The history of the Anglican Communion may be attributed mainly to the worldwide spread of British culture associated with the British Empire. Among other things the Church of England spread around the world and, gradually developing autonomy in each region of the world, became the communion as it exists today.
Origins
The only provinces of the Anglican Communion with a direct and unbroken history stretching back to the pre-Reformation church are to be found in Great Britain and Ireland: the Church of England, the Church in Wales, the Church of Ireland and the Scottish Episcopal Church. As its name suggests, the Scottish situation is unique; the national Church of Scotland is Presbyterian and for some years in the late 17th and early 18th centuries the Scottish Episcopal Church, despite its similarities to the Church of England, was regarded with some suspicion because of its occasional associations with Jacobite opposition to the House of Hanover.
Although Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome in the 1530s, he strongly resisted thereafter associating the English Church with the Continental Protestant Reformation. Henry's position was however, reversed in the brief reign of his young son Edward VI 1547–1553, when the leaders of the Church of England, especially Thomas Cranmer, actively sought to establish England in the centre of evolving Reformed churches. Cranmer's ambitions, however, were not widely shared amongst the bulk of laity and clergy; and accordingly, the return to the religious forms of traditional Roman Catholicism under Queen Mary was widely welcomed.
The Elizabethan Settlement in England was broken in 1570 with the excommunication of Elizabeth. Although few, if any, concessions were made to the Papacy or to Roman Catholic doctrine, a small number of changes were then made to the Articles of Religion and to the Prayer Book, especially in relation the Real Presence and to the continuation of worship in more traditional forms. Only one of Mary's English and Welsh bishops conformed to the Elizabethan settlement, though all save 300 of the parish clergy subscribed. In Ireland the position was reversed; all bishops save two accepted the Elizabethan Settlement, but the bulk of parish clergy and laity remained loyal to the pope. In the period since 1553, Continental Reformed Protestantism had itself continued to develop, especially in Geneva and Heidelberg, but English divines who wished the Elizabethan church to take part in these developments were to be bitterly disappointed; Elizabeth refused any further change to the forms or structures of religion established in 1559. In particular, Protestant controversialists began to attack the episcopal polity, and the defined liturgy of the Elizabethan Church as incompatible with the true Reformed tradition; and, in response, defenders of the established church began, from the early 17th Century onwards, to claim these specific features as positively desirable, or indeed essential.
The attempt to impose in Scotland a Prayer Book on the English model, drove the three kingdoms into civil war. However, the Puritan sympathies of the victorious Parliamentary armies in the English Civil War, and the consequential abolition during the Commonwealth of English bishoprics and cathedral chapters with the suppression of the Book of Common Prayer, resulted in English churchmen beginning to recognise Anglican identity as being distinct from and incompatible with the traditions of Presbyterian Protestantism. This distinction was formalised at the Restoration of Charles II, when the proposals of Puritan divines for further reform of the Prayer Book were thoroughly rejected; and 1,760 clergymen were deprived of their livings for failing to subscribe to the 1662 Book. From this date onwards dissenting Protestant congregations were to be found throughout England, and the established church no longer claimed or sought to comprehend all traditions of Protestant belief. In Ireland and in many of England's American Colonies, the numbers who subscribed to Presbyterian congregations formed the majority of the Protestant population; while in Scotland from 1689, following the accession of William and Mary, Presbyterian church polity was revived, and constituted in that kingdom, the established church; so that those ministers and congregations who continued to subscribe to the Anglican Episcopalian traditions eventually became a dissenting minority.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, divines of the Church of England increasingly differentiated their faith from that of the Protestant churches. Controversy broke out into the open after 1829, with the removal of religious restrictions on political rights in the United Kingdom, following which elected members of the UK Parliament (the legal authority in England for definitions of religious faith), might include both Roman Catholics and Dissenters. The Tractarians undertook a re-examination of Anglican traditions of the 19th century; developing these into the general principle that Anglicanism represented a via media between Protestantism and Catholicism; or otherwise, that the Church of England together with the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, represented three 'branches' of the Universal Church, whose faith derived from Scripture and Tradition independent of legislative formulae. The issue was more pressing insofar as Anglican societies were engaging actively in missionary work, often in conjunction with Christians of other traditions; resulting in the foundation of new churches, especially in Africa. Anglican traditions implied an expectation that these churches should develop self-government and a locally based episcopacy; but it was unclear who had legal power to create such bishoprics, who had the authority to appoint to them, and what discretion such bishops would have to define local statements of faith and forms of worship. Matters came to a head with the case of John William Colenso appointed to the Bishopric of Natal in 1853. When Bishop Colenso published commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans and on the Pentateuch that questioned traditional teachings, he was deprived of his see by the bishops of the South African church in 1863; but then re-instated on appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1866. Whatever the merits of the Colenso case, the implied action of a British court in constraining matters of faith and discipline in a church outside the United Kingdom was instrumental in the decision to summon the first Lambeth Conference in 1867.
As Britain's worldwide colonial empire grew, the Church of England began to spread with it. But at first no bishops were sent overseas; all colonial churches reported back to the Bishop of London. At the time of the American Revolution, there had already been considerable American demand for a local bishop; and after that event the Church of England in the new United States certainly needed to organize itself on a local basis.
Anglicanism in the colonies The first Anglican service in North America was conducted in California in 1579 by the chaplain accompanying Sir Francis Drake on his voyage around the globe. The first baptisms were held in Roanoke, North Carolina, by the ill-fated Roanoke colony. The continuous presence of Anglicanism in North America, however, begins in 1607 with the founding of Jamestown, Virginia. By 1700 there were more than 100 Anglican parishes in British colonies on the mainland of North America, the largest number in Virginia and Maryland. The American War for Independence resulted in the formation of the first independent national church in the Anglican tradition.
The 1609 wreck of the flagship of the Virginia Company, the Sea Venture, resulted in the settlement of Bermuda by the company. This was made official in 1612 when the town of St. George's, now the oldest surviving English settlement in the New World, was established. It is the location of St. Peter's Church, the oldest-surviving Anglican church outside of the British Isles (Britain and Ireland) and the oldest surviving non-Roman Catholic church in the New World, also established in 1612. It remained part of the Church of England until 1978 when the Anglican Church of Bermuda was formed. The Church of England was the state church in Bermuda and a system of parishes was set up for the religious and political subdivision of the colony (they survive, today, as both civil and religious parishes).
The parish of St. John the Baptist in the city of St. John's, Newfoundland (part of the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador) is the oldest in Canada, founded in 1699 in response to a petition drafted by the Anglican townsfolk of St. John's and sent to the Bishop of London, Henry Compton. In this petition the people also requested help in the rebuilding of their church, which had been destroyed, along with the rest of the city, in 1696 by the French under the command of General Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville.
On August 12, 1787, Charles Inglis was consecrated Bishop of Nova Scotia with jurisdiction over all the British possessions in North America. In 1793 the see of Quebec was founded; Jamaica and Barbados followed in 1824 and Toronto and Newfoundland in 1839. Meanwhile, the needs of India were met, on the urgent representations in Parliament of William Wilberforce and others, by the consecration of T. F. Middleton as Bishop of Calcutta, with three archdeacons to assist him. In 1829, on the nomination of the Duke of Wellington, William Broughton was sent out to work as the Archdeacon of Australia. The first Anglican church in Latin America, St. John's Cathedral (Belize City), was built in the colony of British Honduras (Belize) in 1812.
Soon afterwards, in 1835 and 1837, the sees of Madras and Bombay were founded, while in 1836 Broughton himself was consecrated as the first Bishop of Australia. Thus down to 1840 there were but ten colonial bishops; and of these several were so hampered by civil regulations that they were little more than government chaplains in episcopal orders. In April of that year, however, Bishop Blomfield of London published his famous letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, declaring that "an episcopal church without a bishop is a contradiction in terms" and strenuously advocating a great effort for the extension of the episcopate.
The plan was taken up with enthusiasm and, in 1841, the bishops of the United Kingdom met and issued a declaration which inaugurated the Colonial Bishoprics Council. Subsequent declarations in 1872 and 1891 served both to record progress and to stimulate to new effort. The Diocese of New Zealand was founded in 1841, being endowed by the Church Missionary Society through the council, and George Augustus Selwyn was chosen as the first bishop. Moreover, in many cases bishops were sent to inaugurate new missions, as in the cases of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, Lebombo, Corea and New Guinea; and the missionary jurisdictions so founded developed in time into dioceses.
It was only very gradually that these dioceses acquired legislative independence and a determinate organization. At first, sees were created and bishops were nominated by the crown by means of letters patent; and in some cases an income was assigned out of public funds. Moreover, for many years all bishops were consecrated in England, took the customary "oath of due obedience" to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and were regarded as his extraterritorial suffragans. But by degrees changes were made on all these points.
America