Essential reading for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby Mrs Simpson would be made Duchess of Cornwall on marrying Edward VIII but not made Queen. That was the idea King Edward put to Queen Mary, the widow of George V. She told the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, on December 1, 1936, and he went to see the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, on December 3. The next day, Baldwin told the Commons that there was no such thing in law as a "morganatic marriage," as the King's idea envisaged. On December 5, Edward decided to abdicate, and went through with it on December 10. The archbishop's previous biographer, J G Lockhart, writing in 1949, asserted that Lang "neither influenced, nor tried to influence, the course of events." Now a new biography, by Robert Beaken, shows that this was not true. In summary, Lang was clear that Edward, who had come to the throne on January 20, could not retain it if he married a woman twice divorced whose husbands were still living. The archbishop, in any case, had come to the conclusion that Edward was not fit to be king. Partly this was political: the King had stopped even attending to state papers. Partly it was religious: Lang recoiled from the idea of consecrating "him as King." As he said to his chaplain: "Think of pouring all those sacred words into a vacuum." Dr Beaken has seen papers that former biographers did not. He also knows his way around. Earlier this year a Channel 4 documentary suggested that Lang was behind a letter written by his chaplain to the editor of The Times declaring that the King was "mentally ill." The letter, sent from Windsor Castle, was signed ACD, which the television people said was Alan Campbell Don, Lang's chaplain. In fact, as Dr Beaken shows, it came from Anthony Charles Deane, a canon of St George's, Windsor, and not a mouthpiece for Lang. I am immensely enthusiastic about Robert Beaken's Cosmo Gordon Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (I B Tauris, £25), not just because it combines judgment and pace in telling the story of the Abdication, but because it establishes a vivid and convincing picture of the man at the helm of the Church of England from 1928 to 1942. Dr Beaken, parish priest of Little and Great Bardfield, Essex, makes Lang seem sympathetic by not hiding his weaknesses. Thus he gets past the reaction of one clergyman who exclaimed to him: "I hate Cosmo Lang." Lang's main troubles were loneliness and workaholism. A well-known anecdote has him remarking that a portrait made him look "proud, pompous and prelatical," to which Hensley Henson, the angular Bishop of Durham, responded by asking which epithet he took exception to. Far more enlightening is Lang's judgment on his portrait by William Orpen: "It is a portrait of a very hard-working, very well-meaning, very lonely and very disappointed man." Lang was lonely partly because he never married. Dr Beaken considers the suggestion that Lang was a repressed homosexual. He concludes that he was not. Among his discoveries is that Lang twice proposed to the same woman. He died on the way to see the actress Ann Todd, for whom he had a tendresse. The author does not claim that this proves a robust heterosexuality, but he convincingly shows that Lang's relationships with his chaplains prove nothing to the contrary. Lang was dutiful, disciplined, frugal, ambitious and given to surface irritability (of which he was aware) and to verbal exaggeration. He excelled as a speaker and preacher. He enjoyed the company of important people but never wrote gossip even in private diaries or told risqué stories. He could type but never mastered the use of a fountain pen. He left, Dr Beaken judges, the Church of England stronger than he found it. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, if he has not read this book already, should not delay in doing so.