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ANGLICANISM AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE c.1700–1850

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Anglicanism and the British Empire c.1700–1850 ROWAN STRON G

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Rowan Strong 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–921804–2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Jill soulmate


Preface and Acknowledgements This work has been gestating since my last book in 2002, when I decided to change direction from Scottish history to engage with the history of Christianity in the colonized world of the British Empire. This milieu had a more direct impact upon the history of the Australian context in which I am now working, and I was also interested to understand more about what happened to British metropolitan Christianity, which I had been previously studying for over a decade, when it was exported into a colonial context. Questions about how the empire was understood from a religious perspective—more speciWcally, a Christian and an Anglican context—preoccupied my attention on this subject. These questions have been prompted by working since 1992 in an Australian university, where I soon became aware that maintaining the importance of a British and imperial connection in Australian history runs counter to the prevailing nationalistic historiography.1 Imperialism seems to be particularly susceptible to questions about the inXuence of personal factors the author brings to the subject. Such a declaration about the author’s own personal narrative, as a sort of intellectual confession, has become almost de rigueur for historians of empire since Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects (2002) and Bernard Porter’s The Absent-minded Imperialists (2004). It is obviously important to declare anything that may bring a distortion or prejudice to a historical study, although none of us is free from such inXuences. I hope to be even more succinct than either of those two eminent historians in declaring my own. Growing up a Pakeha (white) New Zealander in the 1950s made one almost inevitably susceptible to the myth of New Zealand as a racial success story of British colonization; although university in the more radical early 1970s in Wellington provided intellectual antidotes to that traditional narrative. My own maternal history is a result of British 1 See my comments in Rowan Strong, ‘The Reverend John Wollaston and Colonial Christianity in Western Australia 1840–1863’, Journal of Religious History, 25 (2001), 262.

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Preface and Acknowledgements

imperialism, since my great great grandfather arrived in New Zealand in the 1860s, becoming the Wrst of a family succession of West Coast gold and coal miners. But this same family history also included a narrative of political and communist radicalism that was in contrast to the reverence of my mother for that last great British imperialist, Winston Churchill. If family history has not made me particularly susceptible to an uncritical acceptance of British imperialism, then neither has it had much to do with my appropriation of the other subject of this work, namely Anglicanism. Aside from my mother, Christian, and more speciWcally Anglican, inXuences in my upbringing were notional. My father was a gentle atheist who was surprised, but not opposed, when his son began to train for the Anglican priesthood, and I have now been a priest for thirty years. However, readers of my two previous books on Scottish Episcopalianism (Anglicanism), as well as this one, will not, I trust, Wnd that that commitment has in any way prevented me from being critical (some have said, hostile) to that church when it is warranted by my study of the sources. Access to British imperial sources is not without its diYculties in the present climate of reduced research funding in the humanities, and so I am grateful that the base of this research was made possible by two periods of research leave from Murdoch University during 2000 and 2003, and some funding for those research periods by the Anglican Diocese of Perth. Librarians at the British Library, and at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, were particularly helpful; the latter in providing unusual access to material on a very short research trip. Colleagues in church history with whom to share ideas and explore avenues do not abound in Western Australia, so I have been doubly grateful for the few correspondents who have taken the time from their own busy lives to comment critically upon sections of this work. Particularly, I want to acknowledge the help of Dan O’Connor; and especially of Professor Andrew Porter, who very kindly read through earlier drafts of some of the chapters of this work and provided feedback that immeasurably improved it, though the responsibility for its Wnal shape is of course my own. Earlier drafts of the sections on the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) during the reign of Queen Anne were read at the 2003 summer conference of the Yale–Edinburgh Group on the History of Missions held at Edinburgh University, and at the

Preface and Acknowledgements

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Religious History Society in Australia in 2004; a part of chapter Wve was given as a keynote address at the conference of the Australia and New Zealand Association of Theological Schools; and a version of chapter four was given as a paper in 2006 to the Institute of Advanced Studies in the University of Western Australia, and to the Ecclesiastical History Society’s Summer Conference. The two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press provided critical feedback on an earlier draft of the book, which made it a more complex and satisfying work. But mostly, however, the book has proceeded like many historical projects, as an individual and silent conversation with the many primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. That soliloquy has been facilitated by the insightful comments of my wife, Jill. She has been patient with my work, willingly interrupting both her own research on late eighteenth-century Scottish millenarianism and her busy career as a senior university administrator to provide insightful historical conversation when my own thinking became too tortuous or tangled. Consequently, this book is dedicated to her in delight for her love and companionship.


Contents Introduction: English Religion and Empire to 1700 1. Anglicans and Empire: Historical Interpretations 2. The Construction of an Anglican Imperialism: British North America in the Eighteenth Century 3. Anglicanism in a Resurgent Imperialism: Bengal, 1790–1830 4. A New Anglican Imperial Paradigm: The Colonial Bishoprics Fund, 1840–1 5. The New Paradigm in the Colonies: Australia and New Zealand, 1820s–c.1850 Conclusion: Anglicanism and Empire, 1700–c.1850 Bibliography Index

1 10 41 118 198 222 283 295 313


Introduction: English Religion and Empire to 1700 The connection between religion and empire in England goes back to at least the sixteenth century. In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, by editing and annotating collections of travel narratives by traders and explorers, the geographer Richard Hakluyt the younger and his successor, the clergyman Samuel Purchas, were early proponents of a connection between a militant new Protestantism and empire, on the basis that trade and colonization would strengthen the position of Protestant monarchs against imperial Catholic Spain.1 However, Hakluyt did admit that, as a motive for voyages of exploration by the English, religion came a rather poor second to hopes of plunder and trade, and that any evangelism would need Wrst to secure a colonized beachhead of English civilization in a new territory.2 The sixteenth-century chronicler of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 North American voyage commented that English colonization in the New World could not succeed unless it was blessed by God as a consequence of incorporating the evangelization of the heathen as its primary motive.3 But, as David Armitage points out, despite such indications, it is surprising that no particular attention is paid to religion in the Wrst volume of the new Oxford 1 Nicholas Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire: An Introduction’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4–5. 2 Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 30–1. 3 Ibid., 31.

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Introduction

History of the British Empire, dealing with its origins.4 Notwithstanding this observation, Armitage believes that no particular panProtestant theory or support for empire emerged in either England or Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because of the fractured nature of British Protestantism between the episcopalian Church of England and the presbyterian Church of Scotland. Consequently, religious conceptions of empire played little part in imperial identity and justiWcation until the eighteenth century.5 But while religion may not have prompted large-scale concern for colonization, that did not mean it was thought to be unimportant by those English who did venture overseas in the early modern period. In a work published in 1943 the American historian Louis B. Wright drew attention to the way in which Protestantism was enmeshed into English voyages of discovery, piracy, and trade. Sir Francis Drake, for example, on his circumnavigation of the world, set out in 1577 ensuring he had ample quantities of bibles and prayer books, Foxe’s Book of Martyres, and a chaplain for the ediWcation of his crew. Sermons and services were frequent on this, as on other such English voyages, as was the carriage of chaplains to deliver them.6 So, although missions and religion may not have been a primary motivation for English venturing overseas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nevertheless when they did so the English ensured their religion went with them, a concern that touched even those freebooting captains such as Drake and Sir John Hawkins. While there were internal divisive obstacles in the way of developing a British pan-Protestant ideology of empire in the early modern period, there were some individuals and groups among English and Anglican Protestants who did draw a connection between Protestantism and colonialism. Dissenters and Puritans saw North America as either a religious Utopia for voluntary settlers, or as an asylum for religious exiles.7 Both conformist and Puritan Anglicans also saw the 4 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63 n. 8. 5 Ibid., 63–7, 99. 6 Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558–1625 (New York, repr. 1965), 6–25. 7 David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 6–8.

English Religion and Empire to 1700

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New World as oVering the potential for religion to escape from an oppressive or moribund Old World. David Lovejoy has pointed to the Anglican poets and priests George Herbert and John Donne in this respect. Herbert, in his poem ‘The Church Militant’, envisaged religion being carried to America as an abundant recompense for England despoiling the natives of their gold, for ‘Religion alwaies sides with poverty’! Donne, preaching to departing settlers of the Virginia Company, pronounced them agents of the Holy Spirit for the advancement of the gospel among Native Americans.8 Sermons by Church of England clergy in support of the beleaguered Virginia Company were one of the few signs of Anglican interest in missionary work in the seventeenth century. They were perhaps encouraged to do so because they did not have to practise personally the emigration that they preached to others. Called upon by the company’s backers to stimulate interest in its struggling colony, these preachers constantly drew attention to the poor comparison that England’s religion in the New World made with the more vigorous Spanish Catholicism spreading its erroneous version of Christianity there. They also viewed mission as a potential national undertaking, as in the Wrst such sermon in 1609 by Robert Johnson. So I wish and intreat all well aVected subjects, some in their persons, others in their purses, cheerefully to adventure, and joyntly take in hand this high and acceptable worke, tending to advance and spread the kingdome of God, and knowledge of the truth, among so many millions of men and women, Savage and blind, that never yet saw the true light shine before their eyes, to enlighten their minds and comfort their soules, as also for the honor of our King, and enlarging of his kingdome, and for preservation and defence of that small number of our friends and countrymen already planted, least for want of more supplies we should become a scorne to the world subjecting our former adventurers to apparent spoile and hazard, and our people (as a prey) to be sackt and puled out of possession.9

However, these sermons had little eVect in promoting trans-Atlantic settlement, as missions were not a major stimulus for English colonization in the seventeenth century,10 even though the promoters of the scheme of settlement in Virginia did advertise their colony as a means of spreading Protestantism and wealth.11 ‘The principal and main ends 8 Ibid., 9–12. 10 Ibid., 32.

9 Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, 319. 11 Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire’, 10.

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Introduction

[of this plantation] were Wrst to preach and baptize into the Christian Religion, and by propagation of that Gospel to recover out of the arms of the Devil, a number of poor and miserable souls, wrapped up unto death, in almost invincible ignorance.’12 The Virginia Company preachers also proposed that England had a moral responsibility to spread its religion because it was true, compared with the gross error of Spanish Catholicism, or the religious ignorance of the native population of the Americas. This surpassing importance of Protestant religious truth could even justify colonial violence in its spread.13 The continuing obsession of advanced Protestants with Spain in the seventeenth century remained a central strand in their advocacy of colonial settlement. The Puritans John Winthrop and William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, were leaders in this regard. English colonial settlement along the Atlantic seaboard of the New World was, for them, a way of challenging the power and religion of Spain.14 Even the English government made some connection between colonialism and the Church of England in the seventeenth century. Colonial governors early in the reign of James I were required to promote the established religion of England in the areas under their jurisdiction. They were to ensure that ‘the true word, and service of God and Christian faith be preached, planted, and used . . . according to the doctrine, rights, and religion now professed and established within our realme of England’.15 This resulted in about a dozen churches being built in Virginia by 1634 and another Wfty by 1668, though in other North American colonies state-sponsored Anglicanism made little headway against established Congregationalism or other forms of predominant non-Anglican Protestantism.16 In their relationship with the native peoples of North America the connection between economics, civilization, and Christianity

12 Anthony Pagden, ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c.1700’, in Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, 35. 13 Nicholas Canny, ‘England’s New World and the Old, 1480s–1630s’, in ibid., 151, 155. 14 Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire’, 20. 15 James Horn, ‘Tobacco Colonies: The Shaping of English Society in the Seventeenth-century Chesapeake’, in Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, 187. 16 Ibid., 189.


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was already being made by the English in the seventeenth century. Writing in 1644, the Revd John Eliot believed that civilization— that is, the adoption of English ways—was a necessary prerequisite to Christian conversion.17 This approach resulted in the establishment of ‘praying towns’, where new native settlements under English control adopted wholesale English customs and worship. They were a partly successful manifestation of the English desire for cultural, social, and economic dominance over the indigenous population. However, as the colonists’ focus shifted to agriculture and the provision of an overseas trade in staple goods the demand for the land of the indigenous people became paramount, and cooperation and toleration dissolved. Even this early limited and self-interested measure of cooperation was absent in the sugar colonies of the West Indies in the seventeenth century, where there was no attempt at all to evangelize the growing slave population because of the opposition of the planter elite.18 Under the Cromwellian government in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, secular concerns of expanding trade and colonial production came to dominate religious motives as a justiWcation for colonization.19 So by the early eighteenth century the intermittent seventeenth-century concern for the spiritual welfare of the indigenous inhabitants of English colonial territory had turned into an exclusion—even annihilation—of them from that territory. The impetus for this was the new image of empire as a source of commercial or agricultural wealth, which had come to replace the idea of conquest justiWed by conversion of the heathen.20 Kathleen Wilson has observed that there is still much for historians to do to discover the concrete ingredients of British imperialism in the eighteenth century. ‘[The] speciWcity of eighteenth-century imperial sensibilities still needs to be recovered: the various ways in which the empire was imagined, debated and discussed, and above all the contending meanings which empire held for the various groups involved in or engaged by the mesmerizing spectacle of 17 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, ‘New England in the Seventeenth Century’, in Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, 171. 18 Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘The ‘‘Hub of Empire’’: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century’, in Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, 233. 19 Canny, ‘Origins of Empire’, 21. 20 Pagden, ‘Struggle for Legitimacy’, 34–7.

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Introduction

Britain’s global expansion.’21 She has shown how imperialism was connected to the nationalism of the eighteenth-century English. I will endeavour to demonstrate that it was also associated with their religion, at least in the outlook of their Anglican leaders as they preached up the empire from the eighteenth century. Thus, I will argue, an oYcial and conscious Anglican concern for empire, and for missions by the Church of England, dates continuously from the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in 1701. The annual sermons, and the published extracts of its missionaries’ reports at its annual general meetings (which were continuous from 1701 until the 1840s) allow investigation into the formation, maintenance, and adaptation of an Anglican discourse of the British Empire from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. The public views analysed in this work were not necessarily those espoused by the whole Anglican Church, either in its colonial or its metropolitan form. Bernard Porter has recently questioned whether there was any large scale imperial concern domestically in Britain,22 and it is true that interest in the empire and its religious imperatives and implications was probably conWned to a minority of Anglicans, especially in the eighteenth century, the majority being preoccupied with matters at home. However, when measured by the membership of the SPG alone, Anglican imperial-mindedness, in terms of missions, represented a signiWcant minority that grew in size throughout this period. The Annual Sermon and Report were circulated only to members of the SPG for most of this period, but these included all of its colonial clergy and missionaries, as well as its few hundred members.23 The following century the Church Missionary Society (CMS), under its secretary Josiah Pratt, was more alert to the potential of publicity in generating support, and accordingly he founded the Missionary Register in 1813 to be just such a vehicle for its membership and for the wider Evangelical Dissenting audience beyond that. It must also be 21 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24. 22 Bernard Porter, The Absent-minded Imperialists: What the British Really Thought about Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 1. 23 H.P. Thompson, Into All Lands: The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1950 (London: SPCK, 1951), 109.


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remembered that the Church of England was a multi-faceted organization, so it was unlikely that any Anglican, no matter how important, could express the mind of the entire church at any one time or over any one matter. Therefore, to reXect this diversity, I will focus initially, in the eighteenth century, on Anglicans connected to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, who were those in that church who did have an explicit concern for empire and Anglican missions within it. However, as this concern for empire, and for mission in the empire, widened among Anglicans in the late eighteenth century, other Anglican voices will be heard from that period onwards, including Evangelical ones. The primary sources used for the investigation of these Evangelical and non-Evangelical Anglican public views of the British Empire are at the heart of the institutional engagement with the English–British Empire (the term is used to encompass the empire both before and after the union of parliaments in 1707, and to suggest the necessarily English bias of Anglicans), via the principal Anglican mission societies of this period, the SPG and the Evangelical CMS. It is important, at this juncture, to explain what this book is not about. It is neither a history of missions, or of the Anglican missionary societies whose publications are used here; nor is it a history of the colonial development of the Church of England in North America, Bengal, Australia, or New Zealand. It is also not a history of the colonial encounter between English or British colonizers and indigenous colonized peoples in the various colonies under scrutiny here, except as these occurrences found their way into the sources used here to construct the public discourse of the Church of England regarding the English, and then British, Empire. This work is, rather, a history of the public views of both metropolitan leaders of the Church of England in England, and of Anglicans in these British colonies, regarding the church and the empire, and about the colonizing and colonized populations to be found there. These views were presented in the public sources examined here, and therefore derive from both the centre and the peripheries of empire—that is, from England and the various colonial contexts over this period. All the Anglicans selected for investigation in this work are those whose views were suYciently signiWcant to warrant publication, and therefore, through publication, form part of a public discourse by

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Introduction

Anglicans on the British Empire during the eighteenth century and the Wrst half of the nineteenth. By and large, these men were mostly those in positions of leadership within the metropolitan Church of England or its emerging colonial oVshoots, or they were Anglican missionaries in the various colonies under investigation here, namely North America, Bengal, Australia, and New Zealand. These four colonial contexts have been selected in this examination because North America was the earliest sphere of missionary Anglicanism; India witnessed a revival of the church–state partnership in the period following the loss of the thirteen colonies in North America; and Australia and New Zealand were the Wrst British colonies to implement a new paradigm of imperial Anglicanism that had developed in England during the 1840s. While other Anglicans may, and did, disagree with what the sources used here had to say, no one disputed the right of these Anglicans to speak publicly and authoritatively in their oYcial capacity as missionaries or as Anglican ecclesiastical leaders. So it was these missionary groups that sustained a conscious Anglican understanding of empire for a century and a half following the foundation of the SPG in 1701. Consequently, rather than the encounter between colonized and colonizers in the imperial world, this project seeks to discern what were the components of a public Anglican discourse of the British Empire—a discourse developed by Anglicans at the centre and at the peripheries of empire. This Anglican imperial understanding fashioned and perpetuated for Anglicans, in England and abroad, a viewpoint that proved remarkably consistent and enduring over a century and a half. Finally, the book is also concerned with the engagement of Anglicans institutionally, as a church, with the empire, and therefore focuses attention on the changing nature of the Church of England’s partnership with the state, and also on ecclesiology—that is, its own self-understanding as a community of faith. The Anglicans investigated here did not stand alone, but were self-consciously and institutionally part of an older collective institution, the Church of England. They upheld an identity that was consciously ecclesiastical, and saw themselves, ecclesiologically, as part of an on-going community of faith and belief that had a history and tradition that, although their particular theological dispositions interpreted


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it diversely, was something they received and consciously applied to their present context. So these Anglicans were, in this period, conWdent of their church’s traditional beliefs and culture and, consequently, desired to export it to the British colonies for reasons to be explored here. In other words, it is impossible to investigate ‘Anglicanism’ and empire without also paying attention to the institutional Church of England, because the church provided the indispensable context for the beliefs of the Anglicans here scrutinized.

1 Anglicans and Empire: Historical Interpretations The connection between English religion and the English (and later, British) Empire has largely been explained as the history of the export, from the 1790s onwards, of British Christianity to the British colonies following the so-called Protestant missionary movement, itself consequent in turn upon the Evangelical Revival of the mideighteenth century. However, this is to begin the connection between Anglicanism, missions, and empire a century too late. In 1701 a royal charter inaugurated a new society for the maintenance and spread of the Church of England in ‘foreign parts’, that is, in those new territories acquired by England as overseas colonies. From 1702 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) established a tradition of providing annual sermons preached on the anniversary of the society’s foundation. These were printed and distributed, along with the society’s annual reports, which increasingly contained extracts and pre´cis from reports of the society’s missionaries. In these two sources, one derived from the centre of empire, and the other from its colonies, the public theology of the SPG in England, as expressed by its oYcial preachers and missionaries between 1701 and 1844, was the most sustained eVort by the Church of England in that period to wrestle with the religious implications of the new overseas empire acquired by the British from the early eighteenth century. These sermons and reports gave rise to the Wrst oYcial Anglican construction of English–British imperialism. It was also an Anglican discourse genuinely concerned— from the very Wrst decade of the Society’s existence—with evangelism

Historical Interpretations

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and conversion of both indigenous peoples and white colonists. Consequently, this chapter will argue that the eighteenth century witnessed the commencement of a genuine Anglican missionary consciousness, which can be understood as part of a pan-European eighteenth-century Protestant revival of piety. In contrast to the attention paid to Evangelical missions,1 the mission of the SPG has not received much scrutiny from historians. Apart from a recent history of the SPG, which is rather patchy in its critical assessment,2 modern historical assessment of the society has mostly been in passing, within works on wider themes. An exception is an essay by Boyd Schlenther in which he examines the society’s role in a reinvigorated Anglicanism in colonial North America. According to Schlenther, the society saw itself as a ‘handmaid to Empire’, combating the inXuence of Roman Catholic France and Spain in imperial territories.3 This judgement that the SPG was a largely uncritical supporter of British imperialism from the eighteenth century onwards is the prevailing historical consensus among those historians who pay the society any attention at all. Jonathan Clark, for example, refers to it as a ‘bastion of British imperialism’ during the eighteenth century, whose support for an Anglican hegemony in North America exacerbated Dissenters’ fears in those colonies of an Anglican establishment.4 1 The literature is enormous and growing annually with the revitalization of interest among church historians, and historians more generally, in the history of Christian missions as sources for studies in the wide range of subjects concerned with colonial interaction. Mostly these works focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rather than the eighteenth, due to the prevailing historiographical connection made between Evangelicalism and the origins of British Protestant missions. In addition to works on Evangelical British missions cited throughout this chapter, some of the most recent monographs include C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the SelfGoverning Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Kevin Ward and Brian Stanley (eds.), The Church Mission Society and World Christianity 1799–1999 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000); papers from the North Atlantic Missionary Project; Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792–1992 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992); A.F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996). 2 Daniel O’Connor and others (eds.), Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000 (London: Continuum, 2000). 3 Ibid., 131. 4 J.C.D. Clark, Language of Liberty 1660 –1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173.

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Anglicans and Empire

This judgement echoes the hostile view of the American historian Carl Bridenbaugh. He saw the society’s active agitation for an American episcopate as a major cause of the American War of Independence. It provoked the reaction of Dissent, domestically and in the colonies, against what was viewed as an Anglican desire for colonial supremacy.5 Outside the chronological scope of this work, James Greenlee and Charles Johnson comment that an imperial theology persisted in the SPG longer than in most nineteenth-century British missionary societies.6 However, aside from this view of the society as pro-imperialist, it has received little detailed examination. The SPG was founded to be a missionary society, and there are grounds for taking its missionary ethos in the eighteenth century— and therefore its inXuence in propagating an understanding of the British colonial world that provided the context for its missionary endeavours—more seriously than has hitherto been the case among historians. In a recent work on the origins of the eighteenth-century Protestant missionary movement, Andrew Walls has drawn attention to its European origins. Walls points out that this is in contrast to the usual British historiography, which regards William Carey’s book, Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792) as initiating British Protestant missions, which in turn led to the development of missions on the Continent and overseas. In contrast, Walls pushes the origins of Protestant missions back to the Wrst half of the eighteenth century in the German Pietist and Moravian initiatives of Halle and Herrnhut, associated with Auguste Francke and Count Zinzendorf. These continental Protestant movements led directly to the Danish mission at Tranquebar in 1706 and to missions in Labrador and in Greenland in 1722. The much later work of William Carey in 1792, according to Walls, therefore marks the beginning not of Protestant missions but rather of British participation in what was by then an already ‘well-established continental tradition’.7 5 Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). 6 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnson, Good Citizens: British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999), 149. 7 Andrew Walls, ‘The Eighteenth-century Protestant Missionary Awakening in its European Context’, in Brian Stanley (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 34.


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Walls is undoubtedly correct in setting the origins of Protestant missions within early eighteenth-century European Pietistic revivalism. However, he unfortunately maintains a late eighteenth-century dating for the British participation in that Protestant missionary awakening, by retaining an identiWcation of British missions with Evangelicalism that is all too common in the literature.8 Consequently, for Walls it was the Evangelical Revival that provided British Protestant missions for the Wrst time with committed personnel and the voluntary societies to direct them. According to Walls’s interpretation, the British dimension of the European missionary movement still begins in the late eighteenth century as a consequence of the outworking of the Evangelical Revival because he retains William Carey as its initiator.9 But British overseas missions predated Carey and the Evangelical Revival, with the formation of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1698 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701.10 Walls’s revision of the customary dating for the origins of Protestant missionary consciousness and activity would be even more convincing if he had pointed to these missions, rather than the Evangelical societies of the 1790s, as marking the beginning of British participation in a European-wide Protestant missionary consciousness. The failure of historians to recognize that the origins of British Protestant missions lay not with the Evangelical missions at the end of the eighteenth century but with these two earlier Church of England societies can be attributed to two reasons. There is either the prevalent equation of British missions and Evangelicalism, or a dismissal of a missionary consciousness among the eighteenth-century churchmen

8 For example, Brian Stanley in The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990), 55–6, is content to accept the customary dating of the missionary awakening in Britain as originating with the Evangelicals and William Carey in the 1790s. The premier historian of British Evangelicalism, David Bebbington, also conWnes British overseas missions to the fruit of the Evangelical Revival in his Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 12, 40–2. 9 Walls, ‘The Eighteenth-century Protestant Missionary Awakening’, 24, 34. 10 It appears that the original name of the SPCK in 1698 was ‘the Honourable Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge’. W.O.B. Allen and Edmund McClure, Two Hundred Years: The History of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1698–1898 (London: SPCK, 1898), 27.

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who comprised the membership of these societies. For example, the same volume in which Walls’s essay is found is, according to its editor, concerned only with Protestant missions, yet there is no mention of these non-Evangelical mission societies despite its inclusive title, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. In fact, as the editor later admits, the essays are solely focused on the missions of Evangelical Protestantism, though these are very late comers into Enlightenment culture compared with the two older Anglican societies.11 There is, among some recent historians, either a disparagement, or even a denial, of a missionary consciousness among the Anglican churchmen who preceded the Evangelicals; or a tendency to reduce the work of these two Anglican societies to that of the mere maintenance of established religion among colonists without any concern for the evangelization of indigenous peoples. Brian Stanley, for example, contrasts what he calls the ‘formal’ Christianity of eighteenth-century Anglicanism, with its emphasis on Christianity as part of national culture, with the religion of the later Evangelicals who emphasized individual faith, or what he questionably calls ‘real Christianity’, and which he sees as alone prompting missions and conversions.12 The same distinctions are made more recently by Catherine Hall in her history of the Baptist envisaging of empire, in which she describes the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century as witnessing ‘the re-emergence of vital, serious or real Christianity, as compared with the nominal focus which had come to dominate Christianity’.13 A more explicit denial of the existence of any motivation for mission among the membership of the SPG and the SPCK is found in an essay by Penny Carson. Examining the evangelistic motivations behind the British missions to India she maintains that the Anglican bishops ‘were not distinguished by a passion for the dissemination of Christianity among the indigenous population of the colonial territories’. Further, she asserts that ‘most High Churchmen before

11 Brian Stanley, ‘Christian Missions and the Enlightenment: A Reevaluation’ in his Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 2, 4. 12 Ibid., 11, 14. 13 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity Press, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 86.


15

the Oxford Movement held aloof from missions’.14 John Walsh and Stephen Taylor also believe that the SPG showed very little interest in converting the native populations of North America in the British colonies there, devoting its resources instead to the support of the colonial settlers.15 Elizabeth Elbourne may be right in claiming that it took a long time for Anglicanism to develop a popular missionary culture, but that did not mean that an awareness of mission imperatives was entirely absent among elite Anglican circles in the eighteenth century.16 What Carson terms a ‘missionary impulse’ did not originate with the formation of the Evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799, as she suggests. Instead, an authentic missionary culture towards the English–British Empire—albeit a minority one—with identiWable elements and practical outcomes, was already present in Anglicanism with the foundation of the SPCK and SPG nearly a century before William Carey or the inauguration of the CMS in 1799. In fact a genuine concern for mission, understood as evangelism of non-Christian or nominally Christian populations in the empire, among eighteenth-century High Churchmen has already been pointed to by a number of historians. In his insightful biography of the late eighteenth-century High Churchman Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733– 1806), F.C. Mather pointed out that early in his career Horsley became an active member of the SPG.17 As a member of the society’s Barbados committee he did oppose the Evangelical push for missionaries among the population of India, believing that the British had no divine mandate to overturn the religion of another country.18 But this did not prevent him supporting evangelism in crown colonies (such as among 14 Penny Carson, ‘The British Raj and the Awakening of the Evangelical Conscience: The Ambiguities of Religious Establishment and Toleration, 1698–1833’ in Stanley, Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, 48, 49. 15 John Walsh and Stephen Taylor, ‘The Church and Anglicanism in the ‘‘Long’’ Eighteenth Century’ in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15. 16 Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Foundation of the Church Missionary Society: the Anglican Missionary Impulse’ in ibid., 249. 17 F.C. Mather, High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1773–1806) and the Caroline Tradition in the Later Georgian Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 14, 237. 18 Ibid., 244.

16


the slaves of the West Indies) as opposed to India which was then still largely governed by Indian rulers. Nor was support for the missionary work of the SPG limited to bishops. Probably its leading protagonist at the end of the eighteenth century was the wealthy High Church banker, William Stevens. W.M. Jacob, in an examination of the lay piety of the eighteenth century, has demonstrated how the work of the SPG attracted wealthy laity who gave it substantial donations, seeing in its evangelistic work a dimension of the century’s emphasis on charity. Jacobs has also identiWed the SPG and the SPCK as precursors of the voluntary societies of later Evangelicalism.19 However, much of this High Church concern for evangelism is found in the late eighteenth century, and therefore could be said to derive not from its own theological tradition but from the inXuence of the contemporaneous Evangelical Revival. But, as will become evident in this work, the evangelistic concerns of these late eighteenth-century High Churchmen were expressed by earlier advocates of the SPG throughout that century. Proclaimed by a variety of its oYcial preachers, and practised intermittently in the North American colonies, this eighteenth-century missionary concern indicates that some in the society had always sought the evangelization of non-Christians and slaves, in addition to the more prominent care for the faith of British colonists. Indeed, an imperial evangelism was embedded in the purposes of the society from the start. Craig Rose has demonstrated that for their founder, the Revd Thomas Bray, both the SPG and the SPCK were to be exemplars of an ‘evangelical philanthropy that was designed to achieve domestic and foreign conversions through an exercise of benevolent charity’.20 Neither was the SPG’s concern for evangelism of British overseas territories entirely aspirational. The society’s colonial clergy did evangelize among non-Christian populations in the British territories, which were the only ones that legally fell to the SPG within the terms of its royal charter. Bray was conscious of the need for his society to convert the Native Americans, and this was undertaken to a larger extent than is often recognized. According to its most recent 19 W.M. Jacob, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 50, 158, 184. 20 Craig Rose, ‘The Origins and Ideals of the SPCK, 1699–1716’ in Haydon and Taylor, The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833, 179–80.


17

historian, by the end of the eighteenth century the society’s missionaries were involved with forty-six Native American tribes. They were most successful with the Mohawks, who became predominantly Anglican. But there were other endeavours, albeit largely unsuccessful and fitful, such as among the Yamasee in South Carolina from 1703; and schools for indigenous children in Virginia, New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. The society also prompted the translation of the Scriptures and the Book of Common Prayer, for example into Mohawk and Micmac.21 There were sporadic attempts to evangelize among the slave populations of the North American and the West Indian colonies, though the society was generally too much in sympathy with the outlook of the slave-owning planters for this to be anything other than the scattered initiatives of some exceptional clergy. It was these few clergy who also ministered to, converted, and baptized among slaves in their parishes. One of the most successful of these parish missions was the ‘Catechizing School’ founded in New York in 1704, which remained in existence until the War of Independence, baptizing some hundreds of slaves. Other schools for slave education were also founded, including one in Charlestown in deWance of the colonial law forbidding teaching slaves to write. Society clergy in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick also ministered to hundreds of ex-slaves who had escaped from the south.22 So there was a genuine evangelizing missionary culture of engagement with the English–British Empire within the SPG, which was publicly proclaimed in England, though it was a minority one in the colonies themselves. This work attempts to examine that public discourse, and to delineate the characteristics of that non-Evangelical missionary and imperial culture of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Anglicanism formed in England and in the colonial contexts. One major source for this exploration is the anniversary sermons that annually celebrated the society’s foundation. These sermons were a major occasion in the public life of the Church of England. They were preached before members of the society every year on 15 February to commence the annual meeting of the SPG, usually in the parish church of St Mary-le-Bow in London. These congregations included many 21 O’Connor, Three Centuries of Mission, 32–4.

22 Ibid., 34–7.

18


leading clerics of the Church of England and some inXuential laymen. These sermons were then published along with the annual reports of the Society, which contained portions or summaries of reports from its missionaries in the colonies. These publications were distributed throughout England and in the colonies, and thereby constituted the promulgation of the oldest continuous Anglican discussion of the empire among Anglicans at home and abroad. Notwithstanding the SPG’s forging of this connection between empire and Anglicanism, a number of historians of the early English and then British Empire have dismissed religion as a major causative factor in the emergence of imperialism. Kenneth Andrews, in his history of the early empire, came to the conclusion that overseas territorial acquisition by the English took so long to occur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because colonization and missions were very much secondary to trade and piracy, which brought quicker returns for less eVort. The contribution of religion in this period was not to missions or to colonization but in the propagation of an anti-Spanish rhetoric that stimulated overseas adventuring by the English in terms of plunder.23 Jack Greene has questioned the alliance between religion and commerce in the construction of British identity made by Linda Colley. He believes that the predominant opinion among Britons at home and in the colonies was that liberty was basic and this, rather than Protestantism, boosted commerce, and not the other way around, as Colley maintains. Britons pointed to their history of intellectual and political independence as a fundamental cause of their break from Rome and their development of a commercial empire.24 This reduction of a religious dimension to English–British imperial expansion has been underlined recently in the work of David Armitage, who maintains that there is nothing particularly Protestant in the origins of British imperial ideology. 23 Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 33. 24 Jack P. Greene, ‘Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 215–30. Colley’s thesis is laid out in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).


19

A Protestant ideology for the origins of the empire did eventuate, but this, according to Armitage, was only with the work of Bishop White Kennett in his Bibliothecae Americanae Primordie of 1713.25 It is Kennett who begins the construction of an empire that is commonly understood to be Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free.26 But Kennett wrote this work—a printed catalogue of some 300 books he and his friends had assembled on American topics—to form the basis of an American library for the SPG.27 It was the context of the society, and Kennett’s very early and active membership of it, that provided the already existing environment for the development of his and other Anglicans’ concerns for the North American empire. More particularly with regard to the Church of England, Armitage believes it ‘never became a uniWed, imperial Church, least of all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, because it was eVectively just one of a number of ecclesiastical bodies in the English–British state.28 Armitage’s view of the Church of England rather downplays its inXuential established status in the most populous and powerful national component of the British state. While a key role for religion in the early English Empire has been dismissed, other historians do see a genuine connection between religion and English society and imperialism in the eighteenth century. Richard Drayton, for example, points to Christian providentialism as the ‘ideological taproot of British imperialism’, which moulded both the search for knowledge and commercial expansion. The Enlightenment examination of the natural world was a worship of that world’s creator. The Church of England was intimately involved in this scientiWc and geographical quest because it believed that it was a counterbalance to Protestant ‘enthusiasm’ and Catholic superstition alike.29 While Drayton puts Anglicanism centre-stage in the British Enlightenment discovery of the overseas world, Jonathan Clark and Linda Colley have brought religion to the forefront in the domestic history of eighteenth-century Britain. 25 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 99. 26 Ibid., 173. 27 G. V. Bennett, White Kennett, 1660–1723 (London: SPCK, 1957), 190–2. 28 Armitage, Ideological Origins, 10. 29 Richard Drayton, ‘Knowledge and Empire’, in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, 233–4.

20


Jonathan Clark, in the second edition of his seminal English Society, has postulated that during the long eighteenth century England was a dynamic and successful ancien regime founded on monarchy, aristocratic and hierarchical social order, and religion, predominantly in the form of the established Church of England. Anglicanism retained its prominence in this society through a hegemonic dominance, rather than any eVective monopoly of religious control.30 With regard to the empire, a domestically inXuential Anglicanism, therefore, formed one of the ties that bound together the transatlantic empire. However, when the Church of England attempted to export its English hegemony to the North American colonies it became a major factor in precipitating the American War of Independence. The Anglican expansionist push of the eighteenth century, chieXy by the SPG but also by some colonial Anglicans, enabled powerful Dissenting congregations in the American colonies to portray Anglicanism as militant, expansionist, intolerant, and persecuting.31 For Clark, religion consequently plays a major part in the history of the eighteenth-century British Empire. Linda Colley is the other scholar to place religion, or more speciWcally Protestantism, and imperialism in a central position in eighteenth-century Britain. For Colley, Protestantism was one of the major factors contributing to an emerging British identity in the eighteenth century, along with war, patriotism, and a commercial empire. A common Protestantism united the formerly disparate and independent parts of Britain following the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, Wnding expression in recurrent wars against Catholic France for imperial mastery, prompting the popular growth of a Protestant patriotism that maintained that Britain was particularly blessed by God. Colley has been criticized, not least by Clark, for overlooking the divisions within British Protestantism, but, as Tony Claydon and Ian McBride have recently concluded in their work on Protestantism and national identity, while Clark and Colley may have overdrawn the power of the Church of England or of a uniWed British Protestantism, it now seems undeniable that 30 J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 3. 31 J.C.D. Clark, Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).


21

there was a close link between religion and national identity.32 This national identity had an imperial dimension in the eighteenth century due both to wars with Catholic France for overseas territories and to the transatlantic connection of Britain with her North American colonies. In the latter, Anglicanism played a role through the SPG missions. But if religion was an important ingredient in the development and understanding of national identity, was it also a case that Christian missions were involved in this connection also? To what extent were missions responsible not just for the export of British religion but, in the case of Anglican missions, for an English identity as well? There is a prima facie case that Anglican missions did have the eVect not just of making Christians in colonies but of supporting a sense of Englishness or Britishness there as well. The historian of colonial Anglicanism estimates that loyalists were a minority of Anglican clergy in Revolutionary America.33 By that time a number of the clergy were native-born or non-English, and not directly missionaries of the SPG;34 most American lay members of the Church of England, Woolverton contends, were also not loyalists.35 But a more recent historical assessment estimates that among the Anglican clergy working in North America a majority of those employed by the SPG became loyalist exiles,36 an assessment that does not include the likelihood that there were additional SPG clergy with loyalist sympathies who nevertheless stayed in America. So society clergy were more likely to have a stronger sense of Englishness than their non-society Anglican counterparts. It is also interesting that the indigenous population among which the society had the greatest conversions, the Mohawks, was also the native group that fought for the British in the Revolutionary War and went into exile in British North America (later Canada) with their SPG clergy 32 Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, ‘The Trials of the Chosen Peoples: Recent Interpretations of Protestantism and National Identity in Britain and Ireland’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 26. 33 Woolverton estimates that of 286 colonial clergy, 150 were patriots. John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 35. 34 Ibid., 25. 35 Ibid., 231, 232–3. 36 O’Connor comments that of the seventy-three clergy on the society’s books, over forty left America for England or Canada. O’Connor, Three Centuries of Mission, 43.

22


afterwards.37 Consequently, there does seem to be a connection between the SPG clergy and a sense of English or British identity that translated into loyalism in revolutionary North America. That same connection between Britishness and Anglican missions does seem to have been present later, in colonial New Zealand, though here also the evidence is uncertain, lacking more research. During the land wars from the 1840s to the 1860s between Maori and Europeans, missionized Maori could be found on both sides of the conXict, and Christianity was capable of transmuting into Maori land movements that were hostile to European land hunger.38 Yet prominent among those tribes that fought on the side of the British were those who were evangelized by British missionary societies, principally the Church Missionary Society and the Methodists.39 (Though they may also have been taking the opportunity to settle old scores with traditional enemies.) In addition, during these wars and subsequently, a number of indigenous prophetic movements Xourished among the Maori, whose leaders identiWed a need for the preservation of a Maori spiritual identity over against the missionaries’ Christianity, which they believed was too allied to European culture and colonial dominance.40 Therefore, again there is some evidence that points to Anglican missions promulgating a sense of British identity among their evangelized subjects. However, this did not always result in a pro-British outcome, for it could also lead to criticism of British colonial policy, as when, in 1860, Bishop Selwyn and the missionaries criticized the government’s land grab in the Waitara region as being contrary to British law.41 The recent upsurge of historical interest in the role of religion in British history, and its connection with empire, is in contrast to the prevailing historiography since the Second World War. Until the 1960s the connection between Christianity and empire was mostly

37 O’Connor, Three Centuries of Mission, 238–47. 38 M.P.K. Sorrenson, ‘Maori and Pakeha’, in GeoVrey W. Rice (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand, 2nd edn. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992), 157. 39 These were the Arawa, Ngati Porou, Nagati Kahunga, and Wanganui. Ibid., 158. 40 Bronwyn Elsmore, Mana from Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand, 2nd edn. (Auckland: Reed Books, 1999), xiii, 12–13, 144–6. 41 Sorrenson, ‘Maori and Pakeha’, 157.


23

the concern of historians of mission, who were largely supportive of this historical movement of western Christianity. For example, the Roman Catholic scholar R.C. Delavignette, in his study Christianity and Colonialism (1964) represented an older mindset, maintaining that Christianity had a Wxed nature that did not alter over time or from contact with indigenous cultures. This meant that the Christianity in the colonies of the European empires was simply understood as a reproduction of that of the metropolis. Nor did he believe that Christianity was an aspect of colonialism, because he reduced colonialism to political control, disallowing any concept of an imperialism of culture. But he did admit that the emotional attachment of European missionaries to their countries of origin could result in a patriotism that favoured the extension of imperial control by their home nation.42 But other, secular, historians in the 1960s, usually in former colonies, began to assess the historical inXuence of the missionary factor in colonialism with negative conclusions, arguing for a missionary agency in racism and imperialism, and for missions as suppressors of indigenous cultures and of local forms of Christianity. Eminent in this respect was the work of E.A. Ayandele in his pioneering work on the history of Nigerian missions in the nineteenth century. Ayandele viewed missions as an aspect and an agent of British imperialism.43 This became the normative historical view of Christianity and imperialism for the next decades. An indication that this more colonially contextualized, critical interpretation was beginning to inXuence missionary historiography, Norman Etherington maintains, came when Stephen Neill in his Colonialism and Christian Missions (1966) took seriously the antimissionary approach of Robert Rotberg’s Christian Missions and the Creation of Northern Rhodesia, 1880–1924 (1965).44 However, this judgement needs qualifying. While criticizing missions, Neill also wanted to defend the missionaries, claiming that they were often the only supporters that oppressed indigenous peoples had, even if 42 R.C. Delavignette, Christianity and Colonialism (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1964), 50–71. 43 E.A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914: A Political and Social Analysis (London: Longman, 1966), 331. 44 Norman Etherington, ‘Missions and Empire’ in Robin W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5: Historiography (Oxford, 1999), 307.

24


that support was not always expressed wisely or sympathetically.45 From his examination of colonialism and missions in a number of countries and regions, Neill proposed some conclusions regarding the relationship between the two forces. Western Christians who opposed colonialism were a small minority compared with those who propagated the view that the spread of western culture was an indispensable part of evangelism, or those who were at least prepared to accommodate themselves to the colonial power in some way. While they were often at work beyond the boundaries of the colonial power, missionaries most often believed they were better judges of the common good than the local people. Consequently, this often resulted in missionaries supporting colonial rule as a means of protection for indigenous peoples, or desiring the prolongation of colonial control, with the result that, in general, missionaries were enthusiastic supporters of their country’s colonial expansion. Some missionaries did oppose colonial rule for as long as possible, and there has been a continual history of a minority of missionaries acting as the severest critics of colonial rule and abuses. But persistent missionary devaluation of local cultural traditions was a more common attitude, resulting in suspicion towards movements of political nationalism by missionaries because these often seemed to threaten the freedom of converts, which appeared to be guaranteed only by the colonial power. Therefore there was a common tendency by missionaries to retain positions of power and control for too long in colonial churches.46 Most of the recent historical examinations into the connection between Christianity and British imperialism have been limited to the nineteenth century, and particularly the later decades of that century when the empire was at its height. A revision of the prevailing negative historiographical assessment of the links between missions and British imperialism has come from Brian Stanley. In 1990 Stanley published a small book seeking to revise the view of Christian missions as merely witting or unwitting agents of imperialism.47 Stanley limited 45 Stephen Neill, Colonialism and Christian Missions (London: Lutterworth Press, 1966), 68. 46 Ibid., 412–17. 47 Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, 52.


25

his examination of missions to Evangelicals on what I have argued is the questionable basis that High Church Anglican missions did not get underway until much later in the nineteenth century. He found that the primary motivation for mission was a crusade against idolatry to rescue the ‘perishing heathen’. It was also a response to the perceived providential ordering of history that had seen Britain bestowed with an empire—a providentialism which was coupled with commerce and civilization.48 Stanley accepted the scholarly consensus that missions imposed their own Western culture on their converts, a connection which was undergirded for Evangelicals by four assumptions. First, indigenous cultures were not religiously neutral but were under Satan’s rule. Second, nineteenth-century Britain was believed to oVer an outstanding model of a Christian culture and society. Third, Evangelicals had an implicit faith in human progress, from primitive societies to western culture. And fourth, civilizing the heathen actually worked. The ‘golden age’ of such missions was between 1880 and 1914, by which time missionaries were not free from the racism that was by then a deeply ingrained part of British society.49 Stanley also sought to rebut some of the criticisms of missions as cultural imperialists. It was not possible for them to oVer a ‘culture-free gospel’, and nor were indigenous cultures in a state of static perfection prior to the encounter with missionaries. ‘The appropriate basis for evaluating the missionary impact thus cannot be whether missionaries promoted cultural change or not, but whether the direction of that change was generally beneWcial or not.’50 This, however, begs the question as to what constitutes ‘beneWcial’ change. Stanley pointed out that the belief perspective of the Evangelical missionaries cannot be dismissed, and that from this perspective they maintained that no area of life, and no society, could be excluded from the sovereignty of Christ, whose rule necessitated civilization so that indigenous societies could be comprehensively regenerated in all their aspects. It was this concern for social transformation that often caused missionaries to become imperialists, in order that non-Christian peoples could be rescued from what the missionaries saw as some oppressive and destructive aspects of indigenous cultures, such as the practice of sati in India.51 48 Ibid., 61–78. 49 Ibid., 160–2. 50 Ibid., 171. 51 Ibid., 171–2. Sati was the self-immolation by widows on their husband’s funeral pyre.

26


Andrew Porter has also restated the connection between religion and imperialism in a 1993 article in which he drew attention to the ways in which this relationship changed over time during the nineteenthcentury British Empire. At the beginning of the century Protestant missions preferred to keep the state at a distance—especially Nonconformists, whose suspicion was fuelled by their domestic experience of the oppressive British state. This distancing between religion and empire was conWrmed by contemporary theology, which emphasized the availability of salvation to all and the responsibility of the converted, rather than the state, to spread the gospel. However, a much closer relationship developed during the nineteenth century, in which missions and their supporters were prepared to use the state to overcome temporary barriers to the gospel, such as hostile locals and white settler governments, or to facilitate the security of missionaries in their localities. Yet, despite this closer connection with state imperialism, missionary self-suYciency remained an intermittent theme. This was partly a consequence of the growing denominational neutrality of the British state, but also because of emerging pre-Millennialist views of the total depravity of human corruption, and increasing government restrictions on missions. Consequently, by the early twentieth century the distance between missions and the imperial government had re-emerged. Nevertheless, Porter aYrmed that British missions did demonstrate a support for empire that shaped ‘a nationalistic missionary imperialism’, which, in qualiWed and critical ways, contributed to a spiritual and moral inspiration for British imperial expansion.52 Most recently, historians of religion and empire have paid more attention to how Christianity has been enculturated in a colonial setting, and to conversion and the role of local agents in this process. According to Etherington, this has brought about a new consensus in mission history. ‘Phased in diVerent ways by diVerent authors, it was that the missionaries, who aimed to replace indigenous cultures with European ‘‘civilization’’ and who frequently allied themselves with colonial governments, nevertheless transmitted a religion which subjugated peoples turned to their own purposes: spiritual, economic,

52 Andrew Porter, ‘Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780 –1914’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, 20 (1993), 370–90.


27

and political.’53 This perspective has caused a shift of focus away from the missionaries and towards the local communities who received Christianity and adapted it to their own ends. The work of John and Jean ComaroV on South African history, with their emphasis on the ‘long conversation’ between European and African cultures, has been particularly inXuential in examining missionary Christianity as an interaction between two participant parties rather than between an active mission and a totally passive recipient indigenous group.54 In a ground-breaking work of historical anthropology on the Nonconformist missions to the Tswana peoples of southern Africa in the nineteenth century, the ComaroVs have pointed out ways in which the missionaries’ objective was not neutral, but formed part of the colonization of the world view of the Tswana by an alien culture. They have indicated the importance of culture, symbolism, and ideology in the missionary encounter rather than the traditional historical focus on ecclesiastical structure, doctrine, politics, and economics. The authors operate with the increasingly common view that the essence of colonization is the transforming of others according to the values and practices of the colonizing group so as to make them complaisant to the colonizing culture. The missionaries sought to establish a cultural and religious hegemony over those they evangelized—a hegemony that was a product of the nineteenthcentury British culture in which the missionaries were formed. The missionaries’ hegemony over Tswana consciousness took place on two levels. Most directly, it was aimed at conversion of the heathen by exposure to the sacred narrative of Christian Scripture. But it also occurred indirectly by civilizing the African according to the unquestioned tropes and perspectives of British culture.55 So the Nonconformist mission to the Tswana was ‘an ideological arm of empire’.56

53 Etherington, ‘Missions and Empire’, 309. 54 For example, Norman Etherington, Preachers, Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978). 55 Jean ComaroV and John ComaroV, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 199. 56 Ibid., 314.

28


But the ComaroVs also point to ways in which the Tswana inXuenced the Nonconformist missionaries in turn—hence their metaphor of the ‘long conversation’ of cultural and religious inXuence. Although the two parties were unequal in power, there was a genuine two-way impact over the duration of the mission. But, ultimately, the missionaries were cultural imperialists transforming the Tswana culture in their own image, propping up British hegemony in southern Africa with their role as cultural imperialists.57 In the second volume of their study the ComaroVs examine how European imperialism exported its own capitalist culture through the Nonconformist missions, which reinterpreted indigenous cultures and societies in their own European and bourgeois terms, thereby cementing the diVerences between the two that the missions had themselves largely created.58 The ComaroVs’ analysis has been trenchantly criticized by Andrew Porter in a signiWcant article in 1997, which questioned the concept of ‘cultural imperialism’ that has been so prominent in analyses of imperialism since the pioneering work of Edward Said.59 Porter questions this concept on three grounds. ‘Cultural imperialism’, he believes, is a term that lacks coherence as a deWnition. The supposed coherence or unity of an imperial or missionary culture is also debatable. Finally, viewing missions in their location as simply oppressive and static is too monochromatic. Porter regards ‘cultural imperialism’ as a value-laden term resting on an untested supposition that it was a cultural inXuence that was imposed, and to which local resistance was largely ineVectual. It assumes that cultures are ‘essentially and wholly coherent, organic structures’ and that cultural change is always a deprivation or degradation of a culture. Porter challenged the view of the ComaroVs that a world view is ‘a coherent and closed, uniform and universalistic order’.60 The way the term is used by its advocates supposes that colonized cultures are strong and uniWed prior to their contact with

57 ComaroV and ComaroV, Revelation and Revolution, vol.1, 310. 58 John ComaroV and Jean ComaroV. Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 17. 59 Andrew Porter, ‘ ‘‘Cultural Imperialism’’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise 1780–1914’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, 25 (1997), 367–91. 60 ComaroV and ComaroV, Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1, 17.


29

the West, yet paradoxically fragile enough to succumb to external Western contact.61 Porter, on the other hand, considers culture to be both more diverse internally and more dynamic in its ability to tolerate and adapt to change and external inXuences than do Said and the ComaroVs.62 The ability to assimilate and modify change was present in colonial and indigenous cultures both before, during, and (presumably) after Western and missionary colonial contacts. But such contacts were not made with a monolithic or monochromatic Western culture in either its imperial or its missionary manifestations. While the ComaroVs explicitly draw attention to the internal cultural diversity of pre-colonized societies, they do not appear to be aware of the similar internal diVerences and diversity in the colonizing British society. With regard to Christianity, Porter maintains that the cultural imperialists have not taken suYcient account of the diversity and diVerences in British Christianity. Consequently, missionary contact had very ambiguous consequences, and could even permit local control over the missionaries rather than the opposite.63 Porter does agree with the ComaroVs that the cultural contact between missions and local cultures was far from a one-way or onesided aVair in which all power and inXuence lay with the evangelizing missions. The resources oVered by the missions, such as education and the Christian religion itself, were often appropriated by local peoples for ends that were not within missionary control. In addition, missions could have a liberating eVect on local peoples and consequently be welcomed—for example, by low-caste peoples in India as a means of defending their cultural, economic, and political interests. The increasing use and diverse roles of women missionaries demonstrate how cultural contact with local peoples could also be subversive of the metropolitan culture and of the patriarchal Victorian religion of the missionaries. The ability of local peoples to use the missions for cultural resistance was, Porter maintains, particularly eVective, because missions had to adapt to local cultures in order to be successful in their primary object of conversion. Missionary success, consequently, depended on local cooperation, while missionary cultural inXexibility meant rejection.64 61 Porter, ‘Cultural Imperialism’, 373–4. 62 Ibid., 374. 63 Ibid., 377–81. 64 Ibid., 382–7.

30


The history of British Protestant missions in fact seems to present us with a paradox. In the sphere of missionary enterprise, indigenous choices and capacity for resistance shaped a process of cultural exchange which often bore little relation to broader imbalances of material power between colonizers and colonized. Highly eVective as missions were in promoting cultural change, they were amongst the weakest agents of ‘cultural imperialism’.65

Notwithstanding Porter’s criticism of the concept of cultural imperialism with respect to Christian missions and their relationship to European imperialism, most commentators have generally accepted, to some degree, the validity of the charge. Two of the latest authors on the connection between religion and British imperialism, James Greenlee and Charles Johnston, Wnd that missions were mostly a mirror of widespread British rhetoric and expansionism in the decades between 1870 and 1918. Generally, the British Empire was regarded by its missionaries as a providential agent for evangelism or simply a neutral guarantor of missionary opportunity in a ‘spiritual free trade’ in British territories. This was the missionary equivalent of Cobdenite middle-class Liberal orthodoxy, though colonial oYcials frequently found such missionaries meddlesome and uncontrollable in the Weld.66 A more explicit imperial Christianity developed in the 1890s, in a revival of Christian imperialism combined with appeals for support based on imperial agendas that tended to shade into a jingoistic Christian imperialism.67 So, for Greenlee and Johnston, British Protestant Christianity ‘was for the most part comfortable with imperialism’ by 1900, when it received a rude shock from the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion, which began to undermine existing hopes of religious cooperation with a moral empire. In his most recent book, Porter has argued for a more complex and nuanced relationship between Christian missions and empire rather than the ‘stereotypes so entrenched in Western historiography’ of missions as agents of imperialism, or as cultural imperializers destroying indigenous cultures. These interpretations overlook such things as the importance of local agency by indigenous peoples, who used missions and their methods for their own ends and empowerment. 65 Porter, ‘Cultural Imperialism’, 388. 66 Greenlee and Johnson, Good Citizens, 1–29.

67 Ibid., 41–54.


31

Porter has, accordingly, argued for a historical revision of the missionaries’ relationship with both colonial and imperial governments—a relationship that missions could not always avoid—on the basis that they generally subordinated that imperial connection to their own religious commitment. Whether they were for or against the British Empire, missions and missionaries were generally propagandists of Christianity before they were political or cultural supporters of the imperial enterprise.68 But the prevailing view of historians remains that British Christianity, in all its variations, was generally supportive of empire in principle while, at times, criticizing some colonial practices as immoral or unjust, particularly to indigenous peoples. This connection existed from the genesis of England’s Protestant identity in the sixteenth century and persisted until the twentieth, when more critical questions about empire began to be raised substantially for the Wrst time within British mission societies and churches. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the export of a saving and only true faith in Protestantism was accepted as at least oVering support for English territorial expansion. Trade and commerce became more important than religious values as reasons for imperial expansion in the eighteenth century, but during that century these became allied with the idea of Britain as a champion of Protestant liberty in its commercial wars against France. According to Christopher Bayly, with the loss of thirteen of its North American colonies British imperialism revived around a newly conWdent conservatism in which aristocratic and autocratic values were emphasized alongside the establishment of the Church of England.69 That church was understood to be especially valuable in reaYrming conservative social values at home and the inculcation of imperial loyalty in overseas colonies where it was to be promoted, with state support, to British settlers and non-Anglican Christians. Evangelization to indigenous peoples, however, was ruled out as dangerous to colonial stability. This revived, conservative imperialism began to disintegrate after 1830 with the growth of religious and political pluralism both domestically and colonially. The emergent 68 Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 69 C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780 –1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), 136–47.

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middle classes, allied with the Whigs, began to support free trade capitalism as a moral force, at odds with oYcial support for a monopolistic Anglicanism that was becoming politically impractical after the enfranchisement of Catholics and Nonconformists in the late 1820s. That retrenchment of government support for Anglicanism, allied with the increasing inXuence in British society of inter-denominational Evangelicalism, gave fresh impetus to all forms of British Protestantism to engage with imperialism in the form of expansive missions to the heathen peoples of the empire. Generally the result was that British Protestantism was imperialist throughout this period. That this included a strong dimension of cultural imperialism, which sought to remake in Western ways indigenous identities in colonized societies, has—as we have seen—been the subject of debate, though British Protestants at the time generally accepted as be part of their civilizing agenda in the mission Weld. However, it remains true that scholars proposing such cultural imperialism have failed to address the diversity within the supposed cultural uniformity of British Protestantism because they have largely conWned their investigations to Evangelical missions. Where they have paid attention to non-Evangelical missions, most scholars have also argued that Anglicanism, and particularly non-Evangelical Anglicanism in the form of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, was the most uncritically imperialist of all the varieties of British Christianity. For example, while he does not develop his remarks in detail, Jonathan Clark believes the SPG in the eighteenth century embraced the Wrst British Empire within ‘a single imperial vision’.70 It is the purpose of this work to identify what that vision was for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I will argue that it was the SPG that began, for Anglicans, a sustained and conscious construction of empire. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the principal Anglican body focused on the empire through its concern for missions, the SPG was able to unite Anglicans in England in contributing to this construction, because for the Wrst time in the history of the Church of England there was a corporate body focused on the empire. In doing so, Anglican clerical leaders of various theological and political hues, and their missionary clergy, developed a number of themes, some 70 Clark, Language of Liberty, 173.


33

of which have been identiWed by scholars with regard to Protestantism and empire. The SPG protagonists pushed these further in the service of a particularly Anglican understanding of what God and their country required of the established church in this imperial endeavour. A British Protestantism, as posited by Colley, may have been too diverse and internally oppositional to provide a common factor for British national identity. However, an Anglican construction of imperial identity was on oVer for some British Protestants, from 1701, through the publications of the SPG. This Anglican religious construction of an English–British imperial identity was a virtual SPG monopoly for most of the eighteenth century, but was gradually joined by other voices as Evangelical and colonial Anglicans, such as the CMS, began to contribute their own understandings of empire by the Wrst half of the nineteenth century. It is of course true that the published sources examined here can give access only to the public attitudes of the front rank of Anglican leadership during this period, and of colonially involved Anglican clergy, which may diVer from their private opinions. It also remains true that this material can reveal nothing, even about public Anglican attitudes, beyond those of the authors of these texts themselves. But it is precisely this public—and published—viewpoint of imperially engaged Anglicans that this research seeks to ascertain. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to regard these sources as providing more than an individual body of authorial opinion, for these published views were those of either the summit of the authorized Anglicanism of their day, or of clergy regarded as experts because of their colonial or missionary involvement. In these sources they were not mere private persons, but leading clerics or missionaries setting forth their views in major publications of missionary agencies connected to the Church of England. Therefore, the texts written by these preachers, colonial bishops, missionary bodies, and colonial clergy and missionaries have a good claim to be regarded as indicative of the outlook of contemporary oYcial Anglicanism. But of course, while these views are found in metropolitan publications, they were constructed under the inXuence of colonial sources as well. Catherine Hall, in her investigation of the construction of a Baptist view of empire in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, has correctly drawn attention to the interdependence of

34


colony and metropole. These two localities of meaning existed in one analytical frame of mutual construction and inXuence ‘even if in unequal relations of powers’, so that metropole and colony can only be understood in relationship to each other.71 This interpretative position of the interdependence of metropolitan and peripheries has become mainstream since Edward Said’s inXuential work, Culture and Imperialism, where he labelled this two-way traYc ‘contrapuntal’.72 Said criticized histories that sought to present the metropolis and imperial peripheries as acting separately rather than interdependently, as this construction promoted what he called ‘a murderous imperial contest between them’.73 That Europe and its colonies shaped each other in a multi-valent dialectic of mutual inXuence has become a norm in post-colonial studies.74 More recently, Jeremy Black has warned of the dangers inherent in constructing a history based on metropolitan print sources because in such sources the authors tended to put forth ideals rather than actual reality. Scholars basing their histories on such idealistic sources can in turn reify such ideals and ‘ignore the far less clear-cut conditions of actual life’.75 Some may consider this an inherent weakness of the present work, which relies on such sources. However, the sources used here incorporate colonial and missionary reports, and the obvious editing of such reports is part of how an oYcial Anglican presentation of the empire, and of the Church of England’s engagement with it, were constructed—which is the subject of this endeavour. While these views may be ideals at odds with the more nuanced and sordid 71 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 9–12. 72 See also the comment of Bernard Bailyn that imperial history needs to focus on the interaction of the various component parts of imperial systems in order to avoid a ‘narrow metrocentric approach’, because colonies themselves played an important part in the expansion of the British Empire along with the British centre. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 9. 73 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 43. 74 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997), 1. 75 Jeremy Black, ‘Confessional State or Elect Nation? Religion and Identity in Eighteenth-century England’, in Claydon and McBride, Protestantism and National Identity, 73.


35

realities in the colonies, such ideals were still powerful and inXuential promoters of imperial understanding within the Church of England and beyond. So this work attempts to understand what were the various public themes of mission and empire that were proclaimed in the predominant religious institution of the English, then British, Empire, the Church of England. In doing so it takes seriously the religious understanding, beliefs, and commitments of these metropolitan and colonial Anglicans examined here, Christian motivations too often overlooked or disparaged by historians as simply a cover for other, more worldly agendas. As Andrew Porter notes, it is surprising that historians—even historians of mission—frequently fail to accept that missionaries and their co-religionist supporters ‘took their theology and religion seriously and applied them to a considerable practical eVect’.76 Such an investigation is, as Black suggests, into ideals, but ideals that, nevertheless, were widely propagated and inXuential during this period. But these ideals, disseminated in Anglican public arenas, include—in addition to those already mentioned—the reports of colonial bishops and, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, an Evangelical Anglican audience reached through the house journal of the Church Missionary Society, the Missionary Register. That source, which went well beyond Anglicans to a wider Evangelical audience, was published from 1813 to 1855 and spread the views of metropolitan and colonial Evangelical Anglicans to a wide British missionary public throughout Britain and the colonies. There are, of course, problems with all these colonial sources. The Weld reports were written largely by clergy, which gave the colonial laity little public voice, though some lay representation is found intermittently. The reports were also written to the colonial clergy’s and bishop’s major metropolitan supporters and therefore tended naturally to accentuate the positive and eliminate, or at least reduce, the negative aspects of missionary success. Even more signiWcantly, in all these colonial sources the voice of the indigenous peoples, and of women, is almost totally silent, so that they had no direct input into the Anglican discourse of this period—making it, consequently, a predominantly clerical, male one, with some inXuence from particu76 Porter, Religion versus Empire?, 10–11.

36


larly inXuential laymen at home or in the colonies. This, however, was entirely reXective of the social centres of power not only in the Church of England during this period, but in Britain and the colonies it created. In his book on the autodidactic tradition of the British working classes, Jonathan Rose has pointed to the work of the sociologist Erving GoVman in his analysis of his subjects’ world views, or what GoVman terms the ‘frame’ or ‘the organization of experience’. Rose explained this ‘frame’ as ‘ground rules for processing information’ about the world as we experience it.77 So this book asks: what was the ‘frame’, or the set of fundamental interpretative themes, provided by these English metropolitan and colonial Anglicans for their Anglican audience to use in their appropriation of a view on the empire? How did these institutional Anglicans frame publicly—albeit ideally—the world of the British Empire with respect to the Church of England and its mission there? This investigation seeks to identify the components of an Anglican construction of a frame of empire for the period of the eighteenth century and the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, when new settler colonies were underway in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and Anglican institutional expansion began in India. But a Wnal question of methodology needs to be addressed here, particularly for the eighteenth century, for which the SPG is our only oYcial public source for a missionary and colonial Anglicanism. How characteristic of Anglicanism were the views expressed by these SPG preachers, colonial clergy, missionaries, and bishops? That they were certainly signiWcant in their own right as the public views of the accredited leaders of the Church of England at home or in the colonies during this period has already been argued. But do they have a wider importance, as promoting views shared by a wider group of Anglicans than just those in episcopal or clerical leadership? It is always diYcult to ascertain with any degree of certainty how far the views of any public speaker or reporter agree with those of his or her audience. However, that these speakers did share their outlook with

77 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 4, 6–7.


37

a reasonably wide body of Anglicans during this period does seem likely, given their context. As the invited and accredited annual preachers of the society, or the oYcial reports of its accredited missionaries and colonial bishops, the Anglicans examined here promulgated their views with at least the concurrence, or even the active agreement of its members. By 1705 SPG members included all the bishops, and numbers of clergy from every diocese in England and Wales. In 1714 a branch was established in the Church of Ireland, which included all its bishops, though just three laity.78 By the later years of the eighteenth century the society’s membership was just a few hundred members, though these still included all the bishops and higher clergy.79 Membership reached a nineteenth-century peak of 4,500.80 But SPG inXuence was wider within the Church of England than just its membership. Its strength always lay in the fact that its royal charter and its episcopal membership meant it was enmeshed in the organizational structure of the Church of England, which gave substance to its claim that it was the oYcial missionary arm of that church. Its mostly clerical membership, and its regular monthly meeting attended mainly by bishops and some lay dignitaries,81 plus its published annual reports and sermon, enabled the small amount of missionary interest that did exist in the eighteenth-century Church of England to be focused and organized. It also meant there was an organization for the dissemination of the views of this party, with numerous copies being sent to the society’s missionaries overseas for distribution there. In the early years of the nineteenth century the society also retained the involvement of important Evangelicals such as Josiah Pratt, sometime secretary of the Church Missionary Society who, in 1814, was trying to get the work of the SPG more widely known beyond its circle of mostly clerical members. Therefore, the views of the society’s preachers and reporters certainly represented, in addition to its membership, a wider body of Anglican sympathizers in England and its colonies—of various theological hues—until at least the early nineteenth century. 78 O’Connor, Three Centuries of Mission, 10. 79 H.P. Thompson, Into All Lands: The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1950 (London: SPCK, 1951), 104. 80 Ibid., 231. 81 Ibid., 104.

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This constituency was sectional in the sense that it formed a minority of Anglicans—namely, those who were interested in missions in the parts of the world that fell to their society by virtue of its charter— that is, the British colonial territories. However, in another sense, this membership was more likely to encompass a broad cross-section of the clergy of the Church of England because, for most the eighteenth century, the clergy were less divided than they were either at its beginning or in the nineteenth century. There were certainly Wssures within the eighteenth-century Church of England, especially during the acrimonious divisions of High and Low Church groupings in the Wrst two decades. But signiWcantly, the SPG was able to embrace both High and Low, Tory and Whig Churchmen, even during that ‘rage of party’. For example, when the backgrounds of the preachers before the society between 1701 and 1714 are examined, one of the most obvious aspects to emerge is their diversity. Not surprisingly in a period that was politically dominated by upholders of the Revolution settlement of the crown upon William and Mary, most of the preachers were Whigs. These included bishops Hough, Lloyd, Burnet, Trimnell, Fleetwood, and Kennett. But there were some Tories, among them William Beveridge, a High Tory with deWnite nonjuring sympathies; Sir William Dawes, a Hanoverian Tory; and Dean George Stanhope. In addition to these High Churchmen, most of the preachers in this initial period of the society’s history were Latitudinarians, particularly the Whigs Lloyd, Burnet, Hough, Williams, and Moore. Charles Trimnell was a Whig who maintained the aVection of his mostly Tory clergy because he was a non-partisan man and an assiduous pastor in his diocese.82 Therefore, from the early eighteenth century the society attracted bipartisan support from leaders of the Church of England.83 This continued into the early years of the nineteenth century, when Evangelically minded bishops such as Beilby Porteus, Henry Ryder, and Charles Sumner still felt able to accept invitations to preach the society’s annual sermon.

82 Charles J. Abbey, The English Church and its Bishops, 1700–1800, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1887), 155–6. 83 G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).


39

After the factionalism of the early eighteenth century clerical divisions were largely limited to small, theologically radical minorities. Peter Nockles and David Newsome have drawn attention to a broad ‘orthodox’ consensus that embraced most of the Church of England clergy in this century. The Church of England in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century was predominantly, but vaguely, High Church (though the label was eschewed for its pejorative party connotations), but some were more so than others, and a minority were more extremely Evangelical or Latitudinarian.84 It is within this broad High Churchmanship that most of the Church of England clergy were found; so also were the members of the SPG and the bishops and deans who preached to them. Therefore, the SPG preachers and their clerical audience broadly shared a common eighteenth-century Anglican viewpoint. It is true that by the late eighteenth century the emerging party of Evangelicals increasingly departed from this theological concord with their revived Calvinism, their emphasis on personal conversion and fervour, and their more systematic evangelistic activism, until the High Churchmen caught up with the latter characteristic in their missionary activity from about 1830. But there remained suYcient accord between the two groups of Anglicans until about 1830 for the SPG to invite Evangelical bishops to preach, and for Evangelicals to be members of the society. This broad theological compatibility within the ranks of the clergy was basically to endure until the rise of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s, which radicalized High Churchmanship and drove a wedge between new and old High Churchmen, and between them and the Evangelicals.85 Consequently, the SPG sermons and reports of the eighteenth century come mostly from a period of comparative agreement, broadly speaking, among Anglican clergy; though the

84 Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27–31; David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: the Wilberforces and Henry Manning (Leominster: Gracewing, 1993), 318. 85 Nockles, Oxford Movement, ch. 6; For the same phenomenon in the largely High Church Scottish Episcopal Church, see Rowan Strong, Alexander Forbes of Brechin: The First Tractarian Bishop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ch. 4; and Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 5.

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colonial and evangelistic concerns of the Anglicans quoted here put them in a minority among their colleagues for that century. In the nineteenth century the signiWcant, but rather clerical, Anglican support base of the SPG began to be widened organizationally to embrace the laity on a much broader scale. The society’s Wrst parochial association was formed in 1819, though growth was hampered by the society’s decision to artiWcially restrict its membership by setting expensive membership fees—a policy that lasted until 1850.86 Another growth-restricting factor was that the SPG suVered from the strengths and weaknesses of the increasing partisanship that emerged in its parent church towards the end of our period, and it gradually became a rather more consciously party-oriented, High Church organization than it had been during the eighteenth century, and even the Wrst decades of the nineteenth. This gave it a new support base, and an identity distinguishable from its more vigorous Evangelical counterpart, the Church Missionary Society. However, it did so at the expense of its former Anglican breadth, though it retained its oYcial character as an accredited society of the Church of England. By the end of the period, missionary-minded Anglican clergy and laity tended to devote themselves to either the SPG or the CMS according to their High or Low Church proclivities. But this had not been so for the eighteenth century, or the early nineteenth, when the SPG had fewer supporters that, nevertheless, represented a greater breadth of the Church of England. It is to embrace that more divided Anglican world of the mid-nineteenth century that the major Evangelical Anglican publication, The Missionary Register, the house journal of the CMS, has also been used as a nineteenth-century source in this research. However, for most of the period examined in this book the divide between Evangelical and High Church Anglicans in their engagement with empire had not yet grown into the chasm it was to become, so that both sources speak with a cohesiveness that may seem surprising to those who are more familiar with the High and Low Church war that raged in the later nineteenth century.

86 Thompson, Into All Lands, 109–10.

2 The Construction of an Anglican Imperialism: British North America in the Eighteenth Century At 8 o’clock on a wintry February morning in 1702 Dean Richard Willis mounted the pulpit of St Mary-le-Bow to preach a new sort of sermon before his invited London audience. His was the Wrst sermon on behalf of the new society formed to encourage long-term support for Anglican Christianity in England’s overseas colonies. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Foreign Parts (SPG) began that year a tradition of sermons preached on the anniversary of the day of its incorporation by royal charter in 1701. The setting, in one of Sir Christopher Wren’s new churches built after the Great Fire of London, epitomized in wood and stone the resurgent Anglicanism that had developed since the restoration of the Church of England in 1660. The society his congregation were in London to support would transmit that revitalized Anglicanism from the metropolis to the English colonies of North America. Wren’s church that day was alive with dignitaries of church and state seated before the preacher on an occasion that expressed the Church of England’s new mission to the English colonies overseas that that church had too long neglected. Under its royal charter the society was enjoined to care for the Anglican religious needs of English colonists and to make ‘other provision’ for spreading the gospel to these English territories.1 From its beginning, and on into the century, the SPG enjoyed support across the traditional divisions of Anglican clergy between Whig and Tory, 1 H.P. Thompson, Into All Lands: The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1950 (London: SPCK, 1951), 2.

42

The Construction of an Anglican Imperialism

High and Low Church. Later preachers continued to be drawn from the diversity of the Anglican leadership, though the predominance of Whigs among the bishops reXected the hold on power this party retained for most of the eighteenth century. However, Whigs included both High Churchmen such as Edmund Gibson of London and Low Churchmen such as Francis Hare of Chichester. There was a continued smattering of Tories, such as Thomas Sherlock when he was Dean of Chichester. Later in the century the society’s faithful were addressed by Bishop Martin Benson, a friend to early Evangelicalism, and Beilby Porteus who, although not a Calvinist, was in other respects an Evangelical. The principal focus of these clerical leaders was the promotion of the vision of the founder of the society, the Revd Thomas Bray, of an Anglican mission to English colonies, which in the eighteenth century largely meant North America and the West Indies. Enduring English settlement in North America had begun with the founding of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, although the later establishment of the Plymouth colony by English Protestant Separatists from Holland in 1620 has become more famous in the history of the United States. These latter colonists were Puritan English, dissenting from the Church of England, who believed God had revealed America at just the right time for them to escape a religiously corrupt Europe.2 During the seventeenth century the legal establishment of Anglicanism was instituted in some of the North American colonies.3 Anglicanism was established in this way in Virginia, Maryland, and North and South Carolina, and the eighteenth century witnessed a reinvigorated Anglicanism in these and other North American colonies through the agency of the SPG. The society was almost totally focused on the North American colonies during that century, and sent 309 clergy to them between 1701 and 1783. These clergymen founded 300 churches beyond the Anglican stronghold of Maryland.4 High-quality clergy willing or able to undertake the hazardous journey 2 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians & English: Facing OV in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 31. 3 Ian K. Steele, ‘The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance in the British Empire’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122, 123. 4 Thompson, Into All Lands, 102; Boyd Stanley Schlenther, ‘Religious Faith and Commercial Empire’, in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, 131.

British North America in the Eighteenth Century

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to America were always hard to Wnd, and the society’s work was largely funded by private subscriptions, along with intermittent donations, and oYcial collections initiated by a ‘Royal Letter’. Six of these oYcial fundraisers in the Wrst eighty years raised money from various towns and cities in England and brought the society £65,110.5 During this period the average annual income of the SPG was £580 from subscriptions and £1,905 from donations.6 This colonial mission was successful enough in targeting white non-Anglican colonists to induce the conversion of some prominent Congregationalist ministers, among whom was the head of Yale College in 1718.7 But the ongoing lack of colonial supervision of Anglicanism in the form of a bishop in North America severely hampered the direction of the Church of England there. So all episcopal decisions had to be taken by the Bishop of London, who was too far away to be eVective. But the inroads of the SPG into North American Dissenting territories did prompt the foundation of a number of colonial Protestant associations that began to counter-attack by invading Anglican territory in the Middle Colonies, and that saw oV an abortive attempt by the royal governor of New York and New Jersey to protect the Church of England. The increasing religious pluralism of the North American colonies was further exacerbated by the immigration of diverse religious groups from Britain and continental Europe, which largely kept Anglicanism in North America centred upon Virginia and Maryland.8 Notwithstanding a focus on white settlers, one of the most obvious ingredients of the Anglican perspective of the SPG, right from its inception, was to see the empire as the opening up of territories of missionary opportunity, an opportunity required to be taken up by the society as a consequence of gospel imperatives. In 1704 John Hough, the Bishop of Exeter, who was surprisingly praised by the anti-clerical Alexander Pope and Horace Walpole,9 insisted that the society’s mission was a matter of obedience to the gospel. Commenting 5 Thompson, Into All Lands, 36–7. 6 Ibid., 102. 7 Schlenther, ‘Religious Faith’, 132. 8 Ibid., 135. 9 Charles J. Abbey, The English Church and its Bishops, 1700–1800 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1887), vol. 1, 130.

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on the injunction at the end of Matthew’s Gospel to make disciples of all nations,10 Hough urged that the gospel as the means of salvation should be proclaimed ‘to every Body without Distinction or Exception’, explaining that ‘no body can be said to assent to, or reject a proposition of which he never heard’.11 The next year Bishop John Williams of Chichester, a controversial foe to Deists and Catholics, also constructed an argument for the support of the society’s missions around the major theme of salvation. The gospel was required to be preached to all in order that the indigenes in the English plantations might be saved by believing in Jesus and his resurrection. In doing so Williams, whom Martin GriYn’s recent study includes among the Latitudinarians,12 questioned whether morality and a natural sense of religion were suYcient for salvation. What was needed was an explicit conversion of the natives to belief in Christ and his gospel. Suppose now that a Missionary should address himself to a native of these Countries, and labour to perswade him to the Change of his religion, and become a Christian. And he should reply, I grant what you say, that the Christian religion doth propose many excellent advantages to those that believe and embrace it; but I have been otherwise educated, and cannot easily part with all that my progenitors have lived and died in; and must have very convincing Reasons to oblige me to forsake it. And therefore pray satisWe me in my Doubt, and giver me a plain and positive Answer, whereby a heathen continuing so to be, may not be saved, if he take nature and Reason to be his Guide, and live soberly and virtuously? And why must all the World submit to you? And are all to be damn’d that believe not as you do believe? And if the Answer of the Missionary be, that I dare not be positive in it: A Christian living as such, will most certainly be saved; but I cannot say 10 Matthew 28: 18. 11 John Hough, Of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts: A Sermon Preach’d at St Mary-le-Bow, Feb. 18 1703 before the Society Incorporated for That Purpose (1705), 7–8. The sermons were preached late in the Old Style year (February) and published soon after, early the next year (which in the Old Style began at the end of March). All the sermons and the Proceedings of the SPG are published in London, unless otherwise noted. 12 Martin I. J. GriYn, Jr., Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 14. The Latitudinarianism of Anglican higher clergy in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was largely orthodox with regard to central Christian doctrines such as the Trinitarian God and the divinity of Christ. In this respect it needs to be distinguished from the more extreme Latitudinarianism of later eighteenth-century divines such as Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) and William Whiston (1667–1752), who were Arian or Socinian.


45

a heathen will be damned. There is more hazard in the one than the other, but the Case is not wholly desperate, it is a doubtful case but it is such as I cannot Wnally condemn. Then, saith the Native, let the Fault lie upon me, and if I may be saved in the Religion of my own Country, I shall need no farther Instructor, nor shall I desire any Change. If this be the Case, the Labour of the Missionary will be at an end; and all the Expence of sending such abroad may be saved. For what is left is not Christianity, but Deism. So necessary is it for all men to believe in Christ, and to look upon that as a Condition, without which we cannot be saved.13

Williams was criticizing the idea of natural religion that was prominent in the theology of the early Enlightenment; the concept that there were certain fundamental tenets of religion universally known by way of reason. While the speciWc content of such a natural religion tended to vary among authors, Martin GriYn has identiWed three religious ingredients that were commonly asserted by Latitudinarian Anglicans to be known among all peoples. These were the existence of an allpowerful God with providential attributes; the immortality of the soul; and an afterlife of rewards and punishments.14 This rational natural theology was generally attractive to Anglican Latitudinarians and it gave them an appreciation that non-Christian peoples of the New World had a genuine knowledge of religious truth. It meant, for such Latitudinarians, that this new imperial world of evangelistic opportunity was embraced in the early eighteenth century with an Anglican aYrmation that the indigenous inhabitants of English colonies were moral human beings created by God with a knowledge of good and evil. But if Latitudinarians upheld natural religion, why was Williams playing down its salviWc suYciency for the indigenous peoples of North America in his sermon? This was probably a consequence of the debate with the Deists, who also defended natural religion and were the beˆte noire of early Enlightenment Anglican divines.15 There has been recent historical scepticism about the existence of a Deist movement on the basis that evidence for any signiWcant number of 13 John Williams, Bishop of Chichester, A Sermon (1706), 15–17. 14 GriYn, Latitudinarianism, 73. 15 According to Ernest Gordon Rupp, Religion in England, 1688–1791 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 257–77, who encapsulates the standard historical scholarship for the existence and nature of a Deist movement in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

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Deists and their supporters is rather scanty.16 But whether or not a signiWcant Deist movement existed in this period, it certainly did in the minds and intentions of its Anglican orthodox opponents. For these Anglicans, the Deist theological enemies of orthodox Trinitarianism aYrmed not merely the truth of natural religion but its suYciency for salvation, thereby eVectively undercutting the need for Anglican missions such as those advocated by the society’s preachers. If Anglican evangelism of the Native Americans was not, therefore, to be judged unnecessary, then natural religion had to be circumscribed as genuine but inadequate for salvation, and the extrarational revelation of the Christian gospel deemed requisite. So it was the revelation of the gospel and not any rational natural religion that was proclaimed by these early Enlightenment Anglican theologians as constituting the salviWc content of religious knowledge. Thus the new imperial world caused a revision of the metropolitan religious culture of Enlightenment Anglicanism by circumscribing some of its former conWdence in the adequacy of the place of reason in religion. These preachers would accommodate the heathen natives within the imperial British world by aYrming their grasp of natural religion, while denying to them its salviWc adequacy. The 1720s and 1730s were a particularly diYcult time for orthodox Anglicans in their contest against heterodoxy among the educated classes, with the publication of signiWcant Deist works such as Matthew Tindall’s Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), the reputation of Queen Caroline (consort of George II) for supporting heterodoxy, and a belief that there existed an anti-clericalism and freemasonry among the fashionable classes.17 This Anglican anxiety about the growing inXuence of Deistic and atheistic inWdelity in England had one curious construction of colonial purpose propounded by two of the society’s preachers in the 1730s. John Denne, Archdeacon of Rochester in 1730, and Bishop Smalbroke of LichWeld and Coventry both portrayed America as an asylum for the Church of England and the Christian gospel in the event of apostasy by England. They advocated 16 S.J. Barnett, ‘The English Deist Movement: A Case Study in the Construction of a Myth’, in S.J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), ch. 3. 17 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 237–43.


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evangelism in the British New World colonies in order that, as Denne put it, ‘we may have some place to Xee into, an Asylum from persecuting InWdels, if God in just Judgement should permit it to be lost in Europe’.18 This was a reference to what Denne saw as the encroachments of Deism in Europe, to which he devoted seventy-seven pages in the printed version of his sermon. Smalbroke was just as convinced that there was a ‘prevalence of InWdelity among us, in these parts of the World, that is God, for the punishment of our most shameful Abuse of the Gospel, should give us up to a general InWdelity, or abandon us to a return of Popery, that the pure Christian Religion may have some Retreat prepared for it in America’.19 These metropolitan anxieties about a traditional theological enemy were supported by some of the reports of the society’s missionaries in New England. In Stratford, Connecticut, the clergyman reported on the ‘pernicious principles’ of Deism propagated in his area, but was upbeat about the positive eVect of the arrival of copies of John Leland’s work on Deism.20 In Hempstead, Long Island, the Revd Seabury reported that while the Church of England was assailed both by Deistic ‘Enemies of Revelation’ and religious revivalists, it was nevertheless gaining ground among the settlers.21 But when focused on heathen natives, rather than apostate English, some preachers aYrmed that while the natives were religiously inferior to the Christian English they did at least share a common humanity, and that common inheritance could be a further reason for mission. Until the 1720s this emphasis was still evident in some annual sermons, such as that of Williams. Another preacher in 1720 pointed to the common Enlightenment aYrmation of a collective global human nature, identical in all its essentials, which meant the English should have a ‘sympathizing Regard to the most distant Partakers of it, when it is in our Power to shew it’. Therefore, a created common humanity meant God expected the English to share with ‘our Brethren by Nature’ their blessing of knowledge of the gospel.22 18 John Denne, Archdeacon of Rochester, A Sermon (1730), 62. 19 Richard Smalbroke, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, A Sermon, (1733), 44. 20 SPG, Proceedings (1759), 58. John Leland (1698–1766) was a Dublin Dissenting minister who published an early intellectual history of Deism, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers that have Appeared in England in the Last and Present Century, 2 vols. (London, 1754–5). 21 SPG, Proceedings (1755), 48. 22 Edward Waddington, incumbent of All-Hallows-the-Great, London, A Sermon (1720), 13–14, 17. In 1724 Waddington became Bishop of Chichester.

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But far more usual than talk of any common humanity was a major distinction drawn between the Native Americans as heathens and the English as Christians. Seeing the world through the theological lens of the Bible meant the preachers viewed each side of the transatlantic world as analogous to the distinction in Scripture between Gentiles and Christians. So the colonial New World was framed over and against England in a series of classic theological contrasts of light and darkness; those subject to God and those under the dominion of Satan; superstition and idolatry versus Christian truth; ‘sottish’ and savage heathendom as against moral and civilized Christianity.23 In this discourse, the identity of Gentile ¼ Native American was set in the starkest contrast to that of Christian ¼ English, not for any reasons of racial or ontological diVerence but on the basis of a theological distinction between Christian and non-Christian. Indigenous Americans were radically other than the English because they were not Christian. However, these Anglicans in the Wrst half of the eighteenth century were implying that if that fundamental deWciency could be rectiWed then the subordinate standing of natives to the English could be bridged. The same contrast between a brutish, ignorant heathendom and a civilized Christian identity was similarly applied to the history of the English themselves by these Anglicans. So Dean Waugh of Gloucester in 1722 paralleled the indigenous Americans with the pagan English in his review of his own country’s early history: it should be remembered, that there was a Time when the Inhabitants of this Island . . . were as sottish Idolaters as the savage Indians are now; and might have continued to this Day, if God had not put it into the hearts of the Apostles, or some of their primitive Successors, to plant the Christian Religion among us: And since we can give no other Account of this DiVerence, which God hath put between us and them, but that it is owing to his free grace and undeserved Mercy, we ought to express our Gratitude to him, by our charitable Endeavours for all these, to whom he hath not yet vouchsafed that Favour.24

23 For example, Phillip Bisse, Bishop of Hereford, A Sermon (1717), 9; Samuel Bradford, Bishop of Carlisle, A Sermon (1719), 22; Hugh Boulter, Bishop of Bristol, A Sermon (1721), 31. 24 John Waugh, Dean of Gloucester, A Sermon (1722), 35.


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Nor was this an idiosyncratic view, as it was echoed by others in the 1720s. The indolent Bishop Thomas Green of Ely in 1723 viewed the pre-Christian English in the same way. ‘For this nation was once a wretched part of that Heathen World, though we are now Light in the Lord. We were in Time past not his people . . . though we are now the People of God .’25 The following year the Bishop of St Asaph maintained that an English transformation from ignorant darkness to moral light was simply due to them having embraced Christianity in their past. ‘We ourselves were sometimes Darkness . . . But now we are Light in the Lord’ and consequently ought to do for others what Christian missionaries had done for the English in their own past.26 The Bishop of Hereford viewed English identity in the same way in 1728, when he upheld the obligation for English missions to the Native Americans on the basis of similar earlier evangelization of the English ‘without the Light of which, we our selves must have continu’d in the same deplorable State with these miserable People, and remain’d to this Day, as ignorant and idolatrous’.27 It was the lack of a Christian identity that was the essential religious diVerence that made the Native Americans fundamentally ‘other’ for the Christian English, according to this early Anglican construction. There was a fundamental distinction between heathen and Christian that the English themselves had transited in their past thanks to early Christian missionaries. This fundamental alteration of identity could and should be made available to the indigenous peoples of English colonies, and it was the obligation placed upon the SPG to do so in the name of the Church of England. But quite early on it became apparent that neither the indigenous peoples themselves, nor many of the colonial SPG clergy, saw it that way. By 1724 it was being reported that most SPG missionaries were Wnding all sorts of reasons for neglecting their ministry to the natives in favour of the English settlers in South Carolina and Virginia.28 The natives were also not exhibiting any more disposition towards 25 Thomas Green, Bishop of Ely, A Sermon (1723), 27. 26 John Wynn, Bishop of St Asaph, A Sermon (1724), 19–20. 27 Henry Edgerton, Bishop of Hereford, A Sermon (1728), 14. 28 Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 148.

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conversion than they had in the preceding century with the English Puritan missions.29 Perhaps it was the missionaries’ reports of the diVerence between the native peoples within and those beyond the pales of settlement that led the metropolitan Anglicans, by the 1730s, to begin to advocate ‘civilization’ as a preliminary to conversion. By this time the society’s preachers were Wnding less and less in common between the English and the Native Americans, in tune with the reports of their North American clergy. Dr Cutler in Boston reported in 1734 that a native woman, as a consequence of his baptizing her, had left behind ‘the Barbarity of her kindred in which she was educated’.30 The following year his colleague, the Revd Miln in Albany, New York, passed on the comments of the commanding oYcer of the garrison at Fort Hunter that thanks to Miln’s ministry the Mohawks had grown more civilized and orderly, observing the Sabbath. The implication was that this was a surprising development, because more often the picture was of the indigenous peoples as persistently uncivilized.31 One of Miln’s successor’s, the Revd Ogilvie, reported on the degrading eVects of alcohol on the native men, making them drunk enough to burn their own huts and abuse wives and children.32 He maintained in 1752 that nothing could be done with the Mohawks until there was a viable scheme to ‘change their present habit of Thinking and Acting, and may instill the Principles of Virtue and Piety into their minds’, preferably by teaching them English and instructing them ‘in proper houses’.33 Two years later Ogilvie seems to have put some of this scheme into operation by taking one of the Mohawk boys, dressing him in English clothes and teaching him English suYciently to read in the Psalter. However, at that point the boy’s parents removed him from Ogilvie’s care lest their son, as they said, ‘learn to despise his own Nation’.34 But it appears that neither the missionaries on the ground nor the society’s leader’s in London were able to recognize the devastating eVects of cultural deconstruction among the Mohawks, nor the local agency of some Mohawks, such as the boy’s parents, that attempted 29 John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), 99–104. 30 SPG, Proceedings (1734), 61. 31 Ibid., (1735), 44. 32 Ibid., (1753), 48. 33 Ibid., (1752), 39–40. 34 Kupperman, Indians & English, 140–1.


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to oppose it. To both metropolitan and colonial contexts of the SPG all of this was subsumed under the motif of barbarity and the need for European civilization. Yet there had been indications since the seventeenth century that some Indians were interested in Christianity, though they were, like the Mohawk parents, not prepared to relinquish their own control over how they appropriated it.35 In fact, so wide was this gap between Native American and Anglican-English becoming that the natives’ apparent lack of civilization was raising questions about their essential humanity, something that had not been so evident in earlier sermons. In 1732, the society’s preacher went into this requisite step of civilizing indigenous peoples at some length. The obsequious and nepotistic Bishop Richard Smalbroke of LichWeld and Coventry believed that the inhabitants of North America required to be civilized Wrst because they were more savage than those of South America—who had, after all, built and inhabited cities. The peoples bordering English colonies in the north lived in a state of nature that was devoid of the civilized conveniences of life. Taking aim at the current European idea of the noble savage, he maintained such a state of nature was not a state of innocence. The idea that primitive men (and it was a gendered concept) were free of the rather artiWcial baggage of civilization and were consequently able to realize the natural virtuousness of humankind was an old idea given contemporary currency by the poet John Dryden and the philosopher John Locke. On the basis of the power of natural reason working on the sense data of experience Locke gave the concept new philosophical life in the eighteenth century. This was picked up by the Deists, who used Locke’s philosophy to formulate a doctrine of natural human goodness and virtuousness to which primitives were fundamentally closer than were those exposed to the accretions of civilization.36 For Smalbroke, however, the Native Americans were not in a virtuous state of nature as the Deists proposed, so what was needed was the transformation of their wild state through education at all levels. It was an Enlightenment recipe for identity change: ‘Not only more Schools are therefore to be 35 James Axtell, The Invasion within: The Context of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 264–5, 186–7, 243–7. 36 Gaile McGregor, The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes toward a Syntactics of Place (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 12, 18–19.

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opened, but more Colleges are to be erected, and Professorships, more especially of History, Geography, and Chronology, are to be endowed, if we would eVectually propagate good Manners and true Religion among them.’ He did, however, recognize that the SPG would have to go some way towards meeting indigenous peoples on their own cultural grounds. ‘And, indeed, the Missionaries that are most likely to be successful in propagating the Christian Religion among the Indians are such as have cultivated their Languages, and therefore have free Admission among them.’ But this was only a small pragmatic concession in the bishop’s assumption of English cultural superiority, for such linguistically capable missionaries should come from the natives themselves, thereby sparing English ones ‘the tediousness of learning their barbarous Languages’. However, he remained reserved about the prospects for success of this civilization-Wrst agenda. The Native Americans came a poor second when compared with the peoples of China and India, ‘where the people are civilized, ingenious, and under the InXuence of an absolute Prince, that favours the Christian Religion, and permits his Subjects to embrace it’.37 These metropolitan questionmarks over the Native Americans’ humanity found an echo in 1757 when the society’s secretary concluded in the annual proceedings that conversion of the Native Americans and black slaves was ultimately in vain in ‘their wild native state. They must be reduced from their barbarity, I had almost said Brutality, and be made Men, that is, rational considerate Creatures, before they will become good Christians.’38 This view of the Native Americans as being so barbarous and crude that, compared with more civilized pagan peoples of the East, they could not comprehend Christianity, prevailed among both metropolitan and colonial Anglicans. This may have been accentuated in the colonial context because most of the indigenous peoples the SPG missionaries came in contact with were those known as ‘settlement Indians’—those living on the fringes of white settlement whose way of life and world of meaning had already been deeply invaded by the colonists, often with debilitating consequences such as alcoholism. For the Dean of Wells in 1734 the Native Americans were so ‘rude 37 Smalbroke, Sermon, 38–41.

38 SPG, Proceedings (1757), 52.


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and savage’ as to lack an understanding of good and evil; though this was, to be sure, compounded by traders who exacerbated their depraved state by selling alcohol to them.39 The importance ascribed to civilization was intensiWed by the saintly and amiable Bishop Martin Benson of Gloucester, who appeared to equate civilization with being human when he proclaimed in 1739 that conversion would only follow the introduction of ‘Civil Life and Arts’ among indigenous peoples, which would ‘make them Men before we can make them Christians’. Benson placed great hopes upon commercial trade with the natives as the catalyst for introducing them to the ways and arts of civilized English life, which would, in turn, lead them to knowledge of the gospel.40 Bishop Thomas Secker of Oxford, an industrious and precise man, the next year also proposed a native identity of utter barbarism that was the antithesis of civilized—that is, English—mores. These [natives] consist of various nations, valuable for some of their Qualities, but immersed in the vilest Superstitions, and engaged in almost perpetual Wars against each other, which they prosecute with barbarities unheard of amongst the rest of mankind: implacable in their Resentments . . . boundless in their Intemperance . . . impatient of labour . . . inhumanely negligent of Persons in Years . . . not scrupling to kill and eat their nearest Relations . . . when reduced to Straits . . . it cannot be an easy Work, to convert nations, whose Manners are so uncultivated; whose Languages are so diVerent, so hard to learn . . . who seldom continue long enough in the same Place, to let any good Impressions Wx into Habits.41

In 1754 the Bishop of St Asaph, a Whig, saw the Native Americans as possessing a liberty ‘of beasts not men’; beasts who had acquired no more culture than was necessary for a subsistence lifestyle. The only course was to ‘reduce’ them to gentle manners before any conversions could be hoped for.42 Having formulated, by the mideighteenth century, a Native American identity as barbarians, their barbarism was proposed as needing to be ‘reduced’ in order for a civilized replacement to grow in its place. 39 40 41 42

Isaac Maddox, Dean of Wells, A Sermon (1733), 31. Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, A Sermon (1739), 15. Thomas Secker, Bishop of Oxford, A Sermon (1740), 9. Robert Drummond, Bishop of St Asaph, A Sermon (1754), 17–18.

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This increasingly negative assessment of Native American humanity in the eighteenth century developed with the growth in the society’s sermons from the 1730s of a ‘civilization Wrst’ agenda for conversion. It was still being held into the 1760s when the Bishop of Gloucester, William Warburton, one of the theological lights of his day and a strong opponent of John Wesley, referred to the Native Americans as ‘Savages without Law or religion’, for whom civilization was a necessary step before conversion. Acknowledging that this policy had continued to fail, he found the reason for such failure in the society’s clergy continuing to preach to ‘Barbarians’ who really needed Wrst to be ‘taught the civil arts of life’ in order to understand such preaching.43 These sentiments were still echoed emphatically in 1788 by the aristocratic Bishop of LichWeld and Coventry (he was also Earl of Cornwallis), who agreed with the common view that an agricultural makeover for the Indians might produce the civilized goods among them.44 Civilization was not a mere matter of acquiring the English language and religion. It was more a case of natives being remade as men and not brutes; transformed into English peasantry, albeit with greater levels of education and catechesis than most English villagers were required to have by their parsons. ‘Civility’ meant giving up the indigenous American nomadic culture—which was equated with a barbaric life—for a settled life of husbandry, which would teach them the virtue of acquiring property as proper commercial beings, according to the blue-blooded Bishop Frederick Keppel. The desire also of the Indians to be instructed in husbandry gives a most promising aspect to our hopes. The cultivation of their kind by supplying them with sustenance at home must reclaim them from their wild and roving disposition, and consequently aVord them more time and tranquillity to consider the awful truths of the Gospel; it will Wx in their minds just notions of property, and enable them to assist others from their superXuity, and by these means lead them to the exercise of those cardinal virtues of our holy religion, Justice and Charity.45

43 William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, A Sermon (1766), 17–18. 44 James Cornwallis, Bishop of LichWeld and Coventry, A Sermon (1788), xxii. 45 Frederick Keppel, Bishop of Exeter, A Sermon (1770), 16–17.


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The requirement for the Native Americans to undergo a transformation from barbarism to civilization remained a constant motif for SPG Anglicans for most of the eighteenth century, largely crossing the political divisions and diVering social backgrounds of the eighteenth-century Anglican clergy. It became the benchmark for assessing whether indigenous subjects of mission had achieved a satisfactory and adequate transformation from heathens to Christians. However, there are some indications of isolated patches of greater cultural awareness of their native subjects by some colonial SPG missionaries, in the burst of enthusiasm for native missions in the 1760s that followed the British victory in the Seven Years’ War. In 1767 the Revd Wood, in Annapolis Royal and Granville, Nova Scotia, seemed to understand the importance of their language in his engagement with the Micmac natives. He reported in October that year that he was able to read prayers in the Micmac language, which he did at a ceremony in St Paul’s, Halifax, in July 1767 before the governor, Lord William Campbell. The Micmac chief gratiWed the local dignitaries by his prayers (said kneeling in suitable Anglican fashion) for King George III, afterwards asking Wood to translate for the beneWt of the governor. The governor reciprocated by bowing to the natives assembled, after which the Micmac’s thanked God, the governor, and Mr Wood ‘for the opportunity they had of hearing prayers in their own language’.46 However, the image of a barbarian people, sometimes thought to be barely human and devoid of civilization, remained the predominant one throughout the century. In 1766, the Revd Barton, itinerant missionary at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, prescribed Christianity and civilization packaged in the Enlightenment motif of knowledge. Acknowledging that white missionaries lacked the necessary cultural tools for this, he maintained that converted natives could be the agents for this necessary enculturation in a conversion agenda that stressed European civilization as a prerequisite to Christianity, particularly as this would remake the Native Americans into peaceable farmers and thereby remove their aggression in defence of their own lands. The SPG Proceedings reported Barton as saying:

46 SPG, Proceedings (1768), 46.

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Till the Werce and cruel Tempers of these poor Barbarians are softened and subdued by knowledge, his Majesty’s American Subjects can never expect a lasting peace with them. Nothing but extending the Light of Knowledge to them will ever conciliate them to us, or eVectually secure the frontier Settlements from their blood-thirsty Designs. European Missionaries residing in their Country can expect to do but little Service, whereas Missionaries formed from among the Indians themselves, by being accustomed to their Modes and Mores of Living, and by being able to attend them in their long Excursions, and to instruct them in their own Language, may do a great deal. Such Missionaries would in a little Time persuade their wandering Tribes to incorporate with civil Society, and to settle to Tillage and the Cultivation of their Lands. Could they be brought to this, he thinks every DiYculty that lies in the Way to their Instruction and Conversion from a wretched and destructive Idolatry to the glorious and saving Religion of Jesus Christ, would soon vanish. And there appears to him no Scheme more likely to accomplish this most desirable End than that of erecting Indian Schools, which would supply the Society with the proper Persons to carry the glad Tidings of Salvation to the deluded Heathen.47

But even at the end of the century, when preachers were acknowledging the undeniable lack of success in conversion of the indigenous population, they continued in this demand for a fundamental Anglocentric change of native identity. So, in 1792, the Bishop of Salisbury, while admitting the lack of native conversions brought about by the society’s missionaries, was nevertheless content to point to the few whom ‘the Gospel has raised from their degraded state of Barbarism to the Exercise of the Arts of civilized life’, rather than the many more who had resisted the SPG invitation couched unattractively in this framework of a cultural makeover. He remained sanguine that greater numbers would soon emulate this tiny minority by embracing the gospel, with its concomitant requirements of a settled arable and stable village life, with proper English schools. In this way the native peoples would arrive at ‘Civilization, and, in consequence of Civilization, to Christianity’.48 The Native Americans were to have their identity constructed for them by SPG Anglicans according to the criteria of Enlightenment culture. Conversion was not only religious, in the sense of accepting 47 SPG, Proceedings (1768), 58–9. 48 John Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, A Sermon (1793), 24–5.


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a new religious world view or mythology; it was formulated as an integrated religious, social, economic, and cultural remaking of Native Americans into English men, women, and children. This eradication of the native way of life was possible because Anglicans did not view it as a culture—as they did those of China or India—but as a brute state of subsistence, a life devoid of meaning. The process required the introduction of European standards, such as permanent settlements, English agricultural practices, language, and dress, which would relieve the indigenous people from the consuming, brutish struggle for mere survival. An English way of life would dispose them to listen to those who spoke to them of higher things, especially if their Christian instructors epitomized in their own persons that civilized life and its virtues.49 Enlightenment rationality had become a benchmark for humanity that overrode earlier assessments of the Native Americans’ humanity based on the common creation by God of both the indigenous Americans and the English, who were divided only by their Christianity. It was, as Thomas Newton, Bishop of Bristol, succinctly put it in 1769, a matter of making them ‘men, before they can be made Christians’.50 This metropolitan Anglican construction of a brutish, barbarian, sub- human Native American identity from the 1730s largely accords with what Anthony Pagden and James Axtell have found in the actual colonial context of encounter between indigenes and European invaders. Pagden identiWes religion as a highly signiWcant component of the imperial campaigns of France, Britain, and Spain to deracinate and reconstruct their new indigenous subjects according to their own metropolitan cultures.51 This use of religion came to be replaced in the eighteenth century by a discourse of commerce in all the European imperial nations, including Britain. James Axtell, in his examination of the cultural encounter and uneven contest between white colonizers and North American natives, points to a number of religious agendas that predate but mirror the Anglican construction of native identity demarcated here. Axtell views this encounter as an ‘invasion within’ of the lives and cultures of 49 John Green, Bishop of Lincoln, A Sermon (1768), 17. 50 Thomas Newton, Bishop of Bristol, A Sermon (1769), 26. 51 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 152.

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the colonized, which paralleled the external invasion of the North American continent by the French and English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.52 These European conquerors used religion to attempt to exterminate the native peoples’ cultural identity and replace it with a Europeanized alternative. In response, the natives resisted as best they could by seeking to revitalize their own culture, or by adopting a syncretistic amalgam of indigenous and Christian religious outlooks, or—for a minority—by giving themselves over completely to the new Euro-Christian identity. This latter option was more prevalent among the English Puritan missions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because the English, unlike the French Jesuits,53 were not amenable to distinguishing between Christianity and European culture. This distinction by the Jesuits made permissible the retention of some native cultural mores in areas deemed non-essential to the gospel. Axtell has very little comment to make upon the SPG missions, as his study of the English missions is largely conWned to those of the Puritan New Englanders of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. But it is clear that it was the cultural Xexibility of the Jesuits that was exceptional in the colonial setting; the English were more or less an extreme example of the European cultural chauvinism exhibited also by the French and Spanish colonial authorities and their religious counterparts. Axtell considers that the English were unable to emulate the French Jesuits because they shared the common Enlightenment paradigm of native peoples as savages who needed to be remade into real human beings—a view that resulted in an almost complete dismissal of the value of indigenous culture.54 In the case of the English, however, this was exacerbated by their insular conviction of the superiority of their own culture and religion not only to that of the Native Americans but also to that of other European nations, which made them especially intolerant of any retention of local ways.55 To be civilized was to be more human than a savage; to be Christian was to be superior to a civilized pagan; but to be English was to be the epitome of a civilized Christian human, and therefore the acme of God’s will. Under such an English paradigm conversion meant essentially an annihilation of 52 Axtell, Invasion Within, 329–33. 54 Ibid., 133–8. 55 Ibid., 131–2.

53 Ibid., chs. 5–6.


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indigenous identity down to the smallest aspects of daily life, and a replacement of that identity with an English one—though never of course to such an extent as to be accepted as genuinely English by the English themselves. Karen Kupperman, however, has reminded us that comments about ‘reducing’ Native Americans may refer not just to replacing their culture with European civilization and Christianity, but may also have meant to contemporaries ‘restoring’ or ‘leading back’, perhaps to a previous knowledge of the monotheistic Judeo-Christian God that some writers posited Native American had once held.56 So to what degree did the eighteenth-century Anglican construction of indigenous identity equate with this colonizing programme of cultural reconstruction that Axtell has identiWed in the British colonies? The evidence of the sermons and missionary reports in the Wrst decades of the SPG suggest that the preachers of that period had conWdence in the humanity of the native peoples that was later undermined by what came to be a prevailing motif of civilization before evangelization. In the early decades the Anglican preachers viewed Christianity, rather than culture, as constituting the basic barrier between Native American and English; a barrier at least theologically, if not culturally, surmountable by conversion. But the emergence of a preliminary criteria for the conversion to civilization, understood as a process of Europeanization, raised persistent doubts about the native peoples’ humanity. This became a justiWcation for the society’s lack of success in producing native conversions on a large scale. Querying the natives’ humanity had not been an issue for the earlier preachers, who focused on Christianity and not culture as the fundamental distinction between the two groups. But when conversions failed to occur the Society’s preachers had another model of conversion to fall back upon to rationalize their lack of success. ‘Civilization’ as an English remaking of all aspects of indigenous life in their own image had been the prevalent strategy and ethos of the Puritan missions and praying towns of seventeenth-century New England. From the 1730s, and for the rest of the eighteenth century, the SPG Anglican preachers took up this older view of their Puritan English forebears in colonial North America.

56 Kupperman, Indians & English, 120.

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While the indigenes’ resistance to this civilizing agenda may have disheartened SPG Anglicans, abandoning their mission was not contemplated, because they framed the English–British Empire within a theological imperative. Maximizing opportunities for heathens to accept the salviWc requirement of belief in the Christian gospel was, in their view, the divine purpose of God in granting England her overseas territories in the Wrst place. In 1707 the High Churchman William Beveridge was among the Wrst of the society’s preachers to express the belief that there was a providential purpose behind England’s territorial acquisition overseas. ‘Now, that we have so many Factories settled in Asia and Africa, and so many Colonies in America, all among the InWdels and Heathens, whereby we may have the fairest Opportunity that ever can be oVered, to open their Eyes, and turn them from Darkness to Light, from the power of Satan to God.’ He backdated this providential acquisition of territory by the English to the geographical discoveries of the previous two centuries, by which the guidance of God had provided the English with the opportunity to preach the gospel to all the world.57 Dean White Kennett, later Bishop of Peterborough, in 1712 similarly urged a commitment to mission in America as the providential consequence of the English ‘discovery’ of North America. Kennett envisaged this divine directing of the English as a feudal transaction, by which God granted the English land in return for religious service which, if not carried out in the spread of the gospel in the empire, God could, and would, revoke. For as the Wrst Discovery of those Northern Tracts in America, was owing to the English Crown, which thereby became justly intitled to them; so it seem’d a Declaration of Providence, that hereby a great Door and eVectual should be open’d to us, for enlarging the Kingdom of Christ. Our forefathers had a pious Sense of this Designation of the Will of God, and took frequent Occasions to confess that it was the Wnger of God, pointing out the Heathen for his Son’s Inheritance, and giving him the utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession. Hence, likewise the Wrst Royal Patents for Settlement and Propriety in those Lands, did run upon the Covenant, and express Condition of helping forward the Propagation of the Christian faith; thereby creating a Feudal Tenure from God and the Crown, to be held for the

57 William Beveridge, Bishop of St Asaph, A Sermon (London, 1707), 14–15.


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Honour, and Service of our religion, and if the Service be wilfully detain’d, the Right is extinguish’d with it.58

A number of other preachers in the early eighteenth century also maintained this connection between England’s Christian and imperial destinies. Like Beveridge before him, Dean William Stanley in 1708 divided the world into areas of Christian light and heathen darkness. When the English had the power, through their colonial territories, to bring light to such darkness, it was not consistent with either Christianity or charity to allow that darkness to continue.59 In 1709 Sir William Dawes, Bishop of Chester, waxed fervent about the prospects of an imperial Anglicanism bringing light to the dark corners of the earth. ‘As to our holy Religion: When doth that ever appear as glorious, as when it is enlarging its Borders, and extending its Conquests over the World? As when it is beating down Ignorance, Superstition, Errour, Profaneness and Irreligion? As when it is triumphing over the Prejudices, Lusts, Passions, and Vices of Mankind, and setting up its rational and holy Empire upon the Ruins of them?’60 In the 1713 sermon George Stanhope, Dean of Canterbury, was moved to include an encomium to English Christianity, which he saw as territorially blessed by God in order that it might in turn plant the best of all possible religions throughout the world. This moves me to intreat, that you would seriously reXect, how deeply you are indebted to God as English Christians. Our happy island was probably by the preaching of St Paul, but undoubtedly in the time of the Apostles themselves, bless’d with the early knowledge of the Gospel; The Wrst profession of the Truth countenanced and enjoined by Laws and publick Authority;61 The Birth of the Wrst Christian Emperor; To Us, the shining of this glorious Light, never totally extinguished among us. And, when eclipsed with those Corruptions and Superstitions, which God, in his Judgement, 58 White Kennett, Dean of Peterborough, The Lets and Impediments in Planting and Propagating the Gospel of Christ: A Sermon Preach’d before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1712), 31–2. 59 William Stanley, Dean of St Asaph, A Sermon (London, 1708), 26. 60 Sir William Dawes, Bishop of Chester, A Sermon (London, 1709), 6. 61 The reference here is to the legendary Wrst Christian king of Britain, Lucius, who was believed to have made Christianity the oYcial religion of his realm in the second century. The legend stems from a reference in the papal biographies written in the Liber PontiWcalis from the sixth century onwards that a British king had petitioned Pope Eleutheris (175–89) for Christian clergy to be sent to Britain.

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permitted to overspread the face of this Western World; We are again among the Wrst, and far the best, Reformed; . . . But, Are such signal Favours remembered as they ought to be, unless our Gratitude express it self, in as uncommon Measures of Piety, and Charity, and Holy Labour, to plant this excellent religion, where it is not yet . . . shall not We, who have all the Advantages of truly Primitive Doctrine, lay the Good of Souls, and the Enlargement of the Lord’s Territories to heart?62

In other words, not only was it English Christianity, but more speciWcally the Christianity of the Church of England, with its retention of the most pure and best reformed faith, that God had providentially picked for this task. In 1747 the Bishop of St Asaph was still upholding as theological fact that God had blessed British commerce and colonization as a divine method of bringing the barbarous nations of North America to Christianity. In such a way ‘the Care of these People is naturally devolved upon the Charity and Piety of this Nation. Providence, I say, has consigned them to our Care . . . to bring them from Darkness to Light, and from the Power of Satan unto God’.63 All the society’s preachers throughout the eighteenth century took for granted that, as the Dean of Lincoln aYrmed in 1778, Christ’s religion was ‘intended to be universal’ and would spread its ‘salutary InXuence over the whole World’ so as to ‘reconcile and unite all Mankind’.64 Like British imperial acquisitions, the Kingdom of Christ was also spreading from east to west, beginning from the Garden of Eden, through the Roman Empire, to the ‘new world in the west’ bringing light where before there had been darkness.65 The Bishop of LlandaV was equally convinced in 1753 that the Christian gospel was intended by God to be universal, and that the British were a divine instrument in realizing this plan. ‘We ought to consider all the Opportunities we enjoy, our extensive Commerce with other Nations, the Light, and Learning, and Wealth we possess, as so many Calls of Providence to the Duty of propagating true Religion in the World.’66 The same providential connection between imperial 62 George Stanhope, Dean of Canterbury, The Early Conversion of Islanders, a Wise Expedient for Propagating Christianity: A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1713), 20–2. 63 Samuel Lisle, Bishop of St Asaph, A Sermon (1747), 31. 64 William George, Dean of Lincoln, A Sermon (1748), 9, 11–12. 65 Richard Osbaldeston, Bishop of Carlisle, A Sermon (1752), 7–9. 66 Edward Cresset, Bishop of LlandaV, A Sermon (1753), 16.


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territorial expansion and the work of the SPG was shared by the society’s North American missionaries. In 1729 the Revd Zachary Pearce rejoiced in his report to the society that since the discovery of North America, Christianity had expanded within it so that it was ‘no obscure indication that the Designs of Providence and of this Society go together, and that in the Decrees of Heaven this new Way was not open’d for the sake of that Temporal proWt which the European Nations have made of it, but for the Spiritual Advantage which its Inhabitants may make of it’.67 This conWdence in the imperial religious purpose of Anglican Christianity was no doubt encouraged by the growth in English, and then British, overseas colonies by the mid eighteenth-century. English settlement of Calcutta began in 1690; Britain’s sovereignty of Hudson Bay was conWrmed, and of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland gained, as a consequence of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, under which it also received Gibraltar and Minorca from Spain; new colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia were established; and there were more ‘factories’ (trading stations) around the coast of India. Modest by comparison with the second half of the century, these acquisitions were nevertheless signiWcant to contemporaries when compared to the paltry English expansion of the previous century. This development continued to be understood by these Anglicans as an imperial territorial blessing by God, carrying with such providential favour a divine condition of evangelism for its maintenance. In the very Wrst anniversary sermon of the SPG, Richard Willis advocated the promotion of colonial evangelism as a means of demonstrating to God that England took its religion seriously, for otherwise God could remove from the nation the protecting providence he had so recently shown them in the outcomes of the 1688 Revolution. We can but be all sensible how near we have often been to the brink of ruine; in how much danger we have been that our Nation should become a Weld of blood, and that our religion should be over-run, if not by Heathenistic, yet by that which is very bad, Popish Superstition and Idolatry. And tho’ blessed by God, we have now a more comfortable Prospect of AVairs, yet we ought to consider that it is still in his Power to blast all our Hopes when he pleases; And what reason have we to expect but that he will do it, if after 67 SPG, Proceedings (1729), 26–7.

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so many repeated instances of his kindness and preserving us and our religion, we shall shew no concern for his honour, or for the promoting of that religion which he has thus wonderfully preserved to us.68

Gilbert Burnet in 1703 also proposed a similar theological connection between domestic and imperial destinies when he advocated the society’s colonial work as part of the domestic campaign for the reformation of manners in order to bring down a blessing from God upon the politics of the nation, securing to England the blessing the Revolution had brought it.69 Dean Stanley in 1707 suggested the same equation by commenting that the continued failure of those in a position to promote colonial religion was one reason for God not granting more success to England’s Xeets, which may have been a reference to the successful French raid on the islands of St Kitts and Nevis in 1706 as part of the War of the Spanish Succession.70 Stanley went on to suggest that current indiVerence towards religion among the inXuential orders of society could be dire for England’s imperial circumstances. This is the Way to keep the Candlestick from being removed from us here, among whom, nothing is more observable than that Carelessness as to religion and all that is good, even in the better sort of People, so that even the Sins of the extravagantly Wicked are scarcely more Remarkable. Let us do our best, that the Threatening of our Saviour himself, may not extend to us, when he says, The Kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a Nation bringing forth the Fruits thereof.71

Just a year later, when God had apparently granted success to English arms (perhaps in the capture of Minorca in 1708 or the successful raid on Cartagena),72 without any improvement in the oYcial promotion of colonial religion, Sir William Dawes proposed that government support for missions was a very appropriate way to 68 Richard Willis, Dean of Lincoln, A Sermon (1702), 22–3. 69 Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, Of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts: A Sermon Preach’d at St Mary-le-Bow, Feb. 18 1703 before the Society Incorporated for That Purpose (London, 1704), 29. 70 J.H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Oversea Empires in the Eighteenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 99. See John Spurr, ‘The Church, the Societies and the Moral Revolution of 1688’, in Colin Haydon, John Walsh, and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127–42. 71 Burnet, Sermon, 26. 72 Parry, Trade and Dominion, 99, 100.


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give thanks to God and thereby to ensure further such successes.73 Charles Trimnell in 1709 underlined for the monarchy of Queen Anne that it remained the clear duty of Christian rulers to promote the Christian religion, for it was God who raised them to this power in the Wrst place.74 In 1726 the Bishop of Norwich applied the same recipe of earthly tit for divine tat to the merchants of London, castigating them for not realizing the divine source of their wealth and its obligations upon them. While trade and commerce had made London into a ‘great and opulent city’, this fact required those who had got their riches thereby to support the country from which they gained their wealth by upholding the work of the society. If merchants persisted with thinking their only business was business, and giving no thought to spreading the knowledge of the true God, then ‘we shall be reckoned very unfaithful Traders, and unjust Stewards, when God shall call us to account’.75 For the Bishop of Gloucester in 1739, unless trade also promoted true religion it ‘must sink to nothing’.76 In contrast to another Anglican contemporary, these early eighteenthcentury proponents of empire believed that deriving wealth from their acquisition of Native American lands put England under religious obligations. But the dominance of a commercial, rather than a religious, understanding of empire was given philosophical rationale by John Locke, who focused his conception of imperial expansion being one of land rather than over people. Locke was a sincerely religious man and a genuinely practising Anglican, but on the Church of England’s more Latitudinarian extremes with his desire for a more rationalist religion, greater religious toleration, and a minimal doctrinal base that had aYnities with Deism. As secretary to the Lords Proprietor of Carolina from 1668 to 1671, secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations from 1673–4, and an inXuential member of the Board of Trade from 1696 to 1700, Locke wrote a number of reports on plantations; but his most famous construction of empire occurs in his Second Treatise of Government (1689). Locke propounded the colonization of North America as requisite because 73 74 75 76

Dawes, Sermon, 24. Charles Trimnell, Bishop of Norwich, A Sermon (1710), 8. John Leng, Bishop of Norwich, A Sermon (1726), 30. Benson, Sermon, 13.

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it was a fulWlment of the divine command to replenish the earth and assert dominion over it. This religious foundation for empire was needed by Locke because, unlike the SPG preachers, he had previously eschewed colonization on the basis of the superiority of Christianity over native religions in his Letter Concerning Toleration in 1685. There he had said, ‘No man whatsoever ought therefore to be deprived of his Terrestrial Enjoyments, upon account of his Religion’, and had explicitly aYrmed this as a universal principle applicable in America as well as Europe.77 For America, Locke developed a concept of Roman law that ‘empty things’ (res nullius), such as land not in permanent agricultural use, remained the property of all humankind until they were put to some useful purpose. America was literally in the State of Nature that preceded private ownership, and therefore land not in agricultural or otherwise proWtable use became the property of those who would make it productive.78 Locke grounded his apologia for empire upon an agriculturally biased idea of ‘useful’ land equating with proWtable agricultural production—there was not yet room for recognition of a hunting and gathering lifestyle as a legitimate alternative use of land. All land use that did not conform to European capitalistic agricultural practice was therefore ‘waste’ and available to anyone in America’s State of Nature. ‘God gave the ‘‘World to men in Common’’ in order for it to be used by the ‘‘Industrious and Rational’’ whose labour gave them title to it.’79 Locke’s argument became widely inXuential in Europe to justify settlement by invasion, removal of indigenous peoples from their traditional lands, and even war if they resisted European takeover of ‘waste’ and unfruitful land.80 While Locke may have used religion to assist his formulation of how England might use its American possessions, his was ultimately an argument that relied more on European legal concepts than on religion. 77 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97–8. 78 Anthony Pagden, ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c.1700’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42–7. 79 James Tully quoting Locke in ‘Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, in James Tully (ed.), An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 156. 80 Ibid., 169.


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The society’s missionary protagonists placed religion and indigenous peoples more centrally at the heart of the English imperial endeavour than did Locke. However, they were at one with him in construing the importance of commerce for an understanding of the empire. While the expansive imperial relationship of the English with God was undoubtedly conditional upon support for colonial evangelism, it was also a relationship these Anglicans interpreted commercially within the imperial context. The SPG preachers developed an imperial theology that used trade and commerce as a metaphor for England’s imperial alliance with God. In the inaugural sermon Dean Willis set missions in the empire within a commercial theology of exchange by explaining that they were a just and appropriate return for the riches England derived from its colonies and plantations.81 In 1703 Gilbert Burnet, one of the political architects of the 1688 Revolution, complained that while England had the greatest commercial advantages of any Protestant nation, it made the poorest return for these blessings of any European nation by way of missions to its overseas territories. Let not our Plantations themselves have Cause to accuse us, that while they were hard at work for us, and while their Productions are so charged that they have had but a small part of the Gain that is made by them, so that they are too low to contribute much in this way, that those among us, whose Dealings with them God has blessed with the hundredfold even in this World, are backward in assisting them in their Spiritual Concerns . . . In a Word, while our Colonies are so many Mines of Wealth to us . . . shall we take no care to secure those Blessings to us and to our Brethren in those Plantations?82

John Hough continued the same commercial theology the following year. Preaching in 1704, he wanted English merchants who were licensed by the crown to trade in overseas territories to be required ‘to join the Cause of Religion with that of Trade’. This investment in religion would promote ‘Virtue and Sobriety’ and result in the English factories and plantations developing a reputation for honesty and integrity that would subsequently cause the surrounding nations to perceive the truth of their religion. If the English in the colonies became known for their sober religion it would result in direct commercial beneWt to them because local peoples would come to 81 Willis, Sermon, 20.

82 Burnet, Sermon, 26–7.

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have conWdence and trust in the virtuous English, and be eager to trade.83 Dean Stanley also urged this commercial theology of spiritual for material exchange upon English traders. They derived wealth from these parts and should, in return, give something to them in thanks to the God ‘that gives them all’. For Stanley what was involved was a direct commercial transaction in which material beneWts were exchanged for spiritual ones, a deal between God and English trade. ‘But also in conformity to St Paul, Reasoning in a like Case, from the Equity of the thing. If you have Reaped so much of these carnal things, or by their means, is it not just that they should reap your Spiritual Things, or by your help and means?’84 Sir William Dawes the next year similarly stressed that a spiritual investment was required as a return for English material enrichment. ‘It will be enough barely to put you in mind, that we cannot make them a more rich amends, for all these Advantages, for all these their carnal things, than by letting them reap our Spiritual ones.’85 In 1729 Bishop Gibson of London, in a pamphlet addressed to colonial slave owners, used almost identical phrases to frame the religious obligations of using slave labour. He urged slave owners ‘if they [black slaves] make you Partakers of their Temporal things (of their strength and Spirits, and even of their OVspring) you ought to make them Partakers of your spiritual Things’.86 The same quid pro quo of spiritual returns for temporal gains was held up by Bishop Joseph Wilcox of Gloucester in 1725. He entreated, ‘where we have a frequent Intercourse by Commerce, and carry on such an advantageous TraYck, and enrich our Country by the Wealth or Labours of an uncivilized, illiterate People, it is but bare Justice, and a Debt we owe them to enlighten their Minds with saving Truths . . . to let them into a Share of our spiritual Things, in Exchange for their temporal ones’.87 For the Dean of Gloucester, likewise, in 1722, and the Bishop of Hereford in 1728, spiritual riches in the form of the gospel needed to be a return to those from whom Britain gained such temporal riches;88 they were a 83 Hough, Sermon, 24. 84 Stanley, Sermon, 22. 85 Dawes, Sermon, 22. 86 Edmund Gibson, Two Letters of the Bishop of London, the First, to the Masters and Mistresses of Families in the English Plantations Abroad . . . The Second, to the Missionaries There etc. (London, 1729), 20. 87 Joseph Wilcox, Bishop of Gloucester, A Sermon (1725), 13–14. 88 Waugh, Sermon, 30–1.


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‘just debt’ for the many beneWts trade had brought the British.89 The Dean of Lincoln conceived of the work of the society entirely within the framework of a commercial metaphor. It had been, he said, ‘incorporated . . . to establish, the most beneWcial Commerce with them [our colonies], in Requital for the temporal and perishable Riches which we receive from them; to import to them our spiritual Things, and Treasures which will never perish; and to send them something in Return, besides our Vices and Criminals’.90 Commerce permeated eighteenth-century English culture. It was a term with wider connotations than simply trade. Rather, it was used to mean all the material and cultural advantages that gave Europe, and especially Britain, dominance in the contemporary world. It was synonymous with modernity, material wealth, and competition.91 Conceiving of imperial religion commercially, these preachers were appealing, therefore, to a well-understood contemporary value. At the heart of commerce as a synonym of culture, and central to the empire, lay trade, conceived by these Anglicans as having positive religious dimensions. Dean Stanhope believed that in trade lay the hope of peace for the world, as nations became mutually interdependent. One of the direct beneWts of this should be an increase in English charity expressed in evangelism towards indigenous nations in the colonies. ‘Be the Strangers, with whom we correspond for supply of our own Necessities, of Birth and Climate never so remote; common humanity obliges us to do good, where we receive Good; and some way to service Them, of whom we take such care to serve our Selves.’ Trade was not simply to be commercial gain, because England received more of value than it gave in such trade and these rewards obviated the principle of charity. A genuine Christian commerce ought to proceed upon this principle of charity and supply the spiritual wants of those who increased English temporal comforts. It was this charitable spreading of the gospel that ought to be one of England’s principal commodities. A Charity that labours to enrich them with Wisdom; as much better and more useful, than that which it was formerly the greatest Glory of Navigation to transport; as our Improvements in Sailing have enabled us 89 Edgerton, Sermon, 13–14. 90 George, Sermon, 21. 91 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 2–4.

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to carry it farther; Or rather, a Treasure of Wisdom, which admits of no Comparison. Oh! Were our Zeal for importing this, proportioned to the Richness and Usefulness of the Commodity. Were it agreeable to that Scheme, and to those Principles of doing Good, which the Gospel hath exalted to so high a Degree of perfection; Did it bear any tolerable Resemblance to the Spirit, and the Practice, of the Primitive Christians: Our ignorant and barbarous Chapmen would quickly be convinced, that we seek not only theirs, but Them.92

Boyd Schlenther maintains that the expanding commercial culture of eighteenth-century Britain most directly aVected religion in the North American empire by facilitating colonial religious pluralism and thereby fending oV Anglican and Congregational attempts at monopolistic religious establishment. Trade provided the opportunity for settlement, and consequently the opportunity for religious exile or emigration to the colonies. It also prompted the internal migration within the North American colonies that promoted religious pluralism because trade routes opened up diVerent parts of the country to missionaries and diverse religious groups. But trade could also have negative consequences for religious expansion. The West Indian direct dependence on the slave trade, and the North American indirect dependence on it—due to its West Indian trade—meant that colonial clergy felt themselves prevented from attacking slavery. Therefore, commerce and trade was both an instrument and a moulder of the colonial religious landscape in the eighteenth century.93 In the North American colonies it was the Great Awakening of the mid eighteenth century, according to Schlenther, that was primarily responsible for cementing within religion this culture of commerce. It was a revival that the trading empire of Britain facilitated by the importation of leaders from Britain such as George WhiteWeld, as well as literature, and news of similar revivals in Britain and Europe. In this primeval revival of North American Christianity its leaders demonstrated the inXuence of the commercial world in their adoption of its culture of consumerism and a free market in their outlook and their techniques of evangelism. They used the aggressive advertising of the commercial world, portraying salvation as a commercial 92 Stanhope, Sermon, 13–14. 93 Schlenther, ‘Religious Faith’, 135–7.


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transaction between the individual and God.94 This commercial and individualized Christianity took deep root in North America and, by opposing it, Anglicanism made itself seem foreign. Colonial Anglicanism in the North American colonies demonstrated that the old model of religious life, based on monopolistic parishes and the landed order, would not survive the new commercial culture of colonial religious pluralism.95 But the evidence of the SPG sermons suggests that Boyd Schlenther’s view that commerce, trade, and religion interacted particularly around the period of the Great Awakening needs some modiWcation.96 The inXuence of a commercial paradigm for colonial religion was already present in metropolitan Anglican understanding at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This earlier, Anglican, commercial theology predates the campaigns of George WhiteWeld who, according to Frank Lambert, initiated a successful adaptation of the commercial practices of a rising consumer society in the service of his transatlantic Evangelicalism.97 It is also older than the nineteenth-century link between commerce and Christianity that Brian Stanley found to be a connection between British imperialism and British Evangelical missions.98 The essentially spiritual condition of tenure for their empire as a requirement for its continued colonial wealth that these eighteenthcentury Anglicans constructed necessitated the English also accepting responsibility for the eternal destinies of their colonists. While it is true that generally the SPG preferred to concentrate its resources on the faith of English colonists rather than indigenes, nevertheless that work was understood as also having an evangelistic motive. For most of the SPG Anglicans throughout the eighteenth century, the Christianity of the colonists was regarded as degenerate, or even as disappearing. So Gilbert Burnet could proclaim in 1704 that the most authentic evangelism among the Native Americans would 94 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of North American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 95 Schlenther, ‘Religious Faith’, 135–49, 149. 96 Ibid., 128–30. 97 Frank Lambert, ‘Pedlar in Divinity ’: George WhiteWeld and the Transatlantic Revivals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–51, ch. 2. 98 Brian Stanley, ‘ ‘‘Commerce and Christianity’’: Providence Theory, the Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism of Free Trade 1842–1860’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 71–94.

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be a consequence of them encountering a genuine and morally upright faith among the colonists. However, this was currently unlikely because the colonists generally exhibited ‘a gross Ignorance and a stupid Unconcernedness in every thing that relates to religion’. Leaving England ill-informed in their religion meant that faith among the English colonists, remote from the ecclesiastical means of sustaining it, ‘must wear out and sink to nothing’. The children of such inadequate Christians would be brought up in even greater ignorance of their religion. Consequently, the society needed to invest in schools and books in order to re-evangelize the colonists themselves, before those colonists could, subsequently, convert the Native Americans and the slaves. ‘Our Designs upon Aliens and InWdels must begin in the Instructing and Reforming of our own People.’99 John Williams also spoke of the ‘Degeneracy’ of the faith of the English colonists in America amounting to a ‘shameful apostasie ’ which made numbers of them ‘little better than InWdels’.100 This early shaping of the inWdelity of colonial English identity was reiterated by later London preachers, who variously exclaimed that the colonists ‘retain’d little more than the Name of Christians’;101 had ‘too little regard for religion’ so that it would become ‘extinct’ in a generation or two;102 and that the society had to secure them from falling into ‘irreligion’.103 For others it was not too strong to claim that the American colonists had sunk into ‘Heathenism’, an ignorance of the one true God that was the same as the indigenous preChristian world, with the same consequent corruption of morals.104 This metropolitan Anglican construction of a degenerate colonial identity was also propounded in colonial reports in the decades before the American Revolution. The Revd John in Stratford, New York, wrote that his converts had gone from ‘a loose and very irregular Way of living’ to one of ‘Sobrierty, Virtue and Industry’. Prior to his labouring for converts at Westerley, the people there were without a resident minister and exposed to the numerous versions of Dissent, which had resulted in a population with a ‘Spirit

99 101 103 104

Burnet, Sermon, 19–20. 100 Williams, Sermon, 22–3. Boulter, Sermon, 32. 102 Maddox, Sermon, 20. Henry Stubbing, Chancellor of the Diocese of Salisbury, A Sermon (1741), 20. Francis Hare, Bishop of Chichester, A Sermon (1734), 13.


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of Irreligion and Profaneness’.105 In 1734 the minister at Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, urged the society to appoint a resident priest at Placentia, for they were ‘regardless of all Religion, and a very great many of them abandoned to Atheism and InWdelity’.106 This slide into irreligion was echoed by a fellow missionary itinerating in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He had visited Trent-Town (today’s Trenton, state capital of New Jersey), where there were ‘a great many People there, and having been so long without a Minister among them, many have fallen into InWdelity’.107 Neither was this colonial deterioration limited to the smaller settlements. Dr Cutler in Boston claimed in 1739 that inWdelity was spreading there, largely due to ‘a Disregard to Revelation’, which seems to point to Deism among the educated.108 But the colonial slide into irreligion was most acute on the frontier, as reported by the minister at Providence, Rhode Island, who said he ‘had found a greater Number of People in the Woods, than he could have imagined, destitute of all Religion, and as living without God in the World’.109 Neither was this discourse of colonial regression into unfaithfulness limited to the SPG colonial clergy; it was also bruited abroad by Anglican settlers themselves in the hope of obtaining a resident minister from the society. In 1755 the settlers in the Pennsylvania counties of York and Cumberland petitioned that for want of clergy, ‘Ignorance prevails among them, Superstition creeps in apace, the Lord’s days are vainly and idly spent, their Children Strangers to the publick Worship’.110 The next year the society received similarly argued petitions from George Town and Frankfurt on the Kenneback River, New England, who, as Protestants from Britain, Ireland, France, and Germany, as well as native New Englanders, found it hard to ‘keep alive the Sparks of religion in themselves’. As a consequence ‘their Children must be in evident Danger of falling to the greatest Ignorance and Irreligion’, as well as becoming ‘easy prey to the Popish Missionaries in the Neighbourhood’.111 The Revd Frinke in Augusta, Georgia, in 1766 even suggested that white degeneration had become so pronounced that they were becoming, religiously, little diVerentiated from the native inhabitants. He reported that ‘he has made some Attempts to instill the 105 106 108 110

SPG, Proceedings (1731), 53–4. Ibid., (1734), 62. 107 Ibid., (1735), 46. Ibid., (1739), 40. 109 Ibid., (1744), 44. Ibid., (1755), 52. 111 Ibid., (1760), 37.

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Principles of Christianity into the Checkesaw Indians, but all to no Purpose, while many of the white People are as destitute of a Sense of Religion as the Indians themselves’.112 It was acknowledged that this lack of religion was not entirely the fault of colonial indiVerence, but also sprang from the daily grind for survival on the colonial frontier. Not only were religious resources, such as churches and clergy, lacking in these areas, but there was little leisure or energy left over from the Wght for subsistence to devote to religion. The Dean of Wells maintained in 1733 that the necessities of colonial existence, and the drive to become wealthy and return home, too quickly took over the colonists.113 The Bishop of St David’s agreed, saying in 1749 that ‘among our Brethren in our Colonies Abroad . . . the pressing Calls for immediate Subsistence, and for clearing and cultivating their new Settlement, gave, at least for many Years in their Beginning, little or no leisure to keep alive and maintain, much less improve that Degree, whatever it might be, of Christian Knowledge they brought with them.’114 The colonial SPG clergy continued to share this dim view of many English colonists’ religion. The missionary at Augusta, Georgia, writing in 1767 that he had made some attempt to evangelize the local native people, reported that not only did that avail little, but the local whites also were ‘as destitute of a Sense of Religion as the Indians themselves’.115 Finally, in 1760 the Revd Martin of St Andrew’s parish in South Carolina reported that he had ridden to the backwoods of the colony, where he had found ‘many of the Inhabitants, educated in the Christian principles, sunk into a State of the grossest Ignorance for want of a settled Minister among them’.116 But there was another outlook deriving from the colonies that viewed the white colonists in a more positive light, as successfully struggling to maintain their religious and civilized identity. But this version of colonial life Wgured only intermittently in the SPG’s public presentations, probably because it was not as suited to promoting support for their cause among their English audience. It is also seems evident that, in some cases, this more encouraging view of colonial 112 SPG, Proceedings (1767), 68. 113 Maddox, Sermon, 26–7. 114 Richard Trevor, Bishop of St David’s, A Sermon (1749), 18. 115 SPG, Proceedings (1767), 68. 116 Ibid., (1760), 62.


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religion could have been reported by the society’s clergymen as a gilding of the lily about their own work in order to keep themselves on the payroll. But while giving them the beneWt of the doubt, there did appear to be to an overall disregard of a more positive interpretation of the colonial situation. So the minister at Newcastle, Pennsylvania, on a tour in 1720 of SuVolk County, preached at one settlement where the people had built their own church, ‘notwithstanding their Discouragement for Want of a Minister’.117 In North Carolina in 1722 the SPG clergyman said that he oYciated at six or seven places in the colony to full and numerous congregations, baptizing some 193 people, including Wve adults.118 In the same year at Lewestown, Pennsylvania, the missionary reported that in two out of the three places on his regular itinerary the people had built their own churches before they had any prospect of a minister. Laymen had been appointed to read Morning and Evening Prayer, which had kept the people ‘steady to their Principles’.119 At Bristol, New England, the people had already spent over £1,500 on their church and ‘numerous’ among them attended on a Sunday, including many who, before the arrival of the clergyman, ‘were Strangers to the Liturgy of the Church of England’.120 Dr Cutler in Boston in 1732 reported that for the services he took at Didham some of his congregation rode between ten and Wfteen miles to be present at the monthly Holy Communion.121 But the SPG’s public discourse on the empire, as published in their Proceedings and annual sermons, generally preferred overall to keep to the theme of colonial religious and moral decline. For some it was a fault of the irreligious history of colonial settlement. The Bishop of Gloucester believed the problem was that British colonization had got oV to a good start that went wrong. The priority given to religion by the Wrst Dissenting English to arrive in North America was not continued by their successors, who put their material fortunes far ahead of any interest in religion.122 Two decades later the Bishop of St Asaph drew a similar lesson from colonial history, seeing English settlement as a tawdry record of good intentions about 117 Ibid., (1720), 54. 119 Ibid., 50. 121 Ibid., (1732), 51.

118 Ibid., (1722), 49. 120 Ibid., 52. 122 Benson, Sermon, 18–19.

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the establishment of religion, as evidenced in the various grants and charters of the colonies, which manifestly remained still to be fulWlled by the colonists who went there.123 The reason for this lay in the colonial context that fostered an ‘abandoned way of living’; possibly also, as far as plantations went, from the corrupting experience of exercising absolute command over slaves or, more generally, from the low-lifes, such as convicts, who were transported to the colonies as punishment. ‘National characters are formed by various circumstances; and we may justly attribute a good deal of what is bad in our colonies, to their being peopled on diVerent occasions by many loose, vicious, and lawless persons, destitute of means to live here; and by criminals; who perhaps might be brought into better order, if they were not sold there to private persons, but employed by the publick.’124 So the construction of colonial identity as inferior to that of metropolitan culture, which had been common to imperializing European nations since the sixteenth century, was taken up into this Anglican imperial discourse.125 The consequence of this supposed colonial degeneracy was proclaimed to be not just mere ignorance but a reversal of previous civilization. Without assistance from the SPG the colonists were likely to fall into the same ‘unhappy State of Ignorance and Wickedness’ as the native peoples.126 Too many colonists were ‘sinking into barbarism’ and were a ‘notorious reproach to Christianity’; they must therefore be the object of the society’s primary care if the colonists were not to be an obstacle to the conversion of the Native Americans and slaves with whom they came into contact.127 This mission to white settlers was all the more necessary as these colonial people were British, fellow subjects, who shared the same language and religion as those at the centre of the empire.128

123 Drummond, Sermon, 12–13. 124 Ibid., 21. 125 John H. Eliot, ‘Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World’, in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 8. 126 Maddox, Sermon, 27. 127 Drummond, Sermon, 20. 128 George Berkeley, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations and the Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity (London, 1724), 19; Bishop Anthony Ellis, Bishop of St David’s, A Sermon (1759), 17.


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The preacher for 1731, George Berkeley, then Dean of Londonderry, had just spent three years in North America eagerly awaiting promised funds from Parliament towards a colonial college in Bermuda.129 Returning to Britain after the failure of the funding to materialize, Berkeley continued to lobby for such a college, and shared his experiences with the society in his sermon as a means of doing so. Berkeley maintained that the SPG did make a diVerence to colonial life when it concentrated on the re-evangelization of colonists. [T]oo many of them [colonists] have worn oV a serious sense of all religion. Several indeed of the better sort are accustomed to assemble themselves regularly on the Lord’s Day for the Performance of Divine Worship. But most of these, who are dispersed throughout the Colony, seem to rival some well-bred people of other Countries in a thorough IndiVerence to all that is sacred, being equally careless of outward Worship, and of inward Principles, whether of faith or Practice. Of the Bulk of them it may certainly be said, that they live without the Sacraments, not being so much as baptized: And as for their Morals, I apprehend there is nothing to be found in them that should tempt others to make an Experiment of their Principles, either in Religion or Government. But it must be owned, the general Behaviour of the Inhabitants in those Towns where Churches and Meetings have been long settled, seems so much better, as suYciently to shew the DiVerence, which a solemn regular Worship of God makes between Persons of the same Blood, Temper, and natural Faculties.130

Berkeley was naturally accentuating the positive in order to invigorate funding for his college. His words would have fallen on fertile soil, as his hearers drew the obvious lesson that the mission propagated by the society could indeed redeem colonial society from its potential slide into irreligious barbarism through a provision of the infrastructure for religious life and practice. In addition to religious degeneracy, Anglicans also found the colonial world threatened by religious perversion in the shape of Roman Catholicism, for them an erroneous form of Christianity. This was a more prominent concern to the society’s preachers in the Wrst half of the eighteenth century than in the second. Dean White Kennett was one of the preachers with a long-standing interest in 129 David Berman, George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 102–4. 130 George Berkeley, Dean of Londonderry, A Sermon (1731), 17–18.

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the colonies, and was an active member in the society. In 1711 his sermon gave the most extensive treatment of the relationship between the English and their empire of any of the SPG preachers in the Wrst decades. He chose not to dwell on the blessings England had received from her colonies, but rather to highlight the obstacles in the way of Christian missions among indigenous peoples. The Wrst of these hindrances was due to the Christian nations ‘aVecting Conquest and usurping temporal Dominion, rather than enlarging the Kingdom of Christ’. Kennett maintained that all peoples had a title and hereditary claim upon their native land, and had the right to resist those who sought to conquer them. Too often in Christian history the faith was expanded through martial means and war called holy, Wrst in the crusades and then by the Catholic Spaniards. However, Kennett exempted the English from this abuse of divine justice. Ignoring any English culpability in the decimation of indigenous populations through disease and war, he claimed—using Locke’s conception of colonial territories—that English plantations were established ‘as it were upon Derelict Lands, whereon the former Inhabitants had been well nigh Extinct by Wars and Pestilence, and the Remnant of them had, for the most part, retired into remoter, safer Habitations’.131 Kennett needed to contrast English occupation in the Americas with the Spanish because his Anglican view of imperial mission was driven by the traditional theological trope of a truthful, pure English Protestantism in conXict with a superstitious, erroneous Catholicism—a trope that had operated in Anglicanism since the Reformation.132 Consequently, Kennett constructed an Anglican interpretation of English imperial history that had as its foil an exploitative, rapacious Spanish imperialism. Against this Catholic Spanish empire he maintained an English territorial expansion that did not infringe upon the freehold rights he aYrmed the Native Americans possessed. In a variant of Locke’s argument, Kennett maintained that the English only took over lands left abandoned by their former owners who had Xed to places of greater safety further 131 Kennett, A Sermon, 5–11. 132 See for example Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).


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inland, or had died from pestilence. It was an Anglican construction of English imperialism that ignored English dispossession of native peoples in seventeenth-century America. So English plantations were upheld as benevolent, acknowledging the property of the original inhabitants by entering into commercial alliance with them, and fairly purchasing their land. According to Kennett, whereas Spanish imperialism was military invasion, the English version was peaceful and just; a commercial transaction with the original owners of the land. This Anglican narrative of England’s empire permitted Kennett to maintain in a new imperial context the old national theological motif of English Protestant righteousness and superiority over Catholicism. This theological superiority could be reconstructed for the eighteenth century as English moral commercialism over Spanish oppressive militarism in the English imperialism these Anglicans were promulgating. But Kennett also aYrmed the superiority of religion over commerce in his view of imperialism. When trade became an end in itself it resulted in planters putting material gain ahead of the glory of God and ‘the good of souls’. As a consequence, English imperial beneWcence could lose its identity and become like its Spanish rival, where missionary endeavours were subjugated to the rapaciousness of imperial oYcials and colonists. When planters prevented the conversion of slaves, lest their value be eroded, and traders incited native peoples to war in order to acquire slaves more cheaply, the purity of English Protestant imperialism became dangerously elided into its Spanish Catholic opposite.133 Just three years after Kennett’s sermon the Wrst missionary’s report of traders’ hostility to the society’s mission was published, so it is likely that Kennett already knew of it in 1711. Mr Andrews, missionary among the Mohawks, told his London sponsors of neighbouring traders who presented his work as teaching the Mohawks ‘a Popish Religion’ as a cover for stealing their lands. This hostility, claimed Andrews, was a consequence of his opposition to the rum traYc and to Sunday trading.134 Unjust and dishonest transactions with the indigenous people threatened the loss of an English imperial identity as morally Protestant. To associate the Protestant faith with commercial malpractice 133 Kennett, Sermon, 12–17.

134 SPG, Proceedings (1714), 56–7.

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and deceit alienated indigenous peoples and transmuted the religion of the English so that it became like that of the Catholic missions in their perWdious treachery.135 English abuse of indigenous populations by force and cruelty, which Kennett reluctantly admitted did exist, also associated English Christianity with its Spanish contradiction. For Kennett, such abuses hindered mission by tainting Christianity with persecution rather than persuasion.136 Finally, immorality among the English, which had introduced the Native Americans to drunkenness, cursing and swearing, gambling, luxury and avarice, also placed English colonial Christianity in jeopardy by its contradiction of the gospel. These things convicted English Christianity of guilt by association with the anti-gospel immoralities of Catholic Spanish imperialism.137 One of the Wrst reported letters from a missionary in the society’s published Proceedings also denigrated Roman missionary practices. In 1713 one of the missionaries claimed Roman Catholic priests either baptized without instruction, or cajoled converts by threats or bribes. It seemed to vindicate the traditional anti-Catholicism of the Anglicans, though the information came not from the missionary but from his Dutch interpreter, who may well have been giving the colonially inexperienced clergyman what the interpreter knew he wanted to hear, or what he himself, as a Protestant, also believed.138 Even into the mid and later eighteenth century, the society’s North American missionaries were still warning of dangerous competition from Roman Catholic priests. In Newfoundland in 1744 the minister urged the society to supply a Protestant schoolmaster to oVer an alternative for the large number of children currently attending the local Catholic school and consequently ‘in great Danger of imbibing the corruptions of Popery’.139 In 1760 the Provost of the Church of England College in Philadelphia, which had been established in 1749 with the initial support of the usually anti-religious Benjamin Franklin,140 lumped together Roman Catholics and Quakers as causes of perversion to the settlers in his bid for the appointment of a missionary at Reading, Pennsylvania.141

135 137 139 141

SPG, Proceedings 17–22. 136 Ibid., 22–6. Ibid., 27–30. 138 Ibid., (1713), 46. Ibid., (1744), 46. 140 Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism, 210–11. SPG, Proceedings (1761), 56.


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So anti-Catholicism played a major role in the early construction of an Anglican imperialism. Catholicism—whether that of Spain, with its long history of New World missions, or (in North America) of France—was a powerful ‘other’ for Anglicanism in this period. This clear-cut imperial new world, constructed by Anglicans of light and darkness, Christians and non-Christians, was only made murky by the ambiguously Christian presence of Catholic missions. Dean Willis’s 1702 sermon particularly highlighted as a motive for mission the reproach that fell on the English Church from the older Roman Catholic missions. He expressed the hope ‘that it shall never more be said, that they of the Church of Rome are more Zealous to promote Superstition and Idolatry in the World, than we are to promote the true, uncorrupted Religion of Jesus Christ’.142 He therefore encouraged his hearers to Wnancial generosity to remedy this ‘defect’, which he called a ‘reproach’ to their church and nation. Rome, as the antithesis of a Christian and benevolent Anglicanism, was also held up by Bishop John Williams in 1705, when he made a connection between English religion and English identity by observing that the lack of missions was a standing reproach to them not only as Protestants but also as ‘English-Men’. This was an Anglican imperial antithesis that would serve again later in the century, when the principal colonial rival became France rather than Spain. Bishop Henry Edgerton of Norwich in 1728 urged the society’s supporters to be provoked further by Catholic missionaries spreading ‘Error, Superstition and Idolatry’.143 Bishop Benson in 1739 believed that as the English had freed themselves from popery so they had a duty to spread this deliverance throughout the world by promoting ‘Primitive Christianity’, a common metaphor for the ecclesiastical and doctrinal purity of the Church of England.144 The best of all possible Christian worlds epitomized by this conWdent Anglicanism was not only threatened by Rome but also by Protestant Dissent among the North American colonists. This became a major theme of the SPG’s missionaries during the 1730s and 1740s, with further alarms raised by the enthusiasm of the Evangelical Revival there in the latter decade. It was a patchwork picture of 142 Willis, Sermon, 21–2. 144 Benson, Sermon, 21.

143 Edgerton, Sermon, 19.

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push and shove from these colonial reports. In the 1730s reports were coming in of successful Anglican proselytism among Dissenters, for example in the Carolinas, Long Island, and Rhode Island.145 But from 1740 the society began to receive reports of the inroads of Revivalism, which at Wrst seemed to be beneWt rather than bane. While the Revd Isaac Brown in Brook Haven, New York, reported on the telling eVects of Barclay’s Apology for the Quakers, which had recently arrived and was becoming inXuential among his people,146 the missionary at Stratford, New England, believed his people remained immune from the variety of itinerant Revivalist preachers. These, he said, had scared the settlers with ‘their dismal Out-cries, that their Bodies have been frequently aVected with surprizing Convulsions, and Agitations; and these Convulsions have sometimes seized on those, who come, as mere Spectators, and are no Friends to the new Methods, even without their Minds being at all infected’. Portraying the new religious Revivalism as a disease, the Revd Johnson reported that three or four families had turned to the Church of England as a remedy against such contamination.147 As well as disordered bodies, other clergymen told of the moral disorder generated by Revival becoming a cause of Dissenters turning to the Church of England. In Jamaica, Long Island, the Revd Colgan claimed his church was in a Xourishing condition because of the backlash against the immoral practices of enthusiastic preachers, which corresponded with the experience of his colleague in Stratford who also spoke of these revivalists’ antinomianism.148 But other reports suggested greater Revivalist inroads into colonial Anglicanism. In Chester, Pennsylvania, while maintaining that his people persevered in ‘Religious Principles’, the priest also admitted that a month before he had ridden forty miles to Pequea, where he found that some parishioners had ‘grown giddy brained with Methodism, and had refused to come to Church’, though he had had some success among those he had been able to talk with.149 145 SPG, Proceedings (1730), 91; Ibid., (1731), 45; Ibid., (1734), 58, 60. 146 Ibid., (1740), 52. This was probably the work of the Scottish Quaker apologist, Robert Barclay (1648–1690), published originally in Latin in 1676, with an English version, Apology for the True Christian Religion, as the Same is Set Forth and Preached by the People Called in Scorn ‘Quakers’ (1678). 147 SPG, Proceedings (1742), 41–2. 148 Ibid., 47. 149 Ibid., 51.


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The missionary at Radnor in Pennsylvania admitted that people had left the Church of England to follow enthusiastic preachers, but they had now returned.150 Ironically, one of the Dissenting ministers in Pennsylvania was reported by the clergyman at Chester to have expressed his gratitude that he had so many Church of England people in his congregation because they were not prone to give themselves up to the ‘wild Notions and enthusiastical Ravings’ of the Revivalists.151 The itinerant missionary in New England admitted that Enthusiasm had unsettled many people ‘from all sober and steady Principles, that great prophaneness and Disregard for the instituted means of Grace appear’, and that he had been unsuccessful in reversing this loss.152 By 1743 the SPG in London was reXecting an increasing anxiety about the disorder created by the Revival. The letters it received from New England pointed to ‘the wild Doings of Enthusiasm’. Their New England commissary, writing from Boston, spoke of how people were being consumed by the eVects of the doctrines of WhiteWeld and his followers. These prevailed chieXy in country towns. However, to that point the Church of England had escaped such disturbances. But increasing disruption to the gendered and social order of colonial society was clearly disturbing to these reporters, as ‘not only Teachers, but Taylors, Shoemakers, and other Mechanicks, and even Women, Boys and Girls, were become (as their Term is) Exhorters’.153 Enthusiasm was a ‘Contagion’, an ‘Infection’, a ‘Phrenzy.’154 However, after the 1740s the ensuing decades returned to the more familiar story of either good relations between the Church and Dissent, or of Dissenters inclining to the Church of England,155 so that by the second half of the century the metropolitan Anglican leadership came to the comforting—though misguided—view that the threat of a new Enthusiasm had been largely seen oV. But the new imperial world of the Anglicans, threatened as it was by prominent Catholic missions and enthusiastic Dissent, was not just populated by heathen natives and near-heathen colonists. 150 Ibid., 52. 151 Ibid., (1743), 50. 152 Ibid., (1744), 44. 153 Ibid., (1743), 40–1. 154 Ibid., 42. 155 For example, at Hebron, New England, ibid. (1761), 48–9; and at Rye, New York, ibid. (1762), 51.

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There were also the increasing numbers of black slaves who made their way into the consciousness of a number of the society’s preachers; once there, the slaves’ condition was constantly excused. Neither did any of the SPG Anglicans ever think to question the ontology that posited a genuine diVerence between black and white humans. They merely accepted that there were blacks; that they were diVerent from whites; and that they were slaves in the British colonies, though they did raise some questions about what exactly that diVerence amounted to. England had been trying to muscle into the lucrative Atlantic slave trade since the sixteenth century, and by the late seventeenth century was the major European slave trader. By the same period, African slaves had replaced white indentured servants as the principal labour force for Britain’s Caribbean and North American colonies.156 From its beginning the SPG and its preachers accepted slavery as a given, though it wrestled throughout the century with a dialectic between the ideas of slaves as human beings and as economic chattels. In 1705 John Williams justiWed slavery as a historic reality in most parts of the world. It was an economic necessity that God permitted because of the sinfulness of human nature. However, in return for allowing slavery the commercial God of the English expected a return on divine leniency by way of conversions. Williams went on to assert that there was a duty on slave owners to take care of their slaves’ souls by instructing them in Christianity. This would, according to Williams, make slaves ‘altogether’ like their masters, except for the massively signiWcant reality of their slavery.157 Slavery, Bishop Beveridge proclaimed in 1706, would never have been suVered by God unless it was because God designed that the Negroes should thereby be brought to Christian faith. That being accomplished, the newly Christianized slaves could be sent back to Africa to preach Christ to their own nations. If those who enriched themselves in the slave trade to the plantations did not agree to uphold their part of this divine bargain by promoting the gospel among their slaves, then they could expect providential penalties; ‘they have little Reason to expect God’s Blessing upon what they have gotten’.158 156 David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660– 1807’, in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, 440, 456. 157 Williams, Sermon, 19–20. 158 Beveridge, Sermon, 20–1.


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The conclusion in Williams’s sermon that conversion meant that slaves became like their masters (with the notable exception of their slavery) was made more explicit by Bishop Fleetwood in 1710. An ardent Whig and gifted preacher, he castigated the near universal neglect of Christian instruction on English plantations. Fleetwood aYrmed the common humanity of the slaves with their masters, a view grounded in their common creation and redemption by Christ. Speaking more hopefully than realistically of the slave-owners’ attitudes towards their slaves, Fleetwood declaimed, ‘They see them equally the Workmanship of God, with themselves, endued with the same Faculties, and intellectual Powers; Bodies of the same Flesh and Blood, and Souls as certainly Immortal: These people were made to be as Happy as themselves, and are as capable of being so . . . They were bought with the same Price, purchased with the same Blood of Christ, their common Saviour and Redeemer.’159 This aYrmation of a common created humanity and divine redemption between slave and master was also the theme of the last of the preachers during Queen Anne’s reign. Dean George Stanhope, in 1713, rhetorically addressing the slave owners, asked: ‘Is it nothing to you, that they are created by the same God, formed of the same Flesh and Blood, descended from the same common Ancestor, endued with the Same Souls, for the same Capacities of immortal Happiness . . . [and] also are redeemed by the same Precious Ransom.’160 Consequently, the beneWts of salvation by way of conversion and baptism should be freely given to those whose undeniably human nature was reduced to such a piteous condition. A good Man will Wnd but too much Ground for Grief and Pity, but none at all for Neglect, Contempt, or inhuman Treatment, even in the meanest and most abject of his own Species. He will observe, with Holy Indignation, the wretched Degeneracy of Human nature, when uncultivated and left to itself; and be very solicitous to restore it to its due Honour. He will lament the uncontrolled Usurpation and Tyranny of the Prince of Darkness; and be zealous in making Reprisals for that God, whose kinder Providence hath not left him, in the same forlorn Condition.161 159 William Fleetwood, Bishop of St Asaph, A Sermon (1711), 15–16. 160 In 1708 Sir William Dawes also urged the importance of mission on the basis of the common humanity of all races of the world. The English were, he argued, obliged to undertake this work not just as Christians but as human beings to other human beings. Dawes, Sermon, 10. 161 Stanhope, Sermon, 24.

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This was not the positing of a common identity based upon an early Enlightenment conception of a general humanity,162 but rather a theological view founded upon the belief that all humanity had a common root stock in Adam and Eve. What human beings throughout the world consequently shared was their creation by God going back to these parents of all humanity. This common divinely given origin was accentuated in the equally universal redemption oVered to all persons and peoples in Jesus Christ. These early SPG preachers seem only too aware of the conXict between this theological commonality and the actual chasm between master and slave. They consequently argued their way out of the conXict by positing the diVerence as merely economic; one that could be bridged by conversion which, while leaving the economic subordination in place, placed the two on a theologically equal level as redeemed human persons. Neither was the religious condition of slaves as human beings on British plantations of concern among Anglicans only to SPG preachers. In 1727 Bishop Edmund Gibson of London, whose inXuence with Robert Walpole led to him being dubbed ‘Walpole’s pope’, wrote a public letter to plantation owners supporting the evangelism of their slaves.163 As Bishop of London, Gibson had a customary responsibility for Anglicans overseas and in the plantations, which he entered into with customary zeal for his own responsibilities. He turned this into a royal commission issued under the Great Seal in October 1726, and reissued in 1728.164 However, his great industry in seeking to establish jurisdiction over colonial clergy was nulliWed by its impossibility due to distance, colonial opposition from more powerful laymen on vestries, and weak colonial churches.165 The bishop was conWned to issuing 162 For some of the ingredients of this generalized human nature see Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), ch. 7. 163 Edmund Gibson, Two Letters of the Bishop of London, the First, to the Masters and Mistresses of Families in the English Plantations Abroad; Exhorting Them to Encourage and Promote the Instruction of their Negroes in the Christian Faith. The Second, to the Missionaries There; Directing Them to Distribute the Said Letter, and Exhorting Them to Give their Assistance toward the Instruction of the Negroes within Their Several Parishes (London, 1727). 164 Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London 1669–1748: A Study in Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 337–9. 165 Ibid., 341–2.


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licences, appointing toothless commissaries, and oVering advice and admonition to clergy through a weighty correspondence. This ineVective energy was redoubled when he replaced the senile Archbishop Wake as acting president of the SPG until the appointment of John Potter to Canterbury in 1737. Appalled by the lack of progress of the Church of England among the plantation slaves, Gibson appealed to male and female slave owners on the basis that slaves were not on a level with beasts but were human men and women. They had ‘the same Frame and Faculties’ as their owners, with ‘Souls capable of being made eternally happy, and Reason and Understanding to receive Instruction in order to it’.166 As if that aYrmation of a human identity were not enough, Gibson also published a further address, calling upon all serious Christians to support the work of the society to enable catechists to work among the slaves. He asked his British and colonial readers to remember that the blacks ‘were truly a part of our nation, living under the same Government with ourselves, and contributing much by their labour to the support of our Government, and the increase of the trade and wealth of the kingdom’.167 The same human ontology was aYrmed by the Bishop of Lincoln, four decades later in 1768, for whom the Negro slaves were ‘partakers with us of the same nature’, and although steeped in ignorance and gross superstition they were entitled as fellow humans to be treated humanely.168 Unfortunately this metropolitan Anglican construction of colonial society in which owners were identiWed as sharing a common humanity with their slave chattels was not an approach likely to endear the SPG or its missions to the slave-owning societies of the West Indies or the American colonies. In 1729 the missionary at Lewes, Pennsylvania, reported that since the distribution of the bishop’s letter he had received permission from slave owners to instruct a few slaves, just nine black adults and some children.169 Another colleague, in 1730, reported being unable to do anything to meet requests for baptism from blacks. Those applying showed every sign of having a knowledgeable and practising Christian faith but he could do nothing because they had no permission from their owners, 166 167 168 169

Gibson, Letter to Masters, 25. Quoted in Sykes, Edmund Gibson, 365. Green, Sermon, 19. SPG, Proceedings (1729), 41–2.

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despite the whites having had the bishop’s letter.170 For these slaveowners, maintenance of a belief in a fundamental, ontological diVerence between themselves and their slaves was essential to the maintenance of their unequal society. They thus clung grimly to the notion of the brute, sub-human black. They did so because they feared anything that made black people akin to the European would threaten the whole notion of there being an ontological diVerence between the inferior black ‘species’ and the superior white, which was requisite for the maintenance of racial slavery.171 This metropolitan ecclesiastical view of British slavery was also unlikely to make any headway in the colonies because in these societies the slave owners were too powerful, especially in the colonial Church of England. Institutionally, that church was weak in the North American and West Indian colonies. It lacked any strong local ecclesiastical authority by way of bishops, senior clergy, or church courts. This deWciency created a vacuum of power that was quickly and permanently Wlled by the lay elites who were the same people who owned the plantations and the slaves. The metropolitan church was simply too far away to make its writ run against the overweening power of the laity in colonial parishes and vestries. Consequently, one historian of American slavery has observed that no Anglican attack on slavery could be made eVective. The scant resources of the SPG were swamped by the needs of white colonial society, even if most of its clergy had been inclined (which they were not) to attend to converting the blacks.172 From the beginning SPG colonial reports demonstrate an acute sensitivity to the local power of the slave owners, who, colonial missionaries knew, were the key to the success or failure of the sporadic attempts by some of the society’s clergy to work for conversions among the slave population. Around 1702 the Revd Samuel Thomas had been sent to Goose Creek, South Carolina—one of the largest rural towns in that colony—where he began Christian instruction for many slaves. But in 1706 he died of fever after a period 170 SPG, Proceedings (1730), 93–4. 171 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 183–4. 172 Ibid., 206–8; Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism, 70.


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in England.173 The Wrst colonial report to mention slaves in the SPG’s published Proceedings, in 1713, was from the Revd Ebenezer Taylor of St Andrew’s parish, South Carolina, who felt a sense of Christian responsibility for catechizing Native Americans and black slaves in his parish. He reported a lack of cooperation from the slavemasters in his work. However, he spoke of the initiative of a Mrs Lila Haigne, who had lately arrived in the plantation, and of her companion, a Mrs Edwards, who had made what he termed ‘extraordinary Pains’ to give Christian instruction to a considerable number of slaves. This had resulted, he claimed, in ‘wonderful success’, so that in six months time he had been able to catechize the slaves who had been able to answer his formal question, ‘Who Christ was’ with ‘He is the Son of God, and Saviour of the World’. They could also recite the Apostles Creed, Ten Commandments, and Lord’s Prayer. Consequently, Taylor had baptized fourteen of them. He remained cautiously hopeful the example of these two gentlewomen would be followed by other male and female slave owners.174 The following year, Dr le Jau, rector of St James’s, Goose Creek, South Carolina, reported that he had baptized Wve black adults and three children, and admitted seven adults to Holy Communion, along with one conversion of a formerly Roman Catholic slave woman from Guadeloupe. All this had been done with their masters’ consent. In an obvious publicity ploy in these published Proceedings to encourage similar examples among the white plantation owners, he said he had received no complaints about these converted slaves but rather commendation from their masters for their faithfulness.175 Viewing this slave-owning world through theological lenses, while it aYrmed the slaves’ humanity, could also result in a wilful deconstruction of the known brutalities of the slave trade by subordinating them to the goal of Christian conversion. So while Williams in his 1705 sermon aYrmed the humanity of slaves, he also rejoiced in the opportunities that the complete powerlessness and subjugation of the slaves’ condition provided opportunities for conversions by the society. ‘Here we may reasonably expect a greater Success in the 173 Shawn Comminey, ‘The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and Black Education in South Carolina, 1702–1764’, Journal of Negro History, 84 (1999), 361–2. 174 SPG, Proceedings (1713), 45. 175 Ibid., (1714), 63.

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Conversion of such, than of natives, because they are wholly in the Power of their Masters, and not in a Condition to refuse whatever they demand of them.’176 Bishop Gibson believed that common humanity did not permit slaves who were human to be treated cruelly as brutes. However, he blithely maintained, ‘the greatest hardships that the most severe master can inXict upon them, is not to be compar’d to the Cruelty of keeping them in a State of Heathenism’.177 The consciousness of slaves and slavery became acute for the society and its preachers from 1710, when the leading Barbados plantation owner, General Christopher Codrington, bequeathed his slave estates to the society.178 In that year this ambiguous gift caused the preacher, Fleetwood of St Asaph, to make explicit reference to the situation the society found itself in. This bequest meant there was an imperative, said Fleetwood (whose espousal of toleration led him to defend in England Christian liberty as an inalienable right),179 not to free their slaves but to make them Christian. Without any sense of contradiction between his domestic and his imperialist viewpoints, he ironically he went on to assert the potential identity of the society’s slaves as Christ’s ‘free-men’. The Servants of this Society shall be, assuredly, the Lord’s Free-Men, whatever else their Condition shall be in this World; and yet, I hope, even that will be changed a good deal for the better. They must be Christians, and they will be treated too as such, i.e. with all the Mercy and Good Nature that can well be shewn, conWdently with their continuing Useful and Laborious Servants, which certainly are things that may be tolerably reconciled.180

Five decades later the society’s preacher was still appealing for the society to make its estates exemplary models of Christian slave owning, arguing that such ownership by the society was a providential 176 Williams, A Sermon, 21–2. 177 Gibson, Letter to Masters, 21–4. 178 The bequest was intended by Codrington to fund a college devoted to the study of divinity and medicine, whose graduates would undertake missionary work in the West Indies and live under the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Perhaps such popish notions were the result of Codrington’s retirement in 1703 from his post of Captain-General of the Leeward Islands to spend the rest of his life studying metaphysics and church history; clearly a religiously unsettling combination! Nina Langley, Christopher Codrington and his College (London: SPCK, 1964). 179 Abbey, The English Church and its Bishops, vol. 1, 120–1. 180 Fleetwood, Sermon, 33.


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opportunity to initiate a lenient regime that would soften the hardship and misery of the society’s slaves. However, once again it was moderation in the treatment of slaves that was the desired end for this preacher, not emancipation. Freedom only occurred when death removed the slaves’ bondage to the society. As men, it will become us to soften the misery and hardships of that servitude, in which these poor Africans are placed; to treat them with all the lenity, which such a state will admit; and though we proWt by their labour, not to impose on them such hard and rigorous tasks, as are injurious to health and incompatible with any degree of self-enjoyment . . . to animate their hopes under the hardships they suVer, with the prospect not indeed of returning, as they imagine, to their own, but of being removed to that better country.181

Such pleading for their own plantation to become an exemplary humanitarian and Christian slave owner was necessary because the society’s estates continued throughout the eighteenth century to be like any other West Indian plantation in its treatment of its slaves. There were few genuine conversions and little in the way of the humanitarian leniency advocated by its metropolitan owners, owing to local planter power and opposition and the society’s ineVectual and collusive campaign to win that colonial power over.182 Codrington slaves worked under coercion and the whip and had ‘Society’ branded onto their chests with red-hot irons to indicate ownership and make escape more diYcult.183 Notwithstanding the continuing oppressive conditions on their own plantations, the society’s preachers continued throughout the eighteenth century to see slavery as an opportunity for evangelism, though there was only a very intermittent amount of this in actual colonial fact. The Revd Hunt, in St John’s parish, South Carolina, dismally reported in 1724 that while there were above 1,400 slaves in his parish he knew of only one who was baptized.184 Even the 181 John, Sermon, 20–1. 182 Harry J. Bennett Jr., ‘The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s Plantations and the Emancipation Crisis’, in Samuel Clyde McCulloch (ed.), British Humanitarianism: Essays Honoring Frank J. Klingberg (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1950), 17–19. 183 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 472. 184 SPG, Proceedings (1724), 41.

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dedicated catechist to the blacks in New York in 1720 could only point to Wfty-Wve adults and twenty children under instruction in the previous two years.185 The attitude of the Revd Barnet in Brunswick, North Carolina, may have been widespread. Reporting on the growth of New Light Baptists in his parish, he mentioned with incredulity that these Dissenters permitted ‘even Negroes [to] speak in their Meetings’.186 Clearly a converted or a freed slave had more opportunities for involvement, and even leadership, in some of these Revivalist congregations than among the Anglicans, which cannot have made the latter any more attractive to those the society’s clergy were seeking to convert. By mid-century there was only sporadic reporting on any engagement with the black slaves, apart from the New York catechist. What mention of slaves that did occur invariably spoke of the obstacles placed in the way of those interested clergy by the hostility or indiVerence of the plantation owners. Of all the eighteenth-century Anglican obstacles to evangelization on slave plantations the most important was to disconnect baptism from civil liberty. The West Indian and Virginian planters had sustained a long campaign against any suggestion in common law that baptism entitled a slave to freedom, and were Wrmly of the opinion, for that reason, that religious instruction was against their interests. They had good reason in law to worry because, in 1656, the daughter of a slave in Virginia had successfully sued for her freedom on the grounds of her baptism. Consequently, the Virginia Assembly ruled in 1667 that ‘the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of a person as to his bondage or freedom’.187 A contemporary observer of planter society in Barbados in the same year commented upon the reluctance of planters to permit their slaves to be baptized, because of fears this would involve their slaves’ emancipation.188 In 1680 Barbadian planters passed a memorandum in their assembly opposing the religious instruction of their slaves on the basis that this would have to be done in English; as a result, slaves would have a common language, which could remove one method of insurance against rebellion maintained by the diversity of native languages among them.189 In addition to language, in plantation colonies 185 SPG, Proceedings (1720), 53. 186 Ibid., (1767), 67. 187 Blackburn, New World Slavery, 251. 188 Ibid., 232. 189 Ibid., 346.


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Christianity had become another means of demarcating whites from slaves, so that to be Christian was to be white. Christianity was therefore a way of sustaining diVerences between the two groups. It demarcated the superiority of the whites because it was they who espoused a higher religion, which further justiWed enslavement of blacks not just as brutes but as religiously inferior and immoral. So the Virginian assembly enacted in 1680 that ‘if any Negroe or other slave shall presume to lift up his hand in opposition to any Christian’ the punishment was thirty lashes on a naked back.190 It was not felt necessary for the law to spell out that Christians were assumed to be white; the implication was taken for granted. Consequently, it is the judgement of a recent historian of slavery’s history in the New World that the notion that baptized slaves or their children should be oVered emancipation had been defeated in every plantation colony by the late seventeenth century.191 It became abundantly clear to the eighteenth-century SPG metropolitan advocates of evangelization that any hope of conversion among slaves meant reassuring slave owners that they were not going to lose their valuable property thereby. As early as 1713 the catechist Elias Neau was reporting from New York that his instruction of slaves was limited not only by their own indisposition to receive what he was oVering, but also by the ‘cold indiVerence’ of their masters. There was, he said, among the settlers generally ‘a horrid Notion, as if the Christian knowledge would be a means to make their slaves more cunning, and apter to wickedness than they are’. In 1724 the ministers at Goose Creek and at Christ Church, South Carolina, both reported on the dismal prospects for success in converting slaves, black or native, against the prevailing indiVerence or objection of their owners.192 At Bristol, New England, the clergyman reported that he had sundry blacks apply to him for baptism who could already give a good account of their own Christian faith, even beyond what he would have expected, and whose lives conformed to that profession. However, he said, ‘I am not permitted to comply with their Requests, and my own Duty, being forbid by their Masters’.193 At St George’s, South Carolina, the same ‘aversion’ to 190 Ibid., 258. 191 Ibid., 329. 192 SPG, Proceedings (1724), 41–2.

193 Ibid., (1730), 93–4.

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Christian instruction of blacks was reported in 1740 among leading planters.194 Whether hostility or indiVerence, the result was the same. In 1758 the Revd Clarke, rector of St Phillip’s, Charlestown, wrote that the black school there was full of children and well attended. But due to the ‘great Negligence of the white People in general in regard to the Blacks, there is not so much as one Civil Establishment in the Colony for the Christian Instruction of Wfty Thousand Negroe Slaves’.195 The response of the SPG preachers and other metropolitan Anglicans was to disavow any idea that baptism meant liberty for slaves. The Bishop of Chichester, just four years after the society’s foundation, stated frankly ‘I know nothing as to Christianity that alters men’s Rights for the sake of it; but such as they were, so they remain till alter’d by a humane law’.196 In 1727 Bishop Gibson of London was reinforcing the same position for colonial slave owners, conWdently claiming ‘Christianity and the embracing of the Gospel, does not make the least alteration in Civil Property . . . but in all these Respects, it continues persons just in the same State as it found them’. For Gibson, the freedom Christianity bestowed on converts was a spiritual freedom without any connotations whatsoever for a person’s ‘outward Condition’.197 In 1754 the preacher still maintained it was a ‘vulgar error, that Christianity makes them free’, which had been so often ‘obviated by the Plantation-laws, by the justest meanings upon the laws of the Realm, and the laws of the Gospel’.198 But the society’s push for the evangelism of slaves was not just about eliminating the negative objections to Christianization; it was also keen to accentuate the positive outcomes of conversion. Far from being a threat to a slave society, Christianity should prove a boon to it. John Williams in 1706 had proclaimed that conversion was an added security in a slave-owning society because Christianity facilitated control of slaves by increasing their respect and obedience for those set over them in the Lord. And if a kind Usage goes along with the Instruction . . . it cannot but work upon them, and prepare them for such Instructions as shall be dictated to 194 SPG, Proceedings (1740), 57. 195 Ibid., (1758), 50. 196 Williams, Sermon, 20. 197 Gibson, Letter to Masters, 21–2. 198 Drummond, Sermon, 19.


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them by a merciful and well-natured Superior . . . How much would this alter the Conditions of these Plantations (where these poor Slaves are mostly employed) when they shall from the Principle of religion, Obey in all things their Masters according to the Flesh, not with Eye-service, Men-pleasers, but in Singleness of heart, fearing God. Col. 3.22 What a security will this be to their Masters, when those they now fear more than an Enemy, are in one and the same Interest; when there will be a mutual Trust and ConWdence, and they that are now watched and guarded for Fear of doing Mischief, shall be a safe-guard to the Masters for preventing it.199

Conversion would result, therefore, in slaves becoming ‘more faithful Servants’;200 the ‘Prospect of future Happiness would make their present Servitude more easy: The Instructions of Christianity would correct those evil dispositions, Falsehood, Sullenness, Revenge, and Cruelty, which are too often found among them’.201 As proof of the pudding Bishop Secker in 1740 was pleased to be able to claim that in a recent slave rebellion in New York just two of the rebels had received any Christian instruction, and the only baptized slave was soon after found to be innocent. The lesson was clear; Christian slaves were unlikely to be rebels, having had the godly instruction of the virtue of obedience and the sin of rebellion inculcated into them by the society’s catechists. If this was supported by a more humane treatment then their baptized state would be found by proprietors to be signiWcantly better commercially than their previous Heathenism. Christianity, said Secker, was in the self-interest of proprietors; it could be commercially useful. It would train slaves in Christian virtue, which reduced rebelliousness and intractability, and promoted proWtable traits such as ‘Industry and Frugality’, ‘Temperance and Honesty’.202 However, from the late 1740s there are indications that some among the society’s metropolitan supporters were becoming uneasy about the slave trade. This discomfort predates the generally accepted beginnings of the British anti-slavery movement in the 1760s,203 and suggests that some eighteenth-century Anglican consciences were not completely stilled by their humanitarian advocacy of a more lenient 199 Ibid., 33. 200 Smalbroke, Sermon, 37. 201 Maddox, Sermon, 28–9. 202 Ibid., 20–1. 203 J.R. Ward, ‘The British West Indies in the Age of Abolition, 1748–1815’, in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, 425.

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slave regime. Most preachers had long condemned the brutality of slave conditions in the plantations, calling for treatment of slaves in keeping with their position as men and women. But now some of these Anglicans also appeared to be acknowledging that the trade in slaves was morally questionable, even if it was regrettably necessary to the economic survival of the plantation agriculture. So the Bishop of St David’s in 1749 asserted that the slaves had a just claim for compensation by way of being brought the gospel, because they were ‘by a sort of TraYck not easy to be vindicated, being reduced to a State of bodily Slavery for the Purposes of our Colonies’.204 In 1755 the Bishop of Norwich acknowledged the trade was ‘a branch of commerce, which carries with it a reXection upon human nature, and is founded upon the misery and wretchedness of a large part of mankind’. But he went on to hope that the same trade could work for the purposes of benevolence and religion if only the owners would permit the slaves to be evangelized.205 Bishop Warburton dwelt at some length on the slave trade in his sermon in 1766. He admitted that the trade was a means whereby ‘vast Multitudes’ were ‘stolen’ for the purposes of being ‘sacriWced by the Colonists to their great idol, the GOD of GAIN’, and denounced the slave owners as ‘worshippers of Mammon’ who clung outrageously to the notion of human beings as their property. Gracious God! to talk (as in herds of cattle) of Property in rational Creatures! Creatures endowed with all our Faculties, possessing all our qualities but that of Colour; our BRETHREN both by Nature and Grace, shocks all the feelings of humanity, and the dictates of common sense. But alas! what is there in the inWnite abuses of Society which does not shock them! Yet nothing is more certain in itself, and apparent to all, than that the infamous traYc for Slaves, directly infringes both divine and moral Law. Nature created man, free: and Grace invites him to assert his Freedom.206

But he excused the SPG itself as a slave owner, seeing it as an ‘innocent partaker of the fruits of this iniquitous traYc’ by virtue of its unsought endowment of the Codrington estates. Given the vehemence of his former language he concluded tamely, by simply 204 Trevor, Sermon, 20–1. 205 Thomas Hayter, Bishop of Norwich, A Sermon (1755), 21. 206 Warburton, Sermon, 25–6.


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challenging the society to become God’s instrument of producing good out of evil by redressing the inhumanity and impiety of the planters’ conduct ‘within the limits of our own property’. So even this diatribe against slavery and the slave trade fell short of lifting the SPG’s slave discourse onto the level of emancipation.207 By 1787 British abolitionists had gathered suYcient momentum to launch a public movement for the end of the African slave trade. The campaign climaxed in 1807 when abolition of the trade was enacted, and in 1833 when slavery itself was outlawed in the British Empire. It brought together various sections of British society, including radical and Evangelical politicians, organized Evangelicalism, and some High Churchmen. Consequently, from the 1780s the society found itself under increasing attack from abolitionists for being a slave owner. Its response was the continued advocacy of a programme of reform without abolition. In 1783 Bishop Beilby Porteus of Chester, who would become Bishop of London in 1787, speaking at the end of the American War of Independence, clearly hoped to refocus the work of the society around slaves in the British Caribbean colonies. He found the causes for the lack of Christianity among slaves to be their dehumanized condition, in which their owners regarded them as ‘mere machines and instruments for work’ without either intellectual capacities or souls. Slaves enjoyed too little leisure time to devote the modicum they had to religious instruction. Instead, they preferred to spend their small amount of free time on Sundays associating among themselves or growing their own food in little allotments. Consequently, Porteus believed they lived without God and so were given to ‘the grossest immoralities’ because they lacked an ethical awareness. Like most preachers he continued to play the card of planter opposition to religious instruction and baptism against the feasibility of emancipation; but he also drew attention to the dearth of legislative protection for slaves by government. Despite this Porteus continued to hold the slaves themselves largely responsible for their own irreligiousness, maintaining the construction that they preferred an immoral life, even though he recognized the oppressive nature of their slavery as an ‘abject, depressed, degraded, uncivilized, unbefriended, immoral state’.208 207 Ibid., 25–9. 208 Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester, A Sermon (1783), 8–12.

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Porteus was hopeful that Britain would adopt laws similar to that just passed by the French government as a means of diminishing the ‘opprobrious’ slave trade.209 He was even more sanguine about moves to encourage slaves to produce more children, as this would result in a generation uncorrupted by the savage and heathen customs of their parents because of their immersion in the English language. He lauded the society’s own slave plantation in Barbados as an inXuential example for other owners, in a manner that we have already seen was out of touch with the reality of the continued harshness of their estates and their lack of any such exemplary reforming regime. Porteus acknowledged that slavery dehumanized, so he proposed a programme of improvement necessary to bring the society’s slaves to the level whereby they would be ready to receive ‘the divine truths of Revelation’. The Wrst priority was to ‘attach them and their families inseparably to the soil’. They also needed the incentive of legally secure rights, including that of marriage, which had previously been forbidden to them. This would, Porteus was sure, accustom them to a life similar to that of an English farm worker in an increasingly capitalist society, whereby material returns for labour would encourage the slaves to adopt a settled English domestic life. Under this system of encouraging the Anglicizing of slaves, and their adaptation to a capitalist society, those who became most advanced in this settled life and in the Anglican Christianity of their masters would be allowed to work towards their freedom, though this would only be for ‘a certain number’, and ‘by degrees’. The programme, Porteus admitted, would take some time to implement due to the poor management of the society’s estates, but gradual changes in that direction would, he trusted, see their plantations become ‘a model for all West Indian islands to imitate’, by producing ‘a little society of truly Christian Negroes’. But this micro-society would still be slaves, however benignly governed; and the outcome was still expressed in a subordination that would not threaten a slave-owning society. It would produce slaves who would ‘look up to their masters as their 209 Porteus, Sermon, 15–16. The French laws were possibly the royal decree of 1784, which relaxed mercantilist restrictions on French colonial trade, but also required plantation owners to provide stricter reports to royal governors on their treatment of slaves. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1998), 166–7.


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friends, their protectors, and benefactors’.210 ‘A scene such as this . . . would form . . . a seminary of religion for all the slaves of neighbouring plantations, perhaps ultimately for the whole coast of Africa.’ Let then our fellow countrymen make haste to relieve, as far as they are able, the calamities they have brought on so large a part of the human race; let them endeavour to wipe away the reproach of having delivered so many of their fellow-creatures to a most heavy temporal bondage, both by contributing to sooth and alleviate that as much as possible, and by endeavouring to rescue them from the still more cruel bondage of ignorance and sin.211

Essentially this was the same programme the English had proposed for the indigenous peoples in their North American colonies since the seventeenth century. The society’s Anglican slave plantation would be turned into a Barbadian version of the old Puritan praying town. Both the indigenous and the imported colonized peoples would be totally controlled in order to replace their own cultures with that of a complete English makeover, to Wt their subjects for a suitably lowly place in English society and economy as farm labourers. Religion was proposed as a major ingredient in fostering upon Native Americans and slaves an identity as non-white Anglicans and as nearly-but-not-quite English villagers. But the bishop’s suggestions were peremptorily rejected by the society.212 In 1789 the Bishop of Gloucester still felt no theological compulsion to call for the abolition of slavery though he, like many of the society’s preachers, was antagonistic to the transatlantic slave trade, calling it ‘a commerce disgraceful to the human species’. He unequivocally regarded black slaves as human beings on a par with the English, which had been a constant understanding of the society’s preachers since the early eighteenth century. It was a shared human identity that had its foundation in a common Christianity. ‘[W]e are not unmindful of the equality of our common condition; and that, far from degrading them from the rank of rational beings, we regard them as the oVspring of a same God, redeemed by the same Saviour, sanctiWed by the same Spirit.’ But to go further, and advocate the abolition of slavery, did not have a clear mandate in Scripture. 210 Porteus, Sermon, 20–9. 211 Ibid., 33. 212 Bennett Jr., ‘The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s Plantations’, 20.

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But a more enlarged and generous policy seems at present to prevail . . . not simply of restricting, but of abolishing a commerce, which, however protected and sanctioned by law, is not, I fear, in its origin to be defended on the rigid principles of natural justice, and is too often accompanied in its progress with the violation of the most essential duties of morality . . . That the spirit of the Gospel is favourable to domestic, as well as to civil and religious liberty, no sober believer will deny; but that Christianity and slavery are incompatible, and cannot subsist together, is more than the authority of Scripture will warrant us to aYrm.213

St Paul’s letters, especially that to Philemon returning the runaway slave Onesimus, he believed did not warrant any religious call for change in people’s ‘relative or domestic duties’, but did prescribe that ‘every man should abide in the same calling wherein he was called ’, and remain there, whether slave or free, in a condition of life that religious conversion left unchanged. Scripture, rather, prescribed an obedience to the existing laws, ‘however harsh and rigorous.’ ‘Though it may be true in theory, that the mild temper of Christianity is little suited to domestic slavery, and though it be true in fact, that in proportion as Christianity has prevailed, Slavery has declined’. To be sure, West Indian slave legislation deserved to be amended or repealed; but until that time ‘the permitting of Slavery in Christian kingdoms is not repugnant to the precepts of Holy Scripture.’ He concluded by reprimanding the abolitionist movement for misrepresenting Scripture as unequivocally requiring emancipation, and as being ‘imprudent’ in the political circumstances of British slavery. He then came to the nub of his criticism of the abolitionist movement; that it was a barrier preventing slave owners supporting their evangelism of their slaves. ‘What hopes of executing the generous purposes of this Society . . . if the planters be once persuaded, that the baptism of a slave has the eVect of a virtual manumission, and that the making of such a one a Christian is an unjust dissolution of the bond between master and servant.’214 So was the society’s option of a humanitarian amelioration tending very circumspectly towards emancipation the only eVective answer to slavery in the face of entrenched planter power? An 213 Samuel Halifax, Bishop of Gloucester, A Sermon (1789), xxvii–xxviii. 214 Ibid., xxx–xxxiii.


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older interpretation, more favourable to the SPG, was argued by the American historian Frank Klingberg in the 1940s. He viewed the SPG programme as one of humanitarianism in that it accepted slavery while at the same time working for its reform and amelioration. It was a pragmatic response to the power structures of the day, which would have completely discounted emancipation. For the society to have adopted abolition, in his view, was both anachronistic in the earlier eighteenth century, and certain to have resulted in its total exclusion from all contact with slaves in the face of implacable plantation-owner opposition. Instead, the society’s programme of engaged humanitarian amelioration and reform of brutality to slaves was, Klingberg argued, both ‘creative in its ideology of a new social conscience, and yet prosaically practical . . . The strategy in demanding support and cooperation from vested interests which opposed humanitarian principles, and in showing that proWts and the civilization of the labourers might be developed in ratio to each other, was both bold and well sustained.’215 Consequently, Klingberg saw the SPG as a major component of an Anglican imperial humanitarianism, which successfully worked to be ‘an ameliorative and civilizing agency’ among both Native Americans and slaves.216 Acceptance of the planters’ argument that baptism did not constitute emancipation, as the society did, was a necessary position for it to adopt, in Klingberg’s view, if it was to get past the overwhelming power of the planters in the colonies and in the British Parliament. To do otherwise would have shut the door to this particular mission Weld in the society’s face. However, in so doing the society neither fell into the extreme position of the planters’ side in denying the essential humanity of black slaves nor, on the other hand, the absolutism of abolitionists.217 Rather, the society adopted what would nowadays be called a policy of constructive engagement with a slave-owning regime they fundamentally did not agree with. In doing so, and in setting what Klingberg claimed was a constructive example in their own estates, the SPG played a major part in the eventual emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, helping to foster a new climate of anti-slavery 215 Frank J. Klingberg, Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York (Philadelphia, 1940), 189. 216 Ibid., 189–90. 217 Ibid., 170–1.

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opinion whose views eventually outran the moderation (in mid eighteenth-century terms) of the society itself.218 ‘If emancipation had been the Wrst cry, missionary work for the Negro would have remained an idle London dream . . . SPG policy was a union of high idealism with practical realism.’219 But despite Klingberg’s case historians have generally lined up behind the abolitionists. This historical judgement with respect to the society’s slavery position is most clearly expressed by J. Harry Bennett Jr, ironically in an essay in a festschrift for Klingberg published in 1950. Bennett agreed that the SPG spurned emancipation, and instead propounded a policy of humanitarianism towards slaves, in order to win over other slave owners to ameliorate the lot of their slaves. But he believes this policy was a failure because of the society’s social and political caution, which feared that a more radical policy would become ‘a lever for social revolution’ in plantation society. Bennett’s evidence rather contradicts both Klingberg’s defence and points to the eighteenth-century society as weak-willed—to say the least—with regard to slavery. Its unadventurous policy resulted in few conversions among its slaves, while SPG catechists were never admitted to other plantations until after 1823, when slave owners could already see the inevitability of emancipation. Even more damning of the eVectiveness of any policy of humanitarian amelioration was the fact that the physical conditions of the slaves at Codrington did not fundamentally improve until the 1790s, and thus could not have provided the constructive example Klingberg claims it did. For Bennett, the SPG’s policy remained one of ‘easy compromises with the American slave system’, in which its gradualist approach in seeking to civilize the slave to be ready for an eventual far-oV emancipation was a policy too closely identiWed with the white slave-owning colonial interest.220 The real contribution of the SPG towards the remedy of slavery for Bennett lay not in its ‘humanitarian’ policy at Codrington, which palpably did not exist there, but in its formulation early in the eighteenth century of an anthropology aYrming that the slave was the spiritual equal of his or 218 Klingberg, Anglican Humanitarianism, 185–7. 219 Ibid., 188. 220 Bennett Jr., ‘The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s Plantations’, 221.


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her master. But the society left it to others to carry through the natural conclusion of this work, in the campaign for the abolition of slavery to which the SPG always remained opposed. The formulation of a theology of slavery and of empire as, in part, a support for existing political and economic powers in the contemporary British state, inevitably meant that these Anglican leaders had to make a response when that status quo was challenged in the American War of Independence (1775–83). The war, and the consequent loss by Britain of thirteen of its North American colonies, which constituted the new United States of America, caused the society’s preachers at the centre of the empire to reiterate Anglican beliefs about the existing political and religious system at home and abroad. The cudgels were Wrst taken up before war commenced by Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St Asaph, in 1773. In a sermon largely devoted to the unity of the empire he began by framing Britain as a nurturing imperial power, treating its colonists since the seventeenth century ‘with the indulgence due to their weakness and infancy’ until they Xourished under the benevolent protection of their mother country. In fact, the bishop assured his audience, ‘there is no instance in the records of time, where infant colonies have been treated with such a just and liberal indulgence’, in contrast to the oppressive regimes their colonies have endured from other European empires.221 In return for this generous and liberal protection towards colonies and colonials—viewed as children needing a wiser parent—all Britain required of her colonies was the mutual beneWt of commerce. Such a combination of mutual self-interest and benevolent rule had brought Britain a justiWed national greatness, and her colonies prosperity, which would in time (implicitly and comfortably far oV), the bishop predicted, raise the colonies into rivals of Europe in arts, commerce, and power. Such a rule was the consequence of Britain’s excellent constitution, the fruits of which had been hard-won by Britain herself in civil wars, but which her colonies received peacefully as a natural inheritance of such a parent.222 This mutually beneWcial union had been disordered by the American rebelliousness, but the bishop refused to venture further into the political mineWeld, as being inappropriate in such a public forum as his sermon. ‘It is by 221 Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St Asaph, A Sermon (1773), vii. 222 Ibid., viii–xi.

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no means decent from this place to censure the conduct of our superiors, or even to suppose it blameable.’223 But he had no doubts that the colonists’ best interests were served by retaining the link with Britain. It is common utility, mutual wants and mutual services, that should point out the true line of submission and authority. Let them respect the power that saved them . . . If we consider their prosperity as making part of our own, we shall feel no jealousy at their improvements: and they will always cheerfully submit to an authority, which they Wnd is exercised invariably to the common advantage . . . the true art of government consists in not governing too much . . . When things are on so reasonable a footing, if there should happen to be an error in government, they will soon be corrected by the friendly disposition of the people; and the endeavours to separate the interests of the colonists from that of Great Britain will be received with the indignation, that is due to the artiWces of factious men, who wish to grow eminent by the misfortunes of their country. Even in that future state of independency, which some among them ignorantly wish for, but which for their true interest can never be too long delayed; the old and the prudent will often look back on their present happiness with regret: and consider the peace and security, the state of visible improvement, and brotherly equity, which they enjoyed under the protection of their mother-country as the true golden age of America.224

Notwithstanding the colonists’ duty of political obedience coinciding with British economic self-interest—according to the bishop—he saw no future in an empire held together by force. This solution had been tried and, as a result, Britain had ‘no reason to be proud of the experiment’. This was probably a reference to the Boston riots over the imposition of the Townshend duties on imports into the colonies. The riots had resulted in troops being sent into Boston in 1768. On 5 March 1770 these soldiers had Wred on a Boston crowd that was pelting them during a demonstration, with subsequent exaggerated reports of a ‘massacre’ (Wve men were killed).225 The British Empire, dispersed over the globe as it was, had no military power swift enough to govern by force, the bishop stated frankly. What was needed was an imperial unity 223 Shipley, Sermon, xiv–xv. 224 Ibid., xv–xvi. 225 Robert J ChaYn, ‘The Townshend Acts Crisis 1767–1770’, in Jack P. Greene and J.R. Poole (eds), A companion to the American Revolution (Oxford, 2004), 146–8.


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based on the mutual self-interest of Britain and all parts of her empire. This would be the result of Britain acting towards its colonies as a ‘serving, obliging and protecting’ power.226 Four years after Shipley’s sermon, in 1777, William Markham, the Archbishop of York, was prompted by the suVerings of SPG loyalist clergy to consider the causes of the American conXict. Some of these were, he said, the responsibility of the government. However, no more than Shipley was Markham going to be drawn further on this dangerously radical course of political criticism in a public forum. He concentrated on the theme of liberty. This, he postulated, was a freedom from all constraints, except those imposed by a legitimate government for the good of the whole community. A government imposed by force cannot subsist with such freedom, which can only exist under the supremacy of law which the American colonists had assailed.227 The next year, Brownlow North of Worcester also lamented the devastation the war had caused to the SPG mission, which he portrayed as a consequence of the Church of England’s support for constituted established rule. ‘But if it is the oVence of the Church of England, that she hath been the ancient friend and companion of the constitution of England . . . in respect both to the civil and spiritual liberties of the people in England, her union with the state hath been most happy.’ He lauded his church’s upholding of religious toleration, despite its place as the established church, a position he was conWdent was a necessary ingredient in social peace and order as against the American situation of a plethora of competing sects; a truth he was sure the Americans would come to discover for themselves. ‘History hath put it beyond doubt, that an equality of sects under one government, without any established church at all, is a chimerical idea, and totally inconsistent with religious order and peace.’228 Finally, John Thomas of Rochester in 1780 pointed, like the other three preachers before him, to aspiring factiousDissenters inthe colonies as the cause of this disruption of the fraternal bonds of unity in the 226 Shipley, Sermon, xviii–xx. 227 William Markham, Archbishop of York, A Sermon (1777), xv–xx. 228 Brownlow North, Bishop of Worcester, A Sermon (1778), 12–17.

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empire. These divisive inXuences had shown in the colonies their true colours as the ancient opponents of English government and church. The only hope of a good outcome now was Divine Providence, and he recalled his audience to the necessary conditions for this providential intervention: true (that is, Anglican) religion and Wrm (pro-imperial) patriotism.229 Notwithstanding the eventual loss of Britain’s North American empire south of the St Lawrence, many of the same themes identiWed during the period of the Wrst British Empire continued to Wgure prominently in the society’s sermons after the loss of the thirteen southern colonies. In 1787 the Bishop of Bangor was still upholding the familiar theme that religion was the basis of the commercial success which had brought Britain her empire. Indeed, he conceived it would be impossible to maintain a commerce with a people who had no religion, as there would be no depending on such a non-virtuous people, as against people who were ‘religious, sober and frugal’.230 The Bishop of Norwich in 1790 continued to extol the interconnection between church and state. The state existed for civil order, of which religion is the greatest guarantee; and the Christian religion, as ultimate truth, must be upheld by the state. Both church and state—in the case of Britain, which had ‘established dependencies in the remotest part of the earth’—had an obligation to extend to them the gospel of Christ as ‘that pearl of inestimable price’.231 Such a pearl was intended by God to be distributed universally, said William Cleaver of Chester, in an equally common theme of eighteenth-century SPG Anglicanism. Christ intended his religion to be propagated universally in order that the redemption of humankind by Christ may be eVected.232 Outside the SPG the same theological conWdence in the divine basis and destiny of Britain’s empire was also being publicly proposed in the late eighteenth century by other Anglican clergy. In 1775, in an Assize sermon no doubt prompted by the outbreak of the American war, the prominent High Churchman George Horne, then President of Magdalen College and later Bishop of Norwich, preached on

229 230 231 232

John Thomas, Bishop of Rochester, A Sermon (1780), 22–5. John Warren, Bishop of Bangor, A Sermon (1787), xxxiv. Lewis Bagot of Norwich, A Sermon (1790), 14–16. William Cleaver, Bishop of Chester, A Sermon (1794), 3–4.


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the familiar theme of the providence of God initiating throughout history the rise and fall of empires according to whether or not they were submissive to the divine will. This will was ‘to punish wickedness and vice, to preserve and promote true religion and virtue’. The British Empire was as subject to this requirement for its maintenance as any of its predecessors. In what seems to have been a reference to the probability of war with France as well as the rebellious colonies, Horne urged that if she were mindful of these providential requirements, Britain could go forth conWdently against its old enemies.233 In another Assize sermon in 1792, Luke Booker, the minister of St Edmund’s in Dudley, Worcestershire was, concerned about the outbreak of war with revolutionary France. But he was as convinced as were the SPG preachers and Horne that providence had not deserted the British Empire but maintained it still, notwithstanding the loss of the American colonies, because for that empire God had a particular care. Booker proceeded to interpret English history in the standard Anglican fashion. God had shown providential care for the English throughout their history in the Reformation; in deliverance from the Armada and the uncovering of the Gunpowder plot; in the restoration of the monarchy when it seemed entirely lost; and in the Glorious Revolution, which had saved the country from a bigoted, enslaving Catholic reign. He ended with this praise to the God of the English: ‘Against this little Isle—what Empires were in arms! ‘‘If the Lord himself had not been on our side, now may England say’’. . . Warring with Omnipotence on our side . . . we . . . TRIUMPHED GLORIOUSLY.’234 So for those Anglicans in the latter part of the eighteenth century who did stop to consider the British Empire, its fortunes were as enmeshed into the scheme of Divine Providence as Anglicans had long conceived it to be. Subject to various criticisms and conditions 233 George Horne, The Providence of God Manifested in the Rise and Fall of Empires: A Sermon (London, 1775), 20–9. 234 Luke Booker, Britain’s Happiness: An Assize Sermon Preached at St Mary’s Church, Warwick, on Sunday the 1st of April, 1792: Exhibiting an Historical Review of Providential Interpositions in Favour of the British Empire, a Faithful Representation of its Present Prosperity; And Recommending a Line of Conduct to Prevent its Declension or its Fall (London, 1792), 6–14.

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as that divine involvement might be for the British, God was— according to this Anglican construction of empire—nevertheless fundamentally favourable to the British imperial project. The inauguration of the SPG in 1701 was a consequence of a new awareness of the need for overseas mission that developed among some inXuential leaders of the Church of England as a result of the growth in England’s colonial territories. It meant that among a number of prominent English Anglicans there was a consciousness of a need to evangelize among the indigenous peoples of these territories, but also among the slaves on English–British plantations, and even among the settlers themselves whose hold on Christian faith was regarded as inadequate, if not tenuous. The SPG therefore kept alive in English metropolitan and colonial Anglicanism an awareness of the religious dimensions of English and then British imperial developments, even if this was only Wtfully fulWlled within the actual colonial context.235 The preachers, missionaries, and members of the SPG who took up this new vision of an overseas imperial Anglicanism included the clerical leaders of the church as well as colonially engaged clergy, and they began to construct in their reports and sermons an eighteenth-century Anglican discourse of empire for their hearers and readers. This discourse, as it was published and distributed through the SPG, developed a framework for their Anglican audience to understand the empire within a religious and theological outlook. It produced the Wrst sustained institutional Anglican public discourse of empire, and of the imperial responsibilities of an Anglican Christian nation. This eighteenth-century Anglican imperial discourse developed a number of evident motifs. The theology of providence was prominent in maintaining that it was God who had granted overseas territories to the English. While these colonies and plantations had brought wealth to England, the SPG Anglicans aYrmed that the divine providential purpose in so doing was principally to bring 235 In 1707 annual subscriptions totalled just £759, and the next year the total annual income was still under £1,000, though disbursements exceeded this. Members were not always prompt in paying their dues, including some of the bishops. In 1708 the Bishop of Gloucester asked to be removed from the list of subscribers. Everts Boutelle Greene, ‘The Anglican Outlook on the American Colonies in the Early Eighteenth Century’, American Historical Review, 20 (1914), 67.


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about the saving spread of the Christian gospel to heathen peoples. English retention of their colonies was therefore conditional upon England promoting colonial Christianity. If this was not accomplished then not only was there a risk that God could remove his providential imperial bequest, but it would also place in jeopardy God’s particular providential protection of England itself, which had been so recently demonstrated in the Glorious Revolution, and before in England’s Protestant history. The relation between God, the English, and their empire was envisaged as analogous to the commerce that these Anglicans recognized was at the heart of English expansion. God had provided material beneWts to the English, and in exchange they needed to return to God spiritual wealth in the form of Christians in the New World. The colonial context of this commercial theology was propounded as entailing a proWtable return in the form of greater trade to the English from the Native Americans, who would be impressed by the fair dealing of the virtuous and godly English. Charity and religion were, therefore, sound commercial and imperial principles. This Anglican construction of an imperial discourse also moved traditional anti-Catholicism into a new arena. Since the Reformation English Protestantism had regarded Catholicism as the very opposite of the Christian gospel, which was found only in Protestantism. Catholicism was superstitious and idolatrous; it was anti-Christian. This traditional Protestant theme seemed conWrmed for these Anglicans by viewing Catholic Spain’s imperial record as one of violence, invasion, and brutality. These religious imperatives meant that England’s imperialism had to be diVerent. English expansion had to enshrine the Reformation belief that Protestantism was true Christianity and Catholicism a tawdry lie. Therefore, the preachers framed English colonial expansion in the idealized image of their Protestant beliefs. It was beneWcent, fair, and took land only by just commercial exchange with its native owners, or occupied land that was empty. However, this discourse of a just English territorial expansion sat uncomfortably with their acknowledgment of ‘some’ English oppression and immorality, but also with the fact of Catholic evangelism preceding their own, in some parts of their empire, by centuries. While the foundation of the SPG countered this latter Catholic reproach to a godly Protestantism, Anglicans were concerned that

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English immorality and brutality in the New World threatened to identify English Protestantism with its deceitful Catholic rival. But the most acute problem for this eighteenth-century religious imperial discourse was slavery on the English plantations. On the one hand, these imperially engaged Anglicans unstintingly upheld a common humanity between masters and slaves, and thus their mutual salvation by Christ. But on the other they retreated from the liberating consequences of their own theological claims—consequences that were anxiously apparent to slave owners. It was this possible linkage between conversion, baptism, and emancipation that prompted slave-owners’ opposition to evangelism among slaves. In the end, so as to allay this fear, it was not a theological equality of humanity and salvation between whites and blacks that was upheld, but a religion propounded as a useful ingredient in supporting slavery, as facilitating the economic basis of a slave-owning society by producing industrious and tractable slaves. This suggests that Hans Turley is at least partially correct when he claims that capitalism—in this case the desire for proWt through trade involving the subordination of the colonized—was a major motivation for evangelism.236 Certainly the religion of these Anglicans never fundamentally challenged the economic, subordinate, and enslaved status of blacks, nor believed that their faith required them to relinquish slavery even as the economic basis of their own plantations. These attitudes, which perpetuated a dehumanizing, oppressive economic regime, seriously calls into question the claim by Colin Kidd that in the period before the High Enlightenment a theology positing a commonly originating humanity between blacks and whites, deriving from Adamic parents, excluded ethnic hatred between the two.237 The Christianity that was proclaimed by the SPG was one holding no threat of slave freedom, or to the commerce in slaves, but rather a religion that facilitated the status quo by making slaves more economically obedient. Conscious they could not overcome the 236 Hans Turley, ‘Protestant Evangelicalism, British Imperialism, and Crusonian Identity’, in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 186–7, 188–9. 237 Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10.


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hostility of plantation society to Christian evangelism among their slaves, the society’s preachers ultimately elected to capitulate to plantation power and formulate a pragmatic Christianity that posed no threat to racially based slavery and which, therefore, had some chance of being acceptable to colonial slave owners. It was an acknowledgement of where real colonial power lay. This willingness of these Anglicans to formulate a theology of baptism that oVered no threat to slave-owning society demonstrates the dominance of a landed and commercial hegemony in English society and its colonies to which the Church of England institutionally had to subordinate itself. This Anglican construction of empire was prepared to challenge the prevailing powers over some issues, such as the church’s reiterated demand for a colonial episcopate.238 However, the deliberate disempowering of the social consequences of baptism, which continued to be upheld in this Anglican discourse even when emancipation was being argued for by other lobbies (religious and otherwise), was an acknowledgement that power lay ultimately not with religion, or the Church of England in the eighteenth-century empire, but with colonial landowners and traders and their allies in the metropolitan Parliament. The formulation of a discourse of slavery around amelioration rather than emancipation, and the virtual non-existence of any such amelioration on the plantations themselves even into the late eighteenth century, demonstrates that, in this respect at least, the Church of England acted as a ‘hegemonic instrument’ for the maintenance of the power of the ruling groups in colonial North America and the West Indies.239 The clearest evidence of this subordinate role of the Church of England in the propertied, commercial, and political hegemony of eighteenth-century Britain came when the two interests clashed, as they did over slavery, but also over the question of the appointment of bishops in the North American colonies. This had been a goal of the society and of leading English bishops since the beginning of the century, as it was recognized that the lack of such authority and institutional focus had a deleterious eVect on the strength of 238 Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 239 Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 173–4.

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the colonial church. As early as 1709 the Bishop of Norwich was lamenting the absence of a proper episcopal authority in colonial North America, which made decision-making in the colonial church cumbersome and inadequate.240 The Dean of Canterbury, preaching in 1713, believed a colonial bishopric would be greatly conducive to the encouragement of piety, manners, and discipline in the colonies.241 The society’s preachers were still battering on the same project three decades later, when Bishop Secker in 1740 drew attention to the risks for aspiring young clergymen having to cross the Atlantic for ordination in England,242 and the lack of the rite of conWrmation for colonists, not to mention ‘orderly discipline’ for their clergy.243 Clearly, for an episcopal church such as the Church of England, the lack of colonial bishops was a fundamental hindrance to its colonial polity and development. Bishops were necessary for ordination, conWrmation, and the provision of a local ecclesiastical authority capable of dealing both with internal matters of dispute and discipline, and able to meet colonial administrators and the powerful clergymen of other Protestant denominations on more or less equal terms. An episcopal church without bishops was a queer creature indeed. Odd it may have been, but it endured in this deWcient state for the entire time that Britain ruled the old North American empire, despite the best eVorts of the church’s English leadership. In addition to the more or less permanent agitation of the SPG’s preachers, Archbishop Tenison left the handsome bequest of £1,000 towards its realization, and the powerful Thomas Secker, while Bishop of London (and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury), unsuccessfully lobbied Horace Walpole for colonial bishops in 1750.244 These were all various attempts in the sustained campaign for a colonial episcopate by the Church of England, which reached its peak during the 1750s and 1760s.245 Secker wanted two or three 240 Trimnell, Sermon, 22. 241 Stanhope, Sermon, 31. 242 In 1753 the SPG would report that Wve of twenty-Wve candidates for ordination from New England perished on their crossing the Atlantic, either from disease or drowning. SPG, Proceedings (1753), 44–5. 243 Secker, Sermon, 27–8. 244 Thomas Secker, A Letter to the Right Honourable Horatio Walpole, Esq. Written Jan. 9 1750–1 Concerning Bishops in America (London, 1769). The letter, originally written in 1750 was instructed by Secker in 1759 to be published after his death. 245 Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism, 220–5.


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suVragan bishops to be ordained for America. He sought to circumvent Parliament, arguing there was already legislation permitting the ordination of assistant bishops, who could be sent to the colonies instead of the current commissaries of the Bishop of London, who were only priests and thus were unable to perform episcopal functions. He drew attention to the fact that Parliament had recently permitted Moravian bishops in North America, and tacitly allowed Catholic ones. Secker spent much eVort emphasizing that such colonial bishops would have no authority other than spiritual jurisdiction over Anglicans only, and were therefore no threat to the position and rights of other churches. There was no intention to replicate the civil and parliamentary powers of English bishops; nor was he concerned that such powerless bishops might prove to be a Trojan horse for their English counterparts. Some have apprehended . . . that it will . . . aVord the laity here an example of English bishops abroad, with no other than spiritual powers: which may tempt them to think of reducing us at home to the same condition. But I should be very willing for the beneWt of those of our communion in the colonies, to run a greater risk, than I conceive this to be. For the fact is so notorious, that all our temporal powers and privileges are merely concessions from the state; and the act of parliament for the suVragan bishops, under which several were made in the last century, and others may now, exempliWes as fully the possibility of bishops without peerages, and consistory courts; that we need have no fear of any new discovery to our prejudice, from appointing a few such bishops in America.246

The crucial point for Secker was that such a colonial episcopal presence was necessary to the identity of the Church of England in North America, and to the maintenance of its ordinary life, pointing out that ‘indeed it belongs to the very nature of episcopal churches, to have bishops at proper distances presiding over them’. As it was, in a bishop-less North America, mostly second-rate British clergy had to be sent over, with many of these being Episcopalian Scots who, as possible Jacobites, ‘may be disaVected to the government’.247 However, Secker, who at the time was the lowly Bishop of Oxford, 246 Secker, A Letter, 497. 247 Ibid., 492–3. For the reasons behind Secker’s political use of the theological Jacobitism of the Scottish Episcopal Church in the eighteenth century see Rowan

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lacked the punch to overcome the government’s opposition to his proposal. Walpole, the younger brother and close collaborator of Sir Robert Walpole, was, understandably, mindful of the opposition the proposal would spark among North American and English Dissenters.248 Nevertheless, despite all these obviously cogent arguments, the Church of England never achieved its desired colonial bishops, because such an initiative ran up against the government’s political agenda. As the historian of colonial Anglicanism in North America correctly observed, the ship of colonial episcopacy proved unable to navigate around the rocks of colonial Anglicans’ indiVerence to it; the successful colonial and metropolitan agitation of powerful Congregational and Independent clergy opposed to it on the grounds that it was a threat to their liberties;249 and the imperial government’s anxiety about the good order of the colonies as a consequence.250 Archbishop Secker’s latest biographer believes that this failure to comprehend the power of dissenting inXuence over the question in the New England colonies and at home was at the heart of Anglican inability to achieve success on this issue.251 Bishops could, and Strong, Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch 1. However, it seems clear that this religious Jacobitism did not, with very few exceptions, translate into open or even covert rebellion among the Scottish Episcopalian clergy or bishops after the abortive 1715 uprising. 248 Leslie W. Barnard, Thomas Secker: An Eighteenth Century Primate (Lewes: Book Guild, 1998), 128–31. 249 Ibid., 132–7. 250 Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism, 221–2, 231–2. Walpole’s reply to Secker’s lobbying in 1750 indicated the strength of Dissent’s political agenda with regard to the North American colonies and the prospect there of bishops: The dissenters of all sorts whom I mention with no other regard or concern than as they are generally well aVected and indeed necessary supporters to the present establishment in State, and therefore should not be provoked or alienated against it, will by the instigation and complaints of their brethren in the colonies although with no solid reason be loud in their discourse and writings upon this intended innovation in America, and those in the colonies will be exasperated and animated to make warm representations against it to the Government here, as a desire to establish ecclesiastical power in its full extent among them by degrees, although the Wrst step seems to be moderate and measured, by conferring the authority of bishops to be planted amongst them to certain colonies and functions. Quoted in Barnard, Thomas Secker, 128–9. 251 Barnard, Thomas Secker, 132–7.


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did, oppose the government on various matters in Parliament. For example, most of the bishops ineVectually opposed penal legislation against Scottish nonjuring bishops after the 1745 rebellion.252 Bishop Gibson in 1734 Xatly refused to accept the nomination of Dr Rundle to be Bishop of Gloucester because he strongly doubted his doctrinal orthodoxy; and the bishops in 1736 opposed the government openly in the Lords over the Quakers Tithe Bill, which they felt threatened the livelihoods of the clergy.253 But despite all the metropolitan agitation, both in public and privately (such as Secker’s quiet diplomacy over a quarter of a century),254 the Church of England failed to acquire a colonial episcopate despite it being obvious that this made its identity, order, and strength seriously deWcient in the colonial context. The end result was that the Church of England was unable to institute an administrative reform that everyone, including some government ministers, agreed was ecclesiastically necessary but politically inexpedient. It was a consequence of the church’s established position that the political considerations should be paramount. To do more was to risk that establishment, which none of the bishops were prepared to do. By acknowledging that political considerations were superior to the church’s own evident need, the bishops were acknowledging the de facto subservience of the church to Parliament, a relationship that had grown progressively more unequal since the suspension of Convocation in 1717. When it came to a tussle between the church and its political masters, it was no contest. Speaking of the issue in 1751, Archbishop Herring admitted, in reference to Bishop Sherlock, ‘that speaking as an Ecclesiastick, he & I agreed, but as this was a point of Policy in our Government, I thought our Governors the only Judges of it’.255 Even on such a fundamental aspect of Anglican identity as colonial bishops, the Church of England remained subordinate to the propertied power of the political classes in both the centre and the periphery of empire. Being subordinate, the church could only hope to achieve its own aims in ways that ultimately supported, rather than challenged, 252 Ibid., 89. 253 Sykes, Edmund Gibson, 265–9, 161–75. 254 Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism, 225. 255 Stephen Taylor, ‘Whigs, Bishops and America: The Politics of Church Reform in Mid-eighteenth Century England’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 351.

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the ruling hegemony. Over matters such as the baptism of slaves, emancipation, and even over its need for colonial bishops, the Church of England was prepared to shape itself to Wt that hegemony, even at considerable cost to its eYcacy, and the consequences for its own colonial identity and vitality. However, at the same time, the unwillingness of the British state to empower the Church of England by agreeing to an American colonial diocese rather casts doubt on the assessment of historians such as Carl Bridenbaugh that the SPG was merely ‘British imperialism in ecclesiastical guise’, as does the intermittent chorus of complaint about the state from the society and the Church of England over this neglect.256 It was indeed a subordinate partnership in the North American empire, but not an Erastian one. The SPG North American mission was, as Andrew Porter has also identiWed, ‘a missionary enterprise dependent on state initiative quite as much as on its anticipation of state support’.257 It was, in an imperial context, the outworking of a domestic role the church had accepted from at least the Reformation, if not before. Christianity was one of a number of universalizing discourses entering into colonial English and British territories, and the indigenous and settler cultures that resided there. In some respects it was possibly the oldest of such outlooks, predating by centuries, if not a millennia, those of Enlightenment Europe’s so-called universal principles in politics, science, economics, or social theory. These European Enlightenment discourses could indeed understand and fashion the colonial context by either encompassing it in a universalist embrace, or by relativizing it in a (normally subordinate) comparison with Europe.258 But the Christian discourse was both universalist and relativizing in that it sincerely viewed all nations and peoples as coming under the universal providential rule of God, but also judged the worth of such groups of peoples in so far as they explicitly and congruently claimed and manifested a Christian faith, which was understood in turn to be inextricably wrapped up in European packaging. 256 Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre, 57. 257 Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 26. 258 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 12.


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Fundamentally, for all the Enlightenment inXuence in this eighteenth-century imperial theology, these Anglicans constructed their discourse of empire on an older, theological, paradigm. For them England, and later Britain, was a Christian nation. This Christian identity drew on a theology of the unity between church and state that had been prevalent in Anglicanism since its foundation in the sixteenth century, and which also went back to a Medieval understanding of Christendom. A Christian society aYrmed the union of church and state because both were founded by God. England’s national Christianity was expressed constitutionally in the Church of England, and in the requirement of its Christian government to uphold that religion and its national church. In addition, the national church should be supported by the Christian government of EnglandBritain because the Church of England was among the ‘best’, if not the best, of all reformed churches. Therefore, both because of that church’s excellence, the English–British constitution, and that state’s Christian obligations to God, the government was required to uphold Christianity through the Church of England by supporting the extension of Christianity and the national church both at home and in the colonies. As well, all sections of English society were equally required to do so, as Christians. By carrying out this duty, English society and its government fulWlled its Christian obligation, and its own self-interest, because religion was seen as the basis of morality and social order. The SPG Anglicans were only too well aware that neither at home nor in the colonies did Anglicanism enjoy either a monopoly of religious life or of government support. However, that did not stop them recalling the government and sections of English society to what they saw as their traditional Christian duty, to uphold the national church of a Christian nation at home and in the empire. This alliance of church and state undergirded the export of Anglicanism to the North American English and then British Empire in the eighteenth century—in Anglican consciousness, colonial engagement, and metropolitan preaching, if not always in the political or religious realities at home or in the colonies. The alliance failed to materialize in that North American imperial context, but it would receive a Wllip in the so-called Second British Empire, of which the jewel in the crown was India.

3 Anglicanism in a Resurgent Imperialism: Bengal, 1790–1830 Following the loss of thirteen of its North American colonies in 1783, Britain continued its territorial expansion in Asia, Africa, and the PaciWc in what historians have come to term the Second British Empire. This was a period when the formal ties of church and state were reinvigorated. A new pattern of close church–state relations, with advantages given to the Church of England in the colonies to shore up the imperial connection, was developed initially in British North America (the nucleus of today’s Canada) and came to be the pattern for the empire until the 1830s. This new political attention given to the Church of England was partly as a consequence of the American War of Independence, which had caused political radicalism to be associated with religious Dissent, and marks a tacit acknowledgement that the government’s refusal to allow the appointment of Anglican bishops to the American colonies had been a mistake. Accordingly, in the newly reconstituted Canada established by the Constitution Act of 1791, there were crown lands set aside as ‘clergy reserves’, and an Anglican bishop was oYcially appointed for Nova Scotia in 1787. The Church of England was now seen as a support for British colonial rule.1 This revival of the connection between church and state had powerful support in Britain from

1 C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 206; P.J. Marshall, ‘Britain without America: A Second Empire’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 588.

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Anglican thinkers such as Edmund Burke, and was further cemented by the conservative reaction of the British governing orders to the French Revolution. Burke’s positive views on the church–state alliance with respect to the French Revolution, set out in his ReXections on the Revolution in France (1789), have been exhaustively explored by a number of scholars, and do not need any further attention here.2 With regard to India—both before the outbreak of the French Revolution and afterwards—Burke was obsessively concerned with the morality of British rule there, but was not concerned with the church– state establishment in that context (unlike, as we shall see, some of his contemporaries in government and church circles). Jonathan Clark and C.A. Bayly have argued that there was a renewed alliance between church and state in Britain and in the empire between the later 1780s and 1830, as part of a revived imperial conWdence after the loss of the thirteen colonies in 1783. The Church of England was to be an instrumental part of an antidote against American republicanism and, soon after, against French revolutionary fervour.3 Bayly maintains that this period saw a revitalized attempt by the British government to rule a renewed and newly expanding empire on the basis of autocratic government using aristocratic military rule and emphasizing accepted values of social hierarchy, racial subordination, and landed patronage. This reconstructed conservatism saw the expansion of government power and inXuence at home and abroad, with the promotion of a new nationalism centred on the concept of Britain as a Christian version of the Roman Empire.4 Successful British military strength promoted imperial expansion and, coupled with the new nationalism, meant the empire oVered the British ruling classes a remedy to the perceived dangerous social and ideological revolutionary change threatening across the Channel. These classes adopted a consciously protective nationalism of ‘Crown, Church and Constitution’ in the face of this threat.5 So, for Bayly, religion was part of the new ‘constructive 2 For example, Nigel Aston, ‘A ‘‘Lay Divine’’: Burke, Christianity, and the Preservation of the British State, 1790–1797’, in Nigel Aston (ed.), Religious Change in Europe, 1650–1914: Essays for John McManners (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), ch. 9. 3 J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 300–1. 4 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 11. 5 Ibid., 107.

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conservatism’ that marks the diVerence between the old and new empires, promoted in association with racial superiority and agrarian autocratic nationalism. In the revived empire, Anglicanism suVused imperialism and inXuenced policy.6 An integral aspect of this revitalized imperial conWdence in the period from the 1780s to the 1830s was the revival of an Anglican establishment for British settlers and residents in British colonies. Until later developments in the 1820s and 1830s brought an end to an Anglican imperial dominance, there were some forty years (between about 1790 and 1830) in which the Church of England played an integral part in a renewed government conWdence and push for empire. This renewed imperialism promoted Anglicanism as one of the major agents of a connectedness between centre and periphery. After Canada, the oldest and most long-lived site of this new ecclesiastical imperialism in this period was in Bengal, Britain’s oldest Indian territory. English Christianity made its Wrst beachhead on the shores of the Indian subcontinent in the form of chaplains to the East India Company (EIC) in its factories established at Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay (today Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai) in the late seventeenth century. Fort William, later Calcutta, was destined to become the most important of these trading posts as the headquarters of English, and then British, Indian colonial government. But until Robert Clive’s military supremacy in the mid-eighteenth century gave the company Wnancial and administrative rule of Bengal, Madras was the most prosperous of the three British outposts. Fort William was established on the banks of the Hugli River (spelt Hooghley at the time) in 1686, and its Wrst company chaplain did not arrive until 1700. His eVorts enabled a church to be built and consecrated in 1709.7 But the religious life of early Calcutta under the EIC, as described by one of the company’s oYcers, was a stew of various religions and forms of Christianity. ‘In Calcutta all religions are freely tolerated but the Presbyterian, and they that browbeat. The Pagans carry their Idols in Procession thro’ the Town, the Roman Catholics have their Church to lodge their idols in 6 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 136–7. 7 Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 1707–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 107–8.

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and the Mohammedan is not discountenanced; but there are no Polemicks, except what are between our High-Church men and our Low.’8 The predominant inXuence in this early period as far as the company’s Anglicanism went has been described as ‘a waning Puritanism’, whose clearest expression was a Sabbatarian Sunday.9 However, oYcial Sunday proceedings in some factories indicate little Puritan inXuence. In Surat, for example, although church was held three times on a Sunday, the rest of the day was occupied by feasting, which does not suggest the sort of Sabbatarianism upheld by seventeenth-century English Puritans.10 While the company accepted some responsibility for religious provision for its own employees, throughout the eighteenth century it was not at all encouraging of the work of its chaplains. Support depended very much on the individual attitudes of its governors, which resulted in a changeable religious policy in its various factories. The London-based directors of the company remained nervously mindful of the precedent of the decline of Portuguese power in India, which they attributed to that nation adopting a policy of European enculturation and support for Catholic missions. They did not wish to lose their opportunities for proWt in such a manner, so throughout the eighteenth century the company’s governing court of directors was the most anti-missionary force in the aVairs of the British in India.11 Chaplains, therefore, conWned their ministry to company oYcials. They were paid employees, and had oYcial precedence after the governor, but the position did not attract many high-quality clergymen because of the high European mortality rate in India. Their work was largely conventional pastoral ministry to the European residents, education of their children, and attempts to get churches built to facilitate their religious ministry. The English failure to give priority to their religion in India during most of the eighteenth century was reXected in the time it took for a new church to be built 8 Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenthcentury India, revised edn. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1971), 2–4. 9 Ibid., 15. 10 Ibid. 11 Kenneth Ingham, Reformers in India, 1793–1833: An Account of the Work of Christian Missionaries on Behalf of Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 2, 10.

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in Calcutta after the original one was burnt down in 1756 during the siege by the Nawab of Bengal. A purpose-built English church was not reconstructed until 1787.12 The Church of England in India during this period, as represented by the company chaplains, was merely one dimension of a colonial social order that consciously sought to be a transplanted reXection of metropolitan society. Consequently, a factor’s wife in 1706 could register a genuine complaint when a surgeon’s wife sat in front of her at church, because this was seen to be claiming greater social precedence.13 During this time there was little concern or engagement by the chaplains with wider Indian society or culture; but neither was any more interest in India shown by other British denominations. The missionary interest of the Church of England in India was limited to the Wnancial support that the SPCK gave to a handful of German Lutheran missionaries it had been supporting in South India since 1728.14 A fundamental change in the nature of the East India Company happened when it became the permanent territorial ruler of Bengal in the 1750s, following the military successes of Robert Clive that culminated in 1757 in the skirmish known as the Battle of Plassey. This military usurpation was, in turn, given administrative depth under Warren Hastings as the company’s governor and then governor general between 1772 and 1784. The growing sympathy of the Deistic Hastings for the complexity and history of Indian culture was representative of the views prevailing among the higher echelons of the company’s Indian administrators by the late eighteenth century. Accordingly, Hastings and those who were like-minded opposed anything more than minimal British interference with Indian life as being dangerous to the company’s rule and proWts. This caution among company oYcials applied especially to any Christian evangelism of Indians. Hastings believed that good government necessitated leaving Indians to what ‘time and religion had rendered familiar to their understandings and sacred to their aVections’.15 But this policy 12 Spear, Nabobs, 34. 13 Ibid., 10, 13. 14 This connection continued until these missions were transferred to the SPG in 1825. M.E. Gibbs, The Anglican Church in India (New Delhi: Indian SPCK, 1972), 14–15, 23. 15 Neill, Christianity in India, 18.

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was to be overturned under his successor, Lord Cornwallis, who was governor general between 1786 and 1793. As part of the revitalized British imperialism mentioned above, Cornwallis was commissioned by the government to bring about an Anglocentric regime in the company’s administration, by favouring Europeans in all its responsible positions. The government in Britain was able to achieve this because, by that time, the company was subject to increasing government control, which had begun with the Regulating Act in 1773. This act made the Calcutta governor into a governor general over the formerly co-equal governors of Madras and Bombay, but constricted his authority with a council of equals, leaving the governor general at the mercy of obtaining a majority in order to execute any decisions. The India Act of 1784, passed during the ministry of William Pitt the Younger, Wnally broke this political logjam by making the company’s Indian government subject to a minister and a board in London—the president and the board of control; but it also gave the governor general supremacy in his own council, and divided the company’s administration into separate commercial and political branches.16 In contrast to the government of Clive and Hastings, successive governors general after Cornwallis entrenched the Europeanizing of the company’s government, limiting Indians to the middle and lower ranks of the administration. In addition, by 1820 British rule had been extended to most of India, either directly or indirectly.17 Therefore, great debate was generated in Britain during the period from the 1780s to the 1830s about what to do with expanding British rule in India. Anglican Evangelical interest in India, for example, was awakened with the advent of the so-called pious chaplains into the company ranks. These were young Evangelical clergymen whose interest in India had been aroused as undergraduates by the famous Evangelical incumbent of Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge, Charles Simeon. The Wrst of this group to arrive in India, David Brown, became chaplain in Calcutta in 1786. These men felt a call to evangelize among the Indians as well as to the European population, but it was a number of years before the Wrst speciWc Anglican missionary arrived in India under the aegis of the Church Missionary 16 Percival Spear, A History of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 93–4. 17 Ibid., 95.

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Society (CMS) in 1815. Hopes for open missionary access to India, and for an Anglican establishment there, received a setback followed a mutiny among sepoy troops at Vellore in 1806, which was blamed on fears of Christian proselytism. But the tight restrictions eased again and, after the 1813 revision of the company’s charter—which made missionary access legal—there were, by 1833, twenty-eight missionaries from the CMS in India. But it was not until 1820 that the Wrst SPG missionaries were Wnally sent to India. They went as staV for the Bishop’s College, which had been founded by Thomas Middleton, the Wrst Bishop of Calcutta, as an institution to educate young Hindus and Christians and to be a resource for evangelism.18 The Wrst mention of India as a missionary responsibility by an SPG preacher was in 1786, when the Bishop of Lincoln, Thomas Thurlow (brother of the ultra-Tory Lord Chancellor) taking a text requiring the gospel to be ‘preached in all the world’,19 mentioned towards the end of his sermon the need to extend this beneWt to the Indian territories now added to the British Empire. Indians, he said, had received the beneWts of British temporal blessings and should now know also Britain’s spiritual advantages. This was all the more necessary as the inhabitants needed emancipating from their current state of being ‘deluded by error or degraded by superstition’. It was a duty incumbent on the British as Christians towards their fellow subjects. Thurlow had been inXuenced to urge India upon the concerns of the society by a sermon he had read by Joseph White, Master of Wadham College and Professor of Arabic at Oxford University.20 He wanted the East India Company to use some of its massive revenues to fund churches in the provincial capitals of its territories, and to found an episcopal establishment in India. The result of this would be to repay the company, and Britain, with peace and order in 18 Neill, Christianity in India, 133, 206. 19 Matthew 24: 14. 20 Joseph White, Sermon on the Duty of Attempting the Propagation of the Gospel among our Mahometan and Gentoo Subjects in India, in Thomas Thurlow, Bishop of Lincoln, A Sermon (1786), 23 n. White was a genuine scholar in his Weld at a time when not all fellows at the university were. He later became Regius Professor of Hebrew from 1801–14. Most of his work was on the Bible, and he published the Wrst printed edition in the West of the Syriac version of the New Testament used by the eastern Jacobites. L.S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 539, 541.

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its oriental territories, as the bishop envisaged Christianity becoming the established religion of the British in India. This would be the basis for the conversion of the country.21 A second mention of India among SPG preachers in the eighteenth century was made in 1794 by William Cleaver, Bishop of Chester, also when commenting on a text about spreading the gospel to all the world.22 Until recently, he said, India had not loomed large in either British commerce or territory, but recent territorial acquisitions had now opened a door of opportunity in the East for the gospel. Cleaver was unusually positive about the non-Christian religion of India, believing there were suYcient connections between Hinduism and Christianity (however much these were ‘disguised by fable’ in the former’s case) for evangelistic success to be achieved wherever a substantial social connection with Hindus could be facilitated. Even with Muslims he could envisage the same triumph because Islam had incorporated a positive view of Christ. But much would depend on the inXuence of British Christians in India and bringing into being a religious establishment to support and encourage them. In concrete terms, Cleaver desired in India an emulation of the establishment recently eVected in Canada, with stipends for chaplains in each British settlement to enable them to carry out the duties of a missionary.23 The Wrst society preacher in the nineteenth century for whom India became an explicit theme was Bishop John Randolph of Oxford, in 1803. His address touched on a number of traditional eighteenth-century Anglican imperial themes. He aYrmed that the British Empire had come as a gift from the Almighty. Not only had God raised up Britain as the pre-eminent international commercial and naval power, but God had also made her a leader among those nations that had preserved a pure—that is, Protestant—Christianity. However, in the early nineteenth century the threat to this consummate Christianity of the Church of England came not from traditional Anglican anxieties about a duplicitous Catholicism masquerading as Christianity, but from the explicit inWdelity of revolutionary France. In contrast with the renunciation of Christianity by 21 Thurlow, Sermon, 22–5. 22 Mark 6: 15. 23 William Cleaver, Bishop of Chester, A Sermon (1794), 19–21.

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their neighbour, God, according to the bishop, had safeguarded in Britain an aVection for the Church of England as the means of maintaining religion in its society. In return for this divine preservation it was consequently incumbent upon Britain to be ‘kindling the holy Xame amongst others yet unconverted’. Religion now needed to be ‘seen in the train of our Power and Commerce’ wherever the British Empire should extend. In so doing Britain would enjoy the continued blessing of God.24 Like his eighteenth-century predecessors commenting on the settlers and indigenes of North America, this preacher also found the religion of the British in India to be inadequate and neglected, and the indigenous religion superstitious.25 The remedy for these deWciencies recurring was again familiar: civilization, the European transformation of local culture, and British education so as to prepare the way for Christianity. Also traditional was the motif of the inadequacy of previous Catholic missions, who were charged with promoting conversions without adequate preparation. However, a new warning was sounded, against ‘Enthusiasm’ or Evangelicalism which, according to Randolph, practised similar evangelistic methods to that of the Catholics by relying on religious feelings that lacked the depth of ‘rational Faith’. The introduction of Evangelicalism into India, he asserted, had been the major obstacle of the work of the society in India, by allowing missionaries into that colony who were ‘impatient of religious instruction, and even of the controul of the Laws of social life’. Accordingly, he advocated a prohibition on privately sponsored missionaries, presumably a riposte against the Evangelical missionary societies—which were collections of private individuals—in favour of the SPG as an authorized body of the Church of England.26 The following year his colleague the Bishop of Chester, Henry Majendie, also advocated a Church of England mission in Bengal, to mirror those already established by the SPCK in South India. He advocated a preaching mission, resourced by translations of the four Gospels into the local language, to ‘eradicate the ancient and 24 John Randolph, Bishop of Oxford, A Sermon (1803), 28–30. 25 Ibid., 28. 26 Ibid., 19–22. By 1803 Evangelical missionary societies were taking an active interest in India; the Baptist Missionary Society, for example, had been formed in 1792, largely in support of William Carey’s mission to India, which commenced in 1793.

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inveterate superstition of the Hindoo’. He criticized the dearth of public demonstrations of Christianity among the British in India and that, except for Calcutta, there was not a single Anglican church to be found in all the company’s territory, meaning that the faith of the British was without the necessary infrastructure for its nurture.27 So by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was evident that the society was becoming conscious of a responsibility both to the British in India and to the evangelization, particularly of the Hindu majority there. But despite this new imperial conquest of a land involving a very diVerent cultural encounter for the British from that of eighteenth-century North America, these Anglicans continued to draw on familiar eighteenth-century themes with only minor alterations to explicate this new colonized society for their metropolitan audience. One of these was anti-Catholicism, which was muted in comparison with the North American mission. Other than Bishop Randolph in 1803, Roman Catholicism was mentioned by only two other preachers in this period. In 1810, the Bishop of Norwich actually praised the work of the Jesuits in Paraguay as exemplars of missionary strategy, along with the Quakers in North America.28 William Howley of London in 1817 believed that had missions depended on human eVort, then Catholic missions in India would have deserved to be more successful because of the organization and energy they had exhibited. He described their religious orders as ‘distinguished by their ardour of piety and innocence of life’. Instead, their eVorts were undermined by the ‘tenets and manners of the East’, the ‘degenerate’ behaviour of Christians there, and ‘the crimes and cruelties of European adventurers’. Still exhibiting some classic Anglican anti-Catholicism, Howley aYrmed that notwithstanding Catholic missionary eVorts it was still a church that adulterated the gospel with erroneous traditions, the dominion of Rome, and counted conversions by numbers rather than sincerity. Howley condemned any softening of the customary hostility towards Indian religious culture, criticizing Roman Catholic missions for allowing the continuance of some Indian practices which, for Howley, was to ‘sanction the ‘‘communion of the darkness with light’’ ’.29 27 Henry Majendie, Bishop of Chester, A Sermon (1804), 17–18. 28 Henry Bathurst, Bishop of Norwich, A Sermon (1810), 15. 29 William Howley, Bishop of London, A Sermon (1817), 17–19.

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The mitigation of the traditional Anglican anti-Catholicism in this period probably had a lot to do with the religious consequences of the French Revolution. Anti-Catholicism was already losing ground among the educated elite in Britain in the last decades of the eighteenth century under the inXuence of Enlightenment liberal thought, especially towards the connection between religious belief and civil and social disabilities.30 English churchmen were convinced that the revolution had become violent and anarchic due to its rejection of religion. Compared with this new threat, numbers of leading English Anglicans found common cause with the dispossessed and persecuted French Catholic clergy in a manner they had never exhibited before. French clergy and religious who sought exile in England were assisted by both church and state from the 1790s to the 1820s. Their plight conWrmed for English Anglicans the disastrous consequences that would result from the severing of church and state.31 But while contemporary circumstances muted the usual imperial competition with Catholicism, other familiar imperial themes would re-emerge as strongly as ever in the nineteenth-century Anglican discourse on India. These motifs were reinforced from a colonial context once the Church of England had missionaries in the Weld. From 1819 the SPG began also to publish reports it received from the Bishop of Calcutta, as one of the new diocese’s major Wnancial backers. Indian reports after 1815 from Evangelical missionaries of the CMS (initially German Lutherans until English recruits began to dominate by 1817) also began from Bengal after 1815.32 Edited versions of their reports, and those of the Evangelical EIC chaplains, were available in the CMS journal, the Missionary Register, after it began publication in 1813. However, before that, as part of the Evangelical campaign for missionary access, India Wgured prominently in the public views of Evangelical leaders of that campaign such as Charles Grant and Claudius Buchanan. The CMS had been formed in 1799 as the Society for Missions in Africa and the East (it became the Church Missionary Society in 1812) with a very diVerent model of mission from that of the SPG, 30 Edward Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 22. 31 Ibid., 20–1. 32 Neill, Christianity in India, 206.

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which valued its formal connection to the state-connected Church of England through its charter. The CMS was founded by Anglicans who despaired of the encumbrances of this connection in harnessing the new mission energies of Evangelicals. They formed the CMS to be a voluntary agency of Anglicans, independent of the control of the Church of England. Due to the diYculties it had in being securely established it was initially tentative and defensive in its public proWle. But, as Elizabeth Elbourne states, in the debates about missionary access to India it provided a ‘focus for popular activism’ that enabled it to tackle directly the orientalists’ construction of India. It could also draw on the previously worked-out position of Charles Grant, a director of the East India Company, who was one of the CMS’s early founders as a member of the Clapham Sect.33 The contrast between a world divided into Christian light and those in heathen darkness remained persistent in both the views of the SPG and the Evangelicals in India. The Bishop of Bristol in 1813 thought India a ‘miserable’ region whose people were ‘without God in the world’ because they were ignorant of the sole divinely appointed means of salvation, so that the ‘propagation of Christianity is a universal duty’.34 The next year Bishop Bowyer Sparke of Ely was equally convinced there were millions in India who were ignorant of Christianity and consequently ‘immersed in thick darkness’ and ‘sunk into the grossest idolatry, and polluted with every impure rite, and detestable abomination’.35 The Bishop of Oxford also believed it to be the purpose of God to bring all nations from darkness, a purpose that was invincible.36 As previously with North America, this theological contrast between Christian and non-Christian continued to be a cause for Anglicans to view Indian society and religion in the direst terms. The Evangelical Henry Ryder, preaching in 1819, saw the situation of India and Britain as two countries tied together under British rule but divided by religion, which in India’s case amounted to Hindu 33 Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Foundation of the Church Missionary Society: The Anglican Missionary Impulse’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 262. 34 William Mansel, Bishop of Bristol, A Sermon (1813), 15–17. 35 Bowyer Sparke, Bishop of Ely, A Sermon (1814), 8. 36 William Jackson, Bishop of Oxford, A Sermon (1815), 8, 13.

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idolatry or Islamic worship of a false prophet. He drew the most stark division between Britain and her colony, for he placed India as captive to the rule of the ‘Prince of this World’ who had formerly seduced the British in India to follow his—that is, Indian—ways, so that conqueror and conquered there were little diVerent from one another.37 Ryder maintained a deeply negative and pessimistic understanding of Indians, believing that religious establishment— too long withheld—could alone ‘cause the millions of British India to feel indeed a fellowship with their Sovereigns’.38 While this religious chasm between non-Christian falsehood and Christian truth remained, Ryder could not envisage that the desired bond between conqueror and conquered would result in overcoming the moral darkness of India. Commenting on what he asserted was an Indian propensity to lie, he thought this was to be expected because they were children of Satan, the father of lies! The Brahmins were proud and tyrannous, while the lower ranks of Indian society were cringing and mean. His assessment of Indians was Stygian and unremittingly hostile towards a people that were inferior not for racial reasons but for religious ones. ‘There is no country, in which the assertion of the psalmist is more amply veriWed—‘‘The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty’’ ’, a judgement Ryder based on reports of the drowning of the aged and sick in the River Ganges, the infanticide of females, and the burning of widows. These reports were derived from his reading of Charles Grant’s Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, published in 1813. Long before Africa, for these Anglicans India was viewed as the darkest place on earth, Wlled with moral iniquity because of what was seen as the inhuman customs of a false and idolatrous religion. To this list of cruelties Ryder added self-mutilation at religious ceremonies, and an acceptance and encouragement of suicide that reached ‘the very acme of wickedness’. In short, ‘the joyless lives and the hopeless deaths, must all conspire to make us apply the lamentations of Jeremiah to fair and peopled India—‘‘was there ever sorrow like unto her sorrow’’.’39

37 Henry Ryder, A Sermon (1819), 17. 39 Ibid., 30–1.

38 Ibid., 19.

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In 1823 Bishop John Kaye was more positive that India would be receptive to this Anglican imperial agenda of a religious and cultural transplant, though he also saw missionaries bringing light to those in the darkness of polytheism, impurity, and superstition, which degraded its followers by ‘absurd and oppressive observances’ and a corrupting immorality that encouraged licentiousness.40 He thought that Indians, particularly the Brahmin caste, were susceptible to the inXuence of imperial authority, especially if Christianity could be seen to have the backing of the British government. As a consequence, he imagined a missionary being able to tell his hearers in India of the superiority of British religion and civilization, conWdent of a hearing for a message that could now point to oYcial British backing. I come not to you, like my predecessors, impelled only by the suggestions of my own feelings . . . I address you on the part of the people, to whose government you are subject; whose pre-eminence in all the arts of civilization you yourselves admit; and to whom you are indebted for that blessing, which it is the chief end of human society to secure, the equal administration of justice. They commission me to oVer you a religion, to the inXuence of which they ascribe their own moral and intellectual superiority; a religion, which is founded on the justest and most elevated conceptions of the divine nature, aVords at once the most rational and consolatory views of the dealings of God with man, and enforces a system of worship and external rites, not calculated like your own, to degrade the mind by the sensual indulgences which it allows, but to enlighten the understanding and purify the heart.41

Nevertheless, for Kaye as well as Ryder, Hinduism remained idolatry, a product of ‘the Enemy of our salvation’, which was designed by Satan to enslave its adherents by sensual indulgence and licence for the passions. This evil enslavement entrenched moral turpitude in the culture of Indian society.42 Charles BlomWeld of Chester cautioned in 1827 against expecting the Indian Church to grow too rapidly, warning that Satan would not relinquish his hold there too easily.43

40 John Kaye, Bishop of Bristol, A Sermon (1823), 2. 41 Ibid., 18. 42 Ibid., 14. 43 Charles BlomWeld, Bishop of Chester, A Sermon (1827), 20.

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On the one side of a divine divide into which the world was split stood the religion devised by humankind, while on the other, alone, stood the divine revelations and truth of Christianity.44 This was a division between artiWce and truth, between God and Satan, absolute truth and total falsehood, that all these Anglicans accepted. Only one SPG preacher in the entire period could see any semblance of social beneWt deriving from the non-Christian faiths of India. Bishop John Banks Jenkinson in 1828, like Voltaire, admitted that even superstition could be beneWcial for the uneducated. Innocent religious error might nevertheless contain the religious tenets of natural religion, enshrined in Deism for the educated, but brought down to the level of the vulgar in the symbols and ceremonies of Hinduism. It was as conducive to social order and good and morality as was the Christian gospel. However, this socially useful but erroneous superstition of Hinduism would inevitably collapse before the truthful onslaught of Christianity.45 Initially, much of this Anglican understanding of Hinduism was constructed in ignorance, because there was little in-depth study of what was, to the British, a very alien religion until the late eighteenth century.46 Until then, the baZing persistence of a false Hinduism in the face of truthful Christianity was explained by it being either a more primitive religion, or a degenerate one.47 These views prevailed until the work of orientalists such as William Jones, whose view that Hinduism was an ancient system came to be accepted in the nineteenth century. However, his belief that it was also sophisticated was not; instead, it was the widespread Christian and British view that Hinduism was barbarous, if not totally evil, with its rites of sati, and the institution of thuggee (sects of murderous bandits), and it should be condemned as superstitious, degenerate, and idolatrous.48 With regard to the British inhabitants of the empire in India, William Howley ventured the opinion that Christianity had been discredited by their neglectful and scornful behaviour towards their religion. Turning this religious lack of interest of the British around 44 John Banks Jenkinson, Bishop of St David’s, A Sermon (1828), 10. 45 John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, A Sermon (1809), 6. 46 Amal Chatterjee, Representations of India, 1740–1840: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 88. 47 Ibid., 87. 48 Ibid., 98–101.

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was, he asserted, the key to the advancement of Christianity in India, which would be a consequence of Britain taking seriously its religious responsibilities as an imperial power. The future advancement of Christianity in India will, in a great measure, depend on the success of our endeavours to eradicate the inWdelity and correct the morals of the European population . . . And much has already been done. This great concern of humanity is no longer regarded with indiVerence: it has engaged the serious attention of Government, and interested the feelings of individuals . . . and whilst appropriate instruction at home is secured to the higher ranks, institutions have been established in India, to communicate religious knowledge to the children of indigent Christians, and by early cultivation of reason, and infusion of virtuous principles, to prepare the hearts of the natives for the reception of Divine grace.49

His colleague the Bishop of Gloucester in 1819 also believed that there was hope of a change in the religious indiVerence of the British abroad, and for the reduction of their scandalous behaviour, which brought Christianity into disrepute, though a concern for the evangelism of their Indian fellow-subjects by the British there was largely still wanting.50 Lastly, in 1823 John Kaye, Bishop of Bristol, dwelt at some length on this subject of British degeneration in a colonial environment. Conversion of the British residents in India was especially necessary because there the worst of Christian vice and crime had been exhibited, because of the inordinate desire for gain that had prompted the European colonization of the country in the Wrst place. As there were no Christian institutions to counteract this worldliness (the bishop evidently did not consider as Christians the Catholics, or the local Thomas Christians of South India), it was no wonder the British there ceased to retain any authentic Christianity. Worse, they became corrupted with Indian paganism. At the very least a visible British Christian presence would shame the delinquent into making their corruption less public and therefore less inXuential. How materially must such a change in the deportment of the British settlers contribute to the success of the Missionary’s labours! Hitherto he has 49 Howley, Sermon, 23.

50 Ryder, Sermon, 22–3.

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contended, not only against the prejudices of the native, but also against the corrupt morals of the Christians themselves: for with reason might the Hindoo question or deny the superior pretensions of a religion which appeared neither to command the respect nor to inXuence the behaviour of its professors. But when he sees that the precepts of Christianity are exempliWed in the lives of the Christians with whom he converses, when he sees that they are just, and temperate, and benevolent, and holy, he will naturally contract a reverence and aVection for a religion which leads men to the uniform practice of piety and virtue.51

Colonial degeneration of the British in India, among the lower orders of their society, was also a characteristic complaint being heard from the colony itself once an Anglican presence there was established. Bishop Heber of Calcutta in 1825 reported that the opportunities for mission were spreading to areas where Europeans ‘are less known, and the degrading habits of our lower ranks have less exerted their unhappy inXuence’.52 The same concern about the disintegration of European identity in India was shown from time to time by Evangelical Anglicans. In 1816 the Missionary Register criticized British residents for their sense of inherent superiority, probably because it went hand-in-hand with unconcern for evangelization of the local population, which was dismissed as ‘chimerical and absurd’. This applied even to ‘pious families’.53 The British in India were apparently a people without a religion because of the lack of oYcial or local British support for Christianity.54 This seemed all the more so when particular groups of British, such as sailors, brought disgrace upon Christianity by ‘their shameful conduct in the sight of the Heathen’.55 So Anglicans at the beginning of the nineteenth century were as equally convinced as their eighteenth-century predecessors that it was their gospel-bound duty to bring the only hope of salvation to the degenerate colonial British populations, and to the heathens of India, as it had been to the indigenous populations of North America. Ryder of Gloucester in 1819 was representative of this conviction among his fellow preachers. Quoting article eighteen of the Thirtynine Articles of Religion he aYrmed: ‘That there is none other name 51 Kaye, Sermon, 24. 52 SPG, Proceedings (1826), 122. 53 Missionary Register, January 1816, 24. 54 Ibid., November 1821, 470. 55 Ibid., August 1823, 354.

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under Heaven, given among men (besides the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth) whereby we must be saved. While there were uncovenanted mercies of God, these remained unknowable, but salvation through Christ was the only covenanted and therefore sure path that had been revealed. This was an inward work, wrought through the ecclesiastical ministry of word and sacraments which inaugurated a change from darkness to light.’56 Mission, therefore, continued to be proclaimed as a Christian requirement, placed by Christ’s gospel upon the Anglicans. It was laid down by divine authority in the Scriptures to be promoted by human instrumentality;57 it was the will of God that all people to the ends of the earth should know his word, a duty that still needed greater attention than it had hitherto received;58 and it was a divine purpose that could not be defeated so that, like the apostles, Anglicans were required to ‘call the nations of the earth out of darkness into light’.59 The indisputable nature of the religious duty of mission, according to Henry Bathurst of Norwich in 1810, compelled the British to bring the religious advantages they enjoyed particularly to those parts of the world connected to the British Empire, the inhabitants of which, the bishop was sure, ‘most loudly call for our assistance’.60 Trade as a metaphor for this process—and the formulation of a mission theology in commercial terms—was still used by some of these early nineteenth-century preachers, though not as frequently as in the previous century. Bathurst urged that missions were a gratuitous return for the lucrative trade with India. Indeed it was owed to India as a return for the worldly advantages India had given England.61 Similarly, seven years later, Howley of London found it distressing that while ‘the ends of the earth have yielded their treasures and territories to the avarice or ambition of Europe, they have not received in exchange the inestimable truths of the Gospel’.62 More common than the eighteenth-century trading metaphor for mission was the proclamation of the need for British civilization in India as the anteroom into Christian faith. Attention was drawn to

56 58 59 60

Ryder, Sermon, 4–12. 57 Fisher, Sermon, 4–5. Bathurst, Sermon, 7–8; John Luxmore, Bishop of Hereford, A Sermon (1811), 5. Jackson, Sermon, 8, 13. Bathurst, Sermon, 6–8. 61 Ibid., 17. 62 Howley, Sermon, 6.

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the need of an alliance between Western civilization and mission by a succession of preachers up to the 1830s. Civilization was a necessary precedent to religious instruction.63 Without it the work of conversion would remain incomplete.64 Education, along with distribution of the Christian Scriptures, would undermine Hinduism and encourage the spread of Christianity. In this way, ‘Civilization accompanies the progress of Christianity through the continent and islands of the East, mitigating by their combined inXuence, the enormity and licentiousness even of the surrounding superstitions and idolatry which still prevail.’65 This was the predominant view of mission strategy from which most preachers never departed. One who did make a greater distinction between Christianity and civilization in this period was the Evangelical Charles Sumner, the Bishop of Worcester, preaching to the SPG in 1829. While the spread of Western civilization, the prohibition of immoral practices, and the improvement of the quality of life for Indians were undoubted beneWts, Sumner reminded his hearers that they did not constitute the essential purpose of the missionary. This was to be found solely in preaching the doctrines of Christianity without mitigating their peculiarity for Indians.66 Finally, among these customary themes of an Anglican engagement with empire, the doctrine of God’s providence was ever present. It was England’s obedience over the previous century—through the agency of the society—to Christ’s missionary injunction in Matthew 28: 19–20 that was the reason, the Bishop of Bristol was convinced, for the continuation of providential protection for the nation over the same period.67 Two years later, in 1809, the Bishop of Salisbury was equally sure of divine protection for England, while other European nations were being destroyed in the wars with France. But such protection would only be maintained so long as the nation obeyed the divine will and executed its purposes, chief of which was ‘the furtherance of Christ’s Gospel promoted, in every part of the widely distant and extended Dominion he hath committed to us’.68 63 64 65 66 67 68

Bathurst, Sermon, 13. Herbert Marsh, Bishop of Peterborough, A Sermon (1821), 6. Robert Gray, Bishop of Bristol, A Sermon (1830), 19. Charles Sumner, Bishop of Worcester, A Sermon (1829), 9. George Pelham, Bishop of Bristol, A Sermon (1807), 10. Fisher, Sermon, 15–16.

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This sense of an alliance between God and the British nation—or at least the English part of it that was the religious responsibility of the Church of England—was, if anything, more pronounced in this period than during the eighteenth century. This was a consequence of a sense of national peril as a result of the war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France. A signiWcant number of preachers devoted large proportions of their sermons to advocating a sense of mission for Britain’s empire as a national enterprise led by the Church of England. The Bishop of Gloucester in 1805, while admitting British colonization was not without faults, claimed it was, however, free from the atrocities that accompanied Spanish colonialism in the New World. After that assertion he fulsomely laid out the benevolent process of British colonialism, in which religion Wgured strongly, at least in the bishop’s eyes, though it would have been better if that religion had more often been Anglican. ‘Where they [the British] have made their settlements, thither they have carried their Commerce; and with their spirit of adventure, they blended warm zeal for Reformed Religion. Happy had it been for them, if they had been guided by the principles of our National Church: principles which would have taught them to be serious, but yet mild; to be earnest, but yet tolerant, in maintaining the Ritual Forms of External Service.’69 For Thomas Burgess of St David’s, a Christian government of the British Empire not only made British evangelism in her empire requisite, but such oYcial support would be conducive to a successful mission in India. In addition, there were a number of pointers in India to the fruitful outcome for such a mission, which included the existence of the Indian Syrian Church (whose doctrines he believed were compatible with those of the Church of England), and a favourable disposition of Indian rulers towards missionaries. But principally it was a matter of a Christian duty—in proportion to the magnitude of the British Empire in the East—that the bishop pressed upon his hearers. This was all the more needful when the ‘superstition and ignorance, the vindictive, deceitful, and fraudulent disposition of the natives of India’ was taken into account. Here Burgess cited as his authorities the writings of Governor Holwell, 69 George Huntingford, Bishop of Gloucester, A Sermon (1805), 16.

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Lord Teignmouth, and Claudius Buchanan, all Evangelicals with experience in India. Consequently, British duty as ‘Christians and sovereigns’ was weighty, ‘the neglect of which may result in the loss of that divine protection, which alone can preserve to us our sovereignty in India, or our independence in Europe. All that wisdom of counsel and vigour of execution could perform, for the extension of our dominion in the East, and for the security of our conquests, has been accomplished. Something should now be as eVectively done for the honour of religion.’70 The Bishop of Hereford, John Luxmore, in 1811 maintained that there were characteristics of the Church of England that made it preeminently suited to spreading Christianity imperially. Its positive use of reason alongside revelation meant it was able to provide supporting evidence for Christianity accessible to all intelligences. It also meant that the Church of England’s doctrines were accessible by being reduced to primitive simplicity, free of the accreting overlay of tradition. In addition, Anglican religion was welcoming to science and to liberty, with the Scriptures open to all, while its toleration permitted a religious freedom evinced in the lack of censorship. It was very much the same encomium of the positive qualities of the Church of England that eighteenth-century churchmen had also used to uphold the pre-eminence of their church as the best of all possible churches. This attitude was now doing service in support of Anglicanism’s leading role in upholding Britain’s unique purpose as a Christian nation and imperial power. Consequently, concluded Luxmore (identifying the nation with the Church of England), ‘on our nation is bestowed a manifest superiority in point of religious knowledge . . . [like] the pre-eminence which we bear in point of extended commerce. Thus elevated and thus endowed, Britain may become the light of the world, the salt of the earth.’71 SPG preachers after him were just as convinced about the possibility that Britain was singled out by God for a divine purpose. Bowyer Sparke of Ely aYrmed that God had highly exalted Britain above other nations in order to be the divine instrument in restoring Europe to freedom from the tyranny of Napoleon. But God was also 70 Thomas Burgess, Bishop of St Davids, A Sermon (1808), 14–21. 71 Luxmore, Sermon, 11–13.

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calling the nation to an even more important work of rescuing millions of fellow human beings from superstition, idolatry, and ‘moral pollution’, thereby bringing them from ‘darkness to light’, from the power of Satan to the liberty of God’s children.72 Like John Luxmore before him, for Sparke this was a consequence of Britain enjoying special divine blessings for this purpose. There was Britain’s national preservation amidst a war-ravaged Europe, and from the ‘moral anarchy’ of France; its unrestricted use of the Bible; and a Church of England worship that conformed as closely as possible to that of the early church.73 Britain had also ‘by the gracious will of Providence’ enlarged her eastern territories and brought millions there under a Christian, Protestant government. Conscious of the intense debate over the renewal of the company’s charter the year before, Sparke concluded that it was inconceivable Britain should accede to the protests of those who opposed an unrestricted introduction of Christian missions into India when considering the ‘abominations of the Hindoos’. The happiness of millions was at stake, and such objections to missions Xew in the face of the manifest course of Providence.74 Two years later George Law, Bishop of Chester, also connected the nation, the empire, and Christian missions because these were an obligation for a Christian nation, especially one that reaped such a material abundance from its empire. How many myriads of intellectual beings are still uncheered, even with a single ray of Divine Truth! Unblessed with the knowledge and hope of an hereafter. And shall we any longer continue wanting to this the Wrst duty of a Christian nation? Shall our ships extend our commerce, and pour forth the manufactures of this land over the four quarters of the earth, without a wish, and an endeavour to communicate, at the same time, and by the same means, the glad tidings of the Gospel. When we review the wider limits of this powerful empire, its magniWcent establishments, its wealth, its charities; when also we reXect on the peculiar and nearly exclusive blessings, which, as a nation, we have enjoyed, we are almost led to observe, that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, is not upholden in a manner, commensurate to that great object which it has in view.75

72 Sparke, Sermon, 22–3. 73 Ibid., 6–7. 74 Ibid., 15–16. 75 George Law, Bishop of Chester, A Sermon (1816), 16–17.

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He went on to draw the lesson that religion was the bedrock of the continued enjoyment of imperial prosperity. One had only to contrast the fortunes of inWdel France with believing Britain. We deceive ourselves, if we fancy we have made all the returns, which the Divine bounty and goodness demand . . . we have as little reason to doubt concerning the temporal blessings which Christianity confers. The example has been tried before our eyes, and we have witnessed the diVerent situations of a believing and an inWdel nation. Not many years since, and few people enjoyed a greater share of prosperity than our continental neighbours. But scepticism paved the way for immorality and how great became the reverse!! A state more deplorable imagination can hardly conceive. Anarchy and misrule subverted every comfort of social life, whilst war, with unwonted ravages, desolated the face of the country. Scarcely was there a family, which had not to deplore a loss, either in the Weld, or on the scaVold. The reverse of this picture it has been our happier lot to exhibit. We have believed in, and worshipped, the God of our forefathers; we have reverenced his sanctuaries, and obeyed his statutes. Thus we have reached the summit of national prosperity, and justly may we attribute this pre-eminence, not to our arts and arms alone, but to the over-ruling providence of God, and let us hope— to our moral character and conduct.76

Bishop Howley likewise tied together Britain’s empire and her duty as a Christian and imperial nation. Referring to missions, he called them ‘the performance of duties peculiarly incumbent on a nation, which covers the seas with her navies, and extends her dominion to the ends of the earth’.77 Ryder of Gloucester asked, rhetorically, ‘Do we acknowledge as a nation our pre-eminent obligations to our God and Saviour’ for Britain’s unprecedented wealth and power? More particularly, with a constitution the envy of the world and a church apostolical and scriptural, wasn’t Britain obliged to communicate these treasures abroad ‘as our national tribute of gratitude’ to God?78 For John Jenkinson of St Davids a decade later, living in a nation pre-eminent for its wealth and standard of living also meant it would be a reproach if Christian mission were not supported. This was, after all, the will of God, which Britain’s advantages required her to accede to. Her international commerce, and the Church of England’s position as the purest of all Protestant Churches in its apostolic 76 Law, Sermon, 17–18. 77 Howley, Sermon, 8.

78 Ryder, Sermon, 33–4.

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conformity, and the national bulwark of Christian truth, was surely authoritative in such a Christian undertaking. Such advantages were not meant by God for the English alone, but were a sacred trust to enable Christian truth to be extended to heathen lands, particularly in the East.79 Similarly, two years later the Bishop of Bristol was equally convinced that British wealth, commerce, and colonial territories meant that Britain had unequalled advantages to undertake the Christian obligations that such divine gifts required.80 The Bishop of Carlisle, like other SPG preachers in this period, thought that religion was an issue of national signiWcance, arguing that it ought to be made the foundation of every colony that Britain founded. He reiterated the theme common since the early eighteenth century that it was also for the purpose of extending Christianity that God had granted Britain the extension of her empire, and therefore the nation had a heavy responsibility to care for the religious condition of its colonies. He also used the commercial theology of British spiritual things being oVered in exchange for temporal increase from the colonies, claiming: ‘we derive through them wealth and inXuence of no ordinary magnitude, and in this way our gratitude to the Giver of all good is best to be shown.’81 These preachers’ emphasis on a national obligation to evangelize the empire was probably a reaction to an oYcial opposition to the evangelization of indigenous peoples in the new empire, lest this create an inferior ‘mongrel’ race that would be culturally divorced from its indigenous ancestors but would have dubious loyalty to Britain.82 Consequently, there was an uneasy compromise after 1790. Anglicanism was actively and oYcially supported in the empire, but only among British settler populations or among people already Christian; while for non-Christians the boosted support for the Church of England in the colonies during this period was to be impressive evidence of the national piety of the imperial power.83 But, if the SPG sermons during the mid-point of this revived oYcial Anglicanism are any indication, within British imperialism it appears that Anglican leaders in England were chaWng against the conWning 79 Jenkinson, Sermon, 13–17. 80 Gray, Sermon, 17. 81 Hugh Percy, Bishop of Carlisle, A Sermon (1831), 9–12. 82 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 101–9. 83 Ibid.

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of that policy to British settlers and residents. Both Evangelical and non-Evangelical bishops by this period were among those promoting the idea of a national mission to India—beyond the British, to the Indians themselves. Evangelization continued to be for Anglicans a Christian obligation placed upon Christian Britain in her empire, just as it had been viewed previously in regard to North America. However, this call for an evangelistic national mission in India by Anglicans was overshadowed during the wars with France by Anglican and government concerns about the impact of the French Revolution. The emphasis of the SPG preachers during this period on the link between the nation and its church and mission were, in this imperial context, a mirror of the Church of England’s domestic response to the French Revolution. In both colonial and domestic contexts Anglican bishops saw themselves and their clergy as promoting the church as a vehicle of a national mission designed to avoid the social, political, and religious disasters of revolutionary France. At home and in the empire the Church of England understood itself as the moderator of social divisions, and as the embodiment of the Christian faith that kept British society together. The aristocratic George Pelham, Bishop of Bristol, in his society sermon clearly stated this connection between religion and society, an interconnection threatened by the atheistic French Revolution. And that religious knowledge has ever been considered as the great instrument for civilizing the multitude, and forming them into union, is a point acknowledged, I was going to say, by all mankind; but I feel myself arrested in my assertion, and obliged to admit, that even in these our days, a nation has been found, who could declare, that they could live without God in the world. But let this very instance, solitary as it is, and as I trust ever will be, rather serve as a conWrmation of the general truth . . . that some religious principle must be established, or else society can no longer be social.84

Human society was fundamentally a divine creation, Pelham averred, and therefore the irreligious principles of the French Revolution threatened anarchy and needed to be opposed and rooted out wherever they appeared, both in Britain and in her empire.

84 Pelham, Sermon, 8.

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So the French Revolution prompted a decade of self-examination by the Church of England, as much as by the propertied and ruling orders, out of which emerged a consensus that the ruling orders were wanting in moral and social leadership. If this was not reversed, it was thought such a vacuum by society’s natural leaders could lead to a similar social revolution in Britain as had happened in France. Consequently, the bishops and leading Anglican clergy and laity, such as William Wilberforce, recalled the nation to a renewed eVort to minister to the needs of the country and to a revitalized connection between church and state as a religious remedy to possible social upheaval. For the bishops, continued parliamentary support for the Church of England was a prerequisite for it to continue this mission to the nation of fostering social peace and unity.85 It is clear from this investigation that Anglican domestic social policy spilled over—for SPG Anglican leaders at least—into the imperial arena. So SPG preachers advocated the imperial export of Anglican Christianity and church structure on the basis that it was a means of securing imperial unity and social order, virtues required abroad as they were at home. Continuously concerned about the possible extension of revolutionary social upheaval from nearby France, English metropolitan elites during this period were therefore more comfortable with an Anglicanism led at home and in the empire by politically acceptable bishops rather than enthusiastic Evangelicals. Around the turn of the century the key Wgure was Bishop Porteus of London, whose views about mitigating the political disabilities of Dissent and Catholicism Wtted the assimilationist views of the prime minister, William Pitt, the governor general of India, Richard Wellesley (Lord Mornington), and the president of the board of control, Henry Dundas.86 All three aYrmed the moral change necessary in society to see oV French Jacobinism, and that domestic political radicalism would be Wltered through the social conformism and conservatism of the Church of England. Consequently, that church was to be promoted imperially—Wrst, to strengthen the Christian witness of Britain abroad, and second, 85 Richard Allan Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783–1852 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 21–50. 86 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 253.

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to convert to Protestantism non-Protestant Christians of the empire. The political elite at home favoured a splendid and high-proWle Anglicanism in the colonies, not to convert the indigenous populations but to impress them into conformity and docility.87 As a result, despite SPG episcopal preachers urging the evangelization of Indians, in reality Anglican eVorts in the East at this time concentrated on the English abroad and on existing non-Anglican Christian communities. This remained the accepted purpose of the SPG as the oYcial missionary arm of the Church of England during most of this period, so that it preferred in 1820 to send clergy to be staV of Bishop’s College; only subsequently did they undertake direct evangelistic missions to Indians. Beyond the SPG, other Anglican metropolitan preachers also saw their religion as a basis and bond for the British Empire. At Assize sermons, and other state occasions before the local legal and social elites, a few Anglican preachers in the 1790s drew attention to the empire in order to promote loyalism and safeguard the providential protection of their country. In 1790, on the anniversary of the ‘martyrdom’ of King Charles I, in London’s St Paul’s cathedral, the lord mayor’s chaplain preached a sermon on ‘Religion and loyalty, the grand support of the British Empire’. Providence punished the sins of any nation because of the rule of God over the aVairs of nations. A state was meant to exist as a balance between the lawful rule of the monarch and the loyalty of the subjects living in peace and liberty, and Britain had a civil and ecclesiastical constitution in which the respective rights of each, monarch and subject, ‘are very nicely ascertained, and very suitably adjusted’. Therefore, disaster could follow from those who espoused the Rights of Man, for the kingdoms of the world are the Lord’s, whose reign is eternal.88 The vicar of Dudley in 1792 preached a sermon on ‘Britain’s happiness: exhibiting an historical review of providential interpositions in favour of the British Empire, a faithful representation of its present prosperity; and recommending a line of conduct to prevent its declension or its fall’. He rehearsed the common providential 87 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 142–3. 88 G.E. De Coetlogon, Religion and Loyalty, the Grand Support of the British Empire (London, 1790), 16, 25.

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theology of God’s rule over nations from his text (Deuteronomy 4: 7–9) and outlined the traditional Anglican theology of God’s protection for England as found in the events of English history, including the way in which the loss of the American colonies had little long-term detrimental eVect on Britain. ‘This Cursory Review of national blessings, of divine and singular Interpositions, must convince the most sceptical of an over-ruling providence; and of his care, in particular, of the British Empire.’89 Consequently, it was necessary for Britons to regard God as the ‘Disposer of all events’, and be thankful to him for those ‘transcendent blessings’ Britain enjoyed, which would continue ‘so long as they ‘‘reverence Him as their king: and meddle not with them that are given to change’’ [Proverbs 24: 21]’, particularly the current ‘republican Spirit’.90 As proof, he compared the upheavals and conXicts in France’s empire with Britain’s peace and prosperity, which made Britain superior to all other European states.91 A remaining blot on Britain’s righteousness was the continued existence of the slave trade,92 and the need for the national suppression of vice.93 But if these were accomplished then British rule would continue to be blessed above all the nations on earth.94 Preaching in 1806, Bishop Porteus of London also drew attention to how providence intended religion to undergird political happiness at home and in the empire. He praised the surpassing nature of the British constitution, which he ascribed to Christianity being its animating spirit, as it was that of British society as a whole, softening the exercise of political power there—unlike in Asian and African kingdoms. Just as Christianity united Britain it also restrained British colonial governments. Consequently, ‘the Spirit of Christianity’ ‘has carried even to our most distant colonies, a large share of the freedom, the justice, the ease, the tranquillity, the security, and prosperity of the parent state’.95 89 Luke Booker, Britain’s Happiness: An Assize Sermon Preached at St Mary’s Church, Warwick, on Sunday the 1st of April, 1792: Exhibiting an Historical Review of Providential Interpositions in Favour of the British Empire, a Faithful Representation of its Present Prosperity; and Recommending a Line of Conduct to Prevent its Declension or its Fall (London, 1792), 11. 90 Ibid., 13–14. 91 Ibid., 18–19. 92 Ibid., 25. 93 Ibid., 27. 94 Ibid., 28. 95 Beilby Porteus, The BeneWcial eVects of Christianity on the Temporal Concerns of Mankind, Proved from History and from Facts (London, 1806), 45–7.

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Two years later Robert ChatWeld, the vicar of Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, applied to Bengal some of these Anglican arguments for the success of the British Christian state in maintaining itself amid then current worldwide conXict. In a long review of its history designed to point to a needful mission of Christianity in India, ChatWeld argued that the excellent nature of British government in Bengal in bringing justice, peace, and good order was undoubtedly due to Providential purpose. ‘If we bear in mind that the probable design of providence is, consonant to his nature, so far as we are acquainted with it from his works and the history of man, namely, the happiness of his creatures, it cannot be for a moment doubted, that the extensive power which has fallen to Great Britain, would not have been bestowed, unless for the best and wisest purposes.’96 It was, therefore, incumbent upon Britain to impart to Bengal a share in its own blessings. ‘[British] justice and our faith are alike pledged to secure to a people, whom we have rescued from the hard yoke of servitude and oppression, a portion of those civil and religious blessings which constitute our pride and prerogative, and are the fundamental pillars of our national superiority and independence.’97 Consequently, ‘the British nation, in return for its former crimes and mismanagement, may be made the instrument in the diVusion of both civil and religious happiness over the fairest portion of the globe.’98 He also wanted to extend Christianity so that India, like Britain, would enjoy the consequent moral and social beneWts. So he proposed an Anglican church establishment there as a permeating inXuence for improving British rule. With the aid of such an improved establishment as may be adequate to the increasing wants of the British Residents, it would not be presumptuous to hope, that their labours combined with the increased attention of the Government to the happiness of the people, would, under the Divine Protection, have the eVect desired by the most zealous and enthusiastic of our countrymen. It is by such regulations that the evils which have been 96 Robert ChatWeld, An Historical Review of The Commercial, Political, and Moral State of Hindoostan, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time: The Rise and Progress of Christianity in the East, its Present Condition, and the Means and Probability of Its Future Advancement: With an Introduction and Map, Illustrating the Relative Situation of the British Empire in the East (London, 1808), 134. 97 Ibid., 135–6. 98 Ibid., 138.

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deplored, may be eVectually removed; that, instead of being the drain of our public strength, instead of spreading wide in the bosom and sanctuary of the ruling State, the seeds of corruption and decay, India may become a fruitful source of revenue, and of public happiness. It is by such conduct that can discharge the important trust committed to our hands, and obliterate the reproach from our national character: thus alone may we secure the attachment of the present race of Hindus, who will transmit to their children the sentiments of their happiness, mixed with those of their gratitude: thus will the memory of former usurpations pass away, and be forgotten, and India, rescued from Tyranny and abasement, by the fostering care of Great Britain, may then repay the beneWts she has received, by becoming the seat of Liberty, Happiness, and Virtue.99

Nor were these preachers futile in their eVorts to drum up support for religion and for their established church, for there is much evidence that the political elite of Britain in this period embraced religion, and particularly, if not monopolistically, the Church of England as part of their bulwark against the pernicious inXuence of revolutionary France. The landed rulers of Britain and their government were only too well aware that the sway of revolutionary ideology needed an ideological counter-attack. Viewing ideas of the Rights of Man and revolutionary liberty, equality, and fraternity as seriously seditious, they turned increasingly to religion as a bulwark for the status quo, especially after the Terror in 1793–4. They especially valued the work of Anglican apologists who emphasized the need of the church in society as a means of inculcating ethics grounded in eternal reward and punishment.100 While political favour was not conWned to the Church of England in this period— the equally established Church of Scotland, for example, receiving a parliamentary grant in 1808 to build more churches—that church was more favoured than others. From the point of view of the forces of the existing political and social order there were not many alternatives, with Dissent tainted at the time by its history of freethinking and early Xirtation with the ideals of the French Revolution. While Anglicans, like Dissenters, also qualiWed patriotism by Christian allegiance and conscience, they were more whole-hearted in their 99 Ibid., 417–18. 100 Thomas Philip SchoWeld, ‘Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 601–7.

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nationalism, and the clergy had been growing steadily more aligned with normal eighteenth-century Anglican theology during the 1780s and 1790s in defence of the established church’s position against the attacks of Old and New Dissent.101 Additionally, many signiWcant Wgures in church and state were part of an orthodox Anglican culture that Xourished—even after the demise of the Tory party in the 1760s—to become very inXuential in this period with their fundamental attachment to the cause of the Church of England. These embraced conservative Whigs and politicians such as Charles Jenkinsson, Lord Rockingham, Edmund Burke; and High Churchmen such as Lord MansWeld, Samuel Johnson, Bishop Horne, and the individuals in the succeeding generation who made up the High Church Hackney Phalanx.102 Therefore, contemporary political circumstances made it feasible in this period for Anglicans to re-emphasize the importance of the connection between church and state. In doing so they were upholding normative Anglican political theory as it had developed since the sixteenth century—the idea that the political nation, because it was Christian, should have a religious will and purpose. In this campaign for a renewed establishment Henry Majendie, the Bishop of Chester, led oV the batting in the nineteenth century on this far from sticky wicket, conWdent that Anglican calls for a revitalized church–state alliance to have an imperial dimension would now have a willing audience among the English political elites. It was very satisfying, the bishop maintained in his sermon of 1804, that at a time of great diYculty in the defence of the country Parliament should have strengthened the established church, which would, undoubtedly, 101 William StaVord, ‘Religion and the Doctrine of Nationalism in England at the Time of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars’, in Stuart Mews (ed.), Religion and National Identity (Studies in Church History, vol. 18) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 382–95. 102 James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 37, 39, 49, 75–6, 78, 201, 255. The Hackney Phalanx was a loose but inXuential group of High Church clergy and laity that Xourished from about 1800 to 1830. The name derives from the living of one of their number, Archdeacon John Watson, who was vicar of Hackney, then a village north-east of London. Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14.

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induce divine favour towards Britain. The legislative boost for the Church of England the bishop was referring to was probably the uniting in 1801 of the Church of Ireland with the Church of England into the legal union known as the United Church of England and Ireland. He clearly hoped that Parliament would look equally favourably upon the imperial mission of the SPG. The society was the best qualiWed to disseminate Christianity and ‘the Apostolic Discipline of the Church of England’ throughout the British colonies. Such parliamentary measures were likely to conciliate the favour of God towards the nation at a time of severe trials.103 A decade later, Majendie’s successor as Bishop of Chester, George Law, also drew attention to the imperial importance of the alliance between church and state. He stressed the advantages that arose from the union in terms of sanctions for uniformity of doctrine for the church, and social morality for the state against the deadly liberality characterized by contemporary, but dangerous, liberal tolerance towards other forms of government and religion. Such ‘salutary restraints’ had checked in Britain the contagion of the French Revolution. The best solution for the continued peaceableness of British society was, not surprisingly, to demand that Christian ministry be properly qualiWed by its learning and that Christianity at home and abroad would best be fostered by the established church.104 On the basis of the reinvigorated support of the British state for its largest established church, the SPG preachers sought to focus this alliance in the empire on achieving an Anglican establishment in India. It was the same goal that SPG Anglicans had pressed for in the eighteenth century in respect to the North American colonies. But in the early nineteenth century, with new political interest in strengthening the Church of England, it seemed success was more likely. Bishops Thurlow and Cleaver had already suggested the possibility in the 1780s and 1790s, and SPG preachers made the most of their annual celebration to press this possibility publicly. It could, they suggested, be the foundation for evangelizing Indians and countering the degenerative inXuence of accruing wealth among the young men of the East India Company, whose riches could erode their religious duties and have a consequently corrosive eVect upon colonial government. The state 103 Majendie, Sermon, 20–1.

104 Law, Sermon, 12–15.

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needed to cooperate with the SPG, according to Bishop Majendie, for this salutary purpose. The measure, it is acknowledged, is primarily within the province of Government; but advice and assistance in the execution of it could no where, it is presumed, be more judiciously sought than from this Society. If motives of Policy determined our Rulers on the introduction of the British Code of Jurisprudence within our Asiatic Colonies,105 it may be hoped that the time is not far distant when, from higher Principles, a suYcient Religious Establishment will there be formed for our own Countrymen.106

Many successive sermons contained episcopal urgings for government to inaugurate an Anglican establishment in India. Bishop Dampier of Rochester in 1806 took up the cudgels. He spoke of the ‘languishing state’ of religion in British Asian colonies, an assessment he based on his reading of the book by the company chaplain, Claudius Buchanan, whose Memoir for the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India had been published the previous year. According to Dampier, for as long as religion was unsupported by the government in these colonies, British rule in India lacked a secure foundation, because it was religion that ‘compacted and bound together’ the colonial political union with England. This could have been corrected with the renewal of the company’s charter in 1793, but the religious establishment planned in that bill was defeated.107 The bishop pressed the point that British residents in India without religious guidance and resources were exposed to the corrosive eVects of local climate and culture. It was the theme of colonial dissipation with respect to colonists in eighteenth-century North America being reiterated for India. ‘It is with Christian feelings that we contemplate

105 The Regulating Act (1773) of the government of Lord North established a supreme court in Calcutta and a judiciary paid by the crown. H.V. Bowen, ‘British India, 1765–1813: The Metropolitan Context’, in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, 540. 106 Majendie, Sermon, 19. 107 The so-called ‘pious clauses’ of the 1793 charter were proposed by Wilberforce and would have required the East India Company to have provided schoolmasters and missionaries as well as chaplains. The proposals were defeated by opposition from company supporters and shareholders. Gibb, Anglican Church in India, 45–6. Despite Bishop Dampier’s comments, these proposals did not seem to have included an established episcopate in India.

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the Possibility of their leaving their Faith behind them, when they depart from this Country, from want of any Provision for the preservation of it in another.’108 He advocated that the government establish clergy in every British settlement in India, with suYcient Wnancial support for them and for churches to be derived from the Indian revenues; support the college at Calcutta, which would provide education for future clergy; and provide for the introduction of bishops.109 The consequences of such an establishment for the Indians, the bishop proposed, would be successful Indian conversions. He sanguinely predicted, ‘Where is your God, where are his Temples, has often been the shrewd Enquiry of the follower of Brahma. Let the Temples be erected and opened, let the appointed Minister promulgate in the sober Word of Truth, and he will Wnd not hearers only, but converts.’110 His colleague from Bristol, the next year, believed a church establishment was necessary as Britain’s Eastern territorial possessions grew more extensive. It was a duty made urgent because of the unacceptable practices of Hindus such as infanticide and the suicide of widows. ‘How can we, as Christians,’ the bishop asked, ‘justify it to ourselves, not to instil into them the mild precepts and the social duties of Christianity, and thereby rescue them from their religious self-delusion?’111 In 1808 the Bishop of St David’s complained that it was left to too few Protestant missionaries to fulWl the great duty that rested upon Britain because of its territorial possessions there. Particularly, British settlements, like the Portuguese before them, should have the beneWts of a properly constituted church establishment.112 The SPG preachers wanted a church establishment consisting of a legally constituted episcopate—that is, one founded by an act of Parliament—debate about which intensiWed around the renewal of the East India Company’s charter by Parliament in 1813. The major protagonists in the debate in Britain over the conditions of the charter included the orientalists—largely present and former company oYcials—who wished to reduce any British intrusion into Indian culture and religion to a bare minimum; any more, they 108 Thomas Dampier, Bishop of Rochester, A Sermon (1806), 16. 109 Ibid., 17–18. 110 Ibid., 20. 111 Pelham, Sermon, 12–14. 112 Burgess, Sermon, 11–12.

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argued, would be destabilizing to British rule and company proWts. The rising inXuence of the Utilitarians and political radicals, meanwhile, espoused free trade and social development along a British model, including Western education and secular humanitarianism as a light to India’s moral and social darkness. The Evangelicals, on the other hand, wanted to open India to unfettered evangelism, and to promote Christian-based social and cultural humanitarianism against the idolatry of Hinduism and the error of Islam. This group was led by William Wilberforce in the House of Commons, and Charles Grant, another member of the Clapham Sect, as a director of the East India Company.113 Grant had been pressing since the 1790s for a bishop in Calcutta and missionaries in India as a means of transforming a superstitious people. In 1812 it was the Evangelical organization of a campaign of pamphleteering and public petitioning to Parliament that turned political opinion their way with respect to the religious provisions of the 1813 charter. The charter renewal also gave the government greater control of the company through direct supervision of its Wnances and direct appointment of its governor general, governors, and commander-in-chief. The new charter also brought an end to the commercial monopoly of the company.114 To what degree Evangelicals and non-Evangelicals in the Church of England were responsible for the oYcial change of heart embodied in the 1813 charter is not in the purview of this work. Given that SPG bishops had been raising the issue publicly in sermons since the mid1780s it is not surprising that the SPG had an East India committee for the purpose, and that this group and the SPCK had discussions about lobbying government with the Archbishop of Canterbury and other High Churchmen on the basis of Claudius Buchanan’s proposals.115 However, similarities and contrasts between the SPG and those Evangelicals in the Church of England who were also interested in the expansion of Christianity in British India do require attention 113 David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1969), 133–44; Spear, India, 121–3. 114 Brian Gardner, The East India Company: A History (London: Hart-Davis, 1971), 171. 115 Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 75.

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here, as forming part of the spectrum of metropolitan and colonial Anglican attitudes to empire in this period. There were, of course, also devout Anglicans in the orientalist camp, such as the soldier Sir Thomas Munro, who was a Scottish Episcopalian, or the diplomat Lord Charles Metcalfe. These men were motivated by an intense and personal religion, but they were very reticent about it because they struggled to practise neutrality as administrators of the company. Anglicans such as these believed that British rule in India would not be permanent, and that the government should not therefore be seen to favour Christianity. Their experience of India also instilled in them a deep appreciation of its culture, so that Munro’s words can be taken as reasonably representative of Anglican orientalists’ attitudes to empire in India. ‘The great secret of rule is to leave the Indians as far as possible to themselves, and to allow them to work out their own destinies.’116 Similarly, the pious soldier-administrator Sir John Malcolm also urged the religious neutrality common to this small but inXuential group of men. Though most deeply impressed with the truths of the Christian religion . . . I do think, from the construction of our empire in India . . . that the English Government in this country should never, directly or indirectly, interfere in propagating the Christian religion. The pious missionary must be left unsupported by government, or any of its oYcers, to pursue his labours; and I will add, that I should not only deem a contrary conduct a breach of faith to those nations, whom we have conquered more by our solemn pledges, given in words and acts, to respect their prejudices and maintain their religion, than by arms, but likely to fail in the object it sought to accomplish, and to expose us eventually to more serious dangers than we have ever yet known.117

Orientalist discourse was indelibly shaped by an Enlightenment intellectual categorization that had come to view human history as a common story in which various societies could be categorized as on a scale from primitive barbarism to advanced rationality, according to how closely they approximated to the government, society, and culture of Western Europe. As Sudipta Sen has detailed, much of this orientalist view of India occurred in the context of historical writings that portrayed India as having its despotic history of degenerate 116 Neill, Christianity in India, 140–3.

117 Ibid., 143.

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corruption rescued by the imperial expansion of a civilizing Britain. This historiography was represented in the monumental History of India by the political philosopher James Mill, published in 1818, which questioned India and Indians as a civilized society. This conWdent imperialist view of India replaced the earlier, more sympathetic, outlooks of the later eighteenth-century orientalists.118 Their view of India and empire was, according to Sen, one of ‘paternalist concern’, in which an India that had never known freedom would hopefully Wnd it now that Britain embraced India in empire.119 Sen Wnds this orientalist construction of India typiWed in Malcolm, who was unstinting in his appreciation of Indian outcomes for British imperialism. The achievement of ‘that extraordinary empire which the British nation has founded in India’, with its ‘comparative superiority of our knowledge, justice, and system of rule, have inspired the inhabitants of our own territories’. Indians, asserted Malcolm, were grateful to the British for rescuing them from the ‘wretched and oppressive rule’ of the Muslim rulers.120 But these orientalist Anglicans were, by and large, individuals within a larger lobby group that was not predominantly inXuenced by Anglicanism but by other factors, such as Utilitarianism among the humanitarians, or the company’s interests, or Enlightenment intellectualism among the orientalists. Among the recognizable groupings of British attitudes towards India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the predominant Anglican ones were the Evangelicals and those non-Evangelical ‘Orthodox’121 associated with the SPG and the SPCK. So what then of Evangelical Anglican attitudes towards Britain’s imperial purpose in India? Of all Anglican groups interested in empire, these have undoubtedly been the most studied by historians, often by those of an Evangelical persuasion themselves.122 Their 118 Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002), 49. 119 Ibid., 53. 120 Ibid., 53–4. 121 ‘Orthodox’ was the preferred self-description of the non-Evangelical High Churchmen in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 25–32. 122 Most notably, Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976); Stuart Piggin, Making Evangelical

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assessment of the Evangelicals as the most inXuential of the Anglican groupings concerned with India at this time was also reXective of the judgement of earlier, secular historians.123 By the early nineteenth century missionary Anglicans of the SPG had been joined by activists of the emerging Evangelical party in the Church of England, and by a growing number of colonial Anglicans throughout the nineteenth century. In this period among Evangelical Anglicans in England, William Wilberforce and Charles Grant were pre-eminent. They, in turn, were associated with the views of the leading Evangelical publicist on India, Claudius Buchanan, whom Grant had appointed as a company chaplain in India.124 Wilberforce became involved in the Evangelical agitation for open access for missionaries to India during the parliamentary debates over the renewal of the company’s charter in 1793 and, when that failed, again in 1813. But his information and his outlook on India were probably moulded by Grant’s greater experience and knowledge of the subcontinent.125 Given that these two shared a common religious viewpoint, Wilberforce would have been sympathetic to Grant’s Indian outlook. So in their common political involvement Wilberforce acted as a political front in the House of Commons for an increasingly organized Evangelical campaign on India. Charles Grant acted as the leading Evangelical proponent of missions within the company itself. Both, in turn, were assisted by the publicity created for missions by Buchanan.126 The public views of these three leading Evangelical protagonists, therefore, are the Wrst major source used here to indicate the major characteristics of the Evangelical Anglican imperial view of India during this period.

Missionaries, 1789–1858: The Social Background, Motives and Training of British Protestant Missionaries to India (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1984); and Allan K. Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 1786–1813: Missionary Publicity and Claudius Buchanan (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1990). 123 Ainslee Thomas Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), ch. 7; Ingham, Reformers in India, 11; George D. Bearce, British Attitudes towards India, 1784–1858 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 61. 124 Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 56. 125 Kopf, British Orientalism, 142. 126 Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 230–1.

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Charles Grant was one of the Wrst prominent Evangelical Anglicans to formulate a public response to Britain’s new Indian territories. In 1792 he wrote a paper for Henry Dundas, the president of the board of control, entitled ‘Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain’. It was part of an eVort to gain Dundas’s support for missions in India in the 1793 charter renewal campaign, and was eventually published as part of the later campaign around the 1813 renewal.127 Grant envisaged Britain’s rule in India as permanent. He could not foresee a time in the future, he aYrmed, ‘in which we may not govern our Asiatic subjects more happily for them than they can be governed by themselves’.128 But in order to reconcile Indians to this he sought to change fundamentally the nature of Indian society, culture, and religion. British rule should seek the happiness of the vast majority of its subjects by giving them orderly, incorrupt government by law. Grant saw this as the outworking of a Christian imperative for the EIC. He was not uncritical of British rule in India, but believed it was far better than what had preceded it under the Mughals.129 But if British rule was to endure, it needed to create a bond between ruler and ruled that could overcome present disorder in India, which was a consequence of India’s debased religious values. Hinduism, and to a slightly lesser extent Islam, he saw as being utterly degraded morally, both socially and among individuals. ‘Abandoned selWshness was the distinguishing mark of Hindu character’; so that throughout the country Indians were ‘in a very degraded humiliating state’.130 Hinduism had also created an unjust social system of caste, which needed to altered from without. Consequently, if their religion could be changed it would improve Indian humanity and society. The necessary remedy was to bring to India Western learning and government, within which Grant included the Christian gospel.131 It was an Enlightenment recipe of self-improvement through an injection of the assumed superiority of Western education, which matched the assumed superior morality and truth of British Christianity. ‘By 127 Stephen Neill, Colonialism and Christian Missions (London: Lutterworth Press, 1966), 89. 128 Embree, Charles Grant, 142–3. 129 Ibid., 151–2. 130 Ibid., 145. 131 Ibid., 150–1.

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planting our language, our knowledge, our opinions, and our religion in our Asiatic territories, we shall put a great work beyond the reach of contingencies; we shall probably have wedded the inhabitants of these territories to this country.’132 Grant seems to have thought that the surpassing excellence of British culture, learning, and Christianity would be so self-evident to Indians that they would almost naturally abandon their degraded ways for these new revelations. The explanation, ‘rationally and mildly’, to the Indians of ‘divine principles’, would raise them as it had raised the British ‘in the scale of being’, so that they would cast oV their former ‘error and ignorance’.133 However, in his 1792 tract Grant argued not so much for an Anglican episcopal establishment as for access for missionaries to India as paid employees of the company. This core of Grant’s argument became standard Evangelical thinking towards India. British rule was requisite in India in order to provide Indians what they could not do for themselves because of their religious and, therefore, social and cultural degradation and falsehood—namely, provide them with the necessary Western advancement and religious truth.134 Claudius Buchanan would publicize this basic Evangelical remedy for India. Buchanan, a company chaplain from 1797 to 1808, spent most of those years as Professor of Greek and Latin at the college at Fort William. This institution was Wnanced by Governor General Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington, to be an incipient university for the training of company oYcials. During his time there Buchanan wrote his Memoir, published in 1805. This was later updated to serve as publicity in the campaign for free access for missionaries in the 1812–13 company charter debate in Parliament. It also formed the basis for a ‘Prospectus of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for India’ adopted by the SPCK as its platform in that campaign. Therefore, the 1805 publication is examined here as the basic source for the other two documents, and is the one in which Buchanan expressed himself most freely, without the adjustments for political and publicity purposes that were made in the two later treatises.135 132 Bearce, Attitudes, 62. 133 Embree, Charles Grant, 151. 134 Ibid., ch. 7. 135 Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 146, 230.

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Buchanan had previously made an explicit connection between empire and Christianity in a sermon he delivered in Calcutta in 1800. Referring to Britain’s growing imperial power, he recalled his auditors—who included Mornington—to the responsibility the British had in India to demonstrate openly the Christian basis of British rule. ‘The importance we are daily acquiring in the eyes of the world, and the destructive eVects of irreligion in other countries, make it proper that we should shew that we yet profess the faith of our country, and that we are yet willing to be accounted as a Christian community.’136 Fundamentally, Buchanan argued in 1800 that British rule in India needed to take more seriously its religious responsibilities towards British residents there and towards its Indian subjects. An explicit expression of British religion required promulgation by the British government as indispensable to the perpetuation of British rule in India. At the beginning of his 1805 tract Buchanan enfolded the growth of the British empire, her military successes against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and the growth of British India within a providential framework. Our extensive territorial acquisitions within the last few years, our recent triumph over our only formidable foe; the avowed consequence of India in relation to the existing state of Europe; and that unexampled and systematic prosperity of Indian administration, which has now consolidated the British dominion in this country;—every character of our situation seems to mark the present æra, as that intended by Providence, for our taking into consideration the moral and religious state of our subjects in the East; and for Britain’s bringing up her long arrear of duty, and settling her account honourably with her Indian Empire.137

Providence had intended Britain to extend her empire in India in order to perpetuate the Christian faith of British residents already installed there and to be the agent for the civilization and conversion 136 Claudius Buchanan, A Sermon, Preached at the New Church of Calcutta, before the Right Honourable the Earl of Mornington, Governor General, &c. &c. &c. on Thursday, February 6th, 1800 ; quoted in Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 109. 137 Claudius Buchanan, Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India; Both as a Means of Perpetuating the Christian Religion among our Own Countrymen, and as a Foundation for the Ultimate Civilization of the Natives (London, 1805), xii; printed in Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India.

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of Indians. At the core of this dual purpose for Buchanan were two requisite policies: an Anglican Church establishment for the former, and missions to eVect the latter. Buchanan took for granted the beneWcial nature of British rule in her colonial territory, though he was critical of its neglect of Christianity. British administration brought ‘unexampled and systematic prosperity’ to the Indian territories it governed.138 Grant had already exhibited the same conWdence, and Wilberforce was equally convinced that British imperialism was benign, bringing the superior cultural blessings of Britain to India. Britain, Wilberforce asserted, governed India with a ‘disinterested regard for the happiness of the subjects’, ruling with a ‘Wrmness and a moderation’. This benign nature of British policy was intended to bring to the Indians what they had never before experienced—‘the blessings of rational and practical liberty’.139 Buchanan, surprisingly, found historical precedent for the twin thrusts of his proposal in Roman Catholic missions in India, pointing to their success as an indicator of what would await British eVorts. He considered that, generally speaking, these missions had both preserved the faith of Catholic Europeans and Indians, as well as being a civilizing inXuence in the subcontinent. As this was precisely what he hoped for from greater British missionary eVort, it suited his purposes to draw attention to how Roman Catholic missions had set a historical precedent for this agenda and ‘dispelled much of the darkness of Paganism’, notwithstanding Catholicism’s ‘constitutional asperity, intolerant and repulsive, compared with the generous principles of the Protestant religion’.140 Therefore, emulating the Roman Catholic precedent, he wanted an Anglican episcopal establishment in India, with four bishops: one in each of the principalities of Madras and Bombay; an archbishop in Calcutta; and a bishop in Ceylon for the islands of the Indian and PaciWc Oceans and Australia. He castigated British neglect of such a foundation in its Indian territories as representing 138 Buchanan, Memoir, xii. 139 William Wilberforce to Richard Wellesley, 1799; quoted in Bearce, British Attitudes, 40. 140 Buchanan, Memoir, 8.

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to the Indians that Britain was a godless state. ‘We seem at present to be trying the question, ‘‘Whether religion be necessary for a state’’; whether a remote commercial empire having no sign of the Deity, no temple, no type of any thing heavenly, may not yet maintain its Christian purity, and its political strength amidst pagan superstitions, and a voluptuous and unprincipled people?’141 Buchanan felt that this lack of religious proactivity by the British with regard to their religion was detrimental to the unity and stability of the empire. British religion, in the form of the Church of England, would be a major instrument unifying the colonies with Britain. ‘And nothing would now so consolidate our widely extended dominions, or prove more obnoxious to the counsels of our European enemies in their attempts on this country, than an ecclesiastical establishment; which would give our empire in the East the semblance of our empire in the West, and support our English principles, on the stable basis of English religion.’142 Buchanan argued that the religion of the British in India was at risk of degrading due to the lack of a proper ecclesiastical infrastructure. ‘And as to the state of religion among a people who have no divine service, it is as such as might be expected. After a residence of some years at a station where there is no visible church; and where the superstitions of the natives are constantly visible, all respect for Christian institutions wears away; and the Christian Sabbath is no otherwise distinguished than by the display of the British Xag.’143 Britain was unique among European imperial powers in not fostering the Christian religion as a remedy for potential social and religious decline among its own citizens in colonial territories, so that British administrators who came out to England as mere youths quickly succumbed, he believed, to the dissolute temptations of Indian society.144 It was the lack of religious instructors for these scions of empire that created the colonial moral vacuum into which they readily fell, having no alternative. So accustomed had the British become to this dearth of religion that the cultural degeneracy which he characterized as ‘that illicit native connection’ was ‘rendered not disreputable’.145 His views concerning this British cultural 141 Buchanan, Memoir, 12. 142 Ibid., 13. 144 Ibid., 16. 145 Ibid., 17.

143 Ibid., 3.

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elision with nativism concluded with a religious panacea for the maintenance of the British imperial state in India. Of what inWnite importance is it to the state, that the Christian Sabbath should be observed by our countrymen here, and that this prime safeguard of loyal, as well as of religious principles, should be maintained in this remote empire. But how shall the Sabbath be observed, if there be no ministers of religion? For want of divine service, Europeans in general, instead of keeping the Sabbath holy, profane it openly.146

British Christianity in India would not only keep Britons British and loyal, it would bring British civilization to the Indians themselves. Since the Indian empire had grown, so had British responsibility for the religion and morals of the British there, and for ‘promoting the civilization of our native subjects by every rational means’. Against the orientalists Buchanan blithely dismissed any negative Indian reaction to British evangelism, arguing that there was no need for particular sensitivity towards Indian religion because the Hindus did not understand their religion themselves. ‘Their ignorance and apathy are so extreme, that no means of instruction will give them serious oVence, except positive violence.’147 Past forbearance on Britain’s part about this had solely arisen because of ‘our own unconcern about the Christian religion’. Accordingly, Buchanan advocated an unblushing evangelism, conWdent, like Grant before him, of its attractiveness to Indians. ‘But so great is the truth and divine excellence of our religion, that even the principles which Xow from it remotely, lead the heathens to enquire into its doctrine. Natives of all ranks in Hindoostan . . . behold an awful contrast between their base and illiberal maxims, and our just and generous principles.’148 Wilberforce had an equally hostile view of Hinduism. ‘The Hindu divinities were absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty. In short, their religious system is one grand abomination’, he told Parliament in June 1813.149 He also drew a stark contrast between the inequality of Hindu society and the equality of British civil life before the law that was ironic, given that this period was one 146 Ibid., 18. 148 Ibid., 22–5.

147 Ibid., 23. 149 Quoted in Kopf, British Orientalism, 142.

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in which Britons were subject to an unprecedented raft of repressive legislation designed to eliminate the contagion of French revolutionary equality.150 Our religion is sublime, pure and beneWcent. Theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel. Of our civil principles and condition, the common right of all ranks and classes to be governed, and punished by equal laws, is the fundamental principle. Equality, in short, is the vital essence and the very glory of our English laws. Of theirs, the essential and universal pervading general character is inequality, despotism in the higher classes, degradation and oppression in the lower.151

To be British, for these Evangelicals, was to be civilized, largely as a consequence of the unquestioned religious and moral superiority of Christianity over Hinduism and Islam, though it was Hindus that Buchanan particularly targeted because of various unacceptable practices such as the use of images of the gods in worship, infanticide, and widow-suicide. These, he argued, placed Hindus on a distinctly lower level of civilization, understood as moral behaviour, to the Christian British. ‘The moral state of the Hindoos is represented [by] . . . Those, who have had the best opportunities of knowing them . . . in declaring that neither truth, nor honesty, honour, gratitude, nor charity, is to be found pure in the heart of a Hindoo. How can it be otherwise? . . . What branch of their mythology has not more of falsehood and vice in it, than of truth and virtue? They have no moral gods.’152 ‘SuYce it to say that no inhuman practices in New Zealand, or in any other newly-discovered band of savages, are more oVensive to natural feeling, than some of those which are committed by Hindoo people.’153 For these leading Evangelicals Christianity was true and Hinduism was false idolatry and superstition, which was why one resulted in a superior society and the other in cultural, social, and individual moral inferiority. Thus Wilberforce, in the 1793 parliamentary debates, eschewed coercion in conversion but asserted the fundamental 150 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 158–61. 151 William Wilberforce addressing the House of Commons in the 1813 East India Company charter debate. Quoted in Bearce, British Attitudes, 82. 152 Buchanan, Memoir, 32–3. 153 Ibid., 47.

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truth of Christianity. ‘It is not meant . . . to break up by violence existing institutions, and force our faith upon the natives of India; but gravely, silently, and systematically to prepare the way for the gradual diVusion of religious truth.’154 In India, Evangelicals believed, Britain was dealing with two groups of degenerate people. The British residents, whose downhill slide into orientalism needed to be arrested by the moral teaching and practice of Christianity; and Indians, whose religion promoted immorality and inhumane practices because it was an idolatrous, superstitious deceit. Britain, accordingly, had a duty to civilize both groups, not because of any material or technological superiority but because of a religious—and therefore a moral—dominance. Formulated in another way, the superior Christian civilization of the Wrst, British, group, at risk in India, had to be preserved in a dangerous cultural environment, while the inferior culture of the latter had to be raised through the direct impact of Christianity. The truth and superiority of Christianity was the self-evident and unquestioned lense through which Evangelicals viewed India, and so Buchanan conceived of the empire in Christian terms. He advocated a ‘Christian’ policy of empire as opposed to what he termed a ‘Roman’ one, after that of the Roman Empire, which did not impose religious change on its conquered peoples.155 In contrast, a Christian imperial policy looked to religion, and speciWcally, to Christianity not as incidental to empire but as its principal binding force. OYcially promulgated, it would enable Indians to understand the imperial policies of a Christian government by, Wrst, bringing to the colonies a civilizing and benign inXuence, and second, by evangelizing the indigenous population, so that it brought about a common bond between governed and governors. ‘There can never be’, asserted Buchanan, ‘conWdence, freedom, and aVection between the people and their sovereign, where there exists a diVerence in religion’, which had been Grant’s initial and fundamentally inXuential argument for subsequent evangelism, as popularized by Buchanan. Third, there was a solemn obligation upon Christians (and, implicitly, a Christian government) to evangelize for the sake of eternal salvation.156

154 Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 49–50. 155 Buchanan, Memoir, 28. 156 Ibid., 28–9.

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Buchanan was upholding the centrality of the part played by religion, and more particularly Christianity, in developing and preserving social and political unity, which applied equally to the empire as to British society. He therefore saw the long-term identity of the British Empire as one which most fundamentally consisted in a Christianity held in common between metropolis and colonies. Christianity constituted a unifying religious bond that would reconstruct indigenous peoples so that they grew to have more in common with their conquerors than with their present compatriots. Is there not more danger of losing this country, in the revolution of ages, (for an empire without a religious establishment cannot stand for ever,) by leaving the dispositions and prejudices of the people in their present state, than by any change that Christian knowledge and an improved state of civil society, would produce in them? And would not Christianity more eVectually than anything else, disunite and segregate our subjects from the neighbouring states, who are now of the same religion with themselves . . . At present, there is no natural bond of union between us and them. There is nothing common in laws, language or religion, in interest, colour or country.157

Britain was Wrst and foremost a Christian nation, and therefore had a religious duty to promote Christianity in its subject territories. Such a course was not only a consequence of this fundamental religious identity, but it was also, for Buchanan, and for Wilberforce and Grant, the only one that oVered the British Empire long-term imperial security, because it would draw subjugated peoples into an empire-wide British Christian identity. Britain thus needed to own and inculcate in its colonies a Christian identity for their greater good as well as for its own security as an imperial power. While a policy of conversion was required of Britain—because, primarily, it was a Christian obligation as a consequence of the success of British imperial growth—it was also purportedly desired by the Indians themselves because of the superiority of Christianity to their own religion; and evangelism was the very reason why God had given Britain such extensive colonial possessions in the Wrst place. Is there any one duty incumbent on us as conquerors, toward a conquered people, resulting from our being a Christian nation . . . Can any one believe 157 Buchanan, Memoir, 31–2.

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that our Indian subjects are to remain for ever under our government involved in their present barbarism, and subject to the same inhuman superstition? And if there be a hope that they will be civilized, when is it to begin, and by whom is it to be eVected? No Christian nation ever possessed such an extensive Weld for the propagation of the Christian faith, as that aVorded to us by our inXuence over the hundred million natives of Hindoostan. No other nation ever possessed such facilities for the extension of its faith as we now have in the government of a passive people; who yield submissively to our mild sway, reverence our principles, and acknowledge our dominion to be a blessing. Why should it be thought incredible that providence hath been pleased, in a course of years to subjugate this Eastern empire to the most civilized nation in the world, for this very purpose?158

Buchanan’s construction of Britain as a Christian nation brought together his attitudes of British religious and therefore moral superiority with his belief in the essential inferiority of the Hindus, and these led him to promote evangelism as the essential methodology for successful imperialism. The former demanded it if Britain was to live up to its Christian identity; while the latter imposed it as a duty lest Britain be seen to regress from its Christian duty into an acceptance of moral turpitude. Only as Christians could Indian Hindus remake their identity to become equals with their British overlords—though a Hindu makeover was anything but rapid, Buchanan comfortably putting oV any possible equality with the British for centuries. In ten centuries the Hindoos will not be as wise as the English. It is now perhaps nineteen centuries since human sacriWces were oVered on the British altars. The progressive civilization of the Hindoos will never injure the interests of the East India Company. But shall a Christian people, acknowledging a Providence in the rise and fall of an empire, regulate the policy of future times, and neglect a present duty; a solemn and imperious duty: exacted by their religion, by their public principles, and by the opinion of Christian nations around them! Or can it be gratifying to the English nation to reXect, that they receive the riches of the East on the terms of chartering immoral superstition.159

The implication being, that if Britain continued in India to support Hinduism and neglect the extension of Christianity then the Providence that governed the rise and fall of empires would remove its empire from Britain. 158 Ibid., 39.

159 Ibid., 40.

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So the views of these leading Anglican Evangelicals towards British India embraced a number of themes that would become standard tropes of the Evangelical discourse on that part of the empire. These included a very optimistic view of British imperialism in India, based on their construction of a moral dichotomy between Britain as a Western nation and India as an Eastern one, and between Christianity and Hinduism. For these Anglican Evangelicals it was a bipolar imperial world of British civilization versus Indian stasis and deterioration, and of Christian truth and moral enlightenment against Hindu heathen error and immorality. Having constructed the empire in these polar opposites the Evangelicals drew out their implications for understanding the Indian empire—which were, basically, to replace the negative pole with the positive one. Accordingly, these three inXuential Evangelicals argued that Britain implement this basic imperial policy by: supporting an Anglican episcopal structure for India; permitting open access for Christian missions; and promoting the inculcation of Western education and society in India. These would both prevent British religious and moral degradation, by insulating Britons resident in India against adopting native or libertarian outlooks; and also civilize Indians, by replacing their superstitious and immoral religion with a true religion and a consequent moral practice. This was because religion was the basis for all human civil society and law, and was therefore the most fundamental foundation for a just British rule in India. The promotion of British Christianity and culture would not only put British government and Indian society on a sounder footing; it would establish an enduring bond between ruler and ruled in the empire, who were currently and dangerously divided by religion. Lastly, it was in keeping with God’s providential expectations for granting Britain its empire in the Wrst place, because of the fundamental truth of Christianity in contrast to the error of Hinduism. While Grant, Buchanan and, to a lesser extent, Wilberforce, were foundational in shaping Evangelical Anglican attitudes to India, these views were further entrenched by those of the CMS Parent Committee in London, the local Calcutta Corresponding Committee, and also by edited published versions of the reports of CMS missionaries engaged in actual contact with Bengalis. These Evangelical sources reveal a construction of India remarkably similar to that

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of the SPG. God and the British Empire continued to be linked in a mutually beneWcial partnership. Commenting upon the growth of mission schools as a means of disseminating Truth and Christian principles, the Calcutta Corresponding Committee of the CMS maintained that to hinder this development would be ‘a disgrace to this nation’. The schools provided knowledge that enhanced the ‘stability and perpetuity of the Empire’; it was also a duty of Britain as a Christian nation. ‘India is entrusted to our charge; and a fearful responsibility awaits us, as a nation, if we prove unfaithful to that trust. IndiVerence or hostility to wise and benevolent attempts to win her to the Faith, bespeak an utter absence of both good political wisdom and of Christian Feeling.’160 The implication here that this evangelistic responsibility fell upon the British in their empire because it was entrusted to them by God was made more explicit by the prayers at a London public meeting of the parent committee in 1826, where God was asked to pardon the British for their evangelistic shortcomings, despite these being the basis upon which they had been divinely permitted to acquire their empire. We confess, O Lord, with shame and confusion of face, that we have not rendered unto Thee according to Thy goodness unto us. Endued with the singular blessings of Thy Gospel, Thou gavest us therewith this solemn charge—Freely ye have received, freely give!—And Thou hast placed, in the workings of Thy providence, a large section of mankind under the power or within the inXuence of this country. Pardon Heavenly Father, for the sake of Thy Beloved Son, our backwardness and sloth in making known Thy Salvation among men.161

The same message was being given by Evangelical Anglicans in India to the British residents there. In an appeal to the British in Calcutta to support the CMS, the Revd T.T. Thomason (one of its missionaries) urged British India to supply its own missionaries. He asked rhetorically, ‘Are we not placed at the post of duty and honour? Are we not spectators of the degradation and misery of the Heathens around us? . . . Are they not perishing, while they are thus awfully sitting in darkness and under the shadow of death?’162

160 Missionary Register, November 1818, 447. 162 Ibid., July 1820, 286.

161 Ibid., August 1826, 363.

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The divine responsibility placed on an imperial Britain was also the theme of the annual CMS sermon preached in St Bride’s Church, London, in 1826 by the Revd Edward Cooper, a StaVordshire rector. This binding duty fell upon Britain because, Wrst, she possessed a large proportion of gospel truth. Second, she possessed a large proportion of the heathen world. Third, she had the wealth to fulWl her Divine Commission. ‘England is appointed, at this eventful period, the distinguished oYce of furthering, as an honoured instrument in the hand of Providence, the Evangelization of the Heathen World.’ While a similar undertaking fell also upon the ‘Protestant Church’, the ‘Protestant Maritime Nations’, and ‘Protestant America’, Britain’s imperial circumstances gave her a ‘peculiar responsibility’. More especially this fell to Britain’s lot because of her ‘system of distant Colonization’, which gave her a uniquely widespread and intimate connection with the heathen world.163 That colonial connection with India only convinced Evangelical Anglicans that they were dealing with an inferior society and culture because, essentially, it was not Christian. For these Anglicans the globe was not so much divided into Us (British) and Them (foreigners or colonials) but fundamentally into Christian (light) and Heathen (darkness), and God, the Missionary Register reminded its readers, had ‘commanded light to shine out of darkness’, the ‘light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’.164 In the same year, the Calcutta Committee of the CMS expressed the hope that there would be ‘a diVusion of light and of true religion among the benighted Heathens around them’.165 One of the original Evangelical chaplains in Bengal, Daniel Corrie, in a sermon in Calcutta that year, spoke of how thanksgiving was due each time ‘the news of a single soul turned from Heathen Darkness to the light of the Gospel’. India was a ‘benighted country’ in which a vast population was inveterately immersed in ignorance, claimed Thomason in his sermon in the Old Church, Calcutta.166 Another of the early Evangelical chaplains, Daniel Wilson, agreed, saying in an address in 1826 (in words echoing Thomason’s) that India had millions ‘who are now sitting in darkness and the shadow of death’.167 163 Missionary Register, May 1826, 233–4. 165 Ibid., October 1819, 413. 167 Ibid., August 1826, 361.

164 Ibid., February 1819, 98. 166 Ibid., July 1820, 285.

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This darkness, death, and ignorance was ascribed to Indians for one reason: they were heathen and without the truth of the Christian Gospel. ‘Heathen’ was not just a mere label for a despised Other, but a name that encapsulated an entire theological world view. This is what lay behind the comments of the Revd Thomas Robertson, chaplain to the station at Dum Dum (north of Calcutta), in his annual sermon for the CMS Corresponding Committee in Calcutta. Heathenism is a system, which the Philanthropist, as well as the Christian, must wish to see abolished: for, spiritually considered, it destroys the souls of men; and, temporally, it is pregnant with every species of calamity to mankind. You know that it inverts or weakens every moral principle—that is deadens the sensibility of our nature—and habituates the eye to scenes, which eradicate from the heart all feelings of tenderness.168

Heathenism meant people lived in ‘gross darkness’ of immorality and ignorance, which was the conclusion of the Revd J.A. Jetter when he understood that one of the local teachers in his mission school was paying a bride-price for an eleven-year old girl he had never met.169 Daniel Corrie, as Archdeacon of Calcutta, in encouraging missionary support from among the British residents in India, presented it as coming from people who, more than Christians in Europe, ‘have better opportunities of knowing the spiritual state of the Heathen, and the wretchedness, both moral and personal, into which their idolatrous system has plunged them’.170 Heathenism was a system, according to the missionaries in India, because non-Christians were under the dominion of Satan. So the report of the missionaries in Agra, very early in the CMS deployment there, ended with a fervent plea that God would raise up workers who would assist in turning India from darkness to light, from ‘the power of Satan unto God’.171 Three years later, the report of the Revd Marmaduke Thompson, chaplain at Madras, to the London Secretary of the CMS surprisingly came out in favour of employing ‘heathen schoolmasters’, but only because their willingness to present the Christian message made them ‘a tenfold force against the strongholds of Sin and Satan in India’.172 In the 1820 CMS annual sermon 168 Ibid., September 1821, 380. 170 Ibid., October 1827, 489. 172 Ibid., June 1819, 275.

169 Ibid., August 1823, 353. 171 Ibid., August 1816, 340.

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in Calcutta the preacher urged the propagation of Christianity in India as more eVective than either a just legal system or an ‘enlightened Government’, because among the heathen ‘Satan has fortiWed himself too strongly, to be dispossessed by any thing, except the power of Christ’.173 Later that same decade the Calcutta Committee expressed the belief that Christians little realized the ‘awful extent of Satan’s Empire at the present day’.174 This was a result, aYrmed the committee two years earlier, of the Fall, which had left these vast regions where heathenism prevailed under the rule of Satan, the Prince of this World.175 As a consequence of this satanic rule, evil resulted. The most serious outworkings of Satan’s dominion were idolatry, immorality, superstition, and ignorance. Not for these Anglicans was any truck to be had with the ideas of Indian virtue and happiness, such as the eighteenth-century orientalists had aYrmed. That was merely to agree to a delusion rather than the reality of ‘the guilt and misery of an idolatrous people’. In fact, Indians were entirely without God in the world because of their enslavement to a falsity of idolatry. Idolatry is truly a monster deserving unqualiWed reprobation: her garments are rolled in blood: she is supported by hypocrisy on the one hand, and by ignorance on the other: she is made a subservient slave to rapacious wickedness: and has been a greater source of calamity to the human race, than all the wars which ambition ever waged. Under the inXuence of a miserable delusion, thousands have become their own tormentor; and think to obtain fellowship with God, by rendering themselves unWt for communion with men.176

To these early missionaries, it was evident that Hindu religion was complex and therefore could be considered a system, but this complexity was merely the sophistication of a dangerous and duplicitous lie designed to ensnare its adherents into the dominion of Satan. Each experience of Hindu worship conWrmed this theological presumption for these Evangelical observers. So the Revd Jetter at Mirzapore, with homes all around him, had ample opportunity to 173 Missionary Register, September 1821, 381. 174 Ibid., July 1828, 316. 175 Ibid., July 1826, 341. 176 The Revd Thomas Pemberton, annual CMS sermon, Calcutta, Whit-Sunday 1820, in ibid., September 1821, 379–80.

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view the domestic rites of Hinduism. ‘Our ears are every day pained, by the senseless music and noise, which accompanies their Idol Worship.’ This merely conWrmed for him that these were an ‘enslaved and miserable people’.177 The Revd Reichardt was of the same mind about idolatrous Hinduism. ‘In this idolatrous land, where a boy beholds nothing but superstitious ceremonies, splendid shows in honour of some idol, and a people prostrate before dead images, and even before its priests, the Brahmins—every object, every movement around him, serves but to increase his ignorance, and to darken his stupid mind by conWrming his erroneous ideas.’178 To the missionaries that idolatry was clearly what their Bible warned was a major sin against the one and the only imageless God (except as God was known in Jesus Christ). As such, it led inevitably to immorality, because that could be the only consequence of a system under the control of Satan. It was in such terms that many Hindu customs were viewed, such as when Daniel Corrie visited Chunar, where in one district, he exclaimed, two widows were burned each month, and six lepers buried alive or drowned by relatives in the last year, not to mention other suicides. For Corrie this was simply the result of idolatry, a ‘whole Hindoo Population drunk, as it were, with the Wlthiness and abomination of idolatry’.179 Jetter found himself prevented from drawing too near to one Hindu rite on a visit to his mission schools by one of the worshippers, who told him, ‘Sir, we are worshipping here a piece of wood, which is covered with mud’, while another danced in what Jetter described as ‘shameful bendings with their bodies’. He conWdently concluded, ‘I have never seen any thing more indecent in rational creatures.’180 A Miss Cooke spoke in 1823 of her girls’ schools and lamented the ignorance, laziness, and thoughtlessness of her charges, but concluded this was hardly surprising as there was ‘the total absence of every thing that is right and good in their parents’.181 Mr Bowley at Chunar told of exposing the fraud of a blacksmith, who extorted money on the pretence of being under the ecstatic inXuence of a

177 Missionary Rigister, April 1823, 190. 178 Ibid., July 1826, 338. 179 Ibid., June 1819, 273. 180 Ibid., August 1823, 344–5. 181 Ibid., August 1823, 355.

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goddess, and whose performance was the natural alliance of superstition and fraud.182 These were nineteenth-century advocates of a Christianity that less than two centuries previously had still been burning witches and heretics, and butchering other Christians in bloody war, or used religion as a source of charms for healing or magic. These missionaries seemed unconscious of some of the murderous or folk customs of their own religion in their assessment of Hinduism. What had changed Christianity for these nineteenth-century Christians was the Enlightenment, which had revised and marginalized these more oppressive or popular-level manifestations of Christianity as irrational or illegitimate, at least at the higher social and cultural level at which most of the clergy operated. However, folk religion, as seen by some of the missionaries in India and condemned simplistically as superstition, was still alive and well in Britain at this time among the rural and lower orders of society.183 But these Evangelical Anglican imperial viewpoints were not new. We have encountered such views before, both in the SPG colonial reports and metropolitan sermons constructing an understanding of their mission to North America in the eighteenth century, and in the society’s preachers concerned with India that were examined earlier in this chapter. Clearly, the eighteenth-century SPG preachers predate the formation of Evangelical Anglican views of the British Empire. From the beginning of the eighteenth century SPG missionaries and metropolitan preachers had also constructed a view of the empire as a providential and a benevolent development for Britain and her colonies. They too delineated a world of theological polarities between European Christian light and the heathen New World darkness. For them also it was a bipolar world that equated to a radical diVerence between civilization and barbarity or, at least, moral degeneracy, that prompted them to believe in a civilizing mission for Britain and her church in addition to an evangelistic one. Both the earlier SPG Anglicans and the later Evangelicals were concerned about the religious degeneracy of British residents in the 182 Missionary Register, November 1820, 120–1. 183 J. Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 259–312.

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colonies, and to advocate the establishment of an episcopal structure and government support for it as its remedy. Both were equally convinced that Anglican evangelism among the heathen in their imperial territories was a requirement of their faith, and necessary because of the unique divine truth of Christianity in contrast to heathen error, a view of indigenous peoples that was commonplace among European Christians.184 There can even be found among the Evangelicals examined here an echo of the eighteenth-century commercial theology of missions identiWed in the North American period of Anglican missionary concern. Buchanan expressed this theology of spiritual returns by Britain traded for the material wealth that Britain received from her Indian colony in two passages in his Memoir. Providence hath been pleased to grant us this great empire, on a continent where, a few years ago, we had not a foot of land. From it we export annually an immense wealth to enrich our own country. What do we give in return? It is said that we give protection to their inhabitants, and administer equal laws? This is necessary for obtaining our wealth. But what do we give in return? What acknowledgement to providence for its goodness has our nation ever made? What beneWt hath the Englishmen ever conferred on the Hindoo, as a brother?185

Later in the Memoir, when commenting on the support of George I for the Danish mission at Tranquebar in 1727, he wrote similarly: ‘The pious exertions of the king for the diVusion of religious blessings amongst the natives of India, seem to have been rewarded by heaven in temporal blessings to his own subjects in their intercourse with the east, by leading them onward in a continued course of prosperity and glory, and by granting to them at length the entire dominion of the peninsula of India.’186 So both the older Orthodox Anglicans of the SPG,187 and the newer Evangelical Anglicans, were formulating very similar theologies and 184 For example, the same view was held by the great Lutheran missionary employed by the SPCK, Bartholomew Zeigenbald, at the commencement of his nearly twenty-three years in India, which began in 1706. Though he never changed his views of Hinduism as a superstitious religion without salviWc eVect, he did come to appreciate India as a great civilization. Neill, Christianity in India, 32. 185 Buchanan, Memoir, 38. 186 Ibid., 74. 187 The SPG preachers, being bishops and deans, did not encompass Evangelicals among their number until the last decade of the eighteenth century, when

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views of British imperialism. The major diVerence between them did not lie in their attitudes or beliefs about the empire and British responsibilities towards it, or in their respective construction of indigenous and colonial identities in those colonized territories, but rather in their modes of acting on that Anglican imperial world view. But it was not simply a matter of the Evangelicals being more willing to act on their (evangelistic) beliefs about empire and mission than the SPG. This is the view of Alan Davidson, who argues that the SPG preachers were largely disengaged from any active interest in missions in the Weld, their sermons being largely ‘academic, armchair reXections’ devoid of any serious active concern to implement what they preached. Instead of an active evangelism, the SPG sermons, for Davidson, ‘reXected a latitudinarian ethos which applauded past achievements but did nothing to initiate new action’.188 This is a serious criticism and would certainly apply to a number of the preachers, but not to all. There were signiWcant examples of the society’s preachers desiring to translate words into evangelistic action throughout the eighteenth century, from Dean White Kennett (1712), who was a vigorous Wnancial contributor to the SPG, to Bishop Samuel Horsley of Rochester (1795), who as a member of the Barbados committee worked for greater evangelism among the slaves on the society’s own plantations. Davidson’s criticism also reXects a later nineteenth-century division that became drawn between High Church and Evangelical Anglicans. As reXected in their similar attitudes to the empire and their common arguments for its Christianization, the Church of England in the period before 1832 was relatively united in comparison with the internal partisan hostility that emerged after the rise of the Tractarians in the 1830s.189 What was diVerent between Evangelicals and Orthodox Anglicans with respect to the British colonies was the type and organization of their activism in pursuit of results for a common Anglican understanding of empire. The SPG and its Evangelicals began to enter the higher ranks of the Anglican clergy. In addition, some SPG missionaries in the early nineteenth century were Evangelicals. Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries, 20. 188 Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 102–3. 189 Peter Nockles, ‘Church Parties in the Pre-Tractarian Church of England, 1750– 1833: The ‘‘Orthodox’’—Some Problems of DeWnition and Identity’, in Walsh, Haydon, and Taylor, The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833, 334–59.

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supporters throughout the period under review in this chapter remained wedded to the style of agitation suited to the eighteenth century, whereas Evangelical activism was, by the early nineteenth century, more contemporary, and publicly organized in pursuit of its goals. Both used voluntary societies, but the SPG relied on patronage and personal inXuence, and looked to inXuential links with government in quest of its imperial Christian purposes and its Shangri-la of a colonial episcopate, whereas the Evangelicals were willing to lobby publicly through an organized national network of supporters, to coordinate petitions to Parliament, and to generate publicity such as Buchanan’s Memoir. By their tactics in the 1813 EIC charter debate, Evangelicals were already incipiently working in the organized way that was indicative of the national party they would consciously become in the later nineteenth century. It is not that one group of Anglicans was putting words into action, whereas the other was not; it is rather that the action taken by the SPG over its missions and its concern for an Anglican episcopate in India persisted with an older eighteenth-century style of patronage activism, while Evangelical support for the same ends was one that foreshadowed nineteenthcentury organized religious activity.190 The eventual government establishment of Anglicanism in India as part of the 1813 renewal of the company’s charter was, initially, far less than the Evangelical constituency and the SPG and SPCK had hoped for.191 Instead of three or four dioceses, only one was inaugurated. However, for the Wrst time in India, Britain, through the East India Company, legally and Wnancially provided for an Anglican establishment in the appointment of a Bishop of Calcutta, and an archdeacon in each of the three presidencies of Calcutta, Madras, and

190 For eighteenth-century society as a world of vertical relationships which, for elite inXuence, required access to aristocratic clientage and patronage, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 595–600; and in a more speciWcally ecclesiastical context JeVrey Chamberlain, Accommodating High Churchmen: The Clergy of Sussex, 1700–1745 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 68–79. 191 The general meeting of the SPCK, inXuenced by Buchanan’s work, passed a resolution in June 1813 in which it expressed its desire for the foundation of dioceses in each of the three company presidencies, as well as churches and seminaries. Davidson, Evangelicals and Attitudes to India, 231–2.

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Bombay. The extension of the episcopate to all three presidencies was not brought about until the 1833 charter renewal.192 From 1814, having Wnally had an Anglican episcopal structure approved for India, the SPG preachers began to formulate an understanding of the role and purpose of that structure in their eastern outpost. They continued to do this until the mid-1820s. The year after Parliament enacted this colonial episcopate the Bishop of Ely eschewed its foundation as being any sort of bridgehead of coercive conversion for Indians. Rather, it was part of an amalgam of measures to support the Church of England in that part of the world, including the encouragement of education and the dispersion of the Bible. Demonstrating how much these early nineteenth-century SPG preachers were still part of an eighteenth-century culture, he used a classic Anglican metaphor to describe the relationship between throne and altar by aYrming that the measure entitled the king to be truly ‘ ‘‘the nursing father’’ of a Christian Church throughout his Oriental Empire’.193 Three years later, Bishop Howley of London had his say on the matter. He regarded the development as one of ‘peculiar importance’ in restoring the Church of England in India to its ‘integrity of form and legitimate honours’, and therefore her inXuence in British India, and as a ‘centre of union’ for all religious persons there to act in accordance with each other.194 In 1819 the Bishop of Gloucester believed that the Anglican establishment represented Parliament sanctioning the promulgation of Christianity in India through the ‘safest and most wholesome channels’. He blithely envisaged the growth of an Indian Anglicanism of both British and Indians in the new structure, which would provide ‘a regular form of Church Government for European residents, and surely by anticipation for the whole community of native converts’.195 For Herbert Marsh of Peterborough two years afterwards the episcopal establishment was necessary for the supervision of missionaries in India, so as to induce the uniformity of faith and worship essential, he thought, for successful evangelism. ‘The diVerence in the opinions maintained

192 193 194 195

Neill, Christianity in India, 261, 176. Sparke, Sermon, 17; Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 58. Howley, Sermon, 24. Ryder, Sermon, 19.

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by the various parties of professing Christians . . . is deeply to be deplored . . . The very circumstances that Christianity is presented to them [the heathen] under diVerent forms, cannot fail to prepossess them against Christianity itself.’196 William Van Mildert, the young but rising High Church Bishop of LlandaV preaching in 1822, was gratiWed to know that the Indian establishment meant that the legal and constitutional ascendancy of the Church of England, which was so necessary for the general good of society, was also taking root in India. This, coupled with the exemplary character of the then-present Bishop of Calcutta,197 would, no doubt, improve the moral character of the British in India and, consequently, the estimation of the British in the eyes of the Indians, ‘whom we are desirous of reconciling to the Christian persuasion’.198 SPG metropolitan Anglicans saw the Indian episcopal establishment as being the national conWrmation of Anglican metropolitan religious superiority in a colonial setting. It was, they felt, a starting point for the organization of British Christianity in India through the Church of England as being clearly favoured by the state and selfconsciously addressing its own imperial responsibilities. The empire, they fondly hoped from this mark of political favour, would now develop as an Anglican as well as a British one. SPG Anglicans in this period of a resurgent imperialism continued to base their imperial plans on continued state support, a hope that seemed well-founded in the years after 1813. A new era in the history of Bengal had begun, aYrmed the Bishop of Bristol in 1823, which would overcome the obstacles in the way of ‘the communication of Christianity to our Eastern Empire’.199 William Carey of Exeter also saw the establishment of the diocese of Calcutta as an important watershed. It fostered the faith of Anglicans there, and the more eVectual promotion of Christianity to Hindus, but also exempliWed to the world the fact that there was a renewed interest in religion in Britain. Among Anglicans it demonstrated an ‘ardent desire’ for the evangelism of the empire. This evangelism, he aYrmed, needed to channel itself

196 197 198 199

Marsh, Sermon, 12–13. Richard Heber, second Bishop of Calcutta, 1822–6. William Van Mildert, Bishop of LlandaV, A Sermon (1822), 33–5. Kaye, Sermon, 25.

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into ‘one uniform and systematic plan’—that is, an Anglican one— rather than the present situation of ‘irregular and unconnected eVorts’.200 The bishop may have had in mind the diYculties the Bishops of Calcutta and the CMS were experiencing in uniting their missionary and diocesan eVorts into a single Anglican framework; or, possibly, given the hostility towards Dissent in this period, he was criticizing the Dissenting Protestant missionary societies operating in India.201 The next year the Bishop of Gloucester expressed similar sentiments about Eastern missions having an overall coherence of design and purpose, so that ‘idolators’ could clearly see a visible church, ‘well-disciplined and well-compacted, at unity with itself, upholding its dignity and maintaining harmony and good order among its members’; towards the accomplishment of which desideratum the establishment of colonial episcopal sees was a satisfying step.202 Once SPG clergy were actually in India they, along with successive Bishops of Calcutta in their reports to the society, more or less repeated in their Anglican construction of India what their predecessors at the centre and the North American colonial peripheries of empire had formulated in the previous century. They conceived of this engagement as a natural part of the national mission in the ongoing partnership between church and state. Writing to the society in 1818, Bishop Middleton looked forward to cooperation with the society and the SPCK in such a manner as to give his mission the ‘character of a national eVort to disseminate in these regions our Holy Faith in its purest form’.203 It was part of the providential plan to spread Christianity in its purest reality—the Church of England— through the agency of the British Christian state. Our power is now established throughout this vast Peninsula in a degree, which but a few years since the most sanguine did not contemplate: civilization and religion may be expected in the ordinary course of Providence to follow the successes of a Christian state; and in every view, religious or 200 William Carey, Bishop of Exeter, A Sermon (1824), 11–13. 201 Gibbs, Anglican Church in India, 71–4, 121–5. On hostility to Dissent see Clark, English Society, 471–500. 202 Christopher Bethell, Bishop of Gloucester, A Sermon (1825), 28. 203 Letter, Bishop of Calcutta to secretary of the SPG, 16 November 1818, SPG, Proceedings (1819), 85.

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political, ought we to desire, that the Faith adopted, and the opinions imbibed, may attach the people to our national institutions, and more Wrmly cement the connection of India with the British Crown.204

But unlike his eighteenth-century predecessors, the bishop had no complaints about the level of state support, praising the liberality and favour of the governor, the Marquess of Hastings, and his colonial government in the development of the projected Bishop’s College.205 However, as more reports came in from society missionaries in India, there were suggestions that this imperial support did leave something to be desired beyond Calcutta. In 1822 the new principal of Bishop’s College, the Revd W.H. Mill, wrote from Ajmeer during his long tour of India at that time. There was, he said, ‘a miserable defect of Ecclesiastical institutions of every kind in this central region’. It was a deWcit that contrasted with the previous European imperial regimes in India, which even astonished the military oYcers he spoke with. It was, he said, without parallel in the history of any Christian nation, and he put it down to the inXuence of Indian sympathizers in Britain who made the government fearful of upsetting native religious prejudice. He felt this was needless, as Indians even more despised those without religious institutions, such as the British appeared to be. He was therefore hopeful of better Indian esteem in the future because of the increased, albeit partial and insuYcient, British religious presence in India.206 At least one of the society’s missionaries was also aware that the state connection was not always an advantage. In 1825 Bishop Heber of Calcutta wrote of the evangelistic mission of the Revd Thomas Christian among the Puharee hill tribes. Heber remarked that Christian desired to reconnoitre the region to assess whether it was worth establishing a permanent mission. He was invited by Sir John Stonehouse, collector of the district, to avail himself of the comfort of travelling as part of the oYcial party. But Christian declined the oVer, preferring instead to travel independently with some local men. Christian had, said Heber, apprehended ‘that the bustle and parade attending an oYcial progress would interfere with his means of 204 Ibid., 94. 205 SPG, Proceedings (1821), 141. 206 Letter, Revd Mill to SPG, Ajmeer, 29 July 1822, ibid. (1822), 197–8.

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obtaining access to the people and the lowly duties to which he has devoted himself ’.207 One feature of the old North American engagement with empire that still Wgured in this Indian one, at least from one of the society’s prominent High Churchmen, was a traditional hostility between Dissent and the church. Principal Mill of Bishop’s College believed he encountered opposition to the established church from Dissenting missionaries. He recognized Dissenting evangelism among the Indians as good work, the Baptists especially, but felt this was undone by the ‘evil’ of their antagonism to the church as established, which prevailed among them. It arose, he believed, out of ‘the original evil of their separation’. The propagation of this anti-establishment view by the Dissenters he saw as a threat to the planting of the church in India.208 Yet Dissenter views on India in this period echo some of those in the older Anglican imperial discourse. It was the stronghold of Satan, according to the Baptist missionary George Pearce, writing from India six months after his arrival in 1827. ‘Of all countries none I imagine present greater obstacles than India to the spread of divine truth. This is, indeed, the stronghold of the prince of darkness.’ Indians were depraved in their superstition, he went on. ‘I had heard much and read much of the depraved character of the inhabitants of Hindostan, but truly I may say the half had not been told me: nor can I conceive it possible for any person to form anything like an adequate idea of Indian wickedness without actual intercourse with the people . . . Falsehood, dishonesty, lasciviousness, superstition, and idolatry seem to be inseparable from their nature.’209 It was because they were heathen that they were sunk in a monstrous idolatry that formed their character, preached the Baptist William Yates in a London sermon in 1826.210 When Yates began to preach in India he reported to the Baptist Missionary Society that the Indians were ‘devoted to superstition, so fettered by prejudice, and 207 Letter, Bishop Heber to the SPG, 18 February 1825, SPG, Proceedings (1826), 120. 208 The Revd Mill to SPG, Calcutta, 4 April 1821, ibid. (1822), 151. 209 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity Press, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 306–7. 210 Ibid., 304.

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so enveloped in ignorance, that nothing but an Almighty Power can rescue them’. Until that day, as a consequence, Hindus were ‘sunk in moral degradation’.211 The prominent Birmingham Baptist preacher James Angell James preached in 1819 against sati occurring on the ‘obscene and deiWed Ganges’, a scene of ‘indescribable horror’ brought on by an ‘idolatrous cruelty’.212 For him, as for the Anglicans, in a sermon preached to a wider Evangelical audience before the London Missionary Society in 1819, the remedy was the civilizing consequences of Christianity. Faith would banish this manifestation of the rule of Satan because true religion was ‘strictly and necessarily a civilising process’. Christian faith would lift the mind above ‘sensual gratiWcations’ and subdue ‘irascible passions’ by the ‘law of kindness’. Consequently, ‘industry and self-improvement’ would follow in the same way that Christianity had made England a civilized and ‘happy country’ which was the ‘glory of Christendom’.213 It seems that in these initial years of the Anglican missions to India, actual encounters with the Indian population hardly budged the theological construction of Indian identity that had already been formulated. This was probably because most of these colonial reporters were still themselves largely metropolitan in their cultural and religious outlooks. Bishop Middleton of Calcutta, who was forty-Wve years old when he arrived in Calcutta, in 1818 saw an almost ontological diVerence between the European and the Indian, their mindsets having little or no points of contact, the European being that of a mature adult and the Indian that of a child. ‘The task [of conversion] is much the same as that of a man, who in the full maturity of understanding and knowledge should endeavour to divest himself of these, and to think as a child.’214 A bridge between colonizer and colonized, albeit one between unequal parties, was only thought possible to any extent with the development of a community of Indian Christians, and the attempted remaking of Indians as Europeans through the education of children, even without explicitly seeking their conversion. Clearly, in this project the Anglicans had sided against the orientalists of the

211 Ibid., 303. 212 Ibid., 301. 213 Ibid., 297. 214 Bishop of Calcutta to SPG, 16 November 1818, SPG, Proceedings (1819), 87.

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eighteenth century. Education as the means of eradication of superstition and idolatry was one major activity that Anglicans of High Church or Evangelical stamp were also agreed upon. In 1819 the Missionary Register was reporting conWdently on the progress of mission schools among Hindu boys; that it was nigh-on impossible for a Hindu boy to go through the course of study in these schools ‘without learning to despise such fabled Deities’ of Hinduism. ‘It is ignorance which enslaves men to a system so absurd and contemptible as that of idolatry.’215 Accordingly, Evangelical Anglicans believed they were on to a winner with their ‘native Schools’ when it came to remaking the minds of the young. This was usually classed as ‘improvement’, and embraced both sexes. So the Calcutta CMS committee publicized an address in February 1822 exhorting the support of its readers for ‘the importance of Education, in order to the improvement of the state of Society among the natives of this country’. But for such improvement to be eVectual it must include girls and boys. This was not because of any supposed equality between the two, but primarily because girls grew to become mothers who, it was assumed, had the most inXuence over infant upbringing.216 It was in the wombs and arms of British-educated Indian mothers that the improved Christian future of British India was to rest. So the Revd Jetter, in examining twelve girls in such a native school, expressed the hope that soon there would be numerous such schools where females could be ‘thereby raised to that rank which they should hold as human beings’.217 However, by 1825 the Missionary Register was urging more caution about over-optimistic results among its supporters, because ‘ignorance and pernicious habits and conversation’ surrounded the schoolchildren on every side outside their school.218 However, it is clear that Anglicans did not have only an evangelistic motive in their educational agenda, which also included a European reconstruction of Indian personality and culture. The comments of the Revd Thomason on his return from a visit to Agra with the governor general were summarized by the Missionary Register as, ‘even the good, the very best Natives, do not obtain the 215 Missionary Register, June 1819, 271. 216 Ibid., November 1822, 481–2. 217 Ibid., 482–3. 218 Ibid., April 1825, 193.

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respect which is requisite for Missionary Labour. They have not that sense of order and discipline, nor that fortitude and steady perseverance in active labour, which generally belong to the European Character.’219 Here, both an Indian and European character were reiWed to the detriment and inferiority of the former in comparison to the latter. This psychological and cultural reiWcation and transformation quickly became of greater signiWcance than the more explicit evangelistic campaign in India, because it was carried over into Anglican attitudes towards converts. The missionaries quickly realized their converts faced social barriers involved in the loss of caste, property, and family;220 and they certainly found positive aspects to the character of convert Indians such as sincerity and zeal or, in the case of convert women, qualities becoming to their gendered identity such as order and decorum.221 Yet neither most of the missionaries nor the British residents seemed entirely convinced that, by conversion, Indians did rid themselves of an inferior identity. At the same time that Thomason praised some of the qualities of converts in 1820, he also in the same report admitted that they appeared ‘exceedingly feeble’ to the Europeans. Other than his Christian conversion, said the missionary, the convert had little to recommend him, being ‘destitute of that expansion of mind and liberality of feeling and strength of character, which the well-educated European usually possesses’.222 Or, converts were seen to be only half-converted, unable to shake oV their indigenous culture. One such convert at Chunar was rather smugly reported to have discovered a snake hole in the Xoor of her hut and, following Hindu custom, made it a milk oVering, but the snake eventually bit her on the hand when she was in the act of doing so, and she died.223 Converts who relapsed after the social pressures they were subject to, or because the European missionary who had converted them had to move on, were seen to be a consequence of a defect in the native character such as a want of method, commitment to personal improvement, use of time, or a lack of industriousness. It was a relapse into a culture where ‘lying, theft, 219 Ibid., August 1816, 335. 220 Ibid., September 1821, 469. 221 Ibid., July 1820, 287; November 1821, 471. 222 Ibid., July 1820, 287. 223 Ibid., January 1816, 24.

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adultery, and all the grosser crimes’ were not, unlike in Britain where they also occurred, ‘objects of shame and disgrace’.224 Consequently, even when missionaries achieved their aims of evangelism, their Eurocentric cultural and social presuppositions remained suspicious of the result.225 But conversion was understood to be a means of attaching Indians to empire. Daniel Corrie’s report of his visit to the mission station at Chunar included a commendation for the missionary’s concluding his service with a prayer for the king, which Corrie mentioned ‘to shew how the labours of such men tend to attach the natives of India to the British nation, by uniting their most important interests’.226 There was some Anglican recognition of local resistance to missionary evangelism, but only as something to be disparaged and thereby dismissed. There was opposition to mission schools using Christian books that mentioned Christ, which sometimes caused parents to withdraw their children from school, in one case voicing their objections through the pandit. The response of one missionary was to reject this objection as a ‘vain complaint’, and to deduct the wages of the teacher for the consequently reduced number of boys in his class.227 In another incident, the missionary oVered a Christian tract as a prize for the best reading from it. When the winner was chosen the boy threw it away, commenting ‘I do not want this book’.228 Children at this school also left because of the explicitly apologetic books they were given to read, and only one came back to school when the missionary sent the pandit to their homes. One father gave his reason as ‘Will you ruin my child? The Books read in this school treat all about Jesus Christ.’229 The local people were also given some Hindu counters to the educational blandishments of the missionaries. One missionary mentioned some of these contraarguments to Christianity in his report published in 1827, reducing them all to being prompted by superstition or ignorance. They included such arguments as: Christianity was a modern religion compared with Hinduism; it broke custom; Christians eat cow’s Xesh and destroy animal life; people are not to blame for their sins; 224 Missionary Register, August 1816, 332–4. 225 Ibid., April 1824, 192. 226 Ibid., June 1819, 272. 227 Ibid., April 1823, 192. 228 Ibid., August 1823, 353. 229 Ibid., 354.

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the soul is a part of God and therefore one’s present state is what God wants; loss of caste; many Christians lead bad lives; and every one can be saved by their own religion. Others were told Christ was a Jew who could not therefore save Hindus, or that fate was unalterable. Some of these arguments appealed to fears of social ostracism, or to an incipient quasi-Hindu nationalism, while others were sophisticated theological objections that questioned the world view of Christianity. They were certainly more than the oppositions of the stupid, but the missionary was convinced he had answers for them all.230 Bishop Middleton claimed that superstition and extreme ignorance were the prevailing characteristics of India, so that little could be achieved by preaching to the people. India was not an encounter with the primitivism of North America, for in India Christianity was opposed by religious system and discipline. But it was still superstition and heathendom, whose tenets were immersed in daily life to such an extent that Indians were generally indisposed to examine Christianity as a genuine alternative to their existing religion. However, there were, perhaps, indications of some Anglican recognition of religions that, unlike those of the North American indigenous peoples, were to British observers, in the cases of both Hinduism and Islam, organized, recognizably ancient, and with their own sacred texts, making them recognizable to Anglicans as ‘real’ religions according to Christian criteria. There was some inkling that these religious faiths were capable of providing satisfaction to their adherents, and to oVer a more genuine theological challenge to the faith of the colonizers than the previous North American indigenous encounter. The progress of our religion, admitted the bishop, ‘is here opposed by discipline and system . . . the tenets of superstition are inculcated in early life . . . the truths of the gospel . . . are not perceived to be truths, nor is there much disposition to examine them: they appeal to no recognized principle . . . the Hindoo, if he reXect at all, Wnds atonement in his sacriWces, and a mediator in his priest.231

He went on, in an Enlightenment paradigm, to propose that the diVusion of European knowledge oVered ‘improvement’, because 230 Ibid., August 1827, 384. 231 Bishop of Calcutta to SPG, 16 November 1818, SPG, Proceedings (1818), 87.

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those Indians who were European-educated in their childhood would surely use this Western knowledge to turn against their native culture and religion, as they also would view it as an amalgam of absurdities and abominations. Such knowledge would lead naturally to the ‘acceptable worship of God’. In particular, teaching the English language was the key to this Europeanization, as it provided access to English literature and thought, which had the power to ‘dissipate the prejudices and indiVerence’ that stood in the way of conversion. Our language is so unlike everything Oriental, not merely in its structure, but in the ideas to which it is made subservient . . . that a competent acquaintance with it seems avoidably to lead the mind of a native into a new train of thought, and a wide Weld of reXection. We, in learning the languages of the east, acquire only knowledge of words; but the Oriental, in learning our language, extends his knowledge of things.232

The subordination, even the dismissal, of Indian religion and culture compared to that of Europe, is also apparent in the Anglican attitude to Ram Mohan Roy’s reforming project of a genuine interface between Hinduism and Christianity on the basis of promoting a greater monotheism in the former.233 Roy (c.1772–1833) was a polymath, thinker, and politician proWcient in Western classical languages as well as those of India, who was as concerned to make Indians proWcient in European science as he was to revive Hinduism in dialogue with Christianity. A major Wgure in this early period of British colonization, he has been called ‘the Father of Modern India’.234 In 1816 the Missionary Register summarily dismissed Roy’s translation into English of an abridgement of the Vedanta as ‘absurd subtleties’.235 Two years later, the same publication reported one of its missionaries disparaging Roy’s theological wrestlings as without merit because, fundamentally, Roy’s monotheism did not go far enough and embrace Christianity. In conversation with one of 232 Bishop of Calcutta, 16 November 1818, SPG, Proceedings (1819), 88. 233 C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 163. 234 Susan Bayly, ‘The Evolution of Colonial Cultures: Nineteenth-Century Asia’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 459; Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 366–70. 235 Missionary Register, September 1816, 373.

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Roy’s followers, the writer said the Indian’s ‘ideas of religion are such as may be expected in every man who is delivered from the shackles of Polytheism, and has not yet received the grace of the Gospel’.236 Notwithstanding the friendship between Roy the Hindu and Bishop Middleton,237 Anglicans generally believed the gulf between Europe and India could only be bridged by travelling one way, from East to West. Principal Mill in 1822 commented on the writings of Roy as an indication of the ‘opening of the native mind in India’ in opposing the ‘reigning superstitions’ of Hinduism (Roy was a noted opponent of sati). However much he applauded Roy’s diagnosis of contemporary Hindu culture, Mill castigated his remedy of a Hindu monotheistic reform as being too intermingled with a debased culture and too distant from the absolute truths of Christianity. It was, he felt, a reforming platform derived from natural, rather than supernatural, religion. But he nevertheless welcomed Roy’s growing inXuence because it paved the way for the Wnal destruction of Hinduism. But Roy’s Christian aYrmation, he maintained, was suspect as insuYciently renouncing Hindu error, or what Mill termed ‘a Christianity . . . unaccompanied with any submission of mind to its authority as a supernatural revelation’. To Mill, Roy sought to separate the morality of the Christian gospel from its religious revelation, such as the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. He dismissed Roy’s latest publication (The Precepts of Jesus, 1820) as a ‘presumptuous vanity’ for that reason, its pretensions at Western learning ‘contemptible’, and as being derived from long-discredited Deistic English writers. It would, he aYrmed, have little eVect in propagating a Unitarianism among Christian converts.238 This attitude towards Roy’s endeavour was characteristic among British Christians who knew of it, and his inXuence was correspondingly limited. His opposition to customs such as sati was used to bolster the case for British intervention in Hindu society in the name of progress and enlightened religion, but his theological contributions were dismissed or ignored.239

236 Ibid., November 1818, 450. 237 Daniel O’Connor and others (eds.), Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000 (London: Continuum, 2000), 72. 238 Letter of Mill, 29 July 1822, SPG, Proceedings 1822, 198–202. 239 Chatterjee, Representations of India, 104.

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Predictably, caste emerged as a major issue for the SPG missions once they moved beyond the project of Bishop’s College in the 1820s. Mill reported that it constituted a major obstacle to the progress of Christianity, for conversion meant new Christians were outcastes and excluded from all previous familial and social contacts, including their means of earning a living. It was, said Mill, like a return to the lot of the Wrst generation of Christians.240 Consequently, there was reason to be more hopeful of the conversion of the hill tribes in Bengal, where caste was absent, but the death of the Revd Thomas Christian in 1826 shattered these SPG expectations.241 Thomas Christian’s journal, extracts of which were published in the SPG’s Proceedings in 1827, oVered a more nuanced reXection on Indians than was customary from the Anglican metropolitan centre, or the English colonial heartland of Calcutta. Following an earlier reconnoitre, in 1826 Christian ventured back to the hill tribes of Bengal to establish a school and a mission residence. He had learned some basics of the local language suYciently to enable him to have conversation with the local people. However, he found them still almost alien, reXecting ‘How hard . . . to enlighten and instruct them for they seem to have no more of men about them than the form and speech. Yet it is encouraging that He who formed them expects no more than they can render.’ Nevertheless, he was able to understand their courtesy to one another, and realized that they heard him out respectfully also, but that it was because they did not understand his message, ‘which makes them grant everything’.242 The following day he had a long conversation with their leader, running through the standard missionary themes of the state of human beings, the invisible world, and future rewards and punishments. He was listened to politely, but with little interest. As they walked through the village he consoled himself with the thought that this was the Wrst time the truths of the Christian revelation had been heard there, reXecting to himself, ‘I wish I knew how to make them believe that they were glad tidings of great joy’.243 Compared with the optimistic messages coming from Principal Mill, which largely concerned an encounter with mainly Hindu high culture and upper castes, this discovery of 240 SPG, Proceedings (1824), 153. 241 Ibid. (1828), 49. 242 Ibid. (1827), 185. 243 Ibid. (1826), 186.

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Christian was a bleaker and more realistic Indian encounter. Here the non-converted Indian speaks, albeit through the medium of the missionary, but it was the theologically constructed ‘eager convert’ that was the Indian who prevailed in the discourses of metropolitan and colonial Anglicans in this period, who could still dream of a potentially Christian India. Four days later Thomas Christian attended the sacriWce of a buValo, which took a long time to die, and all his Western Christian judgements were reinforced. India was, after all, not inhabited by courteous people whose culture was satisfying enough for them to show little interest in the Christian mission; it was the realm of heathens under the dominion of Satan. When the sacriWce was ended, I rose, and went away, satisWed at having seen this, at the same time horriWed and disgusted. May He, in whose hands are the hearts of men, Wre me with zeal and ability to understand this empire of Satan, and open the minds of this deluded people, that they may turn to the Lord, who bought them, not with the slaying of beasts, but with his own precious blood.244

For most of this period the energies and resources of the SPG in India were captured by the original vision of the Wrst Bishop of Calcutta, Thomas Middleton, for whom a college to educate Indian and British missionaries in Bengali language and culture was a prerequisite to evangelism. It would be, wrote the bishop in 1818, a centre for translation of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and various tracts, and the centre for the Anglicanization of a native Indian Christianity, through the enculturation of missionaries who would subsequently be sent throughout the subcontinent. On such mission stations, the English clergyman would remain in charge of native missionaries, although he acknowledged the latter were indispensable for accessing local cultures.245 Optimism remained high in this period that education and the college were indeed the way forward in the SPG’s Christian assault in Bengal. In 1821 Mill conWdently reported to the society in London that, with regard to the college and the new diocesan schools for Bengali children, there 244 Ibid. (1827), 212. 245 Bishop of Calcutta to SPG, 16 November 1818, ibid. (1819), 89.

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was no danger of any extreme reaction from Bengalis to this Christian initiative, because they avoided any direct attack on Hinduism. The desire of parents for an education that would advance their children in the British regime, coupled with their own indolence and sensuality, prevented any local opposition—a supposition we have seen, in some cases, that was naive and untrue. But Mill was emphatic that the European education and English language provided would gradually erode Hinduism. He overoptimistically asserted, ‘From the very limited experience I have myself acquired in this country, I can speak with conWdence to the fact, that the Scriptures, and other Christian books, even in places the most contradictory to the whole system of idolatry, may be read in Heathen Schools, where Brahmin pandits are the hearers and teachers, without exciting alarm or oVence whatever.’246 Four years later he was still in no doubt that the schools would subvert Hinduism and Bengali culture. They were a silent operation ‘weakening the power of slavish ignorance over the native mind, and preparing the way for the reception of truth’. Consequently, he defended the mission from the lack of conversions, arguing that such a demand overlooked the obstacles in the way, including education as a providential method working to that end.247 Mill clearly overlooked the Bengali cultural and religious obstacles to his purposes, or possibly just presented it in this way to maintain English support. There was a sort of cultural schizophrenia that, on the one hand, demonstrated an awareness of the need for cultural resources in order to understand and engage Bengali culture and Hinduism, while on the other, denigrated and underestimated the sophistication and reality of that same religion and culture. Two years later the society continued to push Bishop’s College as an example of how to ‘banish that moral and intellectual ignorance which now pervades the Eastern world’.248 At the end of the period of renewed church–state partnership in the British Empire, the word from missionaries in India showed almost as little understanding of the diVerent, sophisticated, and satisfying cultures of India as it had at the beginning. The 1829 246 Principal Mill to SPG, 4 April 1821, SPG, Proceedings. (1822), 151. 247 Principal Mill to SPG, 26 September 1826, ibid. (1826), 44. 248 Ibid., (1828), 54.

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SPG Proceedings summed up the work of three missionaries in Bengal in their superintendence of native schools, which were thought to be the thin end of the Anglican wedge in the project of remaking India in Europe’s image. The annual report expressed the society’s hope for the Bengali children it was educating. ‘It is presumed this must necessarily be followed by a disinclination to submit to the degrading superstitions of Hindoo mythology, and when once the mind is open to conviction of the absurdities which it has hitherto imbibed, it will not long hesitate to lend a willing attention to the wisdom and truths of the Gospel dispensation.’249 Looking beyond India, the most extensive metropolitan examination by any of the bishops in this period of the relation between the Church of England and the state with regard to the empire was towards its end, in 1827 by Charles BlomWeld, Bishop of Chester, who later became Bishop of London and the driving force behind the ecclesiastical commission established by the new Whig government in 1835 to reorganize the Church of England. He criticized the state for not being more proactive concerning religious provision during the previous century. The Wrst duty of every government, BlomWeld asserted, was the maintenance and promotion of Christianity for, ultimately, it was the degree to which a country was subservient to God’s eternal purposes that was its Wnal guarantee of stability. However, while religious provision for subjects in colonies was a responsibility of a metropolitan Christian government, provision for the conversion of unbelievers rested with the colonial authorities.250 Like so many of his predecessors, BlomWeld was setting earthly politics under divine dominion, and espousing the traditional Christian belief that it was the purpose of the former to serve the latter. He used the Scripture text ‘freely ye have received; freely give’ to also uphold the theology of exchange of his SPG predecessors. Britain had received many blessings. She had early received the gospel; her Protestant truth had been sustained by a series of historic deliverances; and she had acquired an unexpectedly vast empire and a continually extending commerce, all of which justiWed the old Anglican providential view that English history 249 Ibid. (1829), 55. 250 BlomWeld, Sermon, 11.

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had been so ordered by God because the nation had a singular role to play in the divine plan. Yet Britain was in danger of being condemned by God for lukewarmness and sloth in carrying out its divine purpose. True, she had been active in war and trade but, BlomWeld asked, ‘is the acquisition of territory in heathen lands to be the ultimate object of conquest to a nation of believers? Shall the acquisition of riches be the highest praise and noblest recompense of commercial enterprise to Christian merchants?’251 The success of both British merchants and British armies in India meant that Britain had an opportunity of carrying out God’s purposes there. ‘May that opportunity be improved’, BlomWeld concluded forcefully.252 He considered the bishopric of Calcutta to be a major development towards British Christianity earning respect in the East, because the Church of England thereby became a recognized part of the system of British government in India, with the authority of that rule behind it, in contrast to the marginality of a few chaplains employed by a private trading company. Alluding to this oYcial authority and to the model of primitive Christianity that Anglicans of the era believed their church to uphold, BlomWeld asserted: ‘Christianity was not likely to make a decided and powerful impression upon the people of that country, till it appeared amongst them in the perfectness and lustre of an Apostolical Church, revered and obeyed by the conquerors of the eastern world.’253 As was the case with the earlier metropolitan discourse on slavery in the SPG plantations, colonial actuality and Anglican rhetoric were not necessarily a mirror of one another. In fact, the new Anglican establishment in India remained too dependent on the British imperial system to become the base for Indian evangelism envisaged by its original Anglican supporters.254 The distinction between the truth on the ground and the understanding at the centre of the empire points out how little diVerent in this period was input from the colonial periphery from that of the metropolitan centre of Anglicanism. In part, this may have had to do with the division between the Indian establishment and the most substantial Anglican missionary society then in India, the CMS, which both parties were unable to 251 BlomWeld, Sermon, 13. 252 Ibid., 20. 254 Neil, Christianity in India, 275.

253 Ibid., 16.

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easily overcome despite sincere eVorts. It may also have indicated how little at this stage of Anglican colonial history the new, underresourced Indian episcopate could inXuence its metropolitan backers into revising their discourse according to Anglican colonial experience. But most of all it was because those Anglicans reporting on India and Indians from the colonial periphery shared the same religious presuppositions as those they reported to at the centre. Essentially, these colonial Anglicans, Evangelicals or nonEvangelicals, interpreted their experience through predetermined theological eyes. Anglican understanding of India during this period by either Orthodox or Evangelicals did not, in any fundamental way, diVer from that of the previous Anglican imperial discourse on North America. With regard to both colonies there was the same emphasis on an English evangelistic and imperial responsibility under God for promoting the unquestioned truth and superiority of Christianity over and against the indigenous religion, and for the superiority of British civilization, as a consequence of her Christian society. It was for this reason that Divine Providence had bestowed the empire on Britain, be it in America or India. As with North American indigenous religion, Indian society, Hinduism, and Islam were seen to be enthralled to Satan and products of diabolic rule, resulting in superstition and religious error—an example of Anglicans viewing the globe in the stark dichotomies of Christian and heathen, truth and falsity, light and darkness. British colonial religion, exposed to such circumstances, and underresourced, was regarded as dangerously vulnerable to dissolution. Christianity, and more especially the Church of England, was the principal solution. It could provide an imperial religious bond that would stabilize and unite the peoples of the empire with Britain, just as that church provided the same peace and stability to England. Imperial unity could be achieved not merely by evangelism but particularly through the establishment of an Anglican state-backed episcopal structure, in India and elsewhere in the empire. These Anglican explicators of empire were not defending a ‘reactionary’, ‘pre-modern’ ‘obscurantist’, or ‘illiberal’ view of Britain and her society by these views. The Anglican churchmen who upheld it were often involved in many of the contemporary developments of

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science and thought.255 Rather than an ‘old-fashioned’ view, these Anglicans were expressing an accepted and acceptable orthodoxy that had prevailed in English elite religious, political, and social circles since the sixteenth century. It had been Wrst deWned by Richard Hooker, and defended in church and state ever since.256 The major motif of this Anglican political theology as applied to the empire was not focused on the monarchy, as J.C.D. Clark has found,257 but simply on England as a Christian state whose Christianity was epitomized in the established Church of England, and whose empire, consequently, ought also to be Christian—and indeed, Anglican. The 255 For example, in the eighteenth century Bishop George Berkeley was involved in theories about perception as a philosopher and mathematician, and Bishop Gilbert Burnett was a historian. They included many who were leading or capable scholars, such as Joseph Butler. A number of these eighteenth-century Anglicans were also interested members of the Royal Society. 256 ‘By the Church . . . we understand no other than only the visible Church. For preservation of Christianity there is not any thing more needful, than such as are of the visible Church have mutual fellowship and society with one another. In which consideration, as the main body of the sea being one, yet within divers precincts hath divers names; so that Catholic Church is in like sort divided into a number of distinct Societies, every of which is termed a Church within itself. In this sense the Church is always a visible society of men; not an assembly, but a Society. For although the name of the Church be given unto Christian assemblies, although any multitude of Christian men congregated may be termed by the name of a Church, yet assemblies properly are rather things that belong to a Church. Men are assembled for performance of public actions; which actions being ended, the assembly dissolveth itself and is no longer in being, whereas the Church which was assembled doth no less agree to continue afterwards than before. ‘‘Where but three are, and they of the laity also (saith Tertullian), yet there is a Church;’’ that is to say, a Christian assembly. But a Church, as now we are to understand it, is a Society; that is, a number of men belonging unto some Christian fellowship, that place and limits whereof are certain. That wherein they have communion is the public exercise of such duties as those mentioned in the Apostles’ Acts, ‘‘instruction, breaking of bread and prayer.’’ As therefore they that are of the mystical body of Christ have those inward graces and virtues, whereby they diVer from all others, which are not of the same body; again, whosoever appertain the visible body of the Church, they have also the notes of external profession, whereby the world knoweth what they are: after the same manner even the several societies of Christian men, unto every of which the name of a Church is given in addition betokening severalty, and so the rest, must be endued with correspondent general properties belonging unto them as they are public Christian societies. And of such properties common unto all societies Christian, it may not be denied that one of the very chiefest is Ecclesiastical Polity . . . a form of ordering the public spiritual aVairs of the Church of God.’ (Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book III, ch. 1, #14.) 257 Clark, English Society, 256–62.

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longevity and dominance of this Anglican political theology accounts for the remarkable similarity between the Anglican discourse relating to American colonies in the Wrst British Empire, and that of the second empire that is often contrasted with it. Such continuities have been aYrmed before by imperial historians, but in non-religious areas such as economics and trade, pointing to the secular focus of most historians of the British Empire.258 In fact, both British Empires were understood similarly by these Anglicans because both discourses—that constructing the old empire from 1701–83, and the new after 1783—were framed during what is called ‘the long Eighteenth Century’. This was the period from possibly as early as 1660, and certainly from 1688, when a hegemonic politico-religious-social culture prevailed that was based on Anglican orthodoxy.259 The remarkable similarity of imperial views between Evangelicals and High Churchmen in this period was also probably to do with the prevalence of an Anglican theology that was more common than is often thought, because Evangelicals also derived their political and social attitudes from the same Orthodox sources for which High Churchmen during this period were the most eVective and inXuential spokesmen.260 Consequently, it seems likely that the focus of most historians of empire on the Evangelicals during this period may have distorted Anglican imperial inXuence by leaving the High Churchmen out of the picture, and the Evangelicals in sole possession of the religious framing of an imperial discourse.261 Whether that Anglican hegemony prevailed to such an extent that England during this period was a confessional Anglican state, as Jonathan Clark argues in great detail,262 is not as pertinent here as the fact that the Anglicans examined in this period so far spoke 258 P.J. Marshall, ‘First and Second British Empires: A Question of Demarcation’, History, 49 (1964), 13–23. 259 While there is disagreement around some of its constituent parts and its exact beginnings, there is now a signiWcant historical consensus that the period between 1660/88 and 1832 (the ‘long eighteenth century’) constituted a uniWed period of English–British culture and politics, which has been most controversially analysed by J.C.D. Clark in his English Society. 260 Ibid., 284–300, 301–2. 261 See for example, C.A. Bayly, who ascribes critical inXuence with regard to the empire to ‘establishment Evangelicals’. Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 143. 262 Clark, English Society, 26–34.

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publicly as if that confessional state existed. Anglicans of the SPG since 1701 up until the 1820s, joined towards the end of this period by Evangelicals, constructed an imperial dialogue as if England was an Anglican state, and therefore that the empire should be at least predominantly Anglican also. These churchmen were as aware as anyone else in this period that the English reality was neither an Anglican monopoly nor uniformity. However, they took for granted Anglican predominance and, in that context, regarded the fact of religious toleration in England as acceptable because it was contained within a society constitutionally committed to a religious orthodoxy that enshrined the social, political, and cultural hegemony of the Church of England, commonly referred to as the ‘Protestant Constitution’.263 As Clark has identiWed, Anglican churchmen in England tenaciously upheld this Protestant Constitution, primarily against Dissent during this period.264 Equally, this research demonstrates, they attempted to construct an understanding of the empire that upheld the export of this Anglican ascendancy to the colonies against the forces of colonial religious degeneracy, indigenous superstition, idolatry, and heathenism—and sometimes, if they were High Churchmen, against the invasions of religious plurality in the form of Dissent, characterized as ‘enthusiasm’, into which they sometimes elided Evangelicalism. However, nothwithstanding greater sympathy for Dissent among Anglican Evangelicals, generally in this period there was no general Orthodox hostility towards their Evangelical coreligionists in the empire, for both espoused an imperial dominance of the Church of England expressed in their common agenda for an Anglican establishment in India. The major diVerence between the periods covered by these last two chapters, 1701–83 and 1783–1820s, is not, therefore, in the content of the Anglican discourse. The signiWcant change is that in the latter period the state gave greater support to the Church of England, both at home and abroad. So Anglican hopes of their church achieving an imperial hegemony to match their domestic one seemed at last to be realized. However, the latter period proved to be not a new beginning but rather an imperial swansong of the relationship between church 263 Clark, English Society, 25, 40, 170, 256–317. 264 Ibid., 40.

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and state as it had existed domestically from long before Anglicans began to address the issue of empire in 1701, and which reached its pinnacle in the oYcially supported Anglican colonial establishments such as that in India. Until then, at the end of the long eighteenth century, it must have seemed to all imperially minded Anglicans, of whatever theological hue, that here at last was the imperial statesupported extension of the Church of England dreamed of by some since the sixteenth century.

4 A New Anglican Imperial Paradigm: The Colonial Bishoprics Fund, 1840–1 In 1840 Charles BlomWeld, Bishop of London, wrote an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury proposing the establishment of a fund to endow colonial bishoprics. It was time, he believed, that the Church of England undertook its own extension to the colonies, instead of leaving this to individuals. BlomWeld maintained that it was still ostensibly the duty of a Christian government to attend to the spiritual needs of its colonies, but this duty, unfortunately, had not been eVectively carried out. Sections of Parliament were now questioning the maintenance and extension of the Church of England as a state obligation, and ‘there does not appear to much hope of our obtaining, at the present moment, in the actual state of the public revenue, any considerable aid from the national resources, for the purpose of planting and maintaining the Church of this country in its colonies’.1 For BlomWeld, the planting of a colonial Church of England had come to have a necessary episcopal character. ‘[I]f we desire the good to be complete, permanent, and growing with the Church’s growth, we must plant the Church amongst them in all its integrity. Each colony must have, not only its parochial, or district pastors, but its chief pastor, to watch over, and guide, and direct the whole. An episcopal Church, without a bishop, is a contradiction in terms.’2 He envisaged a colonial pattern of settlement that was integrally Anglican, complete with a bishop from the Wrst. ‘Let every band of 1 Charles BlomWeld, A letter to His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Upon the Formation of a Fund for Endowing Additional Bishoprics in the Colonies (London, 1840), 4. 2 Ibid., 5.

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settlers, which goes forth from Christian England, with authority to occupy a distinct territory, and to form a separate community, take with it not only its civil rulers and functionaries, but its bishop and clergy.’3 BlomWeld remained convinced that although it was a requirement of the government of a Christian state to both maintain and extend Christianity in all its dominions, however, the British government was now most unlikely to do so. If it took any steps in this direction at all it would be in the expanding industrial cities of Britain rather than in the empire.4 In the colonies themselves there was either a dearth of resources to provide for Anglican expansion, or a colonial indiVerence arising—in part, he believed—from that very situation of previous Anglican insuYciency on the ground. So, if the government shirked its duty then the church had to take this up, as the SPG had endeavoured to do so, albeit inadequately in place of the government.5 His proposed fund would be established speciWcally for the moderate endowment of bishops in British colonies by the purchasing of land there; it would be administered by the bishops of the Church of England; and it would be complementary to, not instead of, money raised in the colonies themselves.6 In order to secure the legal status of these colonial bishops, letters patent issued by the Crown would be the way forward for this Anglican imperial extension. BlomWeld was hopeful of substantial contributions to the fund from the SPG, SPCK, and the CMS, and although he alluded to the possibility of the latter society having some diYculty with the proposed episcopal supervision of its missionaries, he insisted on the organization’s participation as ‘absolutely necessary’ to the completeness of the church’s purpose. The bishop also envisaged funding from the colonial settlement companies, because ‘a wiser proposal could not be made, for insuring even the temporal wellbeing of a new colony’.7 If the Church of England did not undertake this Anglicanizing of her colonial populations then, BlomWeld warned, ‘some other kindred Episcopal Churches would do so’. As his eighteenth-century Anglican predecessors had done, he was raising the

3 Ibid., 7–8. 6 Ibid., 12–13.

4 Ibid., 9–10. 7 Ibid., 13–14.

5 Ibid., 11.

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spectre of a more forceful Roman Catholicism harvesting British colonists in the imperial absence of the Church of England.8 Consequently, it was now time for the Church of England to grasp the nettle of its own colonial future. My own deeply-rooted conviction is, that if the Church of England bestir herself in good earnest, and put forth all the resources and energies which she possesses, and for the use of which she must give good account, she will in due time cause the reformed Episcopal Church to be recognised, by all the nations of the earth, as the stronghold of pure religion, and the legitimate dispenser of its means of grace: and will be a chosen instrument in the hands of God for purifying and restoring the other branches of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church, and of connecting them with herself, as members of the same mystical body.9

BlomWeld, whose see had traditional responsibility for colonial churches in the empire, no sooner saw a need than he felt compelled to Wnd a solution. He found his solution in empowering the Church of England to act from its own resources alone to promote Anglicanism in the empire. The letter resulted in a meeting of Anglican clerics and male lay worthies at Willis’s Rooms in London on 27 April 1841 to commence the proposed fund. This public occasion was a platform for notable metropolitan Anglicans to publish their views on Anglicanism and empire. The chorus of voices was led oV by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, who drew attention to factors that militated against the development of colonial Anglicanism, chief of which was the absence of bishops in these territories for episcopal rites, discipline, and superintendence. ‘A Church without a Bishop can hardly deserve the name of episcopal’, Howley aYrmed. A bishop would also bring great inXuence to bear on the morals and religion of a colonial population, and he instanced the West Indies which, since the arrival of its bishop sixteen years before, had increased its number of clergy and churches. This perspective of colonial Anglicanism was persisting with the blinkered positive spin with which the metropolitan church had regarded the West Indies since the eighteenth century. The bishop’s

8 BlomWeld, Letter to His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, 15. 9 Ibid., 15–16.


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arrival in those colonies in 1825 had had little eVect on the slave population, as most of the clergy remained enmeshed in slave management, and were uncritical supporters of plantation slave-owning society.10 But it suited Howley’s case in the public launch of an Anglican episcopal initiative to the empire to use the West Indies as an argument for church extension being linked to the arrival of a colonial bishop, as the cause of more regular Christian practice there. He blamed the current lack of institutional Anglican provision in the colonies on a number of factors, including the previous history of British inattentiveness to religion in the establishment of their colonies as compared with the French. As a consequence, the Church of England declined while Dissent had grown in the American colonies. After the loss of these colonies, ‘the mistake was perceived’, said Howley, so that the British government began to inaugurate colonial bishops in Canada (which at the time meant Ontario and Quebec), Nova Scotia, and the West Indies.11 But now the church alone would continue this pattern of colonial bishoprics for British emigrants, as well as the heathen in British colonies who would ‘hereafter be converted and ranged under the banners of the Church’. ‘We may thus, and thus only, enable the country to perform her duty to those of her own natives who have gone forth as settlers, and to those amongst whom they are settled, in a manner worthy of the Church and of the nation.’12 This was gentle criticism of government dereliction of its duty towards the national church from a mild and conciliatory archbishop. But Howley, despite his almost innate conservatism, was also a realist who had come to understand the changed circumstances of the 1830s, perhaps through working with BlomWeld.13 BlomWeld followed Howley with a much more direct speech, stating that this 10 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity Press, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 77. 11 Proceedings at a Meeting of the Clergy and Laity OYcially Called by His Grace, the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, and Held at Willis’s Rooms, 27th April, 1841, for the Purpose of Raising a Fund towards the Endowment of Additional Colonial Bishoprics (London, 1841), 3–4. 12 Ibid., 5. 13 Edward Carpenter, Cantuar: The Archbishops and their OYce (London: Cassell, 1971), 290–9.

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plan for colonial bishops was a virtual confession of past neglect, albeit this had begun to be reversed in the previous twenty-Wve years. But I know, also, that the results which have followed from what has already been done, are such as will increase our condemnation if we do no more. The neglect . . . of a century and a half lost us our American provinces. The pious and charitable eVorts of the last few years have enabled us to confer with safety the invaluable boon of liberty upon the slave population of our colonies; for I believe, in my conscience, that if Episcopacy had not been established in the West Indies, it would have been, I will not say impracticable, but far more dangerous than happily it has been found to be, to discharge that vast debt of justice and mercy.14

BlomWeld proposed the Wrst resolution for the meeting, ‘That the Church of England, in endeavouring to discharge her unquestionable duty of providing for the religious wants of her members in foreign lands, is bound to proceed upon her own principles of Apostolical order and discipline’. Asking who it was should discharge that duty, he upheld the traditional Anglican view that this was undoubtedly the responsibility of a Christian state. Let us leave the State to consider its duty; let us be diligent and faithful in performing ours. That it is, indeed, the duty of the State, of every Christian State, as administering one province of God’s universal empire, to provide that all its subjects should have the full enjoyment of their Christian privileges and means of performing their Christian duties,—and in order thereto, to send out from time to time an adequate supply of labourers into the Lord’s harvest,—I shall ever be forward to contend. We have only to look at the fruits which have been gathered from that harvest-Weld, where it has been duly cultivated, and at the briars and noxious weeds which overspread its surface where it has been neglected, to convince us, that, if the full and complete discharge of this duty on the part of the State would have drawn largely upon the country’s resources, the non-performance of that duty has occasioned it an expenditure of tenfold the amount.15

As episcopacy was ‘essential to the perfectness of the Church’, it was therefore culpable that Britain had not extended this principle to her overseas churches compared with the missions of the Roman Catholic Church. The state had repeatedly refused this request of the church over the past century and a half. But now there were requests 14 Proceedings, 6.

15 Ibid., 7.


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coming not just from the church in England but also from the colonial churches themselves. It demonstrated that this want of bishops was global now that British dominions extended over all the earth. The obligation for such a world-wide episcopal provision was especially accentuated for the national church of an imperial nation. It is impossible for any one, who has considered the nature of the case, not to perceive that the Church of this country, the reformed Church of a country entrusted by Divine Providence with an empire of unprecedented magnitude, whose commerce is extended to the utmost parts of the globe, whose language now begins to be spoken in the remotest regions of the earth, a Church whose members are wafted over seas unknown to our forefathers:—that such a Church must be in the highest sense of the term a Missionary Church. It is impossible not to acknowledge that the duty of preaching the Gospel to the heathen, of planting the standard of the Cross in the dominions of the prince of the power of this world, has been entrusted with a supreme degree of responsibility to a Church, favoured with such advantages by Him who has founded it upon a rock.16

This colonial extension of the episcopal Church of England was not principally a missionary obligation discharged by missionary societies, but rather was the responsibility of the church itself, regardless of what the state did, or did not do, about it. Consequently, these societies ought to exist in greater connection to the wider church at a time when the church was considering the responsibility of extending her polity to all the dependencies of the empire. Greater integration between missionary societies and the church would allow Anglicanism to present a united front throughout the empire.17 Henry Thomas Pelham, third Earl of Chichester, in seconding BlomWeld’s resolution, also saw it as a means to rectify the neglect of Anglican colonial expansion in British history, which had resulted in ‘the moral and religious destitution of the British Colonies’. Pelham was a Whig and a temperate Evangelical who was one of the ecclesiastical commissioners until 1878, and president of the CMS for half a century.18 The continued dereliction of religious duty resulted in ‘a state of things most adverse to the mere civil prosperity of the 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Ibid., 12–13. 18 G. Le G. Norgate, ‘Pelham, Henry Thomas, Third Earl of Chichester (1804–1886)’, rev. H.C.G. Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 43 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

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Colonies, and to the stability of their connexion with this country’. ‘Some imperial bond greater than mere commerce was required; some connecting moral principle, stronger than has yet existed, to attach the inhabitants of our vast and growing Colonies to their Mother Country.’ For the earl, this imperial unifying principle was the ‘preservation of our common faith’ and the establishment of its religious institutions, to whit, the national church. Bishops were necessary if the faith and church of the colonies was to be similar to that of Britain. The church, in this instance, should be ready to lead the state, though it was the duty of both to provide for the religious needs of its people at home or abroad.19 When the nation, through God’s grace, begins to care for these things at home, then, and not till then, will she feel the charge which God has so evidently laid upon her, to become the messenger and dispenser of His light and mercy to every part of this dark world. The more we dwell upon the vastness of this prospect, and the painful state of human misery which it discloses on the one hand, and the great privileges slighted and opportunities unemployed on the other, the more anxious must we feel to lend our aid to that great work which God has put into the hands of the Church of England,—the more anxious shall we be . . . to do what we can to repair our past neglect in not providing for the due government and order of the Colonial churches.20

The resolution having been passed unanimously, Justice Sir John Taylor Coleridge (nephew of the poet) proposed a second one. ‘That the want of Episcopal superintendence is a great and acknowledged want in the religious provisions hitherto made for many of the colonies and dependencies of the British Crown.’ The High Church Coleridge asked rhetorically what obstacles in ‘the vast Colonial Empire which the Almighty has entrusted to us’ would occur unless colonial churches were divided into manageable dioceses?21 The Bishop of Winchester, the Evangelical Charles Sumner, seconded this resolution, asserting that, as a nation, Britain had not made the Christianizing of its colonies a priority, having done ‘little or nothing’ about it. ‘We have sent,—I speak in a national sense,— we have sent out our ships, but we have not sent our religion. We have 19 Proceedings, 13–14. 21 Ibid., 15, 17.

20 Ibid., 15.


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sent out our commerce, but we have not sent our religion . . . We have sent out our very crimes, but not our religion.’22 The nation had done little in the way of extending the Church of England to the empire, and now that prospect looked as unlikely as ever. ‘It is well known that it is the policy of the present day . . . to look upon all religious persuasions in our Colonial Dependencies with the same degree of favour.’ Consequently, it was all the more important that the speciWc polity of the Church of England was also extended to the colonies. Such a policy could only result in the improvement of colonial Anglican Churches. Unless the Church of England could be represented there in its completeness, ‘we shall not only have deserted our own bounden duty, but that those Colonies themselves will fatally experience the want of that moral and religious superintendence which gives the best security for the inculcation of scriptural principles, and for placing the conduct of man in his social relations on the truest and safest basis—on the doctrines of the Gospel, as taught by our Church’.23 John Labouchere24 moved a third resolution, which was agreed unanimously: ‘That the acquisition of new Colonies, and the formation of British communities in various parts of the world, render it necessary that an immediate eVort should be made to impart to them the full beneWt of the Church, in all the completeness of her ministry, ordinances, and government.’ He wished he could give the government as much credit for promoting the spiritual welfare of the colonies as for their temporal, or for upholding the interests of the Church of England, but it had been very remiss in this respect. In doing so the government had overlooked ‘one of the most eYcient means of ensuring the allegiance and attachment of the inhabitants of those colonies’. However, Anglicans in England had been equally culpable, especially given the length of time Britain had possessed its colonies, and the beneWts it drew from them. Colonial bishops would also be useful in extending Anglicanism to the ‘idolators’ in their territories by fostering the missionary cause there.25 22 Ibid., 18. 23 Ibid., 19–20. 24 John was the brother of the more prominent Henry Labouchere who, until September 1841, was president of the board of trade in Lord Melbourne’s cabinet. 25 Proceedings, 20–2.

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Britain had ‘guardianship’ over one-eighth of the world’s population and one-eighteenth of the surface of the globe, the Tractarian Archdeacon Henry Manning reminded the assembly, and the providence of God had entrusted to Britain the responsibility of evangelizing these colonial populations. Britain held her empire on this evangelistic condition. The work was of immense magnitude, beginning with domestic needs, and then on to established, and Wnally to new colonies. But the resources available were totally inadequate to meet this need. Britain was falling into ‘moral arrear’ in its continued neglect of spiritual provision for these populations. This ethical indebtedness could well result in what had happened in North America—the revolt of the colonies and the despoiling of the Church of England in revolution. It may be, that we are now falling into the same moral arrear in the Colonies which we still possess, and preparing a like race of men, who shall one day rise upon us, and root up what we have planted: we are preparing them, not only by neglect, but by suVering the growth of false principles, which so counteract our better eVorts, as either eVectually to resist the Wrst planting of a Church, or, when they afterwards gain head, to ensure its overthrow.26

Manning pointed to Australia. Penitential colonies were established there without any attention to the spiritual means of recovering the convicts.27 Also, Manning repeated the theme of imperial unity grounded in a common Anglicanism throughout the empire, but gave it a new twist of ensuring imperial longevity. An empire required unity with itself, but this would only come about if the Church of England was enabled to export both its doctrine and its discipline so as to organize genuinely functioning colonial churches. If that were done, then Britain with a Christian empire would have a share in the perpetuity promised by Christ to his church. Surely, as citizens, the only hope we can have for the perpetuity of this great Christian empire, is that . . . its unity of organization shall be identiWed with the unity and organization of the church of Christ, and so be made partaker of her perpetuity. If we look back, as every Christian man will look back, to the history of past empires,—not regarding the history of the world as a turbulent rolling sea, in which empires rise and fall by chance, driven about by some blind destiny, but recognising some moral law, guided by an 26 Proceedings, 24.

27 Ibid.


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unerring Governor, determining the rise and fall of empires, as of men . . . when we behold these things, and see that it has pleased the providence of the same Supreme Governor to raise us up now to stand where they stood, and to commit to us the same deposit—to make us carriers of the light, we surely have the choice to make, whether we will be the mere beast of burthen for all nations, or the evangelizer of the world. Whether it may please the same Ruler who has raised us up to continue us as we are, to make us an empire which shall last with the perpetuity of his Church . . . had we bound them [the former colonies of the United States] to us by sending forth amongst them the polity of the Church . . . though we might not yet have stood in the dominant relation of Mother Country to that great Colony, we might have knit that mighty land to us in such a bond of peace as would have deWed all that interest could do to render us asunder, and to bring us in collision. We might have become, also, by the propagation of the same Apostolic government, the peacemaker of the world.28

Still at this time in his life prepared to be publicly and aggressively conWdent of the divine and apostolic commission of the Church of England, Manning called for it to be spread across the globe, because it had been given by God for the ‘pure restoration of the one Catholic faith, which . . . holds forth the brightest light in Christendom’.29 It was for him a salutary pointer to the ‘incredible growth in the moral strength of the English [church]’ that, whereas in 1814 Archbishop Manners-Sutton’s sermon at the consecration of Bishop Middleton had to remain unpublished, lest it rekindle heated divisions over a church establishment in India; now, in 1841, Manning exclaimed, the same church could meet in public assembly to discuss its extension into the whole empire.30 William Gladstone submitted the next resolution, which was for the fund to be under the direction of the bishops. At the time he was the young Tory MP for Newark in the ultra-Tory Duke of Newcastle’s interest, and had just that month Wnished revising the fourth edition of his The State in its Relations with the Church, which expressed his support for the Anglican confessional state.31 The work was 28 Ibid., 25. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 26. 31 H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 40–3. Gladstone had already established himself as having a public interest in the colonies, and was, brieXy during the government of Sir Robert Peel, under-secretary of state at the Colonial OYce for two months in 1835. In subsequent years, as an opposition

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an exposition of the church–state partnership paradigm that had prevailed since at least 1660, if not since 1558. It was the view that had operated in Anglican ecclesiastical, political, and imperial circles in the period covered so far. Originally written in 1838, Gladstone’s book was, as H.C.G. Matthew has pointed out, ‘probably the last point at which a general defence of Anglican hegemonic nationalism could be attempted’.32 Gladstone aYrmed that the state was a moral entity that had a duty to uphold religious truth, and therefore to require conformity to that truth, which was enshrined in the divinely instituted Church of England. David Bebbington has drawn attention to Gladstone’s Notebooks for 1835, where the young politician encapsulated this argument as a series a propositions that later would be enshrined in his book. That government is not an optional but a natural institution. That governments are human agencies: rational: collective: and of functions suYciently inXuential for good or evil to render them responsible to God. If they have a moral being, they must also have a religious profession. That where there is unity of government, there must be unity of this religious profession. That this unity need not rigorously apply to circumstantials, even of importance, but of substance. That it would be absolutely broken were the same government of the same kingdom to maintain & profess in one part of it a form of Christianity which anathematised that which it maintains in another.33

For Jonathan Clark, Gladstone’s book was the ‘obituary notice’ of the old regime. Indeed, Gladstone’s political leader, Sir Robert Peel, was horriWed at the impractical politics it now represented.34 The Gladstone of 1841 was still an ultra-Tory and a High Churchman, who was only just beginning a transition through that decade towards MP he spoke regularly in the Commons on colonial aVairs, an interest probably stimulated by his father’s West Indian estates. In 1845 Peel would appoint him colonial secretary. See David W. Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 105. 32 Matthew, Gladstone, 41. 33 David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 55–6. 34 Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 134.


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a more moderate conservatism, and from a (now) old-fashioned High Church establishmentarianism towards Tractarianism. Consequently, in 1841 he continued to uphold that the exclusive contract between the Church of England and the state held true abroad where, aside from the equally established Church of Scotland, no assistance should be given by the British government to other churches or faiths.35 Gladstone, on the verge of a decade of intellectual and theological change, maintained the Church of England was essentially an autonomous, true, and divine community, and therefore was the only proper partner for the state in England which, as a moral entity, had to be concerned with the upholding of truth. Accordingly, Gladstone aYrmed at the 1841 public meeting that the temporal connections between colonies and metropolis could be augmented by ‘ties of spiritual brotherhood’.36 He considered this was not an obligation primarily for the colonists themselves because it took some time before colonial prosperity, either as individuals or as a colony, was suYcient for the purpose. The majority of colonists were from the labouring classes, without capital, and almost completely caught up in a battle with the land for subsistence.37 If the church was to wait until colonists’ prosperity had risen suYciently for them to invest in religion, they may already have fallen into a habit of religious neglect. The church needed to bridge this gap between colonial disability and ability, if the habits of religion were to be kept alive in the colonial context. Gladstone also posited that if the time should come when colonies became independent, then former colonies would only maintain their connections with Britain if previous imperial foundations ‘were deeply laid in the recognition and maintenance of a common faith’.38 The whole English nation was bound to this religious duty because of the Wnancial obligations that the nation owed to its colonies. Colonial revenue enabled the maintenance of the navy, provided markets for British manufactures, and remitted money directly to Britain from which all Britons beneWted in terms of employment and economic growth. 35 Bebbington, Mind of Gladstone, 56. 36 Proceedings, 26. 37 Ibid., 27. 38 Ibid., 28.

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And therefore much as has been said of the duty of the State with regard to this matter,—a duty up to this moment so partially fulWlled, and ardently as I long to see the day when that duty shall be more adequately recognised, yet I do not scruple to utter a sentiment in which I am sure I shall carry with me universal concurrence, that we should lament to see the State in such sort charging itself with the fulWlment of these sacred obligations, as to make the provision for the religious wants of the Colonies altogether a mechanical, or altogether a legal matter, and thus depriving the members of the Church amongst us of the opportunity of bringing their free-will oVerings into the treasury of God.39

The same year, 1841, not only saw the launch of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, but also a declaration by the bishops of the United Church of England and Ireland on colonial bishops as a consequence of that fund, and the passing of the Colonial Bishops Act. The declaration was largely the bishops’ public acceptance of responsibility for administering the fund established the previous month. However, it also contained a statement about the Church of England and the colonies generally; that ‘insuYcient provision’ had been made for her members overseas, which now required the Church of England’s assistance in the form of colonial bishoprics to be established in thirteen parts of the empire, beginning with New Zealand, but also including South Australia, the district of Port Philip (predecessor of the state of Victoria), and Western Australia. The bishops thought it unwise to proceed ‘without the concurrence of her majesty’s Government’, and so appointed a standing committee of their number with powers to confer with ministers.40 As a consequence, later that same year Parliament passed the Colonial Bishoprics Act (5 Vict., c. 6), which gave legislative authority to the Church of England to create bishops for the colonies in keeping with the purpose and intent of the fund and the declaration, although Parliament’s remit was, strictly speaking, to legislate bishops for British subjects rather than for missionary purposes.41 Also in 1841, the bench of bishops of the Church of England became vice-presidents of the CMS, so bringing together the church and the most active and extensive 39 Proceedings, 29. 40 R.P. Flindall, The Church of England, 1815–1948: A Documentary History (London: SPCK, 1972), 94–7. 41 Ibid., 98–100.


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Anglican missionary society; that society having already agreed that the hierarchy of the Church of England should be the Wnal arbiter in any dispute between itself and colonial bishops.42 In the early 1840s, then, leading national Anglican Wgures in church, politics, the judiciary, and among the aristocracy were publicly advocating that the Church of England initiate its own programme of colonial church extension, quite apart from the state. In doing so they were publicly critical of the state for not maintaining what they understood to be its proper concern to support the national church in the colonies. Although they were mindful of such support in recent decades, it was apparent to them by this time that this period of a renewed state–church alliance in the empire was not going to be sustained. This acceptance of the limits of state assistance for the Church of England, the consequent resolutions to act autonomously in promoting a colonial Anglicanism, the establishment of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, and its consequent developments in 1841, were new aspects of the Anglican discourse on empire in the early years of the new decade. Some of the public comments of these leading churchmen maintained themes that had comprised Anglican imperial discourse since the early eighteenth century. Notwithstanding recent decades, they spoke of how the Church of England had been neglected in the colonies, allowing Dissent and irreligion to grow there. They aYrmed that Britain had a responsibility for the spiritual welfare of British emigrants and for the evangelism of colonial heathens. Without the realization of this obligation, millions would perish eternally of irreligion because they knew not Christ and his gospel. Britain owed this duty to the colonies as a debt for the wealth its commerce and rule accrued to it. It also owed this to God, who had given Britain the empire in the Wrst place, and whose providential rule sustained that power on the condition of Britain fulWlling its divinely appointed spiritual obligations. The spiritual imperial bond that Britain could create in the proper fulWlment of this religious duty was the best, deepest, and most enduring unity the empire could have, as well as providing the most secure foundation for moral conduct in society. 42 C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the Self-governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 14.

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However, some of these statements in the early 1840s constituted rare public and direct criticism of the state oVered by Anglican pillars of the establishment, although it was couched in less than Wery terms. Speaker after speaker at the 1841 meeting had something to say about how the state had deserted its religious obligations to the Church of England, despite the reinvigoration of that alliance in the past few decades. BlomWeld, in his public letter of 1840, had stated that there did not seem much hope of Parliament supporting any longer the colonial planting of the Church of England, although he remained convinced it was a duty of Britain as a Christian state to do so. Archbishop Howley pointed out that the British government had provided for an Anglican establishment in its Canadian colonies as a consequence of the rebellion and loss of its other North American ones to the south. The implication from this cautious High Churchman that that lesson should continue to be learned was there for all to draw. Other speakers were more explicit. The Earl of Chichester urged the church to lead the state in this regard, though it was undoubtedly the duty of both to provide for domestic and colonial religious needs. For Bishop Sumner the prospect of the state privileging the Church of England over other denominations in the colonies looked dismally unlikely, leaving the church to do her duty unaided. John Labouchere also regarded the government as having been inattentive in this colonial duty, thereby risking the future allegiance of its colonies; while for Manning that dereliction placed Britain in moral indebtedness to the colonies. Gladstone, then still a Tory, was unambiguous in stating that the maintenance and extension of colonial religion was a duty of the whole nation and not just the church, which the state until then had only ‘partially fulWlled’, but which should be ‘more adequately recognised’. So all the principal speakers at the launch of this new colonial initiative by the Church of England were united in lamenting the demise of the state’s involvement in the transplantation of their church to British possessions overseas. All were equally sure that the present situation was unlikely to change. As a consequence, they supported this move by the Church of England to assume greater responsibility for its own colonial development, without the support of the state. P.J. Welch, writing in the 1960s, believed that cooperation between the state and the Church of England continued to be strong into


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the 1840s, despite some disagreements over practical politics in this decade, based on his assessment of the close working relationship between the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, and Bishop BlomWeld. However, even Welch’s own evidence demonstrated that the disagreements between church and state were substantive, including the failure to retain the separate bishoprics of Bangor and St Asaph, notwithstanding the overwhelming support of the bench of bishops; and the lack of political support for the maintenance of parliamentary grants for church extension.43 Rather than the old cooperation, the criticism of the state expressed publicly at the launch of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, and the assumption of greater colonial activism by the Church of England, represented a watershed in the response to the situation the church found itself in by the 1840s. This was a realistic acknowledgement of developments of the 1820s and 1830s, a period that has been called a ‘constitutional revolution’ by GeoVrey Best,44 and the ‘end of the Protestant Constitution’ and the old order by Jonathan Clark.45 Between 1828 and 1832 the Church of England lost its hegemonic status in England as a result of the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act (which lifted all legal restrictions on Roman Catholics except those relating to succession to the crown) in 1828, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (which had legally disbarred Dissenters from public oYce) in 1829, and the Reform Act of 1832, which for the Wrst time enfranchised a portion of the non-landowning middle classes— the level of society where Dissent was strongest. These were elemental changes to what had been encapsulated in the concept of the ‘Protestant constitution’, by which Anglicanism, monarchy, and an aristocratic social order provided the prevailing set of ideas that constituted the ideological framework of English political, cultural, and social life throughout the long eighteenth century. Of these forces, Clark argues, Anglicanism constituted the most signiWcant and inXuential; so much so that he believes England constituted a confessional state during this 43 P.J. Welch, ‘BlomWeld and Peel: A Study in Co-operation between Church and State, 1841–1846’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 12 (1961), 71–84. 44 GeoVrey Best, ‘The Constitutional Revolution, 1828–1832, and its Consequences for the Established Church’, Theology, 52 (1959), 226–34. 45 J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 6.

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period in that, while other religious bodies existed and were agreed to exist legally, they were only tolerated and never formally permitted to enter the political institutions and oYces of the state. It was this hegemonic relationship between the Church of England and the state that had existed throughout the period so far covered by this investigation. In 1713 Bishop Gibson of London had encapsulated it for the largest section of the High Church party, which had entered into a Whig–Church alliance, in an understanding that was echoed by other Anglicans throughout the long eighteenth century. That the Spiritual Body was independent of and equal to the Temporal, that the Temporal Courts ought to be restrained from interference with the Ecclesiastical, that the clergy were the proper judges of the degree of assistance which the Church required from the State, and of the means by which that support should be rendered, and that the suppression of vice was the proper function of the Spirituality not of the laity.46

The hegemony of the Church of England and the state was revived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As seen in the previous chapter, this hegemony can be clearly seen in the colonial policy of the British government, whereby the Church of England was introduced into colonies and supported by endowment in India, as also in Canada and the West Indies. This colonial endowment was an imperial mirror image of the same oYcial support for the established churches domestically, as in the parliamentary grants in 1818 and 1824 for church extension in England and Scotland.47 After 1815, according to Clark, with social unrest increasing, the Church of England became even more important as the guarantor of social and constitutional order and concurrently came under attack from those excluded from that system.48 To upholders of the status quo, the church alone appeared to be able to provide the requisite theoretical and ideological counter to the theorists of Dissent and revolution. Old Dissent was associated with pro-revolutionary positions and this, and its individualism, were perceived as making its nationalism and patriotism very conditional. New Dissent was conservative, but 46 Clark, English Society, 101. 47 Stewart J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 68–72. 48 Clark, English Society, 421–8.


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placed the nation and nationalism very much after a converted Christianity and conscience that knew no national boundaries in its fellowship of the converted. But the old Anglican theology provided a basis for civil society that qualiWed individualism by the greater importance of communal Christianity and church allegiance.49 So the Anglican theorist John Bowles, a High Church layman, could comment in 1815 that the constitutional order of the country was ‘composed of two distinct establishments, the one civil, the other ecclesiastical, which are so closely interwoven together, that the destruction of either must prove fatal to both’.50 Bishop BlomWeld, who initiated this drive for greater imperial autonomy by the Church of England, had himself previously been a proponent of the old regime. Born in 1786, he rose to the episcopal bench as Bishop of Chester in 1824. During that episcopate he was an opponent of Catholic emancipation, on the basis that as heretics they had no place in the Protestant constitution of England. He did, though, favour the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, not from any large sympathy for Dissenters but because he considered that using the sacrament of Holy Communion as a political test was a profanation that the Church of England clergy could well do without.51 It was the union with Ireland in 1801—making that island an integral part of the United Kingdom—and the subsequent incorporation of 100 Irish MPs into Westminster, that eventually led in 1828 to Catholic emancipation, as the catalyst for the end of this old order, and brought an end to the Anglican hegemony within it. In its place came a storm of anticlericalism and anti-church militancy as a consequence of the Church of England’s belated and unhappy opposition to political reform. The bishop’s palace in Bristol was burned down, and bishops were mobbed, and burned in eYgy. For the SPG preacher in the fateful year of 1832, the Bishop of Rochester, it was nothing less than a further sign of the reign of the Antichrist. 49 StaVord, William, ‘Religion and the Doctrine of Nationalism in England at the Time of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars’, in Stuart Mews (ed.), Religion and National Identity (Studies in Church History, vol. 18) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 382–95. 50 Clark, English Society, 433. 51 Malcolm Johnson, Bustling Intermeddler? The Life and Work of Charles James BlomWeld (Leominster: Gracewing, 2001), 27–9.

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‘The wise laws which the prudence and piety of our ancestors imposed for the suppression of blasphemy and irreligion have been so far repealed or mitigated, that they now stalk through the land unrestrained and unpunished.’ The clergy were once again exposed to persecution of the Papists and to robbery and spoliation. It was all a result of allowing a prideful reason, expediency, and worldly policy to usurp the place of the revealed will of God, morality, and religion. ‘Are these not,’ he asked dolefully, ‘signs of the existence of that spirit which shall oppose and exalt itself above all that is called God?’52 Whereas in the past, compared with other nations, Britain had been blessed with peace and social stability because the kingdom had been founded upon true religion, the current attempt to refound it upon principles of utility and expediency would only bring upon it the just judgement of a providential God, the almighty governor of the world.53 But while there was Anglican lamenting in the late 1820s and early 1830s at the passing of the old ways, the ultimate response of the Church of England to the fundamental alteration in its place in English society and its alliance with its rulers was to assert its own independence, now that the state had deserted its responsibilities towards the church. As evidence of this, Clark points to the Tractarian Movement of the 1830s and 1840s, and to a growing ecclesiastical assertiveness among the younger generation of High Churchmen, such as these words of Walter Hook, Vicar of Leeds, in 1831: As a Church, the Reformed Catholic Church in England will be beneWted by its disunion from the State; but, as the Bishop of Limerick observes, the question is not whether the Church be less pure, but the country be not more pure . . . I refer our calamities to the repeal of the Test Act; for then the State virtually renounced every connection with religion. It pronounced religion to be, so far as the State is concerned, a thing indiVerent. England is now in the position of a man who has excommunicated himself.54

But evidence for a new Anglican assertiveness can also be found in the episcopal preachers of the SPG in the 1830s. In 1835 even the cautious Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford, while deploring that 52 George Murray, Bishop of Rochester, A Sermon (1832), 12. 53 Ibid., 13. 54 Clark, English Society, 359–60.


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the government of a Christian nation should have withdrawn its support for the society, called on his hearers to Wll the gap left by the government. It was, he said, ‘our duty as Christians to increase our private and individual exertions, proportionally to such a loss, in every practicable way’, and he proposed parish committees to encourage lay involvement with the society and the increase of ‘smaller donations’.55 The next year, the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol (from 1836 to 1897 it was a joint diocese) drew attention to the fact that, ‘at the very moment’ when North American emigration increased, annual grants of public money for the Church of England in those colonies was withdrawn. Ultimately, he foretold, this would have a deleterious eVect on imperial unity, for ‘no bond of union is so strong between distant nations as that of a common faith and a common worship’. The remedy he also called for was greater support for the society among churchmen at home.56 The feisty Henry Phillpot of Exeter, as preacher in 1838, managed to make his point in a backhanded way by disclaiming any intention to ‘charge our rulers with neglecting their Wrst duty’, because this was not such an occasion. The government was ready, he professed, to perform this duty, but it was ‘deterred by the unrighteous, the unchristian clamour against every expenditure which has religion for its object, especially if it be in that form which the laws of the land recognize as true’. If the government would but realize that they too would face the judgement of God, he was sanguine that they would recall their duty, and unite in reversing the present policy of putting ‘National Piety on a short allowance’.57 The drive for imperial self-suYciency by the Church of England in the early 1840s must be placed alongside these statements of the 1830s, and its more widely recognized domestic responses as part of this watershed in the development of Anglicanism in response to the demise of the old order. The 1840s were, as Hans Cnattingius identiWed in 1952, the turning point of change for Anglicanism, whereby it evolved into a ‘World Church’. It was change that had already been foreshadowed outside Britain and the empire in the 55 Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford, A Sermon (1835), 9–10. 56 James Monk, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, A Sermon (1836), 12–13. 57 Henry Phillpot, Bishop of Exeter, A Sermon (1838), 13–14.

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1830s, with the idea mooted in 1835 by Bishop George Washington Doane of New Jersey for missionary bishops to lead, rather than follow, missionary outreach. These ideas were picked up by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Bishop BlomWeld in the late 1830s.58 The catalyst for greater initiative by the Church of England towards missionary expansion has been ascribed by Cnattingius to a demand within that church stimulated by the Oxford Movement, and the rapprochement between the CMS and the bishops. But this is to ascribe too much to the church, and not enough to the fundamental paradigm shift that dethroned Anglicanism from its hegemonic position in the years 1828 to 1832. Change was forced upon the church, which took a decade to embrace it. It also attributes too much to the Oxford Movement which, as a consequence of increasing Roman Catholic sympathies and Newman’s Tract XC was, in the early 1840s, a more marginalized movement within Anglican circles of power, looked at by Evangelicals and High Churchmen alike with suspicion and hostility.59 In the early 1840s a new imperial paradigm for the Church of England was created from within the central power structures of the church itself. It was the initiative of the Bishop of London, who was probably the most powerful and active bishop at the time, notwithstanding the two archbishops. It had the support of other principal Anglicans, both lay and clerical, and from the rising generation in church and state, such as Gladstone and Manning. A new Anglican imperial paradigm arose at this time because these inXuential and mainstream Anglicans understood only too well that the old one was defunct, and most unlikely to rise again from its political grave. BlomWeld’s initiative with regard to the Colonial Bishoprics Fund provided these Anglicans with the requisite practical direction, in a paradigm shift for Anglicanism to adapt to the new domestic and imperial reality, which now left it without its former hegemonic status in the British metropolitan and colonial world. It was one in which episcopacy was now to be the basis for a global Anglicanism. Bishops would now be indispensable to colonial Anglicanism, their 58 Hans Cnattingius, Bishops and Societies: A Study of Anglican Colonial and Missionary Expansion, 1698–1850 (London: SPCK, 1952), 200–6 59 Frank Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), chs. 7 and 8.


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presence guaranteed and resourced by the Colonial Bishoprics Fund; and not just for British colonies, but wherever signiWcant numbers of Anglicans were to be found. Consequently, the fund also proposed to endow a bishopric for Anglicans in Europe,60 and also the bishop in Jerusalem that Newman so opposed because it was a combined project with Lutherans, but was to ensure the genuinely episcopal character of a future Anglican Church in the Holy Land.61 Now that the Church of England was conscious of its need to act autonomously, it was no longer prepared to subjugate or suppress its episcopal character as it had done in the North American colonies for most of the eighteenth century. The new paradigm was for a deliberately and consciously episcopal Anglican Church as a given for colonial Anglicanism. It was a new way of being Anglican imperially that evidently caught the imagination of some very signiWcant Anglicans in England. The fabulously wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress to the Coutts banking fortune, gave £35,000 in 1845 to endow the new dioceses of South Australia and Cape Town, and £50,000 in 1858 to endow a bishopric in British Columbia when that became a crown colony.62 This episcopal foundation for colonial Anglicanism was not agreed to by all metropolitan Anglicans, the CMS and its innovative secretary, Henry Venn, being the major exceptions. Venn strongly believed that bishops were for the consolidation of a missionary church once it was established, rather than being part of the initial evangelistic thrust. The conXict between these two ideals came to a head in the 1850s in India.63 However, this distinction should not be exaggerated, as Venn was not anti-episcopal. He agreed to the alteration in the CMS structure that made bishops the Wnal arbiters in its disputes, and that missionary Anglican Churches should be episcopal, even to being at the forefront of agitating for a native, rather than European, episcopate. It was more an argument about precisely when that episcopal structure should be put in place— 60 ‘Declaration of a Meeting of Archbishops and Bishops, Held at Lambeth, on Tuesday in Whitsun Week 1841’, in Flindall, The Church of England, 95. 61 Turner, John Henry Newman, 395–7. 62 Diana Orton, Made of Gold: A Biography of Angela Burdett Coutts (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980), 105, 185. 63 Williams, The Ideal of the Self-governing Church, 9–21.

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whether at the very commencement of a mission or subsequently— rather than any dispute over episcopacy as such. Both Anglican sides aYrmed an episcopal church; their dispute was over just when that episcopacy should be instituted in new churches. Nevertheless, it was the paradigm of a fully episcopal church, from its beginning or as soon as feasible thereafter, that was enshrined in the resolutions of the 1841 London meeting that gave birth to the Colonial Bishoprics Fund and the consequent parliamentary legislation that same year. In the early 1840s the Church of England created a new paradigm of engagement with the British Empire, replacing the old one that had operated since a conscious concern for Anglican missions in that empire began in 1701. The old paradigm was founded on the constitutional settlement that prevailed throughout the long eighteenth century. It had accepted and defended the alliance of the church with the state as a mutually beneWcial partnership between two autonomous bodies; with the state, as a moral entity, having a duty to uphold the Church of England exclusively, because it was the purest and divinely appointed embodiment of the most truthful form of Christianity, which was Protestantism. While the Church of England acknowledged that this former paradigm had not always been adhered to fully by the state during the eighteenth century, it was encouraged by its revival at home and abroad in the decades after the loss of the North American colonies and the French Revolution. During the 1830s the Church of England came to accept, reluctantly, the end of this religious-political-social arrangement, and consequently, in 1840–1, a new Anglican paradigm was developed as a response to the demise of the old one, following the political acceptance of religious equality and pluralism by the British state in the years between 1828 and 1832. This new Anglican imperial paradigm promoted the need for more autonomous action and an episcopal identity by the Church of England in the colonies and elsewhere. It was a bowing to the inevitable that the empire was now no longer likely to be an Anglican one, because the British state had relinquished its substantive connection with the Church of England in favour of denominational pluralism for all forms of Trinitarian Christianity. The old did not instantly replace the new. Rather, for some time both paradigms co-existed in the empire. This is shown by a comparison


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between the two white settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, on the one hand, with those we have examined in North America and Bengal, on the other. Both these newer colonies witnessed the operation of the new Anglican imperial paradigm. But in Australia, the old only reluctantly gave way to the new under the leadership of the Bishop of Australia, the High Church William Grant Broughton. In New Zealand, Bishop George Augustus Selwyn readily embraced the new Anglican self-governing and episcopal paradigm from the beginning of his episcopate in that colony, but in doing so built on the work of the CMS missionaries there, whose voluntary mission had existed without episcopal oversight since 1814.

5 The New Paradigm in the Colonies: Australia and New Zealand, 1820s–c.1850 Anglicanism in the unique penal colony of New South Wales began under the old paradigm in 1788, when the ancien regime still ruled unchallenged in England. Consequently, this colonial Church of England was enmeshed with state support from its beginning, and reXected the revival of the church–state alliance in the period from its beginnings in 1788 until the late 1820s. Thereafter, there was a reluctant withdrawal from the old paradigm by the colonial Anglican leadership until the new had Wnally surfaced unequivocally by 1850. During these Wrst decades of Anglicanism in this anomalous colony there was only belated and Wtful engagement with Australia’s indigenous peoples. Conversely, in New Zealand, Anglican engagement preceded colonization by over two decades, and when Anglican episcopacy Wnally began there, it did so with the explicit intention of implementing the new paradigm of ecclesiastical engagement with the empire. Throughout these Wrst decades of Anglicanism in New Zealand Anglican attention was very much primarily on the mission to the Maori, the successful conversion of whom became one of the highlights of Anglican mission history in the nineteenth century. The only SPG preacher to mention Australia in the years of the old order was the strict Tory George Huntingford, Bishop of Gloucester, in 1805. He reminded his hearers that even convicts were still human beings and British subjects, who could be redeemed as members of civil society. Very optimistically, he believed the only reason the lower orders did not attend the Church of England was because of a lack of churches for an expanding population, for the masses

Australia and New Zealand, 1820s–c.1850

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‘love the Church of England’. This lack of attendance was, however, he said—no doubt with one eye on revolutionary France—‘pregnant with moral and political mischief ’. What was true at home was also true of the colonies, and especially of New South Wales, where the children of convicts would imbibe their parents’ corrupt principles. The bishop was advocating imperial Anglicanism for the same reason as the government during these decades of rejuvenated oYcial support for the Church of England. The church taught the politically important virtues of subordination and political quietude. But the bishop could also foresee the day when Australia would command the respect of the nations of the world, and it was therefore important to cultivate in its inhabitants imperial aVections by fostering among them the apostolic, episcopal religion established in Great Britain.1 Anglicanism would be the spiritual and moral bond of empire, even among its least likely colonists, who were involuntarily transported into it in penal servitude. As part of the imperial revival of a state-sponsored Church of England, Australian Anglicanism began with a substantive state connection in the form of clergy who were military chaplains, appointed by the government to the penal colony of Botany Bay from 1788. Governor Arthur Phillip had under him 19 oYcers and about 200 other ranks, with some wives and children. When the Xeet Wnally sailed on 13 May 1787 these personnel had in their charge approximately 730 convicts—men, women, and children.2 The inclusion of a chaplain among the oYcial personnel of the new penal settlement had been a consideration of the government since August 1786 at least, nine months before the Wrst Xeet of convicts sailed. In that month a cabinet paper outlining the prospective colony speciWcally included provision for a Church of England chaplain. Despite being petitioned by one Roman Catholic priest, who wished to be included (without charge to the government), the home secretary, Lord Sydney, decided against it. He felt such an appointment would be a concession to Roman Catholics that 1 George Huntingford, Bishop of Gloucester, A Sermon (London, 1805), 17–25. 2 C.M.H. Clark. History of Australia, vol. 1: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, and London: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 76.

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The New Paradigm in the Colonies

would only weaken the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland and in England.3 Governor Phillip’s instructions included the enforcement of religion and the establishment of public worship according to the rites of the Church of England. He was also to execute laws against immorality and to uphold Sabbath observance.4 But whereas the Church of England in colonies such as Canada, with well-established or growing settler populations, received increased government infrastructure, the home government saw no advantage in colonies with small settler populations having anything more than a minimum church provision. So the initial decades of penal settlement, between 1788 and 1820, just twelve Church of England chaplains in the Australian mainland colonies, and two in Van Diemen’s Land, were paid for by the crown, which also gave them land for their own use and for their churches.5 The Wrst chaplain, the Evangelical Richard Johnson, preached his Wrst sermon in Australia, to troops and convicts, at Sydney Cove on 3 February 1788, just days after the Wrst Xeet landed. On 17 February he celebrated his Wrst service of Holy Communion in a marquee. But as the sole Christian minister, with the governor the source of all resources and inXuence, Johnson’s work was necessarily dependent upon the goodwill of the authorities. Arthur Phillip was typical of many in the eighteenth-century British ruling orders in holding the church to be useful primarily as a means of maintaining public morality and social subordination. Within a matter of months Phillip had allocated a site for a church at Sydney Cove, but limited resources did not allow him to allocate any building materials. He also set aside 400 acres as glebe land for the support of this church, and all convicts had to attend Johnson’s Church of England services, by order of the governor.6 Johnson’s diYculties increased under Phillip’s acting successor, Lieutenant Francis Grose. At the heart of the conXict between the two men were diVering concepts of the purpose of the colony. 3 Clark, History of Australia, vol. 1, 78. 4 Ibid., 80. 5 Brian H. Fletcher, ‘The Anglican Ascendancy, 1788–1835’, in Bruce Kaye (ed.), Anglicanism in Australia: A History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 9. 6 Neil K. Macintosh, Richard Johnson: Chaplain to the Colony of New South Wales, His Life and Times, 1755–1827 (Sydney: Library of Australia History, 1978), 49–61.


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Johnson believed it was an opportunity for the reformation of the convicted. Grose thought the colony existed purely for the incarceration and punishment of convicts. The conXict with Johnson climaxed when Grose denied him access to condemned prisoners in favour of the chaplain of his own corps; obstructed the use of convict labour on Johnson’s 100-acre farm; and removed him from the bench of magistrates. According to Johnson such social demotion removed much of his inXuence. ‘Though my oYce is sacred, and though I have neither intention or inclination to become either a farmer or merchant, yet I conceived my station and standing in the colony entitle me to the same privileges and indulgence as are given to others . . . I believe no gentleman in the colony has exerted himself more than I have done.’7 Johnson was giving vent to the common cultural understanding that clergy of the Church of England held the rank of gentlemen, whatever their material wealth, by reason of their education and their standing as clergy of the legally established church. Therefore, as a gentleman, Johnson believed Grose was using him abominably. It was their social position, it was commonly believed, that enabled the clergy of the established church to inXuence the upper orders and, through the ruling classes and their higher social standing, to bring morality and belief to social subordinates. The arrival of the new governor, John Hunter RN, in September 1795 brought about a closer relationship between colonial church and state. Hunter was also an Evangelical, and he demonstrated the importance he and the imperial government attached to the church’s role in society by reappointing Johnson to the bench of magistrates; he similarly appointed the second chaplain, Samuel Marsden. In 1798, Hunter oYcially consulted both chaplains on the colony’s moral condition, and reissued instructions for a return to compulsory church parades by convicts. But this was only partially enforced and when, in 1798, Hunter attempted strict enforcement, the church was burnt down by person or persons unknown. He also enacted regulations for the control of the rum trade, and for Sabbath observance. Clearly, under Hunter, church and state worked together amicably, even

7 Ibid., 67.

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enthusiastically, to implement the contemporary imperial religious and political agenda for a well-ordered society.8 In 1798 there was also the Wrst indication that the Anglicans would not always enjoy a monopoly of religion in the New South Wales colony. That year Johnson welcomed a group of Wesleyan missionaries who had been forced to leave Tahiti because of a tribal war.9 Yet at the demise of Hunter’s governorship in 1800 (when Johnson too returned to Britain) Anglican ascendancy, with its legal and social monopoly in the small colony, continued for the time being. As military chaplains, their salaries were paid by the colonial government, from whence they also received houses, land grants, and use of convict labour to clear and work their land. A measure of independence for the Church of England from the oYcial military was established by Samuel Marsden during his visit to England from 1807 to 1810. He desired the end of the clergy’s appointment as military chaplains, preferring instead that the church establish a genuine parish-based clergy in New South Wales, as in England. Not only would this enable parochial Anglican clergy to minister to the increasing numbers of free and emancipated settlers in New South Wales, but also, Marsden believed, it would release the clergy from the military authority of the governor. Marsden did not entirely convince the British colonial authorities, but did manage to eVect a change in his own commission from a military to a civil one.10 The wisdom of this alteration in clerical status became evident in Marsden’s growing estrangement from the new governor, Lachlan Macquarie, after Marsden’s return to New South Wales, as the senior churchman in the colony, in 1810. Macquarie, also a convinced Evangelical, began to use his autocratic powers to alter the chaplaincy, placing the clergy under his direct control. ConXict between Marsden and Macquarie, by then the two senior Wgures in colonial church and state in New South Wales, came to a head in 1816. It involved an argument that became an important step in the recognition of the Church of England in the colony as an institution in its own right, and not merely subordinate to the colonial government. In 1816 a chaplain, the Revd Benjamin Vale, became entangled 8 Macintosh, Richard Johnson, ch. 6. 9 Ibid., 91. 10 Ross Border, Church and State in Australia, 1788–1872: A Constitutional Study of the Church of England in Australia (London: SPCK, 1962), 28.


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with the arrest of an American schooner whose cargo Governor Macquarie had given permission to be landed for the colony. Vale and a young solictor had arranged for the ship to be arrested under the Navigation Acts—old mercantilist measures that forbade imports into the British colonies in non-British vessels, but were largely antiquated and ignored. The historian Ross Border believes that the two young men may have been acting as stooges for Justice Bent, who was at loggerheads with the governor over the latter’s taxation powers. Macquarie arrested Vale and, to make an example of him, court martialled him in his capacity as a military chaplain for insubordination and sedition. Vale was only found guilty of the lesser charge, but Marsden protested against this court martial of a clergyman as being a person of ‘sacred character’—a description that hardly seems suitable to the unfortunate Vale. Eventually this led to Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary, agreeing that the governor had no legal power to discipline chaplains as military personnel. Bathurst’s decision was one of the factors that prompted Macquarie’s resignation. It was, nevertheless, a step towards the Church of England establishing a distinct identity and a normal structure in the penal colony.11 The development of a customary parochial structure in New South Wales was not before time, as the population was growing. By 1829 Sydney had 10,000 inhabitants, although the convicts still predominated as an overall percentage of the colony’s population.12 It was necessary for the Church of England to develop a parish structure in order to minister not just to the convicts but, increasingly, to a growing non-convict population. A major step towards such a structure was the appointment in 1824 (by the Tory government of the Duke of Wellington) of Thomas Scott as Archdeacon of New South Wales, within the Diocese of Calcutta. Following a rebellion by the New South Wales Corps, in 1819 Lord Bathurst had accepted an imperial commission’s recommendations about the Church of England in the colony that were designed to make it more eYcient in a changing situation. Parishes were to be established, with a school in each under the control of the vicar. The 11 Ibid., 29–37. 12 Stephen Judd and Kenneth Cable, Sydney Anglicans: A History of the Diocese (Sydney: Anglican Information OYce, 2000), 11.

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Letters Patent legally establishing the archdeacon’s position, along with Bathurst’s instructions to Scott, give a clear idea of just how the British government intended to develop the place of the Church of England in New South Wales. The archdeacon was to rank third in the colony after the governor and lieutenant-governor, and was to be accorded appropriate public honours. It was the archdeacon, not the governor, who would appoint clergy to their stations, and who would be responsible for their stipends. The archdeacon would hold annual visitations of all parishes, and be able to summon civil as well as ecclesiastical oYcers to attend. There was also to be an archdeacon’s court for canonical oVences. The archdeacon had control of all church property and was oYcial visitor to all schools in the colony, including those that did not belong to the Church of England. The governor was instructed to uphold the archdeacon’s authority, and Scott was made a member of the executive and the legislative councils, which, along with the governor, constituted the colonial government.13 In eVect, this constituted a near-establishment of the Church of England in the colony. Thomas Scott was Archdeacon of New South Wales from 1825 to 1829. During his time the Anglican ascendancy reached its climax, but also began to be eVectively challenged. At Wrst it seemed secure, as the colonial government made further moves towards the establishment of the Church of England in keeping with the revived partnership in this period. One piece of legislation made the Anglican clergy the sole ministers legally able to register births, deaths, and marriages; and another required intending publicans to obtain a certiWcate of good character from an Anglican priest, who were the only authorities licensed to dispense such certiWcates. The climax of this gradualist move towards legal establishment came with the institution of the Church and Schools Corporation in 1826. The corporation was established in New South Wales on the instructions of the British government, and it was designed to put education and morality—for a colony that seemed more depraved than most—under Anglican control.14 It was a colonial reXection of the 13 Border, Church and State, 41–5. 14 Kelvin Grose, ‘Why Was Hobbes Scott Chosen as Archdeacon of New South Wales?’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 69 (1984), 260–1.


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same tussle to provide national elementary education that was being waged in England by the Anglicans and their Nonconformist competitors. It was also an indication of the intention of the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst, to establish the Church of England throughout the empire.15 By the terms of the corporation, the Church of England was granted a seventh of all colonial crown lands for the provision of parishes and schools.16 The funds and property of the corporation were to be administered by trustees, and the wealth generated would also lead to the Church of England becoming independent of state grants. The corporation would clearly give the Church of England an unassailable advantage over other churches in the colony. Obviously, it was intended by the British government that the Church of England would occupy in New South Wales the same privileged position it held in England. Not only would the corporation ensure land, and thus wealth, for the Church of England out of proportion to its colonial strength, but it would also draw oV available funds from the other denominations. Almost immediately this initiative of imperial support for the Church of England ran into colonial opposition. The strength of that opposition, and the changing political scene back in England, meant that the corporation, and the Anglican legal, political, and religious monopoly in New South Wales that it represented, could not be maintained for more than a few years. By 1826 it was already far too late into the changes that were working through British society in the nineteenth century for the survival of any government intention to establish the Church of England in Australia. Possibly it could have been implemented successfully ten years earlier, when the eighteenth-century paradigm of the old order still ruled unchallenged in Britain. But under attack in Britain, the ancien regime there would be toppled in the constitutional revolution between 1828 and 1832, which eVectively disempowered the Church of England’s established status. But by the late 1820s colonial factors also contributed towards preventing the Church of England maintaining any 15 Kelvin Grose, ‘What Happened to the Clergy Reserves of New South Wales?’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 72 (1985), 92. 16 Brian H. Fletcher, ‘Christianity and Free Society in New South Wales, 1788– 1840’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 86 (2000), 98.

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legal or material privilege from the state. These included the rise of denominationalism in New South Wales, the development of a colonial free press vociferously opposed to old-order privilege, and the abolition of censorship in the colony in 1823 by Governor Thomas Brisbane.17 Opposition Wgures used the press to bring Archdeacon Scott and the Church and Schools Corporation into public disfavour. They argued that the government-sponsored advantage given to the Church of England was a piece of hierarchical English life unnecessary and unwanted in the colony. This argument attracted a large measure of support among a population that included many ex-convict emancipists, who naturally resented any signs of the export of the sort of privileged English society that had been responsible for transporting them to Australia in the Wrst place. Consequently, the corporation was suspended by order of the secretary of state for the colonies, Sir George Murray, in his despatch of 25 May 1829, after nearly 420,000 acres had been granted to the church, and it was legally terminated in 1833.18 SigniWcantly, when Scott’s successor, William Broughton, went to England in 1834 to ask the Colonial OYce whether the lands formerly vested in the corporation were only to be applied to the use of religion and education according to the Church of England, he was told they were for the maintenance and promotion of religion and education in the colony without reference to any particular denomination.19 Archdeacon Scott left New South Wales in 1829 and was replaced the same year by the High Church William Grant Broughton. Everything about Broughton’s life experience at the time of arriving in Sydney made him a proponent of the old Anglican hegemonic paradigm. Born in 1788 of a family with modest means, the death of an uncle brought him the means to go up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he imbibed a virile High Churchmanship that defended the established order. He learned critical scholarship of the Bible from Herbert Marsh, who had studied at German universities yet roundly condemned the Bible Society for distributing Bibles without the Book of Common Prayer. Churchmen who supported such policies, Marsh believed, soon became lax towards Dissent and 17 Border, Church and State, ch. 5. 18 Grose, ‘Clergy Reserves’, 92–3.

19 Ibid., 94–5.


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Dissent’s agenda of repeal of the Test Act. Marsh, like his pupil, also upheld the National Society for the Education of the Poor according to the Principles of the Church of England, which was committed to using the Prayer Book Catechism in its schools. As a curate, Broughton’s scholarship in support of King Charles I as a royal martyr attracted the patronage of the truculent High Churchman Bishop George Tomline of Winchester. His next patron was the Duke of Wellington, despite the fact that Broughton had signed a number of petitions opposing Catholic emancipation. It was through the duke that he was made the oVer of Archdeacon of New South Wales, though Broughton knew it oVered little Wnancial reward.20 In his Wrst major public sermon in Sydney soon after his arrival in 1829 he spoke of the providential guidance behind the expansion of the British Empire that had been so much a part of the old paradigm. If there be any here present . . . who have witnessed the exaltation of the English nation, and its gradual extension of power to the limits of the habitable world without ever considering this but as eVected in the natural course of events, and not, as it assuredly is, by the particular and evident providence of the Lord, for the fulWlment of His own purposes; if such there be among us, let them, I say, awake and take a new view of passing events.21

But Broughton proved himself to be one who did not take his own advice, steadfastly refusing to take a new view of events and instead adhering steadfastly to the old partnership paradigm of church and state in the empire. From 1832 he fought the new Whig governor, Richard Bourke, over his demotion in precedence from third to fourth in the colony (the colony’s senior military oYcer was promoted in precedence over him), and over his removal from the civil list of guaranteed salaried oYcers as his original instruction stated his position should be, because these changes were to him (correctly) indicators that the new Whig government in Britain and its colonial outriders intended to downgrade the traditional place in society and government of the Church of England. Broughton continued to harp on these things with the Colonial OYce when he returned to England in 1834, though the government considered them decided.22 Bourke, 20 G.P. Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet: William Grant Broughton, 1788–1853: Colonial Statesman and Ecclesiastic (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 2–12. 21 Ibid., 20. 22 Ibid., 84.

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on the other hand, as beWtted an appointee of the new Whig regime following the 1832 Reform Act, declared to a Roman Catholic priest in Sydney, ‘A government is bound in my opinion to extend equal freedom of conscience, equal protection, and equal proportionate assistance to all classes of its subjects provided they teach nothing inconsistent with plain morality’.23 It was a clear expression of the new politics ushered in by the fundamental changes of 1828–32, and one that Bourke had been sent to New South Wales to institute. It was also one that Broughton, doughty defender of the old way, was equally determined to oppose. In 1834 Broughton was still preaching the traditional Anglican doctrine that religion was fundamental to the peace and good order of a nation, because the only stable security for the political and legal order was obedience to the commandments of the eternal God who was prepared to punish national disobedience. Religion, with its promotion of divine rewards and punishments in this life and eternity, provided the only guarantee that the basic sinful nature of humanity would not give way to its natural vice and licentiousness. Preaching in St James’s church in Sydney on 26 January 1834, the forty-sixth anniversary of the founding of the colony of New South Wales, Broughton set forth the usual Anglican argument used as the basis for the old political establishment of religion. But in a colonial context hostile to such Anglican teaching he fell short of making that call explicit. Instead, while urging his hearers to strive to have ‘our faith established’ in colonial society, he preferred to point to greater individual practice and example as the means to do so.24 It was while he was in London that Broughton communicated with the SPG for the Wrst time, writing them a begging letter on 8 December 1834 and giving his summary of the state of the Church of England in the Australian colonies, and New South Wales particularly. In this metropolitan setting he pulled no punches in setting out an argument for imperial responsibility towards the morality and religion of Britain’s penal colony. He noted that until the middle of 1826 the British government had provided religious instruction 23 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 61. 24 William Grant Broughton, Religion Essential to the Security and Happiness of Nations (Sydney, 1834).


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and worship for the convicts transported to the colony, but this was now entirely a colonial expense, and the need was severe for decent churches, parsonages, and schools. Without some assistance, Broughton warned, atheism and impiety would spring up in the Australian colonies just as they had in the American ones. Contributing to this threatened outcome in Australia were the colonial press, which was anti-religion, especially towards the Church of England clergy; the proselytism by Roman Catholics; and the convicts who were predisposed ‘to shake oV the slight degree of reverence for religion with which they may have originally been imbued’. Only suYcient numbers of qualiWed Anglican clergy stood in the path of ‘these demoralizing causes’. Broughton argued that with respect to the thousands of convicts it was ‘the duty of the nation and of individuals . . . that as surely and undeniably as we are under an obligation to supply food and light to prisoners in a state of conWnement by land or sea, we are also bound, as far as we are able, to furnish them with the bread of life, and with the light of the gospel in that foreign country to which, for our security, they are banished’. For the last eight years, he trumpeted, not as much as one shilling had been contributed towards religion by the government in either New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land. There were thus no precautions taken against those forcibly landed on those shores becoming pagans and heathens, a ‘deadly infection’ that would be passed on to their descendants. ‘The question, in truth, which the people of this nation have to consider is, whether they are prepared to lay the foundation of a vast community of inWdels; and whether, collectively or individually, they can answer to Almighty God for conniving at such an execution of the transportation laws as will infallibly lead on to this result.’25 Whether spurred on by this thought of being responsible for a colony of British heathens or not, the society voted an initial £1,000 for Broughton’s use, and remained an annual contributor for years afterwards. Newly consecrated as Bishop of Australia, Broughton returned to Sydney from England in 1836 and resumed his seat on both the legislative and executive councils, in keeping with the usual political

25 Broughton to SPG, London, 9 December 1834, SPG, Annual Report (1835), 190–6.

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place of Anglican bishops since the Reformation, though Governor Bourke tried hard to exclude him. The Church Act passed in New South Wales in that same year provided government subsidies to all denominations, if local congregations could raise their share of the overall funding required. Broughton raised no objection to the bill in the legislative council as being the best outcome the Church of England could hope for in the new political realties, but he remained as Wrmly opposed as ever to the non-establishment principle behind it of government aiding less perfect churches than the Church of England; churches that were also in conXict with each other rather than the state having the beneWt of the homogeneity of the Church of England. For the same reason he opposed Bourke’s plan to fund non-denominational schools based on the Irish National System, and resolutely set his course to achieve state aid for denominational schools in order to preserve the integrity of Anglicanism among the rising generations. In the old paradigm, education had been the business of the church as beWtted its role as the custodian of truth and moral and social order; but in the new, that role passed to the state, as Bourke believed it should.26 But Broughton remained opposed to the political liberalism of Bourke and his British masters with respect to the Whig nondenominational support for religion. It led, he told the SPG in 1838, to the ‘lax and dangerous opinion that there is in religion nothing that is either certain or true’. Broughton hoped to retain the Anglican supremacy in education that had been characteristic of the old order. He soon left the Protestant Association, which had been formed in Sydney to lobby for pan-Protestant church schools, letting its Dissenting members know that the only cooperation they could expect from him was if Dissent was willing to shelter under the wing of Anglican schools, albeit with freedom for their own religious instruction.27 In the account of the proceedings of the society’s 1838 annual meeting, Justice Coleridge presented a metropolitan Anglican view of the Australian colonies. You must be aware how painful it is to me, and to those who hold situations similar to mine, to send from the country of their birth, men, 26 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 110.

27 Ibid., 103–8, 111.


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women, and children, sometimes of tender years, to that unhappy colony. You have been asked to-day if you have a right to legislate in favour of emigration, while you do not provide for the spiritual support of those whom you encourage to try their fortunes in a distant land . . . can we calmly and cheerfully send persons abroad to those penal colonies, changing imprisonment in this country for banishment in another, where they are deprived of all religious consolation? . . . can we justify ourselves in sending them to a country possessing every disadvantage, and the inhabitants of which are little short of heathens?28

He quoted from a recent letter from Bishop Broughton that such penally compelled colonists lived in concubinage, were often promiscuous, had no religious instruction, neglected the Sabbath, had children growing up without religion, and were ignorant of their Creator. ‘These persons,’ he said, ‘are placed in a situation as dreadful as that of any race of heathens in the world.’ So the colony of Australia stood ‘in a peculiar position’. While all British colonists were in diYcult situations religiously and morally, those sent to Australia were ‘inWnitely worse’ than most colonists, and without great exertions from the British could they, Coleridge asked rhetorically, expect to see continued the ‘great blessings which Divine providence has hitherto vouchsafed to us?’29 Broughton was certainly sending the society mixed messages in his regular letter to London, at times portraying a traditionally degenerate picture of the colonists, and at others remarking on their religious devotion. In 1841 he continued the same themes that Justice Coleridge had remarked on, following a visit to the scattered settlements along the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. It was, he maintained, the fault of the government in not subsidizing the contributions of the society and his diocesan SPG committee, on the basis that they were not private contributions. Accordingly, the preservation of even the name and form of Christianity in many parts of that district was being ‘fatally retarded’.30 But about the same time he began to present a more positive picture of church-desiring colonists. On his Wrst visit to the new settlement of Melbourne he found the church there Wlled, despite the torrential rain; and the same in his subsequent visit to Van Diemen’s Land, where in 28 SPG, Annual Report (1838), 60–1. 29 Ibid., 61–2. 30 Ibid. (1841), lvii–lviii.

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many of the settlements there was a ‘full and respectable’ attendance. In Launceston—a congregation of just Wve members eight years before—Wlled the church now that it was built, so that ‘the walls cannot contain those who are anxious to hear the Word of God within them’. Colonists exhibited a ‘strong’ disposition to attend churches where they were provided. Broughton was giving metropolitan donors another colonial picture of pious, church-desiring colonists in order to prove successful his remedy of church extension for colonial irreligion and immorality. He could not ‘doubt that, under such a disposition of the means of grace, a gradual but certain improvement of the moral and religious condition of the inhabitants is taking place’. He admitted that in both Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales these improvements were ‘surrounded . . . by much that is base and disgusting’. But church building was resulting in ‘a preponderating proportion of integrity and worth’ that, if supported, would cause to ‘spring forth a wise and understanding people to occupy this land’. These congenial church-going colonists he found to be ‘exemplary and deserving’, and displaying wherever he went on this long diocesan visitation an ‘anxiety . . . to possess the observances of religion and the guidance of their proper ministers’.31 It was not until 1838 that Broughton began to show indications that he too was prepared to venture into the new Anglican imperial paradigm, to go where the Church of England went without the backing or the sanction of the state. Bruce Kaye dates this change in Broughton’s outlook to the 1840s, but this overlooks the evidence from Broughton’s visit to New Zealand (which Shaw Wnds compelling), and also arguments in his sermons from the later 1830s oVered here.32 In December that year he went to New Zealand in response to the urging of the Church Missionary Society that a bishop visit there, notwithstanding that his Letters Patent only made him Bishop of Australia, legally empowered to perform sacramental functions in the ‘said See of Australia, but not elsewhere’.33 For Broughton, by this time, his ecclesiastical authority given him by his consecration at the 31 Broughton to SPG, 22 May 1838, ibid. (1838), 101–5. 32 Bruce Kaye, ‘Broughton and the Demise of the Royal Supremacy’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 81 (1995), 39–51. 33 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 125–7.


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hands of bishops of the Church of England was beginning to loom larger than the royal commission. It was the church and not the state that made him a bishop in the church of God, and he was now prepared to act upon the independent spiritual authority of that consecration. As his biographer pointed out, ‘the trip to New Zealand proved to Broughton that he had an apostolic ministry. He had come to New South Wales to serve an establishment: he remained now to serve a church.’34 Broughton also spoke publicly of this spiritual authority in a sermon on ‘The Apostolic Commission’ the following year at an ordination. He found this authority residing in bishops because they inherited a succession of episcopal ministry stretching back to the apostles, whereby Christ gave authority to the church such that ‘no admission to the ministry was acknowledged to be scriptural and valid, except it was conveyed by the laying on of the hands of bishops’.35 From now on, Broughton would point to another colonial identity in Australia alongside the more common one of Australia as a sink of moral iniquity arising out of its penal colonization. The SPG, for example, in 1838 spoke of ‘the dreadful state of wickedness into which the great body of the people throughout these colonies were falling’.36 But the increasing numbers of respectable, church-going colonists pointed to a diVerent future for this blot on Britain’s imperial record. In his report the following year, Broughton maintained that sixteen out of every twenty-three colonists in Van Diemen’s Land were Church of England, and that they were, ‘with some exceptions . . . warmly attached to it’, and were proceeding to mark their religious and moral attachment by the erection of churches in various parts of the colony.37 In 1840 he was even more sweeping, claiming that colonial attachment to the Church of England was such that ‘in no one instance, of which I am aware, has this same consequence failed to follow. The churches are no sooner built and opened, than the sittings are engaged and occupied.’38 34 Ibid., 128. 35 William Grant Broughton, ‘The Apostolic Commission’, in his Sermons on the Church of England: Its Constitution, Mission, and Trials (London, 1857), 156. 36 SPG, Annual Report (1838), 157. 37 Broughton to SPG, 18 August 1838, ibid. (1839), 123. 38 Broughton to SPG, 24 June 1840, ibid. (1841), clvii.

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Broughton understood that this was not the only possible colonial representation. He had himself previously reported to the SPG in London on the colonists as degenerate, both religiously and morally. But now he was portraying church-going settlers as agents of religious and morally improving change in this disturbing colonial landscape, probably because this facilitated the continued resourcing of the provision of churches by metropolitan funds from the SPG. It was an exciting and tantalizing prospect to hold out to the Anglican readership of the society’s Proceedings. Through their missionary oVerings, they could directly inXuence the transformation of Australian colonial society; they could be the means of working an alchemy that brought out of the dross of these penal colonies the gold of moral and religious respectability. In 1840, on a visit to the Hunter River District, Broughton gave them an example of what they could hope for. I also observed the eVect of the earnest endeavours which have of late years been made to bring the means of religious instruction more fully within the reach of our scattered population. The truth and importance of religion are certainly felt and acknowledged by many who might not, it is possible, absolutely disbelieve, but certainly gave themselves no concern about the objects of belief, so long as they were not reminded of them by the presence of the minister of God, and the regular dispensation of his mysteries. I certainly observe, not only in the part of the colony of which I am now particularly speaking but in all other parts where Clergymen have been introduced, a growing seriousness in families, a stronger sense of the evils of vice, increased reverence for the Scriptures and the precepts of the Church, more regular attention to the duty of prayer, and a clearer view of the beneWt of a Christian education . . . easier access to the Church and its ministers, which now prevails, has had a gratifying eVect in promoting reverence for the institution of matrimony, and in diminishing the practice of dispensing with its hallowed forms, which in times past was but too universally the bane of this community.39

The churches, clergy, and church-going colonists that were now developing in the Australian colonies, in contrast to previous decades of destitution, would constitute Broughton’s ‘improving inXuence’ on colonial society, albeit a society viewed (not without some reason) 39 Broughton to Sydney Diocesan SPG Committee, 24 June 1840, in SPG, Annual Report. (1841), clviii.


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as mired in convict degradation. ‘It is not reasonably to be expected that evils which have been so long accumulating, should be instantaneously or even speedily removed.’ But in his agents of improving inXuence the ‘seeds of future improvement do exist, and are very widely scattered’ across the colonial territories. Colonial Australian society, long pictured in colonial and metropolitan imaginations as a sink of vice, was now portrayed by Broughton as containing the potential for redemption. We are acquiring an improving inXuence. It appears to me to be favourably extending. From these beginnings may it be the pleasure of God to ordain that a renovating inXuence . . . shall extend itself over the whole of this community. . . how might this land be eminent among the nations of the earth, on the entire removal from its moral reputation of that stigmas which, even now, I am persuaded, has been too unsparingly and indiscriminately aYxed to it!40

One of the unfortunate consequences of a colonial bishop for the historian is that reports to the SPG from clergymen and missionaries in this period tended to be to the resident bishop, and such reports would only appear—and thus be preserved in print for us—in the published report of the society if they subsequently formed a part of the bishop’s own report. Consequently, there is less diversity among the clerical sources for the Australian colonies presented to the reading audience of the society’s reports than there were in the eighteenth century for the North American and Indian colonies, in which missionaries corresponded with the society directly. However, Broughton did quote two of his clergy in this period, probably because they shared his view of an Australian colonial identity undergoing moral and religious improvement. However, in the Wrst instance the clergyman’s words (it is not mentioned where he was stationed) indicated how fragile such a transformation could be if the agents of change provided by the SPG funding—that is, clergy and churches—were prevented from working their presumed inXuence upon colonial identity, which clearly suited Broughton’s agenda. I see around me on every side inWdelity, drunkenness, and the grossest profanation of the Lord’s Day. I have no means of checking these crimes;

40 Ibid., cxli.

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for there is no place whither I can direct men to go, and pray to God to pardon them . . . whenever a family wishes me to oYciate, I readily comply, and have often urged it. But many Sundays I have celebrated the services of the Church at home, with no other persons present but the members of my own family. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper has never been administered. The lower orders were struck with some dread by the addresses delivered by your Lordship [alluding to the consecration of a burial ground during a recent visitation], but in a few weeks their conscience was again dulled. I was told they knew the warnings against drunkenness were in the ‘Book’, because the Bishop said so, but they say the Clergy have put into the ‘Book’ what was not there, to serve their own purposes . . . There is not money now perhaps suYcient to complete the [church] building.41

This comment suggests that Broughton’s ‘improving inXuence’ was not always as improving or inXuential as he portrayed it. There is a glimpse here of the beliefs of the uneducated strata of colonial society, which viewed religion as a self-serving construct of the clergy, manipulated by them for their own beneWt. These colonists alleged the clergy added to Scripture injunctions about drunkenness because that enforced their own moral agenda. But the religion of the wealthier classes in an Australian society that, from the 1820s, was increasingly Wlled with free settlers, could also at times come close to Broughton’s ideals. In 1841 the clergyman at Melbourne, A.C. Thompson, reported to Broughton on an Anglican lay initiative in the Portland district, far west of him towards the border of South Australia. There, local landowners, the Henty brothers, had assembled a congregation for Matins from the Prayer Book, with an occasional sermon read from an SPCK book. However, prior to Thompson’s visit to the area, the service had been discontinued for some months due to the brothers’ illness or absence. However, Thompson convinced one of them to revive it, and hoped he could do so until a clergyman was duly appointed to the region. Here indeed was a colonial improving inXuence from religion, and for Broughton, one that would ideally need the even more essential Anglican catalyst for colonial social change, a clergyman.42

41 Broughton to SPG, 3 September 1840, SPG, Annual Report (1841), li–lii. 42 Revd A.C. Thompson to Broughton, 1 November 1841, ibid. (1842), cxxxiii.


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The missing ingredient in these SPG reports from the Australian colonies is mention of indigenous peoples. This was probably because by the time Broughton arrived in New South Wales the various Aboriginal peoples had been exterminated there, deliberately or by disease, or driven to the fringes of white invasion and settlement; or they were only encountered on the moving frontiers of settlement— with similar consequences. So Australian indigenous peoples in this period are mentioned only once, in the bishop’s 1843 report, an account that was written by the chairman of his diocesan SPG committee when commenting on the bishop’s visit to the frontiers of white invasion of traditional Aboriginal lands in Victoria. Apparently, by the 1840s, Aboriginal people occupied less of a place in the bishop’s Anglican world than did the need for churches and clergy in white settlements. The lay chairman reported that in this Victorian region there was a white population in the interior of the colony amounting to about 9,000 persons, entirely without religious ministrations, and with little previous contact with religion in Britain. They did, however, live among some 1,300 indigenous people who were ‘in a savage and entirely uninstructed state’, who roamed among them ‘to the injury and deterioration of both races’. The lack of religious resources resulted in no public worship, little concern for the soul’s salvation, neglect of the Sabbath as a day of rest, and general carelessness and indiVerence towards religion, ‘which amount almost to practical atheism’. This irreligion, the absence of any moral restraints, and the ‘leaven of some hundreds of degraded and untutored savages, expose all to moral contamination, and allow the vicious and polluted to proceed to great excesses in immorality’. It was, he commented, the prevalent condition of the bush that was being passed down to their children, so that ‘the Wrst principles of Christianity’ were being forgotten, with the result that all whites in the bush ‘are nearly in the condition of the unenlightened heathen’.43 In 1838 the Revd Edward Smith reported to Broughton from Palmerville on the Limestone Plains (now the area constituted as the Australian Capital Territory), portraying a contrast between the landed settlers and the convicts and labouring outback males. 43 C.J. La Trobe, Report of the Sydney Diocesan SPG Committee on the Port Phillip District, ibid. (1843), 66.

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On the one hand, settlers and the overseers of the stations supported his oVering of worship services, with congregations drawn from among them as their geographical or seasonal circumstances allowed. Notwithstanding this religiousness, he asserted that immorality, ungodliness, and an extreme insensitivity to spiritual matters prevailed. It was a consequence of the religious ‘famine’ that had long prevailed in the area so that men, when asked, admitted that it been six, ten, or more years since they attended church. Smith also mentioned that ‘Government men’, or convicts, generally admitted they did not own a Bible. On one occasion Smith had travelled twenty-six miles from his base, and encountered seven men who were sheep-shearing. In his conversation he discovered not one had a Bible or a Prayer Book. He endeavoured to bring before them ‘some of the alarming truth of the Bible’. He found them attentive, and invited them to a service the following Sunday about six miles from there, promising them a Bible between them. He commented on their open indiVerence to religious practice. ‘They are not backward to confess that they are living in neglect of religion; but they make the confession apparently without compunction, and show no anxiety, but, on the contrary, a perfect indiVerence about possessing the Word of God.’ Evidently, what struck Smith was not so much their lack of religious observance as their insouciance about it.44 From these two frontier Anglicans, there are the familiar constructions of an identity created for the colonizers and indigenous people that had been present in this Anglican discourse since the early days of the North American colonies in the eighteenth century. Here in the mid nineteenth-century Australian bush are the same savage, ignorant, degraded, and immoral heathen that Anglicans had identiWed on the North American frontier. Similarly, there were—in both locations and centuries—the religiously ignorant and indiVerent whites who were in danger in one or two generations of sliding into the same immoral heathen identity as the indigenous inhabitants, needing to be rescued from this un-Christian, un-English, and uncivilized identity by the ministrations and evangelism of the church. It was a comparison that occurred explicitly to the Sydney

44 Revd Edward Smith to Broughton, 13 November 1838, SPG, Annual Report (1839), 128–9.


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SPG committee, who portrayed the Australian situation as even more dire than that of North America. Their [fellow-Christians in the bush] condition holds out to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel such a sense of spiritual destitution as called that noble institution into existence, when thousands of our Christian brethren were similarly situated in the North American colonies . . . Worse, therefore, and under more aggravated circumstances of religious destitution than they were then in the plantations, are our bush populations at the present day. In this widespread tract of country without the observance of the Lord’s day, without the celebration of public worship, without the ministrations of religion, and without even the occasional visit of a clergyman, either to counsel or comfort, rebuke or exhort.45

A public discourse on Australia by Anglican Evangelicals for likeminded consumers both at home and in the colony did not begin until an auxiliary committee of the CMS was established in Sydney by Samuel Marsden, who became its president, in 1825. It arose because Anglicans in the colony felt their church was not doing anything about Aboriginal mission and, more particularly, because they were concerned about the growing conXict on the expanding frontier of settlement along the coast of New South Wales. In an extract of a circular published to announce its commencement, the auxiliary committee claimed they wished to prevent, in future, the destruction of property and the loss of human life. They would do this by funding and establishing missionaries among the Aborigines ‘for the promotion of their civilization and general improvement’.46 Obviously, to a nomadic culture like the Aborigines, the preservation of property was not a major concern, as it was to the settlers; while the committee were also concerned lest the settlers ‘extirpated’ the Aborigines. So the CMS initiative saw itself as the initiation of a mediating and moderating inXuence on the frontier, serving the interests of both parties, but with pre-existing Eurocentric cultural assumptions. The New South Wales Auxiliary Committee evinced some of the classical features of the Anglican imperial discourse about indigenous peoples in its view of the Aborigines it hoped to serve. In its 1826 45 Report of the Sydney Diocesan SPG Committee, ibid. (1843), 68. 46 Missionary Register, August 1825, 373.

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report to the London Parent Committee of the CMS it portrayed the Aborigines as a ‘degraded’ people. It also saw them as having got into that state because of the injurious interaction they had with settlers. However, it asserted that right-thinking and conscientious people in the colony believed the Aborigines, as the original settlers in Australia, had a strong claim on Britain. ‘These Wrst possessors of the soil have the very strongest claim on those who have planted themselves on their shores.’ The committee maintained that these conscientious colonizers would ‘liberally support such eVorts as shall be made to bring them into possession of the enjoyments of civilized life and the higher blessings of Christianity’.47 This was rather gilding the lily about colonial thinking, because it was not until 1835 that there was any sort of colonial support for an Anglican mission to the Aborigines in Australia. And even then it was not colonial fundraising among the ‘conscientious’ people of the colony that made it happen, but an initiative by the imperial government. In 1831 the parent committee announced that the colonial secretary, Viscount Goderich, had directed that £500 be allocated from the revenue of New South Wales for the establishment of an Aboriginal mission. The CMS felt that they had a duty to respond to this government initiative, and ventured to explain why they thought it had occurred. Their reasons are a sample of the humanitarian thinking that was becoming predominant in British church and oYcial circles in the late 1820s until the 1840s, which climaxed in the establishment in 1835 of a parliamentary select committee, presided over by the politician and philanthropist Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, on indigenous peoples in British colonies.48 Included in the reasons that the CMS gave were that the increasing prosperity of New South Wales had largely been at the expense of the Aborigines whose lands had been occupied; the Aborigines had experienced defeat and further loss in conXicts with the settlers; and those settlers, in a penal colony, were themselves debased. ‘The European Settlers amongst them, having been generally selected from the most ignorant and depraved part of the population of our great 47 Missionary Register, February 1827, 120. 48 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1993), 83.


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cities, have had little else to communicate but the vices of civilized society, with their attendant degradation and misery.’49 Consequently the Aborigines, stated the parent committee, had a claim upon Britain in whose empire they involuntarily and inoVensively found themselves. Not only was this a matter of a common humanity for ‘injuries which we have inXicted upon this unoVending part of the great family of Man’; but also a matter of redressing the wrongs of British policy. Such a duty had a pragmatic dimension of boosting the security of British settlers. ‘Even on the most sordid calculation of national Interest, it would not be diYcult to shew that such an expense is wisely incurred for the protection of our Australian Settlements against the enmity of their uncultivated neighbours.’50 But it was also presented as a matter of a just return for the colonial revenue that Britain derived from Australia, secured upon the Aboriginal deprivation of lands whose ‘ancient proprietors have been deprived forcibly, without compensation’. There was also a theological argument, which presented British colonization being to Aboriginal experience like a second Fall, which required the life-giving salvation of the Christian gospel to rectify. ‘We have imparted to the Aborigines the knowledge and the practice of European Crimes. Having compelled them to taste such fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, could we, without the most gross injustice, neglect to give them access to the Tree of Life?’ Finally, the parent committee presented the history of European and British colonialism as an almost unmitigated evil for indigenous peoples, because it was irreligious and immoral in its practice. The history of Colonization amongst the Barbarous Nations is the deepest and most indelible reproach to the character of Christendom. Wherever civilized man has set his foot in America or in Southern Africa, it has been as a scourge, to desolate the regions over which he has advanced. The vast territories of New Holland, and its adjacent Islands, are the latest territorial acquisitions eVected by the energy and science of Civilized nations. Could any man who values the reputation of his native Country, or any Government to whose care that reputation is conWded, think, without abhorrence, of repeating on this new theatre the abominations by which the early

49 Ibid., February 1831, 118–19.

50 Ibid., 119.

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European settlements in the Antilles, in America, and in Southern Africa, were polluted.51

It was not that colonization was itself wrong, but its outcomes were insuYciently connected to the propagation of Christian faith and morality. This could be rectiWed by the promotion of Christianity in the colonies and among their indigenous populations. The inculcation of Christianity, or ‘extending the peaceful dominion of Christ throughout the world’, was a duty upon all Christians, including oYcials such as the colonial secretary. To do so made the requisite connection between the temporal good of the state and the ‘spiritual welfare’ of those it ruled, including its indigenous ones.52 The eventual allocation of government money made possible a CMS mission to the Wiradjuri people in the Wellington Valley of New South Wales. Although a CMS mission, it had the support of colonial Churchmen such as Thomas Scott, and his successor William Broughton. Established in 1832, it was staVed by two German Lutherans ordained in the Church of England for that mission, and an English clergymen, William Watson, and his wife Ann. The mission only lasted until 1843 as it lurched between drought, Aboriginal fatalism at the impact of European diseases, the dissonance between the missionaries’ message and settler sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women and girls, and acrimony between the missionaries themselves, and with the local settlers.53 The Wrst extensive report of the Wellington Valley missionaries published in the Missionary Register presented the Wiradjuri people around the mission station as growing in British civilization and Evangelical Christianity. So the young men were happy to plough and harvest, the children were quick at school, and several of the Wiradjuri were becoming aware of themselves as depraved sinners needing the salvation of Christ.54 But these published reports also contained indications of the ignorance of the missionaries about the culture of the people they hoped to evangelize. One of them approached a young Wiradjuri woman and asked after her father, 51 Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 119. 52 Ibid., 120. 53 John Harris, One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity— A Story of Hope (Sutherland, NSW: Albatross, 1990), 56–71. 54 Missionary Register, August 1838, 373.


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and was told he was dead. When he persisted and asked the father’s name, the girl evaded his culturally oVensive request to speak of the dead by saying, ‘I shall cry if I mention the name of my father when he is dead’. On another occasion a young man was upbraided for wandering about all day and not either lending a hand at mission tasks or attending religious instruction. The man responded angrily, ‘What do you want here? What do you come here for? Why do you not go to your own country?’ The same young man, who had been at the mission for some time, was again reprimanded for not looking after his own wheat patch. He replied, ‘What shall I do with it? Directly black fellow know I got wheat, they come up, and eat it up all at once; and then I shall have to go into the bush, like another black fellow’.55 The culture of food-sharing and immediate consumption in a nomadic culture was lost on the missionary, who simply reduced the cultural complexity faced by the young man to a mere personal wilful disinclination constituting an unnecessary impediment in the adoption of a capitalist agriculture. ‘There was much truth in his remarks; and in them may be perceived one of the impediments that lie in the way of their becoming possessed of property.’56 Other diVerences, such as the need to talk of death to oVer the hope of resurrection from the dead, were against an Aboriginal taboo against such talk or of the naming of the dead, but such responses were simply reported as superstition by the missionaries. In this case the missionary could observe the behaviour, but had no means of accurately understanding or interpreting it, except by reducing it to his own familiar and inaccurate categories such as ‘depraved’ or ‘uncivilized’. This meant that civilizing the Aborigines inevitably involved drawing them away from their own culture, which the missionaries did not understand in the Wrst place, seeing only barbarous inferiors, rather than a people with a genuine cultural sophistication vastly diVerent from that of the missionaries.57 It was the same dilemma that had faced Anglicans in North America, and that had the same solution for the Australian missionaries in that 55 Ibid., September 1838, 422–4. 56 Ibid. 57 John Ferry, ‘The Failure of the New South Wales Missions to the Aborigines before 1845’, Aboriginal History, 3 (1979), 25–36; Jean Woolmington, ‘The Civilization/Christianization Debate and the Australian Aborigines’, Aboriginal History, 10 (1986), 90–8.

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diVerent time, place, and indigenous culture: the remaking of an indigenous people in their own European image. By the late 1830s, with the collapse of the Wellington Valley mission, and perhaps because of this disappointment of Bishop Broughton’s hopes of Aboriginal conversions, the growing presence in the settled areas of the colony of religiously aware and supportive white colonists—whose faith only seemed to need the invigoration of churches and clergy among them—oVered Broughton and his staV a new hope for religion in Australia. He began to speak with a new focus about the mission and future of the Church of England in his colonial context. He now aYrmed not the providential role of the English nation, but that of the Church of England itself. From this point on, Broughton determined to wrest whatever government aid he could to provide suYcient funding to ensure the future of the Church of England in Australia before that source succumbed to the liberalism of the age and was cut oV. Accordingly, he recklessly planted schools and churches in new settlements, established a colonial theological college, and a circulating library for his isolated clergy.58 Finally, he would inaugurate the ability of his colonial church to take action independent from the state. It was a hurried acceptance of the new Anglican imperial paradigm in the last years of his episcopate. But notwithstanding his growing appreciation of its futility, Broughton still retained some personal attachment to the old paradigm of the mutual support of church and state. In writing his public report to the SPG in 1838, he commented upon the support of the Van Diemen’s Land government for religion oVered to all denominations, under the strictly proportional system similar to that provided by the New South Wales Church Act. Broughton confessed that such a system was likely to lead to indiVerence in religion, or the idea ‘that there is in religion nothing that is either certain or true’. The implication behind such government support was that there was ‘no divinely instituted form of Church membership or doctrine’, Broughton complained. The consequence is that the most awful truths of Christianity which have been acknowledged and preserved in the Church from the beginning, are 58 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 128.


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now frequently spoken of as mere sectarian opinions to which no peculiar respect is due; and, indeed, I have been truly shaken sometimes to Wnd those truths placed on a level, as to credibility, with the most destructive of the heretical opinions with which the Church has had to maintain a contest. In referring to this subject I speak of what is of too common occurrence in both these Colonies; and I am strongly impressed with the conviction that this unhappy mode of thinking is fostered and encouraged by the inXuence of those principles upon which our present system of public support to religion is founded.59

In 1842, under the new constitution for the colony that year, Broughton was oVered a place on the legislative council, but declined it, demonstrating to himself at least that by this action it was the church leaving the state and not the other way around. But he retained his place on the executive council. As far as Broughton was concerned it was still desirable that the church, in the person of the bishop, be involved in government.60 With regard to education also, Broughton demonstrated a desire for the maintenance of the old paradigm, Wghting to the last for state aid for Anglican schools rather than permit the religious neutrality in this area that was by now the political preference of both colonial and imperial governments.61 His acceptance of the new paradigm was a reluctant bowing to the inevitable—to a reality he judged to be less than desirable. However, it was one that by the late 1830s he was becoming more engaged with. Broughton found some theological resourcing for his developing acceptance and understanding of the new Anglican paradigm for a self-governing episcopal church in the colonies in a cautious reception of the writings of the Tractarians. He found their vigorous defence of the independent, divine authority of the Church of England, and particularly the doctrine of apostolic succession, a valuable replacement for his former High Church reverence for establishment. Such succession involved, he thought, a transmission of spiritual authority that connected the present church with that of the apostles, and therefore with Christ, and so provided the basis for its own authority.62 But like other High Churchmen, Broughton 59 SPG, Annual Report (1838), 122–3. 60 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 157. 62 Ibid., 181.

61 Ibid., 130–1.

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parted company with these Anglican radicals when the Tractarians denigrated the Protestant Reformation, and in their increasing respect for Rome as a model of Catholicism. It was on the basis of the English Reformation that Broughton engaged with the theme of the British Empire in a sermon in 1849. He reminded his congregation of the unequalled position of England at the centre of a vast system of empire, the various colonies of which gravitated towards her like a planetary system around the sun.63 This could not have happened without the Wat of providence, which sought to use that empire to extend Christ’s kingdom. Just as Christianity was inaugurated during the providentially given dominion of the Roman Empire, so now it would spread through the British Empire as a ‘reformed and recovered Christianity’.64 Though Reformation Christianity was debilitated by its own divisions, it was an ark that carried the treasure of spiritual freedom against the spiritual slavery of the falsity of the Roman Church. Consequently, ‘the hope of the world, I repeat, is still bound up with the cause of the Reformation, as it was undertaken and carried on within the Church of England.’65 It was still the organization that best exhibited the church as founded by Christ and as restored in the Reformation.66 Broughton Wnally resigned from the executive council when it seemed that his political duties would be used against him with the SPG, one of his few major sources of dependable funding.67 Broughton, like Archbishop Howley and Bishop BlomWeld before him, was now convinced of the need for more Anglican independence from the state. In 1847 he was appalled at the rejection by the colonial secretary, Lord Grey, of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s nomination for the new see of Newcastle in New South Wales, as the Xouting of the highest ecclesiastical authority by a layman without the possibility of an appeal. Indeed, Grey had told Howley that in nominating colonial bishops to the crown, ‘The Secretary of State must exercise his own judgement. No right on the part of the Archbishop of Canterbury to recommend the appointment could be recognised.’ Broughton, in contrast, by this time wanted the 63 William Grant Broughton, ‘The English Reformation and the Empire of England’, in his Sermons on the Church of England, 55. 64 Ibid., 56–7. 65 Ibid., 58. 66 Ibid., 63. 67 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 193.


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colonial church to be able to choose and consecrate its own bishops without beneWt of royal Letters Patent.68 The climax of Broughton’s increasing embrace of the new paradigm of Anglican autonomy came with his achieving a conference of colonial bishops in 1850. He had been trying to get it oV the ground since 1848, when he encountered possible legal challenges to his episcopal authority to discipline his clergy for oVences outside the common law. He was further catalysed into action by his own near mortal illness, and by hearing about the decision of the Canadian bishops to confer with each other.69 He had also learned of the judgement by the judicial committee of the privy council in the Gorham case, which, in 1850, had judged as legitimate the appeal of a Calvinist parson against his bishop, who had refused to install him in a parish because he objected to the doctrine of baptismal regeneration (that is, that the action of grace automatically follows from baptism). This judgement by a secular law court over-ruled the decision of the parson’s bishop (which had previously been upheld by the highest ecclesiastical court of the Church of England) that the parson’s belief was opposed to that of the Prayer Book and therefore he could not be instituted to his nominated living. The shock of a secular court over-ruling an ecclesiastical one on a theological issue Wnally galvanized Broughton into calling a conference of the Australian bishops, and included Bishop Selwyn of New Zealand on the basis of Broughton’s own ecclesiastical authority as Metropolitan of Australasia. Broughton wanted the meeting to be classed as a synod, a term redolent with ecclesiastical authority, despite English law outlawing such gatherings without royal assent in the British Empire. According to Broughton, such royal prohibition only held so long as the crown maintained its constitutional obligation to support the Church of England, but as that had clearly lapsed, the church was freed from its obligation to uphold royal authority. As far as he was concerned, colonial synods could meet on the sole basis of the independent apostolic authority of the bishops. But in deference to the anxieties about royal authority of the Low Church Charles Perry of Melbourne, Broughton agreed to meet without any challenge to the royal supremacy, and to call the meeting a conference and not 68 Ibid., 205.

69 Ibid., 205–8, 218–30.

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a synod. But, unlike the other Australian bishops, he wanted the colonial Church of England to be entirely free of control from either Whitehall or Canterbury. He and Selwyn both sought provincial autonomy, leaving colonial Anglicanism free to make its own decisions, like other colonial denominations, without having to seek permission from the colonial oYce to appoint archdeacons, choose and consecrate bishops, and hold ecclesiastical councils.70 He had come a long way from the establishment archdeacon who arrived in the colony of New South Wales in 1829. The resulting compromise among the Australasian bishops at the 1850 meeting was an agreement to have synods of bishops and clergy decide on matters of discipline, doctrine, and worship, with concurrent conventions of laity associated with the episcopal synod in temporal matters. But the imperial government wanted to have their ecclesiastical cake and eat it too. Having ushered in the circumstances that forced the Church of England to evolve a new ecclesiastical imperial paradigm, the British government continued to shackle the colonial Church of England by the unfettered ministerial exercise of the royal supremacy, often without so much as a by-your-leave to the church. Lord Grey had just compelled the SPG to endow the diocese of Nova Scotia to avoid its suppression by the state, and then he installed his own nomination as bishop, stating to the society that it would not do to have royal ecclesiastical patronage eroded by giving a say to those who paid for the colonial Church of England.71 Propelled, in part, by this reluctance of the Whig ministry to provide the colonial Church of England with the religious freedom Whigs vaunted publicly, the new Anglican paradigm for church and empire was now embraced by Broughton and the colonial Australian church by the inauguration of its de facto synod. However, the Bishop of Melbourne informed Lord Grey that his diocese remained irrevocably committed to the authority of Canterbury in worship and doctrine, thus ending Broughton’s hopes of an autonomous Australian province.72 But, notwithstanding some of the political and legal constraints left over from the old paradigm, and the divisions within the Australian church, the new Anglican paradigm 70 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 224–5. 72 Ibid., 251.

71 Ibid., 240–1.


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was now being advanced more radically in the colonies against the preferences of the imperial government, which had caused it to be inaugurated as a response to the fundamental political changes of 1828–32. When Archbishop John Bird Sumner of Canterbury responded to the correspondence from the Australian bishops’ meeting by insisting that colonial synods were an illegal infringement on the royal authority, and that the bishops leave to the colonial oYce the drafting of legislation for clergy discipline, Broughton would tarry no longer with the old paradigm, even if it was still upheld by this Evangelical archbishop. For Sumner, the establishment of the Church of England was nonnegotiable, and he was consequently to play down claims by the colonial or metropolitan Anglican churches for independence.73 Not so Broughton. He left for England in 1852 determined to press the local case for synods—though they would include, much to his own chagrin, laity as well as clergy. But he was also insistent on securing for the bishop in such synods a vote, and a veto as a separate order, with no appellate authority from the metropolitan to Canterbury, and for the bishops to meet authoritatively in provincial synod.74 At his farewell in Sydney he gave voice to his new convictions of a church free from any suggestion of Erastianism. In his address delivered in the school room attached to the cathedral on the eve of his departure, he reminded his hearers of his purpose in making the arduous trip to England at his age. In a reference to the convocations of Canterbury and York suspended in the early eighteenth century, Broughton explained he was going ‘to solicit in the proper quarter, the removal of those restrictions by which our Church is at present inhibited from the free exercise of those faculties of selfguidance with which she was originally endowed’ by being able to meet in synods of bishop, clergy, and laity.75 It was, he said, fundamentally important that, if Parliament enacted such legislation, it would only be subsequent to, and enshrining the Wnding of, a 73 Edward Carpenter, Cantuar: The Archbishops and their OYce (London: Cassell, 1971), 309. 74 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 252–65. 75 William Grant Broughton, Farewell Address of William Grant Broughton DD Late Lord Bishop of Sydney and Metropolitan, Delivered in the School Room, Adjoining the Cathedral Church of St Andrew, in Sydney, on Saturday, the 14th August, 1852. On the Eve of his Embarkation for England. ‘Let Brotherly Love Continue’ (Sydney, 1853), 8.

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church commission, in order to avoid any hint of Erastianism. ‘[T]hat is’, said Broughton, ‘that the State do not assume to itself the right to alter the existing laws of the Church, or to impose rules of government, unless the Church (both clergy and laity) shall have had a previous opportunity of examining into the proposed settlement, and judging whether it is fully agreeable to the law of Christ.’ Such a commission’s Wndings should also be circulated among the colonial churches for their input. This was a way of proceeding that would also ensure the fundamental doctrine and discipline of the Church of England was maintained, and that the uniformity of Anglicanism was perpetuated throughout the empire in harmony with the Church of England and Ireland. The achievement of such a global Anglicanism, Broughton envisaged, was not just to be a divine instrument for spreading the gospel, it was requisite for the imperial destiny of the Church of England envisaged by God.76 The achievement of this autonomous and uniWed imperial Church of England would signally assist the British Empire to realize its Christian destiny, despite its often tawdry history of colonial extension. This, I entertain a strong hope, is part of the high destiny reserved for the Church of England by the extension of her colonial empire. It may be that the motives which often impelled the agents and instruments in that extension were worldly and sordid. In many cases, we know they were so. But all our fears may be composed by the remembrance that however the nations may rage together, in pursuit of objects of their own, the Lord is the Great King over all the earth. The Werceness of man shall turn to his praise, and the Werceness of them shall He restrain, and make them all work together for the establishment of his own glory and he redemption of His chosen people.77

Broughton arrived in England ill and debilitated after yellow fever had raged throughout his ship, to Wnd that the SPG and others regarded him as the father of a movement for colonial autonomous episcopal churches, because he was the instigator of the bishops’ conference in 1850 whose minutes were becoming a template for other colonial churches.78 While he was in England a convention of colonial bishops

76 Broughton, Farewell Address, 10. 78 Shaw, Patriarch and Prophet, 267–70.

77 Ibid., 11.


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met under his presidency in January 1853 and passed the following motion, which aptly summed up the two paradigms that Broughton had had to work with since 1829. The Church is entitled in common fairness to occupy one or other of two positions: I. That of favour and privilege derived from her connexion with the State; or, II. That of freedom and independence, accorded to other tolerated but non-established communions. At present, however, she is in the unhappy condition of possessing neither the substantial advantages of an established, nor the compensating freedom of a voluntary, Church. Now on one or other of these alternative conditions we must peremptorily insist. The former we know to be absolutely hopeless in the Colonies; and we claim, therefore, in the full conWdence of right, as well as with an unhesitating preference, the latter. Plainly, and in set terms, we demand that the particular religious communion, attached to the doctrine, and using the service book of the Church of England, be left at liberty in the several Colonial Dioceses to regulate its own internal order and discipline, and to manage the aVairs of its own parishes and schools, in such manner as it shall deem most conducive to God’s honour and service.79

Broughton, however, was dead less than a month later, and was buried in Canterbury Cathedral, a remarkable honour for one colonial Anglican warrior, who began in the ranks of the old Anglican paradigm of the church–state connection and lived to lead the charge of the colonial Anglican churches for its demise, supplanted by the new ideal of an episcopal and autonomous imperial Anglicanism. One of the indicators of that new paradigm in Broughton’s later life was his 1838 visit to New Zealand, which he made solely on the basis of his own episcopal authority within the Church of England, a visit that came at the instigation of the London Parent Committee of the CMS.80 Begun in 1814, the CMS mission to the Maori of New Zealand was, by the time Broughton went there, one of that society’s most successful. It had begun under the old Anglican paradigm of the exclusive partnership between church and state, and would continue into the new one of Anglican autonomous engagement with the empire. However, the CMS, formed in 1799 as a voluntary 79 Ibid., 271.

80 Missionary Register, April 1838, 221.

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society to maintain its Evangelical independence from the bishops, showed a diversity of attitudes towards church and state during this period, in addition to many of the common characteristics of the Anglican imperial discourse we have come to identify in the course of this investigation. The New Zealand mission originated in the initiative of Samuel Marsden who, on a visit to England in 1807–9, urged the parent committee to undertake the mission, recommending that practical mechanics be sent instead of clergymen, because he was convinced of the priority of civilization as the forerunner to evangelism. Accordingly, a carpenter, a shoemaker, and a teacher (John Kendall) were sent out, and Marsden accompanied them from Sydney on the voyage to New Zealand. He conducted the Wrst Christian service there on Christmas Day 1814, at their landing in the Bay of Islands on the east coast of the northern part of the North Island. In 1818 the CMS sent a clergymen to the mission, and Marsden continued to make periodic visits—four up to 1823. However, developing tensions between the missionaries were solved by sending an ex-naval oYcer, the Revd Henry Williams, who became the pre-eminent Wgure of the mission, and his wife Marianne, as well as Henry’s brother William and his wife. They put the mission on a more stable basis, became Xuent in Maori and, during their control of the CMS mission in this period, developed various mission stations throughout the North Island from their eventual base in Waimate.81 During the period prior to New Zealand’s formal annexation by Britain in 1840 there had been growing European interest in the islands, stimulated by the development of New South Wales, 1,200 miles across the Tasman Sea. Increasing numbers of whalers, sealers, and traders of various sorts made New Zealand a regular destination, and by the time the CMS mission had begun, numbers of white men had begun to settle among the Maori. This trickle of Europeans prompted the boisterous settlement in 1830 of a small frontier township, Kororareka, initially a port for whalers and sealers, in the Bay of Islands. Given these conditions it is not surprising that Evangelical presentation of Europeans in New Zealand should have 81 W.P. Morrell, The Anglican Church in New Zealand: A History (Dunedin: Anglican Church of the Province of New Zealand, 1973), 1–23.


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followed the characteristic lines of colonial corruption. Already in 1817 the parent committee in London was commenting on the basis of Marsden’s reports that the New Zealand mission was being ‘retarded and counteracted by the conduct of men who disgrace the name of Englishmen’. It was hardly surprising, ruminated the committee, that in its missions the providence of God had thrown it into ‘conXict with the most rapacious and unfeeling of their countrymen’. While it was also true that obstacles to conversion existed among the Maori themselves, these were from their own uncivilized condition ‘rather than from the more degraded vices of the sensual’ among the Europeans. In addition, the behaviour of the Maori could be further excused because of the ‘rapine and murder committed on them’ by vessels trading in New Zealand waters. ‘Surely,’ the committee asked, ‘the mere Policy of this country, to say nothing of her Justice and Humanity, demands that an instant stop be put to the capricious and lawless insolence of marauding Englishmen.’82 However, tensions continued to overXow, resulting in periodic conXicts between Maori and various ships in New Zealand waters. In 1830 Samuel Marsden was moved to conclude after one such incident that ‘The immoral conduct of some of the Whalers is dreadful’.83 No one ever claimed that whaling crews were paragons of virtue but, for the missionaries, the problem was made acute by the fact that, other than themselves, these were the only other Europeans with whom the Maori came in contact, so their behaviour continued to be a standing contradiction of the missionaries’ message, by whites whom the Maori considered were also Christians. But even by 1840 and the advent of organized settlement from Britain, the missionaries were often unimpressed with the quality of the human product Britain exported. This was the conclusion of the Revd J. Couch Grylls, who was visiting New Zealand from Australia in April 1840. At Port Nicolson (later Wellington) he was impressed to be asked by a Maori catechist to preach to his congregation on Sunday, and Wnding there some 300 people assembled in a Maori hut knowledgeably and piously following the Prayer Book service. He contrasted this with the habits of an old British settler in the district who, though living only a 82 Missionary Register, October 1817, 427–9.

83 Ibid., August 1830, 377.

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few yards from the chapel, did not attend, and used the Sabbath day to maintain his boats. Grylls concluded, ‘Surely the Missionaries have reason to lament the introduction of a class of Settlers like this!’84 The following year, the missionary at Maraetai reported the arrival of many European settlers in the area. Their advent, and their competing demand for labour and materials, had the local Maori accusing the missionaries of defrauding them by their previously lower prices. For the missionaries, the increased incomes of the Maori meant they would, regrettably, be exposed to the immoral temptations of European society.85 With the growth of the township of Auckland, the Revd Maunsell at Waimate recorded how some young converts had succumbed to the town’s temptations, although there were some notable exceptions.86 The following year, Maunsell again reported his concerns about Auckland. ‘The evil characters in the township, the seductions of drink and of exorbitant wages, have proved too strong.’87 For the Revd Hamlin at Orua in 1842, European colonization had also brought unfortunate immoral consequences to the Maori. Again the comparatively spectacular growth of Auckland was the culprit, whose society drew converts into its ‘bewitching snares’. ‘The class of Society, too, with which the Natives are most likely to come into contact, is such, that it cannot fail to exert a baneful inXuence upon the mind.’88 Along with settler degeneracy, anti-popery—that longstanding motif of Anglicanism since the sixteenth century, and prominent in the imperial discourse developed in eighteenth century North America—was also present in the New Zealand Anglican outlook. More muted in the Bengal mission due to the lack of any Roman Catholic competition there, and the greater anxieties about the atheism of the French Revolution in that period, anti-popery received a spur in the New Zealand mission. This was due not so much to its Evangelical outlook, since it was, as we have seen, a common Anglican note among High Churchmen as well. Rather, it was because of the disturbing arrival of a competing Catholic mission in

84 Missionary Register, June 1841, 308–9. 86 Ibid., 477. 87 Ibid., June 1843, 308. 88 Ibid.

85 Ibid., October 1842, 476.


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New Zealand under the French Bishop Joseph Pompallier in 1838. There had been Wesleyan missionaries in New Zealand since 1823, but the Evangelicals of the CMS, after some initial competitiveness, worked out with them separate spheres of operation. However, Roman Catholics, complete with a bishop, were a vastly diVerent matter. Almost immediately reports went back to England that led the parent committee to portray Rome as a distortion of the pure gospel which their own mission represented, a characteristic of Anglican imperial engagement since the eighteenth century. ‘For it is an axiom established by the History of the Gospel, that wherever the soil has been best cultivated, and wherever the hopes of a future harvest are most promising, there the Enemy will be most busy in sowing tares. The very activity of Rome, therefore, now so prominently brought to view before all the world, is an attestation to the progress of the pure Gospel.’89 To the parent committee, Rome was an ‘evil’, an agent of the Devil, a ‘corruption of the Gospel’, ‘Popish Superstition . . . attempting to gain mastery of the world; planting one foot on the civilized nations of Europe, the other on countries just emerging from barbarism and hailing the dawn of the pure Gospel’.90 Unconscious of the fact that the same accusation about global expansionism could also be levelled at its own activities, these were views echoed by the committee’s New Zealand missionaries. William Williams feared for the inXuence of Rome on ‘poor ignorant Natives’, which said little for his own converts. To the Revd Davis at Waimate, Catholicism was a ‘fatal delusion’, appealing to the ‘worst and most ignorant characters’ to ‘believe a lie’. It was the ‘subtle enemy’. ‘The Lord has a Church and people here, against which Satan and his emissaries will never be able to prevail.’91 At Paihia the Revd Baker believed ‘this [Catholic] system consisted in forms and ceremonies; but it left the poor deluded creatures in just the same state as before’. However, he was convinced the Maori knew the diVerence between the real and the pseudo-gospel. ‘Contrasting their systems of religion with that which the Bible teaches, the Natives are struck with the amazing diVerence. These systems leave them, as they found them, in gross ignorance and darkness, and 89 Ibid., August 1839, 368. 91 Ibid.

90 Ibid., December 1839, 553.

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under the inXuence of every sinful passion: that which the Bible teaches works through a thorough reformation of character, making the man anew in Christ Jesus.’92 The Revd Shepherd at Kaitaia had similar hopes in the ability of the Maori to discern between the Anglican real thing and their erroneous competitors. ‘The natives, as a body, are a discerning people, and they can already see that Pikopo’s [Pompallier] religion is a farce.’93 Mr Puckey, also at Kaitaia, expressed the same conWdence (or was it hope?). ‘The wiser natives see the fallacy of its [Roman Catholicism] doctrines too well to embrace them.’94 As in the previous century, these Anglicans were concerned to maintain a theological barrier between their undoubtedly true Christianity and the Roman masquerade. What was self-evident to them in their European history and culture, they hoped would also be apparent when exported to New Zealand. They convinced themselves the Maori could see this diVerence also, yet their anxieties about the progress of Catholicism in New Zealand revealed the insecurity of this Anglican construction of diVerence between the two forms of Christianity. For the missionaries, one was of God and the other of Satan. But the Revd Brown aYrmed of the Catholic mission, ‘Satan has contrived to sow tares very quickly among the good wheat’, which suggests that to the Maori the Anglican God and the Catholic Devil were not so easily separated as the clergymen hoped.95 It was the eternal salvation of the Maori that mattered most to the CMS missionaries, and which they believed was put in peril by the false Christianity of the Roman mission—and the latter, of course, had the same concerns. It was an indication that the Maori were, fundamentally, the reason the missionaries were in New Zealand in the Wrst place, so how was Maori identity presented to their society back home? The earliest Evangelical to do this was Samuel Marsden in his extensive report on his 1814 visit, an edited version of which was published in 1816. He concluded that the Maori were a warlike race, proud of dignity and rank, who ‘never forgot a favour or a wrong’, gratefully remembering kind Europeans, with no quarrelling within 92 Missionary Register, December 1839, 554. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 553–5. 95 Ibid., January 1841, 57.


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their own tribe, kind to children, and no sign of abuse to women. Marsden was anxious to improve their civilization, and advised two chiefs that they should develop a dressed Xax export industry, using his brig Active, and Marsden would pay them with goods they wanted. He also hoped the mission would have its own vessel, so that chiefs could visit Sydney to see civilization at Wrst-hand and be suitably impressed and, consequently, desirous of acquiring European material culture. ‘A single view of our houses, with their furniture, our public buildings, His Majesty’s stores and granaries, together with our arts and cultivation, would so much enlarge their views, that they would never lose the impression.’ Marsden thought the Maori ‘active and industrious’, ‘bold and daring’, undertaking diYcult enterprises, but he wished to redirect their energies from war to commerce.96 Clearly, for Marsden, civilizing the Maori meant incorporating them into the capitalist economy of Britain— something that, given the ready agreement of the chiefs to his Xax proposal, the Maori saw advantages for themselves in doing. But others were not so sure. The carpenter, William Hall, one of the original CMS missionaries, found the Maori not so eager to become mechanics, preferring their traditional life. Hall, though, remained committed to the idea of remaking Maori into industrious workers, believing that the introduction of European agricultural work was the means to do so, because they found this outdoor work more attractive than carpentry. He bemoaned their lack of a civilized capitalist mentality, which would accept the prospect of working at unpleasant tasks for the sake of future proWt.97 Henry Williams considered the Maori intelligent and quick-witted, of noble and digniWed appearance, with a high sense of honour, whom God would soon adopt. By 1824 he noted the growing desire for missionaries among the tribes, and the observance of the Sabbath, a day on which many wore European clothes.98 Marsden, on his fourth visit, maintained his favourable assessment of them, asserting their reXectiveness and observation, which made them great students of human behaviour, and again remarked on their peaceableness within their own tribes.99 Bishop Broughton, when he visited, also 96 Ibid., December 1816, 521–2. 98 Ibid., September 1824, 513–14.

97 Ibid., November 1818, 461. 99 Ibid., November 1824, 513–14.

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was upbeat about the Christian future of the New Zealand aboriginals in his report to the CMS Parent Committee in March 1839. He noted their laziness, slovenliness and dirtiness, but was pleased by their readiness to work if directed by ‘the inXuence of superior understandings’, their joy and reXectiveness, quickness and ingenuity. In religion, he noted with satisfaction their attractiveness to outward rites that, as a High Churchmen, he believed ‘necessary to conduct all things with decency and order’, although he believed they realized (as the good proto-Protestants the bishop considered them) that such things ‘did not form the substance of religion’.100 Yet more fundamental than any of these social and psychological assessments was a theological identiWcation of the Maori as heathens. Hall, soon after his arrival in New Zealand, found them ‘poor darkminded Heathen’ under the tutelage of the ‘Great Enemy’ Satan.101 Thomas Kendall also found the Maori in ‘a sad state of captivity’ to ‘the Great-Deceiver of Mankind’, so that he was distressed at times when Maori were sick or dying to consider their eternal destination.102 For Marsden, Maori—though the noblest indigenous race known to the civilized world—were still sunk in ignorance of true religion and superstition, needing these remedies to make them a great nation.103 Marsden expressed this theological view of the world in which the heathen, un-Christian parts of it, and the non-Christian peoples therein, were part of the damned dominion of Satan. Whether Satan is permitted to practice any oral deception in support of his spiritual dominion (for he is God of this world), and in maintenance of those dark superstitions which universally pervade the minds of these poor Heathens, I cannot tell. I have met with no New Zealander, even among the most unenlightened of them, who does not Wrmly believe that their Priests have communication with their God . . . I do not pretend to know how far the agency of Satan may extend in a barbarous and uncivilized nation, where there is no human or divine law to check or restrain men’s corrupt passions; but of this I am fully convinced, that, in all regular civil governments, where wholesome laws lay the necessary restraints upon men’s turbulent passions, the secret agency of Satan—the spirit which worketh in

100 Missionary Register, December 1839, 547. 101 Ibid., December 1818, 526. 102 Ibid., November 1819, 465–6. 103 Ibid., August 1816, 330; November 1816, 461.


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the children of disobedience—is greatly restrained, and the force of his wicked instigations weakened and counteracted by those laws.104

One major indication of this heathen state of being in thrall to Satan was Maori cannibalism and the practice of sacriWcing people to the gods. These were, Marsden was convinced, only going to cease when the remedy of the gospel displaced Satanic superstition. ‘Satan has got fast hold of the consciences of these poor Heathens, and leads them captive at his will.’105 The sacriWce and eating of a young woman caused him to reXect on why mission was necessary. ‘However horrid and revolting the custom is to the Christian’s mind, yet the New Zealander feels himself as much bound by his superstitions to kill and eat human sacriWces, as the Christian does to oVer his sacriWces of prayer and praise to the True God. These bloody rites will never be laid aside by the Natives, until the fetters of their superstition are broken by the power of the Spirit.’106 So for the Evangelicals of the nineteenth-century New Zealand mission, as much as the Anglicans of the eighteenth century, the world of the British Empire—indeed, the globe generally—was divided ontologically and theologically into Truth and Error, God and Satan, Light and Darkness. So the imperialism of these missionaries was primarily theological, rather than political or economic. Their concern in the colonies of the British Empire was to replace Satanic darkness, and his evil errors with the true light of the gospel of the Christ of the one and only God. The Day-Star from on high hath evidently begun to shine upon these poor benighted heathens . . . Though the Missionaries are situated in the very centre of Satan’s Dominions . . . where the degradation of human-nature appears in all its horrors, through man’s depravity, called forth into exercise by the inXuence of the Prince of Darkness; yet they shall see the day when Satan will fall like lightening from heaven . . . the time will come, when Human SacriWces and Cannibalism will be annihilated in New Zealand, by the pure, mild, and Heavenly InXuence of the Gospel of our Blessed Lord and Saviour.107

By 1842, with the increasing progress of conversion in the North Island, one missionary coming across the human remains of a cannibal feast 104 Ibid., October 1822, 443. 105 Ibid., November 1824, 512. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid., January 1831, 58.

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found them to be ‘evidence of the prosperity of the cause of Satan’; but he could, nevertheless, give thanks that as the area was ‘the last refuge of genuine Heathenism in this island, so will its dark places very soon shine with the Gospel light’.108 The means by which this theological imperial push against the dominion of darkness was to be achieved was, as usual, Christianization and civilization. By 1826 George Clarke, one the CMS lay catechists, could report signiWcant progress in KeriKeri, in the Wrst prong of this Christian assault on Satan. He found that the local people no longer wanted to chant the karakia (prayers) for the planting of sweet potato, nor to call in a tohunga (priest) to make the ground sacred and thereby secure a harvest; they now ate and slept in the same houses, which was sacredly forbidden (tapu) in the traditional culture; and hair cut from the most sacred part of the body, the head, was no longer carefully collected and buried, but left to blow away.109 Now, it was prayer books and Bibles too worn for use that the Maori buried. For the missionaries this was still a superstitious practice deriving from Maori fear of the anger of God, and therefore representing the dregs of heathenism.110 However, while the evangelistic confrontation with the Maori was primarily motivated by a sincere theological belief that they were thereby attacking Satan’s empire, it was also motivated by a desire to remake the Maori into brown-skinned Britons. In 1816 Marsden reported approvingly of one chief asking for a set of European clothes to wear on Sundays, as he did not consider Maori dress proper to attend the church service in.111 Similarly, the death of the protecting chief ‘Dauterra’ (Ruatara) in the Bay of Islands, where the CMS had their Wrst mission station, was lamented by Marsden because he believed Ruatara had ‘introduced agriculture’ to the area (in fact, the Maori had centuries of successful cultivation before Europeans arrived).112 For Marsden genuine farming was only European, and he was consequently blind to its existence in another form (the absence of large Welds of cereal crops and of draught animals were obvious diVerences, since the Maori were vegetable gardeners). 108 Missionary Register, October 1842, 474. 109 Ibid., December 1826, 612–13. 110 Ibid., July 1839, 348. 111 Ibid., August 1816, 328. 112 Ibid., 331.


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He was equally convinced the Maori would be impressed and eager to adopt European lifestyle, houses, and industry once they had experience of it from European settlers.113 It was the adoption of such aspects of European life and culture that constituted ‘improvement’, with the implication, sometimes made explicit, that this would involve the renunciation of Maori ways of doing these things. Indeed, Maori themselves could see the greater eYciency and returns on some European imports, hence their readiness to adopt iron tools, trade, and some agricultural processes—as well as ‘improved’ ways of warfare, such as muskets and trenches. The missionaries generally expected Maori material culture to be jettisoned in favour of the European civilization they brought. It was their British cultural monopoly and hegemony they equated with civilization, rather than the Maori preference to pick and choose from either culture as they saw Wt. So the education oVered by missionaries included no dimension of Maori culture but taught almost entirely European subjects, aside from the signiWcant exception of their own language, in which they were instructed and learned to write, once the missionaries had established a written form of Maori. This was in order that the people should be able to read the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer services, which had almost all been translated into Maori by 1857.114 So one missionary, in noting the eVects of the mission, in addition to the reduction of theft, murder, and plundering of vessels, also drew satisfaction from the reduction of ‘lascivious dances’ and the increased use of European clothes, soap, and other such articles, European-style farming of wheat, horses, and cows, and the participation by Maori in the European capitalist economy, such as the selling of butter by one Maori farmer for 2s. 6d. per pound.115 Henry Williams agreed that Christianity and civilization were intimately connected, but they were not always united, in that civilization could be found without Christianity. However, Christianity ‘inevitably’ produced an advancement in civilization, which he clearly understood as Europeanization, imparted through an education that fostered a wish for such an ‘improved condition’.116 113 Ibid., November 1816, 468. 114 Lawrence M. Rogers, Te Wiremu: A Biography of Henry Williams (Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1973), 79, 160. 115 Missionary Register, April 1841, 220. 116 Ibid., November 1847, 481.

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But there were occasional missionaries who did dispute the equation between Christianity and Europeanization, or the priority of the latter that Marsden upheld. Foremost among these was the Revd Octavius HadWeld at Otaki in the south of the North Island, north of Wellington. In 1841 he questioned whether converted Maori had to appear in their person and habits like a European for their conversion to be understood by Europeans as genuine. Persons at home are apt to connect civilization with the reception of Christianity; and can scarcely form a conception of a real conversion, without assuming as an axiom, that the persons so converted must immediately become neat, cleanly, &c; and they consequently question the reality of the conversion, when these results are not found. But this is an unwarranted assumption, to which the civilized Christian is led, without ground or proof that such a result is even to be looked for, or expected, as an immediate fruit of the reception of the Gospel. On the contrary, the Scriptural view of the eVect of conversion, and that which agrees with what I practically witness, appear to me at least to be a deadness to worldly things, and a carelessness about the things of the body. The young convert, who turns from the world to the Lord, shuns all those things which may draw his soul and aVections from his God, and again allure him to that world, from which he now feels himself, for the Wrst time, in some degree freed and disentangled. And though, to the civilized mind, cleanliness of person and decency of habit do not appear likely to ensnare the soul, they really have that eVect upon the New Zealander, as much as gold and pearls and costly array on his civilized brethren, however improbable such an eVect may appear to be.117

But HadWeld’s view of conversion was conceived on a theological framework that the things of this world should be of no account to the convert, a counsel of perfection that overlooked the physical needs of life that were a necessity for Christian and non-Christian alike. They were also limited to the maintenance of customary personal habits by Maori, and said nothing about the value of the perpetuation of Maori cultural outlooks and practices. These unrealistic expectations were perhaps what had come to grief by 1847, when HadWeld admitted his views had changed. He summed up his former views as believing that Christianity could, of itself, cause indigenous peoples 117 Missionary Register, October 1842, 474.


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to ‘abandon their own usages’, and develop a simple code of law ‘unencumbered with the many wants of civilized life’. But now he felt Maori were British subjects and came into contact with ‘civilized people’, that is, Europeans. So unless Maori were assisted to improve their civilization, they would almost certainly be destroyed culturally and materially, which suggests a recognition of the destructive potential of European colonization. HadWeld’s eventual solution to this was for Maori to embrace entirely the colonizing culture. ‘I think that, next to the communication of direct religious instruction, the object of the Missionary ought to be the civilization and improvement of the Natives in every way.’118 HadWeld’s connection between the Maori as British subjects and the importance of civilizing them raises the question of how the New Zealand CMS missionaries understood the relationship of the Maori and the British Empire. Ian Wards, in his study of British policy and racial conXict in New Zealand in this period, Wnds that the missionaries initially favoured non-interference by any other British organization than their own society. But, increasingly, they came to believe that an eVective British government of the colony, in conjunction with the Maori, was necessary in order to bring stability to frontier New Zealand and end the intertribal warfare and the European lawlessness prevalent there. So they supported the eventual annexation of New Zealand by Britain, and the treaty made with the Maori at Waitangi in 1840, because they were convinced that the government intended by it to act principally in the interests of the Maori—including Maori land rights—above all other parties, particularly the inXuential colonization society, the New Zealand Company. However, as Ian Wards and Peter Adams demonstrate, the British government, after decades of uninterested but growing involvement in New Zealand, eventually adopted a pragmatic approach that was conWned to the legal acquisition of sovereignty without addressing the consequences of what that involved.119 The government did not consider annexation the establishment of principles; rather, the 118 Ibid., November 1847, 487. 119 Ian Wards, The Shadow of the Land: A Study of British Policy and Racial ConXict in New Zealand, 1832–1852 (Wellington: Historical Publications Branch Department of Internal AVairs, 1968), 5, ch. 1, 42, 56.

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government was pushed into formal colonization because of the pressure of the irregular settlement that was increasingly occurring in New Zealand.120 Yet there is evidence that Samuel Marsden, at least, looked more favourably upon British involvement in New Zealand from well before the 1830s. In his Wrst venture there, he had noted the Union Jack Xying on the ship as an ensign of entirely welcome prospects for New Zealand and its people under British rule. ‘On Sunday morning, when I was upon deck, I saw the English Xag Xying, which was a pleasing sight in New Zealand. I considered it as the signal and the dawn of civilization, liberty, and religion, in that dark and benighted land. I never viewed the British Colours with more gratiWcation; and Xattered myself that they would be never removed, till the natives of that island enjoyed all the happiness of British subjects.’ In 1822 Marsden drew both Australia and New Zealand together in the orbit of Britain, thanks to the providential government of God in the world characteristically choosing Britain as his instrument. ‘No permanent Mission could have been established in New Zealand, or in any other island in the South Seas, had not His over-ruling Providence led the British nation to establish a colony in New South Wales. Through the medium of the British nation, He has now sent his Gospel to the very ends of the earth.’121 No doubt Marsden’s sentiments were shared by some of the CMS missionaries, who were generally pro-imperialist in the sense of desiring, by the late 1830s, that New Zealand become a British colony.122 But Britain formally annexing New Zealand, and having it colonized by British settlers, were not necessarily equally good outcomes, according to the Anglican missionaries. By 1839, however, the CMS had reluctantly come to recognize the inevitability of European settlement along with British annexation, a prospect the parent committee believed had been facilitated by their successful mission, which had made the country safer for settlement by converting the Maori.123 120 Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand, 1830–1847 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1977), 109. 121 Missionary Register, June 1822, 257. 122 Adams, Fatal Necessity, 82. 123 Missionary Register, November 1840, 516.


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It is not the purpose of this work to assess the ramiWcations and complexities of the Treaty of Waitangi, the formal treaty made between the British government and many, but not all, of the tribal chiefs of New Zealand, who began to sign the treaty from 6 February 1840. The meaning of the treaty is complex because it existed in three English versions, and one Maori version, which is not an accurate translation of any of the English ones. The general historical consensus is that Henry Williams, the Maori translator of the text, got it wrong, or was misleading, in his translation of the crucial Article One of the Treaty. This was the article in the English version that ceded sovereignty to the British Crown by the Maori. In the Maori version the word used is ‘kawatanga’, signifying a governor who rules on behalf of a sovereign. The Maori word for sovereignty is ‘mana’. If the latter rather than the former word had been used, Maori would have known they were ceding their material and spiritual authority over the land, and probably, argue modern historians, would not have signed.124 R.J. Walker, in the most hostile interpretation of Williams’s action, believed this interpretative confusion occurred because Williams wanted British sovereignty over New Zealand to initiate law and order, and to prevent annexation by papist France. On a personal level, he also had a vested interest in a secure legal title to the land he had purchased, like other missionaries in New Zealand, in order to secure his children’s future.125 Certainly these Evangelical Anglicans were not delighted at the prospect of white colonization, however much they supported British sovereignty for the good of the Maori. They believed the period of annexation was a cusp. On the one hand, it marked New Zealand’s transition-state from savage to civilized, but at the same time it threatened, by settlement, to make that transition at the expense of the Maori. ‘In every instance, hitherto, where colonists from Great Britain have taken possession of the soil of any country, the unhappy inhabitants have gradually diminished in number, and 124 M.P.K. Sorrenson, ‘Towards a Radical Reinterpretation of New Zealand History: The Role of the Waitangi Tribunal’, in I.H. Kawharu, Waitangi: Ma¯ori and Pa¯keha¯ Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1989), 158–9. 125 R.J. Walker, ‘The Treaty of Waitangi as the Focus of Maori Protest’, in Kawharu, Waitangi, 268–9.

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have, in many instances, wholly disappeared. It was in the hope of preventing such a disastrous result, and to rescue one page in the history of European Colonization from so foul a blot, that the [Parent] Committee were opposed to the colonization of New Zealand.’126 With regard to the Treaty of Waitangi, the CMS presented it to its Anglican and Dissenting readership as necessary to establish legal authority over the various Europeans already settled, whose great risk to the Maori would now be mitigated by the imposition of British law. The only other alternative was anarchy. This overlooked the reality that the numerical superiority of the Maori, and their warlike reputation, generally left Maori in control of most conXicts with Europeans before the advent of organized settlement. However, the more large-scale, intentional, organized settlement, beginning in 1840 with the formation of the New Zealand Company and its dispatch of immigrant ships, made British sovereignty and law necessary, according to the CMS. But the society remained convinced that European proXigacy and immorality posed, as a consequence of British immigration, a considerable threat to evangelism. ‘Destruction threatens them [Maori], not only from the bullet or the sword, but from the more deadly spirit-store, and the crimes and vices of that class of settlers who are reckless of the wrongs and injuries inXicted on them.’ It would have been better, from the CMS view, if evangelism had been able to continue uninterrupted by settlement.127 The CMS missionary, the Revd R. Davis, reported uneasiness among Maori over the cession of sovereignty and the assistance the missionaries had provided to the British authorities. It is clear that the mission sided with the government against the opposition to the treaty, and against the sporadic armed resistance against the imposition of British rule in the northern North Island in the early 1840s led by Hone (John) Heke. Heke had been educated and baptized by the mission, but the missionaries disowned his position. Davis described how some Maori led by Heke had turned up at his mission and made highly critical speeches about the mission’s involvement in the treaty. Davis concluded, ‘I saw the poor creatures were under a delusion of the great Enemy, and that they could only be met in the spirit of Christ.’

126 Missionary Register, November 1840, 506–11.

127 Ibid., 507–8.


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He believed Heke’s supporters had got their ideas from other nonmissionary Europeans, and were deluded by Satan, but the matter was resolved peaceably on that particular day.128 But open conXict broke out in 1845 in the Bay of Islands between Heke and other tribes and the small British forces, after Heke three times cut down the Xag pole at Waitangi, the symbol of British sovereignty. Consequently, the missionaries were in no doubt he was a rebel, although they praised the restraint shown by both sides. However, Davis maintained contact with Heke, holding services in his pa (hill fort), so that missionary contact with the rebels caused them to be branded traitors by sections of the burgeoning European population.129 But Heke’s resistance was portrayed in the CMS metropolitan literature as a ‘direct and persevering assault upon British Sovereignty’. That rule had to be maintained, one correspondent with the parent committee asserting that only ‘the disaVected and ill-disposed’ sided with Heke.130 This analysis was conWrmed for some missionaries when some of the Christian Maori who sided with Heke reverted to nonChristian customs such as tattooing. For one missionary at least, this was a relapse into heathen ways.131 The thought that such decisions might also be a rejection of missionary, and therefore Christian, complicity in a British sovereignty that some Maori sincerely rejected, never seems to have occurred to any of the missionaries about Heke’s unsuccessful action. A year after the defeat of Heke in January 1846, the CMS in London published the correspondence between the Revd Maunsell in New Zealand and Governor Sir George Grey over the relationship of the British with the Maori, presumably because they agreed with the views of their missionary. Maunsell argued that the Maori were in a position that was analogous to that of a ward in chancery, because they were a mixture of adult and child and that, left to their own devices, they would alienate their land for a bauble, which would translate into discontent against the government ‘whom they are taught to consider as their friends and guardians’. So government needed to control sales of Maori land and, in return for their trouble 128 129 130 131

Ibid., November 1841, 516. Morrell, Anglican Church in New Zealand, 35–6. Missionary Register, July 1845, 338; October 1845, 455–6. Ibid., July 1847, 320.

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in ensuring Maori had a ‘fair beneWt’, government should take a proportion of the sale price. What this beneWt translated into, Maunsell went on to elaborate to the governor. Roads and other such infrastructure, while beneWcial, were not the most suitable good. Good guardianship should aim, not just at increasing the value of Maori estate, but at preparing the Maori to enjoy it, and for that they needed education, which he clearly hoped the government would now make a substantial commitment towards, as a means of the state lending ‘their aid toward the civilization’ of the Maori. This was needed also for the good of the colony, in order to remake Maori from ‘wild, lawless, roaming warriors, disturbed themselves, disturbing others’ into ‘useful members of society, fearing God and respecting lawful authority’.132 During the CMS mission to New Zealand there was one Wnal theme in the Anglican imperial discourse that had been among its characteristics since its North American beginnings the previous century, and that was the Anglican push for a colonial episcopate. Given the increasing divergences and antagonisms between High Church, Tractarians, and Evangelicals in Britain by the late 1830s and 1840s—with the Tractarians, in particular, theoretically exalting the spiritual authority of bishops—there was considerable support in this Evangelical public speaking for a bishop in New Zealand. It has already been noted that Bishop Broughton undertook his New Zealand visit to the mission there at the express invitation of the parent committee, after which the committee vaguely aYrmed that it was their hope of obtaining further divine strength through the ‘introduction of the beneWts of Ecclesiastical order’ in New Zealand.133 Broughton, of course, was in no doubt, reporting to the CMS that the Church of England required to be planted in New Zealand ‘in the full integrity of its system’, with the clergy submitting themselves ‘to regular Ecclesiastical Authority’.134 The CMS New Zealand missionaries also, in their address to Broughton at Paihia on 5 January 1839, seemed generally to have favoured the possibility. Asserting that the church, unlike nations, drew no boundaries between Englishman and Maori, they ‘could look to your Lordship 132 Missionary Register, July 1848, 321–3. 133 Ibid., December 1839, 542–3. 134 Ibid., 549.


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for all the beneWts and privileges belonging to our Church’.135 While these were expected and formal words on such an occasion, they suggest little resistance to the possibility of a bishop for New Zealand.136 Henry Williams, as the de facto head of the mission, certainly wished for a bishop in New Zealand.137 But the parent committee were not so delighted with the eventual episcopal advent in the new colony, when George Augustus Selwyn was consecrated the Wrst Bishop of New Zealand in 1841. In private correspondence, they advised Williams that the control of the mission would remain solely in the hands of the parent committee, with the bishop being limited to ‘advice and cooperation’.138 This division between the centre and periphery of empire became increasingly contentious in later years, complicated by the theological diVerences between the Evangelical CMS and the new bishop’s modern High Church views. However, in New Zealand, the bishop and his CMS missionaries worked well together until Selwyn, in 1847, came out in support of Governor Grey’s attack on the missionaries’ land, which, though extensive, were needed to support their large families in the new country. The governor acted out of political malice towards the missionaries in order to undermine their inXuence with the Maori. Selwyn’s misguided support for the governor destroyed Williams’s position, because he refused to give in to the governor’s demands.139 Until then, however, the missionaries in the Weld had a common viewpoint with their bishop as to the importance of the episcopate in New Zealand. Selwyn was a man of the next generation to Broughton when he took up his position in the colonial Anglican Church. Consecrated bishop at the age of thirty-two, Selwyn was born in 1809, educated at Eton College, went to the conservative St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1827, and married in 1839 after his ordination some Wve years before.140 The environment of St John’s and Eton moulded him as a High Churchman, though one of a later vintage than Broughton, 135 Ibid., 550. 136 Ibid., 552. 137 Rogers, Te Wiremu, 188–90. 138 Ibid., 191–2. 139 Ibid., 239–82; Morrell, Anglican Church in New Zealand, 35–40. 140 Warren E. Limbrick, ‘A Most Indefatigable Man’, in Warren E. Limbrick (ed.), Bishop Selwyn in New Zealand 1841–68 (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1983), 13–14.

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who was only too aware of the changes happening in English society and religion during the 1820s. From before he left for New Zealand Selwyn was concerned to mould the church there as one formed according to ‘true principles’. According to one historian, this left him rather Wxated when he encountered the diVerences of colonial and Maori life.141 Yet the same historian Wnds that when he left the New Zealand church in 1868 (to become Bishop of LichWeld) it was a ‘fully Xedged colonial Church organized as an ecclesiastical Province, and self-governing in its polity’.142 That he did so was largely because Selwyn was a child of the new Anglican paradigm for self-driven and autonomous ecclesiastical engagement with the empire, a model that was being formed in the Church of England at the time of his consecration. When he left for New Zealand he was more than conscious of the need to export that new Anglican self-awareness of the need for spiritual and ecclesiastical independence by the Church of England in the British Empire. Warren Limbrick agrees that Selwyn developed these principles of independence for the Church of England before he left for New Zealand, though he fails to provide any evidence from Selwyn to support this contention.143 After the annexation of New Zealand as a crown colony, the Wrst governor, Captain William Hobson RN, was instructed by the colonial oYce to guarantee ‘the most absolute toleration’ to all religious denominations. Selwyn, in their view, was to be bishop only of the Church of England settlers, and to have no oYcial support beyond that.144 But the colonial government did make provision for Selwyn’s salary, as that of other Anglican clergy in their capacity as colonial chaplains in various colonies, though this arrangement soon lapsed under pressure from colonial legislatures, which developed quickly in the 1850s and were disposed towards religious equality.145 Once in New Zealand, Selwyn sought to work cooperatively with government, provided always that this did not threaten the autonomy of the Church of England in the colony. In a letter to the Tractarian lawyer James Hope-Scott, Selwyn commented on the failure of 141 Limbrick, ‘A Most Indefatigable Man’, 16. 142 Ibid., 20. 143 Warren E. Limbrick, ‘Transformation and Tradition: Bishop Selwyn and Anglican Foundations’, in Limbrick, Bishop Selwyn, 25. 144 Ibid., 29–30. 145 Ibid., 30–1.


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Hobson’s 1842 Church Extension Ordinance to be upheld by the imperial government, and so provide government subsidies equally to all denominations. ‘I have little doubt of securing the Church upon permanent endowments so as to be altogether independent both of assistance from home, and from local Government’, he wrote, but he would not accept such government assistance if it meant admitting that the Church of England was just the same as other denominations.146 Limbrick suggests that Selwyn was confused in his theology, because this was never his strong point, and because he was living on the cusp of a new church–state reality in the colonies, with their growing culture of religious equality. According to Limbrick, only after the 1850 bishops’ conference called by Broughton was Selwyn entirely clear about calling for an entire separation of church and state in New Zealand.147 Yet Selwyn, who arrived in New Zealand in 1842, called his Wrst synod of clergy on his own episcopal authority to meet at his residence in Waimate just two years later, in 1844. Their purpose was to discuss rules and government for the church in New Zealand.148 Selwyn clearly referred to this gathering as a diocesan synod, able to act decisively by making and revising its own canons, which then only awaited a determination of their authority from a more representative gathering of the clergy of the whole diocese. Already in 1842, therefore, he was exhibiting none of Broughton’s hesitancy about this move.149 Against English criticism that he was Xying the face of the royal supremacy, he explained his actions to friends there as anti-Erastian. My desire is, in this country, so far as God may give me light and strength, to try what the actual system of the Church of England can do, when disencumbered of its earthly load of seats in parliament, Erastian compromises, corruption of patronage, confusion of orders, synodless bishops, and an unorganised clergy. None of these things are inherent in our system, and therefore not to be imposed as faults.150 146 Ibid., 32, 35. 147 Ibid., 35. 148 John H. Evans, Churchman Militant: George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zeland and Lichfield (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), 136. 149 George Augustus Selwyn, A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of New Zealand at the Diocesan Synod, in the Chapel of St John’s College, on Thursday, September 23, 1847 (London, 1849), 99. 150 Evans, Churchman Militant, 136–7.

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This suggests none of the lack of clarity about the nature of the colonial Church of England that Limbrick claims Selwyn exhibited until 1850. A second synod was called in 1847 in Auckland, to which Selwyn gave an extended charge that he regarded as his most important statement of principles to be delivered after he had gained suYcient experience of the country.151 He spent most of the charge calling his few clergy to avoid all expressions and impressions of disunity on matters of doctrine, as being seriously harmful to their missionary work, and urged unity among them based on the Bible and the Prayer Book. But at the beginning of the charge he mentioned his hopes for the Church of England in New Zealand. He believed synods in the Church of England, in the form of convocation, had been suspended for so long because they had lost their spiritual character and became mere political assemblies. However, in New Zealand, freed from a connection to the state, and in a primitive colonial context, there was good reason to believe such synods could be revived. It was important to avoid, on the one side, an overweening sense of self-importance, and on the other, the ‘no less fatal error of servility to the ruling powers of the State’.152 Selwyn admitted to mixed feelings about the colonization of New Zealand. On the one hand a land of heathens, cannibals in ‘a land devouring its own inhabitants’, had been transformed by the gospel. On the other, that very Christianization removed the fear of the Maori felt by potential colonizers, who subsequently Xooded in. But this was only to be expected, and the missionaries could not keep converts immune from the eVects of colonialism. Either that colonizing culture would come to them, or the colonized would seek it out. Selwyn, however, pinned his hopes on the religious grounding of his converts being able to withstand what he described as ‘actual conXict with Satan’. He thereby alluded to heathenish aspects of their own society, and to the moral evils of European colonization on the Maori. ‘Our duty seems to be, to oppose the sword of the Spirit to every form of sin and error, as they arise. At one time, it may be idolatry and heathenism against which we contend; at another, the vices which follow in the train of civilization.’153 151 Selwyn, A charge, 6. 153 Ibid., 17.

152 Ibid., 8–10.


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He did believe that the colonization of New Zealand had resulted in two great achievements. It brought humanitarian legislation towards the Maori by the state, and, for the church, the episcopal principle from the very beginning of the country’s colonization, because ‘in a new colony the Church ought to be planted at once in all the integrity of its system’.154 New Zealand could become a mission centre for the South PaciWc, he believed, so long as it had a settled form of episcopal government that was ‘unfettered by connexion with the State’, and free to call its own synods.155 Towards the end of his charge Selwyn again made some mention of the place of the Church of England at home and in the colonies, as part of his concern for the implementation of an eVective system of moral and ecclesiastical discipline in the new colonial church. Anglican discipline had lapsed and become distorted, he felt, by the church’s alliance with the state. As a consequence, discipline intended for moral reformation of its members had become the imposition of uniformity supported by the force of secular law. It was a product of ‘this false alliance with the civil power’ that it was important to avoid in the New Zealand context, where discipline should rely only on the force of Christian morality and ‘the inherent power of the Church’.156 Selwyn concluded this Wrst charge to his clergy by urging the accomplishment of a ‘comprehensive system of church polity’ in New Zealand. By this he explained that the episcopate was not meant to be monarchical over the clergy, but cooperative with them.157 But neither could the clergy act without the bishop, and in cases of doubt the Wnal arbiter was the Archbishop of Canterbury. As a result, Selwyn set out what he believed were the powers of their diocesan synod, which were to advise the bishop, refer appeals to the archbishop, and develop their own diocesan government. They would not be free to alter the Prayer Book or the Authorized Version of the Bible.158 Soon after he returned from the Australasian bishops meeting called by Broughton in 1850, Selwyn was ready to send out a pastoral letter in April 1852 to all Anglicans in his diocese, proposing general 154 Ibid., 18–19. 156 Ibid., 70–1. 158 Ibid., 90–1.

155 Ibid., 21. 157 Ibid., 88.

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principles for a constitution for the Church of England in New Zealand. In keeping with his statements of the 1840s, in this letter Selwyn clearly understood that the Church of England in the colonies should not depend on the state connection. It was required to be autonomous, and indeed voluntarist, and its state connection in England could not, and should not, apply in the empire. What had taken Broughton two decades to arrive at, Selwyn had already implemented as purely clerical synods just two years after arriving in New Zealand, and within a decade was proposing to extend this synodical principle to embrace the whole church—bishop, clergy, and laity. The necessity of this measure arises mainly from two causes: First, that the Church in this colony is not established by law, and consequently that a large portion of the ecclesiastical law of England is inapplicable to us; Secondly, that the Church in this colony is dependent mainly upon the voluntary contributions of its members . . . We can scarcely expect that such a revision of the ecclesiastical law as would meet our wants will be undertaken in England, because the Convocation of the clergy is no longer allowed to meet for deliberation, and the British parliament is no longer composed only of members of the Church . . . It follows, therefore, that we must either be content to have no laws to guide us, or that we must apply for the usual power granted to all incorporated bodies—to frame by-laws for ourselves in all such matters as relate to our own peculiar position, reserving to Her Majesty and to the heads of the Church in England such rights and powers as may be necessary to maintain the Queen’s supremacy, and the unity and integrity of our Church.159

It might be thought that in maintaining the royal supremacy Selwyn was not fully committed to relinquishing the state connection. But he clearly saw no role in the discipline, doctrine and government of this colonial Anglican Church for a British Parliament, or a metropolitan government that was no longer exclusively Anglican. His reference is to the crown—the monarch—alone. This is in the manner of traditional High Church theology, which viewed the crown as a sacred and separate oYce from Parliament and the crown’s ministers; as a genuinely Anglican monarchy exercising, by virtue of the royal coronation oath, a lay but genuinely Anglican 159 Evans, Churchman Militant, 139–40.


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supremacy over the church.160 But since the constitutional revolution this authentic Anglican royal supremacy was no longer applicable to either Parliament or the crown’s ministers. Overriding all was Selwyn’s concern for the unity and integrity of the Church of England in the empire, so that he was willing to give a share in its colonial government to the ecclesiastical heads of the church in England, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the monarch in its ecclesiastical person as Head of the Church of England, but no longer to Parliament and politicians. His General Principles were essentially proposing that the church in New Zealand be governed by its three orders—bishops, clergy, and laity—meeting in a general convention, whose decisions were Wnal and abiding on members of the church, and were reached by each of these three orders voting separately.161 Selwyn was inXuenced in these principles by constitutional developments in the Episcopal Church in the United States.162 But he also wanted to maintain a truly Anglican royal supremacy and union with the Church of England. Accordingly, he proposed that meetings of clergy and laity agree on a draft constitution to send to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the secretary of state for the colonies in order that they sponsor an Act of Parliament to permit the New Zealand church to ‘frame laws for its own government’.163 The legal position of the church in New Zealand needed to be secure, and that required an act of the imperial Parliament, though it was clear that Parliament would only legally enable what the church was in process of realizing anyway. At a reasonably representative meeting of the clergy and laity of New Zealand Anglicans in Auckland, in May 1857, a draft constitution was agreed, with six fundamental provisions. The Church of New Zealand would: Hold and maintain the Doctrine and Sacraments of christ as the lord hath commanded in his holy word, and as the United Church of England and Ireland hath received and explained the same in the Book of 160 Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 50–3. 161 Evans, Churchman Militant, 140–1. 162 Hans Cnattingius, Bishops and Societies: A Study of Anglican Colonial and Missionary Expansion, 1698–1850 (London: SPCK, 1952), 203. 163 Evans, Churchman Militant, 141.

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Common Prayer, in the Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, and in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Religion. And the General Synod hereinafter constituted for the government of this Branch of the said Church shall also hold and maintain the said Doctrine and Sacraments of christ, and shall have no power to make any alteration in the authorized version of the Holy Scriptures, or in the above-named Formularies of the Church.164

The new Anglican episcopal and autonomous paradigm, which was inaugurated in England for imperial Anglicanism in the 1840s, and carried into eVect partially in Australia, and wholly in New Zealand, was one that also retained its continuities with the past in terms of much of its discourse of empire. The heathens were still there to be converted, and they were still regarded as completely other to Christian light and truth, being under the dominion of Satan. The Bishop of Hereford preached to the SPG in 1844 that it was only due to their long-ago conversion that Britons themselves did not, like the heathen, ‘dwell in a land of darkness and of the shadow of death’.165 It remained the Anglican task, in alliance with God’s providence, to ‘dissipate ‘‘the darkness, the gross darkness which covers the people’’ in heathen lands’.166 By the mid-nineteenth century English and colonial Anglicans still saw such a task as being their peculiar duty, because of God’s unique and wonderful exaltation of their nation imperially. Britain was still providentially purposed and imperially endowed by God to diVuse the gospel globally. For the Bishop of Chichester, though, the problem was that most Britons remained stubbornly unaware of the divine responsibility conferred by the fact ‘that this country has been specially selected, and endowed by Providence, as an instrument for suVusing knowledge and civilization and social happiness throughout the world’.167 The vast charge of empire that God had entrusted to Britain brought with it corresponding responsibilities for individuals and the nation, according to Charles Longley, Bishop of Ripon (and later Archbishop of Canterbury) in 1841. The earliest Christians beneWted from the Roman Empire facilitating the spread of their 164 165 166 167

Evans, Churchman Militant, 144. Thomas Musgrave, Bishop of Hereford, A Sermon, xxvi. Ibid., xxvii. Philip Shuttleworth, Bishop of Chichester, A Sermon (1840), xxx.


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message. So now also God’s providence had ordained that a large portion of the earth should be under the rule of one nation, ‘in order that his word may have the freer course, and reach the ends of the earth through those numberless channels which our commerce and enterprize are ever opening to us’.168 The Bishop of Hereford in 1844 believed that the present international peace was designed by God to allow Britain to be the foremost divine instrument for spreading Christianity, which was aided by the unparalleled communications Britain enjoyed with her empire. It would therefore be ‘inexcusable’ if they did not attempt to dissipate the darkness of heathen lands.169 While heathens remained in a moral and religious darkness, the settlers were still not much better in the view of these metropolitan Anglicans. Colonists, according to the Bishop of Chichester in 1840, were full of faithlessness and ingratitude towards their mother country because of the lack of religion among them, which was also the cause of settler cruelty and rapacity towards the native populations. Religion remained the balm for this, and the most hopeful ingredient of a continued imperial unity, while British commerce should still ensue in requisite mercantile support for the SPG, as a return for divine blessings bestowed upon British commerce and manufactures.170 The retention of these older themes in imperial Anglican discourse into the mid nineteenth century points to continuities in Anglican imperialism, alongside the instigation of a new Anglican paradigm of imperial engagement. The resistance of Archbishop Sumner to the prospect of an independent Anglican Church in New Zealand, and to the revival of convocations in the Church of England as threatening to the establishment of his church, also indicates that not all Anglicans felt comfortable with changes in that vision.171 Broughton in Australia took some decades before he felt able to embrace it willingly and proactively, whereas the younger Selwyn’s de facto calling of gatherings of clergy—which he believed were genuine synods—from the start of his colonial episcopate pointed to the future. It was an ecclesiastical and imperial future supported by the more energetic and reformist elements of the Church of England, 168 169 170 171

Charles Longley, Bishop of Ripon, A Sermon (1841), xxix. Musgrave, Sermon, xxvii. Shuttleworth, Sermon, xxx–xxxi, xxxviii. Carpenter, Cantuar, 308–9.

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such as BlomWeld and Gladstone. To these metropolitan and colonial Anglicans the establishment of the Church of England, with its mutual obligations on church and state, was eVectively dead following the political changes of 1828 to 1832, and the Church of England consequently needed a new way forward. Now, imperially engaged Anglicans began to implement a colonial episcopal church regarded as requisite, in an increasingly self-directed and self-governing church in the empire, and at home. Frances Knight has drawn attention to the way in which this new denominational identity was shaped within England, through a narrowing of its support base and a deWning of its spirituality, to which the laity made a gradual but uneasy adjustment that enabled the Church of England to remain a powerful force in the lives of the English and their society.172 However, a further factor in this denominational redeWnition of the nineteenth-century Church of England was the empire. The imperative of colonial church extension, consequent upon the state relinquishing its revived commitment to Anglicanism in the empire in the late 1820s, saw the Church of England in the 1840s, both in the imperial centre and by bishops at the colonial periphery, devise a new Anglican paradigm that recreated Anglicanism around a requisite episcopacy and an ability for self-determination. So Anglican redeWnition was not merely a process reactively entered into in response to external changes, but proactively embraced from within. The empire was still largely understood in a way that was continuous with the previous century: as being providentially bestowed for the purposes of evangelism, populated with religiously debased colonists and heathen living under the darkness of Satan, and needing to be held together by religion—that is, Christianity (that is, the Church of England). But now that church was diVerent in this Anglican construction, even if the empire was not. From the 1840s there was an irreversible dawn of a new Anglican way of being a church in the empire with regard to its self-understanding, its relationship with the state, and its polity in the colonies. However, much of the Anglican discourse in relation to the colonial populations or colonized and colonizing peoples remained, in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, very much within the same theological framework it had developed in the century before. 172 Frances Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Conclusion: Anglicanism and Empire, 1700–c.1850 It seems almost tautological to aYrm that Anglicans who engaged with the English–British Empire did so primarily from a position of belief and, as most of them were clergy, from a perspective of theology. Yet given that religion, belief, or theology is often viewed historically as limited to its inXuence in social control, political support, or other relevant, but ultimately derivative secular consequences, it seems necessary here to aYrm that this group of English people saw their Christian belief as a matter of fundamental truth. That religious truths or beliefs had social, political, economic, and a host of other consequences is not in dispute here.1 But unless it is appreciated that these Anglicans understood their beliefs, and those of the church in which they were formed as Christians, as Wrst-order matters—and other outcomes as secondary—then they will be fundamentally misinterpreted historically. Nor was their Christian truth newborn. It was consciously received by these Anglicans through the tradition of the Church of England since the sixteenth century and, in areas of basic theological concern such as the providential action of God in the world, from theological thinking elaborated since the Wrst Christian century. In understanding the English–British Empire religiously they constructed their world in a series of theological polarities. The most fundamental of these was a religious division between Christian and 1 I have, for example, interpreted Anglican religion in this way—as one manifestation of its social consequences—in my article ‘An Antipodean Establishment: Institutional Anglicanism in Australia, 1788–c.1934’, Journal of Anglican Studies, 1 (2003), 61–90.

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non-Christian. Non-Christians were considered heathen, a concept that meant more than the negative idea of simply being not Christian. Heathens were believed to reside in the parts of the world under the dominion of Satan and, consequently, their lives, beliefs, and societies were thought to be systematically shaped by the very opposite to God. In this sense heathens, enslaved by the supernatural enemy of God, were the ultimate theological Other for these Anglicans. This was hardly a surprising division but one that, in its particularity and exclusiveness, is perhaps disturbing to some early twenty-Wrst-century minds, but completely understood and accepted at the time and for centuries earlier. Christianity constituted truth, light, and right, because it was revealed by God incarnate fully and perfectly in the man Jesus Christ. Consequently, non-Christian beliefs and societies were the opposite; they were dark, false, and pernicious because they were the product of Satan. Consistently throughout the period, therefore, these Anglicans, while themselves holding diverse ecclesiological positions within the Church of England, were agreed on the necessity of evangelism to the peoples and societies of the empire who were not Christian. More particularly, this theological construction of Christian belief as a lense through which to understand the empire was devised within the traditions and life of the Church of England. Until the 1840s, that church maintained and valued its subordinate partnership with the state, which it understood to be an Anglican political community for which it had the religious and moral responsibility. That politico-theological understanding was a major ingredient in what I have called the old imperial paradigm for Anglican engagement with the empire, which lasted throughout the eighteenth century, and until the state moved away from it in the constitutional revolution of 1828–32. Also during that period the Church of England (and the Anglicans studied here) thought of itself as the best of all possible churches, reformed in the Protestant Reformation so that it was the denomination most closely resembling the primitive church of the Wrst centuries. This ecclesiological understanding formed another component of Anglican self-conWdence, which never questioned their self-proclaimed responsibility to bring Christianity in its Church-ofEngland form to the colonized and colonizers in the empire.

Anglicanism and Empire, 1700–c.1850

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This Anglican self-congratulation had its imperial foil throughout this period in the Roman Catholic Church, commonly regarded by Anglicans at the antithesis of their own gospel and ecclesiastical purity. Based on a theological antagonism dating back to the sixteenth-century Reformation, which maintained that Catholicism was a spurious and Satanic masquerade for true Christianity, it also had its roots in an Anglican sense of inferiority about the older, and often eVective, missionary engagement of their rivals. Exacerbated, therefore, whenever Anglican missions had to actually compete with the presence of Roman Catholicism in a colonial context, Anglicans saw their work as a major bulwark against the possibility that the empire would become less Christian and less British through Catholic evangelization. In the period of the old Anglican imperial paradigm, there were aspects of a theological construction of empire that persisted throughout the century and a half under investigation in this study—that is, even after the old paradigm fell apart at the end of the 1830s. These formed common theological generalizations in both the old and new Anglican imperial discourses, before and after the 1840s.2 The most prominent continuous theme for Anglicans was their fundamental belief in God, and God’s providential rule of the world. Not only did God govern the world directly, but it was a generalization of the Anglicans studied here that God did so with a particular purpose for England–Britain in the divine mind, providing territories overseas in exchange for souls garnered in English evangelism by God’s favoured English people. This favour was particularly connected to their conviction of the pristine purity of their Protestant Christianity, which made Anglicanism the best of all possible Christian varieties, and therefore the most requisite to be spread to England’s, then Britain’s, colonized peoples. This linkage between empire, providence, evangelism, and Anglicanism was an enduring generalization, which enabled them to link what happened in the colonies causally with Britain, forming a unity of divine economy. That the empire was understood as providentially granted to Britain for this very purpose 2 On the way in which a narrative is constructed using generalizations from either the historical period under investigation or the historical period of the historian, see Peter Munz, ‘The Historical Narrative’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997), 851–72.

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was aYrmed from the beginnings of the SPG in 1701, and was still being upheld by other Anglicans before a parliamentary select committee in 1837. The British Empire has been signally blessed by Providence, and her . . . advantages, are so many reasons for peculiar obedience to the laws of Him who guides the destinies of nations. These were given for some higher purpose than commercial prosperity and military renown . . . He who has made Great Britain what she is, will inquire at our hands how we have employed the inXuence He has lent to us in our dealings with the untutored and defenceless savages; whether it has been engaged in seizing their lands, warring upon their people, and transplanting unknown disease, and deeper degradation, . . . or whether we have, as far as we have been able, informed their ignorance, and invited and aVorded them the opportunity of becoming partakers of that civilization, that innocent commerce, that knowledge and that faith with which it has pleased a gracious Providence to bless our own country.3

The belief that Britain was blessed by God in order to carry out a providential mission to indigenous populations in the colonies endured even longer than that; so that the colonial secretary, the third Earl Grey, could publicly state in 1853: I conceive that, by the acquisition of its Colonial dominions, the Nation had incurred a responsibility of the highest kind, which it is not at liberty to throw oV. The authority of the British Crown is at this moment the most powerful instrument, under Providence, of maintaining peace and order in many extensive regions of the earth, and thereby assists in diVusing among millions of the human race, the blessing of Christianity and civilization.4

The chairman of the East India Company at the time of the Indian Mutiny in 1857 also agreed, aYrming that ‘he had no doubt whatever in his own mind that providence had been pleased to place the magniWcent Empire of India in our hands in order that in due time we might be the instruments of converting the inhabitants to Christianity’.5 The acceptance of God’s involvement in the English–British Empire, and 3 Quoted in Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 143. 4 Quoted in Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–1995 (London: Longmans, 1996), 18. 5 Quoted in ibid., 32.


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the divine providential ruling of it, was a major theological understanding of the empire from the very Wrst, among those SPG Anglicans involved in North America from 1701, then on through the Evangelical and High Church Anglicans in Bengal at the turn of the century, and to Australia and New Zealand more than a century after the inauguration of the SPG. It is true that the enduring Anglican expression of the ancient Christian belief in providence was given a renewed boost by Evangelical Anglican missions from the early nineteenth century.6 However, that imperial providentialism, focused for these Anglicans on God’s favourite church, the Church of England, was being publicly proclaimed long before the rise of Evangelicalism in the later eighteenth century. An Anglican theological and ecclesiastical vision of empire did exist throughout the eighteenth century in the public statements, reports, and sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The later, more well known, Evangelical British views of empire were very similar in content to this earlier construction. That similarity, therefore, suggests that the later Anglican Evangelical outlooks made reference to the earlier non–Evangelical imperial discourse for the formulation of their own engagement with empire and missions when that began from the 1790s onwards. So the theological discourse that had been constructed by SPG preachers and North American missionaries during the eighteenth century became an Anglican imperial meta-narrative that survived in large part throughout the century and a half of this study because it was largely upheld by Anglicans of most theological persuasions. It not only generalized about England–Britain’s premier providential imperial place in the scheme of divine salvation, but also about how identities were constructed in the English–British Empire. According to this generalizing Anglican narrative, the colonizing English–Britons were mostly either degenerate, or likely to become so if they were left to their own devices. The colonized peoples were viewed as morally and spiritually inferior human beings if they were indigenous heathens, though it is noticeable that the New Zealand Maori were sometimes less harshly assessed than either the 6 Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-slavery, and Humanitarianism’, in Andrew Porter, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 204.

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Native Americans, the Bengalis, or the Australian Aborigines. However, all of these indigenous peoples in the colonies, as heathens, were subjects of the dominion of Satan, while colonists were always in peril of also sliding into Satan’s rule through religious indiVerence or degeneration. But this identity of either group was not ontologically Wxed. Their condition could be reversed through evangelism, producing conversion in the case of the latter, or re-evangelism in the former, in the same way that English identity had been raised from a similar dark and debased condition in their history when the Christian gospel had converted the heathen Anglo-Saxons. The possibility of such a theological alteration of colonial or of indigenous identity pointed to the contemporary role of the Church of England in the English–British Empire, which was to eVect a similar moral and spiritual elevation of indigenes and colonists to what had occurred in English history, by providing these peoples with the Christian gospel according to the Church of England, the best of all possible Christian worlds. But, while it was clearly engaged with the global expansion of its Christian gospel, was Anglicanism imperialist, in the sense of being favourable to the English–British imposition (by military or political power) of its own culture, rule, or society on overseas territories? JeVrey Cox maintains that in the nineteenth century both voluntarist and confessional religious institutions were engaged with imperialism, an interpretation he contrasts with what he calls the ‘celebratory tradition of Protestant missionary historiography’ found in the works of Stephen Neill and, more recently, Brian Stanley. These authors distinguish between missions and imperialism, suggesting that missionaries had no imperial motives but simply religious ones, unlike others in the British imperial establishment. However, Cox maintains that, for example, the use of subsidies, such as grants for schools by missions, or lobbying for the maintenance of the West African Squadron against slave traders by the CMS, inevitably involved them in imperial power, either knowingly or unknowingly. There was unequal power in the imperial context between colonized and colonizers, and the use of the power of the colonizers by missions and other religious bodies, for whatever reasons, meant complicity with that power.7 7 JeVrey Cox, ‘Religion and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-century Britain’, in Richard Helmstadter (ed.), Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, CA: 1997), 339–42.


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In that respect the SPG, the CMS, and the Church of England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were undoubtedly imperialist but, I have argued here, for genuinely and thoroughly religious motives. But the ‘imperialist’ label covers such a plethora of possibilities. Their imperialism clearly had a diVerent religious basis and theological construction from that of the imperialism of commercial and territorial expansionists during this period, though there were some crossovers. For example, the powerful Henry Venn, secretary of the CMS, while still an imperialist in the sense of being willing to use the resources of the British Empire for his society’s ends, also believed that his church’s establishment placed it under undesirable constraints in that imperial setting, compared with other churches. The unfavourable contrast may be explained by the fact that other denominations are accustomed to take part in the elementary organization of their Churches at home, and therefore more readily carry out that organization in the Missions. Whereas in our Church the Clergy Wnd everything relating to elementary organisation settled by the Law of the Land:—as in the provision of tithes, of church-rates, of other customary payments, in the constitution of parishes, and in parish oYcers, our Clergy are not prepared for the question of Church organisation.8

Cox maintains that this ability to understand the imperial diYculties for his church in acting independently was a consequence of Venn, as a voluntarist committed to religious freedom, being able to look at his church more objectively and understand its deWciencies. But then, as this study has shown, so also did the non-voluntarist High Church and non-Evangelical Anglicans who were the SPG’s preachers in the eighteenth century, who also chafed under some of the legal and political constraints of the state connection with regard to a colonial episcopate. So also did Broughton, Selwyn, and BlomWeld, and others in the established church in the nineteenth century, who ultimately opted to act in a voluntarist fashion to achieve that satisfactory colonial episcopate. Unlike Venn, whose answer was the formation of a native church before a local episcopate,9 these Anglicans maintained that, as Anglicanism was fundamentally episcopal, such a colonial or native church could not be completely itself without a bishop. Hence 8 Ibid., 365.

9

Ibid, 366.

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their advocacy of colonial Anglican churches in their ‘full integrity’, with an episcopate from as close to their colonial beginnings as practicable. In that sense they had maintained in the Anglican imperial discourse of the nineteenth century a trope of their eighteenth-century predecessors. The diVerence was that, by the 1840s, this fundamental episcopalian identity for an imperial Anglicanism was more readily achievable once the Church of England had adopted a new self-directing identity, initiated at the metropolitan centre, and taken up also in the colonial peripheries, which no longer looked to the old paradigm of a partnership with the state, which had prevailed until then. Anglicanism during this period was imperialist if by that is meant that the Church of England in the colonies was enmeshed with the social, political, and economic realities of colonial inequalities of power between colonizers and colonized. It was probably historically diYcult for an established church not to be collusive with imperial power—though it is clear that, in North America at least, its established position put it at a disadvantage compared with other denominations when it came to instituting its own preferred ecclesiastical government in the face of the local power of lay elites who disliked the idea, or metropolitan political ones who found it inexpedient. Anglicans were also imperialist if that is understood to mean they believed there was a positive meaning and purpose in the institution and maintenance of the British Empire. They upheld the empire as, fundamentally, a potentially good development in English–British history, because it had been divinely bestowed upon Britain for the benevolent purpose of extending the absolute life- and society-changing truth of Christianity, and, more particularly, the Church of England, overseas. But such a fundamental providential imperialism was always conditional upon those divine evangelistic purposes being met. However, a comparison of the critical attitudes towards the English– British state of the SPG preachers and missionaries on the issue of a colonial episcopate, with the myopia with which they approached the oppression and power diVerentials of slavery, reminds us that such critical conditionality in their imperial enthusiasm was muted and seriously Xawed when it concerned these Anglicans coming to grips realistically with colonial inequalities that they felt were outside the direct ecclesiastical interests of the Church of England, very narrowly deWned.


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They were also imperialist in that they applied to the empire their domestic agenda of the Church of England as constituting the moral and social unity of the nation. Just as the nation needed to be preserved in peace and good order by the bond of Christianity epitomized in the Church of England, so this long-standing sense of national mission was exported to the empire. There also the Church of England constituted the best chance for the inculcation and promotion of imperial unity. These Anglicans drew a lesson from the failure of the state to promote Anglicanism in the ultimately rebellious North American colonies and, consequently, they promulgated the imperial usefulness of Anglicanism. As this imperial bond was based on the divinely given and directed Church of England, so a British Empire whose inhabitants, indigenous and colonial, were born and bred in that church would have a share in the God-given promises of endurance and perpetuity given to the church. Only this religious basis for social unity, both at home and abroad, had any real chance of permanence in this world. The maintenance of a very traditional Christian providential theology in this discourse throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, in which God is understood to be directly in control of events, governing the world according to moral rules of reward for divinely approved behaviour and punishment for immoral behaviour—by individuals and by nations—also raises signiWcant questions about a new Enlightenment world view that supposedly undermined this traditional theology in the eighteenth century.10 Contrariwise, this study underscores the importance of the continuation of fundamental elements of traditional orthodox Christian 10 For example, the argument that the cultural prevalence in English society of a freethinking Deistic movement is largely the fabrication of historians has been argued recently by S.J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). This contrasts with usual interpretations of a deleterious impact of radical or rationalist thought on traditional religion, in works such as Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967); G.R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (London: Penguin, 1962); and J. Byrne, Glory, Jest, and Riddle: Religious Thought in the Enlightenment (London: SCM Press, 1996); a summary of such views about the impact of radical religious thought of the Enlightenment can be found in D. Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 3.

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religion in Enlightenment culture. This maintenance of customary English religion in the Enlightenment within England may have been a major ingredient in the successful spread of Enlightenment culture that is too often overlooked by historians. Recent historical research has pointed to the continuing popularity of the Church of England at home in this period, rather than its supposed decline.11 Cries of ‘the Church in danger’, for example, were able to harness considerable popular support, from the Sacheverell case under Queen Anne, at least until the anti-Catholic Gordon riots in the 1780s, and in the ‘Church and King’ riots against Dissenters in the next decade. The anxiety expressed by the Anglicans in this study about either (or both) Catholicism and Dissent gaining ground in the empire in the early eighteenth century, and as late as Archbishop Howley at the 1841 public meeting to inaugurate the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, suggests that the promotion of imperial concerns among their Anglican constituency may have had much to do with the old pre-Enlightenment battle with these two religious opponents moving out from England to the empire. The eighteenth century was certainly one of intellectual ferment, but this Anglican imperial discourse suggests that more of the discursive development that took place had continuity with traditional religious outlooks than is often allowed by historians of what is commonly regarded as the High Enlightenment. But there were also fundamental changes alongside these Anglican imperial continuities, which saw new assertive emphases on episcopacy, self-determination, and self-governance emerge in metropolitan and colonial Anglicanism in the mid nineteenth century. An insistence on the necessity of episcopacy in colonial churches, and a determination by the Church of England to institute it in Anglicanism’s engagement with the British Empire, were enshrined in formal documents at home and abroad in the 1840s and 1850s, in connection with the Colonial Bishoprics Fund established by the church acting unilaterally and autonomously, and only afterwards enshrining that action in new parliamentary legislation. In the case of British colonies, this 11 Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 1660–1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); W.M. Jacob, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).


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new Anglican episcopal forwardness was found in the ecclesiastical constitutions of colonial Anglican churches from the mid nineteenth century. Both in the centre and the peripheries of empire, Anglican leaders—bishops, clergy, and laity—initiated and accepted these two thrusts of a new Anglican engagement in empire and in Anglican self-identity. However, the establishmentarian attitude of Archbishop Sumner in opposing them warns us against any simplistic theory of replacement of one paradigm with another. There was something new in Anglican attitudes to empire and to its own colonial selfdeWnition from the 1840s, but it continued to exist and develop alongside older establishment attitudes of the church and state in partnership, and alongside older tropes of an Anglican construction of the English–British nation that derived from the early eighteenth century. This was so even in Australia, which was, as we have seen, a major site of the initiation of the new imperial paradigm under Broughton; but under his successors, more often than not, there was a continued upholding of the old church–state paradigm in these colonies long past its use-by date.12 With regard to episcopacy, the new paradigm of a self-determining and fundamentally episcopal Anglicanism extended to the empire the same episcopal identity, regarded as essential and non-negotiable, that had already been realized in the Church of England in 1662. In 1660 the moderate restoration of the Church of England, envisaged as a revised episcopalianism in a negotiated settlement with moderate presbyterianism (a dominant force during the Commonwealth and Protectorate), and enshrined in the Worcester House Declaration of October 1660, quickly became defunct. It was killed oV by, among other things, a revitalized grassroots Anglicanism expressed in enthusiasm for the Prayer Book and for episcopal ordination by aspiring clergymen; by gentry welcoming the return of the old, known order; and by episcopalians becoming more militant in Parliament. This resulted in the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ passing the Act of Uniformity that made episcopal ordination absolutely requisite for ministry in the Church of England—a view enshrined in the Prayer Book of 1662. It resulted in the nonconformity of some 1,700 ministers to the restored, episcopal 12 Strong, ‘An Antipodean Establishment’, passim.

294

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Church of England.13 From the 1840s, that same episcopalianism became also, for the Anglicans studied here, either an essential or, at least a vitally important, part of the identity of colonial Anglicanism. Anglicanism, in the form of the institutional Church of England, the Anglican missionary societies, and their supporters, was institutionally, consciously, evangelistically, and organizationally connected and concerned with the English–British Empire since the beginning of the eighteenth century. To be so, Anglicanism needed to understand the empire religiously as a theological missionary imperative, a discourse it framed quite early on in the context of the colonies of North America. This discourse remained remarkably consistent throughout the next century and half, despite Anglicanism’s engagement with a diversity of colonial contexts, indigenous peoples and cultures, and penal and free colonists in North America, India, Australia, and New Zealand. The Anglican engagement, and how it framed the empire, clashed with its cultures, and provided imperial purpose—as well as oppressive constructions and blindnesses—in that imperial commitment is, fundamentally, the history of the construction and persistence of a theological discourse. It is a reminder of how religion in this period was vital and inXuential to a substantial section of the British people, and that through the framework of this religion they understood, for better or worse, their empire and the peoples who populated it.

13 John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 31–41; Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 174–9; Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 143–9, 171–6.

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Index America, North 3–5, 8, 11, 15, 19, 31, 60, 65–6, 70, 75, 106, 119, 127, 220, 233, 242–3, 279 see also SPG missions; Indians, North American; colonists, North America Boston 104 Georgia 63 Great Awakening 70, 71, 81–3 Long Island 82 New England 73, 83 Maryland 42, 43 Middle Colonies 43 New York 95 North Carolina 42, 63 Philadelphia 80 Praying towns 5, 59, 99 Rhode Island 82 South Carolina 42, 49, 63 New York, 43 Pennsylvania 73 Virginia 42, 49, 92. 93 War of Independence 12, 17, 20, 97, 103–6, 118 Anne, Queen of England and Scotland 65, 292 Australia 8, 159, 206, 221 see also Colonists, Australia; Broughton, Bishop; Church of England Aborigines 241–8 Identity of 242, 243–4 Wiradjuri people 246–7 Limestone Plains 241–2

New South Wales 223–34, 236, 238 Schools 228–9, 234, 248, 249 South Australia 210, 219 Sydney 224 Van Dieman’s Land/Tasmania 224, 233, 235–6, 237, 248 Victoria 235, 240, 241 Western Australia 210 Bagot, Richard, Bishop of Oxford 216–17 Baptists 14, 92, 180 Bathurst, Henry, Bishop of Norwich 135 Bathurst, Lord, Colonial Secretary 227–8, 229 Bent, JeVrey, judge of New South Wales 227 Benson, Martin, Bishop of Gloucester 42, 53, 65, 75, 81 Bethell, Christopher, Bishop of Gloucester 178 Berkeley, George, Dean of Londonderry 77, 194 n. 205 Beveridge, William, Bishop of St Asaph 38, 60, 84 Bible 17, 27, 99–100, 135, 136, 171, 230, 240, 242, 276, 277, 280 Bishops, see Church of England, episcopacy and Bisse, Phillip, Bishop of Hereford 48 n. 23

314

Index

BlomWeld, Charles, Bishop of Chester, Bishop of London 131, 191–2, 198–200, 201–3, 212, 213, 215, 218, 250, 289 Book of Common Prayer 17, 230, 231, 240, 242, 251, 276, 277, 280, 293 Book of Martyrs, Foxe’s 2 Booker, Revd Luke, English clergyman 107, 144–5 Boulter, Hugh, Bishop of Bristol 48 n. 23, 72 Bourke, Richard, Governor of New South Wales 231–2, 234 Bowles, John, High Church theorist 215 Bradford, Samuel, Bishop of Carlisle 48 n. 23 Bray, Revd Thomas, founder of SPG 16, 42 Broughton, William Grant, Archdeacon of New South Wales, Bishop of Australia 221, 230–41, 246, 248–55, 261–2, 275, 281, 289 Brown, Revd David, East India Company chaplain 123 Buchanan, Revd Claudius, East India Company chaplain 128, 138, 150, 152, 155, 157–61, 173 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, English philanthropist 219 Burgess, Thomas, Bishop of St David’s 137–8, 151 Burke, Edmund, political theorist 118–19, 148 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury 38, 64, 67, 71–2, 194 n. 255

Butler, Joseph, Bishop of Durham 194 n. 255 Buxton, Sir Thomas Fowell, English MP 244 Canada (British North America) 21–2, 63, 80, 118, 120, 125, 201, 214, 219, 224 Cape Town, bishopric in 219 Capitalism 28, 32, 66, 98, 258, 261, 265 Carey, William, Baptist missionary 12, 13, 15 Carey, William, Bishop of Exeter 177–8 Caroline, Queen 46 Catholic emancipation 32, 213, 215, 231 Catholicism, Catholics 44, 77–9, 80, 128, 133, 143, 159, 223–4, 233, 258–9, 292 see also Theology, Anti-Catholicism Spanish 3, 4, 78–9, 80 Jesuits 58, 127 Cavalier Parliament 293 Ceylon 159 Charles I, King of England and Scotland 231 ChatWeld, Revd Robert, English clergyman 146–7 Church and state see also Theology; Church of England, royal authority in 118–20, 143, 148–51, 179–80, 196–7, 198, 199, 202–3, 204, 209–10, 211, 212–16, 223, 225–6, 231–2, 248–9, 252–4, 255–6, 274–80, 282, 293 Church Missionary Society 6–7, 15, 37, 40, 199, 203, 221, 288, 289 see also Henry Venn

Index Bishops and 210–11, 218, 219–20 Missions, missionaries India 123, 124, 128–9, 166–7, 169–70, 192–3 Bowley, Revd, Chunar 171–2 Calcutta Committee 182 Cooke, Miss 171 Dum Dum, Bengal 169 Jetter, Revd J. A., Mirapore. 169, 170, 182 Reichardt, Revd 171 Thomason, Revd T. T. 167, 168, 182, 183 Missions, Australia 243–8 Missions, New Zealand 236, 237, 255–73, Kaitaia 260 Kerikeri 264 Orua 258 Otaki 266 Paihia 259, 272 Waimate 256, 258, 259, 270–1 Church of England 7, 8–9, 19, 20, 31, 32, 111, 119–30, 142–4, 147–8, 174, 282 Australia 223–55, 283 n. 1 Australasian Bishops’ Conference 1850 251–3, 275, 277–8 Church and Schools Corporation 228–9, 230 Colonial Bishops Act 210 Convocations 115, 253, 276 Ecclesiastical Commission 203 Episcopacy: ch. 4, 289–90, 292–4 Imperialism and 288–94 India 118, 149–52, 159–60, 175–8, 192–3 London, Bishop of 43, 218

315

New imperial paradigm 218–21, 236–7, 249, 251–5, 28, 274, 280, 281–2 New Zealand 272–3, 275–80 North America 43, 111–16, 201, 217, 219 Purest church 62, 81, 138, 139, 140–1, 178–9 Restoration of (1660) 293–4 Royal authority in 251, 252, 278–9 Synods 251–5, 275–6 Church of Ireland 149 Church of Scotland 1, 147, 209 Civilization and missions, see also Imperialism, culture; 25, 50–9, 135–6, 156–7, 161, 162, 163, 181, 245–6, 261, 264–7 Clapham Sect 129 Cleaver, William Bishop of St Asaph 149 Clive, Robert. Army oYcer of the East India Company 120, 122, 123 Coleridge, Sir John, judge 204, 234–5 Codrington, General Christopher 90 Colonial OYce 231 Colonists, British 141, 209, 281 see also Identity Australia 223, 234–6, 237–40, 241–2, 244–5 India 126, 132–5, 149, 150–1, 160–1, 163 New Zealand 256–8 North America 71–7 Colonization see Civilization and missions; Imperialism

316

Index

Commerce 18, 31, 65–6, 79–80, 204–5, 211, 261 see also Theology, commercial theology Conversion 5, 10, 26, 50, 85, 89–90, 93–5, 162–3, 164, 183–4, 257 Convicts 76, 223, 225, 233 Cornwallis, Lord, Governor-general of India 122–3 Corrie, Revd Daniel, Archdeacon of Calcutta 168, 169, 171, 184 Cresset, Edward, Bishop of LlandaV 62 Dampier, Thomas, Bishop of Rochester 150–1 Danish missions 12, 173 Dawes, Sir William, Bishop of Chester 38, 61, 64–5 Deism, Deists 44, 45–7, 51, 73, 132 Denne, John, Archdeacon of Rochester 46–7 Dissenters, 2, 6, 11–12, 20, 43, 75, 81–3. 92, 114, 143, 147–8, 178, 180, 196, 201, 211, 213, 214–15, 230–1, 234, 292, 293–4 Doane, George Washington, Bishop of New Jersey 218 Donne, Revd John, Dean of St Pauls 3 Douglas, John, Bishop of Salisbury 56 Drake, Sir Francis 2 Drummond, Robert, Bishop of St Asaph 53, 94 Dryden, John, poet 51 Dundas, Henry, President of the Board of Trade 143, 156

East India Company 120–24, 150 nn. 105, 107, 151–2, 155, 175, 286 Edgerton, Henry, Bishop of Hereford, Bishop of Norwich 49, 68–9, 81 Education, see India, schools; Australia, schools Eliot, Revd John, missionary in North America 5 England, English 48–9, 61–2, 78–9, 172, 214 see also Imperialism, religion and Enlightenment 14, 19, 45–6, 47, 51–2, 55, 57, 58, 86, 110, 116, 154, 156, 172, 185–6, 291–2 Evangelical Anglicans, 7, 35, 38, 39, 123, 143, 195, 196, 218 see also Church Missionary Society India and 152–75 Australia and 224, 226 Evangelical missions 11, 13–14, 32 Evangelical Revival 13, 14, 81–3 Evangelicalism 13, 14, 97, 126, 157, 166, 287 Evangelism 142, 161 see also Theology Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury 136 Fleetwood, William, Bishop of St Asaph 38, 85, 90 Folk religion, England 172 France, 11, 20, 21, 57, 81, 97, 107, 158, 201 French Revolution 107, 119, 125–6, 128, 140, 142–3, 147, 149, 220 Francke, Auguste, German Pietiest 12

Index George I, King of the United Kingdom 173 George, William, Dean of Lincoln 62, 69 Gibson, Edmund, Bishop of London 42, 68, 86–7, 90, 94, 115, 214 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, English adventurer 1 Glorious Revolution 38, 63, 64, 107 Gladstone, William, 207–10, 212, 218 Goderich, Viscount, Colonial Secretary 244 Gorham case 251 Grant, Charles, director of the East India Company 128, 130, 155, 156–7 Gray, Bishop of Bristol 141 Green, John, Bishop of Lincoln 57 n. 49, 87 Green, Thomas, Bishop of Ely 49 Grey, Lord, Colonial Secretary 250, 252 Grey, Sir George, Governor of New Zealand 273 Grose, Lieutenant Francis, acting Governor of New South Wales 224–5 Hakluyt, Richard, English geographer 1 Halifax, Samuel, Bishop of Gloucester 99–100 Hall, William Hall, CMS missionary in New Zealand 261, 262 HadWeld, Revd Octavius, CMS missionary in New Zealand 266–7 Hare, Francis, Bishop of Chichester 42, 72

317

Hastings, Warren, Governor-general of Bengal 122, 123 Hawkins, Sir John, merchant and naval commander 2 Heber, Reginald, Bishop of Calcutta 134 Herbert, Revd George, priest and poet, 3 Herring, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury 115 Heyter, Thomas, Bishop of Norwich 96 High Church Anglicans 14–15, 16, 25, 39, 121, 148, 152, 154, 174–5, 177, 180, 195, 208, 216, 218, 230–1, 262, 272, 273, 278–9, 289 Hinduism, see India Heke, Hone, Maori leader 270–1 Hobson, Captain William, Governor of New Zealand 274 Hooker, Revd Richard, Anglican theologian 194 Hope-Scott, James, Tractarian lawyer 274–5 Horne, George, Present of Magdalen College, Bishop of Norwich 106–7, 148 Horsley, Samuel, Bishop of Rochester 15–16, 174 Hough, John, Bishop of LichWeld and Coventry 38, 43–4, 67–8 Howley, William, Bishop of London, Archbishop of Canterbury 127, 132–3, 135, 140, 176, 200–1, 212, 250, 292 Hunter, Captain John, Governor of New South Wales 225–6

318

Index

Huntingford, George, Bishop of Gloucester 137, 222–3 Identity, see also Indians, North America; India, Identity, Hindu; Australia, Aborigines Christian 48–9, 164–5 Colonial 76 imperial 2 Missions and 21–2 National (English/British) 20–2, 31, 48–9, 76 Imperialism, British 245–6, 269–70, 276–7 see also Church of England Culture (English) and 25–30, 57–9, 99, 157, 182–4, 186, 189, 246–8 missions and 21–33, 268 religion and 18–20, 137–42, 163, 164–5, 204, 206–7, 245–6, 276–7, 282 India 14, 15, 25, 119, 214, 219 see also SPG, missions, India; East India Company Agra 182 Ajmeer 179 Bengal 8, 120–2, 126, 128, 146 Bombay 120, 123, 159, 176 Brahmins 130, 131 Calcutta 63, 120–2, 123, 159, 175 Caste 188 Christians 181–4 Fort William College 157 Hindus, Hinduism 124, 125, 126, 129–30, 131, 132, 136, 151, 156, 161–3, 165, 170–2, 180–1, 185, 186–7, 188–90, 288, 288

Identity, Hindu 181 Islam 130, 156, 185 Madras 120, 123, 159, 175 Schools 182–3, 184, 189–91 South India 122, 126, 133 Tranquebar 12, 173 Indians, North American, 3, 4–5, 16–17, 45–59, 80, 288 Chickesaw 74 Humanity of 51–6 Identity of 56–7 Micmac 17, 55 Mohawks 17, 21, 50–1, 79 ‘Noble savage’ concept 51 Yamasee 17 Indigenous peoples, see Australia, Aborigines; Indians, North American; New Zealand, Maori; India, Hindus Islam, see India Jackson, William, Bishop of Oxford 129 James I, King of England 4 Jenkinson, John, Bishop of St David’s 132, 140 Jerusalem, Bishopric in 219 Johnson, Revd Richard, chaplain in New South Wales 224–6 Johnson, Samuel, writer 148 Jones, William, Indian orientalist 132 Kaye, John, Bishop of Bristol 131, 133–4, 177 Kendall, Thomas, CMS missionary in New Zealand 262 Kennett, Bishop White, Bishop of Peterborough 19, 60, 77–9, 174

Index Keppel, Frederick, Bishop of Exeter, Earl of Cornwallis 54 Labouchere, John 205, 212 Land, colonization and 66, 77–8. 109, 244–5, 271–2 Latitudinarians 44–6, 65 Law, George, Bishop of Chester 139–40, 149 Leland, John, theological writer 47 Leng, John, Bishop of Norwich 65 Lisle, Samuel, Bishop of St Asaph 62 Lloyd, William, Bishop of Worcester 38 Locke, John, English philosopher 51, 65–7, 78 London Missionary Society 181 Longley, Charles, Bishop of Ripon 280–1 Luxmore, John, Bishop of Hereford 138 Macquarie, Lachlan, Governor of New South Wales 226–7 Maddox, Isaac, Dean of Wells 52–3, 72, 74 Majendie, Henry, Bishop of Chester 126, 148, 149 Malcolm, Sir John, Indian administrator 153, 154 Manners-Sutton, Charles, Archbishop of Canterbury 207 Manning, Henry, Archdeacon of Chichester 206–7, 212, 218 Mansel, William, Bishop of Bristol 129 Markham, William, Archbishop of York 105

319

Marsden, Revd Samuel, Senior Chaplain in New South Wales 225–6, 243, 256, 260–1, 268 Marsh, Herbert, Bishop of Peterborough 176–7, 230–1 Maunsell, Revd CMS missionary in New Zealand 258, 271–2 Metcalf, Lord Charles, diplomat 153 Methodism 82. 226, 259 Middleton, Thomas, Bishop of Calcutta 124, 178–9, 181, 185, 187, 207 Mill, James, Utilitarian philosopher 154 Missions, see Church Missionary Society; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; Evangelical missions; Protestant missionary movement; Danish; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; Imperialism, missions and; civilization and missions; Imperialism, religion and Local resistance to 184–5 Missionary activism 174–5 Moore, John, Bishop of Ely 38 Monk, James. Bishop of Bristol and Gloucester 217 Moravians 12, 113 Munro, Sir Thomas, Indian administrator 153 Murray, George, Bishop of Rochester 215–16 Murray, Sir George, Colonial Secretary 230

320

Index

Musgrave, Thomas, Bishop of Hereford 280, 281 National Society for the Education of the Poor 231 Natural religion 45–6 Navigation Acts 227 New Zealand 8, 22, 162, 221, 222, 236 see also Church Missionary Society; Colonists; Church of England; Selwyn, Bishop Annexation 256, 267–70, 274 Auckland 276, 279 Bay of Islands 256, 271 Maori 22, 221, 255, 257, 259, 260–72, 276–7, 287–8 Cannibalism 263–4 Identity of 260–3, 271 Port Nicolson (Wellington) 257–8 Treaty of Waitangi 269–70 New Zealand Company 267 Newman, Revd John Henry 218, 219 Newton, Thomas, Bishop of Bristol 57 North, Brownlow, Bishop of Worcester, 105 Orientalists 151–2, 153–4, 170, 181–2 Osbaldeston, Richard, Bishop of Carlisle, 62 Oxford Movement 14, 39, 216, 218, 249–50, 272, 274–5 Paraguay 127 Peel, Sir Robert, British prime minister 208, 213 Pelham, George, Bishop of Bristol 136, 142, 151

Pelham, Henry, third Earl of Chichester, 203–4, 212 Percy, Hugh, Bishop of Carlisle 141 Perry, Charles, Bishop of Melbourne 251, 252 Phillip, Capt Arthur, Governor of New South Wales 223, 224 Phillpot, Henry, Bishop of Exeter 217 Pitt, William, the younger 123, 143 Pompallier, Bishop Joseph, Catholic Bishop of New Zealand 259, 260 Pope, Alexander 43 Porteus, Beilby, Bishop of Chester 38, 42, 97–9, 143, 145 Potter, John, Archbishop of Canterbury 87 Pratt, Josiah, secretary of the Church Missionary Society 6, 37 Protestant missionary movement 9, 12–14 Puritans 3, 4, 42, 59 Quakers 80, 82, 115, 127 Randolph, John, Bishop of Oxford 125–6, 127 Reform Act 1832 213, 232 Reformation, Protestant 78, 250 Roman Empire 119, 163, 250 Roy, Ram Mohan, Indian philosopher 186–7 Ryder, Henry, Bishop of Gloucester, 38, 129–30, 133, 134–5, 140, 195 Sabbatarianism 121 Saye and Sele, !st Viscount 4

Index Scott, Ven Thomas, Archdeacon of New South Wales 227, 228–30, 246 Scotland, 2, 20, 214 Scottish Episcopalians 113, 114 n. 247, 115, 153 Scripture, see Bible Secker, Thomas, Bishop of Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury 53, 95, 112–13 Selwyn, George, Bishop of New Zealand 22, 221, 251, 252, 273–80, 281, 289 Seven Years War 55 Sherlock, Thomas, Dean of Chichester, Bishop of London 42, 115 Shipley, Jonathan, Bishop of St Asaph 103–4 Shuttleworth, Philip, Bishop of Chichester 280 Simeon, Revd Charles, English clergyman 123 Slaves, 16, 68, 84–103, 110–11 see also Theology, baptism and slavery Abolition, 97, 99–100 Amelioration of 100–3 Codrington [SPG] plantations 90–1, 98–9, 102 Humanity of 85–8 Slaveowners 84, 85, 86–9. 92–3, 94, 96–7 Slave trade 95–8 Smalbroke, Richard, Bishop of LichWeld and Coventry 46–7, 51 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 13, 14, 16, 157, 178, 199 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign parts

321 32–3, 108, 128, 149, 174–5, 196, 199, 287 Australia 232, 235, 237, 241 Annual reports and sermons 6, 10, 17–18, 41–2 Foundation 6, 10, 13, 16, Historians on 11–16, Missions and congregations, North America 11, 17, 21, 42, ch. 2, 247 Albany, NY 50–1 Augusta, GA 73–4 Boston 50, 73, 75 Bristol, NE 75, 93 Brunswick, NC 92 Catechizing School, NY 17, 92 Chester, Penn 82–3 Goose Creek, SC 88–9, 93 Hempstead, Long Island 47 Jamaica, Long Island 82 Lancaster, Penn 55–6 Leweston, Penn 75, 87 Newcastle, Penn 75 Nova Scotia 55 Providence, RI 73 Radnor, Penn 83 St Andrew’s, SC 74, 89 St George’s, SC 93–4 St John’s, SC 91 St Philip’s, Charlestown, SC 94 Stratford, Conn 47, 82 Stratford, NY 72 Trenton, NJ 73 Trinity Bay, Newfoundland 73 Missions, missionaries India Bishop’s College, Calcutta 124, 144, 151, 179, 189–90 Christian, Revd Thomas, Puharee hill tribes 179–80, 188

322

Index

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign parts (cont.) Mill, Revd W. H., Principal of Bishop’s College, Calcutta 179, 180, 187, 189–90 Support for 36–40, 42–3 Spain 1, 4. 11, 18, 57, 63, 81 Sparke, Bowyer, Bishop of Ely 129, 138–9, 176 Stanhope, George, Dean of Canterbury 38, 61–2, 69–70, 85 Stanley, William, Dean of St Asaph 61, 68 Stevens, William, High Church banker 16 Stubbing, Henry, Chancellor of the Diocese of Salisbury, 72 Sumner, Charles, Bishop of Winchester 38, 136, 204–5, 212 Sumner, John, Archbishop of Canterbury 253, 281 Sydney, Viscount, Home Secretary 223–4 Syrian Orthodox Church 137 Tenison, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury 112 Test and Corporation Act 213, 215, 231 Theology, 166, 172–3, 193, 245, 283–8 see also Civilization and missions; Imperialism, Religion and Anti-Catholicism 81, 109–10, 127–8, 25860 Baptism and slavery 87–8, 92–5, 111

Christian and non-Christian 48 Christianity as universal 62–3 Church and state 106, 114–16, 117, 193–7, 236–7, 249–50 Commercial theology 67–71, 106, 109, 135, 173, 191–2, 281 Evangelism 43–4, 134–5 Heathens, heathenism 25, 72, 167, 169–70, 262–3, 281 Idolatry 129, 130, 131, 170, 171, 180 Light and darkness 48–9, 61–2, 129, 168, 280 Providence, doctrine of 19, 25, 60–4, 106–9, 136–7, 146, 158–9, 167, 191–2, 211, 231, 254, 280–1 Satan (Devil) 4, 25, 48, 60, 130, 131, 132, 169–70, 180, 189, 262–4, 280 Truth and falsehood 48, 130 Thomas, John, Bishop of Rochester 105–6 Thompson, Revd Marmaduke, chaplain at Madras 169 Thurlow, Thomas, Bishop of Lincoln 124, 149 Tindall, Matthew, Deist writer 46 Tomline, George, Bishop of Winchester 231 Tories 38, 42, 207, 208, 212, 222, 227 Tractarians see Oxford Movement Trevor, Richard, Bishop of St David’s 74, 96 Trimnell, Charles, Bishop of Norwich 38, 65, 112

Index Tswana Nonconformist mission 27–8 Trade, see Commerce Utilitarians 152, 154 Vale, Revd Benjamin, chaplain in New South Wales 226–7 Van Mildert, William, Bishop of LlandaV 177 Vellore, mutiny of 124 Venn, Henry, Secretary of the Church Missionary Society 219–20, 289 Virginia Company 3–4 Waddington, Edward, Bishop of Chichester 47 Wake, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 87 Walpole, Horace, politician 43, 112, 114, 114 n. 250 Walpole, Robert, prime minister 86 War of Spanish Succession 64 Warburton, William, Bishop of Gloucester 54, 96 Warren, John, Bishop of Bangor 106 Waugh, John, Dean of Gloucester 48, 68 Wellesley, Richard, Lord Mornington, Marquess of Hastings 143, 157, 158, 179 Wellington, Duke of, prime minister 227, 231

323

West Indies, 5, 15, 17, 77, 92, 97, 98, 99, 200–1, 214 see also slaves Whigs 32, 38, 42, 191, 203, 214, 231, 234, 252 White, Revd Joseph, orientalist 124, 124 n. 20 WhiteWeld, Revd George, English clergyman and revivalist 70, 71 Wilberforce, Samuel, Bishop of Oxford 218 Wilberforce, William, politician 143, 155, 161–3 Wilcox, Joseph, Bishop of Gloucester 68 Williams, Revd Henry, CMS missionary in New Zealand 256, 259, 269, 273 Williams, John, Bishop of Chichester 44–6, 47, 72, 81, 84, 89–90, 94–5 Williams, William CMS missionary in New Zealand 256 Willis, Richard, Dean of St Paul’s, London 41, 63–4, 67, 81 Wilson, Revd Daniel, East India Company chaplain 168 Winthrop, John, Puritan 4 Women 35, 89, 171, 182, 219 Wren, Sir Christopher, architect 41 Wynn, John, Bishop of St Asaph 49 Zinzendorf, Count, Moravian founder 12

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