- AHS
Australian Historical Studies
- BC
Brisbane Courier
- JAS
Journal of Australian Studies
- JRAHS
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
- MBC
Moreton Bay Courier
- QDG
Queensland Daily Guardian
- SMH
Sydney Morning Herald
- VS
Victorian Studies
Recent scholarship has shown increasing interest in the gendered nature of Anglican history in Australia.Footnote 1 Aspects of Anglican women's experience of colonial Queensland life are revealed in their letters and diaries, but unfortunately few of their husbands or brothers seemed to have shared their literary proclivities. More often than not public sources provide the only data for men's activities and it is to newspapers, as a distinctive medium for public debate in the period, that we will turn here. In public debate about church affairs it is possible to discern some of the ways in which Anglican men perceived their Church, how they thought, spoke and wrote about it. Significant in their perception was the Church's Protestant nature, and the rhetoric they used in public debate often drew upon anti-Catholic, anti-Tractarian and popular Protestant polemic that had been in use in Britain. There had been many events in Britain in the first two-thirds of the century that precipitated outbursts of anti-Catholic feeling in particular. Notable were debates about the Test and Corporation Acts, the Catholic Emancipation Act, education in England and Ireland, the Maynooth grants, the conversion of leading Tractarians to Roman Catholicism, the creation of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England (the ‘Papal Aggression’), the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by Pius ix and the demands for government inspection of convents.Footnote 2 This article focuses upon three debates on Anglican matters in Brisbane newspapers in the years 1855, 1864 and 1865. These were coloured by similar anti-Catholic and popular Protestant rhetoric to that used in England. In exploring public debate about what the Anglican Church ‘should’ be, issues of gender, authority, churchmanship and class are addressed.
The Moreton Bay District, on the east coast of Australia, was originally part of New South Wales, beginning as a penal colony in 1824.Footnote 3 This short-lived colony closed in 1840, when most of the population returned to Sydney. Partly in response to the rapid settlement of the hinterland by sheep squatters on the Darling Downs, the district was opened to free settlers from 1842 and in 1859 it became part of the new colony of Queensland, with Brisbane as its principal town. The population of the district in 1841 was 200, growing steadily to 23,520 by 1859 and to almost 100,00 by 1868.Footnote 4 Brisbane itself grew from a mere handful of caretaker convicts and their overseers in 1842 to 960 in 1846, and 14,256 in 1868.Footnote 5
The colony was not Victorian England: immigrants forged a new society from the values that they brought with them. These values had a diverse provenance. Most of the colonial population was English-born, or born of English parents. Next most numerous were the Irish and those of Irish extraction. There was a much smaller, but no less influential population of Scots. Broadly speaking, the English and Scots were Protestants and the Irish were Roman Catholic.Footnote 6 It is the denominational affiliation which is perhaps more important at this point: in 1864, 45·9 per cent of the population was Anglican, 23·2 per cent was Roman Catholic and 20 per cent belonged to other Protestant denominations. Numerically, then, an alliance of Anglicans and other Protestants had great potential hegemonic strength. It is not surprising that this was the direction of the process of social formation.
Of particular significance in the development of the colony was the arrival of three boatloads of immigrants in 1849 with more than 500 new settlers, all from Evangelical Churches. This project was the work of the Presbyterian minister, John Dunmore Lang, who was concerned to combat the growing influence of Roman Catholicism and Tractarianism (‘Popery and Puseyism’) in New South Wales.Footnote 7 The power of this group in the small colonial population has been long been acknowledged, not only in the ‘pan-Protestant’ vision behind the United Evangelical Church that they founded in Brisbane, but also in their influence in municipal politics and the press. If, as it has been claimed, some of these immigrants had been influenced by Chartism, and were ‘in favour of liberalism and even radicalism’, their willingness to be involved in public life is understandable.Footnote 8 For example, James Swan, who had worked on Lang's newspaper The Colonist in Sydney, and who launched the Brisbane Moreton Bay Courier in 1846, had Chartist connections.Footnote 9 Lang's immigrants used the Courier very effectively as a platform for their views and as a vehicle of political organisation. By these means they initiated an early Protestant hegemony that was remarkably resilient.Footnote 10
With the proclamation of the colony of Queensland in 1859, the Anglican diocese of Brisbane was established by means of letters patent issued by the crown, with Edward Wyndham Tufnell as its first bishop. Tufnell was an old-fashioned High Churchman, but his Oxford background and friendships with known Tractarians made him vulnerable to charges of ‘Puseyism’, and his political opponents were often lavish in their criticism.Footnote 11 Some of this came from within the Anglican community itself. Many ‘Protestant’ Anglicans had strong reservations about Tractarianism, especially the innovations in worship that began to filter into the Church in England from the 1850s onwards – innovations that were perceived to have a Romeward trend.Footnote 12 They identified themselves as being heirs of the Protestant Reformation in England, and consequently had no sympathy with Roman Catholicism or with the colonial Irish. Within the Anglican fold, they ostracised anyone who was suspected of Tractarian or ritualist sympathies, treating them as ‘Romanisers’. Wariness of any form of innovation was an expression of conservatism in theological, social and political matters.
Colonial gender roles were built upon the values that British emigrants had brought to colonial Queensland. Of particular importance was the notion of ‘separate spheres’, which placed women in the domestic sphere regardless of their social or economic class, and men in the public sphere.Footnote 13 It was on the basis of their citizenship, their right to the franchise, that men claimed their role in public political life. The restrictive nature of the franchise excluded all women and most working-class men from voting. The notion that politics and public life was the realm of the landed gentry and aristocracy did not apply in colonial Queensland quite as it did in England. Most of the population was working-class and socially upwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie, and men from these classes sought public positions to give them social leverage. The rising ‘middle class’ of shopkeepers, small businessmen (often formerly skilled labourers) and professionals satisfied their political aspirations in areas of office-holding in the parish, in voluntary societies and in municipal politics, areas of activity that were within the public domain, and were part of the definition of the public sphere in which men moved and worked, and which were largely closed to women. In Sydney and Melbourne women sometimes did engage in public debate by writing to newspapers. For example, Caroline Chisholm, the promoter of emigration to Australia, did write to newspapers when issues affecting women were debated, but rarely spoke at public meetings.Footnote 14 For Brisbane, there is minimal evidence of this kind of activity before 1875. This may reflect a different kind of colonial society or simply a much younger community, but when contentious issues were raised, there is no evidence of women becoming involved in the public debate in this way. Denis Cryle, an historian of the colonial press, has noted the masculinity of the public sphere and the masculine nature of colonial press culture: newspapers, and more particularly public opinion, were a male preserve, and were a locus of ‘men's business’.Footnote 15
Newspapers can be an equivocal historical source and are not necessarily mirrors of social practice and attitudes. Letters written to the editor of a newspaper come from people who are highly motivated to present their point of view, which may well be that of a minority.Footnote 16 There is an element of theatricality in newspaper letters. The choice of writing style, the stance of the writer and the nom-de-plume adopted often reveal how the writer represents him or her self; the use of Latin and Latinisms may represent a claim to be ‘educated’, a nom-de-plume may identify the writer as a member of a party, or be a way of claiming special privilege to legitimate a point of view. For example, one who signed a letter ‘One of the Congregation’ makes a claim to be ‘more in the know’. There is often an element of performance in the way proceedings of meetings, including parish and church-related meetings, were reported in the papers.Footnote 17 If a reporter were present, speakers were capable of performing for his benefit. The hand-wringing performance of Sir Maurice O'Connell, a leading Brisbane Anglican, at a meeting to debate Bishop Tufnell's education policy, is a good example.Footnote 18 It was pitched at wavering opinion and sought sympathy for, and deference to, the bishop. Captain Wickham put on a good performance of righteous indignation during the controversy in 1855 over taking up a collection during morning service, by claiming that he had been unjustly misrepresented.Footnote 19 Again, he was garnering support for his side of the issue. Reporters also dramatised meetings by parenthetically recording the audience responses.Footnote 20
Public meetings could be theatrical. The meetings arranged by the Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops of Brisbane to debate education in 1864–5 were part serious debate and part entertainment. The towns were placarded beforehand and newspapers primed their readers with background material for the debate. The rituals of reviewing who requisitioned the meeting, of electing a chairman and of clarifying the format of the debate were assiduously observed, with the local dignitaries seated on the platform with the key speakers. Afterwards, newspapers published the proceedings in detail, often with editorial comment. This whole performance was largely by and for men. It was a gendered production. Women did not attend the meetings. They were men's business.
Church life was gendered too. Men kept control of church leadership and held a monopoly over public religious responsibilities, both clerical and lay.Footnote 21 Women were more pious and devout than men, and were encouraged to avoid meddling in controversy. Their role was as moral agents, with responsibility for elevating feelings and refining behaviour. It was in this context that Caroline Chisholm spoke of women as ‘God's police’. Men were the philosophers, with greater intelligence and a broader field for thought. In the parish men were responsible for the public face of the Church, while women undertook fundraising and sensitive philanthropic and pastoral work behind the scenes.Footnote 22 This division was essentially patriarchal, with ultimate authority in both the public and the private sphere resting on men's shoulders. Women's agency was ‘permitted’, not a right.
This article does not argue for Queensland exceptionalism. All Australian colonies had debates which targeted Roman Catholics and Tractarians. It is the timing of the debates in Queensland that is significant: popular anti-Catholicism was currently strong in Britain and alive in the memories of recent immigrants, and the debates took place in Queensland during a process of vigorous social formation. An examination of the debates sheds some light on how Anglican men asserted their authority in the public sphere on behalf of the institutional Church in order to strengthen an existing male Protestant hegemony, and in the process limited women's role in the ‘public life’ of the Church.
The collection controversy
St John's was the first Anglican church in Brisbane. In 1855 a controversy erupted within its congregation which defined some of the areas of contention for Brisbane Anglicans for years to come: anxiety about Tractarian ‘innovation’; the structure of authority in the parish'; and the role and authority of the bishop in parish affairs.
The problem was the simple act of passing a collection plate during morning service on Sundays. Bishop Tyrrell had restored the practice in obedience to the rubrics of the Prayer Book in each new church, to encourage people to contribute to the parish's expenses on a weekly basis.Footnote 23 Using the strategy of petitions and public meetings developed by English Radicals and Dissenters to seek redress of grievances, a group of forty-nine parishioners petitioned the bishop to have the practice stopped, claiming that St John's was no new church, that the congregation had been gathered before the church was built. They distinguished the church as the congregation from the church as a building.Footnote 24 Whether they took this position simply in order to oppose the bishop, or whether they were making a theological point about church polity is unclear. The petitioners were almost exclusively drawn from the small businessmen in the town. When the incumbent of the parish, H. O. Irwin, suggested that ‘men not qualified by dint of previous pursuits and the experience of their past lives should not aspire to pronounce judgment on the matter’, he acknowledged a class element in the dispute. The complainants did not have the background to participate in public debate. That was the preserve of the educated class. Irwin's exhortations to them to defer to their betters, especially the bishop ‘who ought to be and must be obeyed’, merely inflamed their ire.Footnote 25 Where did authority lie in a parish in a colonial church? For their model of action the petitioners took the rather more democratic stance of Churches rooted in the English dissenting tradition where the congregation held authority in the parish. If a sizable proportion of the parishioners wanted a meeting, it would happen. Irwin maintained that authority rested with him and the churchwardens. It was their responsibility to convene a parish meeting if one were needed. For Irwin, decisions made by the meeting were not binding on him or on the congregation, as it had been irregularly called. This highlighted the urgent need for a firmer (and clearer) legal basis for colonial church organisation.
Anxiety about Tractarianism especially focused upon changes to the received patterns of worship, and could arise out of the colonists' ignorance. What clergy wore, how a church was arranged and how a service was conducted were all scrutinised for changes that might be Tractarian ‘innovations’. For example, when Bishop Short of Adelaide first wore his new doctoral hood, after a visit to England, some people mistook it for a chasuble, a symbol of ultra-ritualist innovation.Footnote 26 In Brisbane, there was basis for suspicion in that Bishop Tyrrell, like Irwin, was known to have Tractarian sympathies.Footnote 27 There was a fear that any innovation introduced by the bishop or the incumbent must be Tractarian and would be followed by others, such as ‘large candles on the communion table or auricular confession’. The concerns were Protestant ones about the Romanising tendency of Tractarianism, ‘priestly supremacy’ and a threat to the right of ‘private judgment’.Footnote 28
The dispute effectively contained women's involvement in church affairs in Brisbane to the domestic or private domain. At the meeting convened by the disgruntled parishioners, the Revd Robert Creyke read a letter signed by many members of the congregation, ‘who exhorted their fellow parishioners, for the sake of peace, to abstain from any further proceedings that might lead to contention and ill will in the matter’.Footnote 29 The letter precipitated a heated discussion and was dismissed as it ‘had been signed by ladies and others who did not form part of the congregation’. The effect was to silence women's voices in this and other church matters. Eleven years later women were specifically excluded from membership of synod when the diocesan constitution was adopted.Footnote 30 The exclusion of women's views was not disputed further; the public business of the parish was specifically men's business and privileged men's voices in church affairs.Footnote 31 The meeting subtly stigmatised the group backing the clergy as feminine, which in turn reinforced the masculine code of those calling the meeting. This explanation has more force because the issue was over an allegedly ‘Tractarian’ innovation. Tractarianism was increasingly portrayed as unmanly and later Tractarian clergy were demonised for their alleged undue influence over women.Footnote 32 As Irwin had Tractarian sensibilities, the marginalisation of the clerical party fits this rhetoric.Footnote 33 This power-play by the anti-offertory party asserted a patriarchal hegemony – a conservative, Protestant one, concerned to mark itself off from Romanising Tractarianism.Footnote 34
The dispute highlighted the issue of the bishop's authority in relation to parish affairs. The disputants decided to withdraw in protest from the church each week after the sermon and before the offertory.Footnote 35 The bishop strongly objected to this and threatened to refuse them communion if they continued to do so.Footnote 36 To some parishioners this was a high-handed response, but they did decide to discontinue the practice and simply refused to contribute to the offertory. It was a singularly ‘Protestant’ stance. The bishop won his point, but at the cost of parish harmony.
Throughout the debate, Irwin was singled out for much criticism. Part of the motivation for the controversy may be found in Irwin's alleged Tractarian sympathies. The offertory stayed; H. O. Irwin didn't. Conveniently, his wife's poor health called him to a parish in Tasmania later that year.Footnote 37
The education debate
The issues of episcopal authority and Tractarianism in the Church of England did not go away, resurfacing in the newly-proclaimed colony of Queensland. In 1860 the colonial legislature debated the organisation of elementary education. This debate has attracted the attention of several historians down the years,Footnote 38 but it is rather the views of Anglican laymen that will be assessed here.
At the time, education was being provided by means of two parallel systems, the national system, run by a board directly responsible to the colonial government, and a denominational board, funded by the government. At the time of the separation of Queensland from New South Wales there were ten denominational and three national schools in Queensland. Only one of the national schools was actually operating. On arriving in Queensland in December 1859, the new governor, Sir George Bowen, undertook to maintain the dual system until the new legislature could meet and make its own arrangements.Footnote 39
Religious issues were significant in the first election from the start of the campaign. Nearly all candidates supported non-denominational education, some specifying that it be secular. Only one candidate unequivocally supported the dual system.Footnote 40 There was more debate over state aid for religious purposes. Some candidates advocated support for clergy stipends and church infrastructure in the less densely settled districts. These candidates were Anglicans, and not surprisingly they were often squatters who had a vested interest in having the burden of supporting the Church lifted from their own shoulders.Footnote 41 At the first sitting of parliament, all state aid for religion was abolished, and the national system of elementary education established.Footnote 42 All this activity took place before Bishop Tufnell had even arrived in the colony. He faced a fait accompli.Footnote 43
Tufnell's task was difficult; he had expected state aid for clergy stipends, parish infrastructure and denominational schools. On his arrival in September 1860, and faced with this substantial financial setback, he immediately tried to persuade parliament to change its mind in respect of financial support for schools.Footnote 44 The editor of the Courier spearheaded opposition to the bishop.Footnote 45 Tufnell agitated consistently for Anglican schools and for the right to open new ones with state aid. He was supported by the Roman Catholic bishop, James Quinn, who was also seeking support for his diocesan schools. This unlikely alliance became notorious when the two bishops began a public campaign of petitions and public meetings to debate education policy. Late in 1864, the bishops toured the larger towns to build up support for their point of view. Meetings were held in Dalby, Drayton, Toowoomba and Ipswich in 1864 and in Brisbane in early 1865. Anglican laymen were prominent on both sides of the public debate.
From the Anglican point of view there were two kinds of rhetoric. One, flowing from the offertory debate, related to internal matters concerning churchmanship and authority. As in the offertory controversy, some Anglicans were very critical of the way in which Tufnell exercised an almost autocratic episcopal power; he controlled diocesan finances and church property; he made appointments to parishes; and he appeared to be answerable to no one.Footnote 46 Tufnell based his authority upon his letters patent, and much of the rhetoric he used was articulated to this central idea; to resist his authority was to resist the authority of the sovereign, as letters patent were issued by the crown.Footnote 47 The second related to the place of Anglicans in wider society, and sought to ally Anglicans with other Protestants and sideline Roman Catholics. Generally the two streams of thought flowed together.
The bishop was condemned for his ‘unholy alliance’ with Bishop Quinn.Footnote 48 Since the secession of Newman and Manning to Rome, the road from Oxford to Rome seemed easy and wide, and Tufnell's Oxford and Tractarian connections were widely known.Footnote 49 Tractarianism and Roman Catholicism had been bracketed together.Footnote 50 Rhetoric in the newspaper editorials and letters helped readers to make the connections. One correspondent to the Guardian suggested that the two bishops debate which the apostolical one was. This was a reference to the Tractarian concern about the apostolicity of the Anglican Church and an implication that Tufnell was Tractarian in sentiment.Footnote 51 The bishop's power was represented as autocratic or monarchical and one correspondent who supported him identified a fear of priestcraft in the opposition's polemic.Footnote 52 Lewis Bernays, a prominent public servant, described the bishop's alliance as ‘unsound in principle and irreligious in character’ and questioned the propriety of an alliance with the leader of a denomination to whose doctrines Anglicans could not subscribe.Footnote 53 Rancour was fed by the pervasive distrust/dislike of the Irish by the British and an underlying discourse that stigmatised their Roman Catholic culture. Bernays's comments were made in the wake of the big education meeting in Ipswich, which resulted in violence that was attributed to the Irish Catholics supporting Bishop Quinn.Footnote 54 He deprecated any involvement of the Anglican bishop in a situation in which the ‘shillelah’ could be brought into use. These ideas were inflamed by editorial rhetoric, the Guardian claiming that Bishop Tufnell was doing the work of the bishop of the Roman Church, supported in the ‘unhallowed compact’ by ‘an unthinking Irish mob’.Footnote 55
The governor, Sir George Bowen, was Anglo-Irish and had little sympathy for Irish Catholics. He was worried about public expressions of Irish nationalism. Drawing on English stereotypes of the Irish he wrote in a dispatch of ‘the physical force of Bishop Quinn's Irish supporters’ and portrayed Tufnell as an ‘instrument of Irish Romanists’. Bowen was one of many who labelled Tufnell as Tractarian, attributing this to the influence of the Revd G. A. Denison whose Tractarianism had attracted negative attention. Tufnell had been Denison's curate at Broadwindsor in Dorset. Bowen's rhetoric reflected the way Tractarianism had been portrayed as feminine and unmanly. In this context, he wrote of Tufnell: ‘He is doubtless activated by feelings familiar to all who know the University of Oxford by that mixture of almost feminine obstinacy with nervous dislike of publicity which induced the heads of colleges to refuse all information respecting their revenues to the Royal Commissioners of Enquiry.’Footnote 56 The premier, Robert Herbert, also an Anglican, criticised the bishops' campaign for a change in government policy. He did not indulge in pique as Bowen had, but his views reflected those of many other Anglicans, including politicians:
I felt that when a law was passed by Parliament establishing a national system of education, I was protected by the law, that I could not be molested by persons who might be expected to have a strong tie on me … I do not say the bishop of Brisbane brought stronger pressure to bear upon me than I was able to resist; but if I had any doubt as to the way the Parliament desired the laws to be carried out, I might have given way.Footnote 57
Herbert repudiated the bishop's claim to speak for all Anglicans. Others, such as his fellow parliamentarian, R. R. Mackenzie, strongly agreed with him.Footnote 58
The Protestant nature of the Anglican Church was under threat by the alliance; the two Churches were really ‘diametrically opposed in doctrine and faith’.Footnote 59 The Anglican Church was an episcopal Protestant one, and the corollary of that was that it was anti-Catholic. Some Anglicans sought an alliance with other Protestant groups to form a Protestant hegemony which would prevent the Roman Catholics from gaining any advantage from the state, however slight.Footnote 60 These observations are consistent with Linda Colley's understanding of the English constitution as essentially Protestant, and defined over and against a Roman Catholic ‘other’; in this case the ‘other’ was Irish and Roman Catholic.Footnote 61
The bishops' opponents used the old idea that it was perfectly permissible to resist a king who exceeded his powers and thus threatened the rights and liberty of the people, and applied it to the autocratic rule of Bishop Tufnell.Footnote 62 They rejected any notion of a divinely ordained hierarchy, and were consequently rather democratic in tone in suggesting that members of the Church should choose their own clergy and bishops. In this controversy the laity claimed that there was a need to find a more equitable means for a bishop to administer the diocese, in co-operation with the laity, and of diluting his autocratic power.Footnote 63 Tractarianism and Romish sympathies were unacceptable to the majority of Anglicans. This latter concern was thrown into sharp relief soon after the education debate started to die down in the early months of 1865.
The Salisbury hymn book
One area of ‘innovation’ in the 1850s and 1860s was liturgical music. It had been a part of the diocesan renewal process in the diocese of Salisbury from which Bishop Tufnell came.Footnote 64 Colonial clergy sought to improve the liturgy by improving the music.Footnote 65 In most churches this meant the introduction of an organ or harmonium to accompany the singing, and the replacement of Tate and Brady's metrical version of the psalms with hymns. Bishop Tufnell introduced the Salisbury hymn book to the diocese of Brisbane.Footnote 66 This had been produced under the guidance of Bishop W. K. Hamilton and had drawn objections in the diocese itself. In a letter to the editor of the Courier, a Brisbane writer drew attention to this dispute in order to raise the issue of its theological suitability.Footnote 67 It did not precipitate public discussion on the scale of the education debate, but it does draw attention to issues already raised in earlier public debate that had already bothered some rank-and-file Anglicans. Bishop Tufnell was back in England at the time, so he was not directly involved. The debate raised issues of ecclesiastical authority (who had the authority to introduce a new hymn book into a parish?); Romeward-looking Tractarianism; and a suggestion of masculine anxiety about undue reverence to the Virgin Mary.
The occasion of the initial letter to the Courier was the use of a hymn at the Ash Wednesday service, containing the lines: ‘When our heads are bowed with woe,/ When our bitter tears o'erflow,/ When we mourn our lost ones dear,/JESUS, SON OF MARY hear [original emphasis]’.Footnote 68 It is the last line to which objection was made. The writer objected to two other hymns in the book which used the expression ‘son of Mary’; another which named Mary as one who, with Salome and Mary Magdalene, anointed the body of Jesus; one referring to St Michael; and three that made references to the virgin birth.Footnote 69 The original writer interpreted all these as examples of the way in which Roman Catholic devotion was being introduced into Anglican worship and piety by according Jesus' mother Mary greater dignity than he felt was appropriate. In light of the recent education debate, another correspondent wrote: ‘No marvel that the worthy Bishop of the Anglican Church can act so cordially with the equally worthy Dr Quinn [the Roman Catholic Bishop]. The hymnbook which the former introduced into the English Church in Queensland, might, if Latinized, be used without impropriety by the Church of Rome.’Footnote 70 The writer's anxiety is most focused in references to Mary's virginity. In quoting the following lines, the writer's confusion becomes clear: ‘In the blessed virgin's womb/Purest flesh thou didst assume [original emphasis]’. The writer erroneously understood this as a reference to the recently promulgated dogma of the Immaculate Conception, rather than the virgin birth of Christ. The former was defined in the papal bull Ineffabilis Deus in 1854Footnote 71, the latter dated back to the earliest Christian creeds. This doctrinal fogginess was also displayed by an Ipswich parishioner who uncritically repeated these misunderstandings, describing the hymn book as having ‘several direct and unpleasant references to the Virgin Mary’ which had the effect of ‘sanctioning a doctrine of which they disapproved’, presumably the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.Footnote 72 A neat refutation of these views was published by the editor of the Queensland Times and copied in the Courier.Footnote 73 A second letter described the offending hymns as ‘worship of the Virgin Mary’. The writer objected to ‘hymns to the Saviour being mixed up with any allusions whatever to the Virgin Mary’ and felt that ‘there was no sanction for so constant reference to the virginity of the mother of Jesus according to the flesh, in the New Testament Scripture’.Footnote 74 Abraham Fitzgibbon strongly argued at an Ipswich parish meeting that the hymn book was the thin edge of the Tractarian wedge and would allow Puseyism (Tractarianism) a footing in the diocese.Footnote 75 The Revd John Mosely played down Fitzgibbon's worries by saying that the hymns were no more likely to lead to worship of the Virgin Mary than ‘the prayerbook [Book of Common Prayer] lead to Romanism’. In spite of the editor declining to continue the hymn book debate in the pages of the Courier, other writers then drew attention to further instances of alleged Tractarianism in Brisbane in ritual and private devotions.Footnote 76
The anxiety about Mariolatry and ‘worship of saints’ was characteristic of Protestant anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century.Footnote 77 Much anti-Catholic polemic rested on a demonstration that Roman Catholic doctrine could not be upheld on the basis of a Protestant interpretation of Scripture.Footnote 78 The popularly-held view that the Roman Catholic Church withheld the Scriptures from the people, and that only the Church and her clergy had the authority to interpret them, was the basis of the claim that the Church kept the laity in superstitious ignorance.Footnote 79 The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was widely reported in colonial papers.Footnote 80 In response to the papal bull, the Anglican bishop of Sydney, Frederic Barker, espoused an Evangelical Protestant view:
The Church of England as a faithful Protestant communion will always find itself in opposition to the Church of Rome. We cannot expect that it will ever be otherwise, or that our protest against the assumptions of the Bishop of Rome will cease to be required … The decrees of the Council of Trent, and the recent addition to the creed of the article of the Immaculate Conception, more than justify the charge of corrupting and perverting the Word of God brought by our reformers against the Church of Rome, and unless we are prepared to exchange our scriptural light for her darkness, there can never be peace with Rome.Footnote 81
Barker expressed a traditional Protestant view of the centrality of Scripture as the rule of faith and challenged the right of Rome to impose this ‘unscriptural’ dogma on Catholics. He was simply restating Article 6 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, part of which says that ‘Holy scripture containeth all things necessary for salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite to salvation.’ By this reckoning, the definition of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was not warranted. It was an uncompromising view, but thoroughly Anglican. Bishop Perry of Melbourne was rather more inflammatory when he condemned the Roman Church as ‘an apostate and idolatrous Church, the subject of the prophetical denunciations of Daniel, St. Paul and St. John’ whose adherents were victims of a ‘satanic delusion’.Footnote 82
The background to anxiety about these hymns can be found in ‘traditional’ British anti-Catholicism. The promulgation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception brought some of the more virulent anti-Catholic sentiment to the surface in Australia. A series of letters to the Sydney Morning Herald gave vent to Protestant myths about Roman Catholic devotional practices. An ‘Ex Dissentientibus’ wrote that the Roman Church had moved from the ‘worship of Christ to worship of Mary’; and from the ‘service of the redeemer to devotions to the Queen of Heaven’,Footnote 83 and quoted some extreme examples to illustrate his point.Footnote 84 It was a dogma combining ‘superstition and ignorance’ that perceived Romanism falling back into paganism, having developed ‘the worship of the virgin into a Goddess’. The Australian Banner went further and sexualised the imagery, calling Mary ‘the Great Whore’ and deplored ‘the foetid womb of the papacy’ which ‘conceived, and brought forth the impious dogma’.Footnote 85 This rhetorical strategy suggests that, at the very least, devotion to the Virgin Mary was very unsettling to the gender identity of some colonial men. The doctrines objected to transgress nineteenth-century notions of both male and female sexuality, and ascribe to Mary qualities that other women did not have, especially with reference to original sin. She no longer seemed as human as other women and was promoted out of the norms of human femininity to have a quasi-divine nature, the origin of accusations underlying Mariolatry.Footnote 86 Furthermore, the Protestant perception that Catholics prayed to Mary as another deity threatened to undermine the monotheistic understanding of the Trinity.Footnote 87
Concerns about the hymns in the Salisbury hymn book seem to be a milder expression of this gender anxiety. Doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth undermined contemporary masculine self-understanding, and sat uneasily with contemporary male gender roles.Footnote 88 Virginity and celibacy were highly charged issues in anti-Catholic and anti-Tractarian debate.Footnote 89 The controversy between Kingsley and Newman, and the campaign for the inspection of convents, revealed the sensitivity of some men to the issues in England.Footnote 90 The denial of any male human role in the conception of Christ is dependent upon the theological idea of the miraculous conception of Jesus.Footnote 91 Unsurprisingly, the virgin birth, as the foundational miracle of the Christian faith, was not without its critics. Likewise, the idea that Mary was born without the taint of original sin subverted an important element of Protestant theology.Footnote 92 Anxiety about the Salisbury hymn book brought together discourses of religion and sexuality in ways that were disturbing for colonial men. It was an anxiety that was not readily resolved, but demonstrates that there was a conjunction of Protestant ideas about Tractarianism, Catholicism, gender and questionable Catholic doctrine. Perhaps what was just as unsettling for Protestant Anglicans was that the Anglican Church seemed to be becoming broader, that it was in the process of comprehending greater doctrinal diversity, and that its identity as a ‘reformed’ Church was in danger of being lost.
Underlying the conservatism of colonial Anglican men was fear – fear of the unforeseen consequences of change. It was the kind of fear that opposed liberal change in nineteenth-century England, such as the fear of democracy and the fear of social upheaval represented by radicalism and Chartism.Footnote 93 In the context of these debates in religious matters in colonial Queensland, it was a fear based on stereotypes of Roman Catholicism, Ireland and the Irish people, especially social unrest fostered by the Roman Catholic priesthood.Footnote 94 The participation of Roman Catholics in political life threatened the integrity of the Protestant constitution.Footnote 95 It is at this point that Tractarianism was suspect. Tractarians were very wary of erastianism as a consequence of the suppression of Anglican sees in Ireland by the Whigs. Wariness of the connection between Church and State brought Tractarians themselves under suspicion. Furthermore, the conversion of leading Tractarians to Roman Catholicism seemed to be living proof of Tractarian duplicity, and gave rise to slogans that Tractarianism was ‘popery in disguise’ and ‘treason to Protestantism’.Footnote 96 In the colonial situation Anglicans (and other Protestants) used familiar anti-Tractarian, anti-Catholic and anti-Irish tropes. The negative stereotypes employed were effective in rekindling the old fears and insecurities that English settlers had brought with them. By bracketing together Tractarians and Roman Catholics, anxieties raised by the presence of Irish Roman Catholic settlers and fear of Tractarian infiltration of the Church facilitated the effective suppression of Tractarianism in the colony.
Conservatism can also be viewed as resistance to change or innovation and the desire to conserve attitudes and values that had been beneficial in a different context in the past. Perhaps the most obvious is the resistance to innovation in ritual – the offertory collection and the new hymnbook – but the debates also shed light on other changes that were taking place. From the early nineteenth century bishops became increasingly active in the administration of their dioceses and asserted their prerogatives more strongly. This was met with resistance from laymen who feared the establishment of a ‘prelatical tyranny’. This was exacerbated by a concomitant clericalisation of the Church of England and the professionalisation of the clergy.Footnote 97 In all three colonial debates there is a discernable resistance to the power being exerted by bishops and clergy, centred in liturgical innovation and Bishop Tufnell's advocacy of a religiously-based (and clerically-controlled?) education system. However, in the colonies where the Church of England was not established, there was a limit to the extent to which bishops and clergy could exert their power, and the establishment of synods with strong lay representation was to be effective in limiting episcopal and clerical ambitions.
The persistent attacks on Tractarianism evident in each of these controversies reveal significant anxiety about its danger for colonial Anglicanism in the minds of some colonial men. They were keen to forestall any drift toward Romanism and to identify the Anglican Church as being Protestant. The appointment in 1876 of Bishop Mathew Blagden Hale when Bishop Tufnell resigned may have been designed to mollify these anxieties. Although outside the scope of this paper, the disputes discussed here and the episcopate of Hale may have slowed the infiltration of ritualism and Anglo-Catholicism until late in the century.Footnote 98 Clashes within the Church in early Queensland moved Anglicans into a closer relationship with other Protestant denominations, and distanced them from the Roman Catholic Church. This was facilitated by the synchronous rapid growth of freemasonry, which served to bond Protestants from different traditions. Many Anglicans were keen freemasons, and parliamentarians and members of the prospering middle class were also well-represented.Footnote 99
The controversies revealed that within Anglicanism there was potential for fragmentation along the fissures of churchmanship, gender, class and authority. In Queensland men were firmly in control of affairs, and the marginalisation of women effected during the offertory controversy persisted until 1963, when women were finally enabled to sit in Brisbane's diocesan synod.Footnote 100 In a broader context (Australia) and a longer time frame (to the present), Peter Sherlock has attributed the exclusion of women from Anglican church government to men's fear of the feminisation of the Church. This fits well with the idea of male conservatism outlined here.Footnote 101 The dispute over the Salisbury hymn book not only challenged Tractarianism but, by bracketing it with Roman Catholicism, attributed to it the negative gender stereotypes associated with Romanism in Protestant rhetoric. This contributed to the development of a distinctively masculine Protestant hegemony.
Suspicion of clerical authority, as evidenced by the disputatious relationship between some of the laity and the bishop and clergy, contributed to pressure for the creation of a synod for the better management of the diocese. The perception that the bishop had unlimited autocratic power was not conducive to dialogue. A new forum for Anglican debate was needed; a place where bishop, clergy and laity could resolve conflict by means of consultation. It came into being when a constitution was agreed by means of a series of meetings between the bishop, clergy and representative laity in 1867–8.Footnote 102
When H. O. Irwin commented that those who were opposed to the offertory were ‘not qualified by dint of previous pursuits and the experience of their past lives’ for a role in parish leadership, this was also recognition that aspiring middle-class men were constructing a new identity for themselves in the colony. That disputants were sometimes ill-informed as to what Tractarianism really was adds poignancy to his remark. These three controversies bear witness to a colonial society in a process of formation, working with a diverse archive of knowledge, experiences and memories to create a new community. Anglicans were doing their part, both in contributing to the formation of colonial society, and creating a church community that they could all own.
In the end, all the debates were about power: of laity in relation to bishops and clergy; of men in relation to women; of Protestants in relation to Roman Catholics; of Englishness in relation to Irishness; and of Protestant Anglicans in relation to Tractarians. The outcome was the strengthening of a male Protestant hegemony in Queensland that was to have remarkable powers of endurance.
