Archbishop Randall Davidson

Michael Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317179641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Randall Davidson was Archbishop of Canterbury for quarter of a century. Davidson was a product of the Victorian ecclesiastical and social establishment, whose advance through the Church was dependent on the patronage of Queen Victoria, but he became Archbishop at a time of huge social and political change. He guided the Church of England through the turbulence of the Edwardian period, when it faced considerable challenges to its status as the established Church, as well as helping shape its response to the horrors of the First World War. Davidson inherited a Church of England that was sharply divided on a range of issues, and he devoted his career as Archbishop to securing its unity, whilst ensuring that its voice continued to be heard both nationally and internationally. A modest and pragmatic man, he was widely respected both within the Church of England and beyond, helping to find solutions to a range of political and ecclesiastical problems. This book explores Davidson's role within the Church and in the life of Britain more broadly during his time at Canterbury. It includes a large selection of documents that help to reveal the Archbishop's character and cast light on the way in which he carried out his varied and demanding duties.

1 The making of an Archbishop

Early years

Randall Davidson was born in 1848 into a prosperous Edinburgh family.¹ His father ran a successful timber-importing business in Leith. His mother was the daughter of a prominent Borders family. Davidson later recalled that his mother’s ‘real absorption in the religious side of life’ was ‘a natural thing’ that shaped the outlook of her children:

I do not find it easy to explain the remarkable influence which my mother was able to exercise over and among us in all religious matters and in Bible teaching […] I think her poetic temperament […] gave her a power of putting things in a way that made them interesting at the moment and rememberable afterwards.²

Davidson was himself baptised into the Church of Scotland – his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had been Church of Scotland ministers – but his upbringing was, according to his own reckoning, ‘very undenominational […] I have no recollection of receiving any teaching upon Churchmanship, either Episcopal or Presbyterian, the religion taught us being wholly of the personal sort, but beautiful in its simplicity and reality’.³ Davidson never understood in later life the passion that matters of doctrine and liturgy exercised on so many who belonged to his generation – a reflection perhaps of his upbringing in a home where such things were deemed less important than a faith based on personal devotion and moral rectitude.

Davidson developed early in life a love of countryside and rural sports that stayed with him for the rest of his life (as Archbishop he continued to shoot and fish well into his seventies).⁴ When his family moved in 1857 to a new home called Muirhouse, a large Gothic house surrounded by 200 acres of parkland, the young Randall spent much of his time shooting and riding his pony. He was taught at home until the age of 12, when he was sent away to a private school near Nottingham, before moving on to Harrow at the age of 14. The choice of Harrow does not seem to have reflected any great desire on the part of his parents to educate their son into the ethos of the British Establishment, for his father knew little of the values and cultures of the various public schools, but the decision was to play an important role in Davidson’s life. He retained a strong loyalty to the school far into adulthood.⁵ Davidson admired the new Headmaster, the Rev. Henry Montagu Butler, although some of his contemporaries were subsequently more inclined to recall Butler’s penchant for using the cane.⁶ He was still more influenced by his housemaster, the Rev. B. F. Westcott, later to become Bishop of Durham, and a man remembered by Davidson as ‘the Prophet to whom we looked for intellectual guidance on every subject’.⁷ Davidson was complimentary about the education he received at Harrow. His letters home discussing the sermons he heard in Chapel suggest he had little interest in abstruse theological questions, instead favouring more accessible addresses that focused on particular Biblical texts and their relevance for human conduct.⁸ Davidson preferred, even as a schoolboy, to concentrate on the immediate and concrete rather than the mystical and remote.

The last year at Harrow was punctuated by an incident that had consequences for the rest of Davidson’s life, when a friend accidentally shot him in the back whilst out shooting rabbits. Davidson spent months convalescing, and the accident left him with injuries that caused pain down until his death. He was cursed by ill health throughout his life – a weakness that was in part physical, but may also have reflected his perennial tendency to work himself into a state of nervous exhaustion. The shooting accident also had a more immediate effect, since it destroyed any chance of winning a scholarship to Oxford, although he still matriculated in the autumn of 1867 as a commoner at Trinity College. Davidson was already certain that he wanted to be ordained. It may be that the prospect of a clerical career – and the secure income it offered – appealed to a young man from a prosperous but not hugely wealthy upper-middle class background. His letters home from both Harrow and Oxford do, though, suggest that he possessed a faith that was strong if oddly unreflective in character.⁹ Davidson was certainly largely oblivious to the great theological controversies of the day during his time at university (although he did show a lively interest in local ecclesiastical tensions and rivalries).¹⁰ Neither the vexed questions posed by the legacy of the Oxford Movement, nor the challenge offered by Darwinism to traditional belief, evoked much interest in the mind of a young man whose faith was instinctive rather than cerebral in character. Whilst T. H. Green was already teaching at Oxford, Davidson was at university too early to come under his influence, or more generally the broad school of British Idealism that had such a powerful sway on a later generation of Anglican clergy (and indeed on some of Davidson’s own contemporaries).¹¹ Nor is there much evidence that he had any real interest in philosophical questions more generally.

Davidson was frequently ill whilst at Oxford and graduated with a third class honours degree (something he regretted to the end of his life). It is indeed astonishing how quickly his career progressed in subsequent years, given the physical and emotional strain it must have placed on his health. Davidson travelled extensively after leaving university, visiting Italy and Switzerland, as well as starting his training for holy orders under the supervision of Dr Charles Vaughan at the Temple Church off Fleet Street (Vaughan had many years previously been Headmaster at Harrow).¹² Vaughan was sceptical of the value of theological colleges, and the training he gave to those planning a career in the Church typically involved a mixture of reading and sermon preparation, as well as a secondment to one of the less salubrious neighbourhoods of the capital.¹³ Such a practical approach suited Davidson well, and many years later, when Bishop of Winchester, he spent considerable time organising the training of ‘men who do not fit happily or easily into the life of an ordinary Theological College’.¹⁴ The future Archbishop had little real interest in theology as an academic discipline (he never hid his lack of a theological cast of mind). He was familiar with the intellectual debates that preoccupied some of his Anglican contemporaries, but showed little interest in them, a pattern that was later repeated at Canterbury when he had to resolve passionate disputes on which he looked with a certain bemusement.

When Davidson was still at Oxford, he met the son of Archbishop Tait of Canterbury, Craufurd Tait, who was subsequently instrumental in arranging for his friend to serve as a curate in Dartford following ordination in March 1874. Davidson had whilst preparing for ordination also had the opportunity to travel once again, heading to Egypt and Palestine, a trip that fostered his lifelong interest in the Christian East.¹⁵ Davidson’s time in Dartford was, at least when he looked back many years later, among the happiest periods of his life. He worked with the sick, visiting smallpox patients, and offering care to those whose family were too scared to look after their relatives. At the age of 29, Davidson was well placed to embark on a successful career in the Church of England, set fair to obtain a living that would allow him to combine pastoral work with his love of country sports. Such a life might well have suited a man whose health was never good, but there was always in Davidson a streak of ambition which sat awkwardly with his modesty and caution. At the end of 1876, when Craufurd Tait announced that he planned to step down as his father’s Private Secretary and Chaplain, the Archbishop asked his son to sound out Randall Davidson as a possible replacement (Archbishop Tait had known Davidson’s father Henry since the two men were children in Edinburgh). The offer of the post was in due course made, and Davidson accepted without hesitation (before the formal offer was made, he tellingly fretted in a letter to his mother about his anxiety that he would be ‘left out in the cold with nothing to look forward to’).¹⁶ His move to Lambeth Palace set him on a course that was to lead a quarter of a century later to Canterbury.

Chaplain to Archbishop Tait

Davidson first heard Tait preach when he was still at Oxford, writing to his mother rather dismissively of the Archbishop’s ‘slightly pedantic, rather dry and strikingly unattractive discourse’. His six years as Resident Chaplain at Lambeth Palace transformed his view of Tait (‘a personality to be neither forgotten nor ignored’).¹⁷ There was a series of almost uncanny similarities in the two men’s background, which may have accounted for the good relationship they built up, which was cemented still further when Davidson married Tait’s daughter Edith in 1878. Both men had been born and raised in Edinburgh families with a strong Presbyterian tradition. They also both suffered from lifelong poor health and chronic pain. There was also a more elusive symmetry in their attitude towards religion in general and the Church of England in particular (doubtless in part reflecting Tait’s influence on his young Chaplain). Neither man was a natural mystic or a gifted theologian. Both were deeply interested in political questions, devouring newspapers and journals, and cultivating relations with leading politicians. When Davidson finally went to Canterbury, in 1903, he followed Tait in identifying one of his principal tasks as the preservation of the influence of the National Church. The two men were both passionately committed to maintaining the Church of England’s status as the Established Church, not so much as a defence of privilege, but rather because they viewed it as a fundamental element in the fabric of the nation. Gladstone once told the House of Commons that ‘Take the Church of England out of the history of England, and the history of England becomes a chaos, without order, without life, and without meaning’.¹⁸ Tait for his part agreed that the Church of England had always been

a part of the history of this country […] a part so vital, entering so profoundly into the entire life and action of the country, that the severing of the two would leave nothing behind but a bleeding and lacerated mass.¹⁹

It was a sentiment echoed by Davidson many times, albeit in more muted terms, during his long journey to Canterbury.

Much of the work carried out by Davidson at Lambeth Palace was very dull. Tait recalled a few years before his death how he had often

seen […] letters enough arrive [at Lambeth Palace] by a single post to fill a large basket. They have as soon as possible to be read and arranged […] Many are of course routine letters, but each requires, none the less, an acknowledgement or reply […] All these, and a hundred such cases, has the Chaplain to deal with.²⁰

The Chaplain also had to arrange interviews, fend off callers, and generally manage the Archbishop’s working life. Davidson excelled at the work. He later wrote in his two-volume biography of Tait that the Archbishop always put ‘complete and unreserved confidence in his se...