On October 28, 1890, the Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i issued a writ of mandamus against Alfred Willis, Bishop of the Anglican Church in Hawai‘i. Behind the incident lay a series of controversies, dating from the 1880’s, between the “Anglo-Catholic” bishop and the “evangelicals” in and out of the church. The present paper attempts to shed light on the issues, the makeup of the parties, and the political aspect of these religious controversies, and to demonstrate how they foreshadowed the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893.