Blindness in the early afternoon

05 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith

Tags

Charles king and martyr, Little Gidding, Palm Sunday, TS Eliot

In Little Gidding, Eliot describes the way in which the “brief sun flames the ice, on ponds and ditches, /in windless cold that is the heart’s heat/ reflecting in a watery mirror/ A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.” The season is “midwinter spring,” one well-known to Englishmen and women, where time is suspended “between pole and tropic.” But the poet is also referring to something else with which we are all familiar – that spiritual lukewarmness from which many of us suffer

Yesterday we considered our deafness to God; today I want to consider our blindness. In this time of trial how many of us have our eyes focussed on the news, and on each other? There is, at least to me, something shocking in the rush so many make to judgment. From the policeman telling people sitting in the park that they cannot do so, to those people themselves, congregating in numbers which rightly give cause for concern, from the person doing his or her best to comply with regulations thinly sketched, to those twitching their curtains and reporting their neighbours for going out “uneccessarily.” The cry to close down open spaces is easily made by thosen notn occupying small apartments with young children. All around we can see a rush to judgment.

We are not told that God is mercy or judgment, we are told that He is “love.” Indeed, St Johngoes as far as saying that the identifying feature of the Christian is the love we have for each other. This is sometimes interpreted as meaning that Christians have love for other Christians, but frankly, even if one accepts this narrower definition, we have to ask how many of us would be found guilty if such love were a crime; would there be enough evidence against us? There would if it were a matter of our rush to judgement; there would if it were a mater of preferring our own view to those of others; there would if it were a matter of virtue-signalling (at least in our own judgement of virtue. Yet, as Eliot reminds us, the “heart’s heat” is “windless cold.” It is that “glare” which blinds us.

We see not through agape, that love God has for all His creation, but through our own eyes. Little Gidding was where the proud Stuart, King Charles I, fled after his defeat at Naseby by the Puritans. It was, for him, a moment of humiliation to which a mixture of stubborn pride and principal had brought him. It was significant that he retreated to the religious community at Little Gidding.

Often accused of being a closet Romanist (enough to endear him to some of us), Charles I was an avowed Arminian, that is he supported those within the Church of England who emphasised continuity with its Catholic past, exemplified in particular by the episcopate. Had Charles been willing to compromise on this point, he might have saved his own life. That he did not do so is one reason why the Church of England recognises him as a Saint and Martyr. Like so many saints and martyrs, his career was one marred by sin, not least the sin of pride; but at his end, he died for something greater than himself. At the last, his blindess was lifted.

It took a greater trial than most of us have to bear to open King Charles’ eyes, but a crisis is an opportunity to turn our eyes toward God. On this, strangest of Palm Sundays, let us ponder what acts of love we might perform which would mark us as God’s. We know from the history of Christianity that it has often been the Christian response to such crises which has, indeed, convinced many of the truth that God is love. Can we, in our time, imitate what our forebears did?

January 30: King Charles, Martyr

30 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Keble, poetry, Prayers

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Charles king and martyr, Church & State, Church of England, Oxford Movement

This blog usually marks this day, the anniversary of the judicial murder of King Charles I, and Chalcedon has written on this for us here. The Book of Common Prayer once recognised this in its liturgical calendar, and as I remain an Anglican, it seems fitting to mark this day with some reflections about this commemoration, which, to many, may seem odd. Charles I was, after all, not a very successful King, and his reign ended in civil war, and with his own execution. All of that is true but beside the point, and the fact that our society does not get the point says more about it than it should feel comfortable with.

Charles I died for a principle. Had he been willing to renounce episcopacy and the Established Church, he would not have been put on trial and would have been allowed to live; this he would not do, and he died for his faith – that is what makes him a martyr. At his coronation he swore an oath to defend the Catholic Church, and that is what he did, even though it cost him his life. At the Restoration the Church he had died for recognised his sacrifice, proclaimed him a martyr and added his name to its liturgical calendar. It would be nice if one could say that the Church remained grateful to him, but that is not the way of fallen mankind, and by the early nineteenth century his cult had been all but abandoned. It was the men of the Oxford Movement who restored it. John Keble, the priest and poet, wrote movingly of the

True son of our dear Mother, early taught
With her to worship and for her to die,
Nursed in her aisles to more than kingly thought,
Oft in her solemn hours we dream thee nigh.

It was apt that it should have been the Oxford men who defended Charles the Martyr as their fire was aimed at the way in which a non-Anglican parliament was the only source of legislation for the Church and sought to pronounce even on matters of doctrine. It was, it is said, a parliamentary draughtsman who removed the commemoration of the King from the calendar in 1859, but for loyal sons and daughters of the Church, he remains there – long before there was any procedure to pronounce someone a saint, it was the love and the memory of the people which did the job. As Andrew Lacey shows in a very fine book on the King, relics were gathered and miracles attributed to their healing power.

Jane Austen, a devout Anglican with Jacobite sympathies, was familiar with the service of commemoration, and there is another literary link through George Herbert, whose family served the King, and thence to T.S. Eliot and Little Gidding:

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.

Nicholas Ferrer, Herbert’s literary legatee, founded a religious community at Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire (about ten miles north-west of Cambridge), and it was thence that Charles I resorted after his defeat at Nasbey, arriving there on the night of 1 Mary 1647. The Cromwellians destroyed the community later that year in one of their many acts of vandalism, but after the Restoration, a church was once again established, and an armorial window installed in the King’s honour:

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Charles was a man of deep personal piety, and it is the manner of his death which made him a martyr. As Marvell wrote of the execution: “He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene”.

To an age where every political problem can be fudged, and where the only question appears to be how much someone wants to surrender a ‘deeply-held’ principle, Charles I’s act must seem quixotic, but to anyone familiar with Christian history, it is recognisable. Charles died a martyr to his Church – and it is high time, and beyond, that the Church restored this commemoration to its liturgical calendar. I asked Chalcedon whether the Ordinariate celebrated the day, but he tells me not. I suppose that if the Church for which he died won’t, it is too much to expect anyone else to. I am sure that members of the Society of King Charles the Martyr will be commemorating him, and in my own little community we remembered him at Matins and will at Compline tonight. Of your mercy, pray for the soul of the martyred King.

Charles: King and Martyr

30 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Faith, Saints

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Catholic Church, Charles king and martyr, Christianity, Church of England, history

In chapter three of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the historian, Edward Gibbon wrote that the peaceful and golden reign of Antoninus offered few materials for ‘history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’. It was on this day in 1649 that one of the more egregious crimes and follies committed by an English government took place: Charles I was beheaded before a crowd in Whitehall; the first, and last time, in English history that an anointed king was executed in public. In a foretaste of what would happen often in the future, the king was put on ‘trial’ by those who had won a war, found ‘guilty’ on charges no proper court would have recognised, and duly subjected to victors’ ‘justice’: the French and Russian revolutionaries would follow suite.

When the Monarchy was happily restored in 1660, the Convocation of Canterbury and York agreed to add the King’s name to the calendar of Saints when the Prayer Book was revised; this, I think, makes him the last saint recognised by the Church of England alone. From 1662 onwards, on this day the Martyr King has been commemorated by the Church he did so much to serve; when I was a young man it was still the fashion to say a Mass for the King; I hope it is so still in some quarters.

No doubt Macaulay was correct in judging Charles a king much addicted to ‘dark and crooked ways’, but then the old Whig had little time for the kind of King and Church Toryism which celebrated the King as a martyr. Like most of the Stuarts, Charles lacked a sense of what was possible in politics, but when it came to the Church, he knew what he was doing, and for those who reverence the Catholic tradition in Anglicanism, he is indeed a martyr.

Charles deplored the growing Calvinist influence on the State Church, and was sympathetic to the aims of Archbishop William Laud who wished to restore the Church a more catholic sacramental and liturgical style of worship and ethos. Under Laud, and with the King’s patronage and encouragement, theEucharist was once again seen as the principal action of the Church, with the sermon being relegated to its proper place. More controversially, the doctrine of the Real Presence was once more taught at Oxford and Cambridge, and vestments were worn again. Candles were lit upon altars and a greater emphasis was placed on the externals of worship including the use of music. Altars, which had been destroyed under Edward VI and Elizabeth, were were restored in churches, replacing the communion tables which had taken their place during the great iconoclasm. In all of this, Charles was instrumental in restoring to the Anglican church its Catholic heritage, and men like Lancelot Andrewes and Jessica’s beloved George Herbert flourished under his patronage.

Readers here, treated to the lucubrations of Bosco, will easily understand the fury raised in Caliban’s breast by such patent and potent signs of reverence for Christ’s Church, and not the least of the factors which led to the Civil War was the rage of Calvinists as they saw their preaching houses turned back into places of prayer and meditation; noise is always threatened by the silence of prayer. Laud was duly impeached and executed, and Charles was offered the chance of retaining his life and throne if he renounced episcopacy and accepted the Puritan way; this he refused to do. It is this refusal which made the restored Church recognise him as a martyr.

Charles was, in many ways, a foolish monarch who played a poor hand badly, but those in the Church of England, and the Ordinariate, who have preserved the Catholic tradition in this land (and, I sometimes think, a better version of it than that reintroduced by Wiseman), owe him a great debt. Whatever his shortcomings, on the issue of supreme importance, he was willing to die for what he thought was right; to suffer and to die rather than compromise his faith. We do not ask of Saints and Martyrs that they live perfect lives, but we do look to the manner of his death, and here the poet Marvell had it right:

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene;
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try:
Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

John Keble’s poem also deserves a mention here. Its full text can be found on the website of the Society of King Charles the Maryer, but here I will quote just these verses:

True son of our dear Mother, early taught
With her to worship and for her to die,
Nurs’d in her aisles to more than kingly thought,
Oft in her solemn hours we dream thee nigh.

For thou didst love to trace her daily lore,
And where we look for comfort or for calm,
Over the self-same lines to bend, and pour
Thy heart with hers in some victorious psalm.

And well did she thy loyal love repay:
When all foresook, her Angel still was nigh,
Chain’d and bereft, and on thy funeral way,
Straight to the Cross she turn’d thy dying eye.