England’s Odd Couple

  

 I recently watched on BBC iPlayer the third part of Simon Schama’s interesting documentary on the history of Britain, though this particular instalment was entirely devoted to English affairs.  Specifically it focused on the turbulent relationship between Henry II and Thomas Becket, Chancellor of England, Archbishop of Canterbury and eventual saint. 

I admire Schama, a reasonably decent telly historian.  Unfortunately the telly history format inevitably lends itself to silly sound bites and glib judgements.  There was one point in the narrative where the glibness was beyond silly.  It came in the aftermath of the infamous 1170 murder of Archbishop Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. 

“All our modern instincts”, the historian said, “seem to say, oh, come on, look at Henry and you find reality; the guardian of the common law, the engineer of government, the smasher of anarchy…and you’d be quite wrong.  Becket, headstrong, infuriating, over the top theatrical Becket made a huge difference.  His view of the church lasted; the Angevin Empire did not.”

Alas, Mister Schama, it is you who are quite wrong, blindingly so!  Yes, of course, the Angevin Empire, that collection of dynastic estates that stretched from England’s northern border all the way south to the Pyrenees, is long gone, but so, too, is Becket’s view of the church.  It was Henry’s view that prevailed, not that of the arrogant archbishop.

Let’s be clear about what we are dealing with here.  Oh, how I resent the skewed view of English history that over amplifies the eighth Henry over the second, a figure now virtually unknown aside from his relationship with Becket.  Henry was, in my estimation anyway, the most significant king in English history.  He was not so much the guardian as the architect of our common law.  He was certainly the great engineer of government and the smasher of anarchy.

And now Becket, what did he represent exactly?  It’s best that you free your mind from any notion that the twelfth century struggle between crown and mitre was over any deep principle of faith; that it represented a desire for religious freedom over state power.  It did not. 

England then had two laws; the law of the land and the law of the church.  Henry saw no reason why churchmen should enjoy extraordinary privileges not extended to others.  Clerics at the time, even those accused of the most serious crimes, including murder and rape, were much more leniently treated by their own courts.  We have seen, by modern example, to what ends the church will go in protecting its own.

For Becket martyrdom was the ultimate goal, the ultimate political gesture.  It certainly secured the ‘liberty’ of the church for centuries after his death – though at the cost of a growing national mood of anti-clericalism - until another Henry appeared.  Becket, as a saint, may have been a heavenly success but in the long run his cause was an earthly failure.  He most assuredly did not make a huge difference.  In the end his shrine, along with his principles, vanished in the Reformation.  Even Charles I, the only Anglican martyr, who also sacrificed himself on a point of religious principle, considered him a traitor. 

Bullying and brutal Henry may have been, but he was simply trying to redress a balance, strengthening a state that had lost so much ground during the Anarchy of Stephen and Matilda.  An over-mighty church was as bad as an over-mighty subject.  Becket, the great commoner, had the misfortune to combine both dangers.  He may have been a good subject of the Pope, but he was a bad subject of the king.  Becket, if you like, represented an extraterritorial power.  Henry represented England.  

Turbulent Priest

Kings can be dangerous and uncertain friends.  Thomas More, Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, knew as much.  A close political and personal adviser to the king, he harboured no illusions about their relationship, telling Will Roper, his son-in-law, that “If my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to fall.”   His head did fall, though not over a castle in France.  So, too, in a way, did the head of Thomas Becket, the martyr Archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered for defying the will of Henry II, his one time mentor. 

There is an interesting parallel between the two commoners and the two kings, close collaborators distanced by politics and circumstances.  Becket’s death secured those very privileges and legal exemptions for the church from the general course of common law that Henry had been anxious to end.  His martyrdom marked a - temporary - victory of the sacred over the secular power. 

More’s martyrdom, in contrast, came at the height of a political and clerical revolution that saw the church firmly subordinated to the power of the state.  To confirm the new realities, Henry had Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, long the most important pilgrimage site in England, destroyed.  He was no saint, the king had decreed, “but a rebel and traitor to his prince.”  His namesake and medieval predecessor would doubtless have agreed.

Here we have Thomas Becket in the round, a martyr for one season and a rebel for another; saint and sinner in one. This year is the eight hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the elevation to the see of Canterbury, an occasion marked with the publication of Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim by John Guy.  Others have traced these steps before him, not just in biography and history but also in drama, poetry and film.  Becket, to use what is now rather a hackneyed expression, truly is a man for all seasons.

Guy, a specialist in Tudor history, has created a man for our season in a lucid and balanced life of one of England's greatest churchmen.  He is to be commended because it’s not that easy to find a ‘via media’ with Becket. So much of the material that followed the infamous 1170 murder in the cathedral is hagiography, to be treated with considerable caution.  But Guy builds up an entirely plausible picture with all of the balance and skill of a good historian.

His is a tale of an odd couple - the brutal and domineering Angevin king and the scholarly and principled commoner.  This was never a relationship of equals.  Henry saw in Becket a useful tool, a man who had performed a commendable administrative role as Chancellor, an office he made uniquely his own.  So impressed was the King that he immediately appointed Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury on the death Theobald, though he wasn’t even a priest at the time. 

Soon after came the deluge.  Without even telling the King, who expected him to combine both offices, Becket immediately resigned the Chancellorship.  A great layman was set to become a great churchman.  Most have seen this as the key moment in the evolving relationship between the two men, as if Becket experienced a kind of epiphany, a revelation on the road to Damascus, taking him from one set of attitudes to quite the opposite.  But Guy shows that there was no sudden transformation in Becket’s character; that, even at his most worldly, he had always carried deep reservoirs of inner piety, that he had principles bordering on stubbornness. 

Rather surprisingly, considering that he had been so close to the centre of power, he lacked political subtlety, the real key to his downfall.  There have to be real questions also about the true nature of the friendship between him and the king.  They could enjoy field sports together, but neither man seems to have fully understood the other.  Supporting the sovereignty of the crown at one moment and the sovereignty of the church at the next, Becket embarked on a course of action with a surprising aggressiveness. Henry was not an easy man to play, but a gentler course might have yielded better results. 

But, then, perhaps martyrdom was the ultimate gaol, the ultimate political gesture.  It certainly secured the ‘liberty’ of the church for centuries after the Archbishop’s death, until another Henry appeared.  Becket, as a saint, may have been a heavenly success but in the long run his cause was an earthly failure.  Even Charles I, the only Anglican martyr, who also sacrificed himself on a point of religious principle, considered him a traitor. 

Generally speaking Guy provides us with a well-crafted analysis of a clash between two giant personalities, all against a wider political clash between church and state.  Weakness comes, where all weaknesses come, when he departs from the record into the misty marshes of psychological speculation. His attribution of Becket’s “insecurity of temperament” to his “closeness to his mother as a child” strikes me as so much psycho-padding and hogwash.  There is also, I have to say, a laziness in his prose style at points, places where he overdraws in the bank of cliché.  Expressions like ‘baptism of fire’, ‘getting into a tight corner’ and ‘vibrant social scene’ really do gall. 

Still, my carping notwithstanding, this is a solid account of a fascinating life and interesting times.  I think the author has done a commendable job in uncovering the man underneath the halo, though perhaps at the expense of his royal master; as the one magnifies the other seems to diminish. Bullying and brutal he may have been, but Henry was simply trying to redress a balance, strengthening a state that had lost so much ground during the Anarchy of Stephen and Matilda.  An over-mighty church was as bad as an over-mighty subject.  Becket, the great commoner, had the misfortune to combine both dangers.  He was the most turbulent priest in our history.  

A Lesson on Smugness

Last month the Sunday Times Magazine carried an interview with Rowan Atkinson, the comedian and rubber-faced gurner (from the verb ‘to gurn’; go on, look it up; it’s even on Wikipedia!), which I quickly read and just as quickly forgot. I’m not a fan of Mr. Bean, I never have been; there is too much of the holy playing-the-goat about the man, or, maybe, just the goat.

I did, however, take note of his comments on Church of England vicars, people he’s rather fond of parodying;

I used to think that the vicars I played, or the exaggerated sketches that were written about clerics, were unreasonable satires on well-meaning individuals but actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society…I believe that all the mud that Richard Curtis and I threw at (vicars) through endless sketches that we've done is more than deserved.

Well, there you are. Do I feel obliged to defend hard working clerics from Atkinson’s scatter-gun? No, not really; I’m sure they can defend themselves much more effectively than I. I don’t feel the need to say anything about them but I do need to say something about smugness, the smugness of millionaire comics.

You see, there are clerics and there are clerics. If you are familiar with Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire series of novels, a chronicle of high and low politics in the nineteenth century Church of England, I feel sure you will remember the self-effacing Septimus Harding, just as you will remember the oleaginous Obadiah Slope. Of these two Atkinson for me is more of a Slope than a Harding, more of a self-promoting and pompous hypocrite than a man of simple emotions and sincere beliefs.

Yes, I can see Slope driving a $3million sporstcar, just as Atkinson does, or rather did, before he and it had an encounter with a tree in Cambridgeshire last month. But would a clerk in holy orders attempt to raze a decent house in Oxfordsshire and build a glass and steel carbuncle in its place? His neighbours are not at all pleased. Still, they have nothing to fear, he said, from “modern design”. Perhaps not, and I dare say they are a lot safer now that the Atkinson-mobile has been put out of commission.

So, here is a man living and lording in a fashion that most Church of England priests could never envisage, people who, as the Spectator said in a recent editorial, live humbly and dedicate their ministry to the lives of others without expectation of reward. Not so the profane goat, who feels able to comment in a wholly presumptuous, arrogant, smug and general way about clerics, regardless of their actual merits or demerits. Perhaps, considering the wealth he has made from his parodies, some kind of tithe might be in keeping, really just as a form of compensation, or as a tax on the mouths of self-righteous prigs.

Tepid Priest

There are some people in public life who would do very well to issue apologies in advance of anything that they might say or write. Perhaps something of a blanket nature would serve, something to cover every contingency. It might proceed as follows: “I apologise for each and every statement that I will ever make, not having said the things I’m supposed to have said, or having the things I have said misinterpreted by the press, because I did not really say that, meaning to say something else.”

Confused? No more confused than Rowan Williams, our present Archbishop of Canterbury, as woolly-minded a man as you are ever likely to come across, one thing at one minute, another thing at the next. To me he is an ass, yes, an ass, no better living example of the paradox of Buridan’s Ass, the creature that died of hunger and thirst because when placed midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water it could not make up its mind between the one and the other.

Archbishop Williams cannot make up his mind about freemasons. He once described this apron-wearing fraternity as having rituals that were “satanically inspired”, that it was incompatible with Christianity and that he would refuse to appoint any member of the ‘brotherhood’ to the clergy, hardly surprising given their Robespierre-like attachment to a nebulous ‘Supreme Being,’ to say nothing of their bloodthirsty oaths! But it was all a big mistake, you see, and he did not really mean to say what he said and was profusely sorry for being found out.

That was a few years ago though the fog in the befuddled prelate’s mind is still to clear. I read in the Sunday press despite misgivings blah blah blah he recently appointed the Reverend Jonathan Baker, a senior Mason, as Bishop of Ebbsfleet. The poor old Archbishop, there are only two things wrong with him: everything he says and everything he does. No sooner was the news of this out than concerns over this latest volte-face were openly expressed, yea even so high as the General Synod.

Ebbsfleet, as we should now call him, or Brother Bishop Ebbsfleet, saw nothing at all wrong with being a Freemason and a senior cleric, nothing at all, at least until last weekend, when he decided that he was leaving the boys only club to concentrate on, to use his words, the “particular charism (sic) of episcopal ministry.” I hope he keeps those secrets, though, just to save the dear man from having his throat cut.

So Freemasons adhering to “satanically inspired” rituals can rise so far in the Episcopacy in the bright new Church of England that has such a man like Rowan Williams at the head of it. Remember this is the same man who said that ‘certain aspects’ of Sharia law seemed ‘unavoidable’ in the United Kingdom. One law for everybody, he continued, was “a bit of a danger.” Yes, over a thousand years of progress in our common law was “a bit of a danger.” Of course that was all a mistake too; he said what he said but he didn’t really say what he said, or what he said was not meant in the way that he said it. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what he means?

Humour aside I can’t be neutral here. I grew up in the Church of England; it’s part of the fabric of this nation, part of its identity, part of my identity. I no longer attend but I have a deep and abiding affection for the institution and its history. To see a man like Rowan Williams in the office of Saint Augustine, to see this inconsistent, confused, wretched hyper-liberal and moral relativist in such a position is tragic. Before this turbulently tepid priest finally departs we may find that he has done as much damage to the Episcopacy as Oliver Cromwell.

The Thoughts of Citizen Pete

Those of you unfamiliar with English ritual and custom might not be aware that we still have an established church, a national church, supposedly. Yes, we have the Church of England, the dear old C of E, the church in which I was baptised and confirmed. It has ancient roots as part of a worldwide Catholic communion, though since the Reformation it has been headed not by the Pope but by the reigning monarch as Supreme Governor.

Now the powers conferred by this office are really residual in nature. Still, the archbishops and bishops all owe a basic loyalty to the institution of monarchy. But the Church of England, you see, is a broad church, with room for all sorts of people; it even has room, as I discovered recently, for republican bishops: it has room for the likes of Pete Broadbent (apparently he insists on ‘Pete’), Bishop of Willesden. Now that’s another new discovery for me: I had no idea that there was a Bishop of Willesden.

Anyway, Bishop Pete is a trendy sort of guy, a sort of Tony Blair kinda cleric. He twitters and tweets and he has a Facebook page. He’s used Twitter to announce to the world that he was going to have a ‘republican day’ in France on the occasion of the forthcoming wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Not content with that, he went on to Facebook to describe them as ‘shallow celebrities’ whose marriage would last seven years at the outside, before proceeding to a sustained assault on the monarchy in general, with some offensive and distasteful remarks about Prince Charles (Big Ears) and his late wife (Porcelain Doll) thrown to season the stew.

What can I say about Pete? He is entitled to his republican and anti-monarchist views, of course he is, though I would have thought that this was something of a problem for a senior cleric in a church that professes outward loyalty to the royal house. But set that aside, for is there not something even more basic, anti-Christian, it might even be said, in his churlish and boorish dismissal of the marital prospects of a couple setting out on life together? It does not really matter if they are celebrities or not (William can hardly help being a celebrity), it does not really matter of they are ‘shallow’ or not (judging, I suppose, by his depth); they deserve the respect that every other couple is entitled to, not this ghastly man’s uncharitable and hurtful rudeness. With people like him in charge small wonder that the decline of the Church of England in recent years has been so rapid.

I simply can’t abide ill-manners, boorishness and discourtesy in any degree. When a man like Pete (a citizen and not a subject, as he says on Facebook) jeers at a couple who have given no offense and caused no harm, other than to announce that they intend to marry, then it becomes absolutely intolerable. But I’m not as uncharitable as Citizen Pete. I really do hope that the sun shines on his republican day and that the French make him very welcome. I hope they make him so welcome that Willesden and England never see Citizen Pete again.

A Turbulent Priest

I mentioned in a blog that I wrote last month that I grew up in the Church of England and have a lingering respect for its rituals and its institutions, for the important part that it played in the history of this nation. In the course of this I said;

If I did not feel affection, a lingering sense of respect, I could look upon the pronouncements of Rowan Williams, the muddle-headed Archbishop of Canterbury, with equanimity; but I cannot: he retains the power to madden me with some of his more outrageous statements.

Well he has done it again, this hopeless, pseudo-intellectual, much given to ‘thinking out loud’ as a substitute for thinking at all. Much given, I have to say, to the most vacuous speculations. Now it seems that Henry VIII, the man who has a singular responsibility in the formation of the independent English Church, the man to whom Williams owes his unique position, might just be in Hell. There again he might not for “If Henry VIII is saved (an open question, perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Haughton.”

Please note the ‘an open question, perhaps’, the kind of slippery evasiveness, get out of trouble quick card, that we have come to expect from Rowan ‘Sharia’ Williams. Anyway, the prayers he will depend on if he is in Hell, an open question, perhaps, are those of Haughton and his fellow Carthusians, executed in 1535 as traitors for refusing to accept the Act of Supremacy, thus recognising the King as head of the English Church. Houghton himself was declared a saint by the Pope in 1970.

I’m not going to say anything about the theology here as Williams is the expert, not I, and he surely knows that no amount of prayer or intervention will be enough to release the denizens of Hell; a closed question, definitely. No matter; Williams went on to say that “In many ages and many places authorities more appalling than Henry VIII have believed that they could abolish God and the cross of God; and they have had to discover that while they may vanquish, they cannot destroy.”

What can I say? Should I agree with Christopher Howse writing in The Telegraph that Williams, in a service aimed at healing the ancient divisions between Catholics and Protestants, should be able to speak freely without being taken amiss? Am I to take it that Henry VIII is to be ranged with modern tyrants like Stalin as one of those who attempted to abolish God?

Poor Henry, a man far more orthodox in his beliefs that Archbishop Williams, a man who believed that while he was a schismatic he was certainly not a heretic and most certainly not an enemy of God. He died, by the lights of his own beliefs, a true Catholic, one who just happened to release the chains binding the national church to the cause of a foreign prince, far more secular at the time than spiritual, a prince whose adherents were at that time and in those circumstances objectively speaking traitors to the English crown. To suggest that he might now be in Hell is an unusual proposition for an Archbishop of Canterbury but not one a fair-minded person would dismiss out of hand, so said Andrew Brown in his Guardian blog.

Well, I dismiss it out of hand, though I confess that I’m not at all fair-minded when it comes to such matters. I could say that Archbishop Williams has even less understanding of Hell than he does of Henry, of the politics and theology of the day. I could say that I do not believe this man fit to be the leading prelate of the English Church; I could say that he himself might very well appear to some as a heretic as well as a schismatic. I will say none of these things because I do not believe in Hell or any kind of afterlife. After all, it’s an open question, perhaps, that if I did that I might end up in the same place as Williams for all eternity, which for me is an open question, perhaps just a little too far.

Men for their Seasons

It’s interesting to try to draw some parallels between Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Henry II, and Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor for a time under Henry VIII. Both were men of strong principle, both took a stand in defence of the church in their different ways, both are now saints.

There were of course ambitious churchmen in the court of Henry II, enemies of Becket, who might be compared to Richard Rich or Thomas Cromwell, enemies of More, but this is perhaps stretching a point just a shade too far. Now, what I am about to say is based purely on the terms drawn up by the plays Becket by Jean Anouilh and A Man for all Seasons by Robert Bolt, both subsequently made into movies. They are a depiction, in other words, of dramatic rather than historical characters. The real historical Thomas Becket is not quite the saintly, self-denying figure often portrayed.

Anyway, the situations depicted in both plays are really quite different. Becket is about the clash between different forms of institutional power, between the church, on the one hand, and the state on the other. Becket believes that royal power has clear limits, and he has no hesitation in defining what those limits are, risking, and provoking, the anger of the king.

Thomas More, on the other hand, believes that there are areas of personal conscience on which the state has no right to intrude. He does not defy the king; he simply refuses to give positive assent to a particular course of action. Becket might be said to be looking for martyrdom; Thomas More most definitely is not. He is defending the church, or his view of the church, but by silence, not confrontation. Becket is an old medieval prelate, defending power and privilege; More, in contrast, might be thought of as the first victim of state tyranny, the first in a long line.

Fidei defensor

I grew up in the Church of England and while I no longer attend, apart from family days and holidays, and even then only to please my parents, I still retain a considerable affection for the institution, for the part that it has played in the history of this nation. If I did not feel affection, a lingering sense of respect, I could look upon the pronouncements of Rowan Williams, the muddle-headed Archbishop of Canterbury, with equanimity; but I cannot; he retains the power to madden me with some of his more outrageous statements.

So, yes, I value the Church of England just as I value Christianity, as I value spirituality in general. Even so I can respect atheism, those who have no place in their personal life for God our any form of spiritual insight; those whose horizons are purely (I was tempted to write bleakly) material. What I loath is the atheist proselytisers, those who would discard one set of absolutes only to promote another, bringing to the debate the worst forms of intellectual intolerance. God is dead; Richard Dawkins is alive. The new faith is totalitarian secularism, worse in ever way than the old faith of ritual and transcendence.

I understand in his latest Papal Bull Dawkins has said that the real abuse by Roman Catholic priests may not be the ‘groping of child bodies’ but the ‘subversion of child minds.’ Saint Richard would have it otherwise; he would chase Christianity to the margins of superstition and darkness in the creation of the kind of an earthly paradise, outlined by John Lennon in Imagine, a song with a message I cannot listen to without a compete sense of loathing. There is no earthly paradise. More particularly, as we should know from the history of the past hundred years, the attempt to create one always ends in hell.

The recent attacks on the Catholic Church, the disgraceful insult that the apparatchiks in the Foreign Office offered to the Pope, and through him to all Catholics, shows that the faith, Christianity in general, needs a defender. It could ask for no better one than Peter Hitchens, one of my favourite polemicists, who has recently published The Rage Against God, an exploration of his own journey from Marxism and atheism to belief.

In this he brings to bear his lucidity and acidy wit against the aggressive secularism taking hold of a society that has no longer and clear idea of itself. One only has to look at the progress of Mad Hattie Harperson’s equality legislation, which effectively tried to dictate what people thought of homosexuality. We are dealing her with new forms of state corruption, of the subversion of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech; of the subversion of moral choice itself. Though qualified in England, similar legislation in Scotland saw a fine of £1000 being levied against a Baptist preacher for saying that homosexuality was contrary to the teachings of the Bible.

Hitchens compares what is happening in our morally debased society with what happened to organised religion in Soviet Russia when faced with the aggressive atheism promoted by the state. The parallels not too extreme, at least I do not believe so. There has been a long process of secularisation at work, but it has taken more pervasive forms in our recent history, with the likes of Harperson and Dawkins occupying the high ground, sitting on judgement on all below. Who would ever have believed that Christianity would have been on defensive in the land of Augustine? It’s time to fight back; time for a spiritual renaissance. The alternative is grim beyond measure; the alternative is barrenness; the alternative is Dawkins.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Carol Bashing Bishop

The Bishop of Croydon, the Right Reverend Nick Baines, is an intelligent and rational man. He’s had a good rational and intelligent look at some long cherished Christmas carols and concluded that they are nonsense; that they turn Jesus into a fantasy, into a Father Christmas figure, and that they are an embarrassment to sing. Just exactly who they embarrass beyond the Bishop I’m not quite sure, so I shall just have to take his word for this, the word of an intelligent and rational man.

In his recently published Why Wish You a Merry Christmas, the dear bishop sets his canon against jolly old tunes like Away in a Manger, O Come, All ye Faithful, and Once in Royal David’s City, which, he declares, are dripping with Victorian sentimentality. After all, he drones on, what adult could sing of a baby that ‘no crying he makes’ without embarrassment? Jesus would be abnormal if he had not cried as a baby:

If we sing nonsense, is it any surprise that children grow into adults and throw out the tearless baby Jesus with Father Christmas and other fantasy figures.

Wait a minute Bish: Father Christmas is a fantasy figure! Why was I not told? You see, dearly beloved, Croydon is a rational man. Our perceptions of Jesus and the Nativity should be based on the realities of first century Palestine, whatever the ‘realities’ of first century Palestine happen to be, Romans and Jews and bawling babies, I suppose, divine or not.

Forgive me; I’m about to change gear; I’ve had enough of the dripping irony. These songs, these carols, are part of a tradition. They have lasted so long, well after their Victorian use by date, because people enjoy them, because they are fun to sing and embarrass not a soul, I would hazard, beyond this ridiculous, silly man.

I don’t believe in God and no longer consider myself to be a Christian. Still, I grew up in the Church of England and still retain some affection for it, for its traditions and its dottiness. It is part of England; it’s part of what made England; it’s part of our national identity. Oh, I so hate to see it so ill-served by the turbulent priests it has now, by woolly-minded Sharia Williams and carol-hating Crying Croydon, in all his ridiculous rationality.

After all, when one starts to ‘deconstruct’ religion, faith and belief, where does the process end? Religion, by its very nature, has to be based on magic and mystery, or it is based on nothing. Yes, if one happened to believe in the divinity of Christ, that he is God incarnate, then surely that would also embrace the possibility that he was a quiet, tearless baby! The baby goes, the manger goes, the three wise men (pagan, incidentally) also go, along with just about ever supernatural aspect of the testaments, Old and New, that one can think of. God is absolute: how can he have a Son? Oh, so all of those animals really fitted in Noah’s Ark, the dinosaurs as well? And did all of humanity, all of it, really spring from two people? This is a door, once opened, will never be closed again. The bishop in all of his rationality and intelligence has not the native wit to recognise this simple truth.

Sing your hearts out and ignore this killjoy and literal-minded prelate, and let’s just hope in future that no more droning he makes. :-)

Sodomy, the Bishop and the Ghost

You’ve heard, I expect, of the mother-in-law from hell? Now you are about to encounter one for real!

My story, a true one, takes us back to seventeenth century Ireland and England. In December of 1640 John Atherton, Bishop of Lismore, was convicted and sentenced to death for, to use the legal commentary of the day, “the crime not to be named.” Well, I shall name it: Bishop Atherton was a bugger, and I mean that in the literal sense of the term!

Atherton was English and a Protestant. He had come to Ireland because the official Church of Ireland, also Protestant, had plenty of opportunities for advancement in a country where the Reformation had the most superficial roots, and had been appointed to the bishopric in 1636. Now at the peak of his career Atherton’s ascent was about to be followed by an equally rapid descent.

In his hometown of Minehead in Somerset something odd was happening. People were saying that Atherton’s mother-in-law, Susan Leakey, was spreading stories about the new Bishop of Lismore. The only problem was she had been dead for well over a year...

Reports of her revelations reached William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who appointed three magistrates to investigate in February 1637. All of the witnesses interviewed said that they had indeed seen the ghost of Susan Leakey, including Elizabeth Leakey, her daughter-in-law, wife of Alexander, her son. Elizabeth reported that while Susan was on her deathbed in November 1634 she threatened to return into the world of the living. “What, will you be a devil?” she asked. “No, but I will come in the devil’s likeness.”

Return she did, accompanied by all sorts of weird happenings. The Leakey’s nephew, a teenage boy, died, saying that he was being strangled by his grandmother. An apparition was seen, making its way towards Elizabeth’s house, finally appearing in her bedroom. There she told her daughter-in-law to go to Ireland with a message for Joan Atherton, the wife of the bishop. The magistrates asked what the message was but Elizabeth refused to answer, saying she would tell only the King himself and even then only if he commanded.

The magistrates refused to accept these stories, believing the whole thing to be fraudulent. Laud himself concluded that it was probably based on some attempt to extort money from Atherton. But matters were about to get ever more serious.

In Ireland Atherton was making enemies. In the summer of 1640, under circumstances that are not entirely clear, his steward submitted a petition to the parliament in Dublin, accusing Atherton of sodomy, a capital crime. This seemed to tie in with the appearance of the apparition in England, the tale that Elizabeth would only repeat if commanded to do so by the king in person.

Other stories about the bishop started to come out; that he was a rapist, a fornicator and an adulterer. He was also accused of incest, sleeping with his wife’s sister, which turned out to be true. Report of this made its way to the Long Parliament in England, where Thomas Wentworth, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, the man who had appointed Atherton, was himself under attack. In the summer of 1641 a pamphlet was published, detailing Atherton’s sexual excesses. The author, rejecting the scepticism of the investigation of 1637, said that Mother Leakey had commanded Elizabeth to tell Atherton to repent or be hanged.

Mother Leakey was set to become one of the ghostly legends of Somerset. Atherton was hanged, either the victim of a political frame-up or supernatural malice. You decide!

The Legend of Joseph of Arimathea

I was thinking about Joseph of Arimathea, of whom almost nothing is known and yet much has been written.

Joseph simply appears in the Gospels as a wealthy man who allowed his own prepared tomb to be used for the burial of Jesus. There is really not much to go on, and the story itself may have been inserted in confirmation of prediction contained in the Book of Isaiah. But on such simple foundations an ice-cream castle has been erected, one in which Joseph has links with Britain, King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

The mythology begins with the apocrypha and un-canonical texts, works like the Acts of Pilate, The Gospel of Nicodemus and The Narrative of Joseph. There are also several fanciful references in the writings of the early church historians.

The first reference to Joseph in connection with Britain comes in the ninth century in The Life of Mary Magdalene, written by Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz. The story was taken up by William of Malmesbury in The Chronicles of the English Kings, where Joseph and eleven companions are said to be responsible for the foundation of Glastonbury Abbey.

But it was Robert de Boron, a French poet who lived in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, who associated Joseph with the Grail for the first time in his Joseph d’Arimathe, amplifying on aspects of the Acts of Pilate.

In Boron’s account Joseph, imprisoned by the Jewish elders, is sustained during his captivity by the Grail. On his release he brings the sacred vessel with him on his journey to Britain. Legend then became truth and truth legend as the Grail cycle spun ever more elaborate threads. John of Glastonbury claims Joseph as an ancestor of King Arthur. For Elizabeth I his missionary work allowed her to assert that Christianity came to England before the Roman Church. So, the new Holy Grail was the foundation of an English National Church, with Joseph as it’s cup-bearer and prophet!