A title such as this hardly suggests one is breaking new ground. But I edge into print on the subject, stirred by the interesting Speaker's Lecture given by the outgoing Second Estates Commissioner, Sir Tony Baldry, in December 2014, and published in the May 2015 edition of this Journal. It reads as the enthusiastic, even romantic, expression of the State–Church relationship by an almost doctrinaire establishmentarian; and I use the word ‘doctrinaire’ deliberately, for I have spent a lifetime of bumping up against leaders of both Church and State, from Enoch Powell to George Carey (let alone Derek Pattinson and Philip Mawer), who exude a firm conviction that the establishment of the Church of England is entrenched somewhere in the Apostles' Creed. Sir Tony continues in this tradition as he serenely asserts ‘We come then to the reign of Henry VIII. I think the important point here is that the Church of England is the creation of Parliament.’Footnote ¹ But would not Augustine, Anselm and the drafters of Magna Carta (who are cited in Baldry's previous paragraph) all be turning in their graves? And what apoplexy would have come upon Newman, Pusey and Keble to have learned that their Church was thus created? Or, more to the point, is the ecclesiastical action of Parliament in the days when church and nation were co-terminous of any relevance to whether and how an unbelieving Parliament should hold control of a Christian body today? However, it is his brief section on ‘Parliament and Anglican liturgy’ which prompted the present submission.

We may certainly concede that the severance from Rome was effected by the monarch in Parliament, though perhaps query Sir Tony's interpretation that Parliament was the driving force in that deliverance. We may similarly acknowledge the role of Parliament in the far-reaching liturgical reforms of Edward VI's reign, though here it was the Council Regent which took the place of the monarch, but equally initiated change. The Acts of Uniformity of 1549 and 1552 were so thoroughly parliamentary that attempts to trace any input by the Convocations have proved a cul-de-sac. And Baldry's description of the Book of Common Prayer as an ‘Annexe’ to the Act in 1662 is equally applicable to 1549 and 1552. The role of an annexe is not surprising, nor is it demeaning of the liturgy.Footnote ² A Parliamentary Act for a church controlled by the state was the only effective way to enforce a change of liturgy.

Interestingly, when Mary succeeded to the throne in 1553, the control of Parliament over the liturgy was further exercised in her First Statute of Repeal 1533 in the autumn of that year, for, though the Act repealed Edward's Acts of Uniformity, in two major respects it conserved the supremacy of English Parliamentary law over the Church of England's liturgy. First, by naming a future date (20 December) when the repeal should come into force, it confirmed that the Act of Uniformity 1552, imposing the use of the 1552 Prayer Book, remained in force by Parliamentary decision (or inaction) until that date, thus providing five months of the official continuation of that book in Mary's reign.Footnote ³ Secondly, the Act of Repeal then named the ‘last year of the reign of the said late King Henry VIII’ as providing the norms to which divine service should now conform – but, although that entailed a return to the pre-Reformation Latin mass, it is very clear that in that last year of Henry's reign the liturgy of the Church of England was wholly subject to the control of the monarch in Parliament, and it remained with Parliament to decide any further moves, whether progressive or retrogressive.Footnote ⁴ What was decided in Mary's Second Statute of Repeal 1554 is, of course, a matter of history. But, before that repeal was enacted, the five months of the Edwardine Book had been followed by eleven or more months of the revived Henrician liturgical dispensation – not the barest papal hint yet had touched the legal wording by which monarch in Parliament asserted total control over liturgy. The second Act thus saw Parliament surrendering a sovereignty which until then it had undoubtedly claimed, possessed and exercised.

There were some variations in this procedure in 1559 and 1604. Elizabeth I's Act of Uniformity 1559 immediately followed the Act of Supremacy 1559, which statute cleared the way for Parliament to control liturgy once again. There would have been no question of referring liturgical questions to the Convocations, for these bodies were predominantly composed of the loyal clergy of Mary's reign, addicts of the old religion who were now to be transformed by law – or ejected.Footnote ⁵ And Elizabeth's Act had no Prayer Book ‘annexed’, for it simply revived the 1552 Prayer Book as annexed to the 1552 Act.Footnote ⁶ The 1559 Act itself has been well worked over in respect of its apparent internal contradiction between the three specified changes in the text of the liturgy ‘and none other or otherwise’ and the later section on the ornaments, which gave rise to the notorious ‘ornaments rubric’; this, of course, was printed in the Prayer Book before Morning Prayer, specifically displacing the Edwardine rubric which the earlier ‘none other or otherwise’ was apparently enforcing.Footnote ⁷ However, following the Act's provision about ornaments, there came a less-noticed pregnant further paragraph:

This paragraph, however it was seen at the time, was an actual surrender of parliamentary control of liturgy for the future, leaving large discretion simply in the hands of the monarch.Footnote ⁸ Thus it was that James I, having inherited the throne in 1603 and having held his Hampton Court Conference in January 1604, simply ordered changes in the liturgy in his own person, citing the 1559 Act in his commission to the Archbishop of Canterbury to get the revised Prayer Book printed:

Parliament, as far as I know, was never consulted. Similarly, when the project for canon law revision followed closely on the heels of the new Book of Common Prayer, there was no parliamentary involvement in the making, enforcing or promulging of the Canons; for Parliament had provided back in Henry's reign that the Convocations could be summoned and could make canons by royal licence, and that the Royal Assent would then bring them into force.Footnote ¹⁰

If we then skip the Commonwealth period, we find ourselves at Charles II's Restoration with a fast growing return to the 1604 Prayer Book happening round the country, as ‘properly Anglican’ clergy came back into the parishes, old bishops reclaimed their sees and new bishops were nominated by the monarch to newly restored cathedral chapters. Yet the Puritan majority in Parliament, and their many ministers around the country, had the real prospect of Charles's ‘liberty of conscience’ from the Declaration of Breda running on into the new settlement.Footnote ¹¹ It was given a cautious extension in the Worcester House Declaration of 25 October 1660, in which Charles both promised a conference to address agreeing a set liturgy and also, while lauding the Book of Common Prayer, affirmed that no action would in the meantime be taken against those not using it. The following month the Declaration became the subject of attempted legislation by the Puritans to entrench in law the liberty that Charles had expressed – and the Commons denied the bill a second reading by 183 votes to 157 (in which it appears that some Independents, being polarised from the mainstream Presbyterians, vented their opposition by paradoxically joining the Cavaliers in the vote).

So we come to 1661. Everything was now moving in favour of the returned churchmen. The general election held in March returned a Cavalier Parliament and the Convocations, already filling with ex officio dignitaries, also saw a major swing among the relatively few elected places. The Savoy Conference met in April, with the bishops clearly holding most of the cards; they played those cards by putting the 1604 Prayer Book on the table and asking the Puritans to state what their objections were. The Puritans duly found 19 ‘General Exceptions' and around 83 ‘Particular’ ones, but the replies they received from the bishops were so largely in the form of rebuttals or refusals that they dispersed at the end of July with little hope of the freedoms which the king's ‘Declarations’ at Breda and from Worcester House had given them some reason to expect the previous year.Footnote ¹²

Nor was the Savoy Conference the largest threat. The Convocations met in May with a charter from the king to take steps to work for the security and defence of the Church of England. They not only drew up orders of service for the royal dates of 29 May, 5 November and 30 January but also, in the second half of May, wrote a service for the baptism of those of riper years, though without any suggestion at that stage of authorising it; thus, while they left any amending of the existing Prayer Book services for the outcome of the Savoy Conference, at the same time they were providing for what the Prayer Book itself did not then provide, and thus firmly asserted their role in liturgical compilation.

Parliament was no less active. To mark the first anniversary of Charles's Restoration they held a communion service following the 1604 order, at which even the most Puritan of Puritans had to receive communion – kneeling; on 29 June the Commons introduced a ‘Bill for the Uniformity of Public Prayers and Administration of the Sacraments’, with the unamended 1604 Prayer Book annexed to it. They passed the Bill on 9 July and sent it to the Lords. There it sat undebated until the adjournment on 30 July. Can one perhaps detect the hand of the monarch, or of Clarendon as his chief adviser, in that delay, both in that Convocation was already engaged in beginning work on new liturgical texts and also in that both bishops and monarch were formally committed in their own persons to seeing the outcome of the Savoy Conference before taking further steps?Footnote ¹³

Meanwhile, the king's mandate to the archbishop on 18 June had specifically chartered the Convocation of Canterbury to devise ‘canons, orders, ordinances, constitutions [etc]’ and, although the Book of Common Prayer was not mentioned, the charter appears sufficiently wide to have given hopes that it would encompass the Prayer Book. So by August the bishops had: actual precedent for liturgical compilation in Convocation; some moral obligation towards revision in the light of the minor ‘concessions’ they had promised the Puritans at the Savoy; and an actual charter from the monarch which looked as though it allowed them to address the revision.

Over and above these formal considerations, there were active episcopal minds zealous to import amendments of various sorts into the Prayer Book. One famous instance is Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely, who, having been imprisoned during the ‘late unhappy confusions’ (as the Preface to the 1662 Prayer Book labels the Commonwealth period), had used his time of enforced idleness to fiddle with the liturgical text and dream of implementing his fiddling. With the Restoration, his time had come, and at an early point he wrote:

By the summer of 1661 there were also in the offing the very thorough and detailed desiderata of John Cosin, new Bishop of Durham, carefully recorded by his secretary, William Sancroft, and a series of other proposals from less prolific churchmen.Footnote ¹⁵ The re-convening of Convocation in mid-November was in prospect and offered much opportunity. Much sharpening of pencils occurred in episcopal residences that autumn, not a little of it by bishops joining with each other to agree the desiderata and be ready for the day.

Parliament duly met on 20 November, Convocation on the next day.Footnote ¹⁶ We have seen that the bishops clearly expected to revise and amend the Book of Common Prayer; this was now settled by the king's letter to the two archbishops, which bade Convocation ‘review … the Book of Common Prayer … and after mature consideration … make such additions and alterations … as to you shall seem meet and convenient’.Footnote ¹⁷ Monarch and Convocation alike were clearly treating the attachment of the 1604 Prayer Book to the Bill which the Commons had sent to the Lords as irrelevant. The Upper House of Convocation appointed a committee of eight bishops, including Cosin and Wren, to work through the whole book, bringing proposed amendments on a daily basis to the Upper House. The bishops as a whole then agreed amendments and sent them to the Lower House, which in turn accepted the text or made proposals to the bishops. The whole task, including more new texts (as, for example, the ‘General Thanksgiving’), was completed by 20 December, after which the finished work, shown by manuscript alterations in a 1636 copy of the 1604 Prayer Book (known as the ‘Convocation Book’) but also now set out as a clean copy in manuscript, was sent to the king.Footnote ¹⁸

Parliament could now re-enter the picture, and indeed needed to do so. It is now difficult to determine how far the processes that followed from this point had been envisaged all along and how far they represented simply taking sensible next steps one at a time as they became clear. But the outline course of events is fairly easy to track.

First, the Bill for Uniformity sent from the Commons the previous July was finally read in the Lords on 14 January 1662; it was then read for a second time on 17 January and referred to a committee; the committee itself then delayed any action until the new Prayer Book should be forwarded to them by the king. He duly ordered the book to be brought to the Privy Council, where it was received and discussed on 21 and 24 February.Footnote ¹⁹ The king's directions were to send it to the House of Lords and this occurred the next day. At that point begins the 12-week saga of the actual handling of the proposed Prayer Book in Parliament – and, in passing, a correction of Baldry's bald denial which ran as follows: ‘History does not relate when the Bill came before Parliament, or whether the Committee considering the Bill considered the Annexe [ie the manuscript of the proposed Book of Common Prayer] line by line and clause by clause’.Footnote ²⁰ But history does so relate these events at just the points which Baldry denies. A chronology of the sequence of Parliamentary consideration will make this clear.

Thus did the Commons of the second (or rather fourteenth) year of Charles II assert their powers over liturgy, even while refraining from exercising those powers in respect of amending the text. In doing so, they arguably retrieved powers which had been lost in Elizabeth's and James I's reigns. In their self-restraint they accepted the advice of the Convocations, but in their assertion of their own powers they relegated the findings of Convocation from decision-taking to offering advice. In both of these respects they did perhaps establish precedent; and, if the ‘Liturgy of Comprehension’ of 1689 had ever found its way into law, it would almost certainly have been through the petition or recommendation of Convocation to Parliament.Footnote ²² But the succeeding two centuries saw little other movement towards change: the effects of Toleration meant that Comprehension became otiose; Convocation spent most of the time in the deep-freeze; and Parliament, insofar as it considered the Book of Common Prayer, generally knew that it was our ‘incomparable liturgy’, in no greater need of revision than its senior but almost coeval partner in divine matters, the King James Version of the Bible.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide a somewhat different picture.