‘The Pope of Cape Town’
by Mike Oettle
“ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM” is one of the longest words in the English language. It is used to describe the conservative reaction against the suggestion that the Church of England should cease to be the established church of the kingdom. It still maintains the dead hand of secular and political control over part of God’s family.
In the 19th century it was much stronger, and Robert Gray, Cape Town’s first Anglican bishop, fought a long battle against it.
In short, “he believed the Church on earth to be a spiritual City, bound by spiritual authority to teach the Faith once delivered to the saints”.[1] But many colonials held to the “the Church of England by law established” (as they [mis]understood it to be), and two major disputes with “this interfering bishop” – who was accused of wanting to make himself “Pope of Cape Town”, with Bishop’s Court as his Vatican – were taken to the civil courts.
The first arose when Gray called his first general synod in 1857, and summoned lay representatives from the parishes. Synods like this were foreign to English practice, and five parishes refused. Gray let the matter lie. But in 1861, when he again summoned lay representatives, the rector of St Peter’s, Mowbray,[2] the Rev W Long, accused Gray of trying to “secede from the English Church”. He appeared before the bishop and five clergy for disobedience, but on being suspended for three months continued taking services and was deprived of his living. Long promptly sued in the Supreme Court, and was assured of a measure of popular support. People saw Long “as a martyr to the bigotry of the Bishop”.[3] Gray defended himself “with masterly ability and at considerable length”.[4] Eleven months after the case first went to court, the Chief Justice ruled in the bishop’s favour. Long appealed to the Privy Council.
Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in Natal, where John William Colenso was bishop. Colenso is a figure much loved and much hated, and will need an article to himself. What concerns us here is the storm he loosed with the publication in 1862 of his book Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans and his next title, The Pentateuch Critically Examined. Colenso was a pioneer of modern biblical scholarship and is today recognised as such, for all that he made statements in his books that could almost have been calculated to upset people. (Calculations were his speciality: he also wrote mathematics textbooks.)
But in his day his writings were revolutionary, and Gray felt that Colenso’s remarks about Romans were sufficiently unorthodox to justify his being tried for heresy. Gray was not alone: 25 English bishops declared in February ’63 that they would not allow Colenso to officiate in their dioceses.
Colenso went to trial in absentia in St George’s Cathedral on 17 November 1863. The Bishop of Natal was in England, and was represented by Dr Wilhelm Bleek. The court of three bishops and the Dean of Cape Town found Colenso to be a heretic and deprived him of any divine office in the Province of Cape Town. Colenso, like Long, appealed to the Privy Council.
Meanwhile, in May of that year, Gray had learned that the Privy Council had reversed the Cape Supreme Court’s decision in the Long case. The bishop was obliged by law to pay Long the earnings of his former position. In August he went further than required, and once more made him rector of St Peter’s.
Even more of a blow was the next Privy Council ruling, in March 1865. The decision turned on a matter of letters patent. When Gray’s original letters patent as Bishop of Cape Town had been issued in 1847, the Cape had no representative
government. But when he resigned this document and received fresh papers in
1853, creating him bishop of a smaller diocese but also metropolitan of South
Africa, the Cape Parliament had come into being. The Privy Council held that
the Crown had had no authority to issue such letters patent for the Cape Colony
in ’53. The result was that Gray had no legal authority over Colenso.
Many men would have seen this as a setback. Not Robert Gray, who now felt himself freed of the restrictions the civil law imposed on the Church. The Church of the
Province of South Africa, which held its first provincial synod in 1870, was
constituted as a voluntary church, not an organ of the State, and thus it has
remained.
