Even quite eminent Tractarians tended to think that, how- ever impossible things might be in the Church of England, the colonies provided the sort of field where they could create the kind of Church in which they really believed. That Church would follow patristic patterns, of course, would be free from the nexus of establishment, and would be governed by synods. As regards South Africa they nourished particularly high hopes. Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Cape Town, was campaigning for synodical government, the creation of ecclesiastical courts to replace the Erastian Privy Council, and to check and outlaw the heresy of Bishop Colenso. It looked so very much as though this were a situation—heresiarchs and councils locked in battle—straight out of the pages of early church history. So when Gray lost his case against Colenso in the Privy Council in 1855, Dr Pusey wrote in a letter to the Churchman, ‘It is no loss to us that it is discovered that the Queen had no power to give the temporal powers which the former legal advisers of the Crown thought she could…The Church in South Africa, then, is free.’

Tractarians continued to support South Africa, to go and work there and to lionize those who were there already. Some of them called Gray ‘the Athanasius of the South’. James Green, Dean of Colenso's cathedral and his bishop's arch-enemy, was presented with a famous suit of vestments, supposedly the first to have been worn in nineteenth-century England.