A Bishop for Virginia in 1672 Revisited

Abstract

abstract:This note revisits a 2009 essay by William Gibson on a proposal to appoint an Anglican bishop for Virginia in 1672. The essay indicated how advanced the planning for the project was and gave information from an archival source of a meeting of five bishops to plan the funding and powers of the bishop. What was not clear was why the project failed. This note, using manuscripts from the Huntington Library, uses letters written in the mid-eighteenth century to explain the reasons for the failure of the project. Principal among these was the distraction of one of the major proposers of the plan, Alexander Murray, by Irish entanglements.