The Royal Letters of Business

Abstract

The authorities of the Church cannot be said to have grasped the opportunity offered by the Letters of Business with eager hands. Archbishop Davidson was of the opinion that ‘such changes as are made in the Rubrics should be reduced sternly to the smallest possible dimensions’.² This view, though widely held, was actively combated. The steady rise of the Anglo-Catholic party had produced a great desire for ‘enrichment’ of the Prayer Book services, usually by borrowing from the Roman Missal; and the publication in 1904 of The English Liturgy had shown what could be done in this direction without going outside the Anglican Communion. It was largely the work of two young men, Percy Dearmer and W. H. Frere, each of whom was to have a great influence on the worship of the Church of England during the next half-century. Dearmer concentrated on the externals, Frere on the text, but both stressed the continuity of the Church of England with the pre-Reformation Church. The Alcuin Club was founded to promote this approach to liturgiology and church furnishings. The so-called ‘English altar’ with its riddels was to become almost universal in churches where the celebrant did not stand at the north end, a position which the riddel-curtains rendered impossible.

The ultimate failure of Prayer Book Revision had its root in the well-intentioned but intrinsically irrational attempt to serve two conflicting policies, of which the one was designed to satisfy the popular demand for order in the Established Church, and the other aspired to revise the system which was to be enforced. … I think few even of the Bishops, as they sate round the table in Lambeth Palace engaged in the task of revision, escaped an uncomfortable feeling of unreality and misgiving when they listened to the earnest and learned pleas of those members of their body (they were not many) who spoke as recognizably expert in liturgical science.

Bishop Hensley Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life¹