Richard Williams Morgan

On 6 June 1866 a former French Roman Catholic missionary priest, Raymond Ferrette (1828 to 1904), was consecrated a bishop, with the religious name of 'Mar Julius', under the authority of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and was sent to England to initiate an indigenous and autonomous Orthodox Church as a step towards reunion between western and eastern Christians. On 6 March 1874 at Marholm, Northants, England he consecrated the Rev'd Richard Williams Morgan (1815 to 1899), a clergyman in the Church of England, as the native British bishop in this plan. Bishop Morgan, taking the religous name of 'Mar Pelagius I', re-established the Ancient British Church, while continuing his duties as an Anglican clergyman and as a historian of note. Exactly five years later, on 6 March 1879 he consecrated his successor as head of this church, the Rev'd Charles Isaac Stevens (1835 to 1917), a former presbyter of the Reformed Episcopal Church of the UK. Bishop Stevens took the religious name of 'Mar Theophilus I'. It is interesting to note that Bishop Stevens' co-consecrators were bishops in the Order of Corporate Reunion - a body of independent clergy who wanted the Church of England to reunite with the Roman Catholic Church! One of the co-consecrators was Dr. Frederick George Lee, who was a literal descendant of the Non-juroring bishop Dr. Timothy Newmarsh who had been consecrated in 1726. This Ancient British Church was to revive the high church and liturgical principles of the former Non-jurors in opposition to the Anglo-Catholicism that was sparked within the Church of England by the beginnings of the Oxford Movement in 1833.