Patrons, politics, and pews

Abstract

This dissertation traces the establishment and expansion of the Church of England in New England through Boston Massachusetts' three interrelated Anglican Churches, from the establishment of Boston's King's Chapel in 1686, as the first Anglican Church in New England, until the formation of the American Protestant Episcopal Church in the years immediately following the American Revolution. Using church vestry records, proprietor records, financial records, correspondence, and material culture, such as pews and communion silver, this project focuses on lay patrons and members of the community who participated in church governance and financially supported or otherwise aided church institutions and fellow congregants. Though rooted in Boston, this project examines a loose transatlantic network of patrons and interest groups, who leveraged their commercial and political expertise for the benefit of individual churches and the advancement of Anglicanism in New England. Working with imperial organs such as the London-based Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Boston's Anglican societies profoundly reshaped the religious landscape of New England and provided for the religious needs of a diverse body of elites and persons of middling and poor means, as well as a sizable number of free and enslaved African Americans. Though the Church of England stood as a symbol of royal authority and Anglicans often served as agents of royal authority, Anglican political ideologies varied by class, occupation, and office, and was never synonymous with loyalism. This project reexamines early protests against Parliamentary measures and authority finding that lay Anglicans featured prominently in these debates and reacted pragmatically as events unfolded in Boston and in the countryside. Even as a number of Anglican loyalists removed to Halifax and England, Anglicans who remained in Boston rewrote the Book of Common Prayer to align with shifting allegiances and theologies and fashion lasting American institutions.