Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-9q27g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T09:01:55.887Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

William Gore: A Puseyite in Parramatta

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2021

Robert Willson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the way one nineteenth-century clergyman of the Church of England in Australia, William Gore, was influenced by the Oxford Movement. Gore was the incumbent of the parish of All Saints Church, North Parramatta in Sydney. He implemented liturgical practices valued by the Oxford Movement, including wearing a surplice to preach rather than a Geneva gown, reading the Offertory sentences in the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer, celebrating the Holy Communion on the saints days set in the Prayer Book and placing a cross on the holy table. He was supported by his bishop, William Grant Broughton. The reaction from parishioners was surprise, shock and opposition and he was branded as a ‘Puseyite’. This article uses local primary material, including press reports of parish meetings, to describe the reactions of parishioners in parish meetings against Gore’s liturgical uses. Gore’s activities are assessed as an important early example of the Oxford Movement’s influence in the Church of England in Australia. Gore’s practices, discussed in the public domain, provide evidence that the Oxford Movement was beginning to transform the nineteenth-century liturgical worship of the Church of England in Australia.

Keywords

All SaintsNorth ParramattaChurch of England in Australialiturgical practicesOxford MovementPuseyiteWilliam Gore
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Anglican Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , May 2023 , pp. 21 - 33
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

The author, the Reverend Robert Willson, has been a priest in the Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn since 1974. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, and was a teacher and chaplain at the Canberra Girls’ Grammar School, Australia, for 17 years.

References

2 Stewart Brown and Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 1.

3 David Hilliard, ‘Anglo-Catholicism in Australia, c. 1860–1960’, in Brown and Nockles (eds.), The Oxford Movement, pp. 114-32 (114-17).

4 Austin Cooper, ‘The Australian Bishops and the Oxford Movement’, in Brown and Nockles (eds.), The Oxford Movement, pp. 99-113.

5 Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 25 April 1851. For Hardy, see Australian Dictionary of Biography (hereafter ADB), vol. 3. For an outline of the life of Gore see the entry in Kenneth Cable, Cable Clerical Index, available at: http://anglicanhistory.org/aus/cci/index.pdf (accessed 9 July 2021).

6 See entry for Cameron, Cable Clerical Index.

7 The author acknowledges the assistance of Prue Gore of Somerset, Tasmania, who has researched and documented every aspect of her husband’s ancestor and his extended family. The author also acknowledges the great assistance of Brian Douglas, author of a study of E.B. Pusey’s eucharistic theology.

8 National Library of Australia, Mss ref: 844.

9 See, for example, Stephen Judd and Kenneth Cable, Sydney Anglicans: A History of the Diocese (Sydney: Anglican Information Office, 2000). The briefest details of his name, dates of birth and death and ordination dates is found, but there is no other reference to Gore.

10 Patricia Dorsch, The History of All Saints’ Church North Parramatta (Northmead: Daram Printing, 1979), pp. 15-16.

11 Brian Douglas, The Eucharistic Theology of Edward Bouverie Pusey: Sources, Context and Doctrine within the Oxford Movement and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 3.

12 William Broughton, Sermons on the Church of England: Its Constitution, Missions and Trials (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857). See especially the sermon ‘The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’, pp. 107-18.

13 Leter from William Broughton to Edward Coleridge, 14 February 1842, in Moore College Library.

14 See entry for Allwood in the ADB: K.J. Cable, ‘Allwood, Robert (1803–1891)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1996, available at: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/allwood-robert-1701/text1841 (accessed 9 July 2021).

15 See entry for Walsh in ADB: K.J. Cable, ‘Walsh, William Horatio (1812–1882)’, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/walsh-william-horatio-2771/text3865 (accessed 9 July 2021) and for Sconce in ADB: R.A. Daly, ‘Sconce, Robert Knox (1818–1852)’, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sconce-robert-knox-2637/text3659 (accessed 9 July 2021).

16 SMH, 21 April 1846. Archbishop William Laud (1573–1645), Archbishop of Canterbury 1633–45, attempted to reintroduce many practices in worship which had disappeared at the Reformation. He was executed in 1645.

17 See Kenneth Cable, ‘St James’ Church King Street, Sydney, 1819–1894’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 50.5 (November 1964), pp. 246-378.

18 This is established by unpublished genealogical work by Prue Gore of Tasmania.

19 Ruth Knight, Illiberal Liberal: Robert Lowe in New South Wales, 1842–1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966), p. 234.

20 Cable, Sydney Anglicans, p. 352.

21 SMH, 23 June 1846.

22 Broughton to Coleridge 26 July 1836.

23 George Shaw, Patriarch and Patriot: William Grant Broughton 1788–1853: Colonial Stateman and Ecclesiastic (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978), pp. 164-65.

24 SMH 15 April, 17 April and 28 February 1848. Also R.A. Daly, ‘Sconce and Makinson, Church of England Clergymen Converted to Catholicism Sydney, 1848’, Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 2 (1967), pp. 49-65. See also Austin Cooper, ‘Romanizing in Sydney’, Australasian Catholic Record, 84 (2007), pp. 267-78.

25 SMH, 11 August 1849.

26 The question of the offertory will be considered later in the account of the 1850 vestry meeting, including why it was so controversial.

27 SMH, 28 July 1849.

28 SMH, 11 August 1849.

29 SMH, 10 September 1849.

30 SMH, 4 April 1850.

31 For the life of Woolls see M.M.H. Thompson, William Woolls: A Man of Parramatta (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986) and Lionel Gilbert, William Woolls 1814–1893 (Canberra: Mulini Press, 1985). Also the entry for Woolls in the ADB: K.J. Cable, ‘Woolls, William (1814–1893)’, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/woolls-william-4886/text8175 (accessed 9 July 2021). For the views of Woolls himself on the Puseyite tendencies of Gore, see William Woolls, A Tract for the Times: Addressed to the Laity of New South Wales (Parramatta: Edmund Mason, 1849), pp 33-34.

32 Woolls, A Tract for the Times, p. 33.

33 Woolls, A Tract for the Times, p. 34.

34 Woolls, A Tract for the Times, pp. 154-55.

35 Ross Border, Church and State in Australia 1788–1872: A Constitutional Study of the Church of England in Australia (London: SPCK, 1962).

36 Letter from Pryce to Clarke in Clarke papers, State Library of NSW, dated 28 March 1849.

37 Kenneth Cable, ‘Religious Controversies in New South Wales in the Mid-nineteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 49.1 (1963), p. 63.

38 SMH, 11 August 1849.

39 SMH, 4 April 1850.

40 See entry for Woolls in ADB.

41 SMH, 25 April 1851, for a full account of this meeting.

42 SMH, 25 April 1851.