“In Lieu of that Part of his Salary received annually from England”

New England’s Puritan heritage made those colonies less than welcoming for the Church of England.

There was an Anglican missionary organization called the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.). It paid for ministers to visit Native American communities.

It also supplemented the salaries of ministers in New England on the assumption that their congregations were small and their work difficult.

The Rev. Edward Bass was one of those ministers. He was born in 1726 in Dorchester into a family that had arrived early in the English settlement of Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard College and spent a couple of years teaching and preaching in Congregationalist meetings.

But by 1752 Bass decided that he really belonged in the Church of England. He sailed to Britain to be ordained, returning to take up the pulpit of St. Paul’s church in Newburyport.

Twenty years later came the war. As quoted yesterday, news of the Declaration of Independence prompted the wardens and vestrymen of St. Paul’s to ask their minister to leave prayers for King George III and his family out of their services for the sake of the church. On 16 July 1776 the Rev. Mr. Bass agreed: “I think it incumbent on me for so important an end to comply with this request during the present state of our political affairs.”

Bass tried to walk a narrow line. He dropped the public prayers for the king but continued to support the Crown personally. When the Massachusetts Council ordered all ministers to read the Declaration of Independence to their congregations, he declined to declaim it from the St. Paul’s church pulpit but evidently allowed a lower church official to do so.

But already other Anglican ministers were complaining about Bass’s conduct. On 15 July 1775 the Rev. Dr. Henry Caner of King’s Chapel in Boston had written to the S.P.G.: “Mr. Bass has complied perhaps too far with the orders of the Rebels.”

The war stopped the S.P.G.’s regular payment to Bass. On 25 Nov 1776, nine Newburyport men signed this pledge:

We the Subscribers of St. Paul’s Church in this town being truly sensible of the Distress which our worthy minister must suffer without some Relief in Lieu of that Part of his Salary received annually from England, and which the present unhappy Times prevent his obtaining, do promise to pay on Demand to Mr. John Vinal the several sums affixed to our Names to be by him delivered to the Rev. Mr. Bass.

The promised amounts ranged between £10 from Tristram Dalton and John Tracy to 18 shillings from Abram Gallisham. As for Vinal the schoolteacher and church warden, his signature doesn’t appear on this document. Perhaps he chipped in on his own, or perhaps his contribution lay in wrangling the contributions of others.

TOMORROW: Did that settle matters?