The Right Reverend Lord Runcie, who died on July 12th aged 78, presided over the Church of England at the time when its internal tensions were exacerbated by the debate over whether it should ordain women to the priesthood and over the Anglican Communion when its cohesion was being strained not just by the presence of women priests but by the imminent prospect of women bishops.
In all this he was able to ensure that Anglicanism both at home and abroad did not disintegrate into mutually hostile factions. Like three of his six predecessors this last century as Archbishop of Canterbury, he did not come from a Church of England background.
His father, a Scot who became chief electrical engineer at the Liverpool sugar refiners Tate and Lyle, had a Presbyterian upbringing which left him with little sympathy for the church or its clergy.
As a child Robert Runcie attended the local Methodist Sunday school in Crosby, the suburb of Liverpool where he grew up, but he owed his introduction to the Church of England to his eldest sister, who had become a church-going Anglo-Catholic under the influence of her headmistress.
From grammar school he won a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, where his studies were interrupted by the war. He served as a tank commander in the Scots Guards, and was awarded the Military Cross for rescuing one of his men from a burning tank and for taking his three tanks into the open to knock out a German anti-tank gun that was holding up the Allied advance through the Netherlands.
Back at Oxford he gained a first in Greats. After training for the priesthood at Westcott House, Cambridge, he served three years as a curate in Newcastle-upon-Tyne before returning to Cambridge, first as chaplain at Westcott House, and then as dean at Trinity Hall, where he married the senior fellow's daughter, Rosalind Turner, who - as the wife of a bishop, and later, archbishop - continued her own career as a distinguished piano teacher.
In 1961 he was appointed principal of Cuddesdon, another Anglo-Catholic theological college. In 1970 Robert Runcie was appointed Bishop of St Albans. He was entrusted with leading the Church of England's dialogue with the Orthodox Churches.
Ten years later he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, in which role his gifts for achieving consensus faced their severest challenge.
An Archbishop of Canterbury may be Primate of All England and head of the Anglican Communion, but he has practically no power.
In all his roles he can exhort and persuade, but he cannot command in the way a Roman Catholic bishop may, for example.
During his primacy the Church of England began the contentious process of legislating to allow the ordination of women priests.
Initially, when the matter came before the general synod in 1984, Runcie favoured a policy of gradualism and voted against the motion the synod adopted calling for the preparation of legislation to allow women priests.
But he changed his mind, and had come round to the view that women should be ordained when the women priests measure began its long passage through the synod in 1988.
The final vote, on November 11th 1992, took place the year after he retired.
Robert Runcie's diplomatic skills were also in demand at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, when the Anglican Communion was in danger of tearing itself apart over the threat to its cohesion posed by the imminent appointment of the first women bishops.
That it did not, and that women bishops were able to attend the 1998 Lambeth Conference, was a tribute both to his chairmanship and to the conciliatory work of Dr Robin Eames, Archbishop of Armagh, who chaired the commission set up by Lambeth 1988 to work out how autonomous churches with women bishops and those without could nevertheless remain in communion with each other. His great gift was his sense of humour coupled with a fluent wit, which made him a brilliant after-dinner speaker.
Indeed, his college magazine, The Brazen Nose, in recording his appointment to Canterbury recalled the "brilliant speech" he had given to the Brasenose Society dinner just two months earlier and commented: "If archbishops were chosen solely on their ability to make dessert amusing, one could confidently have predicted his elevation at that time."
Nor had that speech been merely frivolous: it concerned "the apophatic way", whereby we come to know God by defining what He is not. He could also be gloriously indiscreet, as in his conversations with Humphrey Carpenter - for the latter's biography which he would have preferred published only after his death.
Among other things he revealed that he had ordained to the priesthood men he suspected of being active homosexuals, though in the case of the Rev Richard Kirker, secretary of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, the latter's forthright support of gay rights proved too much for the then Bishop of St Albans and Mr Kirker never advanced beyond the deaconate to which he had already ordained him.
Dr Robert Runcie: born 1921; died, July 2000