Justin Welby is gone: some initial thoughts

The forced departure of the Archbishop of Canterbury is unprecedented in more than three centuries, and it does matter

The fall

In the days leading up to Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury on 12 November, I found myself in a strange mental duality. On the one hand, I have watched politics for long enough and at close enough quarters to see when a series of events becomes inevitable and a career is irretrievably dead, and it became obvious by the beginning of the week that Welby could not survive the scandal engulfing him. One commentator on the BBC’s Newsnight remarked grimly that Russell Brand was more likely to be Archbishop of Canterbury than Justin Welby by the following week. I don’t say this as a judgement on Welby’s failings as set out in Keith Makin’s detailed report on John Smyth QC, though the report was damning. It simply seemed to me that significant criticism on an issue as sensitive as child abuse and the institutional concealment or diminution of such abuse was too serious for Welby to endure. Logic, experience and low politics all said he was finished, as indeed events proved.

At the same time, I’m an historian, and in some ways an historian of religion, which made me perhaps more conscious than some others that the resignation in disgrace of the Archbishop of Canterbury is momentous and historic. I can’t really exaggerate this. The first archbishop even to retire was Randall Davidson, who occupied the see of Canterbury for a quarter of a century, form 1903 to 1928. He was 80 years old when he decided to stand down from the most senior role in the Church of England, choosing his golden wedding anniversary, 12 November, to leave. There was some uncertainty about how this was to be handled; eventually the King formed a four-man commission—the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester—to accept his resignation. The outgoing archbishop was created an hereditary peer as Lord Davidson of Lambeth, though he had no children and it became extinct on his death 18 months later in 1932.

Before Davidson, the presumption was that the Archbishop of Canterbury was appointed for life. Although William Temple (1942-44) died in office, he was felled unexpectedly by a heart attack at the age of 63. Otherwise, primates since Davidson have retired, and in general are now expected to step down at the age of 70 as stipulated in the Ecclesiastical Offices (Age Limit) Measure 1975 (though there is a degree flexibility). Welby himself would have reached retirement age in January 2026.

Searching for precedent

Because I am as I am, I started thinking about precedent. To underline the historic nature of Welby’s departure, the last Archbishop of Canterbury to be forced from office was William Sancroft—in 1690. Then Dean of St Paul’s, he had been appointed, somewhat unexpectedly, by Charles II in 1677, and had to be persuaded to accept the office, not least by the King telling him he had already appointed a successor as Dean. His term of office was turbulent: in 1688, he and six other bishops presented a petition to Charles II’s successor, James II and VII, protesting at the King’s Declaration of Indulgence. This proclamation suspended the penal laws enforcing conformity to the Church of England and ended the requirement of religious oaths for holders of government office, which the Anglican hierarchy regarded as not only dangerous but illegal because it relied on royal authority rather than the legitimate decision of Parliament. The so-called Seven Bishops were committed to the Tower of London, then tried for seditious libel in the Court of the King’s Bench in June 1688 but acquitted by the jury, in a disaster for James’s government.

This was not the end of the turbulence. In November 1688, the King’s son-in-law, William of Orange, arrived in England intending to take the throne, and soon gained the support of many Protestant officers in the army as well as the King’s own daughter Princess Anne. James tried to flee in December, was captured but released and allowed to go into exile in France. Sancroft supported the House of Lords in their declaration to William, who became William III and joint ruler with his wife Mary II, for a free parliament and indulgence for Protestant dissenters. But the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance Act 1688, passed by Parliament to endorse the “Glorious Revolution”, required office-holders to swear an oath to the new King and Queen, and this Sancroft could not do. Like five other bishops are around 400 lower clergy, he took the view that the oath he had sworn to James II was still valid while the former king was alive and could not be contradicted. In February 1690, therefore, he was formally deprived of his office and succeeded as Archbishop of Canterbury by another Dean of St Paul’s, John Tillotson.

The fact that Sancroft’s deprivation was under such different circumstances from those of Welby’s resignation serves only to underscore how long a period of time has passed, 334 years. It was before the establishment of the United States, of Germany, Italy, Turkey. China had only just come under the rule of the Qing dynasty, Australia had been explored by European navigators and traders but not settled, while the European presence in Africa was limited to trading posts and coastal enclaves like Ceuta, Oran, Casablanca and Cape Town. Put it this way: if in my old profession as a clerk in the House of Commons I had gone back to 1690 for a precedent, I would have been asked somewhat pleadingly if there was anything more recent.

The weight of Anglicanism

It is fair to ask if this matters very much. Without diminishing the seriousness of the abuse that John Smyth committed, its impact on his victims and the mismanagement by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the Church of England is an organisation in steep decline. Even its own documents claim a “Worshipping Community”—those who worship regularly—of 984,000 and average weekly attendance of 654,000. Five years ago, those figures were 1,113,000 and 854,000 respectively. That is dwarfed by, say, the National Trust, with 5.6 million members, or the Trades Union Congress, with 5.2 million. Closer numerical comparators are the Camping and Caravanning Club (720,000 members) or the Royal Horticultural Society (626,000).

In religious terms, according to the most recent census of England and Wales, the Church of England’s Worshipping Community is punching at the same level as Hinduism (one million adherents), while its weekly attendance is more like Sikhism (524,000). The Catholic Church claims regular attendance at Mass by 1.75 million, far outstripping Anglicanism. More broadly, and hugely significantly, the 2021 census was the first ever to record a minority of respondents (46.2 per cent) identifying as Christians.

Participating in Christian worship is simply not something we as a nation are doing in the same numbers as we used to. In 2011, 59.3 per cent of England and Wales identified themselves as Christians, and in 2001 it was 72 per cent. The direction of travel is obvious and bad news for churches. Last year, Dan Hitchens wrote a fascinating piece in The Spectator reporting the work of former mathematics lecturer John Hayward, using the R number made famous by the Covid-19 pandemic to model the growth or shrinkage of Christian denominations. His predictions were that, assuming nothing changes, the Church in Wales will effectively disappear in the 2030s, the Church of Scotland and Methodism in the 2040s, and the Church of England and the Catholic Church in the 2060s. Bluntly, on those projections, if I don’t live to see the practical end of the Church of England, my sister, who is 13 years younger than me, has every chance of doing so.

The Church of England is not, of course, like other denominations, because it is the Established Church in England (though not in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland). There are 26 Anglican bishops—the Lords Spiritual—in the House of Lords, the monarch is crowned by a Church of England prelate in an Anglican service and the King swore an oath at his coronation that he would:

maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel… maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law… maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England… [and] preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them.

He is required to do this by the Coronation Oath Act 1688, part of the religious settlement which was the undoing of Archbishop Sancroft.

My view is that we can get too exercised by the established status of the Church of England. Yes, it is technically true that Parliament is the only legislature in the world to have seats reserved ex officio for clerics apart from the Guardian Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the King is the only head of state of a democracy who is required to adhere to a specific Christian denomination. I’ve written before about the part religion formally plays in British politics and the role of the House of Commons in the governance of the Church of England. I can see that for militant atheists and constitutional purists, the Lords Spiritual are unsatisfactory at best, but I would challenge anyone to find a piece of legislation on which their influence has been decisive; and anyone who seriously thinks Iran and the UK are comparable in terms of theocracy is in another world.

But it is worth noting that the Labour Party’s manifesto for the last election contained plans to remove hereditary peers from the House of Lords, which will be achieved by the miserable House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill currently before Parliament, to introduce a mandatory retirement age of 80 for the remaining peers as well as a participation requirement, to strengthen the powers of the House to remove “disgraced members” and to reform the appointments system. It said nothing, however, about the Lords Spiritual. In fact, the government is currently using its supposedly valuable legislative time to extend measures to boost the number of women who sit as bishops in the House of Lords through the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 (Extension) Bill [Lords].

The Archbishop of Canterbury is an important figure. He may lead a church with fewer than a million adherents in this country, though it should be remembered he is also recognised informally as the spiritual of the Anglican Communion, which numbers around 85 million worldwide. He is joint president of Churches Together in England and the Council of Christians and Jews, both ecumenical organisations. More broadly, though, his status as senior primate, established by the Accord of Winchester of 1072, and as the clerical head of the Church of England (of course the King is Supreme Governor), combined with his ex officio status as a legislator, gives him an imprimatur like no other religious leader in Britain. Among Christian denominations, he still has greater reach that the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, the collective leadership of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland or the Archbishop of Armagh, as well as the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the President of the Methodist Conference or the President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain.

He is, in effect, the default setting for a “voice of faith”. Welby was the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury since St Augustine, the “Apostle to the English”, established himself in the capital of King Æthelberht of Kent in AD 597. The Church of England has been the national church since the Act of Supremacy 1534. A quarter of primary schools in England and 228 secondary schools, teaching around a million pupils, are run by the Church of England, and there are 1,540 Church of England academies as well as 280 Multi Academy Trusts holding Church of England Articles, making the church the biggest provider of academies. In addition, more than 500 independent schools declare themselves to be Church of England in ethos. Having attended broadly Anglican schools, I can attest that they are hardly hard-line madrassas, but they add to the status of the Church of England and of the Archbishop of Canterbury along with everything else.

The Church of England does not shy away from this profile: why would it? The Archbishop of Canterbury’s website sets out the various elements of his public role, noting not just his legislative presence and his position as patron of a wide range of organisations but also his influence in the armed forces, all of which have dedicated chaplains overseen by the Bishop to the Forces, formally the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Episcopal Representative to the Armed Forces. (The post is currently held by the Bishop of St Germans, Hugh Nelson.)

What’s next?

Justin Welby has announced his resignation but remains for the moment in post, and it is not yet clear how long it will take for him to be replaced. The selection of the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury formally lies with the King, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, as prescribed by the Appointment of Bishops Act 1533. However, since 1974, vacancies and appointments are considered by the Crown Nominations Committee, which will propose a candidate to the Prime Minister for nomination to the King; the CNC will also agree on a second candidate, whose identity will not be disclosed, to be kept in reserve in case it is for some reason impossible for the first candidate to accept the appointment. In theory, the Prime Minister is entitled to reject the initial nomination and request the second name from the CNC, but no premier has done so. The successful candidate must have the support of two-thirds of the committee, according to Standing Order 141(6) of the General Synod’s Standing Orders.

The CNC has 17 voting members: three representatives from the diocese of Canterbury; six members (three clergy and three lay) of the General Synod; the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell; another bishop elected by the House of Bishops; and representatives of five global regions of the Anglican Communion, Middle East and Asia, the Americas, Africa, Europe and Oceania. Of those five, at least two must be women, and the majority must be of “global majority heritage” (a nonsense phrase which means non-white). The CNC would normally be chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but in this case it has been agreed that the Prime Minister will appoint a chair following consultations who will be “an actual communicant lay member” of the Church of England.

There are three non-voting members of the CNC: the Archbishops’ Secretary for Appointments, Stephen Knott; the Prime Ministers’ Secretary for Appointments, Jonathan Hellewell; and the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, the Rt Revd Anthony Poggo.

There is a minor irony in the involvement of the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, as he is an atheist. A Catholic premier would be prevented from advising the King on ecclesiastical appointments under section 18 of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, and an analogous prohibition is set out in section 4 of the Jews’ Relief Act 1858. (We have not yet had an avowedly practising Roman Catholic or Jew as Prime Minister, and no legal disability applied to Rishi Sunak, a Hindu.)

The appointment of a new archbishop could take several months. Welby’s predecessor, Rowan Williams, announced his resignation in March 2012 and Welby was not appointed until November, while George Carey made his departure public in January 2002 and Williams was selected in July. One might imagine that the circumstances of Welby’s resignation might encourage all concerned to speed up the process, but in age-old bureaucracies that is not always easy.

Conclusion

Anglicans and non-Anglicans alike (most of us falling into the latter category) should pay attention to Justin Welby’s fall. How much attention we should pay is a matter of taste, but the Archbishop of Canterbury is an important and influential figure in public life. At this point, I would make two tentative predictions.

First, I suspect there will be considerable pressure from within the Church of England to select a woman as the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Although women were first ordained in any capacity only 30 years ago, and the first female bishop, Libby Lane, was appointed within the last decade, there have been strenuous efforts to make rapid progress, and seven of the 26 Lords Spiritual are now women, including the Bishop of London, Dame Sarah Mullaly. The Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015 gives preference to female candidates to be bishops in the House of Lords, and, as mentioned above, the government is currently legislating to extend the provisions of this act. It is not difficult to imagine the argument that appointing a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury would be another major step in this process, and that it would in some way counter the damaging circumstances of Welby’s resignation.

On the other hand, it is important to remember that the ordination of women was and remains controversial in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. At least five of the 44 members of the communion do not allow female ordination, and another seven or more do not permit women to be bishops. Even if that did not prove an insuperable obstacle to a woman’s appointment, it would make it deeply divisive.

My second prediction is that there will be renewed calls for the Church of England to be disestablished. There have been campaigns to remove the church’s privileged status since the 19th century: the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871, while the Welsh branch of the Church of England lost its official standing in 1920. There was renewed support for disestablishment from within the Anglican church in the late 1920s, when Parliament refused to authorise changes to the Book of Common Prayer. But it remains a relatively niche position. A bill was introduced into the House of Lords last year by Lord Scriven, a Liberal Democrat, but made no progress. The National Secular Society and Humanists UK both support disestablishment, and activists tried to use the results of the last census, showing that a minority of those in England and Wales identified as Christians, to agitate for action, but there was little widespread public resonance.

There is a possibility that the gruesome connection of child abuse could change the situation. Many of the arguments in favour of disestablishment, while impeccably logical, are largely theoretical and intellectual, and most people do not feel the Church of England impinging on their daily lives. The suggestion that the church was involved in failing to police or prevent and then concealing the abuse of children is clearly of a different order, and it could be a “cut-through” issue.

This is a space to be watched. It is possible that the public gaze will drift elsewhere and the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury will become a minor issue, of interest only to church-goers and constitutional observers. Undoubtedly, however, this is a major challenge to the Church of England, one which it will be lucky to weather unscathed.