CHAPTER SIX
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only being uncomfortable.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman
We all know God is an Englishman. How else would the English have presided over the first truly worldwide empire? There is the Duke of Wellington surveying the carnage at the end of the battle of Waterloo and remarking ‘the hand of God was upon me’. The roots of the English belief to have been chosen by God lie far back with the implausible legend that Jesus had visited the country as a boy (the basis of William Blake’s ‘And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountain green?’) and that Joseph of Arimathea, the man who had begged Jesus’s body from Pontius Pilate, had brought to England part of the crown of thorns. In the fourteenth century, religious English people had talked of their country as ‘our Lady’s Dowry’. In 1554, during Queen Mary’s attempt to turn the country back to Roman Catholicism by incinerating Anglicans, Cardinal Pole had arrived with a message from the Pope encouraging her to get on with the frying by saying that England had been uniquely selected by God. The Elizabethan courtier and wit, John Lyly, described the English as ‘His chosen and peculiar people’.1
By the eighteenth century, as self-confidence grew ever greater, the English had come to believe they were a covenanted people, like ancient Israel. When Isaac Watts set out to translate the Psalms in 1719, the word ‘Israel’ could easily and thoughtlessly be replaced by ‘Great Britain’. Handel celebrated the Duke of Cumberland’s massacre of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army of starving Highlanders at the battle of Culloden with the oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, comparing ‘Butcher’ Cumberland to the Jewish guerrilla leader who led the rebellion against invasion by the Seleucids. For the coronation of Cumberland’s father, George II, he turned out four anthems, the most famous of which, ‘Zadok the Priest’ (another Old Testament hero, Zadok was the founder of the priesthood of Jerusalem), has been played at every British enthronement from 1727 to 1953.
The eighteenth-century writer Emanuel Swedenborg, who at one time numbered William Blake among his disciples, went further. Because of their unique genius, the English had a special heaven, reserved exclusively for their use. Nineteenth-century missionaries sent out to convert the colonized peoples of the world sincerely believed they were spreading the word from a New Jerusalem in England. It was only a short step to the crackpot belief propounded by Edward Hine in a lecture in Chelsea in 1879 that Great Britain was Israel, the Americans the lost tribe of Manasseh, the Irish the Canaanites, and that Jacob’s Stone was really in Westminster Abbey. It was, his followers claimed, the only explanation for the extraordinary success of the English people. According to this theory, the Jews of ancient Israel had been captured by Assyrians led by King Sargon, had migrated across Europe and eventually emerged as the Anglo-Saxons. As late as the 1960s, an American, Herbert W. Armstrong, was repeating the ‘chosen people’ theory:
Certainly there can be no mistaking the identity! Take a map of Europe, lay a line due northwest of Jerusalem across the continent of Europe, until you come to the sea, and then to the islands in the sea. This line takes you direct to the British Isles! Proof that our white, English-speaking people today – British and American – are actually and truly the Birthright tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh of the ‘lost’ House of Israel.
There is nothing unique in the belief that a nation has God on its side: the sight of army chaplains on either side of a conflict urging on their troops with the lie that they are doing the Lord’s work is a constant feature of warfare. But what is perhaps most curious about the English experience is the way in which a belief that they had been chosen by God could have produced a version of religion so temporizing, pliable and undogmatic. After all, orthodox Judaism, which is built upon the assertion that the Jews are the chosen people, is one of the most demanding, prescriptive religions on earth. But there is scarcely anything prescriptive about the Church of England.
I once asked the Bishop of Oxford what you needed to believe to be a member of his Church. A look of slight bafflement crossed his face. ‘An intriguing question’, he answered, as if it had not occurred to him before.
You cannot imagine an orthodox rabbi, or a Roman Catholic priest replying like that. When the bishop went on, he opened with an inevitable English preface, ‘Well, it rather depends.’
‘It depends on which church you go to. An evangelical church will say you need to be sincerely converted. A traditional Anglo-Catholic church will teach you a Christian orthodoxy virtually indistinguishable from Roman Catholic teaching.’
It doesn’t add up to a very coherent set of rules of belief, does it?
‘The Church of England doesn’t believe in laying down rules,’ he said. ‘It prefers to give people space and freedom. It’s enough to make the effort to attend and take communion. That shows you believe.’
This is the sort of woolliness that drives critics of the Church of England to distraction. If required by bureaucracy to declare their religious affiliation on a questionnaire, millions will tick the box marked ‘C of E’. The rest is silence. What kind of an organization is it that makes itself as available as a local post office and requires virtually nothing of its adherents? The most characteristic English statement about belief is ‘Well, I’m not particularly religious’, faintly embarrassed by the suggestion that there might be something more to life. It sometimes seems the Church of England thinks God is just the ultimate ‘good chap’.
And yet it was the Church of England that provided the moral authority for the model Englishman and -woman. Early in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, an argument develops between the humanist Mr Square and Tom’s lash-wielding teacher, the Reverend Thwackum. The question is whether humankind is capable of being virtuous without being religious. Square points out that Moslems and Jews each claim that their religion imparts virtue. To which an angry Mr Thwackum responds with ‘When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion but the Church of England’.2 The self-confidence of the assertion that Anglicanism was the only way of moulding primeval Anglo-Saxon clay into an honourable English person sounds so well practised that perhaps Fielding had heard it from real-life parsons. He could well have done so, for the Church of England is such an odd invention that it can only be explained in its own terms.
This is not the same as anti-Catholicism, though. It is true that many popular post-Reformation festivals were explicitly sectarian. The first of August celebration of the beginning of Protestant Hanoverian rule, the November 5th bonfires to celebrate the thwarting of the plot by Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators to blow up Parliament, and celebrations marking the 1688 landing of William of Orange to deliver the country from James II (coincidentally, he arrived in England on 5 November), all had an anti-Catholic element to them. Bonfire Night, in particular, often turned into something approaching a riot, with mobs demanding money and attacking the homes of Roman Catholics. At an institutional level, recusancy laws forced Catholics to pay fines if they failed to attend Anglican church services and right through much of the eighteenth century they faced harsh taxation, were denied access to education and banned from owning weapons. Well into the nineteenth century Catholics were barred from Parliament, from offices of state and even from voting. Twice – in 1688 and 1714 – the rules for dynastic succession were broken to avoid the horror of a Catholic taking the throne. The 1701 Act of Settlement prevented a Catholic, or anyone married to a Catholic, from ever taking the throne, so that by the time George Lewis, Elector of Hanover, acceded in 1714, over fifty people with a better claim had been passed over. He might have been a dreary lumpen individual with bad English. But at least he wasn’t a papist. The Act is still in force.
Both the popular celebrations and the acts of Parliament were not so much religious in inspiration as political: when the historic enemies France and Spain were both Catholic countries, an assertion of Protestantism was a declaration of nationalism. But there is something more profound than politics at work, too. In World War One, Rupert Brooke reported one private encapsulating his suspicion of the Continent by saying, ‘What I don’t like about this ’ere Bloody Europe is all these Bloody pictures of Jesus Christ an’ ’is Relatives be’ind Bloody bits of glawss.’3 It was not just that the Church of England has no grottoes, no relics of holy cloth, no rotten old tooth or shard of bone said once to have belonged to St Peter and venerated as a cure for sickness. All that was smashed or discarded in the Reformation. There is something else, too, a sense that because Anglicanism has always owed more to Erasmus than to Luther, it is rooted in the everyday world. As a result, it has found it a good deal easier than the Roman Catholic Church to adjust to the scientific discoveries which changed the world: the Catholic catechism predates not only Darwinism but the Enlightenment.
In developing a sense of national identity, the achievement of the Church of England was not so much what it proclaimed but what it made possible. There is a case for saying that the invention of the Church of England was the invention of England. However, this is not to say that the English are a churchy people. They prefer their religion as they used to like their clothing and cars, understated and reasonably reliable, there when you need it. In a sense, England is hardly a Protestant country at all. As every schoolchild knows, its national church was invented so that Henry VIII could get a divorce. As Ralf Dahrendorf, a shrewd observer of his adopted country, puts it, ‘a falling out with the Pope is not the same as a true Reformation’.
The Church of England is the maddening institution it is because that is how the English like their religion – pragmatic, comfortable and unobtrusive. Small wonder that so many English writers have preferred the dramatic certainties of Catholicism. You simply couldn’t write a novel like Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory about a church built on the conviction that anything can be settled over a cup of tea. It is nearly four centuries since the heyday of Anglican sermons, and the last flowering of literary Anglicanism – Rose Macaulay, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Betjeman, Stevie Smith – has none of the force of a Catholic poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins. No one can read Trollope or even Barbara Pym and believe the Church of England has a mission to the poor and oppressed. It is what it has always been, a convenience cooked up by Tudor monarchs for political purposes, where the conventional Trinity has been amplified to Five, including the monarchy and Parliament. The cleverness of the achievement of Anglicanism has been to tame a deep anti-clericalism in the English (one of my favourite village names, Bradfield Combust, commemorates the burning-down in 1327 of Bradfield Hall, owned by the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds, by a furious crowd said to number 40,000) by knitting the Church into the fabric of the state.
This profound integration of sect and state is seen every afternoon of the parliamentary year, as, just before two-thirty, a little procession totters through the central lobby in the Palace of Westminster. To the cry of ‘Hats Off, Strangers!’, the policemen remove their helmets as the column passes. First comes a man in funny gaiters, clicking his heels on the tiles, followed by a retired general carrying the gold Mace, then the Speaker of the House of Commons in black-and-gold gown, and behind the Speaker, the Speaker’s chaplain. It is like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. Inside the chamber, for the benefit of the handful of MPs who have bothered to turn up, the chaplain recites the prayers that commend the political deliberations, name-calling and point-scoring of the day to God. What, you wonder, has God got to do with it? Yet something similar is going on in every army, navy or air-force unit, and is recognized in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s notional place as the pre-eminent commoner in the land, the man who lays the crown on the monarch’s head at the coronation. The everyday liturgy, with its insistence upon prayers for the monarch and ‘all those set in authority under her’ is the voice of a church that knows its deeply conservative and semi-secular place in English society.
So it would be a mistake to see the historical animosity towards Catholicism as proof of enthusiasm for Protestantism. You have only to look at the hostility shown towards non-conformists for taking the Bible too seriously: John Bunyan, author of the most famous devotional novel of all time, Pilgrim’s Progress, spent the best part of twelve years in Bedford gaol for preaching without a licence. Anti-Catholicism came from the belief that once the country had gone through the Reformation, it was impossible to be both a Roman Catholic and a patriot. Yet the Church of England’s founder, Henry VIII, was a most Catholic sort of Protestant. (Two of the distinguishing elements of Anglicanism, the abolition of clerical celibacy and the creation of a liturgy in the vernacular, did not occur until after he was safely in his coffin.) In the ensuing centuries the Church of England has managed to encompass Puritanism, Anglo-Catholicism, Celtic mysticism, Evangelicalism, Christian Socialism and half a dozen other doctrines. The Church is there because it’s there, sensible, adaptable, a comforter of the comfortable. The only sensible conclusion to draw from the uniquely privileged position of the Church of England – its official status, the bishops’ seats in the House of Lords, the Prime Minister’s right to appoint senior clerics and so on – is not that it represents some profound spirituality in the people, but that it suits mutually convenient purposes for state and Church. Many a bishop or dean will tell you privately that it would be better for the Church if it severed its formal links with the state, and became ‘disestablished’. It is often said that it would better reflect the new Britain, where an average Sunday will find more Roman Catholics in church than Anglicans, a country of large numbers of Asian Moslems and Sikhs and Caribbean Pentecostalists, if the Church of England was just another sect. (Privately, many leaders of these other faiths are much less keen on the idea – they like the idea of some spiritual presence near the heart of the constitution, and the woolly old Church of England is better than most, because it worries so much about seeing that other faiths and denominations get a shout.)
The eighteenth-century ballad about the Vicar of Bray, who changed his beliefs to fit in with whomever was on the throne at the time,
And this is the law, I will maintain,
Unto my dying day, Sir,
That whatsoever King shall reign,
I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!
is usually used to tease the Church. But, in truth, trimming represents the true spirit of Anglicanism. Its enthusiasts see something wholly admirable in its refusal to take up extreme positions. ‘The via media is the spirit of Anglicanism,’ wrote T. S. Eliot of the sixteenth century. ‘In its persistence in finding a mean between Papacy and Presbytery the English church under Elizabeth became something representative of the finest spirit of England of the time.’4 The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, saw the vagueness for which it is castigated as a strength. ‘There are other churches in Christendom which take pride in their lack of ambiguity – in doctrine or leadership, or in monolithic interpretation of the Gospel. Anglicanism, by contrast, is a synthesis, and a synthesis necessarily unites thesis and antithesis.’5
A more cynical way of putting it might be to suggest that it is the Church of England which gives the English their extraordinary capacity for believing they can have it both ways. The capacity for hypocrisy among this people who have liked to claim that they are straightforward is stunning. Take as one example the question of abortion. Thirty years after it was made legal in the United States, the issue was still the source of angry and sometimes violent confrontation on the steps of abortion clinics across the country. In England, it is not that the issue is any less ethically charged, merely that no one likes to make a fuss about it. The English know that abortions take place on a staggering scale in their country – 177,225 in 1996 – which means that for every four children born, one foetus was destroyed. There is a ‘thesis’ and an ‘antithesis’ in the issue all right. But the English simply prefer not to notice.
The nineteenth-century Prime Minister Lord Melbourne got it right. He once complained about his duty of appointing Church of England bishops, saying ‘Damn it all, another bishop dead – I verily believe they die to vex me.’ He also remarked that ‘Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.’6
During World War Two someone in the BBC had the idea of inviting a group of writers to record a series of morale-boosting radio talks which would be broadcast on the Empire Service to troops serving around the world. J. B. Priestley, Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole, and Philip Gibbs all contributed, as did a nowadays largely forgotten writer called Clemence Dane. It was the pen-name of a former actress, Winifred Ashton: she had adopted it twenty-five years earlier from her local church, St Clement Danes in the Strand. She began her talk with the words ‘You know, Britain is an extraordinarily permanent country’.
Despite having taken her name from a church in the Strand and spent most of her adult life in Covent Garden, the author followed this opening with the time-honoured English example of permanence:
Last week-end I drove past my old home in Kent, and, slowing down to look at it, I wondered to see that it was quite unchanged in the forty years, although it lies not twenty-five miles from the heart of London. One still drove to it through cloth-of-gold fields – England is all buttercups this week – the deer were still grazing in the park opposite, and the little paths on to the common trekked round the same heavy-laden pink and white May trees.
Thus far we are in familiar territory: the Luftwaffe may be raining bombs down on London (St Clement Danes had been hit on 10 May 1941), the army may be embattled, but the heart of England beats steadily in tens of thousands of country villages. But then she changed tack. ‘What is Britain, to mean so much to us?’ she asked, and answered, ‘I think the answer is the English Bible!’
After a conventional history of the translation of the Bible into English, Clemence Dane concluded by describing a meeting with the wife of a countryman who, having fought in the First World War, had signed up to fight again, and was currently serving in South Africa. The author had been shown his last letter home,
asking after his two grown daughters and his little son, giving what news he could, worrying over some neglected ploughing, and ending with love and kisses. And then, after his signature, he has added a postscript. In that heavy hand, so much more accustomed to a spade than to a pen, he has written: ‘So be of good cheer, my dear ones!’
Dane identified the phrase as coming directly from Matthew’s Gospel in the Authorized Version, where Christ appears to his disciples, walking on water.
Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid [more lamely rendered in the New English Bible as ‘Take heart!’]. And that ‘Be of good cheer!’ has echoed down the centuries [she ended her talk, crackling across the ether to servicemen worldwide], so that today an English working-man can still use it, and so become the voice of the whole Island speaking to all the British World. It is the voice of Caedmon, the voice of Alfred, Wycliffe, Tyndale, Elizabeth, Cromwell, Nelson, Gordon – all the countless known and unknown men and women who made, who are, Britain. And the message still runs – ‘Be of good cheer, my dear ones!’7
You could not write anything like that nowadays for all sorts of reasons; because England hardly shares even a common faith, let alone a common liturgy, because knowledge of the Bible is so much more restricted, because modern-language versions of the scriptures have such reduced resonance, because while most of the audience might recognize the name of Nelson or Cromwell, they’d be hazy about Gordon, baffled by Wycliffe and shrug at Caedmon.
Thinking that perhaps I might be wrong, I called on the Secretary of the Prayer Book Society at her home in the London suburb of Edgware. Margot Lawrence fights a tireless struggle to preserve the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, which, apart from being the cornerstone of Church of England worship almost since its foundation, was for so long the second great reservoir from which the English draw so many of their figures of speech. She had just had a Clemence Dane sort of experience and was in sprightly form. The plumber had reassured her that her hot-water system would soon be working again with the words ‘we’ll soon have you back in the land of the living’.
‘You see, that expression, “the land of the living”, comes directly from the Book of Common Prayer!’ she exclaimed excitedly.
The Prayer Book Society is neither a wealthy nor a fashionable pressure group. You get the impression that its eight or ten thousand members (there are no central records, but their journal goes out to 7,000 addresses) are mainly men and women like her – sensible, decent folk in the autumn of their lives driving elderly British-made cars). Their campaign has a religious purpose, but the cause has a much greater cultural significance. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer, largely the work of Thomas Cranmer over a century earlier, was devised, as its name suggests, to provide a shared (‘common’) experience. It did so in plain yet dignified language in the proper register so that even the most tongue-tied vicar could be borne aloft by the words. They became so familiar that 549 of the Prayer Book’s phrases occur in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. ‘Moveable feasts’, ‘the old Adam’, ‘the jaws of death’, to ‘lead a new life’, to ‘pass man’s understanding’, to be ‘at death’s door’, to ‘give up for lost’ and many other expressions still in current use are lifted straight from the Prayer Book.8
Officially, the Book of Common Prayer is still the cornerstone of Church of England worship. But it is another polite fiction. Candidates for ordination are required to show ‘sufficient knowledge’ of the book and the church’s doctrine in the Thirty-nine Articles. In practice, new vicars are emerging from theological college unaware of anything but the new forms of service.9 In churches across the country, the old black-bound prayer books have been piled up in a corner of the vestry and in their place are thin red, green or yellow paperbacks, often with some stick-man drawing on the front, which the congregation stumbles through every Sunday.
I know people who have to drive thirty miles to get to a Prayer Book service [says Margot Lawrence]. And the clergy are so manipulative. Sometimes they’re downright dishonest. I heard on Monday from a man in Portsmouth whose daughter was getting married. The couple had discussed the wedding with the vicar and made absolutely clear that they wanted the Book of Common Prayer to be used. It was only when she walked up the aisle on her father’s arm that she heard him begin another form of service altogether. She was distraught. But what could she do?
The Society claims that it is ‘holding the line’ against the extirpation of the old liturgy. But every year another few dozen of the remaining parishes where the Book of Common Prayer survives, find a new vicar arriving. He or she introduces ‘as an experiment’ alternative forms of service. There is nothing so permanent as a Church of England experiment.
In removing the Book of Common Prayer, the clergy are merely trying to make the Church ‘relevant’. But in so doing, they are chipping away at a body of language that has been shared by the English people for centuries. While there is nothing inherently wrong with trying to make religion more easily available, the ‘experimental’ alternatives adopted by the Church of England have no durability: their purpose is to be relevant only in a particular time. ‘A prayer is not the same as the Prayer Book’, is the way one historian puts it.10 All communities need resonant phrases, touchstones of expression, and instead of the shared language of the Anglican Church, the English have only a series of slogans they have picked up from television: ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’, ‘And finally’, ‘It’s just for fun’.
When I asked the Very Reverend David Edwards, the author of over thirty books on modern Christianity, for his assessment of the state of spirituality in England, he just told me bleakly that ‘The English have lost any sense of what religion is’.
Perhaps he’s right. But one is bound to ask whether the mass of the English ever had any profound sense of religion. The heyday of the Church of England was 200 years ago, when Jane Austen was born the sixth of seven children in a Hampshire rectory. (Nowadays, the rambling rectories are all occupied by successful businessmen and novelists: the vicars live in red-brick bungalows at the bottom of what was once the vegetable garden.) English religious fervour had by then long blown itself out in the Civil War, after which the nation settled back to mutter its way through a largely passionless set of rituals. Rather than any messianic ambition of leading the English people to salvation, the church authorities who presided over these comfortable slumbers seem to have been much more concerned with putting ‘a gentleman in every parish’. Even the best-remembered Anglicans are recalled for something other than their spirituality. They are diarists like Francis Kilvert and James Woodforde, naturalists like Gilbert White, Great and Good figures like Cosmo Lang, or philosophers like Sydney Smith.
The greatest dereliction of this uniquely privileged Church was its inability to put down roots in the city. The archetypal Church of England parish – the one affectionately satirized in television’s The Vicar of Dibley – is rural, the archetypal bishopric a cathedral close in Salisbury, Hereford or Winchester. Too late, the Church woke up to Dostoevsky’s furious denunciation that
Anglican ministers and bishops are proud and rich, live in wealthy parishes and dioceses and wax fat with an entirely untroubled conscience … It is a religion of the rich, and undisguised at that … They travel all over the earth, penetrate into darkest Africa to convert one savage, and forget the million savages in London because they have nothing to pay them with.11
It may sound like propaganda, but when the Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew asked a London costermonger (fruit-and-vegetable seller) if he knew what St Paul’s was, the vendor replied that he’d heard it was a church, but ‘I never was in church’. A survey on Sunday 30 March 1851 showed that two thirds of the population of London did not go to church and other samples bore out the pattern of paganism. East and south London had the lowest rate of church attendance in the country.
So when people speak of the Church of England being ‘the established Church’, they have only ever really been referring to its constitutional privileges, to the monarchy and to its position in the shires. Most of the time, in most of the cities and suburbs, where most of the English people live, the Church of England is almost absent. There are Anglican vicars heroically toiling away in poverty-stricken inner-city slums, helping people with their benefit claims, running soup kitchens and drop-in centres for the elderly or unemployed. But they are working as social workers – on half the pay. Their lives are witnesses to a faith, but it is one they are embarrassed to proclaim, for fear it ‘gets in the way’ of their work. In David Hare’s play, Racing Demon, the Reverend Lionel Espy is summoned to see his bishop to answer charges that he is neglecting the sacramental side of his work. He tells the bishop, ‘In our area I wouldn’t even say the Church was a joke. It’s an irrelevance. It has no connection with people’s lives.’12 As his evangelical colleague explodes later in the play, ‘Inner-city priesthood? It’s a cartel. Based on a massive failure of nerve. You’ve become enlightened humanists.’13
When I suggested to Canon Donald Gray, chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, that the Church had lost the cities, he replied, ‘It’s not that the Church has lost the Inner Cities. We never had them.’ He is right: it was non-conformist denominations from the Methodists to the Salvation Army who tried to meet the challenge of urban life, while Irish immigrants brought their own Catholic faith with them. In the few areas where popular urban Toryism took root, the Church of England broadened its base. But, for the most part, those vast, echoing buildings built by the Anglicans on street corners throughout the great industrial cities as an instinctive response to mass migration from the countryside have never been filled, not even when originally built. Small wonder they look cold and uncared for over a century later, waiting to be bought up and turned into a Sikh temple or nightclub. The Reverend Lionel Espy and others like him are doing their best. But so long after the event, they have no chance at all of making up the ground lost.
As things stand, the Church of England has the worst of all worlds. Admittedly, the virtues of the Church, its gentleness, tolerance and compassion, are undermined by a complete lack of intellectual rigour. Because so much of the churchgoing population has still not got beyond the Enid Blyton Book of Bible Stories, priests are condemned to stand up each Sunday and preach as if every word in the Bible is fact when so much is clearly fiction or allegory. Theologians who dare to suggest things may be more complicated, like John Robinson in Honest to God or David Jenkins when Bishop of Durham, set themselves up for a howling-down. And because it is ‘established’, everyone feels they have a right to criticize. More thoughtful members of Parliament may take a vow of silence, feeling themselves unqualified to meddle in issues like the liturgy, but that leaves the floor to boneheads. Even Prince Charles, who will inherit the role of Defender of the Faith that the Pope originally gave to Henry VIII, seems to have lost any will for the job. ‘I hope to be the defender of faiths,’ he once said in an interview, as if Sikhism, Jainism, Catholicism, Druidism and a belief in the healing properties of astral projection were all of equal importance. He was, doubtless, well intentioned, but it is symptomatic of muddle. Religious education in schools – taught by graduates of teacher-training colleges into which the Church of England has ploughed millions – is a bland and passionless blancmange of everything from Guru Nanak to creationism.
The word ‘religion’ has doubtful origins, but is thought to derive from the Latin religare, to bind: the nation that prays together stays together. A pessimist might conclude that the fact that there is no longer any common body of expression reflects the fact that there is no longer any common body of belief and that a society which has lost its most binding ties was destined to fail. But there is another sense in which the Church of England has profoundly shaped the English people.
Everyone knows that the break with Rome involved the wholesale sacking of the Catholic Church, an event registered in school history textbooks as ‘1536: the Dissolution of the Monasteries’. But stripping the Roman Catholic Church of its earthly power was much more than the appropriation of land, buildings and treasure. This most enormous act of collective vandalism, involving the smashing of thousands of works of art, had profound cultural consequences. Andrew Graham-Dixon has argued quite persuasively in his History of British Art that an entire medieval tradition of painting and sculpture which survived elsewhere in Europe was in England more or less wiped from the slate. Certainly, there is no doubting the scale of the vandalism. Between the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 and the death of Oliver Cromwell over 120 years later, hardly a corner of England was untouched by a zealotry that decreed that devotional art was a form of Romanist idolatry. There was even talk at one point of razing Stonehenge to the ground. The evidence that this was the moment when England exiled itself from an artistic tradition is scant, for the obvious reason that very little of the Roman Catholic artistic heritage survived the binge of destruction. A single stone sculpture, the Christ discovered by builders working on Mercer’s Hall, London, in the 1950s, exquisite in the surviving details, proclaims, says Graham-Dixon, ‘two deaths, the death of God and the death of an entire tradition of British art … this is a work created on the cusp of an English Renaissance that was never to be’.14
If this was the moment when the English cultural tradition cut itself off from the rest of Europe, you could not find a more striking signal of the new direction in which English creativity was to turn than the tearing-down of altar screens and their replacement in many churches by bare boards listing the Ten Commandments. Here, literally, was the replacement of the visual by the verbal. Measured by its consequences, this was not so much ‘an English Renaissance that was never to be’ as an Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment that predated its Continental counterpart by a century or more. The English not only came to a new way of appreciating the Word, they came to an appreciation of words. We cannot know whether there would ever have been an English Titian, Raphael or Michelangelo. But we are sure that the Reformation and its aftermath threw up William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, John Bunyan and John Milton.
The literary tradition that followed them has become the most sustained and distinguished in the western world. We cannot know, of course, how it, and its branches in North America and Australasia, would have evolved had England remained a Catholic country. But the English certainly became a people obsessed by words, while interest in – and facility with – both music and art has varied wildly. At one time England is being called ‘the land with no music’, at another, the German-born Handel is being fêted by the court, and in 1905, Elgar is lamenting he ‘had inherited an art which has had no hold on the affections of our own people, and is held in no respect abroad’.15 The contrast with the English love of words could not be starker. It shows itself in the absurdly overproductive British publishing business, which turns out 100,000 new books a year – more than the entire American publishing industry – in the fact that the country produces more newspapers per head of the population than almost anywhere else on earth, in the unstoppable flow of Letters to the Editor, in the insatiable appetite for verbal puzzles, anagrams, Scrabble, quizzes and crosswords, in the vibrancy of British theatre, in the secondhand bookshops in half the market towns in the land. ‘Books are a national currency,’ concluded one recently departed foreign ambassador.16
And as for painting? Even in portraiture, the great painters who lived through or followed the Reformation – Holbein, van Dyck, Lely and Kneller – were foreigners. You might argue that the climate was the enemy of much other painting, that grey skies make for gloomy landscapes. But if so, why should not the same argument apply to Holland, which has produced such a roll-call of superior artists? And anyway, northern light is more varied than the bleached heat of southern Europe. The answer seems to have to do with the fact that the English Reformation was about politics, rationality and choice, and the theological stimulus behind it was concerned with meaning: therefore words are the medium of choice.
Even before the upheaval, English art had been preoccupied with natural observation: cathedral misericords and illuminated manuscripts were all adorned with scenes from everyday life – animals, farming, even games of football. It was not merely because the aristocracy rather than the Church now became the main patrons of art that the English tradition developed with portraiture and landscape rather than baroque allegory. It was also something in the English cast of mind. ‘I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can shew me in the world,’ said Dr Johnson,17 and English art is preoccupied with telling stories. ‘Nearly all of the greatest painting of the British school is either man observed or nature observed, either portrait or landscape: Constable and Turner, and the water colourists from Cozens to Cotman, and Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and so on,’ wrote Nikolaus Pevsner in The Englishness of English Art.18 If he had been frank, he might have conceded that it is also one of the least distinguished traditions of visual art in Europe. The English were too busy writing to paint.
Becoming a people of the word also had profound political consequences. The ambition to have a bible in English had been a revolutionary one. In 1407 the Archbishop of Canterbury had made translation punishable by excommunication and Wycliffe’s Lollards acquired their name from the Dutch word for ‘mumbling’, as they met to hear illicit English versions. So that when it was achieved by William Tyndale19 and Miles Coverdale, the English version was a victory of radicalism over vested interest. The first casualty was the standing of the Church; who needed a hierarchy of clergymen to interpret the Bible when they could read it themselves? But it went further: the Bible was, after all, the Word of God, and it was the Word of God that gave the king or queen their authority. Making the scriptures available to everyone had great subversive potential. An order that every parish was to have its own English Bible displayed in church was rescinded in 1543 because the right was being abused by ‘the lower sort’. It was decreed that ‘no women, nor artificers, prentices, journeymen, servingmen of the degrees of yeomen or under, husbandmen nor labourers shall read the Bible or New Testament to himself or any other privately or openly’.20 (The restrictions were lifted after Henry’s death.)
The Authorized Version, or King James Bible, whose echoes Clemence Dane heard in the letter from South Africa, appeared in 1611, the fruit of three and a half years’ work by forty-seven scholars but, essentially, the work of Tyndale.21 It had the immediate effect of democratizing learning and created a stock of memorized stories and sentences that became a shared currency among the English people. They may never have been racially monolithic, but now they had a shared intellectual inheritance. Hugo Grotius, the Dutch philosopher, wrote of England in 1613 that ‘theology rules here’, and the seventeenth century was the heyday of the English sermon. But the most important consequence of the translation of the Bible was to embed in the English mind a belief in the rights of the common man. For the Puritans, the Bible was the supreme authority on everything; the idea would never have occurred to them it was anything other than the direct Word of God. ‘Nothing [should] be done in this or any other thing, but that which you have the express warrant of God’s word for’, as Thomas Wilcox put it.22 But the power of the Word extended much further. By offering a direct relationship with God, unmediated by popes or bishops, the common language of devotion gave the individual all sorts of rights he might never have otherwise thought he had.
The emphasis on the importance of the individual implicit in the new covenant may also be one of the explanations for the English talent for nurturing utopian romanticism. From the seventeenth-century Diggers to the twentieth-century Labour party, by way of William Blake, Robert Owen and dozens of others, a belief in the perfectibility of mankind has flourished. The vulnerability of America to every passing conman in a shiny suit and a bogus smile comes from its British origins: the founding fathers, after all, were making their own attempt at Utopia. As a historian of the movements discovered, in mid-Victorian Lancashire alone ‘Manchester had incubated the ecstasies of Mother Anne, foundress of the Shakers. Accrington kept the Swedenborgian metaphysic warm. Ashton had provided a temple for John Wroe. Salford had provided, with Rochdale, recruits for Manea Fen [a ‘communionist’ settlement in East Anglia]. Now at Preston, it was the turn of Heber C. Kimball and his fellow missionaries to harvest souls and bodies for their new revelation’.23 (Mr Kimball was boasting that he would not die until Christ’s second coming and prophesying that, within ten or fifteen years, the sea between Liverpool and America would dry up. It didn’t, and Mr Kimball’s second coming is still awaited.)
Would the English have had their revolution a century or more earlier than much of the rest of Europe, had these beliefs in the rights of the individual not taken such firm hold? Unlike the secular uprisings of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the English rebellion did not spit out religion, it turned to it for support. When John Milton sought to justify chopping off the king’s head, he cited the belief that God had created man in his own image: therefore all authority from kings and princes is ‘what is only derivative, transferred and committed to them in trust from the people to the Common good of them all’.24 The English belief that ‘I know my rights’ owes a lot to this profound conviction that it is liberty, not kingship, that is divinely ordained. When England was split by civil war, the rebels identified themselves with the Hebrews, and Cromwell became a Joshua or Moses figure. He wasn’t afraid to make the comparison himself: the English people had been blessed by God, he said in 1654, and ‘The only parallel of God’s dealing with us that I know in the world … [is] Israel’s bringing out of Egypt through a wilderness, by many signs and wonders towards a place of rest’.25 It is in the fight with Church and state, first to get access to the Bible in their own language, and then to use the scriptures to establish their own relationships with one another and with authority, that we see the spirit of English individualism at work. It is one of the reasons that it has never been necessary for an Englishman or Englishwoman to submerge their identity within the state. And it is one of the reasons that the country has produced so many eccentrics.