Background
James MacSparran was born on September 10, 1693, in Dungiven, County of Derry, Ireland, of Presbyterian parents who had gone there from Kintore, Scotland.
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James MacSparran was born on September 10, 1693, in Dungiven, County of Derry, Ireland, of Presbyterian parents who had gone there from Kintore, Scotland.
MacSparran was educated at the University of Glasgow, receiving the degree of master of arts March 5, 1709. He studied for the Presbyterian ministry and received credentials as a licentiate of the Presbytery of Scotland.
In August 1737, the University of Oxford conferred upon him the degree of doctor of sacred theology.
In 1718, MacSparran visited America, stopping at Boston, Barnstable, and Plymouth on the way to the home of the widow Pampelion, a relative, in Bristol, at that time under the jurisdiction of the Colony of Massachusetts. He filled temporarily the vacant pulpit of the Congregational church in Bristol and was invited on December 16, 1718, to become its pastor at an annual salary of £100, an invitation in which the town concurred, December 22, 1718.
During his stay in Boston, MacSparran seems to have aroused the enmity of Cotton Mather, who first delayed his ordination and then spread reports that his credentials were fraudulent. He proceeded to Ireland to procure their confirmation but never returned to the Congregational church at Bristol and later wrote that a false charge in his youth had opened the way into the Anglican priesthood for him.
Ordained deacon by the Bishop of London in the chapel of Fulham Palace August 21, 1720, and priest by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the chapel of Lambeth Palace, September 25, 1720, he was licensed to discharge the ministerial office in the province of New England by the Bishop of London on October 3, 1720.
The Parish of St. Paul, Narragansett Country, had written to the Bishop of London and to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, June 15, 1720, asking for a missionary to succeed William Guy, and the Society now sent out MacSparran to officiate there and at Bristol, Freetown, Swansea, and Little Compton at an annual salary of £70.
He arrived at Narragansett April 28, 1721, and proved to be one of the ablest of the missionaries sent to America by the Society, serving as rector of St. Paul's and ministering to the surrounding country for a period of thirty-six years. He entertained Dean Berkeley and John Smibert in 1729, but it was probably at a later date that Smibert's portrait of MacSparran now in the possession of Bowdoin College and that of Mrs. MacSparran now in the possession of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts were painted.
During almost his entire ministry at St. Paul's he was involved in a lawsuit to gain possession of three hundred acres of land granted by the proprietors of the Pettaquamscutt purchase to an orthodox ministry but lost the suit by the decision of the Privy Council in 1752. He paid two visits to England; the first, between June 1736 and August 1737 and the second, between the autumn of 1754 and February 1756, perhaps to work for the creation of an American bishopric, which he had long favored, and to obtain the office for himself.
He contemplated publishing an extended history of New England and is supposed to have written an account of the Narragansett Country, but after his death, no trace of the manuscript was found. A diary kept by him during the years 1743, 1744, 1745, and 1751 was discovered and published in 1899.
MacSparran died in the present township of South Kingstown at the age of sixty-four.
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MacSparran bequeathed his farm for the use and support of an American bishop whose diocese should include the Narragansett Country; this provision of his will was not carried out, however, and individuals of the parish of St. Paul bought the farm from his heirs to be used as a perpetual glebe.
On May 22, 1722, MacSparran married Hannah, daughter of William Gardiner of Boston Neck, Narragansett, a sister of Silvester Gardiner. His wife died of smallpox in London, June 24, 1755. He had no children.