MODERN CHURCH ASSEMBLIES
The Representative Church Council was formed in 1904 as periodic joint meetings of the convocations of Canterbury and York, with the purpose of enhancing representation within the Church. It was reconstituted in 1920 as the National Church Assembly to act as a forum for Church self-government, endowed with legislative abilities by the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act – the ‘Enabling Act’ – passed by parliament during 1919.
Henson was an ex-officio member of the Representative Church Council successively as proctor for the chapter of Westminster Abbey, dean of Durham and bishop of Hereford, and of the Church Assembly as bishop of Durham. Yet as an ardent defender of the Church as a national institution represented above all in parliament, he was ill-disposed towards both bodies, at least before 1927-8.
In 1913, for example, he referred to the Representative Church Council as ‘that preposterous assembly’; earlier, he had opposed votes of money to it as a matter of principle.[1] Ever averse to ‘canting’ and ‘windbaggery’, he disdained the self-satisfaction that set the tone of debate in the newly formed Church Assembly.[2] More worryingly, however, he feared the ascendancy of the high church ‘party’, where the best speakers in the Church were concentrated.[3]
He commented in his Journal on the dominance of the proceedings of the first session by ‘the Clique’. This comprised Lord Selborne, Viscount Wolmer, Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord Parmoor, and William Temple. Broadly sympathetic to high church interests, they had pressed hard for an Assembly through their leading role in the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, 1913-16.[4] Nothing in his experience of the Assembly during the next few years led him to alter his view, either of its centre of gravity or its adverse effects on the Church of England as an established Church. As he wrote to a correspondent in 1925:
The more efficient the Church Assembly becomes as the organ of an autonomous sect, the more repulsive to it becomes the obligations & restraints of the national Establishment.[5]
This was to change abruptly following the Prayer Book rejection in 1927-8, when he defended the Assembly as more representative than parliament of the Church’s interests as a spiritual society. It was here, Owen Chadwick argued, that his volte-face in embracing disestablishment was most marked. [6]
Despite his disdain for both bodies, he attended most of their meetings, even when – as from 1913 – distance from London made this more difficult than it had been during his Westminster years. Moreover, he spoke frequently during their sessions, and with effect, contrary to remarks in the Journal that his intervention had been ‘poor’.[7] Following his speech in the Church Assembly in 1936 opposing the Church’s continued support for establishment in the aftermath of the Prayer Book crisis, Lord Hugh Cecil, who took a different view, handed him a note saying it was the most ‘powerful and brilliant’ he had ever heard.[8]
His speeches ranged widely over important areas of public concern, not just Church issues.
CONVOCATION
Henson’s membership of the modern Church assemblies was based on his membership of the two ancient Convocations representing the provinces of Canterbury and York. Founded in the thirteenth century for the purposes of clerical taxation, their business soon incorporated spiritual matters that had been dealt with hitherto in synods and councils; through their privileges and franchises, the political power of the clergy was established independently of that of the laity. [9] Their sittings were suspended in the eighteenth century, but in 1852 were revived under Tractarian influence. However, deprived of legislative powers, their business was mainly confined to the discussion of Church questions and reform of the canons, though increasingly they also engaged with wider issues of social reform and public policy.
The Convocations consisted of two houses, an upper house constituted by the bishops of the province and a lower house of ex officio and elected members of the clergy. Houses of laymen were added in 1886 (Canterbury) and 1892 (York); elected by diocesan conference, they were entirely separate from the other two houses. They were, as Henson took pains to point out, merely ‘voluntary’ bodies, with no constitutional role.[10]
He first served as proctor for the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey in the lower house of the Convocation of Canterbury, from 1903 to 1912. Here, he later recalled, ‘I soon took rank as an independent and rather formidable debater’.[11] This was consistent with his concern that the public should take note of its proceedings, overcoming the ill-founded suspicion that ‘it merely talked’. [12]
However, the problem went much deeper; in setting out the measure of the task of prayer book reform with which the Convocations had been charged by the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline in 1906, he emphasised the hostility among laymen that had taken root over a generation previously. If there were two Churches of England, he quipped, it was not ‘high’ and ‘low’ but the ‘Church of the Clergy’ and the ‘Church of the Laity’. This was due mainly to the triumph within the Church of the Tractarians, the modern equivalent of the Non-Jurors, whose practice of militant self-assertion against Stuart government had led to the abeyance into which the Convocations fell from 1717 to 1852. [13]
The effect was to undo the Elizabethan concordat between Church and nation represented by the Convocations on the one hand, and Parliament on the other, to which Hooker gave ‘supreme’ expression. [14] The division between clergy and laity would be entrenched further by Prayer Book reform, the salient issue for the first two decades of Henson’s membership under the ‘Letter of Business’ issued by the Crown in 1906, as recommended by the Royal Commission; on the basis of historical precedent he was not optimistic for its success, though not in ways he could have imagined when his reservations were confirmed when Parliament twice rejected the Prayer Book in 1927-8 .
As Dean of Durham, 1913 to 1917, Henson was an ex-officio member of the Convocation of York, much the lesser of the two Convocations in terms of size and distance from London.[15] He returned to the Convocation of Canterbury as Bishop of Hereford, 1918 to 1920, returning to the Convocation of York as Bishop of Durham, 1920 to 1939.
As senior bishop of the Province of York, he moved the Address to the Throne after fresh elections to the Lower House following the dissolution of Parliament. In that capacity he also moved the series of resolutions reaffirming the Church’s position on Christian reunion and its bearing on the issues raised by the invitation to a Unitarian minister to preach at Liverpool Cathedral in 1934. [16]
He was the only clergyman ever to serve in both houses of both convocations.
SPEECHES
See Henson’s speeches in the Representative Church Council and National Church Assembly
See Henson’s speeches in the Convocation of Canterbury
See Henson’s speeches in the Convocation of York
[1] Henson, Journal, 3 July 1913; speech in Canterbury Convocation, 2 May 1907, 143.
[2] Henson, Journal, 19 Nov. 1920.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Henson to George Frodsham, 28 Feb. 1925, HHH 105.
[6] Owen Chadwick, ‘The idea of a national church: Gladstone and Henson’, in Marcel Simone, et al (eds.), Aspects de L’ Anglicanisme (Paris, 1974), 184-205, at 199.
[7] For example, Henson, Journal, 27 Nov. 1917.
[8] Henson, Retrospect, II, 377.
[9] Drawing on William Stubbs’ Constitutional history of England, Henson gave a brief but acute account of the origins of the Convocations in ‘Letters of Business’, Quarterly Review, 90 (July 1906), 704-8.
[10] Henson, ‘Royal Letter of Business’, Canterbury Convocation, 2 May 1911, 191-3.
[11] Henson, Journal, 16 June 1935; for his electrifying effect on the assembly, see Chadwick, Hensley Henson, 100-101.
[12] ‘Abstention from public worship’, Canterbury Convocation, 30 Apr. 1912, 248; see also ‘Letters of Business’, 717-18.
[13] Henson, ‘Convocation and the Church’, in The national Church: essays on its history and constitution and criticisms of its current administration (London, 1908), 423-4; ‘Letters of Business’, 717.
[14] Henson, ‘Convocation and the Church’, 428-30.
[15] Henson, ‘Letters of Business’, 708.
[16] ‘Unitarians in cathedrals and parish churches’, York Convocation, 7 June 1934, 47-55; Henson to George Adam Smith, 13 May 1934, HHH 110, 466.