Randall Davidson(1848–1930)

Randall Thomas Davidson was born at 14 Muirhouse Crescent in Edinburgh on 7 April 1848, the eldest of seven children of Henry Davidson, a Leith timber-merchant of substantial north-Scottish-Protestant commercial standing, and Henrietta Swinton, a daughter of the Swinton family of Berwickshire and Northumberland. The family was Episcopalian in religious affiliation, the Scottish Anglican confession of the Scottish-Episcopal-Church communion in union with the Church of England, and the household was raised in the Edinburgh Episcopalian world of St Peter's, Roxburgh Place. He was schooled at Harrow from 1862 to 1867 and went up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1867 to read classics. The Oxford years took him through the high-church Tractarian-and-Pusey atmosphere of the late-1860s university (Edward Bouverie Pusey was at Christ Church across the same five years, and the Oxford Movement controversies of the previous generation were still live in undergraduate debating-society and theological-society discussion). He took an indifferent degree in 1871 on the working-distraction of a shooting accident in Scotland in 1870 that left him in continuous moderate-to-severe pain for the rest of his life.

He was ordained deacon by Archibald Campbell Tait, then Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1874 at twenty-six, and priest in 1875. He served briefly as a curate at Dartford and then in 1877 was appointed Tait's resident chaplain at Lambeth Palace. The next twenty-six years of his career, through three successive Archbishoprics of Canterbury (Tait to 1882, Edward White Benson 1883 to 1896, Frederick Temple 1897 to 1902), were a continuous administrative-and-political apprenticeship at the political centre of the Church of England. He married Tait's daughter Edith in 1878 (the marriage was childless and lasted fifty-two years to his death in 1930), was appointed Dean of Windsor in 1883 and Bishop of Rochester in 1891, and translated to Winchester in 1895. The Winchester appointment was the English bishopric below Canterbury and brought him into the inner clerical-political circle of the late-Victorian and Edwardian episcopal establishment.

He took the see of Canterbury on Frederick Temple's death in December 1902 and was enthroned on 12 February 1903 at the age of fifty-four. He held the office for twenty-five years, three months and three weeks, to his retirement on 12 November 1928. The twenty-five-year tenure was, and remains, the longest single Archbishopric of Canterbury since the Reformation; he outsat the Edward VII coronation, the death of Edward VII and accession of George V, the First World War, the post-1916 Easter Rising and the Irish independence settlement, the post-war 1928 Prayer Book crisis (the political-and-ecclesiastical confrontation over the proposed revised Prayer Book that the House of Commons defeated twice across 1927 and 1928), and the General Strike of 1926. He wrote the prayers for the 1902 coronation, the 1911 coronation, the 1937 funeral of George V and the 1936 abdication crisis (the last from retirement, as advisory consultant to the Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang and the Stanley Baldwin government on the canonical position of the abdication). The 1928 Prayer Book controversy was the political defeat of his Archbishopric.

The 1916 Easter Rising and the related Irish-Roman-Catholic-Protestant settlement were the difficult Irish work of his Archbishopric. He took a moderate ecumenical line through the Sinn Féin negotiations of 1919 to 1921, supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 from the Lambeth Palace ecclesiastical position, and corresponded with the Irish-Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin William Walsh, then with his successor Edward Byrne, through the 1922 to 1923 partition-and-Civil-War period. The First World War work was the senior pastoral work of the period: he visited the Western Front in 1916, conducted communion services at the small advanced-aid stations of the Somme campaign, and wrote the Lambeth-Palace pastoral letters to the parish clergy across the four war years that the Bishop of London Arthur Winnington-Ingram printed in *The Times* every six months and that ran across the entire English-language Anglican communion as the ecumenical pastoral-instruction body of the war.

He retired on 12 November 1928, was raised to the peerage as Baron Davidson of Lambeth in 1928 (the first Archbishop of Canterbury to take a peerage on retirement rather than at appointment to the see), and lived the last eighteen months of his life at the country house at Chiswick with Edith. He died at the Chiswick house on 25 May 1930, eighty-two years old, of complications from chronic bronchitis. He is buried in the cloister garth at Canterbury Cathedral alongside the Archbishops of Canterbury since the Reformation. The Davidson name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the patronymic of David (the Hebrew-Christian-Davidic name compressed into the standard *-son* northern English-and-Scottish genitive), one of the foundational Scottish-Borders surnames of the late-medieval and early-modern Lowland tradition; he carried it from a Leith timber-merchant household into the longest single Archbishopric of Canterbury since the Reformation.