The English Church Mission to Korea, established by Archbishop Edward Benson in 1889, was a late addition both to the Anglican missionary field and to Western missionary involvement in Korea. The first Roman Catholic missionary arrived in Korea from China in 1794, to be followed by French missionary priests in the 1830s. Several waves of intense persecution ensued prior to the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries in 1884–5 and, a year later, the legalisation of Christianity. The latter inaugurated the influx of long-term North American Presbyterian missionaries, who would rapidly become preponderant.Footnote ¹ As an Anglican mission, the English church mission was unique in its relationship to Japanese colonial rule and the Korean independence movement, from the imposition of a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and the annexation of Korea in 1910, to the Allied commitment to the revival of Korean independence at the Cairo Conference of 1943 and its realisation with the Japanese surrender two years later, albeit with the de facto division of the peninsula.Footnote ² In further contrast to the Anglican Churches in Japan and China, which were recognised as provinces in 1930, the mission was initially established and would remain as a single diocese under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Canterbury throughout this period, and was ‘practically the only contact Koreans had with British life and thought’, even if it had the smallest foreign staff of any mission in the country, averaging only ten by the 1930s, and barely ten thousand baptised adherents by 1940.Footnote ³ Indeed, it ‘always suffered from lack of interest, and consequently lack of funds, because English church people did not think that Korea was important. It was outside the British Empire, and had not received the same glamorous press that China and Japan had long had in Britain’.Footnote ⁴ Its first bishops, then, were in an anomalous position, overseeing a financially precarious missionary endeavour in a politically volatile context, viewed as ‘so ticklish and so remote (in every sense) from England’.Footnote ⁵ This article will propose that they navigated the potentially explosive tension between Japanese colonial rule and Korean independence with a degree of success overall, and from the Korean point of view can be held to have been on the right side both during the pro-independence demonstrations of 1919 and in their direction of a small-scale but effective rural medical strategy and suburban orphanage. On the other hand, the construction of a metropolitan cathedral in Seoul, regarded by some as ‘the finest ecclesiastical structure east of Suez’, required a degree of public acquiescence in Japanese rule, and the bishops ultimately avoided any significant involvement in education on account of a more stringent regulatory framework than they had anticipated when Japan took over the country in 1905–10.Footnote ⁶ There was, then, an element of initial miscalculation and subsequent compromise which qualifies the overall narrative of success suggested by this article.

Since 2000, research on the English mission inside the Republic of Korea has largely focused on church law and doctrine, though there have been valuable studies on missionary activities by region, the influence of English ecclesiastical art and the relationship with the Japanese Anglican Church. Far less attention has been devoted to its bishops, who not only navigated its response to Japanese rule on the ground but also articulated it to its supporters at home, through regular published letters and periodic return visits. Indeed, whilst the mission’s work in Korea did encompass a small number of non-clerical lay doctors and nurses, together with nuns seconded from the Community of St Peter in Kilburn and female Korean catechists, it was essentially a hierarchical organisation under the overall direction of the bishop. Ku Daeyeol has thus highlighted the significant influence of Mark Trollope (bishop from 1911 to 1930) on the British diplomatic response to Japanese oppression during the independence uprising in 1919, an interpretation which can now be amplified in the light of a wider range of archival material.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, Trollope’s intervention in 1919 can only be fully understood in the light of his predecessors and successor – Charles Corfe (served 1889–1904), Arthur Turner (1905–10) and Cecil Cooper (1931–54) – and by reference to his correspondence from his first arrival as a priest in Korea in 1891. In terms of the question raised by this article, the bishop and the mission were largely synonymous.

To understand the English mission’s acquiescence in the Japanese takeover of 1905–10 it is necessary to return to the 1890s. Corfe’s strategy as first bishop was determined primarily by the linguistic barrier and limited resources. A primary focus was on medical work executed both in Seoul and in the treaty port of Chemulp’o (Incheon, 제물포); in the latter, there was also a significant Japanese population, towards whom the mission would also direct its efforts, baptising its first members there in 1896. The nearby island of Kanghwa (강화도) was also chosen as a centre as it was remote from other missions. King Kojong (고종) was viewed as amenable and openings were identified in English-language teaching in secular schools and the provision of relief when, for example, the River Han flooded in 1895.Footnote ⁸ The bishop espoused a long-term view of Korea’s evolutionary development, with the mission contributing over time to the amelioration of civil society but eschewing involvement in politics.Footnote ⁹ Its permanence would be ensured by a strategy of building up endowments and by the results of its modest work in medicine, education and the translation and publishing of Christian texts in Korean.Footnote ¹⁰ The country was seen as a backwater, through the prism of the uneasy equilibrium between China, its suzerain until 1895, and in the south of which the United Kingdom’s commercial interests were concentrated, and Japan, which had begun to open to the West thirty years ahead of Korea’s first treaty with the United Kingdom in 1882. Corfe sought to adopt a detached non-political role but he could not avoid alignment with British diplomatic and commercial thinking. Indeed, one of the mission’s two properties in the capital, Chǒng-Dong (정동), was adjacent to that of the British consulate general, and the vice-consul interceded with the Korean government to purchase a plot outside the foreign settlement in Chemulp’o for its first hospital.Footnote ¹¹ This context is important because relations between the bishops and the consuls-general remained intimate throughout the subsequent Japanese colonial period, and underscore a reactive approach towards events which mirrored British diplomatic policy. The logic of this was that it was highly unlikely that the Anglican bishops would explicitly defend Korean independence unless the British government first chose to do so, which became increasingly improbable after the mid-1890s.

Indeed, as early as 1894 the precariousness of Corfe’s initial non-political position had already become evident. The dramatic Japanese interventions on Korean soil between 1894 and 1896 – the destruction of Chinese suzerainty in the first Sino-Japanese War and the assassination of Queen Min by Japanese agents – necessitated a challenging reappraisal. Corfe’s outraged responses to these events in his published letters as bishop are, compared to his successors, uniquely uncompromising in highlighting the iniquity of Japan’s actions.Footnote ¹² His standpoint is the more striking when one considers that elsewhere there seems to have been an editorial censorship at work in what was said about Japanese actions.Footnote ¹³ By the end of 1896 he seems reluctantly to have settled upon the view that the mission would have to navigate a neutrality between both Korean and Japanese nationalism; he had therefore closed the mission’s secular school previously undertaken at the invitation of the Japanese. He was sceptical of Japanese intentions to reform Korea, though both he and Trollope (at that stage vicar-general) also espoused the view that ‘To those … who love Corea and long to see her people released from corruption and ignorance anything will be welcome, no matter from what quarter it comes.’Footnote ¹⁴ This reflected the near-universal view that the Korean monarchy was moribund. Trollope seems initially to have favoured the Chinese over the Japanese, but partly as a result of the asylum given to Kojong at the Russian Legation between 1896 and 1897 shifted to favouring a Russian takeover, hoping that Corfe could negotiate favourable terms with the Russian ecclesiastical authorities so that the mission’s non-political character would not be misconstrued.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, Russian political and ecclesiastical influence in Korea was at its height during this fluid period, with the establishment of a Russian Orthodox mission in 1900 and the dedication of a church in the legation compound within walking distance of the Anglican episcopal lodge. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Corfe sought to pre-determine any ecclesiastical response to the potential loss of Korean sovereignty – either to Russia or Japan – during this period as opposed to dealing with the practical consolidation of the fledgling mission.

Corfe’s wish to maintain a non-political stance had therefore already been severely tested well ahead of the formal consolidation of Japanese influence in 1905. By the time of the signing of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1902, which explicitly recognised Japan’s political and commercial interests in Korea, his public position appears to have evolved to greater acceptance of Japanese reformist credentials, and he would lend the mission’s hospital at Chemulp’o to the Japanese Red Cross once war between Japan and Russia broke out in 1904.Footnote ¹⁶ In this, he partly reflected a significant realignment of British diplomatic policy in East Asia. The first Sino-Japanese War had already marked the beginning of a gradual recalibration away from the traditional pivot of China towards Japan, whilst the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 completed Russia’s containment in East Asia and allowed Britain to withdraw its capital ships from the China station in order to concentrate on containing the growing German naval threat in the North Sea.Footnote ¹⁷ The renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1905 underscored this policy and effectively gave Japan a free hand in Korea. But the mission’s response in 1904–5 was above all pragmatic. 1904 had witnessed a severe financial crisis which, coupled with Corfe’s inability to learn spoken Korean at his relatively advanced age, precipitated the bishop’s resignation. In this context a Japanese victory was now officially presented in The Morning Calm, the mission’s journal, as a preferable outcome for its continued work compared to the restrictions the Russian authorities might impose if they prevailed.Footnote ¹⁸ Corfe himself may well have been much more sceptical in private. In one of his final letters as bishop he had predicted that ‘The nation that “takes over” Corea against her will, will find, when it has taken her over, that her work has only just begun.’ Trollope would also describe the collusion between the great powers in the Japanese protectorate as a ‘shameless bargain’ and clearly remained uncomfortable about it.Footnote ¹⁹ Certainly, a post-war successor believed that Corfe’s dislike of the Japanese contributed to his resignation.Footnote ²⁰

In the light of the mission’s crisis of 1904, and British diplomatic policy towards Japan, it is difficult to see that there was any alternative to episcopal acquiescence in the Japanese protectorate of Korea established in November 1905 following the dramatic defeat inflicted upon Russia by Japan earlier in the year. Pivotal to this article’s thesis is therefore an assessment of Arthur Turner, the new bishop. It is not surprising that Turner, in common with the wider expatriate community in Seoul, sought positive relations with Itō Hirobumi, the first Japanese resident-general. But he went further, adopting the line that the mission had to deal with the reality as opposed to the legitimacy of Japanese rule. The key considerations for him were ‘how far that is prejudicial to us and our work, and also how far we can help to make the new condition of things bearable to the Coreans’. In acknowledging the ‘great growth in the spirit of independence’ over the previous decade, the bishop also appeared to hope that this would somehow prove a force for the growth of this still miniscule denomination.Footnote ²¹ The suffering of Koreans under Japanese rule could be alleviated through the salvation of Christ, and the Church could be the only hope for Koreans; this opportunity should be effectively utilised for missionary activities.Footnote ²² It was certainly the case that the increasing reality of Japanese rule would cause a surge of Korean recruits seeking protection, with baptised numbers increasing from 603 in 1906 to 2,978 in 1910.Footnote ²³ Moreover, with the transfer of Manchuria to the diocese of North China in 1901, the bishop could now accelerate catechetical and medical work for poor Koreans and evangelical activity amongst the rapidly increasing Japanese population, which was encouraged by the Japanese-speaking wife of the British consul-general in Seoul, who hosted, with Turner’s approval, afternoon tea dances for the wives of Japanese officials.Footnote ²⁴ By 1913, there were a quarter of a million Japanese in the country, a figure which would double by 1933.Footnote ²⁵

Moreover, Turner’s position at this pivotal stage might not appear different from that of the Roman Catholic Vicar Apostolic Gustave Mutel, with whom he was received by the Japanese crown prince in 1907. However, he was more critical than Mutel of Kojong’s sending of emissaries to the Second Hague Conference in 1907, which he considered misguided and futile.Footnote ²⁶ And whereas Turner certainly took independent soundings on the direction of missionary work amongst the Japanese, official intentions were increasingly given the benefit of the doubt, suggesting the particular influence of the Japanese-speaking missionary Stephen Cartwright prior to his suicide in 1909.Footnote ²⁷ For example, the bishop endorsed the new regulatory requirement that all doctors would now require a degree to practise, even though this would require Arthur Laws, one of the mission’s most respected lay members, to be funded for two years by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to complete his medical training at the University of Philadelphia.Footnote ²⁸ In 1907 a substantial donation by the crown prince of Japan to the orphanage run by the Anglican Sisters of St Peter reinforced this view, as did Itō’s accompanying the Korean crown prince to the new YMCA building cornerstone ceremony in Seoul. As ‘the greatest statesman of the Far East, one of the greatest of the whole world’, Itō received a fulsome obituary following his assassination by a Korean nationalist two years later. It is difficult to imagine such language appearing in The Morning Calm under Corfe, suggesting that a significant shift in ecclesiastical policy took place after 1904.Footnote ²⁹

Turner’s response to the tightening of Japanese political control between 1905 and 1910 also represents a fundamental miscalculation regarding the endurance of Korean nationalism as well as the determination of the Japanese authorities to assimilate the country. Whilst his optimism and realpolitik are perhaps understandable in the light of the religious toleration ostensibly guaranteed by the Japanese constitution of 1889, they overestimated the extent to which the influx of Japanese civil servants, administrators and schoolteachers could be Christianised, particularly in the light of what would become an increasingly dominant state Shintō by the mid-1920s. Turner himself was fortunate to escape unscathed from a Korean army mutiny on Kanghwa and official assurances that the mission would be given carte blanche for religious instruction would prove unfounded under Terauchi Masatake, Itō’s successor.Footnote ³⁰ The Japanese minister of education visited the mission’s school in Suwǒn (수원) shortly after Terauchi’s appointment and its pupils were inspected annually thereafter in their proficiency in both written and spoken Japanese.Footnote ³¹ One may speculate that the reasons for Turner’s miscalculation lay in an assumption that a quasi-English model of Church–State relations might prevail in Korea under Japanese tutelage. A successor thus reflected that ‘his physical courage was not matched by a theological and psychological zest for adventure. Of the first three bishops in Korea he was the one who was the least willing to depart from English ways and standards’.Footnote ³²

Had Trollope become bishop in 1904, it is likely that he would have adopted a more hard-nosed position, which he sought to reassert on succeeding Turner in 1910. In the light of the new regulatory framework imposed by Terauchi, and the deplorable state of the mission’s finances, by 1912 Trollope had already taken the decision to divert resources away from Korean education to the setting up of a theological college at Chemulp’o, reflecting his belief that the nascent Church should in time become entirely self-sufficient. What remained was a hostel for girls from the mission’s orphanage who attended the nearby non-religious government high school to be taught in Japanese and, in some cases, trained as teachers. Trollope saw this as ‘a better method of providing higher education for our girls than attempting to run expensive (and possibly not very efficient) schools in opposition to the Government’. In private, he believed that, sooner or later, the Japanese would take into their hands all educational work.Footnote ³³ By 1918 this policy had crystallised into two hostels in Seoul, one for girls and one for boys, recruited from rural missionary stations and admitted if they passed the high school examination; there was also a short-lived small textile and metalwork school. Trollope hoped that these initiatives could develop into an ‘educational ladder’ encompassing small elementary church schools in villages remote from towns with government schools, but the ubiquity of the latter meant that the Seoul hostels remained elite ventures whose longer-term Christianising impact is difficult to assess and the overall quality of the schools, which only educated about nine hundred children in total, was held to be variable.Footnote ³⁴ Nevertheless, this peripheral involvement in education on Trollope’s part, in contrast to the United States and Australian Presbyterian missions, probably postponed the final clash with colonial rule until the autumn of 1940 and was therefore politically shrewd.

As with the setting up of the Japanese protectorate in 1905, the annexation of Korea by Japan in August 1910 coincided with a crisis in the episcopate, in this case Turner’s terminal illness and death two months later. But on this occasion, the Japanese authorities adopted a sophisticated public relations strategy. Readers of The Morning Calm were told that Terauchi had sent a message of condolence on the bishop’s death and had been much concerned about him during his illness. Logistical support was provided by the Japanese authorities for Turner’s body to be brought within the capital’s city walls to lie in the mission’s Church of the Advent, which was regarded as ‘a great and special privilege’. Even the loss of extraterritorial legal privileges as a result of annexation was presented as beneficial to the mission’s supporters, in removing a superficial source of attraction for Koreans joining the Church.Footnote ³⁵ These assurances were taken at face value, not least in the light of the endorsement of annexation by the British government, subject to Japan’s continued adherence to the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation of 1883. The mission would further reassert a loyal stance by providing relief when the Korean harvest failed in 1913.Footnote ³⁶ But there was clearly a degree of unease on Trollope’s part too, since by 1919 he would acknowledge that the Koreans ‘felt, not without some justification, that they had been tricked and sold when they had been unblushingly annexed by Japan in 1910’.Footnote ³⁷ Prior to accepting the archbishop’s offer of the see, Trollope was privately concerned that the ‘very bitter things’ he had previously said about the Japanese under Corfe, ‘probably deservedly tho’ not wisely’, would cause him to be branded as anti-Japanese. He believed that he ‘cd. make a fair bid to win the sympathies of both sides’, but feared that ‘the extraordinary “sensitiveness” of the Japanese officials & of our pro-Japanese friends at the Consulate &c wd. be quite as great a difficulty as the waywardness & partisanship of the “Corean” clergy’.Footnote ³⁸ This again suggests that the bishops always felt they had limited leeway, certainly in their public role, to deviate from the well-understood parameters of British diplomatic policy.

Trollope was therefore astute enough to realise that in 1910 there was little room for manoeuvre. An additional reason for acquiescence was one of Turner’s final decisions, taken in June of that year, that ‘a Central Church, adequate in size and dignity’, was required for the diocese; on the bishop’s death it was decided that his memorial would take the form of the Lady chapel of this future cathedral.Footnote ³⁹ This endorsement of a long-term metropolitan ecclesiastical strategy for what would remain a minority denomination throughout the colonial period would further underscore the practical importance of positive relations with the new order; indeed, in spite of the by now compelling case on the grounds of convenience, as late as 1915 Trollope expressed a preference for a more detached location for his see, though thereafter endorsed its metropolitan location unequivocally.Footnote ⁴⁰ Bishop Henry Montgomery, secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which now contributed a significant amount of the mission’s annual funds for medical work, echoed Turner’s earlier assessment that the Japanese ‘will find in the English Mission loyal subjects who will do their very best to accept the situation and make it as easy as possible for the race to whom the country really belongs’. Prayers were thus said on the death of the Japanese emperor in 1912, and on the enthronement of his successor in 1915, just as the bishop would organise requiems for the late King Emperor Edward vii, seeing this as fulfilling ‘the apostolic injunction as to the offerings of “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving thanks for Kings and for all that are in authority”’.Footnote ⁴¹

Whilst this inherently loyal standpoint towards secular authority fell short of an endorsement of erastianism, to which the mission’s High-Church pedigree was instinctively opposed, it nevertheless seems to have been innate. Trollope offered to release its priests in response to the British government’s military appeal of late 1916 without consultation. Cooper, the son of the chief magistrate of Bombay, may well have viewed the governor-generalship in the same light as the British viceroyalty; even as late as 1940, he would defensively emphasise in private the consistent loyalty of the mission.Footnote ⁴² But there were also points of tension: prior to the dedication of the monumental Chōsen Shintō Shrine in Seoul in 1925, ‘being the only bishop in the English community’, Trollope was looked to for a lead as to whether or not to bow, and in refusing ‘he gave it, as he always did, wisely, gently, but very firmly’. Whilst this ‘passed off with a complete understanding and good feeling maintained’, it was ‘really a very ticklish moment in our [the missionaries’] relationship with the Government’. More problematic from 1937 was the fact that its church at Ch’ǒng-ju (청주) directly overlooked another major Shintō shrine, which was not the case in Seoul, and by 1940 the Japanese authorities were no longer in the mood to display the veneer of civility for which they had been renowned in some missionary circles.Footnote ⁴³

Under Trollope, the mission’s attitude to Japanese rule developed an intellectual sophistication and political circumspection which Cooper would inherit, even if he would adopt a less autocratic style of episcopal governance. By 1912 Trollope could publicly endorse a cautiously optimistic view of the future, based upon the stabilisation of the country following the guerrilla warfare of 1907–9, though privately he was doubtful whether in the longer term intermarriage would ever successfully lead to some amalgamation.Footnote ⁴⁴ The mission’s official assumption was that the nation’s ‘separate character’ could survive annexation and ‘influence Japanese and Chinese religious thought and … interpret Christianity to them, playing a great part in bringing about the reunion of Christendom’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the fluid context of East Asian politics this was not entirely unrealistic. In his first report from the diocese as a missionary at the beginning of 1910, Cooper did not rule out Korea regaining its independence as a buffer state between China and Japan in the future context of an awakened China.Footnote ⁴⁶ At this stage Trollope drew upon his knowledge of the sweep of Korean history not to dismiss the country shaking off Japanese rule.Footnote ⁴⁷ He also resisted pressure from the Japanese bishops in his insistence that the Anglican Churches of Korea and Japan would be defined as independent in 1915; to attach the former to the latter ‘would simply provoke a stampede of all the native adherents of the English Church Mission in Corea into some other religious body, Catholic or Protestant’. Instead, he viewed the ‘three mutually independent but sister Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland’ as a model, with Corea eventually becoming a separate, if small province, ‘with a distinct individuality and organisation of its own as complete at least as the Province of York … if not as those of the Churches of Ireland and Scotland’.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was this conviction, expressed in person to his longstanding friend Archbishop Cosmo Lang shortly before his death, which would later influence the latter’s decision to appoint Cooper, who had served in Korea for over twenty years but did not speak Japanese, as his successor rather than the Anglican bishop of Kobe, and would also cause Trollope, in some Japanese ecclesiastical quarters, to be branded as anti-Japanese, as he had correctly feared would prove the case when he assumed the see.Footnote ⁴⁹

Trollope’s choice of ‘adapted Corean style’ for the mission church in Kanghwa town (강화읍) and subsequently in a variety of churches in its mission stations and hospitals further reflected this perspective: it was regarded as ‘an experiment which may help a future Christian Corea to find her own expression in ecclesiastical architecture’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This was an aesthetic position, as the Korean press recognised on Trollope’s death in lamenting the loss of his antiquarian interest in Korea.Footnote ⁵¹ The bishop viewed a distinctive function of the mission ‘to make the worship of God first intelligent & then magnificent, in a way no other mission can’, imparting the same version of the Catholic faith to both Koreans and Japanese.Footnote ⁵² The new cathedral, constructed in Western Romanesque rather than Korean hanok style for reasons of scale and interior sight lines, prominently featured in the magazine Chōsen and Architecture in 1927, and one of the later hanok churches, at Ch’ǒngju, even has a somewhat Japanese architectural atmosphere.Footnote ⁵³ In theory, then, Korean nationality could be refracted through this prism, but the political issue of independence was skirted. Even the sympathetic Lang felt after Trollope’s death that the bishop ‘had thought so much of picturesque machinery that evangelism had been much neglected’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Japan’s prestige was further enhanced by its early entry into the First World War; in 1915 Japanese officials organised a huge ‘charity soirée’ for the Allies at the Chōsen Hotel, which Trollope attended, and he subsequently underwent instruction in Japanese for public speaking in what had now become the official language.Footnote ⁵⁵ Most important, Trollope’s position ran counter to the entire thrust of Japanese colonial policy in Korea, whose ideology of assimilation both rejected separate status while justifying widespread political discrimination. The English mission ultimately failed to square the circle that whilst the Japanese continued until the 1930s to be generally regarded as the more educated harbingers of progress, who had brought much-needed reform to the country, its bishops continued to assert that the Koreans formed ‘an homogeneous nation united by language, with a long history and culture of their own’, which would suggest the desirability of Korean home-rule.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although Cooper set up a translation committee which oversaw the publication of a flurry of liturgical texts in Korean throughout the 1930s, its manual for priests was unequivocal that meddling in politics was not acceptable, though it acknowledged that ‘This does not mean that there are never occasions when for right, and conscience sake protests may not be necessary’; it also recommended cultivating personal relations with local officials.Footnote ⁵⁷ In reality, by 1941, a range of views on Japan seems to have prevailed among the mission’s English, Korean and even Japanese clergy, and a later bishop believed that some of the latter, ordained by Trollope, ‘appear to have sailed very near the wind with their own government at times’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Trollope and Cooper were certainly aware of these tensions and potential contradictions, but regarded them as secondary to maintaining unity and the practical ability to carve out a freedom to minister to Koreans and Japanese and to build up over time a self-supporting and distinctive branch of the Catholic Church.

The First World War appeared to have stabilised the independence question, certainly until Wilson’s enunciation of self-determination in his Fourteen Points at the start of 1918, though the mission prudently did not include prayers for an Allied victory in its Korean services. At this time Trollope first articulated a vision of a cathedral which would enable the three Christian communities (Korean, Japanese and expatriate) to worship under the same roof, ‘before the present state of practical schism between our Christians of different languages and nationality becomes irredeemably stereotyped’. The mission would thus attempt to achieve ‘unity from within’ rather than ‘unity from above’; ‘while being in no way engaged in political activities, we are endeavouring to build up, in however small a way, the future leaders of the country’. Whilst this was a sincere attempt not to perpetuate a ‘scandalously schismatic’ situation, it was always more theoretical than real. Once the Japanese had moved from their church in Seoul to the crypt of the cathedral, services for Koreans and Japanese, even for confirmations and the Easter liturgies, were in different parts of the building; when, during sub-freezing temperatures, the crypt was used by the Korean congregation, they still worshipped at different times. But by 1933, the mission’s entire Japanese congregation only numbered about 500; on the other hand they were regarded as highly devout, intensely loyal to the mission and sufficiently wealthy to endow a handsome new church in Pusan (부산), consecrated by Trollope in 1924.Footnote ⁵⁹ In contrast, by the early 1930s the larger Korean congregation of Seoul was increasingly being pushed out to its new suburbs.Footnote ⁶⁰ On Cooper’s entry to his cathedral at his enthronement in 1931, the archbishop of Canterbury’s mandate was read in three languages, to which the bishop responded in Korean. His first duties on arrival in the capital had been to confirm eight Japanese and then attend a ‘Corean tea party’.Footnote ⁶¹ The previous length of his service in Korea was viewed favourably, as was his wearing of a white cassock in line with Korean tradition on his pastoral visits.Footnote ⁶² The first ordination of Korean deacons in 1914 was likewise in Korean, though ‘owing to the liturgical difficulty – the Coreans and Japanese being mutually unable to understand one another’s speech’, and out of deference to the Japanese ordinand, the order of service was printed in both languages.Footnote ⁶³ All of this suggests that Trollope and Cooper consciously walked a delicate tightrope, knowing it was always vulnerable to missteps as well as to external political events beyond their control.

Less precarious politically was the mission’s low-key involvement in charitable medical work, which reflected the bishops’ strategy towards colonial rule at its most nimble. Whereas its ecclesiastical strategy combined a metropolitan centre with outlying missionary stations, under Turner’s and Trollope’s direction its medical activities had already begun a significant redeployment prior to annexation to maximise impact and avoid competition with wealthier missionary or Japanese institutions in cities: it was envisaged that the Mission would run ‘a chain of hospitals, all right “off the track”, and working in virgin soil’. Ultimately, however, a continued shortage of funds and personnel resulted in the permanent realisation of only two hospitals. The Ay-In (애인/愛人 ‘For the Love of Mankind’) hospital at Chinch’ōn (진천), at that time a village of no more than three hundred houses, was thus set up in 1909. As the licensed male doctor-in-charge until 1929, Arthur Laws enjoyed a detached but cordial engagement with Japanese officialdom, recognising that to a degree it was Japanese fee-paying outpatients who effectively subsidised the in-patient Korean poor.Footnote ⁶⁴ Certainly, following his return to the United Kingdom, the military authorities in Manchuria would accede to Cooper’s request to release a Korean Christian doctor to enable the hospital’s work to continue.Footnote ⁶⁵ Dr Anne Borrow ran the mission’s second hospital at Yŏju (여주시), a small town fifty miles south-east of Seoul, from 1924 to 1940, which also treated considerable numbers of Korean obstetrical and paediatric cases and provided relief for Koreans during a typhoid epidemic in 1932 and the floods of 1936.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Japanese authorities seem to have admired both hospitals, though of the mission’s various institutions it was the orphanage for thirty Korean girls which they visited most, presenting the sister-in-charge with an award on the silver anniversary of annexation and making generous grants, Cooper receiving one of these in person in 1934.Footnote ⁶⁷ So whereas Corfe had initially viewed the medical and social welfare work of the mission as primarily a short-term expedient until the language could be mastered, as a result of annexation his successors clearly came to regard this as a permanent missionary strategy towards the Korean rural poor which until 1940 could largely co-exist with a relatively benign Japanese regulatory framework. Although Cooper had to intervene shortly after his consecration when Borrow was sued for criminal negligence after her needle broke when aspirating fluid from the chest of a tubercular Japanese patient, his oversight was generally unproblematic politically and something he seems to have instinctively enjoyed more than Trollope, regularly visiting both hospitals and the orphanage.Footnote ⁶⁸

Given the longevity of Trollope’s first-hand knowledge of Japanese rule and of Korean patriotism, it is ironic that the bishop departed from his diocese for the United Kingdom just as the March First Movement escalated in March 1919, only returning in the autumn following his mother’s death, since the scale and volatility of the situation represented a significant threat to the entire missionary project; his departure was presumably because he had not returned home for the duration of the war and in the light of his mother’s failing health. In his absence, Herbert Welch, the resident Methodist bishop, assumed a role as missionary spokesman. Trollope claimed that these demonstrations were a ‘complete surprise’ to missionaries, though four years earlier he had confided to his mother that the bitterness regarding annexation ‘though kept down by a strong hand … is smouldering very fiercely under the surface’. Immediately prior to Christmas in 1918 he had also been required to sign two thousand documents regarding the governor-general’s new regulations on ‘Religious Propaganda’.Footnote ⁶⁹ He was particularly nervous about representatives of Protestant missionaries overseas inciting domestic student agitation by interfering in Korean issues such as education: ‘The Japanese Government officials are extremely sensitive on the subject – & not without reason, considering the attempt that was made to get the Edinburgh Continuation Committee to interfere in the Conspiracy Trial.’ The latter, also known as the 105-People Incident, was where 105 Christian leaders were accused of conspiring to assassinate the governor-general in 1911.Footnote ⁷⁰ Trollope perceptively observed that ‘the rising generation … throughout Corea are as revolutionary as their parents and grandparents are “reactionary”’, a combustible generational and societal shift which became an increasing preoccupation in his thinking.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1919 he thus told the Foreign Office that the May First Movement was ‘a reflection of what was going on in other parts of the world, controlled by bodies of young Koreans who had been driven from their own country by the Japanese & taken refuge in Shanghai, Vladivostock, &c’.Footnote ⁷²

Trollope’s public response to events during his absence was understandably muted. ‘In such matters political’, he later stated, ‘missionaries intervene without warrant and at their peril’ and he said next to nothing in The Morning Calm in his episcopal letters of June and August 1919.Footnote ⁷³ Only on his return to Korea in November did he comment on the ‘independence outbreak’ and ‘independence movement’, lamenting that ‘the difficulties of the situation are such as it is impossible to exaggerate, or even adequately to describe’ and he waited until 1922 to engage in a polemic with The Church Times in an attempt to articulate a middle ground.^.Footnote ⁷⁴ That said, compared to the American missions, the properties of the English mission were largely unaffected by the spate of Japanese burnings in the wake of the independence uprising, as were its congregations, and the bishop could therefore afford to be more eirenic.Footnote ⁷⁵ But privately Trollope was aware not only of the savage Japanese response to the uprising evident, for example, in the wounded Koreans treated by the mission’s hospital in Chinch’ōn, a significant centre of pro-independence demonstrations, and longer-term issues which had intensified since annexation such as male congregations at Easter being depleted by forced recruitment to labour gangs employed in road construction. Regardless of its violence, Trollope knew that Japanese rule had failed to deliver what its proponents had purported it would in 1910.Footnote ⁷⁶

Readers of The Morning Calm were unaware that, during his visit to London in 1919, the bishop was asked to visit the Foreign Office in May and make ‘any constructive suggestions with reference to affairs in Corea, as distinct from mere criticism’ of the Japanese. As Ku Daeyeol and Hamish Ion have highlighted, in response Trollope produced a comprehensive indictment of Japanese rule across five areas (language, political and administrative participation, education, agriculture and justice), a ‘relatively quiet action’ which nevertheless substantially influenced British policy towards the uprising in the second half of 1919.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, whilst The Morning Calm claimed otherwise, Trollope’s analysis of Korean grievances in 1919 was not substantially different from the English Labour MP Noel Buxton’s subsequent critique of Japanese rule in its rejection of independence as a politically feasible outcome, though unlike Buxton it stopped short of advocating a home-rule solution.Footnote ⁷⁸ Whilst Trollope accepted that the independence movement was ‘purely national in its aspirations’ he ‘had no illusions about [its] futility … His only hope was that it might induce the Japanese Gvmt. to mitigate the extreme harshness of the military regime in Korea’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Trollope’s intervention from the outset supported the wish of the acting consul-general in Seoul and the Tokyo Embassy, with which he was particularly close – having recently enlisted the ambassador’s support in a longstanding civil case regarding a major property in Seoul – to strengthen the British response, since the bishop delivered by hand two ‘very confidential’ papers to the British ambassador on his way back home: ‘The Case for Corea’, by his friend the Canadian missionary James Gale, and, most remarkably, a translated record of the uprising by ‘the chief of the supreme secret section of the Corean National Assembly’. The latter concluded that ‘So long as Japan remains in occupation of Corea internal troubles will never cease.’Footnote ⁸⁰ From a Korean perspective, at least behind the scenes Trollope was therefore on the right side in 1919, even if Koreans continued to see Britain and Japan as collaborators well after the formal termination of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1922.Footnote ⁸¹

However, if Trollope’s low-key intervention in 1919 may have had the humanitarian impact he sought in mitigating Japanese brutality as a result of British pressure, in terms of ending assimilation and allowing self-government Japanese colonial policy remained fundamentally unchanged. Moreover, concern regarding the excesses of Japanese rule over Korea never became one of the mainstream criticisms of Japan; even then, it was limited to 1906–12 and 1919–22 when, for example, Frederick McKenzie had highlighted its most egregious excesses.Footnote ⁸² Whilst the mission’s organising secretary did recommend McKenzie’s The tragedy of Korea to readers of The Morning Calm in 1920, with the arrival of Saitō Makoto (斎藤実) as governor-general in August 1919 Trollope and his successor were ultimately content to operate under what they saw as a benevolent toleration and this was the status quo they sought to preserve until it became untenable in the second half of 1940.Footnote ⁸³ From 1921 the mission’s publicity material would now say that it was ‘constantly embarrassed by political disturbances’, and its journal was not censored until Cooper was warned by the Japanese police in September 1937. Saitō was photographed attending the stone-laying ceremony of the pro-cathedral in Seoul in 1922, Trollope and his three fellow bishops having previously attended lunch at his private residence; the inscription was cast in neutral traditional Chinese just as the cathedral’s mosaics, installed later in the decade, were drawn from the medieval Italian tradition rather than depicting the newly beatified Korean martyrs.Footnote ⁸⁴ A successor reflected that on the whole Trollope liked the Japanese, though he did not speak the language well. He knew Japanese scholars and felt at home with their statesmen, allowing the Japanese-speaking Father Ernest Arnold to be regularly employed by the governor-general, presumably as an interpreter or translator, and sincerely admiring Saitō’s international statesmanship.Footnote ⁸⁵ The colonial regulatory framework could be unpredictable: there was an official demand to regularise the mission’s lands and real estate in 1923, but gifts to the new building were, for a period, declared exempt from import duties in 1925. The annual statistical reports required by the authorities were also a significant additional burden for Trollope and Cooper.Footnote ⁸⁶ Public events required particular managing. The consecration of the cathedral in 1926 was kept low key following the death of King Sunjong (순종;); held at 9.30 in the morning, it was nevertheless attended by one thousand Korean and Japanese Christians drawn from across the country and the liturgy was mostly in Korean.Footnote ⁸⁷ Later that year Saitō would make a presentation to the visiting bishop of London, and during the visit ‘gave further proof of his goodwill and kindness, adding still further to the obligation under which the English Mission lies towards him’.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, it appears that Trollope and Cooper ordinarily sought little direct engagement with the governor-general, and this primarily focused on high-level ecclesiastical and missionary visitors and registering its properties in new legal entities.Footnote ⁸⁹

For the period 1920 to 1937 the relationship therefore seems to have been one of respectful semi-detachment and, unlike its Roman Catholic equivalent, the Anglican cathedral does not even appear on maps from the colonial period.Footnote ⁹⁰ By the late 1920s the mission compound in central Seoul, including a Korean-style bishop’s lodge with a large garden, constituted a tranquil oasis, under whose trees office-workers would sit during lunch, yet within walking distance of the monumental headquarters of the government-general and what Trollope privately described as the ‘Wembley stunt’ of the Chōsen Exhibition commemorating the twentieth anniversary of annexation.Footnote ⁹¹ With the appointment of an assistant bishop based in Py’ŏngyang (평양시), the imperative of Japanese work in the north of the country had also increased and there were cogent reasons for wishing to preserve the equilibrium. By the late 1920s those who had been with the mission for thirty years could observe the considerable degree of social and economic change which had occurred under Japanese rule. Until 1937 the consensus was that the colonial government ‘has the welfare of the Coreans at heart, in spite of shortcomings and mistakes’ and the ‘practically ubiquitous, frequently annoying’ Japanese police, though it was acknowledged that even the latter could be unexpectedly helpful.Footnote ⁹² The most conspicuous example of this was when the chief constable of Sŏdaemun district (서대문구) promptly issued a permit for Trollope’s corpse to be ‘preserved’ and buried in the cathedral crypt – that is, in breach of Confucian traditions and local laws, within the city walls – following his sudden death in Kobe in 1930; it had been decided not to cremate the body out of deference to Korean sensitivities on the matter.Footnote ⁹³ Whilst Trollope is not mentioned in Saitō’s official biography it is highly likely that this was a personal gesture prior to the governor-general’s final return to Japan seven months later, suggesting that the respect was mutual.Footnote ⁹⁴ On his final departure from Korea in 1929, Arthur Laws thus concluded: ‘The relations with the Authorities are good – no small matter when you consider what the Authorities are.’Footnote ⁹⁵

With the outbreak of war between Japan and China in 1931 external pressure on the non-political stance maintained by Trollope’s successor Cooper was likely to increase, though until the summer of 1940 finance continued to be the greater challenge. Due to its limited involvement in education, obeisance at Japanese shrines never became a fundamental issue, Cooper following Trollope in accepting – it would seem in the face of some scepticism amongst mission staff – the official interpretation that it had no religious significance.Footnote ⁹⁶ Moreover, the bishop could point to the remarkable expansion of work and church-building in the north, together with the growth of a Korean diaconate and the profession of Koreans to the Society of the Holy Cross, an order of Korean nuns established by Trollope in 1925. Moreover, whilst the suppression of the 1919 independence uprising was believed to have caused a decade of stagnation in missionary growth, from 1931 expansion was again evident.Footnote ⁹⁷ In 1935 Cooper spoke of ‘almost a Mass Movement’ in the north and if there had been no war with Japan and if Korea had not been divided in 1945 there are indications that the strategy employed in the south could readily have been reduplicated.Footnote ⁹⁸ Cordial relations with the governor-general were preserved, the latter attending the memorial service for King George v in the cathedral in 1936, and the subsequent British coronation was also duly marked. In spite of Archbishop Lang’s highly publicised highlighting of civilian casualties in China in October 1937, the government allowed church bells to ring that Christmas and even assisted in obtaining a replacement when the site of the mission’s summer retreat was commandeered for military purposes.Footnote ⁹⁹

But by the summer of 1939 it was decided to postpone the mission’s anniversary celebrations and by this time even the bishop’s pastoral visits were not immune from the attentions of the Japanese police.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In this respect, after 1937 political reality progressively caught up with the mission. British and Japanese political interests had steadily begun to move apart in the 1920s, with very different perspectives on the future of China, and even prior to the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war in 1937 they had become precarious and confused; and the full-scale mobilisation of Korean society into that war increasingly called into question the entire basis of the English church mission’s foreign staffing and funding and, from an official point of view, its loyalty.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Whilst it was largely left alone until the summer of 1940, with the temporary arrest of Cooper and other priests and clear indications that the safety of its Korean congregations was increasingly compromised by their association with the mission, the bishop took the decision to withdraw foreign staff, transfer legal ownership of its properties to a Korean entity and delegate his functions to a Japanese priest acceptable to the Korean clergy; he also destroyed his diaries. The mission’s final Christmas services were pervaded by ‘a feeling of primitive Christianity … such as the early Christians must have had in the Catacombs’.Footnote ¹⁰² In view of Trollope’s insistence that the Church must work towards becoming self-sufficient, this was not an illogical denouement, and one which was accepted by the Japanese authorities.

An overview of the first four bishops thus indicates a largely consistent attitude towards colonial rule and a more elusive response to Korean independence. A further repositioning would now take place in response to wider events. During his wartime exile Cooper’s initial narrative was that Japan had brought significant progress to Korea, but had exploited it for its own ends. In spring of 1942 he further expressed the hope that he would return to ‘a Corea freed from Japanese domination’ and that ‘some sort of independence’ was a possibility; but by the spring of 1944 was explicitly likening the entire span of Japanese rule to the Gestapo.Footnote ¹⁰³ However, whilst it was increasingly clear that a new dispensation for the Korean peninsula was required, independence only began to surface as a serious diplomatic proposition in 1943, with the Americans driving the Cairo Declaration’s commitment to its revival in November. As late as September 1945, after the relatively sudden Japanese surrender, Cooper noted ‘an extraordinary silence in England about Korea. Nothing appears to have been officially stated as to what is to be its immediate future’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Regular services had in fact continued in the cathedral and the Japanese bishop departed the country in late August 1945, to avoid any ‘attack by outsiders’ that the Anglican Church in Korea was ‘under Japanese control’ and to await contact from Cooper.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the latter’s arrival eight months later he spoke to a journalist in fluent Korean: ‘When I was in England, I knew that Korea would gain independence through the Cairo Declaration after this war, and I constantly prayed to God for this, rejoicing more than anyone else when it happened.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

However, if the Church had survived the context was now radically different; there was, Cooper reflected, ‘never a time of greater uncertainty in many ways than today’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The wealthier Japanese congregations in the south had been forcibly evacuated and it was now out of the question for him to visit the Korean congregations above the thirty-eighth parallel. Korea’s claim for independence was now entirely accepted on the basis that its people ‘had reasonably looked for freedom after the 1914–18 War’, implying a belated acceptance of the claims of the Korean Provisional Government.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The first diocesan conference and synod since 1939 grappled with the imperative of founding institutions of higher education ‘at the birth of Korea’s independence’, since failure to do so during the colonial period was now viewed as mistaken; and Cooper made a broadcast on the occasion of the recognition of the Republic of Korea by the United Kingdom in 1949.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Yet he also remained acutely aware of the strategic questions which had bedevilled Korea’s status as an independent nation since the mission’s first arrival and would explode with the North Korean invasion a year later.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In conclusion, between 1910 and 1940 the bishops of the English mission attempted to walk a tightrope between the demands of the colonial government, bent on assimilating Korea, including the Churches, and the ardent aspirations of Koreans, including Christians, who sought to resist colonial rule. This was a complicated policy which they did not always pull off, but one which can be judged as successful overall. The mission accumulated an authority and insight over time which strengthened Trollope’s partially successful advocacy of Korea’s plight in 1919, and his and Cooper’s trusted status as ‘a reliable go-between’, both with the Foreign Office and with the archbishop of Canterbury, once Anglo-Japanese relations diverged from the 1920s. Theirs were the most influential voices for the Korean people in the United Kingdom beyond official diplomatic circles at a time when the country enjoyed very little profile.Footnote ¹¹¹ There was also an accumulation of pastoral authority, not least through modest medical and social welfare work, and the prewar institutional and financial underpinning and the development of a Korean priesthood and female religious order would enable the English mission – somewhat against the odds – to survive the painful reality of a revived Korean independence after 1945. The cathedral building, unlike its Anglican counterpart in Tokyo, also survived the Second World War and Korean War to become the vibrant centre of an indigenous Church, whose ecumenism is happily less contrived than that which Trollope envisaged. That said, there were also some miscalculations, particularly Turner’s misplaced faith in Japanese progressive rhetoric in 1905–10. The bishops sought to assert a non-political missionary strategy, but in attempting to balance a role in the public sphere with a detachment more in accordance with their minority position, this was always precarious and vulnerable to political events over which they had no control. The equilibrium established by Trollope was maintained with a degree of success from 1920 to 1937, but had become untenable by the end of 1940. Moreover, whilst Corfe and Trollope had both been critical of Japan prior to 1905, they and their successors ultimately converged with the wider trajectory of British diplomatic policy in East Asia. This therefore entailed an avoidance of the claims of the Korean independence movement until the later stages of the Second World War.