The Archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual leader and senior clergyman of the Church of England, recognized by convention as the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The incumbent is Dr. Rowan Williams.
Williams is the 104th in the list of Archbishops of Canterbury, a line stretching back more than 1400 years to Saint Augustine of Canterbury, who founded the see, the oldest in England, in the year 597. Along with the Church of England as a whole, these archbishops were Roman Catholic until the English Reformation, around 1534, when the independence of the English Church was established.
Since the twentieth century, the appointment of Archbishops of Canterbury conventionally alternates between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals.