The Bishop of Winchester is ex officio a Lord Spiritual of the Westminster Parliament, one of five clerics (specifically certain prelates) of the Church of England with such automatic entitlement.

Williams also "stepped back" and Debbie Sellin (then-Bishop of Southampton) served as acting diocesan bishop.

This Wessex diocese not only covered most of Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Surrey, Berkshire, parts of Oxfordshire and Wiltshire but for the first few decades three more south-western counties mentioned below.

Around 704–705, Aldhelm saw the four south-west peninsular counties of England, save for Cornwall, form the Diocese of Sherborne.

[8] Winchester shed north-western lands in AD 909 such that Wiltshire and Berkshire and the parts of Oxfordshire formed the See of Ramsbury.

During the Middle Ages, the rump diocese left of all areas appertaining to Hampshire and Surrey before those counties shrank was one of the wealthiest English sees, owning for instance the rectories (the feudal landlord's interest in farms, fisheries, mills and great or small tithes) of many churches in its former, greater area and even in Norman France.

Amid the English Reformation, the 1530s the diocese faced low compensation for the confiscation of its accumulated wealth and monastic feudal dues and lands in the Dissolution of the monasteries such as, principally, the pensioning of abbots and friars and in some cases granting of the rectories to the incumbent priests.

[9] Later the diocese found it difficult to prevent unlawful, nefarious subletting of some of its buildings, for morally dubious purposes such as connected with the numerous British Empire wharves involved in the slave trade often due to the distance, physically and legally from the perpetrators in ownership/operating structure of diocesan clergy and administrators as chief landlords.

In the early 19th century office holders lobbied hard with other bishops to bring to an end the trade in the House of Lords, through its missionaries, and in the messages preached across the diocese itself.

The transfer was later confirmed by a letter from Elizabeth I and an order in council dated 11 March 1569 which expressly perpetually united the islands with the diocese and, for avoidance of doubt, the bishop, which remains the law.

Willmott was previously Bishop of Basingstoke, a suffragan see of the Winchester diocese, and in that capacity was familiar with the islands' preferences.