St Hugh’s Principal, Lady Elish Angiolini will make history by becoming the first Catholic to hold the position of Lord High Commissioner to the 2025 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in May. The announcement follows the lifting of a prohibition on Catholics representing the King at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The Statute received unanimous praise during its readings in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The prohibition dates back to the Stuart-era Claim of Right Act 1689, which barred Catholics from the throne and other public offices. Much of it was repealed in the following years, most notably in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, but some restrictions remained, including for the role of Lord High Commissioner.
Commissioners to the General Assembly, which was first held in 1560, the year of the Scottish Reformation, examine the work and laws of the Church and make decisions that affect its future. The Lord High Commissioner makes opening and closing addresses and carries out a number of official functions throughout the course of the week.
Lady Elish said, “This is an immense honour, and I very much look forward to the General Assembly in May.’
Leader of the House of Lords Baroness Smith of Basildon said: “…Lady Elish’s appointment will be a historic gesture of unity, goodwill and collaboration between the Church of Scotland and the Catholic Church in Scotland, following the St Margaret declaration signed in 2022, as well as a continuing declaration of friendship between the two churches…’
Below is an extract from the House of Lords reading of the Church of Scotland (Lord High Commissioner). Please click here to read the document in its entirety.
“Lord Hope of Craighead (CB):
This amendment could not, of course, have been achieved without the full support of the Church of Scotland, to whose wisdom I wish to pay tribute. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, has reminded us, we do not have to look all that far back into our history to a time when its response might have been very different.
My reason for contributing to this debate is that I had the immense privilege of serving as the Lord High Commissioner on two occasions, in 2015 and 2016. That experience enables me to assure your Lordships that the question as to which denomination of the Christian faith the person belongs is wholly immaterial to his or her ability to perform the duties of that office, so I should like to say just a few words about what the office involves.
The duties of the office will be defined in a commission under His Majesty’s sign manual that Lady Elish will receive when she presents herself at the opening of the General Assembly. It will commission and warrant her to represent His Majesty at the General Assembly as his High Commissioner specially appointed to that office, no more and no less than that. It will authorise her
“to do all and everything belonging to the power and place of a High Commissioner to a General Assembly as fully and freely in all respects as any other in that High Station hath done or might have done in any time heretofore and as We Ourselves might do if Personally present”.
She will, in short, be His Majesty’s personal representative to do what he would have done if he had been there himself.
It will not be her function to participate in the work of the assembly or to perform any religious duties. She will sit high above in the Royal Gallery as an observer, from where her only function will be to deliver two speeches, one at the opening and the other at the closing sederunt. Her opening speech will, as tradition requires, begin by stating that His Majesty the King has commanded her to assure those attending the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland of his great sense of their steady and firm zeal for his service and to assure them on his behalf of his resolution to maintain the Presbyterian Church covenant in Scotland. She will also offer to the incoming moderator warmest congratulations on her appointment and wish her a most happy and successful year in office. Her final speech will end by, in the King’s name, bidding everyone farewell and, in between, she will attend the General Assembly’s morning services throughout the week and a Sunday service in St Giles’ Cathedral, where she will sit in a place of honour as the King’s representative.
Those are the formal requirements. As for the rest, there is an immensely busy programme of ceremonial: of receptions, of lunches and dinners which she must host, and of visits to organisations and places of the kind that His Majesty would have wished to do had he been there. She will travel everywhere in a car with no number plate, with a police escort to speed her through the traffic. She will reside, throughout the week, in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where a large and rather beautiful fountain will always play in the courtyard. A guard of honour will be on parade and the full national anthem will be played whenever she appears at the door of the palace to carry out her duties elsewhere on the King’s behalf.
All good things must come to an end of course. The police escort will have disappeared when she returns to her car at the end of the closing sederunt. When she returns to the palace, she will find, like Cinderella, that the guard of honour has disappeared and the fountain has been turned off. She will then have to use her own car when she drives herself home. But she will have an audience with His Majesty some weeks later, to report to him on her week as his High Commissioner, and there is the possibility that, all being well, she will be invited to do the same next year. For all this, she has my very best wishes.”
