‘attached to the Protestant succession’: The Religious Influence of Veterans

Abstract

Ideal British army officers have traditionally been viewed as ‘men of high social position, holding large possessions and attached to the Protestant succession’.1 As demonstrated in Chapter 2, the first two criteria were not always observed when granting commissions during the Peninsular War. There remained one unassailable part of that trinity, however: British army officers had to be Protestant and a look at the career of one army officer, Frederick Chidley Irwin, influential in the development of the Swan River colony,2 illustrates this point. Given a commission in the British army in 1808, Irwin served in the Peninsula for the entire six years of the war, from 1808 until 1814. Later, he was sent to Canada and Ceylon. He first came to the Australian colonies in command of a detachment of the 13th Regiment to provide military protection for the colony at Swan River, and spent four years in the colony. In 1834, when he was posted back to England, Irwin took the opportunity to make enquiries about sending Evangelical missionaries to the Swan River colony. Irwin, the son of a minister of the Church of Ireland, was himself an Evangelical. He sought assistance from St John’s Chapel, Bedford Row, London, a particularly Evangelical church: the foundation of the Church Missionary Society had been planned at St John’s. There, in 1835 with support from the ‘Clapham Sect’, Irwin organised a meeting to form the Western Australian Missionary Society,3 and the first missionaries of that organisation sailed to the Swan River in January 1836.4