This article focuses on the role of private patronage within the Church of England. Private patrons own advowsons. These property rights can no longer be traded but may still be bequeathed or transferred without value. When there is a vacancy in a benefice, a patron has the right to nominate a new incumbent in accordance with the Patronage (Benefices) Measure 1986. This article uses contemporary and historical records to define private patronage and analyse the current role of the four broad categories of private patrons: private individuals, educational bodies, guilds and patronage societies. While acknowledging the benefits that patronage can bring, this article advocates substantive reform for the future including a sunset rule for private individual patronage. The article suggests that reform of the law of private patronage will make a positive contribution to other contemporary issues before the Church by promoting diversity in vocations, facilitating necessary pastoral reorganisation and adding to the dialogue about the future of the parish system.

Women's ordination raised issues of conscience across church traditions. The Church of England's statutory legal framework prevented these issues being confined to the Church; they were also played out in parliamentary debate. The interface between law and conscience has, however, considerable historical and contemporary resonance, as well as sound theological pedigree. This article therefore considers the place of conscience in legal and philosophical thought before the Enlightenment. It looks at norms of conscience in Roman Catholic and Church of England liturgical use. On a broader canvas, it looks at the interplay between thought, conscience and religion in human rights case law. The article suggests that a consensus of thought which sees the dictates of conscience as founded in, and inseparable from, the teachings of religion begins to break down in the early seventeenth century. Yet human rights courts find themselves deciding cases of conscience or religion where conscience and religion are often intertwined and where the external manifestation of one is governed by the inner promptings of the other. Such difficulties are not limited to the human rights courts but also play out in debates pertaining to ordination. While the North American churches sought to deal with issues of conscience head on, the Church of England very carefully avoided the language of conscience in its early discussions of women's ordination, conscious, it seems, of a lack of consensus around its meaning and source. As the women's ordination debates developed, arguments of conscience were often deployed more by those opposed to the move than those who supported it. Conscience became as much the locus of pain caused by another's action as it was an inner faculty for self-guidance. Its valence shifted from an intellectual to an emotional category.

The process of Church–State separation began 90 years before the 1919 Enabling Act, which gave the Church Assembly legislative powers. The Assembly was conceived not by William Temple's Life and Liberty movement but by aristocratic Conservative politicians, motivated by practical efficiency and High Church principles. With Church lawyers, they dominated it for 40 years. The Church's response to Parliament's rejection of the 1928 Prayer Book, to the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 and, in the 1950s, to the impossibility of fully articulating in the Church of England's canon law its doctrine on marriage discipline and the seal of the confessional, was united, confident and defiant. The Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974 largely completed efforts to achieve legislative autonomy without disestablishment. The General Synod era has seen changes in both Church and State. The traditions that eclipsed the Church's former ‘Centre-High’ consensus have been less concerned to underline the Church's distinctive identity and doctrines, about which the Synod has been less united. Among MPs, Conservative High Churchmanship and concern for minorities have waned, while expectation that the Church's practice will reflect contemporary social attitudes has increased, placing the long-term survival of the 1919 settlement in question.

Liberal modernity and its associated individualism have created conditions in which a case for an established Church appears to contradict all the principles of social diversity. But the characteristic mechanisms of liberal modernity for managing difference – the ballot and the market – have proved inadequate to prevent social divisions from deepening, as the national argument about Brexit demonstrates. Despite the Church of England's lack of a confident narrative of establishment and the tendency to evaluate establishment on pragmatic grounds, this article proposes that a robust theological defence of establishment can be made in terms of both Anglican ecclesiology and a theology of power and authority in which the highest sources of authority are those with the least power. Whether the Church of England is able to regain confidence in such a theology of establishment and rise to the challenge of generating a unifying national narrative of identity post-Brexit, is left as an open question.

I am grateful to the Society for the opportunity to mark the centenary of the Enabling Act and the beginning of the Church Assembly with some reflection on an often ignored but highly valuable feature of that inauguration: the Single Transferable Vote or STV. I tried on one respected registrar recently an illustration of what the task must be like for those who do not welcome it. Was it, I suggested, like a blind person doing a jigsaw where the pieces were all shaped differently from each other – in other words, where the blind person could ensure that it was put together accurately, but on the other hand never saw the picture? The response was that that picture reflected accurately how it had in fact felt to that registrar. That might suggest that this lecture should be explaining and commending STV as general good practice, but in the event the process and virtues of STV have here to be largely taken for granted. I offer here one short commendation of STV.

The Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration Etc.) Bill, originally introduced by Tim Loughton MP as a private Member's bill in the Commons, received Royal Assent on 26 March and came into force two months after it was passed. Section 1 empowers the Secretary of State to amend by regulations the Marriage Act 1949 to provide for a central register of marriages in England and Wales ‘which is accessible in electronic form’. Section 2 requires the Secretary of State to amend the Civil Partnership Act 2004 so that opposite-sex couples become eligible to form a civil partnership in England and Wales – and the amending regulations must be in force no later than 31 December 2019. Section 3 requires the Secretary of State to report on whether the law should be changed to allow the registration of pregnancy losses which cannot be registered as stillbirths under the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 and section 4 requires the Secretary of State to make arrangements for the preparation of a report on whether, and if so how, the law should be changed to enable or require coroners to investigate stillbirths.