Reviews of Books

Fears and rumors of a British plan to appoint a bishop to rule over the Church of England in the American colonies were a recurrent irritant in the long run-up to the American Revolution. When some colonial Anglicans renewed efforts to secure a bishop in the 1770s, the issue became entangled in protests against imperial policy, including the Quebec Act of 1774. But the episcopacy controversy, as it is known, remains little understood, particularly from the British imperial perspective. For the most part, the conflict has been cast as a battle between a minority of colonial Anglican clergy and bishops on one side and a large coalition of laity, dissenting clergy, and low-church Anglicans on the other. In this struggle among British and colonial Protestants, the standard story goes, the real needs of the colonial Anglican church for a bishop to perform ordinations and confirmation and to regulate clergy were overwhelmed by a symbolic politics linking episcopacy to royal tyranny and the arbitrary rule of Charles I and Archbishop Laud that in Whig myth provoked the English Civil War.	1
Peter Doll's Revolution, Religion, and National Identity is the first major study of this subject since Carl Bridenbaugh's Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics 1689–1775 (Oxford, 1962). Bridenbaugh viewed the issues largely through a Protestant and patriot lens; Doll sets the episcopacy question in a wider context and makes Canadian experience and policy central to the discussion. As the bibliography and notes make plain, his study is steeped in the voluminous materials on colonial Anglicanism (including Canadian archives) and British church history. It testifies to the value of an imperial perspective. British concerns about governing the Catholic population (both French and Indian) of Canada, Doll shows, were a driving force behind imperial religious policy. Even after the Revolutionary War, such considerations persisted, affecting both the ways bishops eventually arrived in North America and the powers that they were allowed to hold.	2
The British government's religious policies stemmed from two threads that intertwined in eighteenth-century Anglican thought. One thread was the role that Anglicanism (or Catholicism) played in nationalism and loyalty to the crown. The other thread was high church emphasis on the catholic nature of the national church, in which all subjects of the king were ideally included. This insistence on the integral bond between church and state prompted some Anglicans (especially converts from other Protestant churches) to seek a proper establishment for the American colonies; hence, the pressure on the government to appoint colonial bishops. It also lay behind the moves to organize the Anglican church in Canada. With the acquisition of that territory from the French in 1763, high-church Anglicans cherished ambitions to win over its Catholic inhabitants, both Indian and French. Because the French Catholic church had a long tradition of independence from Rome, it was hoped that French Catholics might be gently brought into the Anglican fold. Because apostolic succession and a vigorous church mattered more to high-church Anglicans than did political power, they were even willing to put forward plans for "primitive" bishops shorn of political privileges and duties if such concessions would result in appointment of a colonial bishop.	3
The experience of governing the French and the Indians in Nova Scotia before 1755 reinforced the need to sever connections between colonial Catholics and the French church hierarchy, if the British were ever to make loyal citizens of the local inhabitants. Once all of Canada came into their hands, imperial officials wavered between building a vigorous Anglican presence and redirecting the loyalty of the French to a Catholic church under British control. Leaders in Canada favored the latter plan; secular British leaders vacillated between approaches, despite constant pressure from church leaders to strengthen Anglicanism. The British government's complicity in securing a Catholic suffragan bishop for Canada—that is, a bishop authorized to perform episcopal functions but without formal powers over a church see—under the guise of a "superintendent" frustrated church leaders and spurred them to press harder than ever for appointment of a full Anglican bishop.	. . .