William Cosmo Gordon Lang (1864-1945) was Archbishop of York 1908-1928 and Archbishop of Canterbury 1928-1942. The son of a minister of the Church of Scotland, he was born in Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, and educated at the Park School, Glasgow, Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1887 he began to read for the English Bar, but in 1889 felt a calling to the priesthood of the Church of England and was ordained deacon in 1890 and priest in 1891. After ministry in an urban parish in Leeds, he became a chaplain at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1893, and then vicar of Portsea in Portsmouth in 1896. He was consecrated bishop in 1901 and appointed suffragan bishop of Stepney and a canon of St Paul's Cathedral, London.He was appointed Archbishop of York in 1908, an unusually swift elevation to high office, only 18 years after ordination and without having served as a diocesan bishop. He caused controversy in 1909 by speaking and voting in the House of Lords in favour of Lloyd George's People's Budget , in 1914 by a speech sympathetic to the Kaiser, and in 1927 by promoting the revision of the Book of Common Prayer. Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1928 to succeed Randall Davidson, he presided over the 1930 Lambeth Conference. He opposed the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 but supported the British policy of appeasement of Hitler's Germany. He is best remembered for his opposition on moral grounds to the proposed marriage of King Edward VIII to Mrs Wallis Simpson which led to the Abdication Crisis of 1936. He spoke of the surrender of a great trust from the motive of private happiness in a radio broadcast on 13 December 1936, which was widely condemned as kicking a man when he is down . Show less «