House of Lords in 1834 controversial change to have Church of England chaplains upsets South Australia dissenters
The original Church of England Trinity Church as seen on North Terrace, Adelaide, looking southeast in 1839. Its minister Charles Beaumont Howard had been appointed as the government chaplain to South Australia province, going against the strong dissenter sentiment among its founders.
One of the 40 changes that the British parliament’s House of Lords made to the bill for South Australian colonisation was to appoint “Chaplains and Clergymen of the Established Church of England or Scotland” to the colony.
This went against the wishes of the bill’s promoters who were concerned about religious freedom and separating church and state. Robert Gouger (of Huguenot heritage) and Edward Gibbon Wakefield (a Quaker) had both objected in 1833 when the Colonial Office pointed to the lack of support for religion in the 1833 proposal to colonise South Australia.
Replying to the Colonial Office’s call for religion to be supported in the South Australian Land Company colonisation proposal in 1833, Gouger replied: “If one particular form of worship is to be established, the unfairness to all those who do not agree with that particular creed or form of church discipline is apparent”.
During the House of Lords debate of colonising South Australia, the Duke of Wellington initially saw the whole affair as a “rather dubious speculation”.
But the Marquess of Clanricarde defended the colony project as having the “most patriotic and pure motives”. He then presented a petition from “Persons possessed of capital who are desirous of settling in the proposed Colony of South Australia” and prayed that the bill “may pass into Law as speedily as possible”.
It has been speculated that Clanricarde, who had large estates in Ireland, may have been diverting attention from calls in the House of Commons for closer settlement in Ireland before the waste lands of the empire were exploited. Or whether emigration to South Australia – and elsewhere – was a way of avoiding poor relief in Ireland which he, as a landholder, would have to pay.
On August 14, 1834, the bill passed the House of Lords and its changes agreed to by the House of Commons. King William IV came to parliament to give the act, among others, royal assent but didn’t mention the proposed colony of South Australia in the short speech that followed.
