In the nineteenth century the Ornaments Rubric, a small paragraph in the Book of Common Prayer, became a major point of contention within the Church of England. The debate over the Ornaments Rubric went further than just the material culture of churches, to the questions of what constituted ecclesiastical law in England, who had the right to create such law, and how and by whom it was to be interpreted. This article will explore how, through the Ornaments Rubric, Ritualists challenged the existing legislative and judicial system of the church, and how parliament reacted to a questioning of its authority.

Recent decades have seen a resurgence in studies of English Christianity in the Victorian era. Nonetheless, in 2010 Jeremy Morris could still assert that ‘there remain areas of neglect, including much of the late Victorian and Edwardian history of the Church of England’.Footnote ¹ This neglect is starting to be ameliorated, for example by Bethany Kilcrease in her study of The Great Church Crisis and the End of English Erastianism. Kilcrease's main thesis was that there was a ‘“Church Crisis,” a conflict between the Protestant and Ritualist … Parties within the Church of England that lasted roughly between 1898 and 1906’.Footnote ² This article places that conflict in context. It consciously begins before the period defined by Kilcrease, starting with the Royal Commission of 1867–70 and ending with that of 1904–6, to show the continuity of this conflict, involving both the church and parliament, as a new Tractarian ecclesiology of the spiritual independence of the church arose, challenging the established right of Parliament to create laws relating to the church, and of secular courts to interpret these laws. It will examine how the Oxford Movement was born as a reaction against key ecclesiastical laws created by parliament, and how the Ritualists took this theoretical opposition to parliamentary supremacy and turned it into practical opposition. It will survey briefly how the Ritualists reimagined the Ornaments Rubric as a legal text, using an interpretative framework that discarded the traditional role of common law in interpreting ecclesiastical legislation in England. It will then examine how parliament responded to the Ritualist challenge through two royal commissions and anti-Ritualist legislation, and how this strengthened Ritualist resolve to ignore the instruments of parliamentary and crown supremacy over the church. Ultimately, it will consider how the report of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline attempted to create a synthesis between traditional parliamentary sovereignty and Tractarian spiritual independence, clearing a path which would ultimately lead to the modern constitutional structure of the Church of England.

In the 1830s the Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism, emerged. The movement left an indelible impression on the Church of England, and was a visceral response to a very specific set of circumstances. As Nicholas Dixon has explained, the Tractarians regarded a period of reform legislation from 1828 to 1832 as an anti-Anglican revolution.Footnote ³ Writing one of the first histories of the movement in 1843, William Palmer claimed that ‘[a]t the beginning of the summer of 1833, the Church in England and Ireland seemed destined to immediate desolation and ruin.’Footnote ⁴ Palmer's use of the full title of the church as the ‘Church in England and Ireland’Footnote ⁵ was more than a formality, for it was the situation regarding the church in Ireland that was the immediate impulse for the birth of the movement. In 1833 the Whig government of Earl Grey passed through parliament the Church Temporalities Act, reducing the number of Irish bishoprics from twenty-two to twelve and moving revenue raising powers from the church to a secular Ecclesiastical Commission.Footnote ⁶ For Palmer, with the passage of this legislation, ‘[t]he State, so long the guardian of the Church, [was] now becoming its enemy and its tyrant.’Footnote ⁷ What triggered the birth of the Oxford Movement in 1833 was the alarm with which some clergy contemplated a parliament increasingly representative of non-Anglican Britain but having control over the church and acting in ways they thought clashed with the best interests of the church. The movement therefore argued that parliament was no longer the right place to create the laws that governed the Church of England.

Ritualism was inspired by, though not a direct continuation of, the Oxford Movement. The link between the Oxford Movement and Ritualism is contested, although George Herring has thoroughly deconstructed the idea that Ritualism was a natural progression from the Oxford Movement.Footnote ⁸ Herring identifies a dramatic shift in the 1850s through what he calls the ‘antecedents of ritualism’, specifically the Western Judgment in 1857, which was the first to recognize the legality of certain ornaments in the Church of England, and the publication of John Purchas's Directorium Anglicanum in 1858, the first great liturgical manual of Ritualism.Footnote ⁹ These antecedents heralded a dramatic shift in the concerns of high churchmen away from the more theological concerns of the Oxford Movement towards the actual performance of the liturgy and the ornaments required for this. When it came to liturgical changes, the Oxford Movement warned ‘against premature developments in ceremonial outrunning the slower pace of doctrinal rediscovery’.Footnote ¹⁰ Jeremy Morris's research into high churchmen's experiences of continental Roman Catholic liturgy during the first half of the nineteenth century suggests that many proponents of the Oxford Movement were more concerned with liturgy than Herring would suggest.Footnote ¹¹ However, Herring's main thesis, that ‘the extent of the dissatisfaction with the Prayer Book of 1662 was clearly an issue which marked the Ritualists off from the earlier generation of Tractarians’,Footnote ¹² well describes the relationship between the two movements. The Ritualists would take the theoretical concern the Oxford Movement had identified with parliamentary sovereignty over the church's laws and would push against these boundaries in an attempt to find ways in which the Church of England's legal system supported their belief in the church's self-government. The rest of this article will consider how this occurred, and the reaction it provoked from parliament.

The central text of which the Ritualists claimed to be the true interpreters was the Ornaments Rubric. In the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the rubric, which appeared at the beginning of the order for Morning Prayer, stated that ‘such Ornaments of the Church, and of the Ministers thereof, at all Times in their Ministration, shall be retained, and be in use, as were in this Church of England, by the Authority of Parliament, in the Second Year of the Reign of King Edward the Sixth’.Footnote ¹³ First introduced in the Prayer Book of 1559, this rather vague rubric provided the legal basis for defining the material culture of ministers and churches.Footnote ¹⁴ Ritualists identified the crux of this rubric in its closing phrase, ‘in the Second Year of the Reign of King Edward the Sixth’, but what was being referred to by the second year was far from clear. The second year of the reign of Edward VI ran from 28 January 1548 to 27 January 1549. Within that year, on 21 January 1549, the first Act of Uniformity was enacted by parliament, authorizing the first Book of Common Prayer as the only official liturgy of the church, to be used from Whitsunday 1549.Footnote ¹⁵ It was therefore generally assumed that the rubric had the first Prayer Book in mind; however, as the Ritualists pointed out, this was not clear cut. Although the 1549 Act of Uniformity had passed through parliament in the second year of Edward VI's reign, it did not actually take effect until Whitsunday 1549, in the third year of the king's reign. Thus, the Ritualists argued, the Ornaments Rubric did not seek to impose the material culture envisaged in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, but rather that of the pre-Prayer Book Church of England. As Percy Dearmer would write in The Parson's Handbook, the last great Ritualist manual to appear in the nineteenth century, Ritualists believed that the Ornaments Rubric ordered ministers to ‘interpret it [the Prayer Book] in the spirit of a parson of the year 1548, who was conversant with the old ceremonial’.Footnote ¹⁶ Such a view ignored the Reformation legislation during the first and second year of the reign of Edward VI, including the Royal Injunctions of 1547 and the Sacramental Act of the same year,Footnote ¹⁷ which marked a clear break with, and attack on, the late medieval Catholic tradition. It also ignored the history of the Ornaments Rubric itself.

Between its first appearance in the 1559 Prayer Book and its reappearance in the 1662 Prayer Book, the Ornaments Rubric underwent a major revision. In the Prayer Book of 1559 the rubric had instructed that ‘the Minister at the time of the communion, and at all other tymes in his ministration, shall use such ornamentes in the church, as were in use by the authorities of Parliament, in the second yere of the raigne of king Edward the syxt, according to the acte of Parliament set in the beginninge of this boke’.Footnote ¹⁸ The most important difference here is the legal basis of the rubric. In 1559 the rubric presented itself as being an expression of the law on the matter of ornaments as laid down in ‘the acte of Parliament set in the beginning of this boke’, that is, the Act of Uniformity (1558). Echoing the Ornaments Rubric, this ordered ‘that such ornaments of the church, and of the ministers thereof, shall be retained and be in use, as was in the Church of England, by authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI, until other order shall be therein taken by the authority of the queen's majesty’. The similarity of wording highlights the fact that the rubric is a summary of the law as established in the act and not a law itself. The rooting of the rubric in the Act of Uniformity also helps to illuminate what the rubric considered to be the legally binding aspect of the second year of Edward VI. The act referred to the Prayer Book of 1552 as the book ‘authorized by Act of Parliament holden in the fifth and sixth years of our said late sovereign lord King Edward VI’. The rubric, and the act, referred to allowing those ornaments that ‘were in use by the authorites of Parliament, in the second yere of the raigne of king Edward the syxt’. Given how the act referred to the Prayer Book of 1552, it appears that the appeal to that which was allowed by ‘the authorities of Parliament, in the second yere’ was a clumsy reference to the ornaments and vestments as defined in the 1549 Prayer Book. This interpretation is further supported by the fact that the 1549 Act of Uniformity was the only legislation to be passed by the parliament that met in the second year of Edward VI which referred to the ‘ornaments of the church, and of the ministers thereof’.Footnote ¹⁹

When in 1661 the Savoy Conference revised the 1559 Prayer Book, it removed the Act of Uniformity and deleted the reference to the act in the Ornaments Rubric. This had a dramatic legal consequence, for it turned the rubric from being an expression of an act of parliament into a law in itself. The alteration also had the effect of turning the law from one of process into an endpoint. The Act of Uniformity of 1559, when discussing ornaments, had stated that they would be as authorised by parliament in the second year of Edward VI ‘until other order shall be therein taken by the authority of the queen's majesty, with the advice of her commissioners appointed and authorized, under the great seal of England, for causes ecclesiastical, or of the metropolitan of this realm’.Footnote ²⁰ Such changes did take place during Elizabeth I's reign. Thus the 1549 Prayer Book ordered the wearing of ‘a white Albe plain, with a vestment or Cope’ at communion.Footnote ²¹ However, in 1559 a royal injunction ordered the wearing of the surplice at all services, with the donning of the cope allowed at the communion service.Footnote ²² Similarly, in 1566 Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury and thus primate of all England, went further in the Book of Advertisements, saying the wearing of the cope at communion was only expected in cathedrals.Footnote ²³ By the end of 1559, therefore, the Ornaments Rubric as found in the Prayer Book of that year was already a misrepresentation of the law governing vestments; the standard was no longer the Prayer Book of 1549, which envisaged a much wider range of vesture, but that ordered by Elizabeth in 1559. The amendment of 1662, however, failed to recognize this and, by removing the reference to the Act of Uniformity, suggested that the legal standard for ornaments had reverted to either the Prayer Book of 1549 or the preceding Edwardian ceremonial. It was this amendment which would open the door for Ritualist interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric.

For the Ritualists, the only legal text that was needed to interpret the rubric was the rubric itself. Moreover, the only rubric with which the Ritualists were willing to engage was the only one that had legal status in the Church of England, the edited version found in the Prayer Book of 1662. This interpretative model stood at odds with much of the English legal tradition. Instead of utilizing common law, considering common usage (and thus the common application of the rubric) and historic interpretations of the rubric, Ritualists argued that the rubric must be understood solely on the basis of the text itself. The Ritualist interpretation rested on an understanding that the rubric of 1662 could only be explained with reference to itself, and so the reference to the second year, even with the clause acknowledging ‘the Authority of Parliament’ in deciding which ornaments were acceptable left intact, had to be understood as referring to the actual year, not any law enacted in it, and thus to pre-Prayer Book ceremonial. Beyond questions of ornaments and vestments, such thinking had radical implications for how ecclesiastical law was to be interpreted. The Ritualists were, in effect, arguing for the end of the traditional status of common law as an accepted interpretative framework in English ecclesiastical legal matters,Footnote ²⁴ in its place proposing a strict interpretation based solely on the text, devoid of legal and historical context. Such a view elevated the rubrics of the liturgy to carry more legal power than acts of parliament, effectively arguing for the supremacy of the rubric of 1662 over the Act of Supremacy of 1558.Footnote ²⁵

With the Ritualists raising such substantial legal questions, it was inevitable that parliament would feel the need to intervene. On 3 June 1867 a royal commission was summoned to investigate ‘the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for Regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship’. The twenty-nine commissioners appointed, a mix of clergymen and statesmen,Footnote ²⁶ included the archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Longley; the bishop of London, Archibald Tait; Sir Alexander Beresford Hope, co-founder of the Cambridge Camden Society; and John Hubbard, a former governor of the Bank of England and a committed churchman who had clashed with leading Ritualists.Footnote ²⁷ They were charged with investigating the Ornaments Rubric and the ‘varying interpretations’ of it;Footnote ²⁸ questions of legal interpretation were thus at the heart of the commission's task.

The work of the commission would stretch over four reports, all of little substance, and all of which avoided tackling the Ornaments Rubric head-on. They were thus of little help in resolving the situation in which the church found itself. Ronald Jasper commented that the fourth report was ‘remarkable for its lack of unanimity’,Footnote ²⁹ but in fact this was true of all four. Not one report received unequivocal support from all the commissioners. The first, delivered on 19 August 1867, was concerned solely with vestments; it concluded: ‘it is expedient to restrain … all variations in respect of Vesture from that which has long been the established usage’.Footnote ³⁰ Implicitly this criticized the methodology of the Ritualists, by asserting that the guiding rule for interpreting ecclesiastical laws should be common law as expressed through common usage. The commissioners recommended the introduction of a system to allow parishioners to complain about deviations from the established norm, but were ‘not yet prepared to recommend’ how such a system should function.Footnote ³¹ By the time the second report appeared, on 30 April 1868, the commissioners were ready to propose an outline for such a complaints procedure,Footnote ³² but this garnered only qualified support from four commissioners, including the bishop of Oxford, while six commissioners refused to sign the report at all.Footnote ³³ The second report also condemned the use of candles on the communion table and incense, popular amongst Ritualists, as being ‘at variance with the Church's usage for 300 years’.Footnote ³⁴ The commissioners were here challenging the Ritualist theory of legal interpretation, affirming that common usage was the marker for correct interpretation of the law, although they did not do so explicitly.

As time went by, some commissioners became restless about the failure to tackle the issue of the Ornaments Rubric directly. At the commission's sixty-ninth meeting, on 22 April 1869, now chaired by Archibald Tait after his translation from London to Canterbury following Longley's death on 27 October 1868, several commissioners proposed revisions to the rubric. These varied from Sir Joseph Napier's proposal, supported by the archbishop of Armagh, that the rubric be removed entirely from the Prayer Book, to that put forward by the dean of Ely, Harvey Goodwin, that the rubric be amended to affirm that the canons of the church could overrule it. Both represented drastic ways to try to resolve the Ritualist crisis. Napier's proposal sought to bypass the battle over interpretation of the law by simply revoking the law, whilst Goodwin wished to assert that ultimate legislative power over the Church of England dwelt in the church's law, and that the church could supersede its own legislation through new legislation. Both proposals, however, were defeated.Footnote ³⁵ Clearly there remained no agreement amongst the commissioners over the best course of action when it came to the central rubric of Ritualism.

The third report, not released until 12 January 1870, avoided all discussion of the Ornaments Rubric.Footnote ³⁶ The fourth report proved to be the most controversial, proposing various alterations to Prayer Book rubrics,Footnote ³⁷ but with no change suggested for the Ornaments Rubric. This led twenty of the twenty-nine commissioners to append only a conditional signature, in protest that ‘the obscure and debateable Rubric entitled the Ornaments Rubric is left in its original form, without even proviso, note, or explanation’.Footnote ³⁸ Nearly two-thirds of the commissioners had desired the commission to tackle the Ornaments Rubric directly, but they had been unable to agree on the best way of doing this. This tacitly allowed the Ritualist interpretation of the law and the application of their interpretation to continue as it had before the commission, and the commission was in this sense the failure Yates paints it to be.Footnote ³⁹ Nonetheless, it had one result: in 1875 the complaints procedure recommended in the Second Report would be set up by parliament; in the closing decades of the nineteenth century this was to become a symbol of parliamentary and state sovereignty over the church and its laws.

In 1874 Tait proposed a draft of the Public Worship Regulation Act; as has been shown in detail by James Bentley, he then approached the newly elected Conservative cabinet to find supporters.Footnote ⁴⁰ There was some suggestion from his fellow bishops that Tait should move the motion through the Church of England's convocations,Footnote ⁴¹ which had been re-established in the preceding twenty years,Footnote ⁴² but Tait was sympathetic to those who ‘believed that Convocation was such a hotbed of ritualism that it ought to be destroyed, not consulted’,Footnote ⁴³ and, as Peter Marsh has observed, he also thought highly of parliament, regarding it as the ‘most important expression of lay opinion’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In seeking to have the worship of the church regulated through a parliamentary act, the archbishop of Canterbury sought to use the power of parliament to legislate for the church in a way he found himself unable to do within the church's internal structures.

Disraeli, newly appointed as prime minister, was initially reluctant to support Tait's measure, having only managed to appoint some members of his cabinet by promising that the new Conservative government ‘would not introduce or support any anti-Ritualist measure’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Disraeli, never a supporter of Ritualism, eventually came round to supporting the measure; however, as Allen Warren identified, this was not a result of his religious views but ‘a matter of party and parliamentary tactics with Disraeli wanting to win the game, simply in order to put the question at rest’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Faced not only with support for the measure by the majority of the House of Commons but also opposition to the measure from Disraeli's lifelong opponent Gladstone, a man much more sympathetic to Ritualism, Disraeli opted for the winning side of the argument.Footnote ⁴⁷ Appearing before the House of Commons on 15 July 1874 to support the bill, Disraeli demonstrated none of this reticence, instead directly attacking the theological underpinnings of Ritualism:

Disraeli's speech before the house demonstrated a clear commitment to the traditional post-Reformation ecclesiology of the Church of England. Warren has identified Disraeli's belief in a ‘historical national tradition’ that united Dissenters and members of the established church in their Protestantism.Footnote ⁴⁹ Disraeli's speech emphasized that, in his view, Ritualists were breaking their ‘solemn contract with the nation’ by espousing what he regarded as non-Protestant doctrines.Footnote ⁵⁰ These views then justified a parliament of Dissenters and non-Dissenters in legislating to ensure the worship of the church remained within that parliament's view of acceptable Protestant practice. It was this kind of English Erastianism against which the Oxford Movement reacted and which it rejected. However, in Disraeli's understanding, that Ritualist belief in the legal independence of the Church of England could be only theoretical; the reality was that parliament was the legislative body for the Church of England.

The Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 came into force on 1 July 1875, legally establishing the kind of complaints procedure envisaged by the second report of the Royal Commission. An archdeacon, a churchwarden or three male parishionersFootnote ⁵¹ could complain to the bishop if they believed illegal alterations to the fabric of the church had been made by the incumbent, or if the incumbent had used illegal vestments in the twelve months previous to the complaint, or if he had illegally altered or added to the Prayer Book during a service.Footnote ⁵² The bishop would first attempt to resolve the complaint, or exercise a veto over the case.Footnote ⁵³ If he were unable to resolve the complaint in twenty-one days, it would be referred to be heard in court, the case to be presided over either by a barrister who had practised for ten years or by a judge; the president of the court was to be selected either by the archbishops or the monarch, with the only ecclesiastical condition being that he must be a member of the Church of England.Footnote ⁵⁴ Any decision could then be legally enforced, with the incumbent being permanently removed if he failed to abide by the judgment. That the final arbitrator was a secular judge rather than an ecclesiastical court was the result of an amendment by the Evangelical leader Lord Shaftesbury.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although the act placed significant decision-making power into the hands of bishops, its use of the secular legal system still clearly conformed to an Erastian view of the Church of England. Parliament had mandated that a secular judge could remove clergy members who broke the laws it had created, and who failed to recognize the authority of these secular courts. The appointment of James Wilde, Lord Penzance, former judge of the Court of Probate and Divorce, as the judge to oversee prosecutions under the act served only to inflame the anger of those who disagreed that a secular judge should oversee the cases.Footnote ⁵⁶ Prosecutions under the act were much greater in symbolic value than they were in number, creating through the few prosecuted the illustrious ‘Ritualist Martyrs’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, Morris comments that by the time of the infamous trial of Edward King, bishop of Lincoln, for ritual practices in 1888, ‘the wave of prosecutions and imprisonments that followed the passage of the Public Worship Regulation Act in 1874 was already spent’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nonetheless, the act, and the actions of the courts associated with it, provided an embodiment of the secular oversight that Ritualism detested.

The act built on previous practice. In the fifty years leading up to it, a secular court had already established itself as the final arbitrator of church law: the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. As Frances Knight has demonstrated, this committee was unpopular throughout the emerging Anglican Communion for it was seen as ‘the ultimate in Erastian sell-outs’.Footnote ⁵⁹ By contrast Tait valued it ‘as an important feature of the intimate connection between Church and State’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Ritualist disdain for this committee had been fuelled by its finding against certain Ritualist practices, such as the use of wafer bread, vestments and the eastward-facing position at the moment of consecration.Footnote ⁶¹ In The Parson's Handbook, Percy Dearmer articulated the problem these decisions created for the Ritualists: ‘The object of this Handbook is to help, in however humble a way, toward remedying the lamentable confusion, lawlessness, and vulgarity which are conspicuous in the Church at this time.’Footnote ⁶² Dearmer did not blame this lawlessness on Ritualist practices, even though it was arguably created by the persistent use of rituals deemed illegal, but rather on a system that allowed the legislation of the church to be defined and interpreted by a secular court. The fact that at the end of the nineteenth century Dearmer was defending the practices which the Royal Commission, parliament and the Privy Council had tried to tackle, demonstrates both how little these attempts had altered the minds of Ritualists, and how ineffectual these bodies had been in rectifying the state of disorder in the church. For Ritualists, however, parliament and secular courts did not have the right to decide matters of doctrine and ceremony and as such any legal interpretations they provided were illegitimate and could be ignored.Footnote ⁶³

By 1904 many members of parliament had had enough of Ritualist disdain for established legal precedents, and began pushing for new anti-Ritualist legislation or a parliamentary select committee to tackle the Ritualist problem once and for all.Footnote ⁶⁴ Instead, the prime minister, Arthur Balfour, under pressure from the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, established a Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, to try to identify better solutions than the previous Royal Commission had proved able to do.Footnote ⁶⁵ Chaired by Michael Edward Hicks-Beach, a long-serving Conservative MP and former chancellor of the exchequer,Footnote ⁶⁶ the body of commissioners was remarkably similar to that of the commission established in 1867, with a mixture of senior clergy, including Davidson, and political figures. The commission took evidence for nearly a year from a cross-section of society. Protestant organizations, such as the Church Association, engaged enthusiastically with the commission, sending representatives to report on services they had witnessed, which were often portrayed as being of the most extreme nature. William Edward Bowen, for example, witnessed at St Columba's, Kingsland Road, in London, a ‘Mass of the Presanctified’. ‘I followed the service’, said Bowen, ‘by means of the Roman Missal; a Prayer Book would have been of no use, one could not have followed it.’Footnote ⁶⁷ The wholesale use of a non-Prayer Book liturgy was an unusual example; much more typical of the evidence presented by those linked to Protestant organizations who appeared before the commission was the mixing of non-Prayer Book ceremonial with the Prayer Book liturgy.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, the reply of John A. Le Couter, vicar of St Columba's, to these allegations was typical of responses by Ritualist priests. Writing to the commission, he stated that ‘whilst the statement is in the main correct, I must entirely repudiate the colour attempted to be given to the facts. Without pledging myself to all the details, I have to say that the ceremonial used in my Church is that ordered expressly or by implication by the ornaments rubric.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Whilst the Evangelical wing of the church engaged with the commission with enthusiasm, the Ritualists tried their hardest not to engage at all. Initially the written responses by Ritualist clergy to the charges laid on the evidence of Evangelicals were not only similar, but followed a template. As Le Couter's reply shows, this template stated that they did not disagree with the evidence in the main, but disagreed with the ‘colour’ given in the reporting of it, and affirmed that their services were not only in line with, but ordered by, the Ornaments Rubric. Most clergy altered this template to suit the particular charges made by the Evangelicals against them; some, however, just sent the template reply itself, resulting in a series of identical responses.Footnote ⁷⁰ This reply not only demonstrated Ritualist adherence to their interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric, but also continued the trend of disregarding bodies that represented the established relationship between church and state, and particularly the power of parliament and the secular courts over the church. This disdain was reinforced when Walter Phillimore, a leading ecclesiastical lawyer, appeared before the commission and lamented the fact that ‘the Privy Council does not command the respect of a great number of people who appear before it’.Footnote ⁷¹ A lack of respect for the established judicial system of the church led to disregard for its decisions, in turn threatening to undermine the very basis of that judicial system. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that the mood of the Church of England was that consent of churchmen was needed for them to be governed by the secular courts.

After the public giving of evidence, all diocesan bishops were asked to provide responses to various questions linked to ritual irregularities that had been witnessed in their particular diocese.Footnote ⁷² Charles Gore, then bishop of Birmingham and a leading Anglo-Catholic, desired in his reply to bring to the fore the ‘principle as to the seat of legislative and judicial authority on matters affecting the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Church’ which he believed lay ‘behind the controversy about details of ceremonial’. Gore held that Christ had founded the church to have independent authority, but that during the Reformation the distinction between the authority of the church and that of the state had become less clear. Now, Gore argued, this should be corrected, for the Church of England had become ‘only one of many religious bodies in the State enjoying practically equal toleration and completeness of civil privilege, and in consequence … the legislative and judicial authorities of the State have ceased to be in any real sense representative of the church or capable of claiming the allegiance of churchmen in spiritual matters’.Footnote ⁷³ This was a more sophisticated ecclesiology than that of many of Gore's fellow Ritualists; it still envisaged the church's independence from parliamentary oversight, but admitted that this had not historically been true of, and was not currently the case in, the Church of England. Instead, Gore advocated this position as a necessary corrective now that the Reformation was over and the state more tolerant of a wider range of confessional groups. Gore was thus admitting that self-government, which Ritualists desired, was not enshrined in the church's current legal structure, whilst calling for it to become so.

On 21 June 1906, the commission delivered its report. Like the reports of the previous royal commission, this affirmed the nature of the Church of England as the state church. However, instead of framing this relationship in terms of the guardianship of the church by parliament, it described it in terms of oversight by the nation, concluding that ‘the nation has right to expect that in the national Church the services shall be conducted according to law’.Footnote ⁷⁴ This was a significant step, as it changed the concept of guardianship from a clear and concrete responsibility of parliament into a more abstract guardianship by the nation. The commission acknowledged that the majority of the English population were not habitual Anglican church-goers, but its report nonetheless affirmed that ‘all parishioners’, whether members of the established church or not, had the right to expect their local parish church to abide by the law.Footnote ⁷⁵ This distinction between ‘parishioners’ and ‘church-goers’ demonstrated a commitment to retaining uniform legal practice across the church, espoused by a parliament that represented the entire nation, and thus all parishioners, Anglican and Nonconformist alike. At the same time, the report recognized that regular churchgoers had desires of their own, and that these could sometimes be in conflict with the law governing the church. It concluded that ‘the law of public worship in the Church of England is too narrow for the religious life of the present generation’. The commissioners were also worried that the requirement of legal obedience to the Prayer Book ‘needlessly condemns much which a great section of Church people, including many of her most devoted members, value’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The commission was thus attempting to find a middle ground between legal obedience and parliamentary oversight on the one hand, and on the other the desires of some churchgoers to be allowed to worship how they wished.

The report concluded:

In keeping with this call for an ‘an adequate power of self-adjustment’, the commission concluded that letters of business should be issued to the convocations of the church, to revise the Prayer Book to make it suitable for the twentieth century. This was a significant shift away from Tait's original vision of resolution of the Ritualist conflict through parliamentary imposition of legislation on the church; instead it represented a first step towards self-governance by the church.

Two key themes emerge from the report. Firstly, it affirmed that the Church of England was a national church, a church in which everyone in England had a say, whether they attended on a Sunday or not. As such, they had a right to expect that their church would remain within the bounds of the law and the Protestant establishment. At the same time, the report recognized that the church needed to consider changing the Prayer Book so it could reflect the current state of the church and thus create a new understanding of uniformity. The commissioners also recommended this new uniformity because it would, in their view, make it easier to prosecute those Ritualists whose ‘practices lie on the Rome-ward side of a line of deep cleavage between the Church of England and that of Rome’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In terms of ecclesiology, the commission thus sought to create a via media between the traditional ecclesiology of the Church of England and that of the Ritualists. It argued that the nation had a role of oversight of the church and consequently endorsed parliament's attempts to legislate against Ritualism; however, it also recognized that rubrics written in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries were not universally fit for purpose when it came to the governance of the church of 1906. It therefore recommended giving the church the power of readjustment to fit modern needs. This bypassed the Ritualists’ attempts at legislative interpretation, by supporting legislation that had sought to crack down on their interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric, whilst affirming that practices that courts had found to be incompatible with the rubric should be understood as compatible with the essence of the Church of England.Footnote ⁷⁹ The recommendations of the commission were neither strict Erastianism nor Tractarian-style spiritual independence; instead, it presented a halfway house, with the crown being recommended to gift the church the (legal) power to determine its liturgical practice. The Ritualists had lost many ecclesiological battles over the course of the nineteenth century, but with the commission's recommendation of an Erastian-style church independence it seems that they might have been winning the war.

The ecclesiology of the report of 1906 would prove to be the start of a much greater, and much longer, battle over the ecclesiology of the Church of England, which reached a major turning point in the Prayer Book crisis of the late 1920s.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Prayer Book crisis provided a forceful demonstration that parliament was the ultimate legislative body for the church, but in doing so it paradoxically reduced parliament's role in the governance of the Church of England significantly and enhanced the legislative power of internal church structures. What is clear is that the Ritualist controversy that divided the Church of England in the nineteenth century was focused not only on incense and chasubles, but on questions of who created church laws and how they were to be interpreted. In this regard, the Ritualists ensured that the Oxford Movement lived on by offering a radical embodiment of the idea of spiritual independence and by helping to lay the foundations for an internal church legislature in the Church of England.