Justin Welby

Welby's mother, Jane Portal, was the daughter of Iris Butler (1905–2002), a journalist and historian whose brother, Rab Butler, was a Conservative politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Their father was Sir Montagu Butler, Governor of the Central Provinces of British India and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Montagu Butler was the grandson of George Butler, headmaster of Harrow School and Dean of Peterborough; the nephew of educator George Butler (husband of social reformer Josephine Butler) and Henry Montagu Butler, headmaster of Harrow School, Dean of Gloucester and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the grand-nephew of John Colenso, the first Bishop of Natal.

Jane Portal's father was Gervas Portal, a half-brother of the Second World War Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford.

Gervas Portal's mother Rose Leslie Portal née Napier was the granddaughter of General Sir William Napier and his wife, Caroline Amelia Fox.

General Napier and his brothers, General Sir Charles James Napier and General Sir George Thomas Napier (respectively commanders-in-chief of the British armies in India and in the Cape Colony), were sons of George Napier (a sixth-generation descendant, via the Lords Napier, of John Napier, the inventor of logarithms) and his second wife Lady Sarah Lennox.

Caroline Amelia Fox was the daughter of General Henry Edward Fox, younger brother of prominent Whig politician Charles James Fox; they were the sons of politician Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, and his wife Lady Caroline Lennox.

Caroline Lennox and Sarah Lennox were two of the five Lennox sisters, daughters of the 2nd Duke of Richmond, son of Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond, illegitimate son of King Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth.

Shortly before her marriage she had a brief relationship with the private secretary to Churchill, Sir Anthony Montague Browne (1923–2013).

Jane had served as a personal secretary to Sir Winston Churchill from December 1949 until her marriage to Gavin Welby in April 1955.

Gavin Welby stood for Parliament in the 1951 and 1955 general elections as a Conservative candidate.

Welby describes his early childhood as "messy": Gavin and Jane Welby were both alcoholics.

Justin Portal Welby (born 6 January 1956) is a British Anglican bishop who, since 2013, has served as the 105th archbishop of Canterbury.

Welby was previously the vicar of Southam in Warwickshire, and later served as Dean of Liverpool and Bishop of Durham.

As Archbishop of Canterbury he is the Primate of All England and the symbolic head primus inter pares of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Welby was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history and law.

Later in life, he studied for ordination at St John's College, Durham.

Justin Portal Welby was born in Hammersmith, London, England, on 6 January 1956, almost nine months after the marriage of his mother, Jane Gillian Portal (1929–2023), to Gavin Bramhall James Welby (1910–1977).

They divorced in 1959, when Justin was three years old, and he was placed in Gavin Welby's custody.

In 1960 Gavin Welby was engaged to the actress Vanessa Redgrave, who called the engagement off after her mother Lady Redgrave wrote to Vanessa's father, Sir Michael Redgrave, that Gavin Welby was "a real horror ... a pretty rotten piece of work".

Welby was educated at St Peter's School, Seaford, between 1964 and 1968; Eton College; and Trinity College, Cambridge, where his great-uncle, Lord Butler of Saffron Walden, was then master.

Welby's mother stopped drinking in 1968, and in 1975 married Charles Williams, a business executive and first-class cricketer 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".

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.

Gavin Welby died in 1977 of alcohol-related causes.

He graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and law; according to custom, he was later promoted to Master of Arts by seniority.

After several parochial appointments, he became Dean of Liverpool in 2007 and Bishop of Durham in 2011, serving in the latter role for just over a year.

Welby's theology is seen as representing the "open evangelical" tradition within Anglicanism.

He worked in business before his ordination, and some of his publications explore the relationship between finance and religion; as a member of the House of Lords, he sat on the panel of the 2012 Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards.

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."

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.

Welby believed that Gavin Welby was his biological father until paternity testing in 2016 showed that he was Browne's son.

Gavin Welby, born Bernard Gavin Weiler in Ruislip, Middlesex, was the son of Bernard Weiler, a German-Jewish immigrant and importer of luxury items who changed the family name to Welby shortly after the First World War broke out.