Chapter I.

THE Orange River Sovereignty--Foundation of Bloemfontein--Bishop Gray's visit--Rev. W. A. Steabler stationed at Bloemfontein--Archdeacon Merriman's visit--Abandonment of the Sovereignty and establishment of the Orange Free State--Rev. M. R. Every--Bishop Gray's efforts to found a Diocese--Consecration of the first Bishop.

BEFORE the year 1835 the country between the Orange and Vaal rivers was but little known to Europeans. A few of the farmers living to the north of the Cape Colony visited it in times of drought to find pasture for their flocks. To the east of it the able chieftain Moshesh was building up what in course of time became the powerful Basuto nation. Moroka, with the Baralong tribe, with whom were Wesleyan Missionaries, had just migrated from the Vaal river to Thabanchu. Adam Kok, with his division of the Griquas, was settled at Philippolis, and some captains of less important portions of the same people had settlements in its western districts. Between Thabanchu and Philippolis a refugee tribe of Batlhaping had formed a settlement at Bethulie. Here and there, from time to time, bands of Koranna were located, and the Berlin Missionary Society had just founded their station at Bethany.

In 1836 the emigration of Dutch farmers from the Cape Colony began, and in October of that year their encampment at Vechtkop, in the present district of Heilbron, sustained the fierce assault of the Matebele under Moselekatse. On the 17th January, 1837, after a successful attack upon this Chief (who was then living at Mosega, near to what is now the town of Zeerust, in the Transvaal), the emigrant Boers under Commandant Hendrik Potgieter settled at a place near the Vet river, to which in memory of their victory they gave the name of Winburg.

Between the years 1837 and 1846, a considerable number of the farmers had settled in the country north of the Orange, and between the Riet and Modder rivers. Disputes between them and the Griquas at Philippolis led to the stationing of a detachment of troops in the country, under the command of Major Warden, as British Resident, who chose as the seat of his court and the station of his force (in 1846) a place between Kaal Spruijt and the Modder river, called Bloem-fontein.

On February 3rd, 1848, the sovereignty of her Majesty the Queen of England was proclaimed by Sir Harry Smith, Governor of the Cape Colony, over the whole country between the Orange and the Vaal, and eastward to the Kathlamba, or Drakensberg mountains. A few months later an organised resistance to this on the part of the farmers led to a military expedition under Sir Harry Smith. On the 29th of August the battle of Boomplaats was fought, and subsequently a fort was built at Bloemfontein, and a considerable garrison stationed there.

In 1850 Dr. Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Capetown, paid a visit to "the Sovereignty." On May 1st he read the Burial Service over the graves of some British officers and soldiers who had fallen at Boomplaats, and whose remains had been interred there. This appears to have been the first service performed in the country by a clergyman of the Anglican Church. [In a letter of Bishop Gray, dated July 2Sth, 1848, he writes as follows:--"Dr. Orpen, in his last letter, asked leave to go to Bloemfontein to baptize and hold a religious service." Dr. Orpen was a physician from Dublin, who had settled in South Africa, had been ordained by Bishop Gray and placed in charge of Colesberg. He had a large family, and several of his sons were noted for their zeal in Church matters. There is nothing to show that Dr. Orpen's desire to visit Bloemfontein was realised.] Previously to the Bishop's coming, the inhabitants of Bloemfontein, who were nearly exclusively English, had appealed to him for a clergyman, and on his arrival there on May 3rd a deputation from the military and civilians waited on him, expressed their satisfaction at the visit, and their hope that it might lead to the establishment of a church and clergyman among them. With the aid of the British Resident, Major Warden, who showed much kindness, sites were selected for Church, Burial-ground, Parsonage, and Schools, the Bishop undertaking to furnish plans for a church to hold 200, towards the erection of which the people had already raised £200.

On Sunday, May 5th, the Bishop held Morning Service in an open shed for the troops, and afternoon (1.30) in the school-house, when three children were baptized, a marriage was solemnized, four candidates, prepared by himself, were confirmed, and ten persons communicated; the building being crowded inside and out throughout the whole services, which lasted three hours. In accordance with a petition from the officers at the Fort, the Bishop consecrated on the same day the military cemetery. Of the Capital he wrote:--"Bloemfontein is rapidly rising in importance. A press is coming up, and a newspaper is about to be started. The Romish Bishop is soon to visit it, with a view, I understand, to fix a priest there, and the Methodists have decided to plant a station in the village." During the Bishop's stay in the Sovereignty (April 30th to May 14th) he visited Philippolis (the Griqua capital of Adam Kok), Bethany, Thabanchu (the town of Moroka, the Barolong Chief), Maquatling (the village of Molitsani, a Bataung Chief), Merimetzo, Winburg and Harrismith, and had interviews with the aforesaid Chiefs. Near Harrismith (a town to the extreme North East) he was joined by the Rev. J. Green, of Maritzburg (afterwards Dean of Maritzburg), whom he commissioned to fix upon sites for a church, parsonage and school at Harrismith, a promising village as yet of only two or three houses. On his way back to Capetown the Bishop ordained to the Diaconate at Maritzburg, Mr. W. A. Steabler, one of the band of Mission Workers who had come with him from England in 1847, and sent him to Bloemfontein, hoping soon to replace him by a priest from England.

Mr. Steabler, who reached Bloemfontein in July, 1850, in addition to his ministrations both to the military and civilians in Bloemfontein, paid occasional visits to Winburg, and to Smithfield, a village to the south-east of the territory near the Caledon river, which had been laid out in November, 1849. There are traces of kindness shown to him in the records of the time. On March 15th, 1851, Major Warden purchased at an auction a house and water erf which had belonged to Mr. F. Rex, then lately deceased, and "made it over to the English Church, that the minister might be provided with a suitable residence." This extract is from the "Friend of the Sovereignty" of the above date. The erf seems to have been No 7 S. George's Street, but though used as a residence by Mr. Steabler, the records in the Government Deeds' office show that the property was never legally transferred to the Church.

Major Warden was evidently a sympathetic friend and helper of the Church of England. Among the Diocesan papers is a letter written by him on June 7th, 1850, to the Bishop of Capetown, stating his intention of reserving sites for church buildings in the different villages of the Sovereignty, and promising to endeavour to procure government grants towards the support of clergy. On January 1st, 1852, in reply to a memorial, the Council of the Orange River Sovereignty unanimously voted the sum of £250 a year for Mr. Steabler's stipend.

The addition of the Sovereignty to the Queen's dominions had been ratified with reluctance by the Imperial government. The six years during which it was maintained were attended by troublesome and vexatious disputes and embroilments with Moshesh. A military expedition of considerable force, led into Basutoland by General Cathcart in 1852, had resulted in the disaster at Berea, and though this was followed by the feigned submission of Moshesh, the failure of the troops to subdue him sensibly affected the opinions of the native tribes as to the power of the British nation. On August 8th, 1853, Sir George Russell Clerk arrived in Bloemfontein with the special Mission from the Home government to withdraw British authority from the country. On the 23rd February, 1854, a convention was signed at Bloemfontein between Sir George Clerk and twenty-four representatives elected by the Boers, whereby the government of the country was transferred to them. On the nth March the flag of England was lowered from the fort and that of the Orange Free State Republic hoisted in its place. The British officials and troops left Bloemfontein, and Mr. Steabler followed them on March 28th. During the following year he was ordained priest by the Bishop of Grahamstown and placed in charge of the village of Graaff Reinet in that Diocese. Here he remained until his death in 1894, having been made a Canon of Grahamstown Cathedral in 1867. In December, 1890, he was one of the guests invited by the government of the Free State to attend the opening of the Railway at Bloemfontein, and on the Sunday following he preached the sermon at the evening service in the Cathedral.

Bishop Gray's visit in 1850 had been succeeded by one from Archdeacon Merriman, who reached Bloemfontein on Saturday, November 23rd of the same year. It must be remembered that at this time the see of Grahamstown had not yet been founded. The whole of the Eastern Province of the Cape Colony comprised an Archdeaconry in charge of Mr. Merriman, that "man of God, one of the most heroic, self-denying, and devoted sons of the English Church," as Bishop Gray wrote of him. He was wont, because he could not afford to do his visitations otherwise, to do his journeys on foot, tramping along in Veldschoens made by himself, with a servant and a pack-horse. On this occasion he had left Grahamstown on November 5th, and on Christmas Eve returned home, having in the seven weeks travelled about 800 miles. He spent Sunday, November 24th, with Mr. Steabler, in Bloemfontein, and on the morrow ministered at a special service at which Major Warden laid the foundation-stone of a church, to be dedicated to S. Andrew, on the spot on which the present Cathedral of SS. Andrew and Michael stands. Leaving the next day he visited Smithfield, and made his way home amid many dangers and apprehensions of the Kafir war, which broke out on the day of his return to Grahamstown. In October, 1852, the Archdeacon paid a second visit. He found the church unfinished, roofless for want of timber; the Kafir wars had made the carriage of this from Port Elizabeth too costly a matter. [So it remained, and when, in 1863, the first Bishop reached Bloemfontein, it was found in a miserable condition. It had cost nearly £500, but it had to be pulled down.] The Archdeacon spent two Sundays (October 24th and 3ist) in Bloemfontein, and on his way back was refreshed with the life and activity which he found at Smith-field, where the people had raised £60 a year for a clergyman and nearly £500 for a church. He heard, too, of an increasing population at Harrismith. A magistrate had been appointed who had once acted as Catechist under the Bishop of Nova Scotia, and was willing to do the same there. But all these hopeful beginnings were nipped in the bud by the political changes which have been recorded above.

The ultimate abandonment of the Sovereignty by the British government had been determined upon as early as 1851. Accordingly in 1853, in arranging the division of the see of Capetown into the three Dioceses of Capetown, Grahamstown, and Natal, the British Government had excluded the Sovereignty from them. But on December 5th, 1854, Sir George Grey became Governor of the Cape Colony, and from August, 1855, to May 9th, 1858, with his assistance, and that of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Rev. M. R. Every, who was in Deacon's orders, sent by Bishop Armstrong, the first Bishop of Grahamstown, was maintained in Bloemfontein. Mr. Every held his services in a thatched house at the corner of Douglas and Gordon Streets, which in the time of the Sovereignty had been the Court-house. The British Government at the abandonment had retained certain erven in Bloemfontein. This was one of them, and when Bishop Twells came to this country, Sir Philip Wodehouse gave it to the church, together with that on which the church building had been begun, some others in Elizabeth Street, and one near to the Dutch church. The old Court-house was in 1863 made into a residence for Mr. Clegg.

Mr. Every seems to have spent the month of December, 1858, in Fauresmith, for there are many entries in the Register of Baptisms having been administered there by him during that month. From May, 1859, to January, 1861, he seems to have been living at Hopetown, on the southern bank of the Orange River, and again to have visited Fauresmith in March, 1861. After a time spent in the Stockenstroom district of the Cape Colony, he became Rector of Burgersdorp, where he remained until his death in 1885. On October 22nd, 1863, he handed to Bishop Twells the Register books, containing the entries of his own and Mr. Steabler's ministrations.

Civil powers might exclude the Free State from their ecclesiastical provisions, but they could not shut out from the large heart of Bishop Gray the thought of "those few sheep in the wilderness." He pressed this subject on the attention of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (by which, in 1859 and 1860, funds for a continuance and extension of the Mission were set apart) and also on the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury. At the consecration of Bishop Mackenzie, the leader of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, in Capetown on Jan. 1st, 1861, the need of a bishop for the Orange Free State was formally recognised by the five Bishops of the Province, then assembled in conference.

In 1862 the Bishop of Capetown made a journey to England, arriving on June 26th. The two chief objects of his visit were to obtain a successor to the lamented Bishop Mackenzie, who had died in Central Africa, on the 24th of the preceding January, and to secure the appointment of a bishop to the Free State. In his letter, published at the time, he stated that it was full three years since the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had voted an income for a bishop, but no one had yet been appointed. The result of his visit was the appointment of the Rev. W. G. Tozer, Vicar of Burgh-with-Winthorpe, Lincolnshire, to succeed Bishop Mackenzie, and of the Rev. Edward Twells, of S. Peter's College, Cambridge, Incumbent of S. John's, Hammersmith, to the Bishopric of the Orange River Free State Territory. The two missionary Bishops were consecrated in Westminster Abbey on the Feast of the Purification, February 2nd, 1863, by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. C. T. Longley) and the Metropolitan of South Africa (Dr. R. Gray), assisted by the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Samuel Wilberforce), the Bishop of Lincoln (Dr. J. Jackson), and the Bishop of Montreal (Dr. F. Fulford). The sermon was preached by the Bishop of Oxford.

In support of the new Diocese the S.P.G. made a grant of £500 a year for the Bishop's income and £200 towards the stipends of two other clergy. For eight months before leaving England the Bishop was busily engaged in raising money for his Diocese. The Rev. J. Galloway Cowan, his successor at S. John's, Hammersmith, became his commissary, and his brother, Mr. William Twells of Birmingham who was devoted to the cause of the new Diocese, undertook to be its Treasurer.

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