Priests and Politics

The Church Speaks Out

Trevor Beeson

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780334046578
• eBook ISBN: 9780334051787
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Since Christianity is an ethical as well as a mystical religion and since individuals live in communities, the church is bound to be involved in politics and other social action that determines the quality of human life. So argues Trevor Beeson in this study of how the Church of England's leaders responded to the radical social changes that transformed life in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

1

Throne and Altar

The Church of England’s relations with the State at the beginning of the nineteenth century differed little from those established by the Elizabethan Settlement in 1559, when three Acts deprived the Pope of his power to appoint bishops in England, required the clergy to surrender to the Crown their legislative independence, and all to acknowledge the monarch as the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England. In principle, this was a continuation of the interdependence of Church and State that had held sway throughout medieval Europe, and it also embodied the Lutheran concept of ‘a godly prince ruling a godly people’. The 1662 Act of Uniformity had prescribed the Book of Common Prayer as the only legal source of the Church’s worship, and the designation ‘as by law Established’ was a recognition that the Church of England’s ecclesiastical regulations alone were enshrined in the law of the State.

It was, however, the case that the political power of the Crown was now waning. The advance towards parliamentary democracy still had a long way to go, but it was undoubtedly advancing and must ultimately affect the mode of Church–State relations. Yet there was no suggestion that the Church of England might one day cease to embody the essential spiritual dimension of national life. In fact, fear that something akin to the French Revolution might cross the English Channel served to strengthen the conviction that this dimension was vital to the national interest.

The Church was content that this should be so. Apart from some serious problems during Oliver Cromwell’s rule and a few anxieties during the brief reign of James II, it had not found its link with the Crown inconvenient. Neither had the Crown been troubled by ecclesiastical dissent, having taken care over its appointments to bishoprics and received regularly the sworn allegiance of all the clergy.

Nonetheless, the appearance in the political arena of Whig reformers was bound to raise in the minds of some of the bishops – all of whom were involved in the business of government through their membership of the House of Lords – the possibility that a Christian conscience might require them to support change. More of the lesser clergy recognized this, and of their number Sydney Smith was the most prominent as well as the most entertaining.

This ceased to be a theoretical matter when the advance of democracy required a Roman Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 and a much wider Reform Act in 1832. In both these instances the bishops were divided – most favouring Emancipation, most strongly opposed to Reform. In the latter case, their opposition, which helped to defeat the Bill, caused considerable public anger expressed in violent demonstrations, and they were soon cajoled into support. It was soon the turn of the State to intervene in the affairs of the Church of England by the setting up of a commission to investigate a situation in which the bishoprics and cathedrals were immensely wealthy, while the Church’s ministry in the new industrial towns was neglected for want of funds.

Pressure for this had come from a Whig government, but it was a Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, who took the necessary action in 1835. The prospect of a substantial reduction in revenue was fiercely resisted by the bishops and capitular bodies, even by Sydney Smith, who was by this time occupying a more than comfortable canonry of St Paul’s. A spirit of reform was, however, gathering force and the Ecclesiastical Commission was chaired by the Bishop of London, Charles Blomfield, who saw clearly that the health of the Church, and therefore of the nation, required a redistribution of its funds. He became a leading builder of new churches, with their associated new parishes, in London.

The proposals of the Commission were embodied in an Act of Parliament which, by establishing a central body to administer substantial funds for the payment of the clergy, changed the life of the Church of England for ever. That this should have required parliamentary action was not generally regarded as offensive and, in any case, the Church possessed no effective machinery for the reforming of its life since the Convocations of Canterbury and York had been suppressed in 1717, and would not be revived until 1852 in the case of Canterbury and 1861 in the case of York. Marriage and Registration Acts in 1836 made provision for civil marriages and for Dissenters to be married in their own places of worship.

Meanwhile, Church–State relations remained cordial and the sense of partnership continued throughout Queen Victoria’s reign. There was some conflict over Poor Law Reform, the admission of Jews to Parliament, and legal provision for divorce in certain circumstances. The Church did not like the abolition of the compulsory Church Rate in 1868, but the Establishment was not disturbed, since no one wanted it to be. Again, the prosecutions led to the imprisonment of a few clergy, and the involvement of the Privy Council, over ritual practices during the 1880s caused concern among High Churchmen, and Canon Gregory of St Paul’s told a Church Congress that the Establishment was ‘miserable and pernicious’ and amounted to a State tyranny. But the intervention of the State had been at the request of the bishops, who themselves lacked power to exercise the required discipline, so the partnership was not affected.

However, the rise of the Free Churches raised an issue that was focused on education but had wider implications. The leaders of these churches had no wish to undermine the place of religion in national life, but they saw no reason why its embodiment should be confined to the Church of England, which, in terms of attendance, was in some parts of the country weaker than Dissent. In particular, why should Church of England schools alone qualify for state aid? A long battle, fought by a resistant Church, eventually brought reform. In this battle the Church of England’s powers were reduced by the fact that a reinvigorated church life required the bishops to spend much more time in their dioceses, with consequent absence from the House of Lords in London. Their direct involve­ment in the legislative process continued to decline during the following century.

Unlike her predecessors, Queen Victoria had no great interest in politics and her long reign saw the transformation of the role of the monarchy so that it became a personal focus of national loyalty, a model of the nation’s best values, displayed especially in family life, and the foremost encourager of philanthropy. In this, she had no doubt as to the spiritual dimension of the nation’s life and the importance of the Protestant Church of England, which she believed should be a moderate, inclusive institution, eschewing the extremes of Evangelicalism and Tractarianism.

This generally accepted view was given significant expression shortly after her death in 1901. Although her coronation was now more than 60 years past, the fact that the ceremony had been a shambles remained in the public memory. The Sacrist of Westminster Abbey, Jocelyn Perkins, noted that the Order of Service used by the Sub-Dean of the time, Lord John Thynn, bore the inscription ‘We must have a rehearsal next time’. Perkins, who had been appointed in 1899, belonged to a small group of priests who, in the wake of the Ritualist controversy, believed that the Church of England’s worship should be made more colourful and dignified, while remaining faithful to the Book of Common Prayer. Described on his memorial stone as ‘A Forceful Sacrist’, he was at the Abbey for 59 years and largely responsible for the transformation of its worship, most of all at successive coronations which later, with the aid of radio and television (both initially opposed by the Archbishops) became international spectacles. The successors of the often reclusive Queen Emperor were on the way to becoming ‘celebrities’, and the bond that bound Crown and people was thereby strengthened.

Although Victoria disliked bishops as a class, appointments to bishoprics were of considerable concern to her, since these were bound to affect the life of the Church. By this time the personal influence of the Crown had been devolved to the authority of the Prime Minister, but nonetheless they took care to consult her, especially when senior bishoprics fell vacant. Her views were taken seriously, and sometimes, but not always, prevailed. They did, however, when the Bishopric of London fell vacant in 1856. The Queen, in common with many others, was deeply affected by the plight of the Dean of Carlisle, Archibald Campbell Tait, five of whose seven children had died of scarlet fever between 6 March and 8 April that year. She believed that he should move from Carlisle to the vacant London See, and, although the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, was not keen to appoint someone not already a bishop to the Church’s third most senior post, he obeyed the Queen’s wishes. Twelve years later, though, when a new Archbishop of Canterbury was needed, she ran into much stiffer resistance from Prime Minister Disraeli over her request for Tait to be translated. In the end, she won, and he proved to be the best of the nineteenth-century Primates. On his death in 1882, the Queen asked for a lock of his hair.

The exercising of patronage in appointments to most public offices continued for much of the nineteenth century and the responsibility of the State for the appointment of the Church’s leaders at several different levels was not seriously opposed. When the ultra-conservative Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, was so incensed by the appointment of the liberal theologian to the See of Hereford that he described the Act of Supremacy as ‘a foul Act and the Magna Carta of Tyranny’, the Queen suggested that he should be prosecuted. It could be, and often was, however, argued that inasmuch as politicians were conforming members of the Church of England, they were in the matter of appointments, and other matters requiring legislation, carrying out the responsibilities of the laity. More of this would be heard when church reform was needed in the twentieth century.

The two World Wars of that century led to a serious decline in church attendance, but while they were being waged they reinforced the Church–State partnership. National survival demanded national unity. The spir-itual authority of the Church of England in particular, but also that of the other churches, was deployed to encourage patriotism, service and sacrifice. During the First World War, the dangers in this were not always fully recognized, with consequences that sometimes involved grotesque distortions of Christian witness. These were largely avoided during the 1939–45 conflict, when, in spite of the desperate need to overthrow the great evil of Nazi Germany, a few church leaders, notably Bishop George Bell of Chichester, questioned, on grounds of Christian humanity, some aspects of war strategy.

The State’s involvement in liturgical matters at the end of the previous century had left no one happy, and in 1902 a Royal Commission was appointed to consider matters relating to the discipline of the clergy, in particular their obedience to the requirement that it should use only the Book of Common Prayer. Two years later it concluded that ‘the law of public worship in the Church of England is too narrow for the religious life of the present generation . . . It is important that the law should be reformed and that it should admit of reasonable elasticity . . . above all, it is necessary that it should be obeyed.’

The government accepted the report, and in 1906 the Convocations were instructed to prepare modifications to the Prayer Book with a view to their enactment by Parliament. The Convocations felt no sense of urgency, and the First World War intervened, so that by 1920 they had done no more than produce a revised Holy Communion service. Meanwhile a committee on Church–State relations set up at the request of the Representative Church Council and meeting under the chair­manship of Lord Selborne had recommended back in 1916 that church legislation should be initiated by the Church and subject only to parliamentary veto.

The former chaplains whose service in the trenches had revealed to them the immensity of the gap between the Church and the ordinary soldier and the inadequacy of the Prayer Book to meet his spiritual needs pressed for change, and not only supported the Life and Liberty Movement’s campaign for a Church Assembly to give the Church a degree of self-government, along the lines suggested by the Selborne Report, but also demanded as a matter of urgency Prayer Book revision. The first was achieved fairly easily, it being understood that any substantial reforms, especially if related to doctrine and worship, would require parliamentary approval. Several proposed revisions of the Prayer Book were discussed by the Convocations and this led to the production of a volume for presentation to Parliament in 1927.

The revision was modest. Morning and Evening Prayer and the Psalms were virtually untouched. Slight changes were proposed to the Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage and Burial services. Pastoral usefulness was the main guiding principle and anything new was to be regarded as an alternative option rather than as a compulsory demand. A major difference arose, however, over the revision of the Holy Communion service which amounted to little more than a rearrangement of the existing material to bring it into line with the medieval pattern. But provision for the Reservation of the sacrament and a few other changes caused the Evangelical elements in the Church to believe that these constituted a change of eucharistic doctrine in a Rome-ward direction.

A vigorous campaign was therefore mounted to secure rejection of the new Book by Parliament, when it was presented in 1927. This succeeded when the House of Commons voted against it by 238 votes to 205. Consternation followed and the bishops hurriedly produced some modifications. These did not, however, satisfy the Evangelicals and, although the House of Lords again signified its assent, the House of Commons voted against, this time by 266 votes to 220.

Consternation now gave way to crisis and in July 1929 the House of Bishops passed by 23 votes to four a resolution which said that ‘for the period of the present emergency’ they would not take action against any clergyman who, having consulted his congregation, chose to use services in the revised book. The ‘emergency’ would last for more than a quarter of a century, during which time the controversial Communion service was used by hardly anyone, and the revised pastoral services came into common use. There had been no uprising of the laity in the parishes, who probably believed that the House of Commons, rather than the Church Assembly, best represented their views.

Among the bishops who had voted against the resolution was the ever-unpredictable Hensley Henson of Durham, who went on to write a book and mount a campaign in favour of disestablishment. This attracted little support, but it marked the beginning of the time when disestablishment became a reasonable subject for discussion. Dick Sheppard of St Martin-in-the-Fields and Bishop Headlam of Gloucester thought that the Establishment should be enlarged to include the Free Churches. More significant, however, was the introduction to the bishops’ resolution which stated:

It is a fundamental principle that the Church – that is the Bishops together with the Clergy and the Laity – must in the last resort, when its mind has been fully ascertained, retain its inalienable right, in loyalty to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to formulate its Faith in Him, and to arrange the expression of that Holy Faith in its forms of worship.

The doctrine of the Church propounded by the leaders of the Oxford Movement 100 years earlier was now mainstream, and the fact that the bishops’ resolution was not seen as contentious by the leaders of the State was a clear indication that the days of the mystical Church–State union were ended. Yet the binding knot was to be loosened, not untied. This was not going to be easy and the next 50 years were marked by intermittent commissions, committees, reports, debates, negotiations, speeches and sermons – all treading delicately lest any proposal for reform called into question the whole relationship. In consequence, much time and paper was wasted and little was achieved, though by the end of the century the position had in many ways been significantly modified.

Meanwhile, shortly after the publication of the 1929 resolution Archbishop Davidson retired – the first Primate ever to do so – and there was no surprise when it was announced that his successor would be the Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang. This guaranteed that no precipitate action would be taken to sever the link between Church and Crown, and it was ironic that within four years of taking office the new Archbishop was faced, in the context of an unprecedented national constitutional crisis, with, potentially, the gravest conflict between Church and Crown since the Reformation.

This involved the possible Abdication in 1936 of a new King, Edward VIII, who was faced with a choice between marrying a twice-divorced woman and retaining the Crown. Lang kept a diary of the events of that time and was deeply concerned by the prospect of having to crown a King whose personal life ran completely contrary to the teaching of the Church, of which he would be the Supreme Governor. Neither did it appeal to most of the general public.

Lang enjoyed a personal friendship with King George V and Queen Mary, and during his annual visit to Balmoral in 1935 he had ‘a long and intimate talk with the King’, who shared with him his concern about the company his son, the Prince of Wales, was keeping. The King died in January of the following year, and on his first audience with King Edward VIII, soon after his Accession, Lang was unwise enough to mention the conversation he had had with his father. The King resented this and thereafter regarded Lang as a likely enemy.

Although the King soon made his marriage intentions clear, and the petition for the second divorce of his future wife was lodged, the British press agreed to refrain from publishing this sensational news. Lang was well aware, however, of the drama that was unfolding, partly from polit-ical sources, but also from letters of concern he was receiving from North America, where the media did not feel constrained. At a late stage, the silence was broken in Britain when the Bishop of Bradford, Alfred Blunt, told his Diocesan Conferenc...

Table of contents

• Priests and Politics
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Throne and Altar
• 2 Towards Democracy – Slowly
• 3 Socialism with a Christian Soul
• 4 The Rise and Fall of Religious Education
• 5 The Durham Miners and their Bishops
• 6 Greater and Lesser Prophets
• 7 John Bull’s Other Island – Irish Crises
• 8 The War that Did Not End Wars: 1914–18
• 9 Living and Talking in Hope – Three Conferences
• 10 Responding to the Dictators
• 11 The Catastrophic War: 1939–45
• 12 Founding the Welfare State
• 13 The Cold War
• 14 The Church and the Bomb
• 15 Racism and Injustice in South Africa
• 16 A New Morality
• 17 Into the Heart of Industry
• 18 A Sorry Tale of Too Many Cities
• 19 Whither Prophecy?
• Further Reading