“There was a point in the service when the coronation had taken place, and we went behind the altar for two minutes before we came out for the communion,” says the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Paul Butler, sitting in his functional office in Auckland Castle while reliving the pomp, the glory, the gold and the splendour of a historic day in Westminster Abbey, “and as we walked through, I was holding the sceptre – the sceptre! – and I thought how did I ever come to hold this?
“Then, one of the king’s equerries said: ‘Sir, we are exactly on time, it has gone exactly as it should’.
“The king just looked at all of us and whispered ‘well done’.
“It was a great moment. There was still more to go, but the king and queen had been crowned.
“It had happened.”
At the coronation of King Charles III that wet day last May, convention dating back to Richard I in 1189 decreed that Durham should be one of two “bishops assistant” beside the monarch on every step of the service as it was beamed around the world.
“Later that evening at the hotel, I was so hungry, all I needed was a pint, we went down to the bar where there were big screens replaying the coronation,” he says, “and everyone was looking round at me and whispering…”
The global spotlight of the coronation is atypical of the 10 years Mr Butler has spent as the fourth most senior bishop in the Church of England grappling out of the headlines with unglamorous issues including child poverty, refugees, asylum seekers, and abuse within the church, while also walking in the footsteps of the northern saints.
Now 68, he held his last service in Durham cathedral at the end of January, made his last speech in the House of Lords last week (about poverty reduction), and officially retired on Thursday, having taken over from Justin Welby in 2013.
“I’ve had no career path,” he says. “I never expected to be in any senior position, I wasn’t the right material, a bit too rebellious in the way I did things, so it was a genuine shock when I was asked to become a bishop.”
Unlike his wife Rosemary, whose family had been pioneering missionaries in Nigeria and Brazil, he came from “a classic Church of England” background where his parents only went to church at Easter and Christmas, but he remembers being at school Christian Union camp when he was 14.
“I knew I had to make a decision about Jesus and the Christian faith and I made a personal commitment to follow Jesus that summer,” he says. “No flashing lights, no warming heart, but I knew this was serious and for life.”
His early work with the church in London was with children, work which saw him travel to Russia and Africa, but with four young children of his own, he had to settle down as a vicar, in Walthamstow. He became Bishop of Southampton in 2004 followed by Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham in 2010 – “we thought that was it, and we’d planned 10 years of walks around Nottingham” – but then came the call to Durham, where children were again one of his priorities.
“The sad thing is that in my tenure the percentage of children living in poverty has grown and not diminished,” he says.
He told the House of Lords last week that 134,000 children now live in poverty in the North East mayoral area, an increase of seven per cent in seven years, and he pointed out that work is not a guaranteed route out of poverty.
“The reality of child poverty is the vast bulk of people aren’t scrounging, they are working, sometimes taking a second or third job - which isn’t great for the children,” he says.
He has campaigned against the two child limit on Universal Credit – where if you have more than two children you do not qualify for additional benefits – which he says “is the biggest driver of the growth in child poverty”.
“We’ve had a triple lock on pensions for the older generation for some time and there’s a cross party agreement to honour and respect the older generation, why don’t we have a similar commitment to the children of the nation?” he asks. “They’d have enough income, decent housing, be well fed and properly clothed, but also respected, not subject to online abuse.
“It would be a social compact by the nation for the raising of children, knowing that they would develop into committed citizens.”
His advocacy of children led to him being the lead bishop on abuse within the church.
“It was a very painful role because the stark reality is that the Church of England failed to deal with child abusers properly for a long period, and that was also true in society as a whole,” he says. As well as helping survivors, he has helped the church introduce good practice.
“For all we don’t get everything right, particularly in handling survivors, I do think we are in a much, much better place for day-to-day safeguarding,” he says.
Since the early 1980s, he has had a deep interest in Rwanda, where he was made an honorary canon at Byumba cathedral in 2001 and where he runs a charity.
“I was back there last summer on my 20th visit, so I’ve watched Rwanda utterly transform under President Paul Kagame,” he says. “It is an economic miracle, but still at heart it is a nation of small villages where poor people live off the land.”
He has been drawn into the debate about the Government’s controversial policy to send illegal migrants to Rwanda. He doesn’t believe Britain should be “off-shoring” its obligations in this way, and has serious concerns about how Rwanda will be able to support all the newcomers.
“In raising these questions, I don’t want people to think badly of Rwanda because I don’t, I love it, it is close to my heart and the transformation has been phenomenal, but I’m not convinced it will work and I’m afraid the human traffickers will only move there,” he says.
The situation in the Middle East also deeply concerns him. He understands Israel’s need to respond to “the horrors of October 7” and to rescue its hostages, but asks: “If I was a family who had grown up in Gaza, who didn’t like Hamas, how would I now feel about how we had been treated as a people?”
He continues: “When I was training back in the 1980s, we were writing essays about the nuclear bomb and the ethics of mutually assured destruction. Since then, we’ve been through a period where it felt like the world had recognised this was stupid and we were not on the brink, but now genuinely feels like the unsafest time in my adult life, not for living in Britain but for the world as a whole: as well as the Middle East, there’s Ukraine, horrors in Sudan, Venezuela, it is very unnerving…”
On a more parochial level, as a keen walker, he has been involved in the creation of the Northern Saints trails, which are six routes of ancient pilgrimages through the diocese’s beautiful countryside that are becoming tourist attractions in their own right.
“It has been an extraordinary time to be a resident of Bishop Auckland, chairing the Brighter Bishop Board, and in the next couple of years the transformational stuff will become obvious,” he says. “It is extraordinary: Bishop Auckland now has two world class art museums, it has one of the most extraordinary of castles or royal palaces, it has the only faith museum in the country, and it has Kynren with 1,000 volunteers – just brilliant.”
A retiring bishop is not allowed to remain on the patch, so he and Rosemary are moving to Newark-on-Trent.
“We sense that this is the next stage of our call to serve God but what it will look like, I don’t know, although it will be a complete shock if I am not involved with children and young people and refugees and asylum seekers in some capacity,” he says.
Having rubbed shoulders with kings at coronations and spoken to lords in the House, it is the ordinary grassroots people in Durham who work in their own communities that he will remember the most.
“It has been 10 years of enormous privilege that has been very challenging, partly because of Covid and it hasn’t been an easy time for the Church of England as a whole, but we depart with loads of happy memories of working with wonderful people,” he says.
“The amazing people are the ordinary people who live in their communities and do their jobs and serve in the foodbank, support the asylum seeker, serve their local school as assistants or governors. They are the heroes and heroines of the North East just as we remember the miners, shipbuilders and steelworkers of the past, they are the people who are doing it now.
“They are stunning. They are wonderful and I shall miss them.”
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