Queen Victoria

The title Supreme Governor of the Church of England is often read as though it made the sovereign a kind of lay pope, and it does not. The holder cannot ordain, cannot celebrate a sacrament, and cannot define doctrine. What the office carried in Victoria's reign was patronage and a voice, exercised through ministers: bishops and deans were nominated by the Crown on the advice of the Prime Minister, and a sovereign with settled views could press those views in correspondence without ever giving an order.

Victoria used that channel against what she called extreme High Church opinion. She disliked vestments, incense and auricular confession, and she supported the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, which was framed to give bishops a quicker way of disciplining clergy who adopted ritualist ceremonial. The Act produced prosecutions and several imprisoned priests, and it is generally judged to have strengthened the movement it was meant to check.

Her own taste in worship was plain, short and Protestant, closer to the Book of Common Prayer read straight than to the elaborated liturgy the Oxford Movement had made fashionable. She preferred brief sermons and disliked ceremonial that drew attention to the priest. That preference matters historically because the Anglican settlement of the period was contested between parties, and the sovereign who nominated its bishops for sixty three years was not neutral between them.

The proclamation issued in Victoria's name in 1858, when the Crown took over the government of India from the East India Company, is the clearest statement of the position the monarchy adopted. It declared that the sovereign disclaimed alike the right and the desire to impose her own convictions on her Indian subjects, and promised that none would be favoured or molested by reason of religious faith or observance. Victoria took a personal interest in the wording and pressed for language of toleration.

The policy and the practice diverged. Missionary societies operating under the same Crown continued to seek conversions, army chaplaincies and mission schools were funded from public money in ways that Indian observers noticed, and the promise of religious neutrality was invoked against the government as often as by it.

In her own household the interest went further than policy. From 1887 she took lessons in Hindustani from Abdul Karim, a Muslim attendant from Agra, kept journals in the language, and defended his standing against a court that resented him. She also worshipped, when in Scotland, in the Church of Scotland at Crathie, receiving communion there in 1873, which Anglican clergy protested because the Supreme Governor of one established church was communicating in another. The reign therefore holds two things at once: a sovereign at the head of a national church, and a sovereign whose subjects were mostly not in it.