Theology students at Cambridge in the 1980s remember their lecturer and tutor Rowan Williams, now 58, as a deeply spiritual, holy and compassionate man. They also remember the hostility with which he was viewed by the growing number of evangelicals gaining admission to one of the nation's two top seats of learning.

The battles played out among Christian students in the sanctums of Cambridge colleges mirror the war being waged today in the Anglican Communion. Dr Williams left academia, by all accounts reluctantly, as none could match him for intellect and spirituality in the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge.

He went to Wales, first as Bishop of Monmouth, then Archbishop of the province, his home country but also a see that fitted perfectly his increasingly liberal Anglo-Catholicism.

Deborah Pitt, a psychiatrist in Wales, wrote twice to him about homosexuality, describing his own intellectual journey on the issue. “Until about 1980, I fully shared the traditional ethical understanding of homosexuality as a condition of (at best) some sort of ‘privation’, the practice of which was strictly forbidden to Christians by Scripture and tradition,” he wrote.

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The Archbishop inclined away from treating it as a sin or a sickness

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His letters were written in 2000 and 2001. Three years earlier, he was considered for Bishop of Southwark. His name was about to be submitted to the Prime Minister when Lord Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, summoned him to Lambeth and quizzed him about his writings on sexuality.

Lord Carey is said to have asked if he would sign up to the Church of England bishops' statement, Issues in Human Sexuality, a notorious document that permits active gay relationships for laity but bans them for clergy. Dr Williams said he could not. He agreed, under pressure from Lord Carey, to withdraw from Southwark. Lord Carey, whose preferred successor at Canterbury was Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, was furious when Dr Williams was appointed instead.

Tony Blair was said to be equally angry that Dr Williams had lost Southwark and was keen to have him at Canterbury.

Amid this web of loyalties, the internally conflicted views of Dr Williams himself became lost. He was assumed to be a liberal on sexuality. Little account was taken of his conservative view of leadership, requiring him to put church unity before his own views.

His letters to Dr Pitt, before he was appointed to Canterbury but after the Southwark debacle, show how he was already working out how to reconcile his private theological view with his public persona.

But for liberals in the late 1990s, Dr Williams was the great Welsh hope who would turn back the clock on the famous Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, that reinforced the strictly Biblical line that all gay sex was wrong. They drew their confidence from the foreword he wrote in 1988 to the book, Speaking Love's Name, when he argued strongly for the liberal position. The next year, in his essay The Body's Grace, Dr Williams continued the liberal theme.

He argued: “If we are looking for a sexual ethic that can be seriously informed by our Bible, there is a good deal to steer us away from assuming that reproductive sex is a norm, however important and theologically significant it may be ... in a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts, or on a problematic and non-scriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.”

It was in the midst of the liberal versus conservative warfare over homosexuality at Lambeth ten years ago, that the lobbying to have Dr Williams succeed George Carey as Archbishop began in earnest.

Dr Williams, nearly always in the black shirts of his Anglo-Catholic brethren rather than liberal pink or evangelical bluish-purple, seemed a willing object of this discreet and very Anglican campaign. Observers reckoned just one other English bishop, another favourite for Canterbury, managed to get to as many parties.

Amid the charged atmosphere his name was leaked to The Times as the first choice of the Crown Appointments Commission, before the future Archbishop himself knew. The resulting fracas left him uncertain as to whether he should take the job. He was persuaded to accept by a senior bishop who believed that only he had the political and theological skills to hold the Anglican Communion together.

A year after his enthronement, the Bishop of Oxford nominated the celibate but openly-gay cleric Jeffrey John as his suffragan in Reading. Dr Williams at first approved the appointment. The subsequent furore among evangelicals in Oxford led to the establishment of Anglican Mainstream, now a key player in evangelical politics of the Global South conservative provinces.

Mainstream lobbied hard against Dr John and the Archbishop bowed to the pressure, persuading him to withdraw in a fraught meeting at Lambeth Palace. Afterwards he knelt before the man whose pro-gay essay Permanent, Faithful, Stable was such an influence on his own liberal views, and asked for his blessing.

Dr John was subsequently appointed Dean of St Albans. The liberal lobby has struggled to forgive Dr Williams for what is still regarded as a betrayal. But he was vindicated when the Episcopal Church elected and consecrated Gene Robinson in 2003, and the diocese of New Westminster in Canada authorised same-sex blessings. The consequence was the “tear in the fabric” of the Anglican Communion his advisers had warned of.

The consequences still reverberate around the Communion. Conservative bishops of Africa and Asia now meet regularly; evangelicals from the Global South, the US and Britain have set up the Global Anglican Future Conference as a rival Lambeth Conference with a strategy of takeover from within.

There is speculation that the Episcopal Church in the US might be prepared to secede from the Communion in order to pursue an agenda that a majority of bishops, clergy and laity believe is the only credible way forward.

The latest moves were played out at the Lambeth Conference. Dr Williams repeatedly made clear that there could be no going back on the strictly Biblical line against gay sex. In his final press conference, elated at having avoided an explosive schism, he appeared to lay blame for the rifts at the door of the liberals of the US.

And in the end, a question mark hangs over whether it will all have been worth it. For conservatives, there can be no compromise on an issue that has become the touchstone of orthodoxy. It is possible that history will recognise the two wings of Anglicanism are as irreconcilable as, in the end, Dr Williams's own divided heart.

ACADEMICS WHO INFLUENCED HIM:

JEFFREY JOHN: Liberal thinker from South Wales

Like Rowan Williams, Jeffrey John is from South Wales and his liberal Catholicism is similar in many respects to that of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr John inspires similar loyalty among those who have experienced his teaching and pastoral ministry. He also provokes hostility among those who find his views on gay sex unacceptable.

Dr Williams names Dr John's essay Permanent, Faithful, Stable as an influence on him in liberalising his views on this issue. In the pamphlet, first published in 1993 and again in 2000, Dr John presents a powerful argument for the blessing of gay relationships by the Church, provided that they are like Christian marriage in terms of convenanted fidelity.

Along with Dr Williams, in 1990 he founded Affirming Catholicism, a movement to bring about liberal reforms in line with traditional theology in the Church of England.

After his abortive appointment as Bishop of Reading in 2003, he was made Dean of St Albans, where he inspires passionate loyalty among members of the cathedral congregation, many of whom remain outraged at the humiliation he suffered when persuaded by Dr Williams to withdraw from Reading.

PETER COLEMAN: Pilot through the stormy waters

The second academic to influence Rowan Williams's liberal views is Peter Coleman. In 1980 his book Christian Attitudes to Homosexuality examined from an objective viewpoint the biblical, legal and other arguments for and against homosexuality. In 1989 Gay Christians - a Moral Dilemma continued to explore the arguments for and against gay relationships.

Coleman, a former Bishop Suffragan of Crediton, who was killed in a car accident aged 73 in 2002, was active on the Church of England's General Synod, where he achieved a reputation as one of the nicest and most genuinely intellectual men in the Church.He was typical of the Anglican gentlemen bishops of his generation, as epitomised by Archbishop Robert Runcie. He was even married to an Austrian princess. His was the era when many believed that God was dead and the Church soon would be. Several bishops - although not him - saw themselves as being in the business of managing decline. He and others of his time would be astonished by the revival of religious debate at the start of the 21st century. His death was a tragedy, not least because he was one of the few men who could advise Dr Williams on how to steer the Church through the present stormy waters.