, 89, 124-5, 244 Atkins, Rev. Thomas 1-2, 194 Australian colonies 1, 17, 51, 169, 184, 197, 233 Anglican bishoprics in 109, 111, 113, 114 Anglican clergy in 11, 23, 27-8, 31, 37, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 90, 194 Anglican laity in 28, 77-9 colonial administrators in 25 fraternal and ethnic associations in 229-32 Free Church of England in 242 India’s influence on Church in 173, 175, 183 Irish clergy in 49-50 Irish settlers in 71 migration to 6 Presbyterians in 36 SPG and 38 Badnall, Hopkins (Archdeacon of Cape Town) 55, 193, 196 Baldwyn, Rev. William Devereux 41, 87 Bandon (Ireland) 159-60 Barker, Frederic (Bishop of Sydney) 115 Bathurst, Henry (3rd Earl of Bathurst) 26 Beaven, Rev. fames 40, 210

Beresford, Lord John (Archbishop of Armagh) 154, 155 Bernard family of Castle Bernard, Bandon 159-60 Bethune, Alexander Neil (Archdeacon of York, Upper Canada) 145, 152, 156, 188-90, 194, 195, 222, 224, 226-7 Bird, William Wilberforce (colonial secretary at Cape) 172 bishops, colonial 11 anti-Irish prejudice among 51, 242 anxiety over lay authority 35 attitudes towards ideal colonial clergy 41, 48 authority of 1, 33, 117 challenges faced by 242 control over recruitment 38, 41, 243 facing difficulties in building popular Church 84 growing prominence of 1840s 91, 99 help to export high church civilisation 114 limited authority of 100 mostly Englishmen 113 patronage controlled by 38 preference for English clergy 48 relationship with Irish candidates 52 seek to build British Church 36, 40, 152 selection of 110 bishops, English 31, 38, 84, 101, 112 bishops, Irish 241 Blair, Rev. Thomas 35, 173, 183, 192 Blomfleld, Charles James (Bishop of London) 53, 54, 101, 125, 194, 197 Boardman, Rev. William 28-9, 59n.34, 62n.130 Booth, Rev. George 55, 75, 88-9 Braim, Rev. Thomas Henry 193, 196 British Banner 139

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broad churchmanship 115-16, 126, 214 Broughton, William Grant (Bishop of Australia and Sydney) 33, 36, 52, 79, 84, 111, 114, 125, 231, 242, 244 attitude to SPG 39 attitude to Tractarianism 40 and clergy from humble backgrounds 45 dislike of Irish clergy 51 preference for English clergy 47 recruitment networks built by 54 Brunswick Clubs 159, 160, 221 Burdett-Coutts, Angela (heiress and Church donor) 70, 107, 109, 117 Cambridge University 28, 43, 44, 46, 54, 116 Campbell, Rev. Thomas 53, 54 Canterbury Association 104-6, 208, 245 Cape Colony 7, 16-17, 73, 100, 108-9, 111, 112, 113, 151, 161, 242 Anglican clergy in 22, 33, 45, 88-9, 183 Anglican laity in 28, 55, 69, 74, 75-6, 87, 90, 91-2, 185 colonial officials in 25 Dutch community in 67-8 ethnic composition of congregations in 71-2 fraternal and ethnic associations at 229, 230, 231 India’s influence on Church at 171-4 Irish clergy in 49 tensions between bishops and laity at 118-25 Cape Dutch 67-8, 71-2, 123 Cape Town 1, 15, 32, 35, 39, 47, 71, 75, 119-25, 172-4, 229 Carlyon, Rev. Frederick 193, 196 Caswall, Rev. Henry 179 CBF see Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund CCS see Colonial Church Society chaplains 24-5 appointment of 25 at Cape 29 emigrant 7-8 government patronage of 33, 39

military 31, 74, 89, 173 in New South Wales 41, 77 non-Anglican 33 Cheyne, Rev. Patrick 152 Chichester, 3rd Earl 105, 111 Children’s Friend Society 7 Christian colonisation 6, 7 church architecture 121 Church Emigration Society 7 Church Home Mission 157, 159 Church in the Colonies 135, 138 church memorials 123 Church Missionary Society 101, 115, 135, 144 Church of England in South Africa 124, 151, 166n.106, 242 Church of Scotland 36, 38, 82 Church of the Province of South Africa 124 Church reform connections between colonial and metropolitan 9 in metropolitan Britain 133, 140-4, 190-1 under Lord Liverpool’s government 31 Church societies (Canadian) 81, 91, 205 Church societies (South African) 120 Clapham Sect 27, 29, 32, 34, 174 clergy English 42, 47, 196 Scottish 53 Welsh 47 clergy reserves in Canada 30, 33, 38, 101, 187, 190-1, 208, 209, 223, 227 in New South Wales 30, 77 CMS see Church Missionary Society CO see Colonial Office Coghlan, Rev. James 181, 194 Colenso, John (Bishop of Natal) 115, 118, 198, 243 Coleridge, Edward (Eton master) 111, 170 Collison, Rev. Henry 193 Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund 18, 91, 99-126, 140, 239, 241, 244 aims of 101-6 attuned to colonial developments 117-18

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Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund (cont.) and campaign for colonial selfgovernment 103-4 a comprehensive institution 116-17 funding for 106-9 fund-raising methods of 106-10 linked to other colonial associations 104-6 as unifying Church 125 Colonial Church Chronicle 107, 114, 136, 184, 185 Colonial Church Society 34, 55, 133, 173 colonial auxiliaries of 35, 120 in Ireland 36, 157-62 publicity of 139 colonial clergy adapt to colonial environment 16 as community leaders 11, 210 attitudes to emigration among 6 authority of 5, 88, 210, 228 contribution to British world 3 dependent on lay support 74 disagreement over what made the ideal 23, 38, 41 as distinct category of clergy 42, 46 engagement with indigenous communities 17 English-born 48 evangelical 37, 43 growing number born in colonies 44, 46 imposters 42 involvement in Orange Order 219-29 as migrants 29-30, 37, 50 military backgrounds of 17, 44, 90 movement of 2, 178-82, 182-5, 191-7, 243 multinational nature of 10, 13, 48, 49 non-graduate 32, 39, 47 numbers of 22, 23, 57n.6 payment of 62n.121, 73, 74 recruitment of 4, 13, 17, 22-57 relations with parishioners 83-9 relationship with national identities 10, 206-21 and return migration 13, 191-7

social and educational backgrounds of 42-7 Colonial Clergy Act (1874) 191 Colonial Office 32, 241 Anglican contact with 187-9 involvement in clerical recruitment 30 Colonial Reform Society 103, 117 colonisation ‘Christian’ 6, 104, 134, 208 ‘systematic’ 104 conservatism 27, 160-1, 210-11, 244-5 convicts 70, 83 Cotterill, Henry (Bishop of Grahamstown) 115, 120, 147 Cotton, Henry (Archdeacon of Cashel) 153-4, 155 Cox, Rev. Robert Gregory 180 Coyte, Rev. William 26-7 Cronyn, Benjamin (Bishop of Huron) 49, 50, 54, 87, 111, 113-14, 116, 159 Daniell, Richard (Cape settler) 69, 90 Dansey, Rev. William 142, 143 Darling, Rev. W. S. 213 Deacon, Rev. fob 54 deputations 136-7 diocese identities of 3, 243 key unit of ecclesiastical geography 17 lay representative in government of 91 limited contact between 174-5 popular attachment to 91 revival of 91, 100, 101, 125, 140-4 Dobbs, R. S. (East India Company officer) 173 Dunbar, Sir William (Scottish evangelical minister) 151 Durham Report (1839) 221 Dutch Reformed Church 67-8 Ecclesiastical Board for the Colonies 30, 33, 53, 54, 189 Eden, Robert John (evangelical recruiter) 111-12 Elland Society 28 Elms, Rev. Rossington 178, 219

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INDEX Elrington, Charles (Regius Professor at Trinity College Dublin) 51, 156 English Episcopal Church in Scotland 147, 150 Episcopal Church of Scotland 13-14, 15, 36, 40, 54, 118, 133, 145-52, 185, 242, 243 Episcopal Church of the United States 99, 124, 169, 171, 176-82, 185, 241 episcopate, colonial 99-131 evangelicals and 105-6, 111-12, 115-16 high churchmen and 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111-12, 113, 114, 116, 125, 179 lay influence in appointments to 116 limited support for 108-9, 119 reform of 101-2 as subject of controversy 100, 117-25 episcopate, metropolitan 101 ethnicity 9 English 10, 206, 229-32 Irish 205, 216-17 significance in relations between clergy and congregations 85-7 unimportant issue in colonial Church 242 Evangelical Alliance 158 evangelicalism 11, 24, 28, 37, 56-7, 80, 177, 198, 214, 232 and Australian colonies 32 British dimensions of 50 and the circulation of ecclesiastical information 139 ‘Claphamite’ or ‘post-millennial’ 34 and colonial clergy 25, 31, 37, 40, 43, 52, 86, 193 and the colonial episcopate 105-6, 111-12, 115-16 and connections between the Cape and India 172-4, 186 in Ireland 50-1, 153, 155-6, 157-62 and lay authority 90-1, 100, 118-25, 185, 241 and missionary societies 4, 13, 34, 356, 55, 101, 133, 134

and networks 27, 29, 54, 187, 194 and the Orange Order 218, 225 ‘pre-millennial’ 34, 35, 155 and Scotland 145, 147, 148, 150, 151 and the SPG 109 and tensions with high churchmen 15, 79, 84, 88, 118-25, 156, 242 Fairbairn, John (Cape reformer) 119 Fawcett, John (East India Company officer) 172 Feild, Edward (Bishop of Newfoundland) 113 Fidler, Rev. Isaac 180, 193 Forbes, William (Scottish Episcopalian lawyer) 146, 165n.78 freemasonry 81, 205, 229, 244 Fulford, Francis (Bishop of Montreal) 112, 114, 116, 128n.62 Fulton, Rev. Henry 25, 42, 54, 82 Galt, John (colonial lobbyist) 188 Gladstone, William Ewart and CBF 99, 102, 103-4, 106 and college at Glenalmond 148-9 and Episcopal Church of Scotland 146, 148, 165n.95 involvement in reform of UCCS 37 involvement in selection of bishops 110-11 and lay representation in synods 118 as member of Church party in Parliament 190 significance of his involvement in the colonial Church 244 support for elected bishops 116 Goderich, Viscount (1st Earl of Ripon) 189 Gore, Rev. William F. 51, 52 Gorham Judgment 103 Gowan, Ogle (Orangeman) 218, 221-4, 226, 233, 245 Grahamstown 69, 75-6, 92, 122, 123 Gray, Robert (Bishop of Cape Town) 11, 42, 114, 117, 172, 183, 184, 186, 241, 242 churchmanship of 112

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Gray, Robert (cont.) emphasises episcopal authority 118, 128n.61 hostile to Indian Church 174 interest in Episcopal Church of Scotland 151 involvement in clerical recruitment 39 negotiates with laity 47, 125 occasionally appointed Irish clergy 52 preference for high churchmen 40 reasons for appointment 113 recruitment policy of 45-6 and reform of Cape Church 100, 119-22 tensions with Cape laity 118-25 unpopular with some clergy 195 Gray, Sophy (architect) 121 Grey, 3rd Earl (formerly Viscount Howick) 39, 110, 111-12, 115, 128n.50, 189 Gribble, Rev. Charles Besly 147 Hackney Phalanx 32, 141, 177 Hall, Edward Smith (New South Wales editor) 77 Hamilton, Anthony (Archdeacon of Taunton) 30, 31, 32, 56, 189 Hawkins, Rev. Ernest (secretary of the SPG) 49, 92, 102, 111, 116, 137, 154, 185 Hewett, Rev. John Short 192 high churchmanship 4, 10, 15, 24, 126, 239, 242 British dimensions of 50, 154 and the Cape Colony 119-25, 174 and colonial clergy 32 and colonial episcopate 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111-12, 113, 114, 116, 125, 179 and ethnicity 213-14 and hostility to Irish clergy 51-2 and Ireland 51, 154, 155, 156, 161-2 and missionary publicity 134, 135-40, 184, 208 and missionary societies 13, 38, 106, 109, 117, 241 and networks 54, 171, 183 and the Orange Order 221, 222-4, 226, 227, 232

‘orthodox’ 39, 112 and Scotland 40, 146, 148-52 and tensions with evangelicals 79, 84, 88, 92, 102, 105-6, 119, 120-22 and Tractarianism 39, 40, 103, 112 and the United States 176-7 Hill, Rev. Bold Cudmore 67, 86, 87, 88, 160, 162 Hinds, Samuel (Bishop of Norwich) 156 Hobart, John Henry (Bishop of New York) 176 Hopkins, John Henry (Bishop of Vermont) 178 Hough, Rev. George 75, 173 Howley, William (Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury) 30, 110, 111-12, 116 India 1, 2, 27, 33, 47, 128n.60, 129, 171-4, 182, 184, 200n.24 Inglis, Charles (Bishop of Nova Scotia) 45 Inglis, John (Bishop of Nova Scotia) 113, 137, 169 Ireland Anglican clergy in 6 Church of 13, 40, 49, 118, 133, 152-61, 217, 227 Protestant crusade in 14, 34, 153, 157-61 Irish Church Missions 158, 160, 162 Irish religious and cultural institutions clergy 7, 29, 37, 40, 44, 49, 50, 51, 52, 86, 220, 225 cultural institutions 51, 216-17, 225-9 high churchmen 15, 51 and imperial Britishness 51-2 loyalism 225-9 settlers 28, 71, 80, 86, 87 Islands and Coast Socièty 157-9, 160 Jackson, James Edward (Dean of Armagh) 154, 155 Johnson, Rev. Richard 24, 27, 194 Jones, Rev. Robert 25 jury, trial by 82-3

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Keane, Rev. John Espy 84, 194, 197 Kerr, William Johnson (Canadian reform politician) 68 King’s College Toronto 46, 210, 213 Kingston (Ontario) 70, 72, 80, 81, 82, 83, 180, 209, 214 Lambeth Conference (1867) 170, 240, 243 Langhorn, Rev. John 27, 41, 192 lay communities attitudes towards bishops among 118-25 authority of 8, 18, 57, 80-1, 90-1, 114, 118 and controversies over siting of churches 73 demand elected bishops 79, 80, 82 demand representative Church institutions 78 ethnicity of 71 have commercial reasons for building churches 73 help to transform character of Church 74, 79, 89 involvement in clerical recruitment 24, 28-9, 34, 198 involvement in reform campaigns 15 local perspective of 91, 98n.161 look to America for inspiration 198, 204n.152 political significance of 66-7, 74, 76, 82, 90 problem of identifying 67-8, 72 relations with clergy 83-9 reticence to take holy communion among 87 and support for Church 69-71 views of Church held by 5, 66, 89 visions of Church government among 124 Leeds, Rev. John 138 Lett, Rev. Stephen 155, 224 Lewis, John Travers (Bishop of Ontario) 50, 51, 82, 116, 155 loyalism 15, 205-33, 244-5 in Ireland 225-9

Macaulay, Rev. William 224, 228 Macdonell, Alexander (Roman Catholic Bishop of Kingston) 210, 222 Macquarie, Lachlan (Governor of New South Wales) 25, 31, 70, 187 Madeira 39 Magee, Thomas D’Arcy (Irish republican) 223 Magee, William (Archbishop of Dublin) 153, 160 Manners, John (7th Duke of Rutland) 132, 137 Manning, Henry (Archdeacon of Chichester) 102, 106, 142 Marsden, Rev. Samuel 27, 43, 82, 89, 174, 187 Mayerhoffer, Rev. V. R 220, 223 McCaul, Rev. John 216-17 McClelland, Rev. Francis 28-9 McGeorge, Rev. Robert Jackson 61n.96, 147, 193, 220 Medley, John (Bishop of Fredericton) 111, 112, 114, 128n.61 and n.62 Melbourne 51, 116, 229-31 Merriman, Nathaniel (Archdeacon of Grahamstown) 39, 40, 92, 120, 122, 123, 185 Methodism 39, 67, 72, 76, 88-9 Middleton, Thomas Fanshaw (Bishop of Calcutta) 33, 169 migration into Canada 47, 207-8 ‘chain migration’ 50 Church of England and 14 clerical 22-64, 182-5, 191-7 and formation of British world 3 involvement of Anglican clergy in 5-8 military officers importance in extension of Church 68, 69, 90 Minchin, Rev. C. H. 161 Morse, Rev. William 85, 183 Mountain, George Jehoshaphat (Bishop of Quebec) 113, 128n.71, 175, 176, 188, 212 Mountain, Jacob (Bishop of Quebec) 26, 27, 29, 42, 89, 187

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Mountcashel, 3rd Earl 35, 50, 158 Mulkins, Rev. Hannibal 84, 196-7 National Association for Church Colonization 7 networks 169-99 evangelical missionary 11 familial 12, 53, 56 historical research on 12-14 Irish 50 limits of 12-13 of patronage 27, 54 recruitment 24, 48 New Brunswick 35, 113 New South Wales 1, 7, 16-17, 39, 67, 73, 83, 149 Anglican bishops in 84, 109, 111 Anglican clergy in 22, 27-8, 32, 33, 41-2, 43, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 82, 187, 191 Anglican clergy return from 191, 194, 195, 197 Anglican laity in 24, 69, 70-1, 77-9, 84, 85 clergy reserves in 30 colonial administrators 25, 31 convict population in 70 India’s influence on church in 173-4, 183 Irish settlers in 81, 87 Orange Order in 218, 231-2 payment of clergy in 74 St George’s societies in 229-32 Newman, Rev. Horace 160 Nixon, Francis (Bishop of Tasmania) 55, 112, 114 Norris, Rev. William H. 58n.19, 67, 177 Nova Scotia 28, 29, 35, 113, 169 O’Neill, Rev. Henry H. 88 Orange Order 34, 51, 81, 116, 155, 161, 206-7, 217, 233, 244, 245 in Australian colonies 231-2 awkward relationship with Anglican clergy 85, 227-9 contribution to the expansion of the Church 205 in England, 218 international gatherings of 243 in Ireland 159-60

Irish clergy gravitate towards 216 in Upper Canada 218-29 Ordinations for the Colonies Act (1819) 9, 42, 56, 186, 191 Orpen, Rev. Charles 51, 52, 87 Osier, Rev. Featherstone Lake 86, 228 Otter, William (Bishop of Chichester) 141, 142, 143 Oxford University 28, 31, 46, 116 Pakington, Sir John 190 Palmer, Rev. Arthur 192, 193, 217 Palmerston, Lord 115 Parker, William 28 Parkin, Rev. Edward 181, 195 Parramatta 31, 52, 54, 84-5, 232 patronage in colonial administration 52-3, 55 in colonial Church 53 in metropolitan Church 52, 55 Perry, Charles (Bishop of Melbourne) 35, 52, 112, 115 preference for English clergy 47 Petworth emigration project 6 pews clergy wield control over 78 controversies over 77 efforts to make free 121 Philipps, Thomas (Cape settler) 55, 76 Phillpotts, Henry (Bishop of Exeter) 190 Port Elizabeth 55, 69, 75, 120, 129 Porter, Rev. George Shepheard 113, 192-3 Porter, William (attorney general at Cape) 76, 174 Porteus, Beilby (Bishop of London) 27 prayer books 86, 88, 146, 148, 164, 176, 240 Presbyterians 53, 65, 67, 82, 85, 87, 208, 242 Pretyman-Tomline, George (Bishop of Lincoln) 27 Protestant Association 158 Protestant Conservative Society 158, 160 Protestant Defence Association (Tasmania) 232

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INDEX Pusey, Edward B. 111 Pyne, Rev. Alexander 183, 184, 195, 197

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Quebec 28, 175-6 diocese of 27, 28, 81, 87, 91, 138-9, 185 Raddish, Rev. Thomas 25-6, 192 Reformation Society 34, 158 Reid, Rev. James 138-9, 185 Roden, 3rd Earl 35, 158 Rogers, Rev. R. V. 180, 214 Roman Catholics 45, 46, 54, 133, 152, 159, 205, 210, 212, 216, 222, 225, 227, 230, 243 Rudd, Rev. James Sutherland 27, 41, 65 Russell, Michael (Bishop of Glasgow) 150 Rutherfoord, Howson (Cape settler) 185 St Andrew’s societies 209 St Bees (theological college) 45, 54 St George’s Day in Australian colonies 229-31 in Upper Canada 208, 210-15 St George’s societies 11, 205, 206, 208-15, 233 in Australian colonies 229-31 St Helena 1, 120 St Patrick’s Day in Australian colonies 230 in Canada 216-17 St Patrick’s societies 51, 207, 209, 216-17, 224 Scadding, Rev. Henry 210, 212, 215 Scott, Rev. Edward Thomas 88-9, 193, 194-5 Scott, Thomas Hobbes (Archdeacon of New South Wales) 30, 31, 32, 77, 83, 230 Scottish Episcopalians 70 in South Africa 146 in Upper Canada 146 Selwyn, George (Bishop of New Zealand) 112, 113, 128n.61 and n.62 Shakespeare, celebration of 211, 215, 229, 240

Short, Augustus (Bishop of Adelaide) 112, 114, 115, 128n.62, 230 Simcoe, John Graves (lieutenant governor of Upper Canada) 24, 26, 80 Simeon, Rev. Charles (Clapham Sect member) 27-8 Skinner, William (Bishop of Aberdeen) 150, 151, 152 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 7, 153, 176 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 7, 51, 54, 55, 69, 73, 74, 111-12, 161, 190, 202n.90 absorbs UCCS 37, 239 adopts clergy in colonies 26 asks clergy for information on ethnic composition of congregations 71, 87 assumed to be an English institution 145 confused with CBF 107 continued importance in Upper Canada 38 declining importance of 38 Emigrants’ Spiritual Aid Fund and 8 grants from British government to 26, 33 historical scholarship on 132, 134 involvement of laity in 34 involvement in recruitment 24, 26 in Ireland 49, 145, 153-7 jubilee of 169 and networks 12 opposed to independent fundraising 186 permits colonial bishops to recruit men in Britain 32 presents itself as national institution 105, 106, 109, 241 problems with its early recruits 41 provides scholarships 26 publicity of 134-9 revival of home base 140-4 in Scotland 147, 149 seeks to control migration of clergy 37 seeks to recruit multi-national clerical workforce 49-50 in Wales 164n.57 and n.74

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INDEX Somerset, Lord Charles (Cape governor) 25 Sons of England (South Africa) 229 South Australia 225, 229 SPCK see Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge SPG see Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Stewart, Charles James (Bishop of Quebec) 32, 34, 35, 113, 182, 187, 188, 189, 242 Stewart, Randolph (9th Earl of Galloway) 35, 36 Strachan, John (Bishop of Toronto) 89, 110, 113, 244 and American Episcopalians 176, 177-8, 179 attitude to Tractarianism 40 and Colonial Office 187, 188-9 dislikes evangelicals 40 involvement in clerical recruitment 38, 199 Irish clergy and 50, 52, 6In. 100 negotiations with laity 47, 55, 73, 88 and other colonial bishops 175 recruitment achievements 46 relations to Orange Order 220, 223 removes troublesome clergy 84 runs schools at Cornwall and York 26 and St George’s societies 208-9, 216 and Scottish bishops 40, 146, 150 and Scottish Episcopalianism 151-2 and secret societies 218 seeks to inculcate ‘diocesan consciousness’ among laity 91 seeks to recruit local clergy 32, 44 tries to match Irish clergy with Irish settlers 40 uses patronage responsibly 56 Street, Rev. George 85, 181, 220, 228 Stuart, Rev. John 28, 42, 45, 62n.131, 65, 73, 89, 175 Sumner, John Bird (Archbishop of Canterbury) 105, 115, 116 Sydney (New South Wales) 15, 46, 69, 71, 77-9, 169, 173, 229, 231

synods 71, 81, 103, 110, 118, 124, 169, 177, 178, 185, 243 Tasmania/Van Diemen’s Land 31, 39, 43, 69, 77, 78, 230, 232 Thackeray, Rev. Elias 157 theological colleges in Cobourg (Ontario) 46 in New York 182 in Sydney 46, 47 Thorpe, Rev. George Villiers 193, 195 Todd, Rev. James Henthorn 154, 156 Todd, Rev. William Gowan 154, 155 Tomlinson, George (Bishop of Gibraltar) 112 Toronto 11, 208-9, 210, 211, 215, 216-17 township meetings 65, 80 Tractarianism 15, 51, 55, 56-7, 104, 109, 171, 184, 198, 224 and American high churchmanship 177, 178 and appointments to colonial episcopate 110-12 British dimension of 50 colonial bishops attracted to 39-40, 112, 114 and episcopal authority 18, 99, 100 influence on reform of colonial Church 121 and Ireland 154, 227 and missionary identity of Church 41, 99, 103 promotes closer ties between colonial dioceses 183 and Scottish high churchmanship 147-8, 150-1, 152 and SPG 144, 154, 241 Trinity College Dublin 44, 46, 50, 156 Trinity College Toronto 40, 44, 145, 156, 188, 195, 210 Twelfth of July 219, 228, 231 Tyrell, William (Bishop of Newcastle, Australia) 39, 112, 114, 115 UCCS see Upper Canada Clergy Society Ulster 154-5, 156, 166n.134, 221, 225, 227

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INDEX

United States 8, 175-82, 243 Upper Canada Clergy Society 102, 214, 242 absorbed into SPG 37, 239 anti-Catholic emphasis of 34 colonial laity ask for support from 70, 85 in Ireland 36, 157-62 missionaries of 67, 86, 183 model of Church expansion held by 102, 198, 241 prominent supporters of 35 Upper Canada Travelling Mission Fund 34, 36 Upper Canada/Canada West 6, 7, 11, 16-17, 22, 29, 30, 48, 73, 74 Anglican clergy in 22, 29, 32, 33, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 53, 54, 88, 89, 138, 147, 240 Anglican laity in 28, 65, 67, 68, 69, 79-81, 82, 90, 92 clerical migrants in 37, 50 colonial officials in 24, 25 disputes between clergy and congregations in 84, 85, 86, 88 and ecclesiastical connections to United States 171, 175-82 election of bishops in 116 and English ethnicity 207-29 ethnic composition of Anglican congregations in 72 evangelical missionary societies and 34-5, 162, 198 Irish clergy in 49, 51 and metropolitan petitioning campaigns 189-90 Scottish Episcopalians and 146, 152 SPG and 38 women and the Church in 70

Vale, Rev. Benjamin 194, 195 Vershoyle, Rev. Hamilton (CCS administrator in Ireland) 158 vestries 72, 74, 75-6, 80, 81, 83, 124, 244 Victoria (Australian colony) 37, 51, 183, 230, 231, 232 voluntarism 4, 5, 41, 73, 74, 84, 89, 101, 118, 178, 185, 198, 205, 241, 244 Waddilove, Rev. W. J. D. 34, 36 Warr, Rev. George Winter 58n.19, 84, 195 Watson, Joshua 32, 169 Welby, Thomas Earle (Archdeacon of St. Helena) 1, 44, 172, 183, 184 Wellesley, William (evangelical missionary society organiser) 35, 36 Western Australia 35, 51 Whately, Richard (Archbishop of Dublin) 154, 155 Whigs 33, 56, 207 Whitaker, Rev. George 210, 212, 215 Wilberforce, Robert Isaac (Archdeacon of the East Riding) 144 Wilberforce, Samuel (Bishop of Oxford) 99, 103, 140, 141, 143 Willson, Thomas (Cape settler) 28-9 Wilmot-Horton, Robert (3rd Baronet) 30, 189 Wilshere, Rev. Ebenezer 83, 84, 122, 172, 184, 194 Wilson, Daniel (Bishop of Calcutta) 175 Wilton, Rev. Charles 31 women authority in Church 70, 121 raise funds for Church 70, 107, 160

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