Herbert Hensley Henson, J. N. Figgis and the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State, 1913–1916: Two Competing Visions of the Church of England

This article brings fresh perspective to the Archbishops’ Committee on Church and State that sat from 1913 to 1916, emphasising the divisions in the Church that it both reflected and reinforced. The article focuses on the shadow that two competing legacies cast over the committee's appointment and recommendations, and the reception of its report. This is evident in the work of two prominent figures of the early twentieth-century Church: Herbert Hensley Henson (1863–1947) and J. N. Figgis (1866–1919). While Henson appealed to Hooker's legacy in upholding a national Church, Figgis drew on Tractarianism in defending a narrower, denominational ideal.

fully socialist gospel outside of existing Establishment constraints. This and his importance as an intellectual influence on some of the main promoters of the archbishops' committee and the Enabling bill have yet to receive the attention they deserve.  The first section of the article examines the context of this confrontation of ideas in divisions within the Church created by the Tractarian movement of the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on the divisions that arose from the problem of Church discipline in liturgy and worship, often linked to opposing conceptions of the Church. While the conflict abated with the appointment of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline in , it revived when revision of the Book of Common Prayerthe main recommendation of the commission's report in raised questions on both sides concerning the 'right' of the Church to determine its own affairs. The formation of Henson's ideas on these issues is integral to the analysis. The second section turns to Figgis's use of F. W. Maitland's writings on group personality to strengthen conceptions of the Church's right to autonomy. It also examines Figgis's connections with churchmen who played a prominent role in the establishment and proceedings of the archbishops' committeeoften referred to as the Selborne committee after its chairman, the second earl of Selborneand the interaction of his ideas with other concerns in influencing the tone and recommendations of the report. The third section considers Henson's response to the report, and the religious differences within the Church the report both reflected and amplified. The final section compares Henson's and Figgis's understanding of the Church of England as a 'national' Church in the aftermath of the Enabling Act, and notes the revival of Figgis's conception of pluralism within the Church in recent years.

The Tractarian legacy and Henson's defence of the established Church
In his recent article on the Enabling Act and its long-term effects on the Church, Colin Podmore well situates the legislation within the context of the Oxford or Tractarian movement, the starting-point, also, of the analysis here. With the end of the confessional state in - following the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation, a leading aim of the Tractarians was to shift the centre of authority in the Church away from parliament towards the episcopacy, grounded in the principle of apostolic succession.  They disliked the role of the civil authorities in the - legislation and, following Newman's conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in , their High Church successors targeted subsequent legislation and matters of doctrine and worship being decided by the courts, for example, in the Gorham judgement in . The legislation and intervention of the courts was a response to the emergence of what Jeremy Morris has termed 'advanced sacramentalism' in the Church centring on the eucharist, and the increasing importance attached to external symbols as used in the Roman Catholic Church. While this was not associated exclusively with Anglo-Catholicism,  the latter increasingly dominated the High Church revival, certainly in the eyes of its opponents. As such, Anglo-Catholic 'ritualism' heightened conflict within the Church and between the Church and the wider religious nation, especially leading up to and following the Public Worship Regulation Act of . The passage of the act and the prosecutions under it strengthened the hand of the English Church Union (ECU) formed in  to defend the Tractarian legacy. In  the ECU, under the leadership of Lord Halifax, rejected the authority of ecclesiastical courts in spiritual matters, fuelling the movement towards Church autonomy.  Halifax's prominence within the Church provided the initial focus of Henson's public opposition to the spread of Tractarian influence. Ordained to the diaconate in June  while a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he spent the first decade of his priesthood as an 'English Catholic' in the sacramentalist tradition of the Church, albeit with increasing ambivalence. Not least, he retained an earlier, lay commitment to Church defence against mounting pressure for disestablishment, particularly in relation to Wales and among Nonconformists and radicals.  His establishment convictions were strengthened on hearing Bishop Lightfoot's sermon at the opening of the Church Congress in Wolverhampton a few months after his ordination. Lightfoot urged the Church to recognise its responsibilities as the spiritual arm of an imperial nation, setting aside other distractions such as church discipline: a reference to the controversy over ritualism. It was, Henson recalled, 'a revelation of the possibilities of Anglicanism' in leading evangelisation worldwide.   Podmore, 'Self-government without disestablishment', -. Henson took up Lightfoot's challenge at local level in his first appointment as rector of the large working-class parish of Barking in the following year, building upon pride of ancestry among older parishioners to enhance interest in 'the history of the Church and Nation'.  He continued this work as incumbent at Ilford Hospital from  to , using the extra time for leisure afforded by the appointment to engage in historical studies of the Church, and at the same time, to combat its widening divisions. These intensified following the introduction of incense in some ritualist churches in , precipitating what Bethany Kilcrease has termed the 'great Church crisis' that engulfed parliament and the Church.  The crisis was marked by the disruption of ritualist church services by the Protestant agitator, John Kensit, and his supporters in the influential Church Association and other organisations established to assert the primacy of Protestantism within the Church. They enjoyed the support of a major political figure, Sir William Harcourt, who had been instrumental in the passage of the Public Worship Regulation Act.  The archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, used his first charge to the diocese in October  to assess the legitimacy of Anglo-Catholic practices and doctrines in the wake of this controversy. While giving some ground, for example, in private prayers for the dead, he reaffirmed the Church's prohibition on reservation and upheld the jurisdiction of the civil courts as a necessity, albeit a 'necessary evil'.  In response, the principal organ of the English Church Union, The Church Times, asserted that 'Catholic minded Churchmen would risk any loss rather than submit to such a yoke.'  This defiance prompted Henson to write one of his most forceful apologetics on behalf of a national, established Church, his open letter to Lord Halifax entitled Cui bono?, published as a pamphlet in the autumn of . He urged Halifax to issue a declaration endorsing Temple's charge 'as broadly defining the position of the National Church', invoking the 'religious interest of the nation' as the ultimate arbiter of ecclesiastical differences, and the Church of England as the 'principal instrument by means of which Christianity is brought to bear on the National life'. He emphasised further the contrast between the institutional strength of the Church and the low levels of confidence in the clergy among the people.  Unsurprisingly, the two main High Church newspapers, not only The Church Times but also the more moderate The Guardian, dismissed his pleas.  Both took exception to his belief that the Church should serve the English people as a whole, particularly in their existing religious guise, which the newspapers associated with the Kensit agitation. The Church Times defended the distance the clergy had taken from the laity, emphasising the importance of leadership to the issue of 'confidence'. ' [T]he leader in whom men have confidence is not the one who is in all points like themselves, but the one who is cast in a different mould, whose thoughts they can but half understand.' In a preface to the fourth edition of the pamphlet, Henson condemned the newspaper's 'arrogant, unspiritual tone'.  Throughout the ritualist crisis at the turn of the century and in the years between  and , Henson regarded the main Church problem as that of its internal divisions, which parliament alone could bridge. He distrusted 'clerical assemblies' as law-making bodies, and was critical of the Church Reform League which had been established in  to campaign for greater powers for the Church to correct abuses itself.  This distrust was evident in his response to the report of the royal commission on ecclesiastical discipline in , particularly its recommendation that the Convocations of York and Canterbury secure letters of business from the Crown for revising the Prayer Book. Writing in The Contemporary Review, he maintained that the recommendation recalled the canons of  prepared by Convocations that were overwhelmingly High Church in membership, against the predominantly Protestant temper of the country.  For Henson, at the heart of the Church's divisions was a shift of power from ancient parishes, represented in a lay capacity by churchwardens, to 'congregations', easily mobilised by organisations such as the Church Association and the English Church Union.  In a sermon of  preached in St Margaret's, Westminster, where he had served as rector since , he reflected on the meaning of the term 'the Church' in the light of this development. 'The Church' did not denote a specific church, one of the many offshoots of the 'Society' that Christ had established, each claiming to embody the Founder's intention. It denoted instead His Church, into which was 'gathered … all the moral loyalty of mankind, past, present, and future'. This notion of the Church as the focus of the 'spiritual energy' unleashed by the Incarnation rejected any clear demarcation between clergy and laity; nor did it permit a return to the separation between Church and State as two distinct societies, rivalry between which had led to the breakdown of the medieval system. Quoting Hooker, Henson emphasised that Church and commonwealth were one, belonging to the '"self-same people whole and entire"'.  These ideas were deliberately aimed at the modern 'sacerdotalists' within the Church led by Charles Gore, bishop of Oxford and a leading Anglo-Catholic active in church reform.  As in , this faction seemed once again in the ascendant. Against the 'flock' theory of the Church rooted in the Ministry of the Word and Sacraments available to all who accepted the call to discipleship, the sacerdotalists upheld the narrower and more exclusive conception of the Church as a 'little fold'. The distinction informed Henson's watershed sermon preached in Cambridge in , in which he argued for a union of the Protestant Churches in England, bringing together the Church of England and the Nonconformist denominations.  A truly national Church had to be capable of full comprehension, that is, of drawing the Nonconformists back into the mainstream of the Church, although a Church shorn of prelacy. Henson continued to berate the Church for its failure to give ground on this issue, including in the report of the archbishops' committee, in insisting on the need for the episcopal ordination of clergy.
The 'little fold' conception of the Church was central to attempts to loosen the connection between Church and State. In an article in , Henson acknowledged other factors at play in this respect. They included delays in Church legislation due to a congested parliamentary timetable, and the presence in the House of Commons of Scottish and Irish representatives with little sympathy for the Church of England. More concerning for him, though, was the increasing influence of what he termedwith evident contempt -'theoretical considerations', or the new, and alien idea of the Church as a denomination, a 'little fold'. He identified Gore as the chief force behind the promotion of this idea during the meetings of the archbishops' committee.  However, as we shall see, he credited Figgis with the language of 'autonomy' that resonated in the committee's report. How had that language been framed, and why? The influence of Figgis's idea of a 'free' national Church on the establishment and report of the archbishops' committee Figgis had undergone a complex personal development before his ordination in , first in rejecting the Nonconformity of his early life and later overcoming wider religious doubts to embrace the Anglo-Catholic faith.  As a history student at Cambridge, he was encouraged to take holy orders by Mandell Creighton, professor of ecclesiastical history and later bishop of Peterborough. At Cambridge, he was influenced by two other leading historians, Lord Acton, regius professor of history, and F. W. Maitland, Downing professor of the laws of England. In an article for The Guardian in  on Maitland's death, he paid tribute to all three historians, particularly their 'strong belief in liberty and their perception of the hollowness of much that goes by the name nowadays'. He added that all three, 'two of them without particularly desiring it [Maitland and Acton], have helped, and will help still more in the future, towards a true conception of the place of our Church in regard to Christendom at large, and also in relation to modern democracy'.  This statement outlined the direction in which Figgis had begun to take the work of his mentors, Maitland especially, whose translation of Otto Gierke's Political thought of the Middle Age and lively introduction marked a turning point in Figgis's thought. The introduction emphasised the relevance to Britain of some weighty issues at the forefront of legal debate in Germany, highlighting the British state's long-standing denial of personality to groups. While in recent political theory the state had been accorded a 'real will', and even 'the real will', suggesting that its 'personality' was more than simply 'artificial', this had not been extended to other groups.  In explaining the continuing difficulty in Britain with the notion of corporate personality, Maitland pointed to the persistence of Roman Law ideas concerning the 'fictitious' nature of groups as representing no more than the sum of their individual parts. At the same time, however, a flourishing group life had developed, some of it of medieval origins, assisted by the law of trusts. The latter had proved a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it had enabled a wealth of associations to exist, mostly outside the boundaries of formal incorporation; on the other, it had hindered engagement with ideas concerning groups and their relation to the state of the kind that had taken place in Germany. Here, Maitland impressed upon his readers the importance of Gierke's Genossenschaftstheorie, inadequately translated as the law of fellowship. It vested sovereignty in the 'whole organised community', constituted by freely formed associations, rather than in the state, or the 'single part' of it that exercised sovereignty in modern society. Towards the end of the introduction, he came down hard on the theory of sovereignty associated with the nineteenth-century legal philosopher, John Austin, which identified parliament, particularly the democratically elected House of Commons, as the new locus of legal sovereignty. Maitland urged his readers to take seriously the warning of some that, 'in the future the less we say about a supralegal, suprajural plenitude of power concentrated in a single point at Westminsterconcentrated in one single organ of an increasingly complex commonwealththe better for that commonwealth may be the days that are coming'.  This statement well captured the spirit of mounting resistance to the authority of the state within the Church and concern for the Church's interests in an increasingly unreliable legislature to which Figgis's writings would soon lend support. Influenced by Maitland, Figgis abandoned his defence of the doctrine of state sovereignty in his earlier work, The divine right of kings (). There, he had traced the doctrine back to the policy of toleration pursued by the state in establishing its omnipotence following the failure of political absolutism to bring about religious unity in the aftermath of the Reformation. In his Studies of political thought published in  and dedicated to Maitland, he positioned himself as a leading critic of the doctrine as both obsoletelike the 'divine right of kings' it replacedand suspect morally.  The opposition of the French priest and scholar, Jean Gerson, to papal autocracy in the early fifteenth century combined with the rich, associational polity upheld by the Dutch political thinker Althusius in the aftermath of the Dutch revolt suggested an alternative.  Their work, deepened by the insights of Maitland and Gierke, led Figgis to believe that it was groups such as Churches, including the Church of England, that were 'real', and the state as the seat of sovereignty in society a mere abstraction. This conviction was to provide ammunition for powerful interests in the Church seeking to transform the Church's relationship to the state.
In the right of organisations such as Churches to develop in their own way as 'facts' of social existence, not as 'fictions' created by the state. Against the backdrop of the dissolution of the religious orders in France in , he insisted that the Church should now take a stand on its 'real rights' and also the 'true authority' it possessed over its members, 'the moment they become such'.  He drew the same conclusion from the recent Free Church of Scotland case, in which the House of Lords decided in favour of the minority against the majority who sought reunification with the United Presbyterian Church in a new United Free Church. While an act of parliament reversed the judgement in August , the Roman theory of groups as artificial entities remained intact. As a magnet for activists within the Church, the Church Congress would have been receptive to Figgis's paper. A few months later, Figgis sent a copy of his address to Lord Hugh Cecil, later Lord Quickswood, son of the three times prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and leading Conservative politician and church layman, whom he had met at the Congress. In his letter, he impressed upon Cecil the importance of the conceptual issues raised in the paper, not least for the controversy over religious education in Britain in which Cecil had taken an active role.  He emphasised that the Baptist leader, John Clifford, and other Nonconformist campaigners for the replacement of denominational with 'undenominational' education in church schools 'differed from us about the nature of the State which they wish to be unitary & the source of all right, while we do not'. He urged Cecil to read Maitland's introduction to Gierke's Political theories of the Middle Age, asserting that 'undenominationalists quand même and ourselves are divided by a chasm and divided not so much on religious grounds as on a theory of the state which theory (theirs) goes back thro' Rousseau to Ultramonanism & thence to [the] Roman Empire'.  Cecil's response has not been found. However, if it is presumed that he did read Maitland's introduction, exposure to Figgis's ideas would have stiffened his resolve to distance the Church from the State. While his primary grounds for doing so were practical, that is, the removal of an obstruction to Church reform,  he was also sensitive to the spiritual dimension, particularly in relation to the issue of marriage following the passage of the Deceased Wife's Sister Act in .  The same is true of Viscount Wolmerlike Cecil, his uncle, a prominent figure in Unionist politics and among the Church's lay leaders. Wolmer was to have shared a platform with Figgis at the meeting of the Church Congress in October  before it was cancelled at the outbreak of war.  Clearly, Figgis was keen for his ideas to find influence within the Church, and in this he was not disappointed. A few days before the meeting of the Representative Church Council in July , Wolmer wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, urging him to consider proposals for overcoming an impasse in parliament on legislation affecting the Church. A particularly pressing problem was the changing religious composition of the House of Commons, with increased numbers of Nonconformists, Roman Catholics and the religiously indifferent among its membership consequent upon democratic reform. In this context, he reminded Davidson of the resolution tabled by Sir Alfred Cripps, a Unionist MP and chairman of the Canterbury House of Laymen, for the forthcoming council meeting. The resolution, cited earlier, maintained that there was no inconsistency between 'a national recognition of religion and the spiritual independence of the Church'.  Anxious to prevent the momentum for disestablishment developing further, Wolmer urged Davidson to support the policy of 'establishment cum liberty', emphasising its timeliness in view of the negotiations currently taking place in Scotland for reunification between the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church. Unsurprisingly, Figgis's name was included among those who had approved the proposals.  As well as Cecil, Wolmer was working closely with Halifax, who wrote to Davidson in the same vein and at the same time. He pressed the archbishop to consider ways of appointing a committee comprising 'the right people' that would draft a new constitution for the council acceptable to both public opinion and parliament. It would, he suggested, 'get rid of all these questions of disestablishment and disendowment'. Like Wolmer, he appealed to developments in the Scottish Church as evidence of the timeliness of the proposal. He went further, however, in sending a copy of Figgis's recent collection of sermons, Anti-Christ, with his letter, remarking, '[i]t seems to say exactly those things that need saying at the present time'.  The volume included the sermon entitled 'Church and State' that Figgis had preached in St Alban's, Holborn, the previous year at the 'annual festival' of the English Church Union. He had addressed the congregation as churchmen loyal to 'the great England that bore us' and, as Catholics, anxious to remain part of that 'stream of universal life which flows through the Church of the ages'. As such, he maintained, they were 'doing a service to politics by asserting on the highest plane the doctrine of the inherent, underived, though not uncontrolled, life of societies within the State'.  This was central to his developing conception of the state as a communitas communitatum, a community of communities, not inconsistent with the existence of a Church 'by law established', if the Church's independent origins were recognised.  Following the representations of Halifax and Wolmer, Davidson encouraged Wolmer to propose a motion in the council once Cripps's motion had been debated, urging the archbishops to appoint a committee representing the different wings of the Church to consider how the principle of consistency might be given 'practical effect'.  In the private discussions that followed, a rider was added to Cripps's motion, drafted by Cecil,  requesting the archbishops to establish a committee 'to inquire what changes are advisable' to achieve the ideal for the Church that the resolution sought.  Wolmer duly seconded the motion at the council meeting. In Henson's absence, it was passed with only one dissentient, the dean of Canterbury, Henry Wace, a leading Evangelical.  It seems clear that the leading figures responsible for the establishment of the committee were aware of Figgis's ideas and had used them to strengthen a wider case for Church autonomy. What of those who became members of the committee? While the evidence is limited, it supports a strong presumption in favour of Figgis's continuing influence.
At the suggestion of Cosmo Lang, archbishop of York, the chairman of the committee was Lord Selborne, Wolmer's father, a prominent church layman and Unionist politician who had served in the administrations of Lord Salisbury and Balfour.  He could not have been unfamiliar with Figgis's work given his son's awareness of its value in church reform. The list of members agreed between the two archbishops and Selborne included Wolmer, Cecil and Edward Wood, Halifax's son;  all three were Anglo-Catholics broadly in Figgis's mould. Two other prominent Anglo-Catholics were Charles Gore and W. H. Frere, both attached to the Community of the Resurrection, the small Anglican monastery in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, which Figgis had joined in  following his departure from Marnhull. Figgis's influence extended to another member of the committee, the historian and Master of Balliol College, Oxford, A. L. Smith, who contributed one of the historical appendices to the committee's report. Davidson approached Smith following Selborne's request for greater representation of 'liberals in politics' and Evangelicals, in keeping with Davidson's concern that the committee should reflect a broad spectrum of Church opinion.  Smith was currently reviewing the book that marked Figgis's full conversion to pluralism, his Churches in the modern state, and in accepting Davidson's invitation he referred specifically to Figgis's book as dealing in 'a very able and interesting way with the committee's general object'.  Although he did not share Figgis's belief that Church and State were now separated by a wide moral and spiritual gulf, he endorsed Figgis's conception of the Church as a corporate body, no more dependent on the state for its existence than other voluntary organisations.  Another 'liberal' was William Temple, rector of St James, Piccadilly, from , and associate of Gore in the Workers' Educational Association and the Christian Social Union, an organisation dedicated to transforming the Church into an instrument of social morality informed by the tenets of Christian Socialism. Temple was to lead the Life and Liberty movement in the Church that pressed for the immediate implementation of the report's recommendations in , a year after its publication. The movement anticipated a newly invigorated Church from this action, one that in turn would transform the nation, socially, politically and economically.  Among its staunch supporters was Figgis.  Selborne readily accepted these and other names, including Douglas Eyre, a lawyer active in the work of Oxford Housethe settlement established in Bethnal Green by Keble College, founded by Tractarians;  and Albert Mansbridgeco-founder and secretary of the WEA. Both were protégés of Gore, and would have been influenced by the intersection of his ideas with those of Figgis. Ecclesiastical lawyers who had been active in church reform during the previous decade also served on the committee, including Lord Phillimore, Cripps (who became Lord Parmoor in ), and Lewis Dibdin, chairman of the Court of Arches, the ecclesiastical court of the province of Canterbury. Francis Chavasse, bishop of