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Chapter One

Saint Paul’s, Halifax:

Victorian Georgian

WHEN BISHOP CHARLES INGLIS SET foot ashore in Halifax on October 17, 1787, St. Paul’s Church (erected on the Grand Parade the year after the founding of the city in 1749) became, in effect, St. Paul’s Cathedral, for it was there that Inglis had his episcopal chair, or cathedra. A few weeks later, on November 25, the members of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly attended St. Paul’s in a body so that the bishop might preach to them. Twenty-nine years before, in 1758, the assembly had declared the Church of England to be the established church of Nova Scotia, even though it commanded the allegiance of a minority of the population of the colony. Inglis’s jurisdictions as bishop were defined in two royal patents: by one he was bishop of the diocese of Nova Scotia “and its dependencies” for life; by the other he had episcopal jurisdiction in the other British North America colonies and territories “at the Royal pleasure,” that is, until they too should be erected into dioceses with their own bishops.²

The St. Paul’s Church in which Charles Inglis addressed the assembly differed considerably from the building familiar to Haligonians today, especially in its exterior appearance. In 1787 St. Paul’s was a rectangular box, ninety feet long by fifty-six feet wide, in the Georgian Style, closely patterned on James Gibbs’ St. Peter’s Church, Vere Street, in the city of London, the plans for which had been published some years earlier and so were readily available. It was placed with its end elevations oriented north and south at the narrow south end of a rectangular square called the Grand Parade, set in the centre of the grid of streets that constituted Halifax.

In 1787 St. Paul’s was still very much as it had been built — or assembled, for its constituent timbers had been prefabricated in New England — in 1750. The site on which it stood was steep, sloping sharply upwards from the harbour to the hilltop that rose above the mostly flat plateau of the Halifax peninsula. The Grand Parade in 1787 was still just a bare patch of cleared ground on the slope of the hillside, for it was not excavated and levelled until 1796. Each side elevation of the church building accommodated two rows of seven round-headed windows, the upper range almost twice the height of the lower. In the centre of the north end elevation was what is commonly called a Palladian window, flanked by two pairs of windows identical to those in the east and west elevations. Set in the centre of the elevation under the Palladian window was an entry porch in which the door was flanked by double columns that supported a triangular pediment that was repeated in the gable of the building. The south end elevation was identical to that of the north except that there was no entrance under the Palladian window and the two lower-range windows of the other facade were replaced by two square-headed doorways, each surmounted by a bracketed cornice and approached by a flight of steps, four to the upper door and five to the one lower down. Set within each of the pedimented gables was a round window, or oculus, that provided light to the attic space between ceiling and roof. The corners of the building and the window surrounds were ornamented by wooden quoins that attempted to convey the impression of stone construction. The glass in the multi-mullioned windows was small paned.

Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

A view of Halifax c. 1763, showing Government House and St. Matthew’s (Mather’s) Church on Hollis Street, and looking up George Street to St. Paul’s Church; oil on canvas by Dominique Serres, working from a drawing made by a military artist using a Camera Obscura.

Inside, galleries ran the full length of the building and across its back. At the front, below the Palladian window, a small Communion table was enclosed by a rail. The earliest photograph of the interior of the church dates from c.1859–68 and shows a high “wineglass” pulpit reached by a narrow, curved, cast iron stair set off-centre in the middle of the central nave alley; but a description of the church as it had been prior to the middle of the century, published in the Halifax Mail in 1893, suggested that there had been an earlier and different layout and arrangement of the sanctuary furniture:

The Communion Table stood against the southern wall, with a low railing before it. The pulpit - a three-decker - was a little to the west of the central aisle. On either side - east and west - were square pews for the officers of the army and navy. On either side of the centre aisle, in front of the Communion Table, were the pews for the Governor, the Admiral and the Bishop. The Governor’s pew was a miniature drawing room. It was square, luxuriously furnished with tables, a desk, chairs, etc. The Admiral’s pew was equally comfortable. Both were upholstered in crimson. The Bishop’s pew was upholstered in blue.

Set saddleback on the crest of the roof over the entrance front was a squat, four-sided tower surmounted by two octagonal cupolas, one smaller than and set above the other, each with round-headed, louvered, full-length windows in each of its eight bays. It was topped by a weathervane.

The construction of St. Paul’s was rapid (no doubt assisted by the prefabrication), and the first service in it was offered on September 2, 1750, less than three months after Governor Edward Cornwallis laid its cornerstone on June 13. Yet for the next twelve years the church is described only as “almost finished” in letters and various other written references.³ Finally, in a letter dated February 27, 1763, its rector, the Reverend John Breynton, describes it as “now compleatly (sic) finished and will (when our organ is erected) be the neatest in North America . . . ”

As the years passed, and the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, St. Paul’s received the usual maintenance required by a wooden building in an exposed position in a harsh climate. The original imitation quoins around the windows were replaced by simpler surrounds, and those on the corners of the building by the wide pilasters common in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century wooden buildings in the Maritime provinces. The building was painted from time to time, usually in an off-white or cream colour, later “stone colour” or grey. The earliest photograph of St. Paul’s, made in 1853, suggests that it was at that time grey with white trim.

The first major change in the building came in 1812, when a large vestibule, or narthex, flanked by two vestries was constructed on the elevation facing the Parade. The old steeple, which had become dilapidated, was taken down, and a replica erected on the new extension. In the early years of the nineteenth century there was an open gallery, rather like a veranda, on the south end elevation below the Palladian window that linked the two exterior doors. This was a curious structure, the appearance of which seems never to have been recorded in any visual form. It appears to have been used to stage entertainments such as boxing matches!

In 1868 the church was enlarged by the addition of aisles, or wings, on the east and west sides of the nave, providing seating for an additional two hundred persons and increasing the width of the building from fifty-six to eighty feet. The old lower ranges of windows were discarded, and new, two-light, sashed, Romanesque-Style windows with rounded heads were installed. This led to the replacement the next year of the old upper range of windows by new ones made in similar style to those below, but with a roundel set at the top between the two vertical lights.

Four years later, a chancel twenty-eight feet deep with flanking vestries was built on the southern end of the church. The old Palladian window was replaced by a massive three-light Romanesque-Style window that incorporated two roundels with quatrefoil tracery in its head. All the detailing was derived from Classical originals, but the spirit of the changes was Gothic Revival, which by the 1860s had become the dominant architectural idiom in the Anglo-Saxon world. St. Paul’s, as originally built, had closely resembled St. Peter’s, Vere Street, on the outside; but now it looked very little like St. Peter’s even in its exterior. Traces of its character as an eighteenth-century Georgian building survived in spots, but now, for the most part, St. Paul’s had been transformed into a Victorian building, both inside and out, with Italianate and Gothic-Revival influences evident in its new chancel layout, furniture, and fenestration.

This enlargement of the building, and its updating, took place shortly after the fourth Bishop of Nova Scotia, Hibbert Binney, had moved his episcopal chair from St. Paul’s in 1864 to St. Luke’s, a Gothic-Revival-style wooden building that stood on Morris Street in the south end of the city, which now became the diocesan pro-cathedral. Binney was a Tractarian, an advocate of the Catholic Revival in the Anglican Church, and, as such, he was regarded with suspicion by more Protestant-minded Anglicans. When he wanted to place a credence table in the sanctuary at St. Paul’s on which to place the Eucharistic bread and wine until it should be needed on the holy table for consecration as the Body and Blood of Christ, there was an uproar when his request was refused. The bishop moved his chair out of St. Paul’s, which then reverted to its original status as a parish church, to St. Luke’s.

An earlier dispute was more serious. When Bishop Charles Inglis died, aged eighty-one, in 1816, the diocese of Nova Scotia had been run for some time by his son, the Reverend John Inglis, rector of St. Mary’s Church, Aylesford, as his father’s commissary. In those days, and for many more to come, no provision was made for clergy pensions, and in consequence, the clergy seldom retired. In 1808, and again in 1812, Charles had attempted to get the British government to authorize John’s consecration as his suffragan, or as coadjutor bishop, but without success. After Bishop Charles was laid to rest under St. Paul’s Church, John sailed for England, expecting that he might return as bishop; but on the same ship, unknown to John, was a memorandum signed by some of the leading citizens of Halifax requesting that the rector of St. Paul’s, the Reverend Robert Stanser, be consecrated bishop of Nova Scotia. So it was that John Inglis returned to Nova Scotia not as bishop, but as rector of St. Paul’s, with Stanser now his bishop in the place of his late father. But Stanser returned to England within two years, where he continued to draw his salary in absentia for eight more years, while John Inglis performed as commissary for Stanser, as he had for his aged father. Stanser was eventually persuaded to resign by the promise of a pension, and John Inglis was at last consecrated bishop of Nova Scotia by the archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace Chapel on Palm Sunday, 1825.

Photo by Graham Tuck

St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, 1750: exterior from The Grand Parade.

Photo by Graham Tuck

St. Paul’s Church, Halifax: interior.

This meant, of course, that a new rector would have to be found for St. Paul’s. John Inglis had left the parish in charge of his curate, the Reverend John Thomas Twining. As soon as word reached Halifax that John Inglis was to be the new bishop, Twining asked the churchwardens to call a meeting to recommend his appointment to the “highly respectable and responsible position” of rector of St. Paul’s.⁴ This they did; but not long afterwards they received a letter from John Inglis telling them that the appointment lay with the Crown rather than with the parishioners, and that the Reverend Robert Willis of Saint John, New Brunswick, not Mr. Twining, had been appointed rector of St. Paul’s. Push came to shove in what was afterwards called the Great Disruption, and the churchwardens locked the church against Mr. Willis, whose induction, in consequence, took place outside the building. However, under the threat of legal action from the colonial secretary, a part of the congregation, including some leading families, withdrew from St. Paul’s. They worshipped for a while in rented premises under Mr. Twining’s leadership, and then he withdrew, having been offered an appointment as garrison chaplain. Some of them opted to attend St. George’s Church on Brunswick Street, and the remaining dissidents, unable to find another Anglican priest who would minister to them, purchased a chapel on Granville Street, and became Baptists. Their story is continued elsewhere in this book.