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Whoever his successor is, Dr. Lang will almost certainly be the last archbishop of his kind (just as he is the first unmarried Primate since the Reformation). The 20th Century does not breed his type of courtier-bishop. Since he first caught Queen Victoria's eye in 1896 with his tactful eloquence and for being "so human," he has been the friend and confidant of the royal family—except for Edward VIII, who called him a "sanctimonious humbug." He also is strong-willed and not afraid to speak his mind, even went to the unpopular extreme of defending his friend Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I.
When George V was Prince of Wales, Dr. Lang rebuked him for having attended a Roman Catholic service, pointed out that there was no precedent for such an act since James II. "A very good precedent too," snapped the Prince. "No doubt your Royal Highness is familiar with your history," retorted Dr. Lang, "and remembers that the consequences to the King and his family were not so good." (James was driven from his throne after three years, and his luckless heirs, the old Pretender and Bonnie Prince Charlie, lived out their lives in exile.)
Dr. Lang even stood up to Queen Victoria. While he was vicar of Portsea, the largest parish in England, with twelve curates under him, she told him a good wife would be more help than any six curates. "If I have a curate I do not like," he replied, "I can sack him. But I couldn't sack a wife." Forty years later his views on sacking a husband cost Victoria's great grandson the throne.
A seventh son of a seventh son, Cosmo Lang was born a Presbyterian. In fact, his father was Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland—as his brother became in 1935. After winning his M.A. from Glasgow University at 18, he had a brilliant career at Oxford, topped in 1886 with a first class in Modern History and the presidency of the famed Oxford Union (which York held in due course, too). In tending a political career, he studied law in London for the next three years, did not decide to enter the church until just before he was to be called to the bar.
As a curate in grimy industrial Leeds, young Cosmo Lang slept in a condemned tenement on a board bed only two feet wide, ministered to people even poorer than himself. But promotion came to the shrewd young man: as an Oxford don, vicar of Portsea and, in 1901, Bishop of London's East End diocese of Stepney. In 1908 the Archbishop of York died, and at 44 Lang was appointed Europe's youngest archbishop.
As Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Lang got £15,000 (peacetime equivalent of $75,000) a year, most of which went in income taxes and upkeep of the vast medieval pile of Lambeth Palace which the Nazis blitzed last year. In his resignation speech the Archbishop referred to his "sudden withdrawal to some obscure place ... to face ... the restraints and inconveniences of very slender means." Leftist papers tartly said they thought his £1,500 pension was more than that.