The Church of England confirmed the election of Dame Sarah Mullally DBE as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury at a service in St Paul's Cathedral, London, on January 28, 2026. With that confirmation, the former Bishop of London legally assumed the office — the first woman to hold it in a lineage reaching back to St Augustine's mission in 597.
The ceremony is the constitutional hinge of the appointment, and it is quieter than the pageantry that will follow. Mullally's name was put forward by the Crown Nominations Commission, a body of up to twenty members that sifts consultation, interview and prayer, and King Charles III approved the nomination on October 3, 2025, per the UK government's announcement. Until the confirmation in St Paul's she remained the Bishop of London; after it, she was Archbishop of Canterbury — the point at which law, not liturgy, changed her title. At the service she took up the Primatial Cross, the emblem of her new office, per the announcement by the Archbishop of Canterbury's office.
The see had stood vacant since Justin Welby stood down after the publication of the Makin review in November 2024 into the failure to stop abuse by the lawyer John Smyth. Mullally's own tenure as Bishop of London, the diocese in which she had been installed at the same cathedral, made her a familiar figure in the church's leadership; before ordination she was a nurse who served as Chief Nursing Officer for England.
The Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury traces its authority through a double inheritance: spiritual primacy among the churches of the Anglican Communion worldwide and a place within the English establishment that runs through the Prime Minister's office to the Crown. The confirmation service compresses that inheritance into a single legal act, which is why it happens in London, in the church of the diocese she was leaving, rather than in Kent.
The symbolic half of the transition was scheduled for March 25, 2026 — the Feast of the Annunciation — when Mullally was due to be enthroned in Canterbury Cathedral's Quire Cathedra and in the ancient chair of St Augustine as Primate of All England, per the Church of England's published arrangements.
For readers who track institutions, the January 28 service matters as the first unambiguous answer to a question the Church of England had never before faced. A woman now leads the see of Canterbury in law; what follows, in dioceses and primates' meetings across a communion that does not everywhere ordain women to the episcopate, will be worked out in the months and years ahead.
For more context, read First Woman Installed as Archbishop of Canterbury.
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