1 PATRON, POLITICS, AND PEWS: BOSTON ANGLICANS AND THE SHAPING OF THE ANGLO-ATLANTIC, 1686-1805 A dissertation presented by Ross A. Newton to The Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of History Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts February, 2016 2 PATRON, POLITICS, AND PEWS: BOSTON ANGLICANS AND THE SHAPING OF THE ANGLO-ATLANTIC, 1686-1805 by Ross A. Newton ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University February, 2016 3 This dissertation traces the establishment and expansion of the Church of England in New England through Boston Massachusetts’ three interrelated Anglican Churches, from the establishment of Boston’s King’s Chapel in 1686, as the first Anglican Church in New England, until the formation of the American Protestant Episcopal Church in the years immediately following the American Revolution. Using church vestry records, proprietor records, financial records, correspondence, and material culture, such as pews and communion silver, this project focuses on lay patrons and members of the community who participated in church governance and financially supported or otherwise aided church institutions and fellow congregants. Though rooted in Boston, this project examines a loose transatlantic network of patrons and interest groups, who leveraged their commercial and political expertise for the benefit of individual churches and the advancement of Anglicanism in New England. Working with imperial organs such as the London-based Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Boston’s Anglican societies profoundly reshaped the religious landscape of New England and provided for the religious needs of a diverse body of elites and persons of middling and poor means, as well as a sizable number of free and enslaved African Americans. Though the Church of England stood as a symbol of royal authority and Anglicans often served as agents of royal authority, Anglican political ideologies varied by class, occupation, and office, and was never synonymous with loyalism. This project reexamines early protests against Parliamentary measures and authority finding that lay Anglicans featured prominently in these debates and reacted pragmatically as events unfolded in Boston and in the countryside. Even as a number of Anglican loyalists removed to Halifax and England, Anglicans who remained in Boston rewrote 4 the Book of Common Prayer to align with shifting allegiances and theologies and fashion lasting American institutions. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project grew from a summer research internship for the Old North Church Foundation and docent and research experience at King’s Chapel’s interpretive program on Boston’s Freedom Trail. Past and current staff and colleagues at both sites deserve thanks, especially Elisabeth Nevin, Kristin Bezio, and Theresa Cooney. Librarians and archivists, especially at the Massachusetts Historical Society, generously assisted me in my research. Over the past years, I also spent time at the Massachusetts State Archives, the New England Genealogical Society, The Baker Library at the Harvard Business School, the Houghton Library, and Boston Athenaeum. Short term grants from Harvard’s Atlantic World Seminar and the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church allowed several weeks of research at the British National Archives in Kew and the British Library in London. Northeastern History Department’s Gillis Family Fund also supported final research through British Online Archives. My advisor Bill Fowler and committee members Anna Suranyi and Chris Parsons provided great feedback on the eventual full draft. Thank you for your patience. I also owe Karin Velez an enormous debt for helping me to take religion seriously and to appreciate the awesomeness of Jesuits. Aspects of this project benefited from feedback at a variety of conferences and workshops, including NYU’s Atlantic World Conference, the Massachusetts Colonial Society Graduate Forum on Early American History, and the McNeil Center for Early American History. Officemates, classmates, and friends at Northeastern made grad school bearable. At various stages, my honorary twin, Satya Som, as well as Colleen McCormick, 5 Amber Clifton, Marco Costantini, Malcolm Purinton, and Colin Sargent joined me in solidarity, and at Punters. Stacy Fahrenthold deserves her own lines. Thanks, bud, for cheering me on and joining me on an extraordinary number of coffee breaks and work parties. Rachel knows my feelings regarding her. She is my dearest friend and ally. Thank you for, among other things, joining me on awesome travel adventures and encouraging John and Abigail references when we were routinely commuting between Boston and Philadelphia and in daily life. Bless you for putting up with my loyalist obsession while we were in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia following the wedding of the century. Please bear with me as I turn this into a book manuscript and we enjoy more non-academic adventures. I cannot forget my longsuffering parents. Thank you both for enduring and even supporting my history endeavors. Finally, my favorite aunt and uncle with PhDs and one very special cousin-in-law get an answer to the age- old question: is your dissertation finished yet? 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgements ` 4 Table of Contents 6 Introduction: New England Anglicanism and the Atlantic World 7 Chapter 1: Establishing the King’s Church in Massachusetts, 1660-1723 26 Chapter 2: Anglicans in the World: Building and Furnishing the Church 58 of England in Boston, 1724-1775 Chapter 3: Material Culture, Race, and the Construction of Community in 124 Anglican Boston, 1724-1775 Chapter 4: Anglicanism and Authority in Revolutionary Boston, 1763-1776 165 Chapter 5: Anglicanism and Allegiance in the American Republic, 1776-1805 211 Conclusion: Boston Anglicans and the Shaping of the Anglo-Atlantic 261 Bibliography 268 7 INTRODUCTION: NEW ENGLAND ANGLICANISM AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD Though the Church of England was the majority church of men and women in England and its overseas colonies, English Protestantism remained contested throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in Massachusetts, where, in the 1630s, members of Massachusetts’s majority religious sect constructed a society centered on its Congregationalist Puritan church. Puritanism began as a moral and ecclesiastical reform movement within the Church of England to return the church to its biblical roots and strip from it all remaining vestiges of Catholicism. The term “Puritan” was initially applied to members of this religious group as a pejorative slur, which they eventually adopted as a badge of honor. Facing persecution under Charles I and Bishop Laud, Puritans ultimately “pursued political hegemony in the Puritan / parliamentarian synthesis of the Interregnum” and at sites in the Americas. For example, following Massachusetts’ 1629 charter, a Puritan standing order emphasized the establishment of ‘pure churches in a godly state” barred other Protestant sects from public worship and office holding, chiefly Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers. 1 Left largely autonomous during the chaos of the English Civil War and the short-lived Commonwealth, New England’s Puritan orthodoxy was “isolationist and suspicious of transatlantic or cosmopolitan ventures, whether military, commercial, or missionary.”2 Rather than apply the term “Puritan” anachronistically, I refer to the descendants of this religious group as their contemporaries did, as 1 Thomas Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 12. 2 Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism, 4. 8 Congregationalists, after their method of organization, or Independents i.e. denominations outside of the established Church of England. Charles II’s return to the throne in 1660 signaled a failure of Puritan hegemony in English politics. Thereafter, the Church of England or Anglican Church was once again the state church. This Church encompassed a wide variety of theological opinions, but agreed on several core tenets, chiefly the supremacy of the Bible, a form of worship centered on the Book of Common Prayer, and governance which ultimately rested on the authority of bishops and the king, who served as the head of the Church. Tensions remained within English Protestantism, as some Anglicans rejected Calvinism, with its emphasis on predestination and conversion, and the evangelical ethos often associated with that theology. Anglicans instead stressed the capacity of humankind, enlightened by reason, to earn salvation by leading upright, moral lives. The term “Anglican” has been commonly adopted to describe adherents of the Church of England in the colonies. This project uses Anglican Church and Church of England interchangeably and defines Anglicanism broadly as a church whose members recognized each other through their acknowledgement of the episcopacy who alone had the power to ordain colonial ministers and the Book of Common Prayer, which ordered weekly worship, annual festivals and celebrations, and vital sacraments. Whereas colonial Anglicans referred on occasion to the Episcopacy I restrict use of this term whenever possible until the creation of the United States’ Protestant Episcopal Church following American independence. Despite tensions