This article sets out to identify the significance of George Augustus Selwyn, the first Bishop of New Zealand, for the development of the Anglican Communion. The evidence on which it is based is derived from secondary sources, most obviously the two-volume life of Selwyn by H.W. Tucker written immediately after Selwyn’s death. Detailed work on Selwyn’s papers and the papers of Archbishops Sumner, Longley and Tait will almost certainly lead to modifications in the details of the paper, but will probably not detract from Selwyn’s significance in having the qualities, personality, experience and background, to develop synodical government in the Anglican Church in New Zealand, independent of the state, and different from the English model. He provided a model for some other churches in the Anglican Communion, most obviously for the Anglican Church in South Africa. This article also demonstrates Selwyn’s concern to create a framework within which the churches of the Anglican Communion could relate to one another, and to include the Episcopal Church in the United States within the Anglican Communion.

George Selwyn, who was appointed first Bishop of New Zealand in 1841, brought highly significant gifts and experiences to the role of a pioneer missionary bishop. He was a member of the secure English upper middle class world of professional men who provided a network of support and encouragement for men of ability. His father was a barrister, a Queen’s Counsel, Treasurer of Lincoln’s Inn, and had been chosen to instruct Prince Albert, on his marriage to Queen Victoria, in the constitution and laws of his adopted country. Selwyn began his schooling at Dr Nicholas’s school in Ealing, reckoned to be the leading preparatory school in England, where his fellow pupils included John Henry Newman, the future theologian and cardinal. He proceeded to Eton, where his friends included William Gladstone, and then to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he was second in his year in the Classical Tripos. He was an athlete, and represented the university in the first boat race in 1829; he bathed in the river daily, whatever the weather; and he and some friends once walked, overnight, in 13 hours, non-stop from London to Cambridge.Footnote 3 Being good on water and land would be an important attribute for a missionary bishop in New Zealand.

He returned to Eton as tutor to the Earl of Powys’s sons. He proved good with a younger generation of Etonians, some of whom he subsequently recruited as missionary priests, and later bishops for New Zealand. Perhaps it was the experience of the rough democracy among public school boys that sowed the seeds of his later style of leadership and governance in the Church in New Zealand. In his spare time he was assistant curate of Windsor, where he did what many contemporary energetic, competent, young priests were doing; setting up and running parish organizations, building a school, and raising money for a new mission church. He courted the daughter of a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir John Richardson, whose country house was at Bray, on the opposite side of the Thames from Eton. If, late at night, he took the ferry across the river, it would have been on the wrong side for the ferryman in the morning, so, ever considerate and resourceful, Selwyn ferried himself across, removed his clothes, took the ferry back, and swam back to his clothes. This too he not uncommonly did as a bishop in New Zealand.

He grew up among comfortably-off and devout lawyers and merchants, many of whom were associated with the Hackney Phalanx, the members of which, laity and clergy, were committed to living devout and holy lives, and believed in the apostolicity and catholicity of the Church of England, and that the Church needed to be constitutionally reformed to be fit for purpose as the Church of the nation and Empire. Joshua Watson, the leading light of this network, at whose dinner table Selwyn first met William Broughton, the Bishop of Australia, had initiated reforms of the great Church societies, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), and established the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, and the Incorporated Church Building Society. Most English bishops and senior churchmen were part of this network, as were many politicians. They encouraged overseas missions, and especially the establishment of overseas dioceses, to provide catholic and apostolic oversight of congregations of settlers, and to initiate missionary work among indigenous peoples, especially through providing education for the children of leaders and elites. They were among the main supporters of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund established in 1840.

It was also, however, an uneasy world. The Church of England was, for the first time, competing for adherents. It was feared that Roman Catholics, recently permitted to vote and hold civic office, were resurgent, and that protestant dissenters from the Church of England, similarly recently released from civil disabilities, were hostile to, and gaining ground on the established Church, and challenging its rights as the national church. The structures of a confessional state with a national church, which in the sixteenth century had been designed to free the Church in England from the dominating interests of the papacy, while recognizing that the Church of England remained part of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, remained in place. However, the legislation that permitted dissenters and Roman Catholics in 1828 and 1829 to vote, also permitted them to sit in the House of Commons which, since the Reformation legislation, had functioned as the representative body of the laity of the established Church of England.

Many churchmen believed that the politicians who had supported this legislation no longer had the best interests of the Church at heart. Politicians, they realized now, had to attend to a broader electorate and a House of Commons which included Roman Catholics and dissenters, who opposed grants or legislation that appeared to privilege the established Church. Many churchmen feared that even apparently devout and well-meaning ministers of the Crown might introduce legislation into a no longer wholly Anglican Parliament, and interfere with and rationalize the Church. Their worst fears were fulfilled when the government, in 1833, introduced legislation to amalgamate the smaller Irish dioceses of the United Church of England and Ireland. This provoked John Keble’s denunciation and in association with Selwyn’s old school fellow, John Henry Newman, he launched the Tracts for the Times to radically expound the catholicity of the established Church. This led some traditional high churchmen, including Selwyn, to consider how a representative form of government independent of Parliament might be achieved for the Church.

Cautious churchmen were made more anxious when popular journalism compared the alleged riches of cathedral chapters and bishops with the paucity of, and financial poverty of parishes in the poorest parts of industrializing towns. This, it was claimed, inhibited the Gospel being preached and the sacraments administered to the poor, and influenced the government to establish a Commission to review the financial needs of the Church, and how best to meet them. Selwyn contributed to the debate with a pamphlet on cathedral reform, proposing deans and chapters as the centre of diocesan administration and providers of a diocese’s central educational resources. He was in close touch with Gladstone about his reforming ideas, which also included a scheme to combine the great societies of the Church – SPG, SPCK, the National Society and the Incorporated Church Building Society – in four departments, based at St Paul’s Cathedral, with branches in each diocese. In 1840 he declined the National Society’s offer of the principalship of its proposed training institute for schoolmasters, on the grounds that he had long resolved never to take an office not strictly ecclesiastical and under the immediate control of a bishop.Footnote 4 He had also come to view, perhaps influenced by his friend Samuel Wilberforce’s book on the American Church, published in 1837, that overseas missions should be led by ‘missionary bishops’.Footnote 5

Selwyn’s background and experience influenced his style and strategy as a ‘missionary bishop’ and an Anglican statesman. His athleticism and ease with water, his focus on education, his traditional high churchmanship, based on patristic study and a high view of episcopal authority, and his anti-Erastianism, his ease and confidence in the corridors of power, his inclusive leadership style, and his interest in the institutional structures of the Church were all to be valuable for the future.

A New Zealand Company emerged in the late 1830s out of E.G. Wakefield’s early New Zealand Association formed to sell land to English settlers, and a Church Society for New Zealand was established to promote missionary work among settlers and Maoris, which pressed for the appointment of a bishop and three or four clergy. There was currently general pressure to establish additional new overseas dioceses, but no money to fund them. In 1840, prompted by Bishop Blomfield of London, Archbishop Howley of Canterbury called a public meeting to consider the matter, and seek funds. The father of one of Selwyn’s closest friends, Mr Justice Coleridge spoke in support of Blomfield’s case, as did Selwyn’s friend Gladstone, recently appointed Under Secretary for the Colonies, who became treasurer of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund established as a result of the meeting. The Fund agreed that the first diocese to be endowed should be New Zealand. Selwyn’s brother William, a member of the Church Society for New Zealand, was offered the bishopric, but declined it and Blomfield recommended it should be offered to his brother George.

Immediately George Selwyn’s anti-Erastianism came to the fore. He negotiated a revision of the conventional royal letters patent appointing a bishop to an overseas diocese, to remove the clauses making the patent revocable at the sovereign’s pleasure, and reserving the appointment of archdeacons in the new diocese to the Crown. He thus hoped to achieve the authority to organize his diocese without interference from the state. He also requested that his consecration should be a public occasion, in Westminster Abbey, rather than in Lambeth Palace chapel, but that was thought an unacceptable precedent.Footnote 6 Between his consecration and leaving for New Zealand Selwyn met Bishop Doane of New Jersey, who had been invited to preach at the consecration of the rebuilt Leeds parish church. Selwyn and Doane continued to correspond until Doane’s death.

Archbishop Howley wrote Selwyn a valedictory letter on behalf of the bishops who were members of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund in which he presciently said ‘Your Lordship will have the great satisfaction of laying the foundations of civilised society in New Zealand on the basis of an Apostolical Church and a pure religion’, and continued ‘Your mission acquires an importance exceeding all calculation when your See is regarded as the central point of a system extending its influence in all directions, as a fountain diffusing the streams of salvation over the islands and coasts of the Pacific’. Howley also encouraged Selwyn to write to him regularly.Footnote 7

Selwyn, like previous colonial bishops, found himself ill-equipped, other than with his own wit and past experience, to be a bishop in an overseas territory. It was unclear whether ecclesiastical laws, or authority to make new laws for the Church in new situations extended to colonies, especially colonies granted self-government. It was generally believed that meetings of clergy and laity to draw up regulations touching ecclesiastical affairs were prohibited by the Act for the Submission of the Clergy passed in 1533 as part of the English reformation legislation. Further, there were no funds to pay clergy nor to build churches or schools, and no provision for raising money for these purposes. Nor was it clear in whom any property that was acquired should be vested, nor by whom and how it should be administered, nor about pay scales for clergy, nor about how they should be appointed, nor, as colonies often attracted problematic clergy, how ecclesiastical discipline should be exercised. Bishops found themselves in a colony with no law, no rules, and uncertain power to draw up rules and laws. A colonial bishop also usually had an aggregation of disjointed clergy and laity, most of whom had no desire for a bishop to be imposed on them, whom it was suspected would interfere with the customs and practices they had established, and might introduce new ways of doing things. There were sad stories of colonial bishops who had never managed to win their way in their dioceses and were ignored by established congregations. Clergy in colonies were usually funded by one of the missionary societies, either SPG or the Church Missionary Society (CMS), who might appoint or withdraw missionaries with no reference to the bishop. Government-funded chaplains might also be appointed or dismissed by the governor of the colony without reference to the bishop. A bishop might also find himself ignored or regarded as a nuisance by the governor of the colony for which his diocese had been created.Footnote 8 The Church of England had no capacity to legislate on such matters, apart from through Parliament, which was a very uncertain body through which to steer ecclesiastical legislation. Ecclesiastical legislation was notoriously difficult to negotiate through the House of Commons.

Selwyn was a man to pioneer a new way of being church in a colony. Although he had strained relations with Henry Venn and the London committee of CMS, as had almost every colonial bishop, Selwyn initially rapidly won the allegiance of the relatively few missionaries in New Zealand.Footnote 9 They were impressed by the commitment to mission among the Maoris he had shown by learning Maori from a Maori lad on the ship on the way out. However, his good relations with the CMS missionaries did not last, and by 1846 he found himself supporting Governor Grey against Henry Williams and several other CMS missionary land claimants. Ill-feeling lasted for years.Footnote 10

One of Selwyn’s priorities in New Zealand was to achieve self-sufficiency and independence from the state, both financially and in governance, for his new church. He achieved this financially by using the SPG’s annual grants, not for revenue costs, but to invest in land, the rental from which he combined with all his own income as bishop, and money he received from other sources, in a trust fund, managed by five trustees. This provided money to build churches, schools, parsonages, and to pay clergy. This secured financial independence for the Church, and at least the partial independence of clergy from their congregations.Footnote 11 Selwyn was determined that the Church should be financially independent of the colonial legislature.

In securing self-sufficiency for his Church, Selwyn’s reference point was his study of the first three centuries of the Church, which he believed showed the monarchical idea of episcopal authority was ‘as foreign to the true mind of the Church as it is adverse to the Gospel doctrine of humility’.Footnote 12 In August 1844 he proposed to Bishop Broughton of Australia a meeting of the three Australasian bishops, and in 1845, and as a first step towards synodical and consultative government for his Church, Selwyn called a synod of the clergy of his diocese, comprising three archdeacons, four priests and two deacons to ‘frame rules for the better management of the mission and the general government of the Church’.Footnote 13

In 1846 he reported to Broughton a letter he had received from Gladstone suggesting how authority for a colonial church might be established independently of both the Crown and local legislatures. Gladstone wondered whether churches in colonies ‘do not want something in the nature of an organization beginning from below, from each congregation and its members’.Footnote 14 Gladstone also mused whether lay people should be involved. Selwyn, however, did not include lay people in his second synod in September 1847, which in his charge to the members he described as standing in succession to the ‘council of Jerusalem’, stating that he would ‘neither act without you, nor can you act without me. The source of all diocesan action is in the Bishop, and it therefore behoves him so much the more to take care that he act with a mind informed and reinforced by Conference with his Clergy’.Footnote 15 In 1849 Gladstone, as under-secretary for the colonies, followed up his letter to Selwyn by writing to all colonial bishops advising them that, in view of the rapid removal of the support of the ‘civil power’, they should look to organize themselves on the basis of a’voluntary consensual compact’ which he claimed was ‘the basis on which the Church of Christ rested from the first’.Footnote 16 Selwyn, in his thinking about the constitutional development of his Church, regularly consulted distinguished lawyers, including his father-in-law, Mr Justice Richardson, Mr Justice Coleridge, the father of his close friend Edward Coleridge, and Mr Justice Patteson, the father of his protégé, John Coleridge Patteson, and, presumably, his own father, who, as has already been noted, had instructed the Prince Consort on the British constitution.

In 1847 Broughton received new royal letters patent creating him Metropolitan of Australasia, and Bishop of Sydney, rather than Bishop of Australia. Anciently one of the duties of metropolitans was to summon other bishops within their jurisdiction to meet and confer. This Broughton did in 1850. However, although he wanted to demonstrate that Anglican bishops had authority independent of the Crown, in order to silence the jibes of Roman Catholics in Sydney, who ridiculed him, claiming that his authority was merely derived from the Crown, he hesitated to call his meeting a ‘synod’. He feared this might lead to a legal challenge from his evangelical opponents in Sydney and their friends in England, alleging that such a meeting required a royal licence under the Act of the Submission of the Clergy of 1533. Charles Perry, the evangelical Bishop of Melbourne pointed out they had taken an oath to uphold the Thirty-Nine Articles and that the declaration prefacing the Articles prohibited meetings to reform doctrine and discipline without royal assent. Although Broughton argued against Perry that they were released from this duty because the Crown had ceased to exercise the collateral duty of conserving and maintaining the Church in the colonies, he proposed the meeting should merely be regarded as a consultation of bishops resulting in issuing, not legislation, but guidance, based on their spiritual authority.Footnote 17

Selwyn continued to work steadily to achieve provincial autonomy for colonial churches, for royal supremacy had practical implications for colonial bishops. The royal supremacy reserved to the Crown the right to subdivide their dioceses and, apart from Selwyn, to appoint archdeacons without reference either to the Archbishop of Canterbury or the local bishop, which severely limited the power and authority of bishops. Selwyn was later furious when in 1856 his own diocese was subdivided, and a second bishop in New Zealand appointed without reference to him. Bishops Nixon of Hobart and Tyrrell of Newcastle and Short of Adelaide, by contrast, did not wish to assert the independence of the Church in Australasia and argued that any decisions they made should be referred to the Archbishop of Canterbury for approval and Bishop Perry proposed an archiepiscopal veto. Selwyn also proposed that colonial bishops should be chosen from among the colonial clergy, and not imported from England. He argued that clergy, as well as bishops, sitting as a separate house, should be included in future provincial synods. In this he was supported by Perry, but opposed by the other bishops.

Encouraged by a petition from the clergy and laity of New Zealand, signed by the Governor, the Chief Justice and the Attorney General calling for ‘the speedy establishment of some system of church government amongst us, which by assigning to each order in the Church its appropriate duties, might call forth the energies of all, and thus enable the whole body of the Church most efficiently to perform its functions’, Selwyn was a pioneer in Anglicanism in proposing that laity should be involved in a provincial synod. However, Broughton opposed this, perhaps because of his great difficulties with opposition of leading lay people in Sydney. The petition went on to outline ‘a plan of Church-government resembling in many points that which we are informed has proved so beneficial to our brethren in America, and which we should all be satisfied to see adopted here’.Footnote 18

The bishops agreed a compromise that bishops and clergy should comprise a synod at diocesan and provincial level, alongside a concurrent meeting of a ‘convention’ of laity. Only the synod might legislate on doctrine, discipline and ritual, with no power to alter or amend the Prayer Book, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion or the Authorized Version of the Bible. It was also required that the synod of clergy and convention of lay representatives must concur on measures affecting the temporalities of the Church and any subsequent changes to the constitution. The bishops were also particularly concerned to establish tribunals to discipline delinquent clergy, but again there was disagreement about whether laity should be represented on the tribunals, and whether appeals might be allowed to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The resolutions of the bishops’ Sydney meeting were printed and published in the churches of the province, and circulated to other churches. Selwyn left Broughton, as metropolitan, to go to London to consult Archbishop Sumner of Canterbury about how to proceed in order to secure leave to actually hold a synod in the face of suspicions of Australian clergy and laity who suspected their bishops, imported from England, of Tractarian and autocratic tendencies. Broad Churchmen, notably Archbishop Whately of Dublin, A.P. Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, and Connop Thirwall, Bishop of St David’s and most evangelicals, including Archbishop Sumner, opposed the establishment of independent synodical government in colonial churches, and wished to retain the royal supremacy in colonial dioceses, again because they feared Tractarian influence.Footnote 19

Meanwhile Selwyn continued to promote a constitution for the Church in New Zealand. He proposed a constitution which did not follow the English tradition of two houses of convocation, one comprising dignitaries and elected representatives of the clergy, and the other comprising all the bishops. Instead he drew on the example of the American Protestant Episcopal Church’s constitution for its General Convention, which had two houses, one house comprising bishops, and the other comprising lay representatives, as well as clergy. However, Selwyn did not provide for houses in his general synod, but three ‘orders’ of bishops, clergy and laity, who met and debated together but were required to vote separately on binding decisions.Footnote 20 In 1852 and 1853 he arranged public meetings in all the settlements in New Zealand to consider his draft constitution. He added amendments that were suggested at the meetings to a new draft in the form of a tabular statement with the signatures of supporters appended. This he thought would reveal the extent of difference or of agreement at the meetings. The draft was then reprinted in its amended form and recirculated, and anyone who had not already signed was invited to sign the statements which most accorded with their opinion.Footnote 21

Broughton had died during his visit to England in 1853, without securing Archbishop Sumner’s advice. When Selwyn visited London in 1854 he discovered that the Colonial Secretary had already advised the Governor General of Canada (the Anglican bishops of which had held their own synod in 1851) that the government were ‘by no means satisfied that any statutable aid was necessary for enabling the clergy and laity in that colony to meet by representative bodies for the purpose of making orders for Church affairs’.Footnote 22 In view of this Selwyn invited members of the Church in New Zealand to voluntarily associate themselves on the basis of a mutual compact, which again followed the example of the Anglican parishes in the new United States of America after the end of the American War of Independence, when they agreed a constitution based on parishes associating together.Footnote 23 By voluntarily associating together, parishes signified their willingness to submit to any laws approved by the Church’s new representative governing body. Selwyn judged it inappropriate to follow the example of the bishop of Melbourne and ask the colonial legislature to ratify the constitution. His anti-Erastianism made him wish to avoid any risk that the legislature could interfere in any way in the conduct of the Church’s business. He wanted no hint that the Church might be established.

On 14 May 1857 he called a conference of bishops, clergy and laity at Taurarua to consider the previously discussed and subsequently amended constitution, and on 13 June at a further meeting in Auckland, they adopted it. Having been appointed Metropolitan of New Zealand by royal letters patent in 1858, Selwyn, in 1859 summoned the first duly constituted provincial synod in the Anglican Communion, over which he did not preside ex officio, as the English metropolitans presided over their convocations, but was elected to preside.Footnote 24 In 1867 he took the final step to separate the Church from the Crown when he and his fellow New Zealand bishops surrendered their letters patent to the Crown, on the grounds that the right of appointing bishops in New Zealand was no longer part of the prerogative of the Crown. He also claimed that, for the future, bishops should be elected by the Church in New Zealand, not appointed on the recommendation of the Crown, and that a primate should be elected, rather than having a primatial see.Footnote 25 In this, too, he followed the Episcopal Church in the United States which then had no primate, for the presiding bishop was merely the presiding officer of the house of bishops.

At the Lambeth Conference in 1867, although the Canadian and South African churches had also established synods, Selwyn was considered the leading exponent of synodical procedures, and came with an ambition to establish a pan-Anglican synod. In this he encountered the indifference at best, and hostility at worst of the English bishops, apart from W.K. Hamilton of Salisbury, the only overtly Tractarian member of the episcopate. Selwyn recognised A.C. Tait, the Bishop of London, along with Connop Thirwall, as the prime opponents of a pan-Anglican synod for the Anglican Communion. Tait was prepared to accept a case for diocesan and provincial synods for colonial churches but believed that they should be required to accept advice on all matters from the ‘National Church’ of which he still regarded them as part. The ‘National Church’ was seen as the Church of England and the colonial dioceses, and so did not include the Scottish Episcopal Church or the then Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. There had in fact been considerable debate as to whether the Scottish and American bishops should be invited to the Conference. Tait suspected that Selwyn’s wish for a body to give a final decision on orthodoxy and heterodoxy concealed a desire to establish a body that would make a new settlement of the faith for the ‘Anglican Communion’. Tait was also very concerned about the implications for Church and State relations in England of any attempt to create a pan-Anglican synod. He was very put out when Selwyn told him that colonial bishops were not interested in the advice of the ‘National Church’. Selwyn was no doubt influenced by Robert Gray’s experience as Bishop of Cape Town, and metropolitan of the Church in South Africa in attempting to discipline Bishop Colenso of Natal for alleged heretical views. Gray had felt severely undermined by the refusal of the bishops of the ‘National Church’ to support him, when Colenso had appealed to the English courts against Gray’s authority.Footnote 26 Selwyn succeeded in securing the consent of a majority of bishops at the Conference to establish a committee to report on the relations and functions of synods, of which he was appointed chairman. However, the English bishops, although only a small minority of bishops present, were successful in avoiding any attempt to promote the idea of a pan-Anglican synod. At the end of the Conference Selwyn aroused the fury of Tait when, in seconding the vote of thanks to Archbishop Longley, he expressed regret at the lost opportunity to establish a synod for the whole communion because of the opposition of the English bishops, whom he claimed depended on the ‘broken reed’ of the State.Footnote 27

While in public, at a meeting in Oxford later in 1867, Selwyn claimed the Conference had ‘contained the germ of the greatest work done yet’,Footnote 28 Mrs Selwyn reported he was ‘sometimes quite desponding; the precious time being so frittered away’ and that he had been distressed ‘at the want of previous arrangement, at the lack of all formality, or of anything to give dignity in the eyes of the public, or honour to the brethren’.Footnote 29 American and colonial bishops had come at short notice and at great expense across vast distances to confer together and on behalf of their dioceses and churches for a mere week, only to find that a significant proportion of the ‘home’ bishops had declined to attend, and that most of those who did come seemed to have little interested in the needs of and challenges facing overseas bishops.

At the adjourned meeting of the Conference in December 1867 which received the committee reports, Selwyn, now Bishop of Lichfield, was appointed Corresponding Secretary for the Bishops of the Anglican Communion, a title which he used when corresponding with overseas bishops. As such he played the leading part in the uphill task of securing a second conference. Tait, who had succeeded Longley as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1868, was, predictably, unenthusiastic about another meeting of overseas bishops who might want to establish a pan-Anglican authoritative body. Bishops Gray of Cape Town and Wilberforce of Oxford, were also concerned about what Tait might do as chairman of a conference.Footnote 30

American and Canadian bishops fairly regularly visited England and so maintained close relations with the Church of England during the 1850s and 60s, but no English bishop had crossed the Atlantic (or visited a colonial church). When the General Convention of PECUSA had invited the English bishops to send one of their number to their 1854 meeting, they had deputed the Bishop of Madras, who was, of course, not a member of the upper house of either of the English convocations, to attend en route for his diocese, along with the secretary of SPG, the Archdeacon of Maidstone, and a layman. The well-travelled Selwyn, from 1869 back in England as Bishop of Lichfield, however, accepted an invitation from Henry J. Whitehouse, Bishop of Illinois, to visit the United States for the General Convention at Baltimore in 1871. He received a tumultuous welcome, and addressed the convention on mission, and preached twice to the convention. In one of his sermons he advocated a

Benjamin Bosworth Smith, the presiding bishop, later responded by suggesting, in a letter prompted by Selwyn, an Anglican ‘Patriarchal Council’ at either Canterbury or Lambeth, to which all the churches of the Communion should send representatives including bishops, clergy and laity, under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which Selwyn endorsed. During this visit he also visited Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec in Canada.Footnote 31

It was to Selwyn in 1872 that the Canadian bishops sent their petition to the Archbishop of Canterbury requesting him ‘to undertake an office by what ever name it may be called equivalent to that of a patriarch in the ancient church’, and to call a ‘General Conference of the Bishops of the Anglican Communion to carry on the work begun by the Lambeth Conference in 1867’.Footnote 32 Selwyn presented it to the Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation in February 1873, and pressed the case for a body that could deal with disputes in colonial churches, and could state terms of reference for proposals for unions with other churches, for example the Old Catholics, and with liturgical revision. He pointed out that, royal letters patent having been abandoned, colonial bishops were mostly consecrated overseas, and no longer took an oath of obedience to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that the bishops of the disestablished Church of Ireland were in a similar situation, and urged the importance of an understanding of the nature of the bond of union between the Church of England and its various ‘branches’ overseas. He urged them to consider ‘what is the best mode by which all the churches of the Anglican Communion shall be confederate together?’ He recommended that a ‘head’ was essential to whom the colonial churches must be united, not by law, but by voluntary compact, and that the head should be the Archbishop of Canterbury, designated as ‘Patriarch’. He further recommended that the archbishop should ‘construct a system’, on the advice of the members of these various institutions, to regulate all those points currently unregulated, and that the authority and the nature of the constituent assembly by which this would be done would need to be identified and recognized. He endorsed the Canadian bishops’ request that the archbishop should convene another conference of bishops to discuss these matters more fully than in 1867. He recommended that a conference should be held in 1875, following meetings of the American General Convention and the Canadian Provincial Synod in 1874, to consider proposals based on the committee reports from the 1867 Conference. He claimed that the colonial churches’ greatest concern was that they would diverge from the Church of England, whose ancient convocations were now meeting for legislative business. He also urged that a process was required to deal with heterodox bishops.

He raised the matter again at the April 1874 meeting of the Canterbury Convocation and also presented a petition from the West Indian bishops, and reported that the Australian bishops had called for a second conference, and that Bishop Smith had inquired about progress towards calling another conference. He further urged the need for organic union between the churches of the Communion to strengthen their capacity for mission. His proposal was seconded by Bishop Browne of Winchester. Tait agreed that the petition might be considered provided the request for a ‘patriarchate of Canterbury’ was dropped, and the date of any conference was left undetermined. Tait pointed out that it was only the Canadian and West Indian bishops who had requested a second conference, and that it had only been requested by bishops, although he allowed that the clergy and laity would probably have endorsed the request. He pointed out that any further conference of bishops could only have the authority willingly conceded to it by the various voluntary bodies whom the bishops represented. Bishop Ellicott of Gloucester proposed that any future conference should not deal with matters of faith, and, with that qualification, the motion was passed, and it was agreed to consult the upper house of the York Convocation, which also endorsed the proposal. As a consequence a committee was set up, with Selwyn as a member, to consider the possibility of a pan-Anglican conference. They reported rapidly recommending a conference be held in 1876, that the committee reports from the first conference form the agenda, and that the title of ‘primate’ should be given to the Archbishop of Canterbury.Footnote 33

Selwyn accepted a second invitation to the General Convention in New York in 1874. On the way he visited the synod of the Province of Canada in Montreal, which requested that a second conference should last for a month, to make the journey worthwhile, and that bishops should be invited to suggest items for the agenda, and that topics for discussion should be included in the letters of invitation.Footnote 34

Selwyn also visited Chicago, Faribault, Minnesota and Omaha, and Nebraska, in the United States and in Canada, Huron and Fredericton, New Brunswick, before attending the General Convention. He found the Convention’s house of deputies reserved about a second conference, suspecting attempts to control their church from abroad. Eventually they passed a resolution

The resolution only passed by 108 votes to 96, which made it abundantly clear that important decisions in the Episcopal Church were not made by bishops alone. Selwyn recognized that the proposal for a Canterbury patriarchate would be unacceptable to Episcopal laity and clergy, and abandoned the idea.Footnote 35

By April 1875 Tait had come round to the idea of a second conference, although he made clear to Bishop Kerfoot of Pittsburgh, one of the main American enthusiasts for a conference, that there could be no discussion of doctrine, or about the administration of ecclesiastical law in any diocese, and that the independence of every church must be respected. In March 1876 he wrote to all the bishops in communion with Canterbury seeking their views on a second conference, indicating that, if a majority favoured it, he would call a conference. By the end of 1876, ninety bishops had replied, with a preponderance in favour. Tait consulted Selwyn and others and, in July 1877, invited the bishops to a conference to last for four weeks in July 1878 with a similar range of topics to be covered as in 1867. Selwyn died on 11 April 1878.

In the context of the Anglican Communion Selwyn’s claim to greatness must be his determined pioneering of provincial autonomy for colonial churches, based on elected synods comprising elected representatives of clergy and laity as well as the bishops, and the election of bishops. He made a significant contribution in helping not just American bishops, but representatives of the clergy and laity in the general convention’s house of deputies feel included in the Anglican Communion, at no threat of any loss of their independence. Although he was unsuccessful in achieving a pan-Anglican synod for the whole communion, including the United States, he achieved a second Conference of the bishops of the Communion, after which there were no further doubts that conferences of bishops every decade should become the major instrument for holding together the Communion.