A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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territories had the responsibility of founding and providing support for parishes of the Church of England. They fulfilled this responsibility most consistently in Maryland, a former Roman Catholic colony in which a large percentage of the populace had always been sympathetic to the Church of England, and in South Carolina. The colonial religious establishment was less successful in North Carolina and Georgia, both because of the late date of enactment and because of the presence of those who had chosen to settle there precisely because of dissatisfaction with the religious situation in Virginia and South Carolina. The late date of establishment would prove less detrimental in Nova Scotia, because the church’s favored status would not end with the American Revolution.
While members of the Church of England in England were not in complete agreement about the wisdom of the church-state alliance that the English government expanded in America after 1688, many of them shared a common conception that was quite different from the dream for world evangelism of the first generation of colonists. Bishop of Gloucester William Warburton (1698–1779) would later explain this new understanding of the relationship of religion and nationhood in his Alliance between Church and State (1736). For him, the church was the soul of the state; it taught a natural religion to individuals who, as a result, became better citizens.8 Residents of the colonies in which the Church of England was established came to share a similar opinion; for them, the Church of England and civic responsibility became increasingly intertwined.9 This integrated view would, however, create problems when the American Revolution severed the ties between church and state.
The Church of England would not be able to expand its establishment to include all of the American colonies. With the exception of the partial establishment in New York, no colony between Maryland and Nova Scotia would have an established Church of England; Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and members of other denominations were too firmly entrenched. The monarchs were, however, able to take steps to encourage and support individual Church of England congregations in those areas. Queen Anne, at the urging of the latitudinarian bishops, designated certain annates and tithes, which had been diverted to the state by Henry VIII, as a fund for the support of low-income clergy.10 From this fund—the so-called Queen Anne’s Bounty—she also authorized gifts to clergy willing to travel to the colonies as missionaries. In addition, the queen made gifts to individual congregations.
During this period, supporters of the colonial Church of England founded their first parishes in Massachusetts (King’s Chapel, Boston, 1688), Pennsylvania (Christ Church, Philadelphia, 1694), New York (Trinity, New York City, 1697), Rhode Island (Trinity, Newport, 1698), New Jersey (St. Mary’s, Burlington, 1703), and Connecticut (Christ Church, Stratford, 1707).
In England, bishops appointed representatives, called commissaries, to perform functions in distant portions of their dioceses.11 In 1684 Henry Compton, the Bishop of London (1685–1715) decided that he would use this system in the American colonies. Though the colonies were not formally a part of his diocese, governmental offices and commercial houses in his diocese controlled the commerce and government of the colonies. Finding no other provision for the supervision of colonial religion, Compton adapted the commissary system to provide some leadership for the Church of England in the colonies.
In 1684 Compton appointed John Clayton (1656 or 1657– 1725) as his first commissary. Clayton was a graduate of Oxford; in the eighteenth century such graduates would come to outnumber the Cambridge graduates who had been more numerous among the clergy in the seventeenth century. At the time of his appointment, he was already in Virginia, where he would serve.12 Clayton’s term as a commissary was brief; he left the colony in May of 1686. He did make one claim to have introduced significant change during his tenure; he believed himself to “have been the first minister at his Jamestown parish to wear the surplice.”13 In 1689 Compton appointed the first long-term commissary, James Blair (1656–1743). Like his predecessor, Blair was already in Virginia. A Scot who had come to England with the support of latitudinarian Gilbert Burnet, Blair had escaped the uncomfortable reign of James II by volunteering for the mission field. He had quickly established roots in the colony, gaining an entry into the local gentry by marrying Sarah Harrison.14
As commissary in Virginia, Blair began to establish some order in the church. He set up a convocation system, sought to enforce morality laws, called annual conferences, proposed—but did not receive—ecclesiastical courts, and attempted to standardize the value of the tobacco in which clergy were paid. In 1693, Blair founded the College of William and Mary—second in age among colonial schools of higher education only to Congregationalist Harvard (1636). The Virginia House of Burgesses agreed to the idea, and English contributors, whose number included Gilbert Burnet, John Tillotson, and Robert Boyle, provided needed financial resources. Blair planned for his school to educate both future clergy and Native Americans.
Blair’s early efforts to educate Native Americans had the support of Governor Alexander Spotswood (1676–1740), who established and financed a Native American feeder school at Fort Christanna. By 1712 there were twenty Native Americans at William and Mary, and three years later the student body at Fort Christanna had risen to seventy. The Members of the House of Burgesses opposed the schools, however, and tried to ban all attempts to evangelize Native Americans. By 1717 both efforts at educating Native Americans had collapsed. A contemporaneous effort by Francis Le Jau (d. 1717) to educate and evangelize Creek and Yamasee children in South Carolina by inviting their families to live with him also was short-lived.15
The College of William and Mary proved more successful in the education of future clergy. By the 1720s a number of those who had studied at the institution were entering the ordained ministry of the Church of England. At least thirty-one would serve in colonial Virginia, with eleven others serving in other colonies.16
Blair’s success convinced Bishop Compton of the usefulness of the commissary system in the colonies. Compton and his successors not only appointed commissaries for Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, in which the Church of England was established, but also for Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. The commissary system reached its apogee during the episcopate of Edmund Gibson (Bishop of London, 1724–49). By the 1740s, commissaries were supervising Church of England clergy in nine of the colonies.17
The commissary system had certain inherent weaknesses, however. So long as the colonial clergy were in relative agreement, the commissaries were effective spokesmen. In a number of circumstances, they were able to lobby effectively for the removal of colonial governors with whose policies they disagreed. They lacked, however, the canonical authority of a bishop, could not ordain new candidates for the ministry, and were able to discipline errant clergy with only the greatest of difficulty.18
Within a few years of the introduction of the first commissaries, therefore, some members of the colonial Church of England were already calling for resident bishops. In 1706, for example, fourteen New York,