CHURCH, CROWN AND PARLIAMENT FROM THE CONFESSOR TO THE REFORMATION

By the time of Edward the Confessor England was a Christian country. Edward liked to visit the somewhat broken-down Benedictine Monastery at Thorney Island and, when he was advised against a pilgrimage to Rome to gain absolution for his sins, he entered into a deal with the Pope which was that if he applied 10 per cent of his wealth to building either a new church or repairing an existing church, he would receive absolution.

Edward did that by using the money to rebuild the Benedictine Abbey on Thorney Island, which became the first Westminster Abbey – not the Westminster Abbey we see today but a predecessor. Having built this new abbey, he then decided to build a palace and that palace became the Palace of Westminster, Minster to the West of London. So from the very earliest days of Parliament, its fate and fortunes have been very often inextricably linked to the history of the Church and Christianity in this country. Bishops, abbots and indeed abbesses were powerful, large landowners and powerful voices in government throughout the Middle Ages.

At the signing of Magna Carta, it was not just the barons who witnessed King John's acquiescence. The whole idea of Magna Carta had been initiated by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who dusted off a 113-year-old proclamation of King Henry I and showed it to the barons, when the idea of a new and improved charter – a Great Charter – took hold. In addition, a number of bishops were present at the signing of Magna Carta, including Hugh of Wells, the bishop of the large and powerful Diocese of Lincoln, who held a bible in one hand and a bloodied sword in the other. At least ten other bishops were in attendance, so bishops were members of Parliament from its very earliest days.

We then come to the reign of Henry VIII. I think that the important point here is that the Church of England is the creation of Parliament. Everything of any significance that has happened to the governance of the Church of England has often been initiated by Parliament and certainly everything that has happened in the governance of the Church of England has been approved by Parliament. The King's break with Rome and his re-marriage required the co-operation and approval of Parliament. In 1533 Parliament passed a law for the Acts in Restraint of Appeals. Described as Thomas Cromwell's masterpiece in statute-making, the preamble to the Act announced that the realm of England was an empire, ruled by the King as Supreme Head with complete mastery over the bodies and souls of his subjects. The Act of Succession 1524 declared Mary Tudor illegitimate and recognised Elizabeth; the Act in Restraint of Annates diverted payments formerly made by the Church away from the Pope and into the royal coffers; the submission of the clergy, which had been passed by Convocation two years before, was also confirmed by Parliament so that by 1534 Parliament had ensured that the break with Rome was finally and incontrovertibly achieved; and the Act of Supremacy 1534 clarified and confirmed King Henry's position as ‘Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England’. The Queen is still Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

When Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, it stipulated that Henry VIII and his heirs

This was followed by the Acts of Suppression of the lesser monasteries and, shortly afterwards, another Act establishing a Court of Augmentations of the King's Revenue, which had the power to collect the lands, property and goods of suppressed abbeys and dispose of them in whatever way it would be most profitable to the Crown.

Henry VIII had been given the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ by Pope Leo X in 1521 as a reward for the pamphlet he had written against Martin Luther. Pope Paul III deprived him of this designation, but in an Act of Parliament of 1544 the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ was restored by Parliament to the King and is still used today by the Sovereign.

OATHS AND DECLARATIONS

It is interesting to note that almost all of the oaths that the Sovereign makes at the Coronation come directly from Acts of Parliament. The Bill of Rights of 1688 required the Monarch to make a solemn public declaration of non-belief in the Roman Catholic faith. In 1910 the wording was changed through the Accession Declaration Act 1910 in preparation for the Coronation of George V, in order to reduce offence to Catholics. The oath was re-phrased to express adherence to the Protestant faith instead of non-adherence to the Catholic faith. The Accession Declaration as it is known is usually delivered at the next State Opening of Parliament. The Coronation Oath Act 1689 requires the Monarch to make a separate declaration to maintain the established Anglican Protestant Church during his or her Coronation. The Act of Settlement of 1701 and the Accession Succession Declaration Act of 1910 make a statutory requirement on the Monarch to take the Coronation Oath.

The text of the oath as set down in the 1689 Act includes the promise that the Monarch will do the utmost in their power to:

PARLIAMENT AND ANGLICAN LITURGY

Henry VIII was a shrewd politician and recognised that there were many in England who still had an affection for the old religion. In 1538, he issued a proclamation defending transubstantiation and clerical celibacy and the banning of heretical books. During Holy Week and Easter 1539 he performed traditional ceremonies and he celebrated Ascension Day in extravagant style, signalling that the Reformers were now acting in direct opposition to the King's own wishes. Having succeeded in divorcing Katherine of Aragon, and having confiscated considerable Church property, he was content that broadly speaking the old religion should continue. It may have been Henry who drove the process but it could only happen because of the authority and actions of Parliament.

And because Parliament reflects the concerns of electors, there have been numerous occasions where Parliament has intervened in the history and development of the Church of England. It is perhaps worth remembering that the Book of Common Prayer was but an Annexe of a Parliamentary Statute, the Act of Uniformity: A Parliamentary Act which ordered the Book of Common Prayer to be used in all churches. History does not relate when the Bill came before Parliament, or whether the Committee considering the Bill considered the Annexe line by line and clause by clause, but the Parliamentary Archive still has a copy of one of the original books of Common Prayer that was annexed to the Bill.

PARLIAMENT AND CHURCH BUILDING

At the time of Waterloo there was concern that there were many growing cities and towns with too many communities that did not have access to an Anglican place of worship, or as it was put, there were:

It was concluded that to provide the building of the necessary new churches was beyond the power of private or parochial means: ‘Parliament alone can do it; and we conceive it to be one of its chief duties to provide places of worship for members of the established religion.’Footnote ³ Here for the first time is a demand that the legislature should provide funds for church-building on a nationwide scale. It led in due course to Parliament establishing the Church Buildings Commission and in 1818 the Government granting a million pounds for building new churches – a substantial amount of money in that time. Between 1818 and 1856 the Church Building Commission built 600 new Anglican churches in England.

At the beginning of 1818, in his speech from the throne, the Prince Regent had referred to the need for providing new churches. In March 1818 the Commons went into Committee on the Government's proposals to provide for that end and when the Bill went to the Lords, the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool commented that ‘No individual had yet opposed this grant.’ It is of interest to note that Liverpool, in moving the Second Reading of the First Church Building Bill, observed on the 15 May 1818 that this Bill was the most important Measure he had ever submitted to their Lordships consideration. He said that he had intended to bring it forward long before but that the need for mature deliberation and the circumstances in the country had delayed it. He emphasised that church room must be provided for one in three or one in four of the population.

The specific objects of the Bill were to grant a million pounds, to authorise subscriptions in aid of the grant and to appoint commissioners to execute the Act. A million pounds would build a hundred churches, but with the aid of subscriptions the Prime Minister expected 150 or 200 would be built and he went on to observe that ‘the great extension of manufacturing towns exposed their inhabitants to vicious habits and corrupting influences dangerous to public security, as well as to private morality’. And thus, within a few years of Britain beating Napoleon at Waterloo, the Government and Parliament from the Prime Minister downwards considered one of the most important issues for the country to be the necessity to build new churches for the growing industrial population. The preamble of the 1818 Act referred to the need to provide free church seating for the poor. Its first clause set aside £1 million and Exchequer bills bearing 2% interest, which could be drawn upon by commissioners whom the King was empowered to appoint for executing the Act. The Commission was to continue in force for a maximum period of ten years.

Churches as well known as St Peter's, Eaton Square or St George's, Hanover Square were built with the aid of Parliamentary grants and there were few counties, cities, towns or urban constituencies that did not benefit from the work and efforts of the Church Building Commission.

THE GREAT REFORM BILL

Parliament next became involved with the Church of England as a consequence of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which marginally increased the male franchise to include professionals. It also removed many rotten boroughs which had little or no population. It was hardly a revolutionary reform. In my constituency of Banbury, the electorate before the Great Reform Bill was 18. Indeed, in the General Election of 1831, only eight votes were cast in the Banbury constituency: six for the Whigs and two for the Tories. After the Reform Act 1832 the Banbury constituency had 329 electors.

At the time there were three Anglican archbishops in the House of Lords because, in addition to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, there was the Archbishop of Armagh; there were also 26 Bishops in the House. (Many of the current dioceses have been created since 1832.) Two of the three archbishops and 21 of the 26 bishops voted against the Bill: they voted against the modest electoral changes; they voted for the status quo. There was a sense on both sides of the House of Commons, among both Tories and Whigs that this demonstrated that the Church of England at the time had become rather antediluvian.

THE ECCLESIASTICAL COMMISSIONERS

The changing face of the Church of England, increasing divergence between the wealth of dioceses and the challenge of ministry in new industrial cities led Parliament to resolve effectively to ‘nationalise’ the cathedral estates and the bishops estates and bring them into one central pot which would enable better provision to be made for poorer dioceses. So, for example, in London the Hyde Park Estate – the area around Connaught Square and north of Hyde Park – had been an estate belonging to the Bishop of London. There were similar estates of farmland and buildings across the country, and these were all taken away from the bishops and the cathedrals and placed into the hands of new Statutory Ecclesiastical Commissioners by Acts of Parliament of 1836, 1840 and 1850.

This, of course, made the Ecclesiastical Commissioners landowners to rival the Crown. So the actual Commissioners were the ‘Great and the Good’. In addition to the two Archbishops of Canterbury and York, they included the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Lord President of the Council, forty bishops, three deans (of Westminster, Canterbury and St Paul's), the Lord Chancellor, a Secretary of State, the Lord Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls and nine laymen, seven of whom were appointed by the Crown and two by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In all, there were 95 Commissioners. They were tasked, in the words of the 1840 Act, to apply the fund to ‘the cure of souls’ in a manner most conducive to the ‘efficiency of the national Church’. In this way Parliament established a curious combination of two different worlds. The ‘cure of souls’ is a concept that can be traced back to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, while ‘the efficiency of the national Church’ was something representing the reforming convictions of the English in the mid-nineteenth century. What now did the ‘cure of souls’ mean and how could the ‘efficiency of the national Church’ best be served?

There were two significant drawbacks with these arrangements. First, people such as the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were too busy running the country and a nascent empire to be able to devote time to the inner workings of the Church of England. Secondly, it was not possible to work out who was going to chair a meeting of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners until all the Commissioners had gathered and, looking around the table, it could be worked out who was most senior in the order of precedence. So Parliament resolved to create three statutory Church Estates Commissioners effectively to act as Treasurers and to manage the funds of the Ecclesiastical Commission. And hence arrived, with the slightly Gilbert and Sullivan titles, the First, Second and Third Church Estates Commissioners.

Because there was no one in the Government and in Parliament to speak on behalf of the Church Commissioners, it was decided at the outset that the Second Church Estates Commissioner would be a Member of Parliament, would need (under the Statute) to be a confirmed Anglican and would be accountable for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in the House of Commons. By convention that appointment has gone ever since to a senior Backbencher on the Government side. It is a statutory appointment made by the Crown on the advice of the Prime Minister. For reasons which I shall explain shortly, the First and Second Church Estates Commissioners are among the last vestiges of true establishment in the sense of being appointments relating to the Church made by the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister.

Having been a Minister in the past, when I first took on the task of Second Church Estates Commissioner, I was concerned as to whom I was accountable. The answer is that I am not accountable to the Prime Minister; I am not accountable to the Archbishop of Canterbury; I am accountable to Parliament.

Some may think it strange that the House of Commons provides time for questions to the Church Commissioners, which have evolved effectively to questions to the Church of England more widely. But this question time is not for the benefit of the Church of England. It is for the benefit of Parliament, to hold the Church Commissioners and the Church of England to account.

The Ecclesiastical Commissioners Act of 1834 was a revolutionary piece of legislation that took much of the financial power out of the control of the bishops and placed it in the hands of the laity under a clear statutory framework provided for by Parliament. Shortly after the Second World War, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners merged with a charity set up by Queen Anne (called Queen Anne's Bounty) to comprise the present Church Commissioners.

CHURCH ASSEMBLY AND GENERAL SYNOD

Before 1919 the only way of making any change requiring an alteration in the law dealing with Church affairs was through an Act of Parliament. In practice, Parliament was far too busy to give the necessary time and indeed, increasingly, was not the most suitable body for the purpose. Thus in 1919 Parliament passed an Enabling Act,Footnote ⁴ which gave powers to a representative Church assembly to adopt Measures relating to any matter concerning the Church of England, including the repeal of an Act of Parliament, subject only to report on the Measure by a committee called the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament, and resolutions approving the Measure in both Houses of Parliament.

The Ecclesiastical Committee consists of fifteen members of the House of Lords, nominated by the Lord Speaker, and fifteen members of the House of Commons, nominated by the Speaker. It is the duty of the Ecclesiastical Committee to consider a measure which has been approved nowadays by General Synod after the various stages of deliberation and to make a report to Parliament stating its nature and legal effect and the committee's views as to its expediency, ‘especially with relation to the constitutional rights of all Her Majesty's subjects’. The Ecclesiastical Committee cannot amend a Measure, but any Measure adversely criticised by the Ecclesiastical Committee can be withdrawn and maybe be reintroduced with or without amendments and considered anew by General Synod.

The Church Assembly was set up in 1920. It is interesting that the arrears of Church reform were clearly heavy when the Assembly began because, between 1919 and 1941, 80 Church Measures were passed by Parliament – with, interestingly and importantly, two controversial Measures on the Prayer Book being rejected in 1927 and 1928.

When Michael Ramsey was Archbishop of Canterbury, he implemented a programme of reform Measures, beginning with the creation of the General Synod in 1970, replacing the Church Assembly. He also set up the Chadwick Commission on Church and State, which reported in 1970 and culminated in the 1974 Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure, which passed in his last months as archbishop. This Measure was particularly important because it represented the acceptance by Parliament of what had been denied in the 1920s, which was the right of the Church to control its own liturgy and doctrine.

THE APPOINTMENT OF BISHOPS

It is often said that the Church of England is an established Church. I am not sure nowadays what exactly that means. There are a number of statutory provisions relating to the Sovereign and the Coronation Oaths. There are some remnants of establishment, such as myself, which were the result of statutory positions that arose from Parliament's desire to manage the Church's finances and to direct them to poorer parts of the country; and there is the need for any Measure of General Synod to be approved by the Ecclesiastical Committee and separately by both Houses of Parliament before it can become law.

However, as with all good English institutions and relationships, this is one that continues to evolve, so that, although archbishops and bishops are nominated by a body called the Crown Nominations Commission, the Prime Minister and Number Ten now no longer have any real influence or say as to who are appointed archbishops or bishops within the Church of England. When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007 he decided to renounce prime ministerial patronage. So, nowadays, the Crown Nominations Commission for the appointment of any diocesan bishop, is made up of six members elected by General Synod and six members appointed by the diocese concerned, together with the two archbishops.

The only role that the Prime Minister played in the appointment of Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, was to nominate the chair of the Crown Nominations Commission for that appointment – Richard Luce (Lord Luce). Today, therefore, it is the Church that makes the appointments of archbishops and bishops.

BISHOPS IN PARLIAMENT

There have been bishops in Parliament since the beginning of Parliament itself. Since the Bishopric of Manchester Act of 1847 the number of Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords has been fixed at 26. There are those who might question why we still have bishops in Parliament. It is worth remembering, however, that the Wakeham Report on the Reform of the House of Lords concluded that ‘The Church of England should continue to be explicitly represented in the Second Chamber’, although it did go on to advise that ‘the concept of religious representation should be broadened to embrace other Christian denominations in all parts of the UK and other faith communities’.

Earlier in this Parliament, there was a Joint Committee of the Commons and Lords on Lords Reform and they resolved that bishops should continue to retain ex officio seats in the reformed House of Lords. Of course, that committee was recommending a considerably smaller Second Chamber and they agreed that the number of reserved seats for the bishops be set at 12, which would have been proportionate to their present membership. In the House of Lords there are now some 786 members; having 26 bishops (2 archbishops and 24 bishops) focusing on the eternal, the global and grass roots is, I would suggest, a worthy and useful addition to Parliament. Each of these bishops in the House of Lords has a portfolio or policy area on which they focus. so, for example, there is a lead bishop for education, a lead bishop for welfare reform, a lead bishop on overseas development and so forth, and the bishops work hard at understanding their policy areas and how the Church of England might best make a contribution to policy development.

As Archbishop Justin observed when he spoke to the Parliamentary Press Gallery, ‘we are by tradition … a Christian society’. He went on to say that

He concluded that ‘The Church of England remains one of the glues of society.’Footnote ⁵ And I would suggest that it is a worthy glue to be included within the fabric of Parliamentary life.

CHURCH AND SOCIETY

There have been many times in our nation's history, from Archbishop Langton at Runnymede to much more recently, where the involvement and leadership of the Church of England has helped reinforce and underpin the national consensus. William Temple became Archbishop of Canterbury in April 1942. It was he who coined the term ‘welfare state’, contrasting the ‘power state’ of the pre-war Prussian nation, in which the state coerced its citizens for its own ends, with the ‘welfare state’ in which the individual was primary, not society, and declaring the state exists for the citizen, not the citizen for the state. Archbishop Temple sought to communicate a vision of the whole of life – religious, personal, economic and political – with Christ at the centre as the one who makes sense of the whole and illuminates it with His truth.

The year he became archbishop, Temple published a slim Penguin special entitled Christianity and the Social Order, which quickly became a bestseller, selling 142,000 copies. With clarity Temple set out the fundamental Christian principles that should govern the way in which a society organises its life, and drew out some of the practical implications of these principles. Temple and William Beveridge, the civil servant who put plans in place for the post-war welfare state, reinforced each other in their determination, and the popularity and influence of Temple's book led to him being described as one of the architects of the welfare state.

In 1944, Archbishop Temple gave crucial backing to R A Butler's Education Act, which for the first time set up a national system of education that would include both state and church schools and would raise the school leaving age to 15. Indeed, the Education Act 1944 could only have worked with the whole-hearted support of the Church of England in bringing church schools into the national state system. So I would suggest that there have been numerous occasions in our nation's history where the Church of England has been one of the valuable glues of society.

Indeed, there are many occasions today where the intervention of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England enables issues and debates to be considered sometimes in a different light and sometimes in a less partisan manner, often provoking different thinking: for example, with the persecution of Christian minorities, and with the causes and consequences of the increase in number of food banks. In his work on the Banking Commission, by literally standing shoulder to shoulder with the dead, the displaced and the destitute, in South Sudan, by going to Pakistan to support Christians and to challenge oppressive laws on apostasy and blasphemy, Archbishop Justin has made it clear that he is determined that the Church of England should remain one of the glues of society and that the Church's relationship with, involvement in and accountability to Parliament is an important part of that glue.