Justin Welby
Justin Portal Welby is a retired Anglican bishop who served as the 105th archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England from 2013 to 2025.
After an 11-year career in the oil industry, Welby trained for ordination at St John's College, Durham. He served in a number of parish churches before becoming dean of Liverpool in 2007 and bishop of Durham in 2011, serving in the latter role for just over a year before succeeding Rowan Williams as archbishop of Canterbury in February 2013.
As archbishop, Welby officiated at a number of notable events, including the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the state funeral of Elizabeth II, and the coronation of Charles III and Camilla. His tenure coincided with the ordination of the Church of England's first female bishop and the blessings for same-sex unions. Welby's theology is seen as representing the "open evangelical" tradition within Anglicanism. He has said that the Benedictine and Franciscan orders in the Anglican churches, along with Catholic social teaching, have influenced his spiritual formation.
Welby resigned as archbishop in January 2025, following the publication of a report into the Church of England's handling of allegations of abuse committed by the barrister John Smyth that criticised Welby's failure to investigate the allegations.
Family and early life
Welby was born at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in Hammersmith, London, on 6 January 1956, almost nine months after the marriage of his mother, Jane Gillian Portal, to Gavin Bramhall James Welby.Childhood and paternity
Welby's mother, Jane, was Sir Winston Churchill's personal secretary from December 1949 until her marriage to Gavin Welby in April 1955. Shortly before her marriage she had a brief relationship with Churchill's private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne. For 60 years Welby believed that Gavin Welby was his biological father until a paternity test in 2016 showed that he was Browne's son.Gavin Welby was the son of Bernard Weiler, a German-Jewish immigrant and importer of luxury items who changed the family name to Welby during the First World War. He stood for Parliament as a Conservative candidate in the 1951 and 1955 general elections.
Welby has described his early childhood as "messy". Gavin and Jane Welby, who were both alcoholics, divorced in 1959 when he was three years old, and he was placed in Gavin's custody. In 1960, Gavin became engaged to the actress Vanessa Redgrave. Vanessa's mother, Rachel Kempson, described him as "a real horror" and "a pretty rotten piece of work", and expressed relief when Vanessa called the engagement off. She was more complimentary about the young Justin, writing, " child is angelic. We all loved him." Gavin died in 1977 of alcohol-related causes.
Jane stopped drinking in 1968, and in 1975 married Charles Williams, a business executive and first-class cricket player who was made a life peer in 1985. Williams was the nephew of Elizabeth Laura Gurney, a member of the Gurney family of Norwich who were prominent Quakers and social reformers, and was remembered by Welby as being a supportive step-father. Commenting on his mother's death in 2023, Welby said that it had been "a privilege to be her son".
Extended family
In 2024, Welby released a personal statement revealing that, through his biological father, Anthony Montague Browne, he was the great-great-great-grandson of Sir James Fergusson, 4th baronet, who owned slaves on his plantation in Jamaica and received compensation from the British Government in 1837 following the abolition of slavery. Through his biological father, Welby is also descended from Admiral Adam Duncan and Robert Stewart, the illegitimate son of King James V of Scotland.Welby's maternal grandmother was the journalist and historian Iris Butler, whose brother Rab was chancellor of the exchequer, home secretary, deputy prime minister and foreign secretary during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as master of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Welby later studied. Iris and Rab's father was Sir Montagu Butler, governor of the Central Provinces of British India and master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Sir Montagu was the grandson of George Butler, headmaster of Harrow School and dean of Peterborough, and the nephew of the educator George Butler and of Henry Montagu Butler, headmaster of Harrow School, dean of Gloucester and master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Sir Montagu was also the grand-nephew of John Colenso, the first bishop of Natal.
Welby's maternal grandfather was Gervas Portal, a half-brother of Charles Portal, who served as Chief of the Air Staff during the Second World War. Gervas Portal's mother, Rose Leslie Portal, was the granddaughter of General Sir William Napier and Caroline Amelia Fox. General Napier and his brothers Charles and George were the sons of Sir George Napier and Lady Sarah Lennox. Caroline Amelia Fox was the daughter of General Henry Edward Fox, younger brother of prominent Whig politician Charles James Fox, sons of the politician Henry Fox and Caroline Lennox. Caroline and Sarah Lennox were two of the five Lennox sisters, who were daughters of Charles Lennox, 2nd duke of Richmond, and granddaughters of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kérouaille, duchess of Portsmouth.
Education
Welby was educated at St Peter's School, Seaford, between 1964 and 1968, and later at Eton College. He continued his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his great-uncle, Rab Butler, was the master. Welby graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and law and, according to custom, was later promoted to Master of Arts by seniority.In a 2013 interview with The Daily Telegraph, Welby related his conversion experience when he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. He said that, while he was at Eton, he had "vaguely assumed there was a God. But I didn't believe. I wasn't interested at all." However, during the evening of 12 October 1975 in Cambridge, praying with a Christian friend, Welby said that he suddenly felt "a clear sense of something changing, the presence of something that had not been there before in my life". He said to his friend, "Please don't tell anyone about this." Welby said that he was desperately embarrassed that this had happened to him. In a 2014 interview, Welby said that his conversion had come when his friend had taken him to an "evangelistic address" which he found to be poor. After this, his friend "simply explained the Gospels" to him. Welby said that from that point onwards he "knew the presence of God". He has since said that his time at Cambridge was a major moment of self-realisation in his life.
He has said that at the age of 19, he began speaking in tongues.
Career in the oil industry
Welby worked for eleven years in the oil industry, five of them for the French oil company Elf Aquitaine based in Paris. In 1984 he became treasurer of the oil exploration group Enterprise Oil plc in London, where he was mainly concerned with West African and North Sea oil projects, and spent part of his career in Nigeria. He retired from his executive position in 1989 and said that he sensed a calling from God to be ordained.Ordination and church ministry
Welby was at first rejected for ordination by John Hughes, the bishop of Kensington, who told him "There is no place for you in the Church of England".He was subsequently accepted for ordination, with the support of the vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton, Sandy Millar. Throughout his ministry Welby has been linked to the charismatic evangelical wing of the Church of England associated with Holy Trinity Brompton, and in a 2019 interview said "In my own prayer life, and as part of my daily discipline, I pray in tongues every day".
From 1989 to 1992, Welby studied theology and trained for the priesthood at Cranmer Hall and St John's College, Durham, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Diploma in Ministry in 1992. He was ordained a deacon at Petertide 1992 and a priest the next Petertide, both times by Simon Barrington-Ward, bishop of Coventry, at Coventry Cathedral. He then became a curate at Chilvers Coton and St Mary the Virgin, Astley from 1992 to 1995. He then became rector of St James' Church, Southam, and later vicar of St Michael and All Angels, Ufton, diocese of Coventry, from 1995 to 2002.
In 2002, Welby was appointed a canon residentiary of Coventry Cathedral and the co-director for international ministry at the International Centre for Reconciliation. In 2005, he was appointed sub-dean and canon for Reconciliation Ministry.
Welby was appointed dean of Liverpool in December 2007 and was installed at Liverpool Cathedral on 8 December 2007.
Views on business ethics
Welby has written widely on ethics and on finance, featuring in books such as Managing the Church?: Order and Organisation in a Secular Age and Explorations in Financial Ethics. Welby's dissertation, an exploration into whether companies can sin, marks his point that the structure of a system can "make it easier to make the right choice or the wrong choice". His dissertation led to the publication of a booklet entitled Can Companies Sin?: "Whether", "How" and "Who" in Company Accountability, which was published by Grove Books in 1992.After joining the House of Lords as a bishop, Welby was asked to join the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards in 2012.
In July 2013, following the report of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, Welby explained that senior bank executives avoided being given information about difficult issues to allow them to "plead ignorance". He also said he would possibly have behaved in the same way, and warned against punishing by naming and shaming individual bankers which he compared to the behaviour of a lynch mob.
High-interest lending
In July 2013, Welby spoke out against payday lending sites and met with Errol Damelin, chief executive of Wonga. Welby pledged that the Church of England would support credit unions as society needs to "provide an alternative" to the "very, very costly forms of finance" that payday lending services represent. He noted that he did not want to make legal payday lending illegal, as this would leave people with no alternative to using criminal loan sharks.Shortly after this well-publicised intervention in the public debate, it emerged that the Church of England's pension fund had invested money in Accel Partners, a venture capital firm that had invested in Wonga. This led to accusations of hypocrisy, and Welby said that the investment was "very embarrassing" for the church. Welby and the Church's Ethical Investment Advisory Group were unaware of their investment in Wonga.
Welby also said that the Ethical Investment Advisory Group ought to reconsider rules which allow investment in companies that make up to 25% of their income from gambling, alcohol or high-interest lending.