A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS
The multiple personalities of Cosmo Gordon Lang
As an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, I used to have my meals in hall under the watchful gaze of a portrait of Cosmo Gordon Lang. At the time I was being fashionably atheistic, but I wish that my younger self could have known at the time about what a remarkable individual he really was.
Lang is a paradox and a contradiction. I remember of the portrait – by Philip Alexius de Láslzó – the very blue veins on his hands. These were hands that would baptise t he present Queen and pen a speech given after the abdication of Edward VIII. They had helped refurbish a Curate House from the wreck of a local drinking den in Leeds and had assisted in the formation of Toynbee Hall, the educational outreach programme to the impoverished in London.
Lang had publicly denounced the anti-Semitism of the Nazis while preaching appeasement; he published on the iniquitous behaviour towards Christians in Russia while fully supporting the alliance with Stalin. He worked in areas of extreme deprivation – Stepney and Portsea, for example, and often with prostitutes, alcoholics and t he homeless – and eventually became Archbishop of Canterbury, with some enemies remarking he had become more of a courtier than a cleric.
His was a life that defies summary. Lang was two Scottish clichés for the price of one: the lad o’pairts, who through ability and dint of thought and effort rises higher and higher, and a Jekyll and Hyde figure, a divided self, an unreconciled split. He was also – and this fact makes me, in a way, just giggle – the only Archbishop of Canterbury whose younger brother
was also Moderator of the General Assembly of Scotland. I can’t imagine that happening again any time soon.
Lang was born on Hallowe’en in 1864, the third son of the Manse, in Fyvie, Aberdeenshire. At the age of fourteen, Lang entered the University of Glasgow and while there he also experienced some kind of spiritual epiphany. While walking t hrough Kelvingrove Park, he recollected, he said aloud: ‘The Universe is One and its Unity and Ultimate Reality is God.’ Whether he said it aloud in capitals is unknown.
But the revelation did not immediately send him on his zig-zag course to the highest ecclesiastical office in England. Instead he went to Balliol – hence his portrait – and studied history. He became President of the debating society, the Oxford Union, and the Secretary of the Canning Club, the Conservative clique, where he was regarded with some suspicion as being more ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’. On graduating he had a plan: the law, then political office. But all that would go awry. He started in the chambers of W. S. Robson in London and even managed, on a second attempt, to get a fellowship to the prestigious All Souls College back in Oxford. But then came Cuddeston.
Cuddeston Parish Church is a typical English place of worship: it looks like it might have been built for period dramas. There had been niggles in terms of Lang’s vocation, but it was here that he heard the call: in his words, an inward voice, saying: ‘You are wanted. You are called. You must obey.’ In 1888, both his practice at the bar and his eye on politics were renounced. Or were they?
By 1901, Lang had been made a bishop. His rise was meteoric according to his contemporaries. He had done sterling work in difficult parishes, increasing congregations and concentrating on charitable work. When he was invited to become Bishop of Montreal, the Canadians were out-manoeuvred: he was offered York instead. His friend Hensley Henson said, with a kind of poisonous wit: ‘I am, of course, surprised that you go straight to an archbishopric.’
As a bishop he could sit in the House of Lords, and again his actions are strangely ambivalent: he supported the People’s Budget, but rejected the Divorce Bill. He was as contradictory outside the House of Lords; encouraging young vicars to support the war effort in France and yet praising the ‘sacred memory’ of the Kaiser praying before the casket containing Queen Victoria.
‘You can take the boy out of the
church, but you can’t take the church out of the boy’
In 1928, Lang became Archbishop of Canterbury. He had become close to the royal family, but suddenly, with the death of George V, all that changed. Edward VIII referred to him as a ‘shadowy presence’, and excluded him from his inner circle.
When the Abdication Crisis loomed, Lang went through his own long, dark night of the soul. He disagreed profoundly with the idea that Mrs Wallis Simpson should be the Queen, and Edward’s dandyish attitudes made it diffi- cult for him, in good conscience, to place the crown on his head.
Always the politician, he kept out of the major discussions. But afterwards he broadcast a speech which was as waspish and pointed as any of the debates he must have participated in at the Oxford Union. The former king had elected to ‘surrender’ the ‘high and sacred trust’ to which God have given him; in favour of ‘a craving for private happiness’. You can take the boy out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the boy.
Lang, in that moment – one in which he knowingly ensured that Edward would have to stand down from the throne – was again a Kirk lad, insisting on principles, adamantine in judgement and in the full knowledge that the Church has authority over the Crown.
Lang is a conundrum. He died in 1945, having seen the end of a war, from a heart attack. He was more a manager than an inspiration for the Church – his books are fairly mundane, and his novel is not terribly good. The lack of a proper work of theology from him is a great absence, even if many would disagree with his beliefs.
Ultimately I go back to that painting, and think how simply odd he was; a mass of different passions and beliefs, a rebel and a reactionary, a snob and a Samaritan. I wonder if even he knew who he was.