Introduction
This comment explores the opening years of the National Assembly of the Church of England (called the Church Assembly from 1924) from its inauguration in 1920 until 1926. Beginning as the fulfilment of a range of competing aspirations, the Assembly was unlikely to satisfy all. I contend that although many significant voices were clear that they sought it to be something different from Parliament, the procedural necessities of running a large assembly, particularly in passing legislation, meant that the structure inevitably operated like a democratic parliament, as has continued into General Synod since 1970. Additional factors are the presence of clear church parties, as in the wider Church since the mid-19th century, and of experienced parliamentarians with expectations of procedure, in the Assembly. I will also identify some of the key personalities in the early Assembly and comment on their role in its development, such as Archbishop Davidson and Lord Hugh Cecil.
Background
It would be an under-statement to say that the Church Assembly did not spring from nowhere. On the contrary, it was built by slow and distinctly constrained steps on existing institutions. Although the call for self-government of the Church of England can be found from the outset of the Oxford Movement, real action waited until after the Gorham controversy in the 1850s. The suggestion which took life was the revival of the Convocations (which had always nominally existed) under the leadership of Bishops Wilberforce and Blomfield within, supported by among others Henry Hoare and W G Gladstone without.Footnote 1
This was a distinctly limited move – the two Convocations of Canterbury and York began to meet regularly for debate, but they almost immediately realised that they suffered from a number of constraints. The two Provinces met separately; they had no formal way to influence legislation in Parliament; successive governments were very reluctant to allow amendments to the Canons; the Lower Houses (i.e. clergy) were extremely unrepresentative as they consisted of all deans and archdeacons, another canon from each cathedral, but only one (in Canterbury) or two (in York) elected members from among the incumbents of each archdeaconry; unbeneficed clergy were neither able to vote or be elected; there was no representation of the laity at all (although this was controversial in itself). The journey of overcoming these several constraints was only completed by the inauguration of General Synod in 1970, but the creation of the Church Assembly in 1920 was the most important stage.
In the journey towards the Church Assembly, Houses of Laity for Canterbury and York had been formed, and then from 1903 these had met together with both Convocations as the Representative Church Council, a body with no formal powers at all but which existed largely to discuss its own purpose and future. To a former General Synod member like me, the minutes are fascinating – it reads like clearly the ancestor institution in spirit, as personalities jostle and points, often irrelevant, are made. But they were also making up procedure as they went along, Archbishop Randall Davidson presiding with dry wit when they lost track of exactly what motion they had decided to vote on. It was this body, with some significant reforms to the lay membership including opening to women, which received authority under the 1919 Enabling Act to present Measures to Parliament, as the National Assembly of the Church of England, renamed the Church Assembly from 1924.
Clerical conceptions of the Church Assembly
There was no formal document setting out the purpose of the Church Assembly, but from the record of proceedings and other sources a variety of conceptions can be traced jostling one against another. At the inauguration of the Assembly Archbishop Davidson opened the proceedings with a speech of some grandeur, declaring that:
We are doing all this in order that our Church may be more fit, more adaptable, more meet for the Master’s use; and the object of that is in order that our nation as a whole may be, in a truer, loftier sense, a people of God. I myself believe that, far from being a less national, in the true and large sense of that word, we shall be more national, more thoroughly national, than ever before.Footnote 2
Not for the first or last time in the history of the Church of England, optimistic rhetoric was deployed to gloss over reality, in this case that the Church Assembly had been brought into being precisely as a belated response to the fact that since 1832 Parliament could not be considered the lay assembly of the Church of England.
A more cynical perspective was offered in an early debate on the relationship between the Assembly and the ongoing Convocations, a Canon Macleane of Salisbury observing that they:
… must make up their minds which of the two conceptions of the National Assembly was the right one – whether it was merely a contrivance for getting Measures desired by the Church onto the Statute Book, or whether, on the other hand, it was the great Parliament and legislature of the Church of England, representing all the baptised men and women over the age of eighteen. It began with the first conception, and it was more or less drifting to the latter, and sooner or later the synods of the Church [i.e., the Convocations] would be swallowed up by ‘a body of colonels and lawyers’ and their wives.Footnote 3
The passion of Archbishop Davidson does not seem to have caught the imagination of observers, either at the time or since. The Church Times provided only a short factual report of two columns for their readers, fearing it would be ‘a very unwieldy conference’, noting the bad acoustics preventing speeches being heard, and disapproving of ‘the curious self-effacement of the Presbyterate’, fearing ‘the danger is that the proceedings should fall into the hands of a small ring of practised speakers, nearly all laymen’.Footnote 4 Brief columns only in The Times Footnote 5 in the days around the first Assembly meeting suggest that it was considered anything but headline news. It has small mention in Bell’s Life of Davidson Footnote 6 and scarce mention in Hensley Henson’s Retrospect, although he spoke frequently. King George V kindly sent a message for the reading of which the Assembly stood, but it was revealed by the last Archbishop of Canterbury at the inauguration of General Synod in 2015 that this was in the form of a telegram from Newmarket.Footnote 7
References to the beginnings of the Church Assembly are similarly thin in general histories of the Church of England. Kenneth Thompson observed of the Assembly, ‘… it was the object of both high hopes and deep fears in its early years. Later on it was to be regarded with indifference by many and disillusion by a few’.Footnote 8 Jeremy Morris states that the devising of the new structures ‘briefly released a wave of optimism about the future’Footnote 9 but ‘Alas, it was not to be’ for, he argues, a range of factors besetting the interwar Church. I suggest, though, that there are also important internal factors in the development of the Church Assembly which made it a somewhat underwhelming institution. Frederic Iremonger, one of those who contributed to the Life and Liberty movement during the First World War, campaigning for the Assembly, summed up the disillusion in a much-quoted passage:
Generally, it may be said that at the outset there was a sharp and fateful struggle between two groups in the National Church Assembly who differed widely in their conception of its policy and purpose and may be called, roughly, the legalists and the moralists. The struggle was a brief one. The legalists – of whom Sir Lewis Dibdin, the trusted adviser of Randall Davidson, will be remembered as the leader – were soon in control; the voice of the Assembly is now the voice of the administrator, not of the prophet.Footnote 10
Macleane and Iremonger represent two different clerical strands, one more Catholic seeking to protect the holy privileges of the Convocations from the upstart Assembly, the latter more liberal, seeking a forum for principled debate.
What about the laity?
Were the laity any keener on a general debate about the life of the Church? Famously, many sources refer to a letter received (reported as either at Church House or by the Life and Liberty leaders) from a disgruntled parishioner somewhere, reading, ‘Now that the Enabling Act has been passed, I understand we can get rid of our parson. Please advise by return’.Footnote 11 Different sources suggest a wide range of motivations for the creation of the Assembly, including the reform of liturgy,Footnote 12 clergy pensions, patronage,Footnote 13 and clergy discipline.
Who comprised the 357 members of the House of Laity?Footnote 14 Proposals to guarantee working-class representation by means of a special constituency for ‘wage-earners’ had been abandoned. The predominance of what read like ‘big house’ addresses confirm the widespread view that it was largely an assembly of those with the economic freedom to attend. The vast majority of the Standing Committee were titled, although more middle-class professional voices emerged over the years. Twenty were MPs, the overwhelming majority Conservative, and nine peers. This Parliamentary overlap gave the MPs and peers an obvious advantage in understanding legislative procedure, and many of them played a prominent role. There were 40 women, when there was only a single female MP in the House of Commons. Of the 40, 12 gave ‘clerical’ addresses (The Vicarage, etc.) suggesting that they were either the wives (if Mrs) or daughters (Miss) of clergy, including the wives of two serving bishops and one widow, Mrs Creighton, who was elected to the Standing Committee. The other addresses suggest that female members were drawn from much the same social class as the men, with a scattering of titles including Lady Florence Cecil, bringing the total of direct descendants of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury governing the Church to five.Footnote 15
Any study of the Church Assembly must reckon with the reality that it was not Lewis Dibdin, as Iremonger felt, but the Cecils who completely dominated. They represented an aristocratic, sometimes reactionary Toryism which, since the Liberal landslide of 1906, was no longer at the heart of national politics. Like the traditional upper class in England in general, they held on to their wealth and many privileges, but the Tory Party in Parliament was now more that of Baldwin and Chamberlain, men of newer money and appeal to middle-class voters. Whereas in the smaller forum of the Church Assembly, their experience and connections seemed to overawe the volunteer members and parish clergy. Most prominent was the youngest Cecil brother, Lord Hugh, a valetudinarian bachelor, notorious for his belief that spirited controversy, especially when acrimonious, was one of the luxuries of civilised life.Footnote 16
Rhetorically at least, the Cecils resisted the idea that the Assembly was leading the Church towards a Parliamentary model. In the debate on the reform of the membership of the Convocations, the Dean of York rashly suggested this would make them more democratic, drawing the following response from Lord Hugh Cecil:
I cannot help protesting against the use of the word ‘democratic’ which I so often hear abused. The clergy are as little like the demos as they are like the demon. Any representation of theirs certainly cannot be democratic. I hope that we shall avoid as a good analogy the analogy between this Assembly and Parliament. Our principles and the ultimate source of our authority are quite different. We represent the Church, and we believe that the Church is under divine guidance.Footnote 17
How the Assembly worked
In practice, however, the way in which the Assembly came to work, directly guided by the Standing Orders drafted by Hugh Cecil, was remarkably like Parliament. The very first Measure was to give the Convocations power to reform their own membership, and passed with little controversy. But the second, the PCC Powers Measure, immediately took them into line-by-line negotiation of a text that will be familiar to anyone who has sat through a legislative debate in General Synod. In this they were led by Hugh Cecil’s nephew, Lord Wolmer, like him an MP, and so naturally ready to resort to moving clauses into a separate Measure, deferring decisions to a committee, and arguing down irrelevant amendments just as in Parliament. And like Synod today, they were mindful of the need to present legislation which would be acceptable to the newly formed Ecclesiastical Committee.Footnote 18
It is also apparent that the agenda of the Church Assembly was dominated by legislation – the PCC Powers Measure took a whole week to manage, and had to run into a Saturday. After a few years it became a convention that Friday afternoon (when many had gone home) became a permitted slot for debates proposed by members, and finally in 1925 two ‘moral’ debates, much desired by Iremonger, reached the floor. These were to support a bill against reporting of divorce cases, and a call for the regulation of private clubs, which were a way of evading the licensing laws. Footnote 19 Both debates confirm that the Church’s sense of moral authority was distinctly backward-looking, but also that as the Bishop of St Albans stated, ‘it did not seem to matter very much whether they passed the resolution or not, provided that the subject was ventilated in the Assembly’.Footnote 20
Hugh Cecil’s biographer lays responsibility for this decision squarely on him noting that he ‘demanded not only an orderly agenda, clarity of thought and conciseness of speech, but also an abstention from those social, political and economic questions to which there were no specifically Christian solutions. Such self-indulgent debates, he urged, both wasted time and detracted from the prerogative of the Assembly in ecclesiastical matters’.Footnote 21 It might also be said that contentious debates only tended, then as now, to reveal the lack of consensus in the Church of England on many issues. When the portrait of Cecil that still hangs on the stairs of Church House was unveiled in 1934, Archbishop Lang declared him to be ‘both in place and in person the “power behind the throne”’.Footnote 22
Whatever the personalities guiding the Church Assembly, the practical need was to respond with Measures to many issues facing the Church, about which it had been impossible to find Parliamentary time in the past. The 16 Measures passed by 1925 justified the publication of a book containing them all.Footnote 23 They included financial matters such as dilapidations, clergy pensions and the creation of Diocesan Boards of Finance in 1925. In the significant area of patronage the Assembly proved the mechanism to finally bring to end the long-contested sale of advowsons. And the Union of Benefices Measure 1923 inaugurated the system of pastoral reorganisation by schemes approved by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners (later Church Commissioners) which has operated since.
And whereas in 1913 undignified Parliamentary horse-trading had been needed to create the new dioceses of Sheffield, St Edmunsbury & Ipswich, and Chelmsford,Footnote 24 the Assembly was able to carefully work through a series of Measures from 1923 to 1926 to create the dioceses of Blackburn, Derby, Portsmouth, Guildford and Leicester. The absorption in the practical business of all this legislation came to shape the personality of the Assembly for the duration of its life, and it is evident from researching the move to General Synod in 1970 that there was a conscious desire to move to a more varied agenda.
Conclusion
The Church Assembly began its life in 1920 with varied hopes and fears: of a new era of spiritual freedom; of a lay assembly that would threaten the ancient spiritual authority of the Convocations; of a practical means to get Church legislation through Parliament. The demand to respond to pressing issues that only legislation could solve, and the lack of consensus within the Church on many moral and spiritual issues meant that the last of these predominated. In spite of protestations to the contrary by many leading figures, this pragmatic and somewhat bloodless outcome fitted well with the intentions of the dominating figure of the early Assembly, Lord Hugh Cecil, who sought a body to offer practical service to the Church rather than a real Synod in which the major questions of the times could be debated. And the reform of the Convocations, paradoxically, reinvigorated them as a distinct forum for clerical opinion over against the Assembly.
Acknowledgements
This comment is a lightly edited version of a paper delivered at the Ecclesiastical Law Society’s conference, Nicaea Received: 1700 Years of Canons, Councils, and Ecumenism, convened at Chichester Cathedral in June 2025.
