Temporary suspension of posting

For the next couple of weeks I am going to find it a bit difficult to post on the blog, but rest assured that as of July 22nd I should be back blogging, catching up with posts for the coming days which are being or will be drafted.

The death of King Edward VI

Today is the 460th anniversary of the death at Greenwich Palace of the fifteen year old King Edward VI in 1553.

Despite attempts by the government to keep the news of the King's failing health quiet rumours had clearly got out, and those with aninterst in what was to happen were ready to make the moves they had anticipated. In his last months the King, a convinced reformed protestant thanks to his spiritual formation even before his father's death, appears to have taken the lead in the moves to side-step the 1544 Act of Succession which settled the Crown on his two half-sisters, the Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth, and then reverted to male succession with the heirs male of his father's younger sister the Duchess of Suffolk through her daughters. This excluded the otherwise superior claim of Queen Mary of Scots, and her Lennox cousins.

The King, anxious to prevent the accession of the Lady Mary, a devout Catholic, profoundly attached to the Catholic Mass, though she may well have kept quiet about her attachment to the Papacy, now sought to leave the Crown by his will, as though it were his private property - a power conferred on his father, but not on him. By his new declaration the Crown was to pass to Lady Jane Grey, excluding both the daughters of King Henry VIII and Lady Jane's mother, Frances Duchess of Suffolk. For this reason the future Queen Elizabeth I appears as monarch never to have trusted the two surviving Grey sisters, Lady Catherine and Lady Mary, and watched their matrimonial misadventures with a beady royal eye and vigilance. For this see Leanda de Lisle's joint biography of the Greys The Sisters who would be Queen

Having got many of the Council on side the young King may have believed it would all go as he wished. His chief minister, the Duke of Northumberland, who on this analysis emerges less as a die-hard Protestant than as a politique par excellence in all things - hence perhaps his last minute return to Catholicism in the last days of his life and his question even on the scaffold as to whether or not he could still serve Queen Mary - the offer was declined and the axe fell - had made his own moves. His son Lord Guildford Dudley had been married to Lady Jane that spring and Northumberland and the Council moved to proclaim her as Queen. So began the tragi-farce of the reign of Queen Jane.

Meanwhile from her estates in Essex the Lady Mary, apprised of what was happening by those contacts at Court sympathetic to her claims, moved north into Suffolk to Framlingham castle, gathered support, and in what has been described as the one successful rebellion against a Tudor government saw off the challenge to her rights and became Queen Mary I, and, as her half-brother had feared, set about restoring Catholicism. The difficulties she faced included the amount of physical and spiritual damage wrought in the reign of King Edward - whatever she might have achieved had she been spared to pursue her policy of restoration for longer, she found she faced a determined protestant minority willing to die for their beliefs; that would not have been the same six years earlier when their father died.

The coronation of King Richard III

Today marks the 530th anniversary of the coronation of King Richard III and his Queen Anne in Westminster Abbey in 1483 by Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, the third and fourth crownings of the five he was to perform - I think that is record for an Archbishop of Canterbury.

King Richard III

The earliest portrait, now in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries

Image.richardiii.net

So came for the new King the triumphant conclusion of the process which had begun with the death of his elder brother King Edward IV on April 9th of that year, and which had, by means of skill and determination, if not perhaps much morality, and quite a bit of blood letting amongst the Yorkist elite, brought him the crown. The future for the new king may have looked positive on that coronation day, but his only legitimate son and his wife both died within a year or so, and he was to die at Bosworth a little over two years later. Thereafter he became, rightly or wrongly, identified as a usurper, murder and tyrant, and lay, as we now know, under a carpark until his bones were recovered last year. With due historical method and discipline, I am inclined to an anti-Ricardian view, and indeed do not find myself sympathetic to the Yorkists - but then I come from a town on the estates of the Duchy of Lancaster.

Recently I saw a piece, in connection with the latest television costume drama offering on the period, which laid stress on the fact that this was the first joint coronation of a King and Queen, and implied a significant role for Queen Anne. That I think unlikely, for all that she was the daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker - I sense her two marriages to Edward Prince of Wales (killed at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471) and to Richard Duke of Gloucester were largely beyond her control. It is also worth pointing out that not since 1308, when the newly married King Edward II and Queen Isabella were crowned together, had there been a married King - they were either bachelors, or in the case of King Henry IV, a widower, and hence there was no Queen to crown. There had been previous joint coronations of a king and queen, as in 1154 and 1274 for King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and for King Edward I and Queen Eleanor of Castile, but seperate coronations for Queens consort were not su uncommon, with monarchs marrying during their reigns, or marrying for a second time. Such aseperate coronation has not been held in this country since 1533.

Abdication of the King of the Belgians

The announcement yesterday by the King of the Belgians that he will abdicate for reasons due to his health and age - he is 79 - on July 21st, the kingdom's national day, makes this the third voluntary abdication, after those in the Netherlands and Papacy, this year.

King Albert II

Image:crossoflaeken.blogspot

King Albert II, of whom there is an online biography here, has worked faithfully to keep his kingdom together, like his brother and predecessor King Baudouin. He, and the Belgian people, have had to endure the frequent failure of the Belgian political class to find a means of co-operating in government, with long periods with caretaker governments whilst negotiations dragged on behind the scenes. On one occasuion the King refused to sanction the honours list as ameans of drawing attentuion to this paralysis of political life.

The task of being King of the Belgians now falls to Prince Philippe, Duke of Brabant as heir to the throne. It is not an easy inheritance, but he has been able to observe his father and uncle in their discharge of the duties on monarch. There is an online account of him here.

Prince Philippe Duke of Brabant

Image: Wikipedia

The excellent blog Cross of Laeken is a valuable and positive commentary on the Belgian monarchy and its history.

St Thomas' Day

Today is the feast of St Thomas the Apostle in the modern calendar, and on this day my thoughts always stray back to the visits I made whilst an Anglo-Catholic in the late 1980s and early 1990s to the church of St Thomas at Purston, just west of Pontefract.

The church was built, if my memory serves aright, in 1878 to serve the new mining community at Featherstone and Purston, and is large, not sepecially attractive church that was never quite finished - the tower and spire were never built over the porch, and the majority of the capitals and label-stops inside the church never carved.

Church of St Thomas Purston

Images: anthonybogdanorgans.co.uk

It has long had an Anglo-Catholic tradition, and never more so than when I knew it, when the Vicar was the redoubtable and splendid Fr (later Canon) Stuart Ramsden, a blunt Yorkshireman trained by SSSM at Kelham, a stalwart of Walsingham and, for one five year session, a member of the General Synod. He was the unofficial leader of the Anglo-Catholic clergy of the area, which is at the northern end of the"Barnsley biretta belt" - the deaneries of Barnsley and Pontefract in the diocese of Wakefield and contiguous areas in other deaneries and stretching into the Sheffield diocese where Lord Halifax's legacy lived on.

When I used to go it was not the most attractive of such churches, rather plain with a post Vatican II brand of liturgical Catholicism. it was the first church at which I was a reasonably regular attender to use the full Roman rite, with barely a nod in the direction of the official books of the Church of England. In style I would have preferred something more traditional, but here at least I began to be familiar with the world of Anglo-Catholicism that was consistent, produced vocations and was rooted in its local, working class mining community. It was blunt and down to earth, yet pointed you to Heaven. It was with this parish that I first stated going on pilgrimage to Walsingham, and all the delights that offered and offers. Here too I made valued friendships, not least that of Canon Ramsden himself.

St Thomas' Day was the great occasion for friends and supporters to turn up, and be made very welcome at a splendid celebration of the liturgy, complete with the staute of St Thomas being carried into churc in procession, and quite probably acolliery brass band filling the south aisle to reinforce the music,  and followed by a formidable bun-fight of a reception afterwards - they know how to do these things well in the West Riding.

 

Interior of the church

Images: anthonybogdanorgans.co.uk

St Thomas is a place of which I have happy memories, and where I learned a lot.

The death of King Manuel II

Today is the eighty first anniversary of the sudden death of King Manuel II of Portugal at Fulwell Park Twickenham in 1932. He was 42 and died from a tracheal oedema. I started this post last year to mark the eightieth anniversary but it never got finished, so I am publishing it this year.

After the 1910 revolution the King lived in England, settling at Fulwell Park in Twickenham, near the former  home of members of his mother's family, the house of Orleans. Whilst there he wrote his important history of Portuguese literature, supported national charities during the Great War and was also a patron of the local church at which he worshipped, and leading figure in the local community.

There is an illustrated online biography of the King here, which gives dwertails as to his death and the funeral ceremonies, which inclued the transfer of his body to Lisbon for burial in the Royal Pantheon.

There is a more detailed biography with photographs and a wealth of detail from the blog Unveiling the Portuguese Monarchy  at King Manuel II, "The Patriot".



A photograph of the King taken only hours before his death



Image: Wikipedia

On YouTube I found this video made by a  local reseacher about the King's life at Fulwell and about surviving memorials to his time in Twickenham:

Evelyn Waugh's Oxford

Yesterday afternoon I spent an enjoyable couple of hours giving a tour of Evelyn Waugh's Oxford to two US visitors. Blessed with fine weather I combined a general tour of some of the colleges with an emphasis on Waugh's years at the University. He was at Hertford College from 1922-24 and in the following years was often back in the city. Many enduring and significant friendships were made in those years, as well as bearing fruit in his novels, and one can still, of course, see many of the places Waugh and his friends would have known. It would be perhaps more difficult to provide the bibulous entertainments they enjoyed...

 

 

Evelyn Waugh, aged 21, the year he finished at Hertford

Image: spectator.co.uk

I have enormous regard and affection for Waugh as a writer, and once hen on holiday in Somerset made a literary pilgrimage to his grave at Combe Florey. It is striking the way his reputation has grown in the years since his death, when he was becoming out of fashion. Today he is perceived as atruly great craftsman with the English language, and a writer of both comic genius, and also one who engaged with very serious and profound matters. He is interesting to compare with his near contemporary and friend John Betjeman - the similarities are striking, but so are the different reactions of the two to what their lives brought them.

I see that Selina Hastings 1994 biography of Waugh has recently been reissued. It is more substantial than Christopher Simon Syke's life, which is perhaps more a well-researched memoir, and which could perhaps not explore all of Waugh's relationships whilst some of his friends were still alive. I do, however, regret that Selina Hastings does not make more use of some of the stories Sykes recounts from Waugh's later years - her biography appears to me to lose interest a little in her subject after about 1950.

 

 

Liturgical combs

Christopher Howse has an interesting piece in his regular column in the Daily Telegraph last Saturday about the use of the liturgical comb in connection with the new exhibition in Durham about the Lindisfarne Gospels.
His article can be read at Why St Cuthbert combed his hair.

As he points out the survival of these great Anglo-Saxon objects is a triumph of chance and good fortune over the events of history. As with St Cuthbert's portable altar which i saw in London the other year in the British Museum's exhibition on relics these are profoundly moving relics, linking us to the great age of the Northumbrian church, and also illustrating how that formed part of the universal Church.