William Cosmo Gordon Lang, 1st Baron Lang of Lambeth, (31 October 1864 – 5 December 1945) was a Scottish Anglican clergyman who served as Archbishop of York (1908–1928) and Archbishop of Canterbury (1928–1942). His elevation to Archbishop of York, within 18 years of his ordination, was the most rapid in modern Church of England history. As Archbishop of Canterbury during the abdication crisis of 1936, he took a strong moral stance, his comments in a subsequent broadcast being widely condemned as uncharitable towards the departed king.
The son of a Scots Presbyterian minister, Lang abandoned the prospect of a legal and political career to train for the Anglican priesthood. Beginning in 1890, his early ministry was served in slum parishes in Leeds and Portsmouth, except for brief service as Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. In 1901 he was appointed suffragan Bishop of Stepney in London, where he continued his work among the poor. He also served as a canon of St Paul's Cathedral, London.
In 1908 Lang was nominated as Archbishop of York, despite his relatively junior status as a suffragan rather than a diocesan bishop. His religious stance was broadly Anglo-Catholic, tempered by the liberal Anglo-Catholicism advocated in the Lux Mundi essays. He consequently entered the House of Lords as a Lord Spiritual and caused consternation in traditionalist circles by speaking and voting against the Lords' proposal to reject David Lloyd George's 1909 "People's Budget". This radicalism was not maintained in subsequent years. At the start of the First World War, Lang was heavily criticised for a speech in which he spoke sympathetically of the German Emperor. This troubled him greatly and may have contributed to the rapid ageing which affected his appearance during the war years. After the war he began to promote church unity and at the 1920 Lambeth Conference was responsible for the Church's Appeal to All Christian People. As Archbishop of York he supported controversial proposals for the 1928 revision of the Book of Common Prayer but, after acceding to Canterbury, he took no practical steps to resolve this issue.
Lang became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1928. He presided over the 1930 Lambeth Conference, which gave limited church approval to the use of contraception. After denouncing the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and strongly condemning European antisemitism, Lang later supported the appeasement policies of the British government. In May 1937 he presided over the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. On retirement in 1942 Lang was raised to the peerage as Baron Lang of Lambeth and continued to attend and speak in House of Lords debates until his death in 1945. Lang himself believed that he had not lived up to his own high standards. Others have praised his qualities of industry, his efficiency and his commitment to his calling.
Cosmo Gordon Lang was born on 31 October 1864 at the manse in Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, the third son of the local Church of Scotland minister, John Marshall Lang, and his wife Hannah Agnes Lang. Cosmo was baptised at Fyvie church by a neighbouring minister, the name "William" being added inadvertently to his given names, perhaps because the local laird was called William Cosmo Gordon. The additional name was rarely used subsequently. In January 1865 the family moved to Glasgow on John Lang's appointment as a minister in the Anderston district. Subsequent moves followed: in 1868 to Morningside, Edinburgh and, in 1873, back to Glasgow when John Lang was appointed minister to the historic Barony Church.
Among Cosmo's brothers were Marshall Buchanan Lang, who followed his father into the Church of Scotland, eventually serving as its Moderator in 1935; and Norman Macleod Lang, who served the Church of England as Bishop suffragan of Leicester.
In Glasgow, Lang attended the Park School, a day establishment where he won a prize for an essay on English literature and played the occasional game of football; otherwise, he recorded, "I was never greatly interested in [the school's] proceedings." Holidays were spent in different parts of Scotland, most notably in Argyll to which, later in life, Lang would frequently return. In 1878, at the age of 14, Lang sat and passed his matriculation examinations. Despite his youth, he began his studies at the University of Glasgow later that year.
At the university Lang's tutors included some of Scotland's leading academics: the Greek scholar Richard Claverhouse Jebb, the physicist William Thomson (who was later created Lord Kelvin) and the philosopher Edward Caird. Long afterwards Lang commented on the inability of some of these eminent figures to handle "the Scottish boors who formed a large part of their classes". Lang was most strongly influenced by Caird, who gave the boy's mind "its first real awakening". Lang recalled how, in a revelation as he was passing through Kelvingrove Park, he expressed aloud his sudden conviction that: "The Universe is one and its Unity and Ultimate Reality is God!" He acknowledged that his greatest failure at the university was his inability to make any progress in his understanding of mathematics, "to me, then and always, unintelligible".
In 1881 Lang made his first trip outside Scotland, to London where he heard the theologian and orator Henry Parry Liddon preach in St Paul's Cathedral. He also heard William Ewart Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain debating in the House of Commons. Later that year he travelled to Cambridge to stay with a friend who was studying there. A visit to King's College Chapel persuaded Lang that he should study at the college; the following January he sat and passed the entrance examination. When he discovered that as part of his degree studies he would be examined in mathematics, his enthusiasm disappeared. Instead, he applied to Balliol College, Oxford, and was accepted. In mid-1882 he ended his studies at Glasgow with a Master of Arts degree, and was awarded prizes for essays on politics and church history.
Lang started at Balliol in October 1882. In his first term he successfully sat for the Brackenbury Scholarship, described by his biographer John Gilbert Lockhart as "the Blue Ribbon of history scholarship at any University of the British Isles". In February 1883 his first speech at the Oxford Union, against the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland, was warmly received; the chairman likened his oratory to that of the Ancient Greek statesman, Demosthenes. He became the Union's president in the Trinity term of 1883, and the following year was a co-founder of the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS).
Although Lang considered himself forward-thinking, he joined and became secretary of the Canning Club, the university's principal Conservative society. His contemporary Robert Cecil recorded that Lang's "progressive" opinions were somewhat frowned upon by traditional Tories, who nevertheless respected his ability. Lang later assisted in the founding of the University settlement of Toynbee Hall, a mission to help the poor in the East End of London. He had been first drawn to this work in 1883, after listening to a sermon in St Mary's Church, Oxford, by Samuel Augustus Barnett, Vicar of St Jude's, Whitechapel. Barnett became the settlement's first leader, while Lang became one of its first undergraduate secretaries. He spent so much time on these duties that he was chided by the Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, for neglecting his studies. In 1886 Lang graduated with first-class honours in History; in October he failed to secure a Fellowship of All Souls College, blaming his poor early scholastic training in Glasgow.
Lang's career ambition from early in life was to practise law, enter politics and then take office in some future Conservative administration. In 1887 he began his studies for the English Bar, working in the London chambers of W.S. Robson, a future Attorney General, whose "vehement radicalism was an admirable stimulus and corrective to [Lang's] liberal Conservatism". During these years Lang was largely aloof from religion, but continued churchgoing out of what he termed "hereditary respect". He attended services at the nonconformist City Temple church and sometimes went to St Paul's Cathedral. Of his life at that time he said: "I must confess that I played sometimes with those external temptations that our Christian London flaunts in the face of its young men."