Parochial Annals of Bengal : a History of the Bengal Ecclesiastical Establishment of the Honourable East India Company in the 17th & 18th Countries in 1901

Abstract

The present compilation attempts to bring together all notices that could be collected from the records of. the East India Company relating to its Chaplains in Bengal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, supplementing them from all available contemporaneous documents. The local records of the Company were almost entirely destroyed in the sack of Calcutta by the Nawab’s army in 1756. From that year until the time of Mr. Warren Hastings’ Governor- Generalship, they are very meagre, but from thence onwards they rapidly improve in extent and completeness. 'The local records include the Parish Registers of Calcutta, and after 1787 the vestry minutes of the Presidency Church. Up to 1756 the student-of Bengal affairs has to rely almost exclusively upon the minutes of court, the correspondence and the duplicate diaries and consultation books preserved among the Company’s records in the ■ Indi^ Office, Westminster. These have been minutely searched for the writer by iiis father, Mr. H. B. Hyde, f .s .s . Having little else than secular sources to draw from, it < cannot be expected that the purely pastoral work of the Company’s Chaplains can now be traced: even ‘ Spiritual Duties’ Berks’ did not exist in Bengal before the Bishopric. Nevertheless enough of evidence exists to show that the colony of the Church of England in Bengal fairly reflected, generation by generation, the prevailing type of religious thought at home. Thus a protestant Whig ministered in Bengal in the time of William of Orange, the old High Church spirit surviving nevertheless at least to the middle of the eighteenth century. About thfit time the National Church entered the very drearest period of her chequered history: nevertheless, it is hut fair to maintain that even throughout the thirty years in which Clive and Hastings are the commanding figures, there is evidence of religious •vitality in Bengal that is remarkable in so unspiritual a generation. But the evangelical movement was making headway at home, and soon Chaplains were sent out, disciples of Wesley and of Simeon, wh'o propagated their principles of devotion under the Divine blessing among the English in Bengal. In studying the scanty memorials here presented, four things should in fairness be borne in mind. The first of these is that clergymen of the Georgian period, when English religion had receded furthest from the Catholic ideals of the Church, must not be judged by the standards of zeal, piety, and canonical obedience now happily everywhere again recognized. In the next place, as the reader with an Indian experience will readily admit* they must have shared like other Englishmen in the tendency to moral as well as physical exhaustion inseparable from an enervating climate. Further, that they lived remote from all access to the fellowship of their brethren in the priesthood and from the supervision of their Diocesan, the Bishop of London, an isolation which, until pensions and furloughs began to be granted to Chaplains at the end of the eighteenth century, was for most of their number a lifelong misfortune. In the fourth place, their salaries were for' a whole century so small that many of them must, like other superior servants of the Company, have engaged in commercial investments to obtain a syfficient livelihood and to provide for their widows and orphans. It*is often supposed that the Company’s Chaplains made fortunes by trade. This is a point on which available documents might be expected to exhibit evidence. These pages faithfully present the whole of such evidence, and it amounts to this: two only of the Bengal Chaplains of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be shown to have practised direct trade, thfit is, the buying and selling of merchandize. Of these, the earlier (Evans) died an eminent Bishop, and left the whole of his fortune to the service of the Church; the later (Butler) wholly failed in his speculations and died nearly insolvent. If the rest traded in any sense, it was probably only by subscribing year by year to joint-stock adventures. None of these? appear to have enjoyed more than a moderate income from all sources. It is not until the golden age, when all,the servants of the Company shared in monopolies and perquisites, that we hear of any Chaplain dying or retiring a wealthy man, and-of these, one at least (Owen) was as averse on principle to anything like clerical trading as any High Churchman could be. In the following chapters the writer has incorporated the contents of papers contributed by him to the Indian Church Quarterly Review and to the Proceedings o f the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, to the Indian Churchman, and to the Englishman newspaper. He records his thanks for assistance obligingly afforded to him by (amongst many others) Mr. H. Beveridge, i.c.s., retired; to Mr. Frederick Danvers and Mr. William Foster of the India Office; Mr. W. Banks Gwyther, Under-Secretary to the Government of Bengal in the D. P. W .; Mr. P . Dias, Librarian of the Imperial Library, Calcutta; Mrs. and the Rev, Mr. Frank Penny, L.L.M ., of Fort St. George; Mr. A. T. Pringle, Assistant Secretary to the Government of Fort St. George, and Mr. C. R. Wilson, M .A . , of the Bengal Education Department,