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

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.

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