Portal:University of Oxford/Selected biography/10

Cosmo Gordon Lang (1864–1945) was an Anglican clergyman who served as Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford from 1882 to 1886, was President of the Oxford Union and co-founder of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. As Archbishop of Canterbury during the abdication crisis of 1936 he took a strong moral stance, and comments he made in a subsequent broadcast were widely condemned as uncharitable towards the departed king. In his early ministry Lang served in slum parishes in Leeds and Portsmouth before his appointment in 1901 as Bishop of Stepney in London. In 1908 Lang was nominated Archbishop of York, despite his relatively junior status as a suffragan bishop. At the start of World War I, Lang was heavily criticised for a speech in which he spoke sympathetically of Kaiser Wilhelm II. After the war he supported controversial proposals for the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, but after acceding to Canterbury he took no practical steps to resolve this issue. As Archbishop of Canterbury he presided over the 1930 Lambeth Conference, which gave limited church approval to the use of contraception. (more...)