Feeling a vocation to minister to the urban poor, Henson served in the East End of London and Barking before becoming chaplain of a 12th-century hospice in Ilford in 1895.

He was tolerant of a wide range of theological views; because of this some members of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England accused him of heresy and sought unsuccessfully to block his appointment as Bishop of Hereford in 1917.

"[9] The young Henson became a dedicated Christian and felt a vocation for the Anglican priesthood; his father's fundamentalist views were anathema, and left him with what Grimley calls "an enduring hatred of protestant fanaticism".

[16] Henson then found a post as an assistant master at Brigg Grammar School in Lincolnshire; the headmaster there recognised his talent and recommended that he should apply for admission to the University of Oxford.

[19] Such was the quality of Henson's scholarship that his history tutor encouraged him to enter the annual competition for appointment as a fellow of All Souls, the university's post-graduate research college.

Peart-Binns comments, "He knew how to hold an audience in thrall by using language which developed into 'Hensonia' ... Charles Oman, Chichele Professor of Modern History was gripped by Henson's 'extraordinary ability'".

[25] Aware that his quick tongue could lead him into indiscretion, he adopted and maintained all his life the practice of writing out his lectures and sermons in full beforehand rather than improvising or speaking from concise notes.

[26] He preferred a quill pen, and wrote in a fine clear hand; he considered illegible writing to be a form of bad manners as tiresome as inaudible talking.

[4] With his suspicion of nonconformism he was a proponent of the principle of establishment – the maintenance of Anglicanism as the official state religion – and in 1886 he became secretary of the new Oxford Laymen's League for Defence of the National Church, to counter the threat of disestablishment proposed by politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain and Charles Dilke.

[32] In 1887, after being ordained deacon, he took charge of the Oxford House Settlement, a high-church mission in Bethnal Green, a poor area of the East End of London.

[35] Shortly afterwards All Souls appointed him vicar of a church in its gift: St Margaret's, Barking, in east London, a working class parish, with a population of 12,000, and increasing.

"[39] With the energy and impetuosity noted by Lang, Henson worked continually over the next seven years to improve the parish, restoring the fabric of the church, opening clubs for his parishioners, and holding popular open-air services in the vicarage grounds.

[38] St Margaret's, the parish church of the British parliament, was a prominent appointment, bringing him into the public eye; he followed predecessors as willing as he to court controversy including Henry Hart Milman and Frederic Farrar.

[45] His eventual successor as Bishop of Durham, Alwyn Williams wrote that at St Margaret's, Henson's brilliance as a speaker and independence of thought attracted large congregations and "his increasingly liberal churchmanship" appealed to a wide range of public opinion, though some of his views offended the orthodox.

[48] From his pulpit, Henson spoke against the view that ecumenism was, as W. E. Gladstone once called it, "a moral monster", and he criticised schools that failed to provide adequate religious instruction.

[52] During his time at St Margaret's Henson published nine books, some of them collected sermons and lectures, others on theological questions and the role of Christianity in modern society.

[38] A story, probably apocryphal, circulated in 1908 that the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, suggested Henson's name to Edward VII when the see of York became vacant, and the king replied, "Damn it all, man, I am Defender of the Faith!

[58] The five years Henson spent as Dean of Durham were marked by further controversy, including his objection to the existing divorce laws as too favourable to men and unfair to women.

Gore and his ally Bishop Weston of Zanzibar led the charge, and appear in Henson's journal as "devoted, unselfish, indefatigable, eminently gifted, but ... also fanatical in temper, bigoted in their beliefs, and reckless in their methods.

Davidson stated publicly that no fair-minded people could read a series of Henson's sermons without feeling that they had in him a brilliant and powerful teacher of the Christian faith.

[73] Although Henson's elevation was controversial among factions of the clergy – in general lay people supported his appointment – it nevertheless gave fresh impetus to the idea of taking away from prime ministers the power to choose bishops.

[76] He argued from historical examples that appointments made at the Church's instigation were partisan and disastrous, and that the Crown and prime minister were able to take an unbiased view in the national interest.

Ecclesiastically there was potential for friction, as the Dean of Durham, James Welldon, who had once been a diocesan bishop himself,[n 13] was temperamentally and politically at odds with his new superior, and given to publicly expressing views contrary to Henson's.

[92][n 14] Relations between the deanery and Auckland Castle, the bishop's official residence, improved markedly in April 1933 when Cyril Alington, the Head Master of Eton College from 1917 to 1933, succeeded Welldon after the latter's retirement.

[96][n 15] Friction arose from Henson's belief that strikes were morally wrong because of the harm they did to other working people,[98] and he had, in Grimley's words, "a violent, almost obsessional", dislike of trade unions.

[107] Henson's colleague Cyril Garbett wrote that the Commons had "made it plain that the Church does not possess full spiritual freedom to determine its worship".

[110] Together with the suspicions he had started to harbour that a socialist government might misuse ecclesiastical patronage, the Prayer Book debacle turned Henson from a strong proponent of establishment to its best-known critic.

"[114] Henson was critical of one of his clergy, Robert Anderson Jardine of Darlington, for conducting the wedding ceremony in France of the Duke of Windsor to a divorcée, Wallis Simpson, contrary to the doctrine of the Church of England.

[38] Despite what Williams calls the "peculiar interest and vivacity" of the books, his survey of his many campaigns and controversies, seemed to others to be self-justifying and wilfully to deny many changes of stance that he had manifestly made during his career.

[127] A successor as Bishop of Durham, Michael Ramsey, nonetheless considered that Henson's isolation from contemporary fashions had not diminished his influence: "Its secret lay in things far deeper than contemporary fashions: his hold upon the spirit of classical Anglican divinity, his intellectual integrity, and his belief in the power and permanence of that pastoral duty which the Prayer Book lays upon the ministry of the Church".