In the view of British government and governors, the established church was a bulwark not only against papal authoritarianism on the one hand and irrational enthusiasm and fanaticism in religion on the other, but also against novel and upsetting ideas about how society should be organized and how people should live in it. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, republicanism — as bred in France and established in the United States — and lunatic fringes of anarchists and levellers were viewed very much as political and religious fundamentalists of various left- and right-wing persuasions are today. It requires some exercise of historical imagination now to stroll about inside a lovely old meeting house, with its antique window glass and the reeded panels on its old pine box pews, and realize that two hundred years ago many of the people in the pretty Georgian-Style Anglican church a few miles down the road, sitting under the three-decker pulpit and warming their feet on hot bricks listening to hour long sermons denouncing the Philistines, regarded those worshipping in the meeting house as dangerous incipient republican agitators who could set cities on fire and drive comfortably-off people like themselves into the woods in ox carts. But that is exactly what had happened just a few years before in New York as that old Irishman, Bishop Charles Inglis, who had been rector of Trinity Church in New York throughout the American rebellion, and had faced down George Washington’s muskets levelled at him from the front pews as he prayed for God’s blessing on His Majesty King George, could testify. Afterwards Inglis had fled with his fellow Loyalists, and in England had been consecrated Bishop for the established church in what remained of British North America under the title Bishop of Nova Scotia. In his declining years he kept pretty much to his rural retreat at Clermont, near Aylesford, in the Annapolis Valley. He had lived through it all, and had found it immensely distressing. It must never happen again! God save the king — and us! — from the twin mischiefs of republicanism in the state and enthusiasm in religion!
Photo by Graham Tuck
Bishop Charles Inglis’s well at Clermont.The inscription on the plaque reads: “This is the site of CLERMONT, the estate of CHARLES INGLIS, who was consecrated the first Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787. He purchased this land in 1790 and had this well dug in 1792. He died here on Feb. 24th, 1816.”
Chapter One
Saint Paul’s, Halifax:
Victorian Georgian
WHEN BISHOP CHARLES INGLIS SET foot ashore in Halifax on October 17, 1787, St. Paul’s Church (erected on the Grand Parade the year after the founding of the city in 1749) became, in effect, St. Paul’s Cathedral, for it was there that Inglis had his episcopal chair, or cathedra. A few weeks later, on November 25, the members of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly attended St. Paul’s in a body so that the bishop might preach to them. Twenty-nine years before, in 1758, the assembly had declared the Church of England to be the established church of Nova Scotia, even though it commanded the allegiance of a minority of the population of the colony. Inglis’s jurisdictions as bishop were defined in two royal patents: by one he was bishop of the diocese of Nova Scotia “and its dependencies” for life; by the other he had episcopal jurisdiction in the other British North America colonies and territories “at the Royal pleasure,” that is, until they too should be erected into dioceses with their own bishops.2
The St. Paul’s Church in which Charles Inglis addressed the assembly differed considerably from the building familiar to Haligonians today, especially in its exterior appearance. In 1787 St. Paul’s was a rectangular box, ninety feet long by fifty-six feet wide, in the Georgian Style, closely patterned on James Gibbs’ St. Peter’s Church, Vere Street, in the city of London, the plans for which had been published some years earlier and so were readily available. It was placed with its end elevations oriented north and south at the narrow south end of a rectangular square called the Grand Parade, set in the centre of the grid of streets that constituted Halifax.
In 1787 St. Paul’s was still very much as it had been built — or assembled, for its constituent timbers had been prefabricated in New England — in 1750. The site on which it stood was steep, sloping sharply upwards from the harbour to the hilltop that rose above the mostly flat plateau of the Halifax peninsula. The Grand Parade in 1787 was still just a bare patch of cleared ground on the slope of the hillside, for it was not excavated and levelled until 1796. Each side elevation of the church building accommodated two rows of seven round-headed windows, the upper range almost twice the height of the lower. In the centre of the north end elevation was what is commonly called a Palladian window, flanked by two pairs of windows identical to those in the east and west elevations. Set in the centre of the elevation under the Palladian window was an entry porch in which the door was flanked by double columns that supported a triangular pediment that was repeated in the gable of the building. The south end elevation was identical to that of the north except that there was no entrance under the Palladian window and the two lower-range windows of the other facade were replaced by two square-headed doorways, each surmounted by a bracketed cornice and approached by a flight of steps, four to the upper door and five to the one lower down. Set within each of the pedimented gables was a round window, or oculus, that provided light to the attic space between ceiling and roof. The corners of the building and the window surrounds were ornamented by wooden quoins that attempted to convey the impression of stone construction. The glass in the multi-mullioned windows was small paned.
Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia
A view of Halifax c. 1763, showing Government House and St. Matthew’s (Mather’s) Church on Hollis Street, and looking up George Street to St. Paul’s Church; oil on canvas by Dominique Serres, working from a drawing made by a military artist using a Camera Obscura.
Inside, galleries ran the full length of the building and across its back. At the front, below the Palladian window, a small Communion table was enclosed by a rail. The earliest photograph of the interior of the church dates from c.1859–68 and shows a high “wineglass” pulpit reached by a narrow, curved, cast iron stair set off-centre in the middle of the central nave alley; but a description of the church as it had been prior to the middle of the century, published in the Halifax Mail in 1893, suggested that there had been an earlier and different layout and arrangement of the sanctuary furniture:
The Communion Table stood against the southern wall, with a low railing before it. The pulpit - a three-decker - was a little to the west of the central aisle. On either side - east and west - were square pews for the officers of the army and navy. On either side of the centre aisle, in front of the Communion Table, were the pews for the Governor, the Admiral and the Bishop. The Governor’s pew was a miniature drawing room. It was square, luxuriously furnished with tables, a desk, chairs, etc. The Admiral’s pew was equally comfortable. Both were upholstered in crimson. The Bishop’s pew was upholstered in blue.
Set saddleback on the crest of the roof over the entrance front was a squat, four-sided tower surmounted by two octagonal cupolas, one smaller than and set above the other, each with round-headed, louvered, full-length windows in each of its eight bays. It was topped by a weathervane.
The construction of St. Paul’s was rapid (no doubt assisted by the prefabrication), and the first service in it was offered on September 2, 1750, less than three months after Governor Edward Cornwallis laid its cornerstone on June 13. Yet for the next twelve years the church is described only as “almost finished” in letters and various other written references.3 Finally, in a letter dated February 27, 1763, its rector, the Reverend John Breynton, describes it as “now compleatly