In Tuneful Accord. Trevor Beeson
not exempt from the law’s demands and in 1888 the saintly Edward King of Lincoln was arraigned before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to answer a series of charges – allowing lighted candles on the altar, mixing wine and water in the chalice at the Eucharist and ceremonially washing the vessels afterwards, permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration, and absolving and blessing with the sign of the cross. The Council eventually remitted the matter to the Archbishop of Canterbury who found largely in King’s favour.
By the end of the century there was no sign of agreement on what forms of worship might or might not be permissible in the Church of England. There were in fact four separate traditions operating in the parish churches. The Evangelicals, untouched by the Oxford Movement or much else in the liturgical field apart from the revival of hymn singing, still worshipped in austere churches in which Bible reading and preaching dominated the Prayer Book services, and Holy Communion was celebrated infrequently. At the other extreme the churches influenced by Ritualism offered worship that hardly differed from that of the Roman Catholics, apart from the use of English rather than Latin. They were now known as Anglo-Catholics. Another, rapidly growing, section of the church accepted the doctrines of the Oxford Movement, rejected Ritualist developments and, instead, remained faithful to the Prayer Book, accompanying it with dignified ceremonial as well as the vesture and furnishings believed to be prescribed by the ornaments rubric. A guild of craftsmen was created to produce appropriate items and during the twentieth century the dignified, colourful ceremonial of Westminster Abbey became the leading example of this worship, which there owed as much to good taste as it did to doctrine.
These three groups represented, however, only a quite small part of the Church of England’s life. The overwhelming majority of parishes continued largely unchanged. Morning and Evening Prayer remained the mainstay of Sunday worship, albeit with a robed choir in chancel and some dignity of movement, more music and shorter sermons. Holy Communion was celebrated more frequently, usually at 8 a.m. and, perhaps, once a month after Morning Prayer. Inclusive Protestantism was still alive and well, ‘C of E’ was a badge of national as well as religious identity. Many new church buildings, almost all in Gothic style, had been erected in urban areas since 1850, and on the whole congregations were large, peaking in about 1900, though the buildings were, contrary to later mythology, rarely filled to capacity and in the large towns and cities most people did not attend church, except for baptisms, marriages and funerals.
It was because religion retained an important place in the national consciousness that so much concern was expressed at the unlawful deviation from the provisions of the Book of Common Prayer. Thus in 1904 the government decided to set up a Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline to investigate the situation, especially the alleged breaches of the law. During the next two years the Commission received evidence from 164 witnesses and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, occupied three days of its time. A good deal of useful information was gathered and the Commission’s report offers an interesting picture of worship in the Church of England at the end of the nineteenth century, but the number of serious complaints lodged with the Commission was comparatively small and it stated that ‘in most parishes the work of the Church is being quietly and diligently performed by clergy who are entirely loyal to the principles of the English Reformation as expressed in the Book of Common Prayer’. Nonetheless it concluded, in words that became the official basis for liturgical reform for much of the remainder of the century, ‘the law of public worship in the Church of England is too narrow for the religious life of the present generation’.
That they should have continued to be quoted for so long is the clearest evidence that the Church of England’s response to the Commission’s labours was not hasty. The Convocations of Canterbury and York discussed the matter from time to time without deciding anything significant, until the 1914–18 war intervened. An advisory committee of liturgical scholars appointed in 1911 lacked the wholehearted support of the Northern Convocation and was also frustrated by the outbreak of war.
The war did, however, stimulate the demand for reform. Chaplains ministering in the horrific circumstances of the trenches found the BCP virtually unusable for soldiers’ services and the burial of the fallen. Even as traditional and fastidious a liturgist as Eric Milner White, who had gone to France from King’s College, Cambridge, and returned to the college for another 13 years before becoming Dean of York, confessed in characteristically elegant language, not frequently heard in the trenches:
Suddenly it became apparent to all that the 1662 Book was out of date. It was plain, especially to chaplains in the field, that the country had no semblance of a popular familiar devotion … The Prayer Book did not seem able to reflect the lineaments of the Lord Jesus Christ, therefore failing to minister the love of God to souls desperately wistful.
Furthermore, the close encounters with soldiers, especially the other ranks, confirmed what the best of the chaplains already knew, namely, that most expressions of Christian faith and worship were more or less meaningless to the overwhelming majority of Britain’s working-class population. The chaplains returned to their parishes therefore firmly determined to demand substantial revision of the church’s services and to work for the restoration of the Holy Communion to that central place in the church’s life which it had held from the earliest Christian centuries until the early seventeenth century. There could be no prevarication, no delaying tactics. There proved to be many.
During the immediate post-war years many suggestions for revision were made by groups of liturgical scholars and other interested parties, and between the autumn of 1925 and the beginning of 1927 the House of Bishops held 45 day-long meetings to devise a revised prayer book. This was intended to be an alternative to the 1662 book, not a substitution for it. The proposed changes were nothing if not conservative, but although the new book was accepted by the Church Assembly later that year, this was in spite of strong opposition from some Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. When it was presented to the House of Commons on 15 December it was rejected by 238 votes to 205, and, in spite of some intensive lobbying, the margin of defeat was slightly larger when it was re-presented in 1928.
The opposition in the church was, as is often the case in controversial matters, united by opposing convictions. The Evangelicals believed that some aspects of the proposed book would take the Church of England in a Rome-ward direction, whereas the extreme Anglo-Catholics believed it would inhibit the liturgical freedom they had already seized and now enjoyed, and would be used by the bishops as an instrument of discipline. The proposals were, in any case, nowhere near to solving the acute problem delineated by the wartime chaplains. Had the church been more united in its enthusiasm for the new book it seems likely that the House of Commons would have voted differently. But there was another division of which many MPs were aware: there was no enthusiasm for liturgical change among ordinary churchgoers (there rarely is) and it seemed that the professionals, including the laity in the Church Assembly, were seeking to impose new ways of worship on reluctant congregations.
Whatever the explanation, however, the leadership of the Church of England was left in some disarray. There were calls for disestablishment. These were not pursued, though the implications for church–state relations of what had happened would never be forgotten. The bishops restored calm, rather cleverly and, it turned out, very helpfully, by consulting their diocesan conferences, then announcing that ‘during the present emergency and until further order be taken’ they would ‘not regard as inconsistent with loyalty to the principles of the Church of England the use of such additions or deviations as fall within the limits of the “Deposited Book”’.
Thus what became known as the 1928 Prayer Book went into widespread use. Or at least, parts of it did. The minor changes proposed for Morning and Evening Prayer, and for the Baptism, Marriage and Burial services, were generally welcomed but a more substantial change to the Prayer of Thanksgiving at the Eucharist did not win much support and was firmly rejected by Evangelicals. Among the war-veteran reformers there was deep disappointment that the new book did nothing to bridge the gap between the church and its absentee artisan members and offered no encouragement to those who wished to make the Holy Communion the central focus of parish life.
The ‘emergency’ lasted for 27 years and embraced another catastrophic world war. During this time the bishops made no serious attempt to impose liturgical discipline, except in a few