Fulford, Francis

First Bishop of Montreal; First Metropolitan of Canada.

Francis Fulford was born in Sidmouth, in 1803 and educated in Tiverton, England. He was ordained deacon in 1826, and served as curate of Holme-next-Runcton, in Downham, England, until 1928, when he was ordained priest. He received a B.A. from Oxford University in 1827, and was curate of Fawley in Buckinghamshire from 1828 to 1832. He married Mary Drummond in 1830, and served as rector of Trowbridge, Wiltshire from 1832 to 1842. He received an M.A. from Oxford in 1838, and became Chaplain to H.R.H. the Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester from 1828 to 1850. In 1842, he became the rector of Croydon, Cambridgeshire, then minister of Curzon Chapel, Mayfair, Westminster S.W., London in 1845. He was the first editor of the Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal in 1848. He was consecrated Bishop of Montreal in 1850, and received an honourary D.D. from Oxford that same year, then another one from the University of Bishop's College in Lennoxville, Quebec in 1854. In 1857, he laid the foundation stone of a new gothic cathedral, the cost of which would put the diocese into heavy debt. He was appointed the Metropolitan Bishop of the Church of England in Canada in 1860, and passed away in Montreal in 1868.