During 10 years as Bishop of London, the third most senior see in the Church of England, he proved a controversial figure because of his strong conservative views on most aspects of faith, morals and Church order at a time when there were proposals for many changes in all Churches. With considerable skill in the realm of Church politics, he also led an effective assault in the House of Lords on the 1988 Education Reform Bill, which secured the strengthening of the place of religious education in schools.
He checked plans to unite the Church of England and the Methodists, and ensured that the formal ban on divorced people being remarried in church was maintained.
As the representative of a minority, he succeeded in these efforts by the careful organisation of votes rather than by powerful advocacy in debate; and he acted in a mood of increasing exasperation with what he saw as Archbishop Robert Runcie's efforts to hold the Church of England together at the expense of doctrinal considerations.
Unlike one of his suffragans, Leonard agreed to ordain women deacons – a decision about which he was to remain uneasy. But he could not avoid forever his Waterloo, in the form of women priests.
As the issue loomed at the Lambeth conference of 1988, he was sufficiently concerned one night to ask a Vatican official, who was in London, to come to see him; the official calmly told him to remain where he was, for the sake of ecumenicism.
But after the General Synod of 1992 agreed to the ordination of women priests, in line with the American Episcopal Church, Leonard turned towards Rome with a sense of firm purpose. He told his former colleagues on the episcopal bench of the House of Lords of his decision to join the Roman Church, and sent papers to the Vatican outlining his claim to be a legitimately ordained bishop.
This was because he had received apostolic orders from a bishop of the Old Catholic Church, which were considered legitimate even though it had broken with Rome at the first Vatican Council during the mid-19th century.
In Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, tactfully told Leonard that he could not confirm that he was a bishop or deny it, then went on to point out that he was addressing Leonard as if he were a bishop.
When Pope John Paul II met Leonard, the "Roman option" – a proposal for former Anglicans to have their own liturgy within the Catholic Church – had been turned down; but Leonard recalled afterwards the Pope asking: "Why are the English Catholic bishops so unapostolic?"
Following instruction by Fr Ian Ker, biographer of the 19th-century convert Cardinal Newman, Leonard was received into the Catholic Church in Cardinal Hume's private chapel at Westminster in 1994. There was no publicity. Hume was nervous that some of his clergy might complain about the speed with which Leonard was to be ordained priest, without being becoming a deacon first. Later Leonard was made a Prelate of Honour, allowing him to retain the title of Right Reverend.
Graham Douglas Leonard was born on May 8 1921. His father, an Evangelical clergyman, was regional secretary of the Colonial and Continental Church Society and later vicar of the south London parish of St Michael, Wandsworth Common. From Monkton Combe School, where the Evangelical influence on his life was greatly strengthened, Graham went up to Balliol College, Oxford, with ordination in mind.
At Oxford, however, where he took a wartime degree in Botany, he changed his allegiance to the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England before being commissioned in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. After serving as a company commander, he was seconded in 1944 to the Ministry of Supply, where he worked in operational research on fuses.
On demobilisation, Leonard went to Westcott House, Cambridge, and in 1947 was ordained to a curacy at St Andrew's, Chesterton, Cambridge. Two further curacies – at St Ives, Huntingdonshire, and Stansted, Essex – were followed by three years as vicar of Ardleigh, where he revived the life of the parish and made his mark as an energetic pastor.
In 1955 he was appointed director of religious education in the diocese of St Albans and became an honorary, then residentiary, canon of the cathedral. Leonard then developed a reputation as a defender and enlivener of church schools, and was soon in demand as a lecturer, preacher and retreat conductor in many other parts of the country. On the strength of this, he became general secretary of the National Society and secretary of the Church of England Schools Council in 1958.
During the next four years his reputation was further enhanced by successful negotiations with the government, leading to increased grants to church schools and agreed syllabuses of religious education for county schools.
He became Archdeacon of Hampstead, a post combined with the parish of St Andrew Undershaft with St Mary Axe in the City of London. This proved to be no more than a stepping stone to the suffragan bishopric of Willesden in 1964.
Leonard treated this north London territory as if it were his own diocese, giving much time to the pastoral care of his clergy and the parishes. It was during this period that he emerged as a figure of national significance through his involvement in the defeat of the Anglican-Methodist reunion scheme.
In 1969 he stood for election as Bishop of the Scottish diocese of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane, but was not appointed. Shortly after this, he was elected Bishop of North Queensland, but declined, mainly owing to the ill health of his father.
A second attempt to unite Anglicans and Methodists foundered largely through Leonard's efforts; any move towards unification required a two-thirds majority in the Synod, and Leonard was always able to muster sufficient opposition.
Although he was recognised in London as an able and hard-working bishop, he was the bête noire of the Church of England's liberal leadership. His relations with the Bishop of London, Dr Robert Stopford, were a long way short of satisfactory and, despite his sensitive pastoral skill, he was sometimes fierce and apparently legalistic.
When Stopford retired in 1973 and was succeeded by Bishop Gerald Ellison, of Chester, Leonard was appointed Bishop of Truro. He was at home in that diocese's strong Anglo-Catholic tradition, getting on admirably with the local Methodists, who had their own reasons for opposing the proposed reunion.
During his first year at Truro he visited 130 parishes and, in 1977, ensured that the diocese's centenary was celebrated with great style. He also set up an advisory board for services in the Cornish language. But while in no way neglecting his diocesan duties, he made good use of the overnight sleeper to London and accepted an increasing amount of responsibility in the Church at large.
He joined the Anglican Orthodox International Doctrine Commission, became one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's counsellors on foreign relations, and in 1976 was appointed chairman of the Board of Social Responsibility – an important post and one of some difficulty for Leonard, since he was often out of sympathy with the reports produced by its committees.
His public comment in 1978 on the private life of Princess Margaret, in which he suggested that some aspects of her behaviour were inappropriate for someone in her position, was thought at the time to be more courageous than wise and was probably paid for by a longer episcopate in Cornwall than he and his supporters would have wished.
Leonard's appointment to London in 1981 was surrounded by unprecedented public controversy. The preliminary consultations indicated that some 70 per cent of the clergy and parishes in London diocese wanted him as their bishop, but this desire was not shared by the suffragan bishops and the Dean and Chapter of St Paul's.
The Crown Appointments Commission submitted to Margaret Thatcher the names of Dr John Habgood, then Bishop of Durham, and Leonard, indicating a 7-5 preference for Habgood. This became known in London Church circles and, after some lobbying of the prime minister, it was announced that the appointment would go to Leonard.
Mrs Thatcher was acting perfectly properly in the exercise of her choice, but it was widely believed that political considerations had led her to favour a man whose conservatism was not confined to theological and ecclesiastical matters. He once surprised a meeting in the House of Commons by declaring that he would rather use nuclear weapons than submit to communism.
Leonard's was a complex personality. At a first meeting he often seemed cold and forbidding. The gold-rimmed spectacles, the soutane with its scarlet or purple piping and the pectoral cross on a gold chain all helped to create the aura of a formidable figure who might have fitted more easily into the Vatican than into an English cathedral or parish church.
Yet in spite of certain threats of schism, generally interpreted as no more than sabre-rattling under pressure, he was for the greater part of his life intensely loyal to the Anglican tradition as he perceived it; during his years at Willesden and Truro, he was a most highly regarded pastor.
In London, while devoting much time to undermining the efforts of Archbishop Runcie and other liberals, his influence in the Church grew. He held the traditional offices of the Bishop of London – Dean of the Chapels Royal, Prelate of the Order of the British Empire, Prelate of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor – but his impact on the capital as a whole was negligible.
In spite of his acute mind and political skill, Leonard was never at home in the secular sphere and walked uneasily when outside the frontiers of ecclesiastical life. While a notable bishop, he enjoyed the episcopal office too much to be wholly successful in it.
After his conversion to Catholicism, Leonard settled down happily to the life of a Roman priest, being joined in his new Church by his wife Priscilla two weeks later; she told him she had been ready to convert years earlier.
Parish congregations were bemused by the novelty of seeing a priest, who never quite lost the aura of his former episcopal office, celebrate Mass with his wife in the pews.
He preached and lectured widely, but declined to write an autobiography – though he produced several pamphlets tracing the history of his disenchantment with the Church of his first 72 years.
While certain that he had made the right decision in moving to Rome, he remained uneasy about the lack of rigour shown by the Catholic bishops on a range of issues, particularly their approach to ecumenicism.
Graham Leonard was sworn of the Privy Council in 1981, appointed KCVO in 1991 and DL in 2005. His wife and two sons survive him.
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