ing touches to this
backwoods aristocracy.

The great majority of the group, men of the Scott and Boulton, Sherwood
and Hagerman and Allan MacNab types, had nothing but their prejudices to
distinguish them, but two of their number were of outstanding capacity.
John Beverley Robinson, Attorney General from 1819 to 1829 and
thereafter for over thirty years Chief Justice, was a true aristocrat,
distrustful of the rabble, but as honest and highminded as he was able,
seeking his country's gain, as he saw it, not his own. A more rugged
and domineering character, equally certain of his right to rule and
less squeamish about the means, was John Strachan, afterwards Bishop of
Toronto. Educated a Presbyterian, he had come to Canada from Aberdeen
as a dominie but had remained as an Anglican clergyman in a capacity
promising more advancement. His abounding vigor and persistence soon
made him the dominant force in the Church, and with a convert's zeal
he labored to give it exclusive place and power. The opposition to the
Family Compact was of a more motley hue, as is the way with oppositions.
Opposition became potential when new settlers poured into the province
from the United States or overseas, marked out from their Loyalist
forerunners not merely by differences of political background and
experience but by differences in religion. The Church of England had
been dominant among the Loyalists; but the newcomers were chiefly
Methodist and Presbyterian. Opposition became actual with the rise of
concrete and acute grievances and with the appearance of leaders who
voiced the growing discontent.

The political exclusiveness of the Family Compact did not rouse
resentment half as deep as did their religious, or at least
denominational, pretensions. The refusal of the Compact to permit
Methodist ministers to perform the marriage ceremony was not soon
forgotten. There were scores of settlements where no clergyman of the
Established Church of England or of Scotland resided, and marriages here
had been of necessity performed by other ministers. A bill passed the
Assembly in 1824 legalizing such marriages in the past and giving the
required authority for the future; and when it was rejected by the
Legislative Council, resentment flamed high. An attempt of Strachan
to indict the loyalty of practically all but the Anglican clergy
intensified this feeling; and the critics went on to call in question
the claims of his Church to establishment and