In 1836, before Sir John Colborne was succeeded by Sir Francis Bond Head as lieutenant-governor, he created 57 rectories for the Church of England, with glebe land totalling . This action created significant political dissent, and was subsequently declared illegal in 1837, but was later held in 1856 to have been lawful. In the interim, it became one of the issues in the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 (and subsequently identified as such in the 1838 report written by Lord Durham), where William Lyon Mackenzie exclaimed to the crowd outside Montgomery's Tavern: