Of course, the English came, in time, to be profoundly Protestant, and the emotional and political bedrock of their Protestantism was, until the 19th century, a profound hatred of Catholicism, nurtured on endless invocations of Mary Tudor’s cruelty. Curiously enough, Elizabeth I once had more Englishmen hanged in a month than Mary had burnt in her entire reign – but perhaps she had better PR consultants.
Monday, 24 September 2007
Richard Rex in the Times
There was a very good letter by Richard Rex in the Sunday Times yesterday in response to an article by Simon Jenkins. A quotation:
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13 comments:
Blood Bess v Good Queen May!
I was unable to find a link to Jenkins' review. Do you know how I could access it?
Sharon
Yes, the "Bloody Mary" story certainly still has legs. Even many Catholics of my acquaintence will trot out the "yes, but Mary murdered thousands of Protestants - no wonder we Catholics are not liked"
Pleaaasssse!
The link in the post (very good letter) goes to his letter.
I think this is the true cause of the "identity crisis" in modern Britain.
Britain defined itself by what it was not and had rejected (ie catholicism)
Therefore the collapse of protestant "christianity" in the later part of the 20th century has left Britain somewhat rudderless
Not least because so many in the catholic church were seduced by aspects of protestantism (especially those aspects that the protestants adopted on the way to implosion in the 20th century) which has somewhat blunted what should be a determined effort to evangelise the former adherents of the C of E with the result that all sorts of sects and pseudo religions are flourishing.
Meanwhile the anti catholic arguments still rage on in the politicians, the latest focus being the "not the european constituion" as they tend these days to focus on the treaty of Rome rather than the Bishop of Rome....
When I was a boy at school...and that is a very long time ago, my History teacher, a priest ( we had priests on the Staff then) said that the whole gunpowder plot was an entire fiction.
No one could have got hold of that amount of gunpowder without being noticed.
No one could have wheeled that amount of gunpowder into a room under the Houses of Parliament, without being noticed.
Even if all these unlikely events had occured, barrels of gunpowder on their own would never have done any more than minor damage to the floor of Parliament. The gunpowder was not compressed to explode, simply being in barrels would have caused little more than a fiz and a fire.
But we all know the truism...only the victors write history.
JARay
I was lucky enough to be taught by Richard Rex :) Very entertaining lecturer, and a very intelligent man...
But were they hanged for Catholic 'crimes' or something else?
Anon - hanged, drawn and quartered in many cases. The saints and beati were executed solely for their Catholicism. The usual thing was to offer them their life if they renounced the faith.
John - the view that the Gunpowder plot was a fabrication of Cecil and his cronies is a respectable view, recognised as such by, for example, Antonia Fraser.
Great stuff!
Yes, Jenkins is very anti-Catholic in just the same arrogant way as he is about everything.
John, well done for the conspiracy theory. I like it.
Paul, the real reason for the identity crisis in modern Britain is that "Britain", in the sense of the United Kingdom, is really defined purely in terms of its secular authority - to which, incidentally, the C of E is subordinate. (Whether the RC Church is in practice subordinate to the C of E is something people can argue about.) This secular authority has been in steep decline since the Second World War (Britain's "finest hour", and all that), especially with the loss of the Empire and the degradation of both Parliament and the Monarchy. There is nothing un-British about Catholicism, except in the sense that Catholics are ultimately responsible to a higher authority than the secular state, and there is certainly nothing specifically British about being anti-Catholic.
Fr. Tim,
Paul and Oliver have made interesting points. The thing that strikes me about Great Britain is that it’s artificial – it was set up largely as a sort of English-led anti-Catholic coalition of countries and a bastion against the Catholic continental powers. In this sense it has definitely lost its raison d’etre and I doubt it will last much longer in its present form.
Interestingly, the Catholic Church has never really recognized “Brit’n.” OK, there is a nuncio to the UK and the UK and the Vatican go through the motions of recognizing each another diplomatically. But there isn’t a “UK Bishops’ Conference.” The Union of Scotland and England, and the partition of Ireland, have never been reflected in the structures of the Catholic Church, which has preserved three separate ecclesial identities in the British Isles – Scotland, Ireland and England & Wales.
Scottish independence, precipitating the reunification of Ireland, could easily occur in our lifetimes – showing that the Catholic Church took the long-term view of things and got it right, as usual.
Errrm! Slight correction Father. The Catholic Martyrs were, in every case found guilty of TREASON. There was no crime of being a Catholic.
It was argued that Catholics held loyalty to a foreign power - Rome - which had proved its emnity by declaring (in 1570) that Good Queen Bess was a heretic and that it was the god-given right of any of her subjects to depose her. This meant, in effect that it was the duty of Catholics to despose her. This made them, de facto, traitors.
This famous document of excommunication against Queen Elizabeth was a terrible and tragic mistake politically. After it was put into the public realm it became open season on Catholics. The most influential and powerful of the English Catholic families did what they could to distance themselves from this document but, sadly and bloodily it nearly did entirely for Catholicism in England.
I know they were accused of treason. The point is that treason was defined to include harbouring a priest, training to be a priest, having Mass in your house etc. That is why many of the martyrs waited for the moment when they were offered their lives if they renounced the faith.
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