By Haydn Brown.
The’ Mountain’ dynasty was well settled in Norfolk by the middle of the 17th century – and it was seriously religious!
Their Huguenot ancestors fled from France after the Edict of Fontainebleau which was issued by Louis XIV of France on 22 October 1685; this revoked the Edict of Nantes (1598) that granted the Huguenots the right to practice their religion without persecution from the state. The family line was also directly related to Michel de Montaigne who formerly lived at Château de Montaigne , in France. From this, you will understand that the ‘Mountains’ settled in Norfolk as being ‘well connected’ – but still someway short of the wealth they once enjoyed.
By the mid-18th century Jacob’s parents, namely Jacob Mountain senior (1710–1752) and his wife Ann (nee’ Postle) were living at Thwaite Hall on the Bungay Road, near the village of Thwaite St Mary, which remains just a short distance from the Suffolk border. Ann was the daughter of Jehoshaphat Postle, formerly of Thorpe-Next-Norwich, who had purchased Colney Old Hall, near Wymondham; Postle was a Brewer and one-time chairman of the Norfolk Agricultural Association.
The 17th century house seen in the background is referred to as Colney Old Hall – it was replaced by a newer Hall a couple of miles further down the road – also Grade II listed. Photo: © Copyright Evelyn Simak
But it was at Thwaite Hall where Ann, and her husband Jacob started their family; which consisted of two daughters and at least three sons, two of which are the subjects of both this blog, about Jacob Mountain Junior, and a second blog about Jacob’s older brother, Jehosaphat Mountain.
Jacob Mountain junior was the youngest to be born at Thwaite Hall; he arrived on 1 December 1749. Three years later in 1752, when the family had settled almost at the other side of Norfolk in West Rudham – a small village which straddles the A148 King’s Lynn to Cromer Road, his father died on the hunting field. Seven years later, they moved from West Rudham to live near Wymondham, at the home of Jacob Mountain’s uncle, from where Jacob and his elder brother, Jehosaphat, attended the local grammar school. Later, after the family had settled permanently in Norwich, the two brothers attended the city’s grammar school. Sometime later, Jacob was sent to Scarning School near East Dereham where he became a favourite pupil of the master, the illustrious classical scholar Reverend Robert Potter (1721–1804). It would seem that Mrs Ann Mountain, who was to die in 1776, was careful with the education of her sons.
Jacob was to try his hand at a counting-house business but showed no aptitude for it; then, on 8 Oct. 1769 he was admitted as a pensioner to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. There he gained his BA (senior optima) and by 1774, had been elected junior fellow of the College and ordained deacon by the Bishop of Norwich, Dr George Horne. Three years later he took a further degree, followed by an honorary degree when he was made a Bishop himself, in 1793. But before then, on 17 Dec. 1780 to be exact, he was ordained priest by the Bishop of Peterborough in a ceremony which took place in the chapel of Trinity College.
Jacob married Elizabeth Mildred Wale Kentish on 18 October 1783, in Little Bardfield Church of St Katherine, Essex and would produce seven children. It was immediately following his marriage that he relinquished his Cambridge fellowship, to be appointed perpetual curate of St Andrew’s Church in Norwich, a post he was to hold for seven years. Then from 1788 to 1790 he was Castor Prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral, and from 1790 to 1793 he became the examining chaplain to the Bishop of Lincoln, George Pretyman Tomline, whose acquaintance he had made at Cambridge. He was also vicar of Buckden, Cambridgeshire from 1790 to 1793, and for the same period he held in plurality the vicarage of Holbeach. It would appear that a bright future lay ahead for Jacob Mountain in the English church!
Back in London, Letters Patent were issued on 28 June 1793 which created the See of Quebec; this embraced both Upper and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec). On the same day, Jacob Mountain was appointed to the newly created ‘See’ after his name had been drawn to the attention of Prime Minister, William Pitt, by George Pretyman Tomline, who at Cambridge had been Pitt’s tutor and mentor and had since become his intimate friend and chief adviser on ecclesiastical matters. Jacob Mountain was consecrated Bishop in the Chapel of Lambeth Palace on 7 July 1793.
Very shortly after his consecration, Jacob and his family sailed to Lower Canada on 13 August 1793 in the British frigate ‘Ranger’; its passengers included Bishop Jacob, his wife and their four small children. Also in the party was Jacob’s brother Jehosaphat, his wife and their three children, including Salter Jehosaphat junior, their 23 year old son who had just been made Deacon. To complete the Mountain family on board were Jacob’s two maiden sisters. The group of ‘Thirteen Mountains’ disembarked at Quebec on 1 November 1793, after a long voyage which involved surviving gales, and separation from their convoy which resulted in the Ranger being harassed by French corsairs.
When Mountain arrived late in 1793, he found that the Canadian diocese clergy consisted of only nine priests of the Church of England; Quebec itself had no ecclesiastical edifice, no Episcopal residence, and no rectory. The three ordained ‘Mountains’ should have brought the number to 12, but of the three ‘old’ bilingual priests already in residence – who, by the way, had failed to attract Canadians to the church – two had already been placed in semi-retirement by Bishop Inglis and the third was immediately retired by Jacob Mountain. During the thirty-two years that were to elapse before his death, Bishop Jacob was to raise the church to a flourishing condition; the original nine clergy became 61 in number, he promoted the formation of missions, and also the erection of church edifices – including the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Quebec City.
But the ecclesiastical situation that faced Bishop Jacob on his arrival was that his diocese was huge and complex! Yet from the very beginning of his appointment he set out to transplant ecclesiastical traditions developed in England on to Lower and Upper Canada. For him the most important of these was the establishment of the Church of England as the state church in the colony. Such a measure, he felt, would heighten the status of the church and encourage dissenters and Roman Catholics to attach themselves to it, thus unifying the population under an institution that was bound to support the government. Jacob’s other purpose was to place his church on a more secure foundation by extending its privileges and reducing the power and independence of its Roman Catholic rival.
In accordance with the British practice of having Anglican bishops sit in the House of Lords, Mountain’s membership in the legislative councils of Upper and Lower Canada as Lord Bishop of Quebec had been arranged before he left England so, shortly after his arrival at Quebec, he requested a seat on each executive council as well, they being the real colonial influence on the provinces’ administrators. Once he was installed, the work of the councils occupied much of his time and most of his duties were unrelated to his episcopal office. His decision to play it fully was determined by his belief that only through the councils could he hope to counter the influence exercised by the Roman Catholic Bishop. Thus, in the 1790s and early 1800s he was to use the weight of his council seats to block the erection of Roman Catholic parishes, and to support the prohibition of refugees into the colony, including royalist clergy from revolutionary France. However, Mountain was also faced with the situation whereby, as head of the church for which he claimed establishment, he had less authority to place clergy than his Roman Catholic counterpart. In effect, his persistent and strong efforts to have a measure of control imposed on Roman Catholic appointments met with little success.
However, in general, Mountain’s relations with the Catholic hierarchy were amicable. Even on his arrival in 1793 he had been greeted by the aged and retired Bishop Briand with words of welcome and the Gallic salutation of a kiss on both cheeks. Joseph-Octave Plessis described his relations with Mountain as “not of intimacy but of reciprocal propriety.” But, because of Mountain’s vigorous and open efforts to advance his church, he was long viewed with apprehension by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Following his last and most discouraging trip to England, however, it saw him in another light. Plessis’s successor, Bernard-Claude Panet wrote, shortly after Mountain’s death:
“The old bishop was what we needed, since there had to be one……. because in his last days he was very quiet and scarcely looked to make proselytes and what is better still, he no longer bothered with affairs and had practically no credit.”
It seems a number of reasons impelled Jacob Mountain, after nearly 12 years in Lower Canada as Bishop, to plan a voyage to England. His sons Jacob Henry Brooke and George Jehoshaphat had been tutored at Quebec by Matthew Smithers Feilde since late 1800, but their further education was a matter of family concern. Of greater weight, however, were the Bishop’s doubts about his own future and his failure to advance the establishment of his church. Three roads out of these difficulties presented themselves to his mind: translation to an English bishopric, partial retirement on a pension with a country living in England, or an improvement in his position in Lower Canada. The Bishop and his family set sail early in August 1805 and arrived in England before mid-September. The boys were placed under the tutorship of the Reverend Thomas Monro at Little Easton, Essex where they remained until they both matriculated to Cambridge.
Bishop Jacob returned to England in 1816 when he attempted again to resign, or to receive translation; but, in these efforts, he failed once again. He also failed to persuade the Government even to pronounce that his church was established. Although the war was over, the Government’s primary concern was political and social peace in the Canadas, not the adoption of policies that might lead to strife. Jacob’s relations with Henry Bathurst, like those with his predecessors, were difficult. The colonial secretary, while acknowledging the Bishop to be “of considerable abilities,” found him rigid and “of a very striving disposition.”
One advantage Jacob did gain was renewed government interest in the creation of parishes and the setting up of rectories within them. In this campaign he now had the aid of a strong committee of the SPG; this being the ‘Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) as a high church missionary organisation of the Church of England which was active in the Thirteen Colonies of North America. Further delays occurred, but, between 1820 and 1823, twelve crown rectories were established in Lower Canada. Although Bishop Jacob succeeded in getting the titles of his assistants, namely his son George Jehoshaphat Mountain and George Okill Stuart, changed from official to archdeacon; however, he did not obtain a desired increase of £150 in their salary.
Bishop Jacob was an imposing man. In 1820, when he was 70 years of age, one of the diocesan clergies confessed himself:
“struck with admiration at as perfect a specimen of the human form as I ever beheld; erect, standing above six feet, face what might be called handsome, eye mild yet penetrating, features well set and expression benevolent, limbs fully developed, and symmetry of the whole person complete.”
Before meeting him, the Governor, Lord Dalhousie Ramsay, had heard him spoken of as “a clever man, amiable in his outward manners but a lazy preacher, very haughty and imperious in society.” When in 1820 Dalhousie heard a sermon by Mountain that pleased him, he described this “fine looking old Gentlemen” as “a Divine of exalted rank & of commanding abilities.” With his background and training Mountain moved easily and graciously in society. Of his wife, Elizabeth, John Strachan recorded that she was “in her manners amiable and engaging – in her religion sincere active and cheerful – in charity unbounded, without regard to sect or nation.” Through her letters to Elizabeth Pretyman Tomline written from 1793 to 1810 much can be learned of the home life of the Mountain family, of Mrs Mountain’s care for her children, of the Bishop’s many illnesses, of her continual concern for her husband and her sympathy with his problems.
Jacob Mountain died at Marchmont House, Lower Canada, 16 June 1825 and was buried under the chancel of Holy Trinity Cathedral he had built and which also contains a monument to his memory. He had never been able to overcome fully his English background and formation, and in 1823 after nearly 30 years as Bishop of Quebec he had referred to his situation as “this long expatriation”; from it he had numerous times tried to extricate himself. His objective had been not so much to adapt the Church of England to the specific and differing circumstances in Lower and Upper Canada, but to bring the religious life of the colonies and particularly the relations between the churches and the state into conformity with the situation in England. Dalhousie, a Scottish Presbyterian and despite his approval of Mountain’s ability as a preacher, felt that the Bishop carried “high church discipline too far for a colonial church,” and Strachan felt that “his habits and manners were calculated rather for an English Bishop than the Missionary Bishop of Canada.”
Thomas R. Millman, Author of, “Jacob Mountain”, stated in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6:
“Mountain gave to position, social dignity and prestige, both institutional and personal, an importance that they perhaps did not merit in the North American context. His clergy, most of them sent from Great Britain by the SPG, were never numerous enough to minister effectively in all areas of their large mission stations and differed widely in ability. Some, because of strict adherence to church rubrics, were not able to attract to their services settlers without strong church loyalties. Others, because of their fear of religious “enthusiasm” – shared by the Bishop – did not meet fully the emotional needs of a pioneer society. To all his clergy he held out high ideals for their conduct and spirituality, defending them in official correspondence, administering reproof and discipline in private as need arose. Jacob Mountain, despite his deficiencies, achieved much as a pioneer bishop, and even Strachan, recognising the difficulties that Mountain had had to face, acknowledged what had been accomplished. Mountain could not realise a number of his dreams and did not live to see the realisation of others, but in his long episcopate he fully earned the title given to him in his epitaph – ‘Founder of the Church of England in the Canadas’.”
THE END
Sources: www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mountain_jacob_6E.html
Thomas R. Millman, “MOUNTAIN, JACOB,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003.
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