Dr. Robert Beaken, himself an Anglican priest, sets out to rehabilitate the reputation of William Cosmo Gordon Lang, the ninety-seventh archbishop of Canterbury. The publication of J. G. Lockhart's 1945 biography fixed Lang's reputation soon after his death, and it has only gone downhill since. According to Beaken, Lockhart's book, in his view short on research and long on tailoring sources to fit his story, caricatures a prelate whose political sway on the British nation was more significant than his impact on Church or society. “Cosmo Lang mattered far more than has generally been understood” (236), Beaken argues.

Following two background chapters (including a quite helpful one on the opportunities for and constraints on twentieth-century archbishops), Beaken focuses on Lang's 1928–42 primacy by reconsidering his handling of three crises: the Revised Prayer Book controversy, the abdication of Edward VIII, and the Second World War. There are chapters on each of these as well as one on Lang and the British monarchy. Lang had special relationships with his contemporary monarchs from Victoria through George VI. All, except Edward, found him clever and loyal; George V made him a confidant. Throughout his public life, Lang held consistently to a vision of a Christian monarchy for a Christian nation, which helps explain why, given Edward VIII's lack of interest in Church affairs, Lang remained detached from him.

Raised in Scotland as a Presbyterian, Cosmo Lang exchanged law for theology when in his midtwenties at Oxford he sensed a call to a career in the Church—of England. After serving parishes in Leeds and Portsmouth, and as dean of divinity at Magdalen College, in 1901 he was appointed suffragan bishop of Stepney and then, aged forty-four, in 1908 became archbishop of York. It would have been helpful to know why Asquith promoted him, Beaken thinks too soon. In these as well as later years, two Langs appear from the pages of the biography, evident in attitudes and even physically, although this is not easily fixed temporally. Lang sought to be the Church's voice in British life while exhibiting Erastian tendencies; he could take initiatives but devoted considerable energy to maintaining a balancing act among the three wings of modern Anglicanism—evangelical, modernist, and Anglo-Catholic. Lang identified with but did not aggressively promote the latter.

The lengthy chapter on the abdication crisis of 1936 breaks new ground because, having access to the only recently opened Lang papers at Lambeth Palace, Beaken demonstrates how the archbishop worked early and often with the prime minister to compel Edward VIII to give up his throne—both were public men who knew too much—although one wonders if the author had consulted the Churchill papers whether any different story might emerge. The episode shows the difficulty of writing a definitive contemporary history. For Lockhart, unable to see Lang's papers, his subject “neither influenced, nor tried to influence the course of events” (136). Edward was far closer to the truth about Lang's role: “[F]rom beginning to end I had a disquieting feeling that he was invisibly and noiselessly about” (88). After the abdication Lang made an unfortunate, ill-received radio broadcast (reproduced as an appendix)—according to Beaken, “arguably the worst mistake of his primacy” (120).

Although Beaken downplays how the divisions among evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, and modernists were fatal for a strong voice, a divided Church—evident in the chapter on the Revised Prayer Book controversy—meant the ecumenically inclined Lang expended considerable energy not then available to shore up orthodox beliefs. For social and cultural historians this is an important matter, for following the post-1945 growth of the church the late 1950s saw a precipitous decline, less belief effecting behavioral changes than the reverse—a story told in different ways in Callum Brown's widely cited The Death of Christian Britain (2001, 2009) and an important new book, Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization (2013). While making a modest contribution to demolishing the myth that the secularization of Britain was somehow inevitable, Beaken tells a different story, one in which the decline of belief was gradual. While as archbishop of Canterbury Lang possessed very little power, he wielded great influence within political culture—in no small part because of the extent to which he utilized the new medium of radio. Had not crises and controversies otherwise distracted him might that influence have extended to mass culture?

During the Second World War, not unlike his role in the first, Lang was too fair-minded regarding Germany for the taste of extreme patriots. A supporter of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, Lang seems to have switched even before the spring of 1939 when the Germans occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. As the war went on, his attitudes toward the Nazi regime hardened. Nevertheless, he spoke about drawing a line beyond which the British war effort should not go, telling Convocation in 1941 that the nation must refrain from “violating the best and oldest instincts of the British character” (192). To that end, Lang adapted Burke: “Let us strive so to be patriots as not to forget that we are Christians” (193). Beaken's sense aside, it is not literally the case that Lang's role on the home front is missing in the histories of World War II, but different sources—and choices—do lead to the telling of different stories.

The archbishop once referred to his portrait as that of “a very hardworking, very well-meaning, very lonely and very disappointed man” (238). Beaken's reassessment of Cosmo Lang reveals all these characteristics.