Francis Fulford, born in Sidmouth, Devon, on 3 June 1803, came from one of the county’s oldest families. He was the second son of Baldwin Fulford and Anne Maria Adams, and in 1830 he married Mary Drummond of Fawley, Hampshire. His life would take him far from Devon, across the Atlantic, where he became the first Anglican bishop of Montreal and a central figure in shaping the church in Canada. He died in Montreal on 9 September 1868, leaving behind a legacy of organisation, reform, and steady leadership.
Educated at Blundell’s School and Exeter College, Oxford, Fulford graduated in 1827 and was ordained the following year. He gained wide experience in parish ministry, serving in western England and later at Croydon, Cambridgeshire. In 1845 he became minister of Curzon Chapel in Mayfair, London, and chaplain to the Duchess of Gloucester, a role that brought him into court circles. By this time he was already active in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), forging a close friendship with its secretary, the Reverend Ernest Hawkins. His editorship of the Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal from 1848 confirmed his reputation as a clear and energetic writer, committed to the SPG’s missionary vision.
Fulford’s churchmanship placed him on the fringes of the Oxford Movement, which sought to free the church from state interference. He sympathised with its leaders, defending Edward Bouverie Pusey when he was barred from preaching at Oxford in 1843, and maintaining friendly correspondence with John Henry Newman. Even after Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, Fulford reviewed his Apologia pro vita sua with sympathy. Yet Fulford was no partisan. He admired the English and Continental reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and in his 1841 pamphlet The Progress of the Reformation in England he insisted that the Church of England was both Catholic and reformed. He saw its expansion overseas as a sign of vitality and promise.
His appointment as bishop of Montreal in 1850 came through his SPG connections. The division of the vast diocese of Quebec had long been planned, and when funds were finally secured, the Colonial Office turned to the SPG for a candidate. Fulford was chosen, and letters patent from Queen Victoria created the new diocese and named him its first bishop. He was consecrated in Westminster Abbey on 25 July 1850 and enthroned in Christ Church, Montreal, that September. His new diocese stretched from the United States border to the Ottawa River, encompassing some 25,000 Anglicans, mostly English-speaking but with French-speaking congregations, German settlers, and even a mission to the Abenaki at Odanak.
Fulford quickly grasped the challenges before him. In his first survey he found both spiritual and material depression: “The people are disunited & few are in reality Church people.” Yet he valued his clergy, then numbering 48, and set about building structures to strengthen the church. He established a cathedral chapter, appointed an archdeacon, and in 1859 divided the diocese into four rural deaneries to encourage cooperation between parishes. These measures gave the diocese a cohesion and efficiency it had never known before. He also reorganised the Church Society, founded in 1840, into committees for education, church extension, and other work, encouraging local branches in the missions. His persistence in establishing a diocesan synod was equally important. From 1851 he pressed for lay participation, and despite opposition from lawyers who doubted the church could govern itself without the state, he secured Canadian legislation in 1857–58 giving the synod legal standing. By 1859 the constitution he favoured, with bishop, clergy, and laity acting together, was adopted. In 1867 the Church Society was merged into the synod, bringing all authority under representative control.
Finances were a constant concern. Apart from the episcopal endowment, there was little regular income. Fulford encouraged systematic giving, local endowments, and the acquisition of glebe lands. Grants from the SPG helped, but he believed the diocese must become self-supporting. His steady hand ensured that, despite limited resources, the church in Montreal grew in organisation and confidence. Francis Fulford’s career illustrates the transition of the Anglican Church from a transplanted institution dependent on England to a self-governing body rooted in Canadian soil. He combined loyalty to tradition with a practical sense of reform, and his work laid the foundations for the Anglican presence in Montreal. A Devon clergyman who became a Canadian bishop, he bridged two worlds and left his mark on both.
One of the most sensitive issues he faced was the question of the clergy reserves. After 1854, some 190,000 acres of land remained undisposed within his diocese, valued at around £30,000. Fulford doubted the strength of the Church of England’s claims to this land and the wisdom of pressing them, recognising the growing Canadian hostility to public endowments for denominational bodies. Yet, with his fellow bishops, he signed a petition to the British government for their retention. His detached comments on the progress of secularisation in 1855 showed his pragmatism: he deplored the facts, but unlike Bishop Strachan, he did not fight them with passion. Fulford seemed to understand that the church’s survival in Canada would depend less on state support and more on its own organisation and resources.
Church building was another challenge. Early in his episcopate he had hoped for extensive construction, but diocesan finances made this impossible. Only the destruction by fire of the old cathedral on Notre-Dame Street in December 1856 forced action. A new site was secured on Sainte-Catherine Street, and architect Frank Wills designed a Gothic church inspired by Fredericton Cathedral and, indirectly, Snettisham Church in Norfolk. When the new Christ Church Cathedral opened on Advent Sunday 1859, Fulford was delighted, declaring, “There is no building to compare with it on this Continent.” While modest in scale, it was a fine example of Gothic Revival architecture and became a symbol of his episcopate.
Education was a lifelong concern for Fulford. He played an active role in Bishop’s University, serving as vice-president and exercising visitorial powers alongside the bishop of Quebec. His relationship with McGill University was cooler, partly due to earlier disputes involving John Bethune. At the parochial level, schools and the supply of teachers became a pressing issue. In 1851 the Colonial Church and School Society sought to establish itself in his diocese, operating independently of episcopal authority. This was complicated by the fact that one of Fulford’s leading Montreal clergy, William Bennett Bond, acted as the society’s local agent. Fulford, however, managed a compromise: he became president of the Montreal Committee, ensuring his authority was recognised while benefiting from the society’s resources. The society maintained schools across the diocese, and in 1853 introduced William Henry Hicks as headmaster of a central training school in Montreal. By 1856 this institution was recognised as McGill’s Normal School, becoming the chief supplier of Protestant teachers in Quebec.
These educational initiatives also supported Fulford’s work among French-speaking communities. The society maintained churches and schools at Iberville and Sabrevois, and a training college at Saint-Jean prepared French-speaking teachers and ministers for missions around Lac Maskinongé and Île Jésus. In 1859 Fulford became chief patron of the newly incorporated Church of England Mission to the French-speaking population of British North America. Unlike the more aggressively evangelical French Canadian Missionary Society, Fulford was not a proselytiser. His aim was to ensure that the Anglican Church ministered to both English and French, reflecting the bilingual reality of his diocese.
In 1860 Fulford’s stature grew when he became the first metropolitan of the ecclesiastical province of Canada. Letters patent in 1861 declared Montreal the metropolitan see, giving Fulford and his successors the dignity of archbishop in all but name. His authority was soon challenged by Benjamin Cronyn, bishop of Huron, but Fulford stood firm, declaring he would not “insult the Queen” by questioning the validity of the letters patent. Later, rulings of the imperial Privy Council undermined the authority of such patents, but Canadian legislation and synodical consensus provided a new basis for metropolitan authority. Fulford’s leadership helped establish the autonomy of the Canadian church, most notably when he consecrated bishops such as James William Williams of Quebec in 1863 and Alexander Neil Bethune of Toronto in 1867, signalling that Canadian synods, not English authority, would govern the church’s future.
Not all was smooth. In 1862 Fulford became embroiled in a bitter dispute with Archdeacon Isaac Hellmuth of Huron, a former Montreal clergyman. Their quarrel, rooted in an old real estate disagreement, flared when Hellmuth toured England raising funds for a new theological institution. Fulford was outraged by Hellmuth’s claims that evangelical clergy were undervalued in Canada and that Protestant teaching was weak. In a series of pastoral letters, Fulford condemned Hellmuth’s exaggerations and even compared him to the controversial Father Charles Chiniquy, a remark calculated to sting given Chiniquy’s notoriety as a polemicist and fund-raiser. The exchange may have given Fulford the upper hand in the immediate controversy, but it did little to promote harmony within the Canadian church, and the bitterness lingered.
Despite such disputes, Fulford’s reputation as a conciliator and organiser remained strong. In October 1865 he travelled to Philadelphia to preach before the triennial convention of the American Protestant Episcopal Church, the first national gathering of that body after the Civil War. His sermon, which he modestly described as “plain and ordinary,” struck the right note of reconciliation, and he believed it helped to heal the breach between North and South. The continuing fellowship between the Canadian and American churches was demonstrated again in June 1867 when four American bishops joined in the consecration of Montreal’s new cathedral.
That same year Fulford played a prominent role in the first Lambeth Conference in London, the inaugural gathering of Anglican bishops from across the world. He had long advocated such a meeting, convinced that united action among the churches of England, Scotland, the colonies, and America would strengthen Anglican identity. At Lambeth he pressed for a strong declaration of independence for the church, and he was invited to preach at the closing service in Lambeth Church. Curiously, he was absent from the famous group photograph of the bishops, though his presence at the conference was significant. During this visit he also officiated at the marriage of John A. Macdonald, Attorney General for Upper Canada and a leading figure in the negotiations that produced the British North America Act, linking Fulford in a small way to the political birth of modern Canada.
By the late 1860s Fulford’s health was failing, yet he continued to work tirelessly for his diocese. He died on 9 September 1868, just as he was preparing to bring the findings of the Lambeth Conference before his synod. He hoped to focus discussion on unity and governance rather than ritualism, a divisive issue elsewhere in Canada. Though he had no objection to ritual itself, he disliked ecclesiastical display, preferring to preach in a plain black gown and often speaking extemporaneously.
Fulford was not a man of wide social interests, but his care for his scattered flock went beyond the pulpit. He was a founder of the Montreal Art Association, supported adult education through the Mechanics’ Institute, and encouraged the Church of England Young Men’s associations. Within his own communion he consistently stressed self-support and self-government, principles he applied from the smallest mission to the provincial synod. For this reason, contemporaries described him as a “master-builder.” His legacy was not only the organisation of the diocese of Montreal but also the shaping of a Canadian Anglican identity that could stand on its own, confident and united within the wider Anglican communion.
