The Origins of the First Episcopal Bishop of the U.S.A.
Today in the Episcopal Church Calendar we commemorate the first consecration of a bishop for the Episcopal Church in America, namely that of Bishop Samuel Seabury. This event took place on 14th November 1784 in the private chapel of Bishop John Skinner at Longacre, Aberdeen, Scotland. The co-consecrators were Robert Kilgour, Bishop of Aberdeen and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church; Arthur Petrie, Bishop of Ross and Moray; and John Skinner, Coadjutor Bishop of Aberdeen. A fourth Scottish bishop, the Bishop of Dunblane, though unable to attend owing to ill health, formally recorded his canonical consent.
Merely citing these bare facts does nothing however, to convey the complexity of the history that preceded this happy event or indeed the complexities of the context of those by whom it was undertaken.
The first step in this lengthy saga had been taken in March 1783, when ten clergy of Connecticut assembled in Woodbury to select a bishop, which it was widely agreed was much needed if the church was to be fully functional in the newly independent America. The choice fell upon Samuel Seabury who was the rector of St. Peter’s Church in Westchester, New York. He was of high church principles and acutely aware of the importance of the apostolic succession. He accepted his election, despite the manifest difficulties which it was clear from the outset would arise.
He sailed for England in early June 1783, arriving in London on July 7th. While he was courteously received and it was evident that the basic canonical requirement that just three bishops lay hands upon him for consecration was straightforward, the legal and political circumstances were much less so.
The most immediate difficulty was that bishops of the Church of England could consecrate by law only those willing to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. For Seabury, now a citizen of the newly independent United States, this was clearly not going to be possible.
This meant that, as later developments confirmed, in order to proceed, new law would be needed. And securing agreement for that was clearly going to be complicated. In its absence, after many lengthy delays, during which he attended repeatedly upon the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of London and many other members Spiritual of the House of Lords (where he became almost a fixture in one of its antechambers) no progress emerged. And after sixteen months of hand wringing the English bishops felt they were simply unable to accede to his request.
Seabury himself recorded that: “Nobody here will risk anything for the sake of the Church and quoted the Archbishop of Canterbury himself as saying of “the people in power, that there is no getting them to attend to anything in which their own party interest is not concerned.”
Ironically, by the summer of 1784, there was finally one legislative fruit, when Parliament passed an Act on August 13, 1784, which empowered the Bishop of London (or such other bishop as he might appoint) “to admit to the Order of Deacon or Priest, Persons being Subjects or Citizens of Countries out of his Majesty’s Dominions, without requiring them to take the Oath of Allegiance as appointed by Law.”
However, while this legislation represented a major gesture by Parliament towards America it was fatally deficient in failing to provide for the consecration of bishops an omission which reflected the fact that this required not merely Parliamentary approval, but also the exercise of metropolitan and episcopal authority under the historic canons of the Church.
Exasperated by the delays, and finally persuaded of the futility of further attendance upon the English bishops, and indeed after exploring a possible Lutheran option, Seabury finally decided to approach the bishops of the Episcopal Church in Scotland.
This was manifestly also an ancient provincial church, but it was in a different constitutional position since, unlike the Church of England, the Scottish Episcopal Church – while it also fully possessed Apostolic succession – had not been re-established as the state church after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This meant that there was no obligation to make an oath of allegiance to the British Crown in order to be consecrated a bishop.
An overture was duly made and the Primus and Bishop of Aberdeen, Robert Kilgour, expressed his “hearty concurrence in the proposal” to admit the Connecticut priest to the Scottish episcopate, deeming the motion to proceed “from and under the direction of the Holy Spirit.” And with this view his brother bishops concurred.
And so it was that on the 14th of November the consecration took place, and the day after that, the Scottish bishops and the now Bishop Seabury entered into a formal concordat, establishing terms of communion and mutual recognition between the Scottish church and the emerging Episcopal Church of the United States.
All of which is a fascinating byway of history and one that entailed some interesting liturgical points – as was later reflected in the fact that the Eucharistic prayer of the Episcopal Church Prayer Books always reflected the Scottish Rite.
But there is yet more to all this when we consider the irony here.
What happened after all, was that the newly independent American Episcopal Church, upon recognizing that for its continued existence it had to go outside itself, ended up deriving its episcopate from Scottish bishops. And the irony here is that the Scottish bishops were deeply conservative ultra royalists who indeed saw themselves as more authentic in their royal allegiance than their counterparts in England.
Theologians should always be wary of supposing that “history” is on whatever side of a particular matter of dispute they are arguing upon. This has long been evident in the case of such claims as those of the Roman papacy to universal jurisdiction and infallibility (as allegedly universally recognized through the entire course of church history). But it also gives reason for caution when it comes to assuming that matters of polity and administration have been more uniform, even among Anglicans through the course of history, than may in fact have been the case.
The notable anniversary of the Consecration of Samuel Seabury in 1784 is, in its own way, a case in point.
The context of Scottish bishops was complicated in a way that had roots that went back almost a century earlier when, because of their loyalty to the oaths that they had originally sworn to James II, the Scottish bishops refused to recognize the outcome of the “Glorious Revolution” in England, of November 1688.
That revolution occurred after the flight into exile of the convert to Roman Catholicism, King James II of England and VII of Scotland. After that event, the London Parliament moved to declare that by fleeing, James II had abandoned his role as monarch and it then secured the succession through William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart, all of which was highly radical in its implications for sovereignty of Parliament in relation to the Crown.
Next, in order to ensure loyalty to the new monarch and government, all clergy and office-holders were required to take (a new) oath of allegiance to William and Mary under the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy Act of 1688.
The decision of the bishops not to do this, was supported by hundreds of the Scottish clergy. The underlying shared point being that the Scottish Episcopal clergy continued to understand themselves to be bound by an irrevocable oath to the Lord’s anointed — the rightful king of Scotland according to the law of succession —and that in consequence they could not in conscience transfer their allegiance to a merely de facto ruler chosen by Parliament.
The consequences proved dramatic and highly challenging for the Scottish Episcopal church. In 1690, the newly reformed Scottish Parliament passed legislation that permanently abolished episcopacy, removing bishops from the Scottish church and establishing Presbyterian government as the national ecclesiastical settlement.
The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland met in November 1690 and expelled from their benefices approximately 200 ministers who refused to accept the Presbyterian settlement. This action had the effect not merely of suspending individuals from office but also of dismantling the entire church and state settlement that had prevailed before.
The parish system itself, which had been presided over by bishops during the Restoration, was rebuilt according to Presbyterian principles, with kirk sessions and synods replacing episcopal authority across Scotland
This meant that the Scottish bishops and those clergy who remained faithful to them thus became effectively the leaders of a persecuted underground church.
Unlike the English non-jurors, who represented a schism within the Church of England in a country where the established church remained episcopal in structure, the Scottish non-jurors stood as the last guardians of episcopacy in a nation that had formally repudiated it.
Accordingly, the Scottish Episcopal Church, as it emerged through the decades following 1690, became a small, persecuted body — ecclesiastically marginalized, economically impoverished, and deeply identified with the cause of the Stuart monarchy exiled on the Continent.
All of which means that the Episcopal Church in America is the fruit of a quite radical action that expressly circumvented the prior prevailing ecclesial order, and did so with the assistance of what was then a particularly conservative part of what we would now call the wider Anglican Communion.
In the light of later history in the Anglican Communion, that has to be ironic indeed.