ANNALS OF KING'S CHAPEL FROM THE INDUCTION OF THE LAST ROYALIST RECTOR TO THE PRESENT TIME. SHOWING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH IN NEW ENGLAND, AND OF THE CHANGES IN DOCTRINE AND DISCIPLINE IN THE ROYAL CHAPEL IN BOSTON. "Their Children also shall be as aforetime, and their Congregation shall be established before Me . . . and their Governor shall proceed from the midst of them." -JER. XXX. 20, 21. COMMUNION RAIL. 1754 CHAPTER XIII. REV. HENRY CANER INDUCTED. - REV. CHARLES BROCKWELL, AFTERNOON PREACHER. HE history of the King's Chapel in Boston, as we have thus far traced it through a period of sixty eventful years, from its founding under Sir Edmund Andros in 1686 to the resignation of the Bishop's Commissary, the Rev. Roger Price, in 1747, shows that the church is an essential link in the chain binding New England to Great Britain. Nor is the closeness of the tie relaxed during the eventful ministry of the Rev. Henry Caner. Its early years, lighted by the welcome of a prosperous and growing parish to the new rector in his manly prime, are brightened by the triumphs of the French war; while its closing period, clouded with the alienations. of bitter political strife, the gloom of a besieged city and a ruined cause, has its climax in the flight of the aged servant of Christ, homeless, proscribed, across a wintry sea, but faithful to his oath and his conscience. The roll of drums and the martial tread which VOL. II. I seem to shake the church at the beginning, sound more harsh and angrily at the close. Dr. Caner's long ministry of twenty-eight years at King's Chapel and the momentous times in which it was cast cover what is in some respects the most interesting epoch in our Annals. It was his fortune to be one of the chief sufferers among those who remained loyal to "Church and King." He was on the losing side, and this circumstance has too long obscured his invaluable services to his church. But it is not the less clear that to his energy, taste, and practical ability we are largely indebted for the noble edifice which still stands as their monument and should perpetuate his memory. The new rector of King's Chapel was a man in the full ripeness of his powers, American bred if not born, with the experience of many years as a missionary from the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and with qualifications for his responsible position, which the course of our history will fully unfold. In being invited to King's Chapel he received deserved promotion to the most conspicuous Episcopal pulpit in America, after a laborious ministry of twenty-two years in the mission at Fairfield, in Connecticut.1 The first edifice of Trinity parish in that place had been opened with a suitable discourse, on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 10, 1725, and the Rev. Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, preached there part of the time for some two years, dividing his labors chiefly between Stratford and Fairfield. At the same time Mr. Henry Caner, a graduate of Yale College in 1724, where he had felt the commotion of Dr. Cutler's defection to the Church of 1 For my account of this portion of the life of Mr. Caner I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Beardsley's exhaustive "History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut," and for valuable information to the late Rev. Dr. Samuel Osgood, of New York, whose summer home was in Fairfield. Dr. Osgood wrote: "The place usually fixed upon as the site of the first Trinity Church upon the southern angle of Mill Plain was the site of the third edifice erected by that parish. The first building was a considerable distance towards the North, on the right hand road to Greenfield, opposite the orchard of Mr. Jonathan Sturges. All that is now found of the old institution there were four or five grave-stones gathered together by the division wall that had been built through the ancient churchyard, and ye Body of Mr Abraham Adams in ye 80th year of his age This inscription is very suggestive, presenting as it does a name which Fielding chose for the hero of one of his novels as the patriarch of Fairfield churchmen in 1729, and dating his birth somewhere about the year 1650, the time when New York was founded and your old King's Chapel was unborn." England, two years earlier, read service at Fairfield in Mr. Johnson's absence. He was "son of the Mr. Caner who built the first College and Rector's house" at New Haven. If his parents, as has been supposed, were Congregationalists, they must have changed their religious connection, and more probably were stanch church-people. Dr. Trumbull calls England "the land of his nativity, where he was probably born about 1700." "Henry Caner" was enrolled in the "Registry Book" of Mr. Pigot, upon the list of communicants at Stratford "Sept 2d, 1722," and "Henry Caner, Jr." by Mr. Johnson, "March 28th, 1725." 1 For the three years after leaving college, Henry Caner lived under the theological teaching of Mr. Johnson, of Stratford, who had the general supervision of Episcopal students of divinity, and who had been his College tutor. Though too young to be ordained, he assisted Mr. Johnson as catechist and schoolmaster at Fairfield,2 Interesting glimpses of the young reader are given in the Rev. Mr. Johnson's letters to the Secretary of the Society for Propagating the Gospel. He wrote, Jan. 10, 1724: 1 Dexter's Graduates of Yale College. The name was written by Trumbull 'Canner," and sometimes, by the early churchmen of Fairfield, "Conner." If, as I conjecture, the Henry Caner mentioned in our records in 1713 (see vol. i. p. 203), was the father, employed in work on the church upon his arrival from England, the future rector of King's Chapel may have first entered it as a boy at that time. The name was long preserved at New Haven by "Caner's Pond," being written on that unstable element, a sheet of water. Dr. Beardsley (i. 65) notes that: "The father evidently went to Stratford to commune, as many churchmen scattered in the neighboring towns were accustomed to do, when the only Episcopal clergyman in the colony was stationed there. He died at the age of sixty; and Johnson came to New Haven Sept. 24, 1731, to attend his funeral, as he had been here six years before to attend the funeral of Elizabeth Caner. It is an interesting fact, that, after his ordination in the Church of England, so little were the services of Johnson called for to baptize, marry, or bury the dead, in the immediate scene of his early religious struggles, that for more than fifteen years the only official acts of this kind in New Haven, with one exception, of which there is no record, - were performed for the Caner family." James Abraham Hillhouse, a distinguished lawyer of Connecticut, born 1730, died Oct. 3, 1775; married Mary, daughter of Augustus Lucas and Mary Caner, sister of the Rev. Henry Caner. "Both she and Madam Caner died in the family of Hon. James Abraham Hillhouse, -one aged 84, the other 89." — Updike, p. 507. 2 This custom of "lay-reading" was reprehended by some strict churchmen. Dr. McSparran, Aug. 4, 1751, preached a sermon from Heb. v. 4, styled "The sacred dignity of the Christian Priesthood Vindicated," printed at Newport. He says of it, in a letter to Rev. Paul Limrick, of Ireland: "The native novanglian clergy of our church, against the opinion of European missionaries, have introduced a custom of young scholars going about and reading prayers, etc., when there are vacancies, on purpose that they may step in them when they get orders. . . This occasioned my preaching the enclosed discourse,” etc. -Updike's Narragansett, p. 238. 8 Church Docs. Conn., i. 100, 109, 114. |