Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
First Primate of Canada
March 10 · d. 1904
also known as Robert Machray
Robert Machray was an Aberdeen-born Cambridge don who left a Cambridge deanery in 1865 to become second Bishop of Rupert's Land, and stayed nearly thirty-nine years. He divided his vast diocese into four, reopened St John's College, Winnipeg, served as Chancellor of the University of Manitoba, and in 1893 was elected first Primate of All Canada. He died at Winnipeg on 9 March 1904 and lies in his cathedral churchyard.
Robert Machray was born at Aberdeen in 1831, and when he was not quite six his father died and he was sent north to Nairn to live with his uncle. He was a clever boy, and the schooling took: Coull, then Aberdeen Grammar School, then King's College with prizes in mathematics and philosophy, then Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge, where he came out first in divinity for the whole college. He was confirmed in the Church of England by the bishop of Ely around 1852, ordained deacon in 1855, and priested by that same bishop the next year. By 1859 he was Dean of Sidney Sussex, and from 1862 vicar of Madingley as well, which is another way of saying he was safe. He had a college, an income and a quiet English parish, and he could have kept all three until he died.
In 1865 the see of Rupert's Land was offered him instead, by command of the Queen and through the Colonial Secretary, on a recommendation the memoir credits to the Church Missionary Society. Rupert's Land was most of a continent, and its second bishop would have twenty-two clergy to cover it. He was consecrated at Lambeth Palace that June, at thirty-four the youngest bishop in the Church of England, and he went out through the United States, stopping to take counsel from Henry Benjamin Whipple, the Bishop of Minnesota. He reached Fort Garry on 13 October 1865, and one of the first things he did was to rule that the services of his diocese should follow the Book of Common Prayer, which earned him a reputation for high churchmanship before he had unpacked. Two months in, he signed the diocese's report to England. It answered the problem exactly: "We hope to bring out this corporate life."
That is what the rest of his life was. He gathered clergy and laity into a meeting in 1866 and it became a synod. He reopened St John's College with John McLean, so that the country could train its own priests. He asked for his diocese to be cut up, and it was: Moosonee under John Horden in 1872, then Athabasca under William Carpenter Bompas and Saskatchewan under McLean in 1874, and in 1875 the whole of the old territory, now four dioceses, became the ecclesiastical province of Rupert's Land, with Machray as its first metropolitan. At its first Provincial Synod that August, Whipple crossed the border and preached, keeping a promise made when Machray visited him at Faribault in 1868, and the Synod thanked him by formal address. In 1877 the University of Manitoba was founded and Machray became its Chancellor, and stayed Chancellor for twenty-seven years.
He was not a serene man presiding over an inevitable growth. In December 1869, when Riel's men held Fort Garry, Machray went and looked at the insurgents himself, put their number at over six hundred, and wrote the same day to Colonel J. S. Dennis that an armed attempt would be a disaster: "Put away such counsel, for a time at least; I feel that the result to be anticipated would be very disastrous." The next evening, after forty-eight prisoners were taken, he wrote again, shorter: "You must be quiet; probably the lives of the prisoners may depend on this." Dennis disbanded his force. His own side did not thank him for it, and historians have argued ever since about what he was doing, because the same bishop who stopped that attack also urged the use of force against the rising and criticized its supporters bitterly. Later he lost a long fight over Manitoba's church schools, and then took the chairmanship of the advisory board of the very system he had opposed. He wrote privately in 1900 that he hoped Eastern Canada would one day want "a really united Church worth some sacrifice, and to give up playing at a sham."
In September 1893 the first General Synod of the Church of England in Canada met at Toronto, and the House of Bishops elected him unanimously first Primate of All Canada. He told a friend what he thought of it: "Much responsibility is added to me and more work, and I fear, what I have always shrunk from and avoided to the utmost, public appearances. Still grace is promised for the need if sought aright."
Early in 1902 he made a winter journey through a blizzard to Minnedosa and never recovered. He spent nearly eleven months in an English nursing home, could not stand without a stick, and filled the time by writing down his early life at his nephew's suggestion. He was still there in September 1902, when the General Synod met and he was too ill to travel to it, so he wrote his address and had it read for him, and it begins with the disappointment and then puts the disappointment down: "But the will of God be done. He does all well." Then he came back to the work.
He died at Winnipeg on 9 March 1904, in the thirty-ninth year of his episcopate. His suffragan, Samuel Pritchard Matheson, was there, and left the account. The day before, Matheson had offered to skip a Confirmation at Wawanesa to stay; Machray sent him: "You must never allow private obligations to interfere with public duties, for where would that end? Go out to your Confirmation and never mind me." A snowstorm stranded Matheson at Morris, and a telegram brought him back to find the Archbishop sinking. Machray asked for Holy Communion, and asked for it quickly, because the time was short. He followed the responses in a strong clear voice. Matheson, seeing how weak he was, left out one prayer, and Machray put a hand on his and whispered, "You have left out one prayer; say it even yet." After the service he never spoke again, but simply seemed to sleep away. He lay in state in the Legislative Chamber of Manitoba while multitudes of all classes passed the bier, and they buried him in his cathedral churchyard under an Iona cross of Aberdeen granite, cut with the words: "He fed them with a faithful and true heart, and ruled them prudently with all his power."
You will probably not be asked to give up a college deanery and a quiet parish for a diocese the size of a continent. But you will be asked, more than once, to go out to the day's work when nobody would blame you for staying, or to say the whole prayer when a shortened one would do. Machray is remembered for structures, four dioceses, a college, a university, a national church, and every one of them was made out of ordinary keeping-on: the meeting called and called again until it became a synod, the nearly thirty-nine years in one place, the winter journey through the blizzard. The last thing he is recorded as noticing was an omission in a rite said over him as he died. What is the thing you have been quietly leaving out because you are tired, and what would it cost to say it even yet?
Machray is documented in ordinary nineteenth-century ways, and the documentation is unusually uneven. The fullest narrative is the Life of Robert Machray, published at Toronto in 1909 by his nephew and namesake, who studied under him at St John's College from 1874 to 1879, was a canon of the cathedral, and served as his secretary through the illness of 1902 and 1903. It is an authorized family biography, with the incentives that implies, and its author states plainly that a great part of the Archbishop's correspondence was accidentally destroyed, so everything it prints is a curated remnant. Its first five chapters are largely based on an autobiographical manuscript Machray wrote during his convalescence in 1902 and 1903, which has not been separately located and survives only through that paraphrase. Two of his own texts can be read directly: the diocesan report of 1867, dated at Red River in December 1865 and signed by him first among seven, and his 1902 address to the General Synod, printed verbatim in the Synod's own Journal of Proceedings. Nothing of his was copied or edited or translated as a text in its own right; there is no manuscript tradition here and no critical edition, and saying so plainly is more honest than implying one.
The modern critical account is Christopher Hackett's article in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, published in 1994 and lightly revised in 2021, built on holdings at Library and Archives Canada and the Provincial Archives of Manitoba. It is careful where the record is thin, hedging his priesting as probably 9 November 1856.
One detail is genuinely contested, and two more look contested in the reference works without being so. Sources divide over when he first bore the title Archbishop: the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the Manitoba Historical Society and his own biographer all place it at 1893, distinguishing three stages, bishop, then metropolitan, then archbishop; The Canadian Encyclopedia and Wikipedia date it to 1875, when he became metropolitan. His arrival at Red River is better attested than the reference works make it look. The 1909 memoir prints Colin Inkster's first-hand account of the escort sent to meet him, reaching Pembina at noon on 12 October, then Fort Garry and St John's on 13 October 1865, which corroborates the Manitoba Historical Society's date; For All the Saints puts the arrival in August, which cannot be reconciled with that eyewitness account. The clergy count is likewise better founded than it looks: the Dictionary counts twenty-two clergy in the diocese when Machray came, and Machray's own 1867 Report puts no fewer than twenty-two there at Bishop David Anderson's resignation, against the twenty given by the Manitoba Historical Society page, which also dates his death to 9 May rather than 9 March 1904.
The most argued-over question is his conduct during the Red River Resistance of 1869 and 1870. The Dictionary calls his actions in the resistance "a point of minor historical controversy." Alexander Begg, a Red River merchant present through the events, portrayed him as a peacemaker, a reading that, in the Dictionary's words, "influenced others, most notably historian William Lewis Morton." The Dictionary reports that Frits Pannekoek, in A Snug Little Flock (1991), read him instead as an agitator who argued for violent suppression of the Métis, moved by anti-Catholicism and contempt for the colony. Hackett does not stand aside between them, and he does not spare his subject: his narrative records that although Machray was sympathetic to the Métis' grievances, he had reacted negatively to their taking up arms, advocated the use of force to suppress the uprising, and bitterly criticized its supporters. On the controversy itself he judges in his own voice: "The truth likely lies somewhere in between. Machray had no trouble with the use of violence to put down the provisional government, but there is no evidence to suggest that he was opposed to a peaceful solution." He does not accept that motive, holding that although Machray distrusted the Roman Catholic Church on principle and looked to Canada as the future of Rupert's Land, "neither anti-Catholicism nor contempt for Red River was sufficiently strong in him to explain the forceful stand he took in 1869–70." The December letters to Dennis stand in the middle of that dispute, verified in the memoir's transcription, and they are the strongest evidence for the moderating reading precisely because they run against his own side.
Machray is kept on 10 March in the calendar of the Anglican Church of Canada, at the rank the calendar calls a Commemoration, its lowest. The propers are in For All the Saints, the church's own companion to the calendar, compiled by the Rev. Dr Stephen Reynolds for a sub-committee chaired by David R. Holeton, first published in 1992 and revised in 2007. The commemoration is deliberately double: it honours the man and, with him, the forming of the Canadian church as a united and independent member of the Anglican communion. Its collect asks that God, who instructed his heart "to guide the Anglicans of this nation in the counsels of peace and unity," would preserve those who pray it in wisdom, "that we may build upon the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord." The foundation image runs through everything appointed for the day: the sentence and epistle from 1 Corinthians 3, the psalm with its refrain "I love the place where your glory abides," and the gospel of the house built upon rock. The rubrics keep a Commemoration modest, with the proper prayers used but the readings and colour of the season or weekday, unless the commemoration is of local importance, in which case a parish may keep it at Memorial level with full propers. There are no relics, no shrine, no pilgrimage. What there is instead stands in his own cathedral at Winnipeg: a brass eagle lectern given him in 1890 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his episcopate, an oak pulpit given in his memory in 1907, and the great east window over the high altar, installed in 1932, carrying his portrait figure among the arms of the western dioceses.
The fullest life is Robert Machray's Life of Robert Machray (Toronto: Macmillan, 1909), written by his nephew, and the source of most of what is narrated here: Colin Inkster's account of the escort and the arrival of 13 October 1865 is in chapter VI; the visit to Whipple at Faribault in 1868 is in chapter VIII; the letters to Colonel J. S. Dennis of 6 and 7 December 1869 are in chapter IX; the Provincial Synod of 1875 and Whipple's sermon are in chapter XII; the 1893 letter on his election as Primate is in chapter XVIII; the private letter of 1900 to Matthew Wilson, Bishop Matheson's account of the death, and the grave inscription are all in chapter XX. The full text is available at Project Canterbury, https://anglicanhistory.org/canada/machray/bio/index.html, and a scan at https://archive.org/details/lifeofrobertmac00mach. Machray's own words are quoted from two published sources: the Report of the Diocese of Rupert's Land, by the Bishop and Clergy at the Red-River Settlement (London: Watts, 1867), sections 3 and 26, at https://anglicanhistory.org/canada/machray/report1867.html; and his Address to the General Synod of the Church of England in Canada, printed in the Journal of Proceedings of the Third Session (London, Ont.: A. Talbot & Co., 1902), pages 3 to 11, transcribed by the Rt Rev. Dr Terry Brown and available at https://anglicanhistory.org/canada/machray/address1902.html. The modern critical account, and the source of the quoted judgments on the Red River Resistance and on residential schools, is Christopher Hackett, "Machray, Robert," in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13 (published 1994, revised 2021), http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/machray_robert_13E.html. The liturgical texts are from For All the Saints: Prayers and Readings for Saints' Days (Toronto: ABC Publishing, 1992; rev. 2007), pages 20 to 21, 26, and 108 to 109, https://www.anglican.ca/wp-content/uploads/For-All-The-Saints.pdf. Frits Pannekoek's revisionist reading is in A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance of 1869-70 (Winnipeg, 1991), known here only through the Dictionary's characterization of it. The cathedral memorials are described at https://saintjohnscathedral.ca/cathedral-tour/.
The heaviest modern judgment is also the Dictionary's, and it deserves quoting whole rather than in half: "His support for residential schools and his rejection of distinctive rights for the Métis hardly made him unique and were reflections of the society in which he lived, but his intransigence in these matters had serious consequences." That is a mainstream academic verdict, and the consequences named are the ones Canada has since reckoned with publicly. No document has been found placing Machray's hand on the founding or direction of any named school; the Rupert's Land Indian Industrial School near Middlechurch, established in 1889, operated in his diocese under Anglican auspices, and the accounts of the school consulted here do not name him. The judgment attaches through his documented leadership and stated support, and nothing sharper than that is available. The same article records that he reorganized the native missions, that he lamented the lower pay that native missionaries such as Henry Budd and James Settee were forced to accept from the Church Missionary Society, and that he criticized British missionaries for treating them as inferiors; and that, like other missionaries, he failed to comprehend that, for potential indigenous missionaries, inclusion in the church required cultural assimilation as well, which is offered as the reason his native-clergy project did not succeed. Both things are in the record, and they are in tension, and the tension is the honest account rather than a defect in the sourcing.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Robert Machray to be a Bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.