Easter Act: a law you've probably never heard of

Parliament legislated in the 1920s to fix the date of Easter more precisely than the lunar-influenced moveable feast it had traditionally been, but it didn't quite work out

If someone asks you “When is Easter?”, it’s a very difficult question. To begin with the Western and (most) Eastern churches calculate the date using different calendars (the Gregorian and the Julian), and the precise date of Easter is decided on a lunar basis by a calculation called computus paschalis. It is a moveable feast—that’s what moveable feasts are—and falls on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which all means that, in the West, for example, Easter can be as early as 22 March or as late as 25 April.

Whether the variation in the timing of Easter bothers you or not is largely a matter of taste. For observant Christians, I imagine it is simply part of the rhythm of the ecclesiastical calendar, moveable because it has always been moveable and no more subject to the strictures of earthly control than is the course of the moon upon which it depends. I can see that those who have to plan entirely secular calendars which nevertheless must factor in Easter, for example in calculating bank holidays and other civic celebrations, or planning academic terms, might prefer a greater degree of regularity. There are also starry-eyed ecumenicalists who dream of East and West marking the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ at the same time as an expression of fundamental Christian unity.

In May and June 1923, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Meletios IV, a 51-year-old Cretan who had been head of the Monastery of Bethlehem and Primate of the Church of Greece and was possessed of a mildly reformist mindset which sought administrative order and neatness, convened a meeting of Orthodox leaders to discuss potential ways of regularising the calendar. Some describe the meeting as a “pan-Orthodox” or “ecumenical” council, while others resist such a characterisation, given that the Coptic Church and the Orthodox Churches of Antioch and Jerusalem did not participate. Those who did attend, including the Church of Greece, agreed to adopt the revised Julian calendar, which would be synchronised with the Gregorian calendar until 2800, but this was so controversial a change that it deepened divisions within Orthodoxy and fuelled the rise of Old Calendarist groups. It would ultimately end in rather fractious failure.

Where the Patriarch of Constantinople clumsily and unsuccessfully led, however, the League of Nations followed. The League had been created in January 1920 at the Paris Peace Conference which also produced the Treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain, Neuilly, Trianon and Sèvres as well as the allocation of former German and Ottoman colonial possessions to the Allied powers as “mandates”. It was powered by that distinctive, post-First World War idealism and optimism which was so fervid that it sometimes verged on desperation, a profound sense not merely that the world could change centuries of practice in relations between nation states but also that it must. Its first Secretary-General was a diligent, altruistic, unobtrusive Scottish aristocrat, Sir Eric Drummond, who had been private secretary to H.H. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey and A.J. Balfour and came to the role on the recommendation of one of the League’s great champions, Lord Robert Cecil.

In those early days, so profound a trauma and disruption had the cost in human life of the Great War represented that it seemed inevitable the world would change dramatically and old enmities and feuds would succumb soothingly to the application of diplomacy and reason. Hardly any area of life seemed off-limits for this powerful urge to reform, pacify and establish consensus, and to achieve by efficient bureaucracy what armed conflict had not achieved: the League was a dream for those who flourished in committees, a welter of organisations, advisory councils, offices, commissions and boards.

One of these bodies was the Advisory and Technical Committee for Communications and Transit. Its remit included a huge variety of issues like the international regulation of ports, waterways and railways, arbitration of disputes over transit, passports, through ticketing and standardised traffic signage, but it also decided to examine the issue of reform of the calendar. This ranged from how many months there should be in a year (12 or 13?) and, relevant here, the date of Easter and its calculation. In January 1926, having consulted representatives of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Anglican Churches, the committee published a detailed report on the subject, one of the recommendations of which was that Easter should fall on the Sunday after the second Saturday in April.

On 10 February 1928, Captain Robert Bourne, the Conservative Member for Oxford, introduced the Stabilisation of Easter Bill into the House of Commons. (He was an interesting character: he had won the Boat Race with Oxford in 1909, 1910, 1911 and 1912 then won a silver medal with New College, Oxford, in the Eights at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912. Blinded in one eye as a child in a game of rounders, he was badly injured at Suvla Bay in the Dardanelles Campaign in August 1915, one hand being crippled and a lung severely damaged. Bourne would go on to be Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means 1931-38 before dropping dead at the age of 50 while walking in Argyllshire. His son, Sir Wilfred Bourne, was Permanent Secretary to the Lord Chancellor’s Department from 1977 to 1982, during which time the Lord Chancellor was Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone who, as Quintin Hogg, had won the by-election in Oxford occasioned by Captain Bourne’s sudden death.)

Bourne’s bill set out to implement the recommendation of the League of Nations Committee and fix Easter to fall on the Sunday after the second Saturday in April. It was a Private Member’s Bill but the government made no efforts to oppose it. On 17 February, it was given a Second Reading and sent to a standing committee chaired by the MP for Thirsk and Malton, Sir Edmund Turton, where its detailed scrutiny was swift. The committee reported the bill with amendments on 8 March, whereafter it became for a while becalmed amid other parliamentary busienss.

On 15 June 1928, the bill, now renamed simply the Easter Bill, returned to the House of Commons for its Report Stage and Third Reading, a straightforward business following which it was then sent to the House of Lords. It had its Second Reading debated in the upper house on 2 July, and the member in charge of the bill was Lord Desborough: he had been Liberal MP for Salisbury 1880-82 and 1885-86 then for Hereford from 1892, but in 1893 he had resigned his seat in protest at Gladstone’s proposals for Irish Home Rule. In 1900 he had returned to the Commons as Conservative MP for Wycombe, then was ennobled at the end of 1905. Like Bourne, he was a former Boat Race winner for Oxford in 1878, having participated in the contest’s only dead heat in 1877, and in 1906 he had won a silver medal for fencing in the team épée at the Intercalated Games in Athens (which were intended to be Olympic competitions between the full Olympiads, an idea which did not last).

After being given a Second Reading, the Easter Bill was committed to Committee of the whole House, which considered, amended and agreed to it on 23 July. Four days late, the bill was given its Third Reading and sent back to the Commons with amendments, the House of Commons agreed to the Lords Amendments on 30 July and next day sent the bill back for a final time. It was given Royal Assent when Parliament was prorogued unusually deep into the summer on 3 August. It was now the Easter Act 1928.

You may well now be wondering why, if Parliament passed an act nearly a century ago to fix the date of Easter, it remains such a complicated moveable feast. The Easter Act 1928 is, after all, a supremely short and straightforward statute, with one substantive section and a single schedule. It would scarcely be possible to have a plainer act. The stumbling block lies in the act’s commencement, that is, when and how it is to come into force.

If an act makes no mention of procedures for its commencement, the assumption is that it becomes law the moment the sovereign grants Royal Assent. Alternatively, there can be procedural measures which have to be followed in order for the statute to become operative, and this is where section 2(2) of the Easter Act is at the heart of the matter:

This Act shall commence and come into operation on such date as may be fixed by Order of His Majesty in Council, provided that, before any such Order in Council is made, a draft thereof shall be laid before both Houses of Parliament, and the Order shall not be made unless both Houses by resolution approve the draft either without modification or with modifications to which both Houses agree, but upon such approval being given the order may be made in the form in which it has been so approved: Provided further that, before making such draft order, regard shall be had to any Opinion officially expressed by any Church or other Christian body.

In other words, when King George V notified Royal Assent in August 1928, nothing actually happened in legislative terms because a trigger existed, waiting to be pulled. If the government wished to enact the law, it was required to “have regard to” any official stance of any church or other Christian body—though “having regard to” something is a fabulously and notoriously indefinable phrase—and then present a draft Order in Council saying that the act should come into force before each House. Both the Commons and the Lords would then both have to agree to a resolution approving the draft order (either unamended or amended). If these hurdles were overcome, then the Order in Council could be passed by the Privy Council and the act would take effect.

Ninety-seven years on, no government has presented a draft Order in Council to implement the provisions of the Easter Act 1928. It is worth remembering that, while the Conservative government in office at the time of its passage did nothing to hinder Bourne’s bill, it was a Private Member’s Bill rather than a government bill. Ministers had made no commitment to take such a step nor was there much incentive for them to do so, and section 2(2) has given ministers for nearly a century a get-out. Even better than that, from a ministerial viewpoint, s. 2(2) also provides a ready-made a perennial scapegoat, the disunity of the world’s Christians.

In February 1939, more than a decade after the Easter Act had become law, Sir Arnold Wilson, a former colonial administrator who served as Conservative MP for Hitchin, asked the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, why the act remained dormant and why no commencement order had been laid, urging him to do so. Hoare, a politician renowned for his bland duplicity and nicknamed “Soapy Sam”, was the picture of regretful impotence.

I am afraid it is impossible to bring the Easter Act into force until there is agreement amongst the religious communities, and there appears to be no immediate prospect of such agreement.

It demonstrated the ubiquity of the excuse governments could so easily reach for; after all, when in the history of Christianity has there been “agreement amongst the religious communities” or “immediate prospect of such agreement”? There has always been debate and dissent over matters large and small, so, if a government is so minded, Hoare’s explanation will always apply.

There have been a number of attempts to implement the Easter Act. In February 1951, Lord Merthyr, a notionally Conservative barrister, moved a motion in the House of Lords to repeal section 2(2) and therefore automatically bring the act into force at once, but he withdrew the motion before it could be put to a vote. The following month, Sir Richard Acland, Labour MP for Gravesend, sought leave to bring in another Private Member’s Bill, the Easter Act (Amendment) Bill, which would have amended section 2(2) to bring it into operation no later than 31 December 1952. He argued that most Christian denominations supported the measures in the act, and that proactivity was necessary rather than stasis. Acland’s bill was duly brought in, but made no progress.

In April 1984, Lord Airedale, a Liberal peer, moved “That this House would welcome the coming into operation of the Easter Act 1928 to provide that Easter Day shall be the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April”. He played down the obligation for the government to make sure Christian groups agreed with the implementation of the act, and said that, while there would be opponents of any plan, “I should have thought that Parliament in 1928 got it just about right, and I should have thought that it was time for us to implement their proposals”. At the end of the debate, however, he withdrew his motion.

Fifteen years later, in February 1999, a Conservative peer, the Earl of Dartmouth, sought leave to bring in an Easter Act 1928 (Commencement) Bill which, if it had become law, would have implemented the act automatically. There was a Second Reading debate on the bill on 11 March 1999, in which Dartmouth, a chartered accountant and former Conservative parliamentary candidate, fully acknowledged potential obstacles and objections to his proposal. Several fellow peers confessed themselves in two minds, but the Bishop of Oxford, Dr Richard Harries, explained that talks about closer ties between the churches, in which the date of Easter was a factor, were ongoing. These should be allowed to proceed further, he maintained, while adding that:

a fixed date for Easter would obscure and weaken the vital biblical link between the events of Holy Week and Easter, on the one hand, and the Jewish Passover festival, which is still calculated with reference to the vernal equinox, on the other.

At the end of the debate, Dartmouth withdrew his bill.

This has been a recurrent pattern when the Easter Act 1928 is raised. Its overall tone of simplification is attractive and initially supporters rally around proposals to bring it into force, especially nearly 100 years after it was granted Royal Assent. The predictability and order which it is imagined the act might bring persuade those who need to make long-term plans and schedules in which the timing of Easter is an element that it should be implemented. However, they frequently wilt or simply lose a degree of certainty when various obstacles are pointed out, particularly the idea of Parliament as the secular authority imposing measures on Christian churches.

In public policy, it is very often easier not to do something, to defer, delay or temporise, than it is to take positive action. When there are valid arguments to be weighed up on either side, as there are with the Easter Act 1928, and when some groups feel a greater sense of involvement and entitlement to engage with the issue than others, the temptation is to wait for a development which changes the situation so drastically that a course of action becomes the obvious decision to make. The arguments for or against bringing the Easter Act into force have not become compelling yet, in nearly 100 years of debate, and doing nothing is still the easiest option. Yet broad demographic trends revealed in the census data suggest we are secularising as a nation, and doing so fast: at the last census in 2021/22, the proportion of those identifying as Christian was 46.5 per cent, the first time it has ever dropped below half, and that had fallen from 59.5 per cent in 2011 and 71.6 per cent 2001. There may be lies, damned lies and statistics, but those statistics are certain supportive of a hypothesis of drastic and rapid secularisation.

If Christianity continues to decline and becomes an increasingly rare or fringe pursuit, will that make us, as a society, more or less inclined to act decisively over the date of Easter? I can’t say: a plausible scenario could be constructed pointing in either direction. In the meantime, Easter remains that most giddily moveable of feasts, and we choose not to take action. That may be a solidly British compromise. But remember, the law already exists, and merely needs to be resurrected…