Bruton Parish and William & Mary April 23, 2016 Taylor Reveley

Friends, it’s good to be with you to celebrate the storied ties between Bruton Parish and William & Mary. Both the Parish and the College are venerable, indeed iconic, American institutions, rich with past accomplishment and potential for future service.

Imagine for a moment that we are gathered in one of William & Mary’s holy of holies: the magnificent chapel of the historic Sir Christopher Wren Building. If the walls of this august sanctuary could speak, they would sing wonderful songs about the College’s long life as an Anglican and then Episcopal school. Before the Revolutionary War, our Chancellors were Bishops of London or Archbishops of Canterbury, with two Earls thrown in for several years for body and flavor. Our professors were Anglican priests sent over from England except for the great William Small from Scotland, a polymath and physician, who was Thomas Jefferson’s beloved professor. Indeed, William & Mary was created by King William and Queen Mary to train Anglican priests for the colonists and to bring Christianity to the native Americans, though it quickly turned its prime focus to educating sons of the colonial elite.

The long-time president of William & Mary after the Revolutionary War was one James Madison, a cousin of the James Madison. William & Mary’s James Madison served simultaneously as President of the College and the first Episcopal Bishop of Virginia. Indeed, it was William & Mary’s close and lasting ties to the Anglican tradition that led our alumnus Thomas Jefferson to defect from his alma mater and repair to Charlottesville to create a new college, one state owned from birth and emphatically secular.

Alas, William & Mary’s close ties to the Episcopal Church never evolved into a formal relationship nurtured by financial support and a steady stream of Episcopalian students. Thus, in 1906 William & Mary, unable to recover from the devastation of the Civil War, ceased to be a private institution, as it had been since 1693, deeded its real estate and other possessions to the Commonwealth, and became part of the state system of higher education, all to keep a financial nostril above the waves.

But let me tell the story from the beginning.

William & Mary’s great progenitor and first president, James Blair, had another, preexisting and quite important role as well. He was the chief Anglican administrator in the colony of Virginia, appointed by the Bishop of London, who had jurisdiction over all things ecclesiastical in the colony. The industrious, ambitious Blair repaired to London in 1691 on behalf of a small, distinguished group of Virginians intent on establishing a college in their midst. Drawing heavily on his ecclesiastical connections in London, the relentless Blair pressed his case with the royal court.

Queen Mary, ever devout, was moved by Blair’s entreaties that the college, if only it were created, would produce ministers of the Gospel to nurture the souls of the colonists and evangelize the Indians. King William, with the wisdom of a good spouse but far less religious zeal, went along, and the monarchs even agreed to provide 2,000 pounds sterling for the cause.

The English attorney general and one of the lords of the treasury, Sir Edward Seymour, was less moved. There was a war going on, he said, and the crown had huge expenses to pay. He sought to rebuff Blair’s plea for support to save Virginian souls, saying, “Souls! Damn your souls! Make tobacco!”

But piety and the royal will prevailed, and, in 1693, a royal charter – the only royal charter for a colonial college issued by the reigning monarchs themselves, as opposed to royal governors – established the College of William & Mary in Virginia. In the words of its charter, the College was created “to the end that the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a Seminary of Ministers of the Gospel, and that the Youth may be piously educated in good Letters and Manners, and that the Christian Faith may be propagated among the Western Indians.”

1 The royal charter was extremely kind to its prime advocate, the worthy Reverend Blair. It named him not only an original member of William & Mary’s board of visitors but also the board’s first rector, that is, chairman. More important and quite remarkable, the charter also made Blair president of the College for life. In short, he was named to lead William & Mary until he shuffled off his mortal coil. I must say, speaking from the fraught perspective of a university president in the early 21st century, the ambitious Blair did unusually well for himself. He got a presidency for life by royal decree and, as president, initially reported to himself as rector of the board of visitors. In a word favored by the young these days, awesome!

As emphasized already, the Reverend Blair was also the Bishop of London’s commissary or chief lieutenant in Virginia, a post he’d held since 1689 when he was rector of Varina Parish in Henrico County. Upon his return from London with William & Mary’s royal charter, he became rector of Jamestown Parish, and, then he moved on to Bruton Parish. From 1710 until his death in 1743, Blair served simultaneously as rector of Bruton Parish and president of William & Mary, a thorough intermingling of church and academy.

Thus Blair was Bruton Parish’s rector when this marvelous church house was built. And he was president of William & Mary for its crucial first 50 years. Beyond possessing serious capacity as a leader and great personal ambition, James Blair clearly had the constitution of an ox and the staying power of a bull elephant.

Until the American Revolution, all of William & Mary presidents were simultaneously the Bishop of London’s Commissaries in Virginia, with one exception. Only the Reverend William Yates, who served from 1761 to 1764, didn’t make the commissary cut.

Indeed, all William & Mary presidents from 1693 until 1814 were Anglican or Episcopal priests. So for the College’s first 121 years, it was consistently led by men of the cloth from the Church of England or its American progeny.

And four of William & Mary’s first nine presidents, including the just mentioned Yates, were simultaneously Bruton Parish’s rector.

Truly, for a very long time, William & Mary’s and Bruton Parish’s ties ran deep, incestuous even.

Bruton Parish itself, if not its current church house, is one of the tiny handful of entities in North American senior to William & Mary. The Parish dates to 1674, and the site of its first church house determined the location the College’s first facility, now known as the Wren Building. William & Mary’s board voted, quote, “to erect the College . . . at that place, as near the Church as convenience will permit.” The Reverend Blair oversaw the construction of the initial College building, the Wren, and soon thereafter he oversaw the construction of church house now marking its 300th anniversary.

James Blair was an extraordinary mortal, who did wondrous deeds and much good, but, like all humans, he had his feet of clay. Before William & Mary was fully operational, Blair insisted on drawing his full annual salary, 150 pounds, a salary which he drew even in years in which the rest of the faculty were not paid. And Blair paved the way for institutions, not just individuals, to own slaves. Both the Church of England and William & Mary began doing so under his leadership.

In 1726 Virginia’s colonial Governor, Hugh Drysdale, stressed the importance of the College’s role as a seminary, linking its fortunes to “furnishing your Churches with a Sett of Sober Divines.” William & Mary did work at its charge of pious education. In 1732, the College added the chapel wing to the south side of the Wren Building. Morning and evening chapel was required of the students every day as well as church attendance once a week. On Sundays William & Mary students made the short walk to Bruton Parish and sat in the loft reserved for them.

The much revered colonial governor, Lord Botetourt, made the short journey between College and Parish church in reverse direction from the students. On October 19, 1770, his funeral was held in the Parish church and his mortal remains then moved to the College Chapel to rest in the crypt below the Chapel floor. The College still possesses what remains of the Baron Botetourt.

2 The decades leading up to the Revolution were good to both Bruton Parish and William & Mary, sustained as we were by English largesse and by the fruits of Williamsburg’s prosperity as the center of Virginia’s political and economic life. The Revolution, alas, brought an end to those good old days. The English developed a bad attitude about feeding ungrateful subjects and Virginia’s capital moved to Richmond to be further removed from British invasion by sea.

After the Revolution, American colleges entered a time of unusual student unrest and, at times, violent behavior. A letter from March of 1798 describes a particularly appalling incident of student debauchery in Williamsburg:

The other evening a large party made an attack upon the sacred property of God; the Communion Table was broken into a thousand pieces, all the prayer Books and Bibles scattered about the Church Yard, one winder entirely destroyed. An offence so heinous, called aloud for punishment. The Bishop and professors talked high of expulsion. But the party was so numerous, and many of them so respectable, that, although they had direct proof, nothing was done.

Four years later, in 1802, the Connecticut Courant reported another dastardly incident in which William & Mary students, protesting the expulsion of two of their own for dueling, “went to the church, broke and destroyed all the windows, cut down the pulpit.”

Despite the havoc, James Madison, who served as William & Mary president longer than any but Blair, holding the post from 1777 to 1812, kept College/Parish ties close. This is not surprising since, as we’ve already heard, President Madison was also Bishop Madison of the Episcopal Church in Virginia. From 1804 until 1839, William & Mary’s commencement exercises were held at Bruton Parish Church on the 4th of July. The first such commencement was described as follows:

About ten o'clock the inhabitants of the town assembled in the Church. Shortly after, the President and Professors of William and Mary College, entered in procession, at the head of the Students. We had solemn music from a very grand organ, accompanied by clarinets, violins and bass viol; and then a prayer from the President of the College, Bishop Madison, very justly adapted to the day. We were entertained with several very handsome Orations from students of the College

The “very grand organ” suffered an unfortunate fate. Originally installed in 1756, it was sold in 1828 along with ornate furnishings like the high corner pulpit and flagstone flooring to help fund the modernization of the church undertaken at that time. The church, no longer the capitol parish, like William & Mary, no longer the capitol college, was both poor as proverbial church mice.

Thomas Jefferson’s alienation from William & Mary because it remained a church school and his creation of a secular, state-owned institution of higher learning in Charlottesville took much of the bloom off what was left of William & Mary’s rose. Then came the Civil War.

That awful conflict brought no relief to either College or parish. Quite to the contrary. Our buildings served as hospitals for the wounded and dying. The town and campus were occupied by Federal troops for three years, following Confederate withdrawal after the Battle of Williamsburg in the spring of 1862. The campus was an occasional front in the war thereafter. The Parish emerged from the war in somewhat better shape the College, which had been largely destroyed by Federal forces.

Benjamin Stoddert Ewell, a Presbyterian layman, had reluctantly assumed William & Mary’s presidency in 1854 despite strongly encouraging the board of visitors to pick an Episcopal priest, or at least someone with close ties to Episcopalians. Ewell himself followed the Right Reverend John Johns, the Assistant Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, who was president from 1849 to 1854.

In the wake of the Civil War, William & Mary struggled to attract students -- no great surprise given its condition. In the five years before the war, only one out of three students were local. In the years immediately after the war, three out of four students came from Williamsburg or James City County. Our 3 matriculation records also show a marked shift in denominational affiliation under President Ewell. Under Bishop Johns, more than 90 percent of the students were Episcopalians. This dropped to 70 percent by the start of the war and fell to less than half the students in the aftermath.

Ewell struggled mightily to entice the Episcopal Diocese to formally adopt the College. In its first 181 years, William & Mary awarded a total of 60 honorary degrees. During the eight years from 1866 to 1874, it awarded 64 more, and more than 60 percent of these honorary degrees went to Episcopal priests or bishops. The College courted the Episcopal ruling elect assiduously, shamelessly. In 1879, William & Mary’s board created a committee to, quote, “confer with the Bishop and Council of the Diocese of Virginia on the subject of a closer connection of the Diocese with our venerable and honored institution.” But, sadly, all to no avail.

In June 1882 the College reached its nadir. The College had shrunk to three students, retained only $33,000 of its ante-bellum endowment, had $30,000 in debts, and the Wren Building was crumbling. William & Mary closed its doors. The stalwart, intrepid President Ewell rang the Wren bell each October to signal the start of a new academic year and maintain the College’s charter, and to keep faith that the College would rise again. But only after a bit of state support was caged in 1888 could William & Mary truly reopen. Finances remained hopelessly fragile. So, in 1906, after 213 years as a private institution with a self-perpetuating Board of Visitors, the College of William & Mary deeded all that it had to the Commonwealth of Virginia, disbanded a board of visitors organically descended from the first visitors of 1693 and came under the jurisdiction of a board appointed by the governor of Virginia du jour. With state ownership came an obligation to put away Anglican and Episcopal raiment and don secular garb.

Of course, we know that was not the end of the ties between Bruton Parish and William & Mary. In 1923, Reverend W. A. R. Goodwin, Bruton Parish’s rector from 1903 to 1909 and again from 1926 to 1938, returned to Williamsburg to direct an endowment campaign for the College and head the department of Biblical Literature and Religious Education. Goodwin was instrumental in John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s restoration from 1928 to 1932 of the College’s three oldest buildings, the Wren, the Brafferton, and the President’s House. So also Bruton Parish Church was restored to its colonial appearance by 1939. It is no accident that the Reverend Goodwin’s portrait hangs in the Wren Building in the company of graven images of the College’s presidents.

Since 1942, Bruton Parish’s Canterbury Association has served as the Episcopal ministry to William & Mary students. Bruton Parish and the Diocese of Southern Virginia have funded a chaplain to the College since 1970, and the Canterbury Association holds weekly services in the Wren Chapel. Today, every freshman marches past Bruton Parish Church led by fife and drum on the way to campus during orientation.

It is telling that through the centuries, seven Bruton Parish rectors served also as William & Mary presidents. Eight Bruton Parish rectors held the title of “master” or “professor” at William & Mary.

Though the head of the Anglican now Episcopal church in Virginia and the head of the College are no longer one and the same as they were for William & Mary’s first century, the College grew up in the embrace of the church.

There remains the abiding “what if” about William & Mary and Episcopalians. What if, in response to Jefferson’s alienation from the College as a church school, the Episcopalians had joined hands with William & Mary as the Congregationalists did with Harvard and Yale and the Presbyterians with Princeton? What if the Episcopalians had sent sufficient students and the funds to sustain the College after the devastation of the Civil War? What then -- would William & Mary today be a private university, perhaps the southern-most member of the Ivy League? Would its heritage as child of the Anglican and Episcopal communions be even stronger?

Enough from me!

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