Randall Davidson

Randall Thomas Davidson, 1st Baron Davidson of Lambeth, GCVO, PC (7 April 1848 – 25 May 1930) was an Anglican priest who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1903 to 1928. He was the longest-serving holder of the office since the Reformation, and the first to retire from it.

Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish Presbyterian family, Davidson was educated at Harrow School, where he became an Anglican, and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he was largely untouched by the arguments and debates between adherents of the high-church and low-church factions of the Church of England. He was ordained in 1874, and, after a brief spell as a curate, he became chaplain and secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait, in which post he became a confidant of Queen Victoria. He rose through the Church hierarchy, becoming Dean of Windsor (1883), Bishop of Rochester (1891) and Bishop of Winchester (1895). In 1903 he succeeded Frederick Temple as Archbishop of Canterbury, and remained in office until his retirement in November 1928.

Davidson was conciliatory by nature, and spent much time throughout his term of office striving to keep the Church together in the face of deep and sometimes acrimonious divisions between evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. Under his leadership the Church gained some independence from state control, but his efforts to modernise the Book of Common Prayer were frustrated by Parliament.

Though cautious about bringing the Church into domestic party politics, Davidson did not shy away from larger political issues: he played a key role in the passage of the reforming Parliament Act 1911; urged moderation on both sides in the conflict over Irish independence; campaigned against perceived immoral methods of warfare in the First World War and led efforts to resolve the national crisis of the 1926 General Strike. He was a consistent advocate of Christian unity, and worked, often closely, with other religious leaders throughout his primacy. On his retirement he was made a peer; he died at his home in London at the age of 82, eighteen months later.